tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59039481908150941632024-03-17T10:21:35.768-07:00exile in happy valleyComrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.comBlogger415125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-59428008573342300912024-03-17T10:21:00.000-07:002024-03-17T10:21:03.504-07:00Free Gaza and Free the Donbas Too!<p> I quite frequently use this space to lament the untimely demise of the antiwar movement in this country and to wallow shamelessly in the miseries of what could have been. Those of my readers who have gone on to join the ranks of the loyal followers whom I lovingly describe as my very dearest motherfuckers likely know the sermon by heart at this point. The Gospel of Abbie Hoffman... </p><p>The epic tale about a ragtag coalition of Black militants, angry faggots, dope smoking weirdos, and disgruntled GIs who came together in rage, love, and empathy to end Babylon's savage crusade in Indochina with a wild campaign of monkey-wrenching sabotage, campus arson, and fucking in the streets. For just one shining, impossible moment the weird people won, the empire coward in its corner, and everything seemed possible. But then they fired Nixon, put the draft on ice, and brought the troops home, and the movement collapsed. Or has it?</p><p>As down and pissed as I get, every once in a while, this nation, long sedated by a toxic casserole of reality television and high-powered prescription narcotics, shows me signs of discontent with their leader's bloodlust abroad. The truth is that this discontent has actually grown more cantankerous than it has been in decades in recent months. But like pretty much everything else good in this country, it has also been tragically bisected by petty partisan bullshit. </p><p>On the left we have seen a sonic upsurge in unprecedented outrage over the Democratic Party's longtime support for Israel's increasingly genocidal policies towards occupied Palestine. While I have long cracked wise and mean about the complacent hipster brats of the nouveau left, what with their creepy Bernie Sanders fetish and their politically correct distractions, these kids have made me downright proud lately with the pure fury of their empathy for the long-silenced people of the Gaza Strip. They have literally shut down parades, engaged the pigs in fist-swinging riots, and relentlessly heckled that old white bastard in the White House with chants of "Genocide Joe!" Abbie would be proud too.</p><p>Meanwhile, on the right, a rising tide of conservative populists have similarly drawn the line over America's bipartisan spending frenzy in Ukraine. While Volodymyr Zelensky uses Putin's illegal invasion as an excuse to betray his promises for peace in the Donbas and sends ranks of the forcefully conscripted people who voted for him bring it to die in the trenches, three out of every four Republicans who support that scumfuck Donald Trump also support peace in Ukraine. And the GOP is playing along by holding up aid in congress in exchange for a more inhumane police state on the border. </p><p>And yet, the same young Democrats who are threatening to ruin Genocide Joe's reelection over the bloodbath in Gaza overwhelmingly support the bloodbath in Ukraine and the MAGA mob furious over being mugged to reignite the Cold War seem to have zero problem dumping their wallets out so Benjamin Netanyahu can drop bunker busters on maternity wards in Rafah. It's total fucking madness and it has me ripping my pink hair out by the roots, screaming at both sides that it's all the exact same goddamn thing.</p><p>Palestine and the Donbas are both ethnically diverse but culturally distinct regions that have found themselves gift-wrapped and handed over to nations that they never asked to be a part of in the first place. Palestine had long been a barely governed patch of desert on the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire before the British and the Americans stole it and arbitrarily proclaimed it to be a homeland for European migrants. Similarly, the Donbas had been a region of Russia going back to the 1700s before the Bolsheviks made a unilateral decision to make it a part of their new Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1922 only to have Ukraine take it with them when they unilaterally left the Soviet Union in 1992.</p><p>While both Gaza and the Donbas have also had their movements for autonomy largely hijacked by imbeciles and monsters, none of that changes the fact that these are both illegally occupied territories fighting for popular autonomy and the crimes of Hamas and Putin do nothing to sanctify the barbarism that America and its heavily armed proxies have reigned down upon their heads. </p><p>In the far less publicized case of the Donbas, I feel compelled to remind my fellow social justice warlords that these people were subjected to a cruel civil war for over seven years before Putin used them as an excuse to sack Kiev. </p><p>After the Donbas defied Putin's own orders and voted to declare independence from Ukraine in 2014 in protest of a blatant NATO overthrow of a president who they overwhelmingly voted for, the new Yankee puppet regime in Kiev placed these people under a crippling blockade and sent openly neo-fascist ethnic extremists to terrorize them under a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire, killing over 14,000 people in the process, most of them ethnic Russians. </p><p>Volodymyr Zelensky was actually elected on a promise to end this Russophobic apartheid nightmare and give the Donbas some degree of autonomy, but after being bullied and bought off by NATO and his own ethnic nationalist infiltrated military, Zelensky went back on his word and recommitted his country to forcefully retaking the Donbas in revenge for that region's desperate support for Putin's invasion.</p><p>As you can see, most people on both the left and the right only seem to know one half of the story but most of them have also been lured into this bipolar ignorance by a corrupt partisan circus that has turned even actual fucking warfare into just another theater for the culture war. </p><p>While the Jesus freaks on the right have been bamboozled by their Evangelical megachurches into believing that anything less than total capitulation to Zionist slaughter is antisemitism, the DNC's cable intelligentsia has transformed Vladimir Putin from a corrupt neoliberal opportunist into the ringleader of some kind of international crypto-fascist conspiracy that has grown to include everyone from Donald Trump to Black Lives Matter.</p><p>Both sides need to snap out of this zombie fugue state and listen to their consciences because these busted pilot lights are both clearly telling them the same damn thing; it is wrong to rob entire regions of their popular autonomy, whether it be granted by God or Allah, and it is worse to slaughter them in mass just so sick fucking creatures on Capitol Hill can sell more bombs for their masters on Wall Street. </p><p>Both parties overwhelmingly support both of these gruesome spectacles, and they are turning what could easily become a viable antiwar movement against itself while they play its peaceniks for dupes. The only viable solution to this con game is to dump these crooks back in their toxic swamp once and for all and join each other back in the streets to demand an end to this madness.</p><p>For the love of Abbie Hoffman, wake up dearest motherfuckers and end the massacres in both Europe and the Middle East. Free Gaza and free the Donbass too!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Rage, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Ramblin' Rose by the MC5</p><p>* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins</p><p>* Down In the Streets by the Stooges</p><p>* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth</p><p>* All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix</p><p>* Breed by Nirvana</p><p>* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival</p><p>* Touch Me I'm Sick by Mudhoney</p><p>* Bulldog Front by Fugazi</p><p><br /></p><p><u><br /></u></p><p><br /></p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-39132232409268011392024-03-10T10:40:00.000-07:002024-03-10T10:46:39.431-07:00Confronting The American School System's Perverted Bathroom Police State<p> Nex Benedict was kind of a weird kid. I know because the moment that I first learned who Nex was I also knew that we would have been friends. Like Nex, at 16 I was a pissed off metal head with a weird sense of humor and a bad temper who ferociously defended the few outsiders I could count as friends. I was also an androgynous trans kid at a conservative high school who was no stranger to getting my ass kicked simply because I stubbornly refused to bow down to someone else's conventions and thus much like so many other trans people in this country today, I find myself looking at the details of Nex Bennedict's tragic death and saying, "That could have been me."</p><p>For those of you who don't know, Nex was a 16-year-old non-binary student at a suburban Oklahoma high school who was murdered for being a Queer kid in the wrong bathroom in a state that has gone out of its way to make that distinction downright dangerous. Nex, who used he/him pronouns, had been brutally bullied for the past year over his and his friends gender identities before the incident even occurred and after standing up for his friends one last time in the girl's bathroom, he was violently assaulted by three older girls who pinned him down and beat him until he blacked out. The school nurse suggested that Nex undergo further medical examination for obvious head injuries, but the school simply sent him home with a two-week suspension for defending himself instead.</p><p>Nex's grandmother and adoptive mother, Sue Bennedict, was reasonably incensed by the school's total nonchalance towards an obvious hate crime and took her battered child to a nearby hospital where she also summoned the local police who informed Sue that if Nex filed charges against his attackers he could be expected to be charged as well just for fighting back. They declined and Nex was released. The next day, Nex Benedict collapsed in his home before being rushed back to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. </p><p>The local police department claims that the autopsy results indicate injuries sustained during the beating did not directly lead to Nex's death, but the exact cause of death remains strangely undetermined a month after the incident occurred and everyone who knows anything about Oklahoma's toxic police culture is calling for an independent investigation. While the Federal Government's Education Department has announced their own investigation, I'm not exactly relieved. Oklahoma has been violating the rights of Queer kids for years and the Federal Government has done exactly jack shit about it.</p><p>Oklahoma is one of dozens of states across the Bible Belt that has essentially declared open war on kids who refuse to comply with the gender identity on their birth certificates. This war has included laws barring minors from access to gender affirming care proven over the decades to have fewer side effects than antidepressants. This war has included investigating the few parents actually willing to take their children at their word by affirming their gender identity as child abusers. And this war includes barring kids like Nex Bennedict from access to safe bathrooms. </p><p>Oklahoma is one of 11 states that currently bans students from using bathrooms that don't align with their biological sex and Nex's death is precisely the kind of violence that these policies make inevitable. However, the officials behind these policies remain shamelessly unapologetic for the bloodshed. Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent that helped push through his state's bathroom apartheid bill with support from Governor Keven Stiff has been quoted pontificating over Nex Bennedict's dead body that "There's not multiple genders. There's two. That's how God created us." before vowing to "continue to fight for parents and never back down to the woke mob."</p><p>And that's about the size of the problem right there. Shitheads like Walters and the lobbyists of the so-called "Parent's Rights Movement" don't give one fuck about the rights of the kids they pretend to protect. They only care about the right for certain parents to police everyone's kids like cattle so they can segregate the normies from the weird kids who might taint them with the perversion of free expression.</p><p>Laws like these are aimed at erasing Queer youth by making their existence too unbearable to sustain outside of the closet without a noose around their necks. But once again there is an even bigger issue at play here that I feel is getting lost in the usual partisan shuffle of the culture wars, a question that no one else but me seems to be asking. Why the hell would anyone afford a bunch of poorly trained and virtually unsupervised adult public servants the right to police their children's basic right to use a goddamn toilet? </p><p>Seriously! Let's stop mincing words right here and put it all on the table. We are talking about segregating children based solely on the contents of their genitalia and carefully policing when, where, and how they shit, piss, and bleed, and somehow, I'm the fucking pervert? This is way bigger than gender. This is about the basic right to bodily autonomy. Why should any child have to use a facility where they feel unsafe? Why should any human being be reduced to the humiliating position of having to beg an authority figure for the "privilege" of being able to relieve themselves?</p><p>Labor laws state that employers must allow their workers free and unfettered access to bathroom facilities, so why not children? Children's needs derive from the biology of their bodies, and nothing makes them feel less safe than having those needs systemically disregarded. There is a reason why so many adults suffer from anxiety related to public restrooms and it isn't just trans people.</p><p>The excuse typically given for the American school systems perverted bathroom police state is the usual rigamarole about law and order. Kids can't be trusted with basic human rights because of smoking or vaping or whatever the fuck the monster of the week happens to be right now but what this really all comes down to is something far more insidious. </p><p>Like most factors of America's compulsory school system, the notion of bathroom privileges is a tool for social engineering and social control. Using the bathroom is a very basic human need like breathing or eating and basic bodily needs are what drives human behavior. Therefore, the ultimate form of social control is to afford only certain designated authority figures with the ability to sustain those bodily needs.</p><p>I feel like I shouldn't have to tell people how sick this is. It is precisely this line of thinking that allows children to be so easily abused by adults and it is precisely this line of thinking that allows individuals to be so easily abused by authoritarian institutions. We are quite literally house broken as kids to be good citizens and the "radical gender ideology" of freaky people like me and rebellious kids like Nex Bennedict is a direct threat to this conspiracy because it returns young people to the notion that it's their goddamn body and no one has the right to define it but them.</p><p>I'm proud of this ideology and not just because I am a trans person. I'm proud because I am an anarchist, I'm proud because I am a survivor of child abuse, and I'm proud because the people who abused me were authority figures who used heavily policed school bathrooms to get away with it. This whole system belongs in the shitter and kids have the power to flush it.</p><p>The solution to the creepy police state that jumped-up Jesus freaks have turned public bathrooms into isn't more laws and regulations. It's unlearning them and teaching young people to do the same. Every single trans bathroom law on the books is totally unenforceable. The money and manpower that it would take to regulate them would bankrupt the whole damn system. </p><p>Like most laws, their power rests largely in the illusion of control. The kind of illusions they need to drive into children at a tender age with fear and humiliation. But kids can take that power back and they can take it back by simply refusing to comply in mass. If everyone decides collectively to use whatever bathroom they need whenever they need to use it, then the whole system collapses into nothing but a tightly coiled pile of meaningless words and edicts spewed from the incontinent holes of asses like Ryan Walters.</p><p>I have to believe that Nex would have gotten a kick out of this kind of revenge. I know I would have at his age.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins</p><p>* Rope by Foo Fighters</p><p>* Jennifer's Body by Hole</p><p>* Outshined by Soundgarden</p><p>* Broken Man by St. Vincent</p><p>* Hear You Me by Jimmy Eat World</p><p>* Dress by PJ Harvey</p><p>* Seether by Veruca Salt</p><p>* Best of You by Foo Fighters</p><p>* Shove by L7</p><p>* Get Your Gunn by Marilyn Manson</p><p>* The Prisoner by Iron Maiden</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-70551192037364116362024-03-03T10:47:00.000-08:002024-03-03T10:47:33.615-08:00The State of Israel Has No Right to Exist and Neither Does the USA<p> The state of Israel has no right to exist. I believe that statement to be a fact based purely on the concept of right and wrong, but just try saying it out loud in any corner of this country and you would think that you'd said it on the streets of Tel Aviv. People who can't even find Israel on a map or properly pronounce the word 'antisemitic' call you out as a fucking racist and they do it with Confederate flags on their belt buckles. But I stand by my opening proclamation, and I challenge any sentient being with common sense to look at the history of Israel carefully and truthfully and tell me that there is absolutely anything legitimate about its existence.</p><p>Israel was built on a foundation of colonial piracy. In the bloody wake of World War 1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a bunch of white men in khakis carved up the Middle East into strategically digestible pieces with the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916. The United Kingdom ended up with a diverse and under-regulated little backwater called Palestine. At the time, the largely Sephardim Jewish community in the Holy Land, known as the Yishuv, was in the single digits percentage wise and had zero ambitions of statehood, nor did your average European Jew. </p><p>But the United Kingdom wanted to tame this stateless region, so they teamed up with a tiny Ashkenazi extremist movement that called themselves Zionists to do it. In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to establish the British Mandate of Palestine as a national homeland for the Jews. Beginning in 1919, they facilitated a dramatic increase in Zionist immigration and between the years of 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population in the British Mandate ballooned from just 9% to nearly 27%, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in the process.</p><p>However, try as they might, the British and their Zionist lackeys still couldn't seem to convince the majority of the Jewish people to get on board with hijacking somebody else's land based on secular misinterpretations of ancient holy books. This only changed when the openly antisemitic Nazis rose to power, uncoincidentally with the full support of the fascists in the Zionist movement who wrote love letters to Hitler and invited Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem while they used the reign of these cowards to herd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 European Jews into the Mandate between 1933 and 1936. The Palestinians reacted with a bloody revolt that raged for three years until the British finally managed to crush it in 1939. But the Brits got scared. Fearing that they may lose control of the entire experiment, they attempted to pump the breaks on Jewish immigration until they could restore order.</p><p>Their Zionist proxies were not pleased and responded by declaring war on their masters, launching a series of bloody terrorist attacks that peaked with the King David Hotel Bombing which killed 91 people in 1946. With their empire already in shambles and their hands full of blood and guts in South Asia, the British finally handed this colonial hand grenade to their heirs in Washington, who used the horrors of the Holocaust and their new toys in the United Nations to give colonialism a veneer of legitimacy. The UN adopted Resolution 181 in 1947, unilaterally recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. When the Palestinians learned that this deal would virtually cut them off from their coastline between Haifa and Jaffa, they violently rejected it, but the dye was already cast. </p><p>With the so-called "international community's" official support and the Jewish community too shellshocked by genocide to resist another committed in their name, Zionist militias like Irgun and the Stern Gang unleashed a tidal wave of ethnic cleansing on the Holy Land between the years of 1947 and 1949 that would become known as the Nakba or the Catastrophe. 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes and at least 15,000 were slaughtered in more than 70 massacres. By the time the dust settled, 530 villages had been erased from the map and 78% of historic Palestine was officially colonized. The remaining 22% was divided into glorified apartheid townships in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And on this graveyard the state of Israel was born.</p><p>Upon hearing this uncensored history lesson, provided you can pry their fingers from their ears long enough to hear it, your average Christian Zionist zombie will usually respond by pointing out the striking similarities between this narrative and America's own hideous colonial origin story and ask with a pithy heir of pomposity; "Does the United States have the right to exist?" And on this point, they are absolutely correct. America, after all, was little more than another British experiment in colonial piracy built on what may very well be the two most devastating acts of genocide in recorded history.</p><p>The estimated population of people indigenous to what is now recognized as the United States of America stood somewhere between 8 and 15 million before the original Zionists showed up in 1492. By the 19th Century, most of this nation's north had been emptied out of red flesh by routine massacres and biological warfare and it was decided that the refugees who fled to the southeast would be dealt with in a much more orderly and systematic fashion. </p><p>The white male landowners of Capitol Hill passed their own Nakba with the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and President Andrew Jackson, America's answer to David Ben-Gurion, spent the better part of the next decade forcing an estimated 100,000 Native Americans from 18 tribes to the desolate West Bank of Oklahoma where they would be confined to reservations surrounded by illegal settlers and military installations and left to rot in poverty. By 1900, America's indigenous population dwindled at around 237,000. The math isn't hard to do but the numbers are impossible not to choke on. Several Holocausts went into turning America into the original Israel. This includes the tens of millions of Africans slaughtered in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. </p><p>With these shockingly true horror stories in mind, it's really little wonder why so many Americans are proud and unapologetic Zionists, our nation served as their blueprint. I guess a better question is how it's even possible that so many avowed anti-Zionists on this illegally occupied soil remain proud if annoyingly apologetic Americans. How can any morally dignified human being chant the words "from the nation to the sea..." and then head straight for the ballot box to validate the nation that outsourced the Nakba to Middle East by voting to fill a government that has no more legitimacy than the one in Tel Aviv?</p><p>This is why I am an anarchist as well as an anti-Zionist and this is why I proudly stand by the accusation made by so many Zionists that anti-Zionism is synonymous with anti-Americanism. They are absolutely right. The state itself, as it is currently defined, is a European colonialist construct designed for conquest. The notion that such a device could ever be rehabilitated for anything less than heinous is almost hysterically ludicrous and the proof is in the history. </p><p>America's rampage didn't end in Indian Country. Manifest Destiny continues to expand to every corner of the globe with a trail of bodies in its wake to this day. The only reason why the Nakba never ended in the Holy Land is because the Nakba never ended in the Promised Land. Without Washington's full and unconditional support, the current massacre raging in Gaza would grind to a screeching halt. In other words, America doesn't have an Israel problem, the whole fucking planet has an America problem. Israel is just a symptom.</p><p>It is high time for American radicals of every political stripe to take off the blinders and recognize that what rests comfortably in Washington is a globalist Yankee Occupied Government that we can no longer afford to legitimize, not with our votes, not with our tax dollars, and certainly not with our petty fucking excuses. The Palestinians will only be free from the river to the sea once we dispatch the beast that resides between sea to shining sea. Because no state has the right to exist, and the ones built on genocide need to go first.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers</p><p>* Broken Man by St. Vincent</p><p>* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana</p><p>* Atom Bomb by Bully</p><p>* Testify by Rage Against the Machine</p><p>* The Glorious Land by PJ Harvey</p><p>* Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos</p><p>* Ruined by Adrianne Lenker</p><p>* The Land of Rape and Honey by Ministry</p><p>* Pretend We're Dead by L7</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This post is dedicated in loving memory to Nex Bennedict, a young, non-binary, indigenous person taken too soon from the guts of Indian Country for refusing to go down without a fight. May all those who have seen their light carry their spirit of resistance forward into the darkness. </p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-13827737241494863152024-02-25T11:01:00.000-08:002024-02-25T11:43:39.522-08:00We Should All Abandon Biden and the Two-Party Junta He Rode in On<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: inherit;">"Some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity."</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #181818; font-family: inherit;">-Fred Hampton</span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> 'If you have trouble figuring out whether you're for Biden or Trump, then you ain't Black! So sayeth the DNC prescribed lord of liberal progressivism.' As shocking as that sentiment may have sounded coming from a career white supremacist like Joe Biden in 2020, this is what marginalized people of all shades have been telling ourselves for decades and that includes pale-skinned Queer folk like me.</p><p>By November of that year of our lord Satan, my people in the trans community were practically throwing up blood, living in a nightmare that seemed to get worse by the hour. While Donald Trump gassed churches and starved Yemen, his flunkies across the Bible Belt passed a vile slew of aggressively fascistic laws that seemed to be designed to torture gender nonconforming children into suicide. Doctors were being threatened with felonies for treating them while their own parents were being investigated for child abuse just for acknowledging their right to exist.</p><p>I saw the effects of this campaign of cultural terrorism firsthand on the faces of my own friends and family. I also saw the craven way in which the Democratic Party used this fear to hijack their votes without doing a goddamn thing to earn them. Suddenly, Joe Biden, the pitiless architect of a prison system that targets a higher percentage of transwomen of color than nearly any other demographic in the country, became our only hope, the straight white savior who could shelter us from Donald Trump and his hordes of bible-swinging backwoods savages. Sadly, it worked. Again.</p><p>This sick game has been going on for far too long. The relationship that minorities like mine have with the Democratic Party is nothing short of abusive. Those super predators have systematically degraded our self-esteem, groomed us into believing that we don't deserve any better and then left us in one ditch after another with nothing to show for our trouble but bruises and track marks. </p><p>Republican governors have continued their fascist crusade against the civil liberties and basic human dignity of trans kids and Joe Biden and his handlers have stood by with their filthy hands in their pockets and done absolutely nothing. </p><p>And we're not alone. Last time I checked cops were still shooting Black boys on mopeds and migrants continue to get mangled by the flailing police state at our prolapsed border. The Democrats treat us all like sadistic white pimps on a bender but thankfully some of daddy's tricks are getting heroically mouthy.</p><p>After months of watching the man they voted for in droves facilitate an open genocide against their brothers and sisters in the Gaza Strip, the long silent Arab and Muslim communities of this country are in open revolt against Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. </p><p>With a rapidly growing community in the battleground state of Michigan, these folks have slyly recognized their strategic value and told their gladhanding DNC bamboozlers to put up or fuck off, hitting the streets armed with signs that read "Abandon Biden" and organizing a campaign calling on all Democrats with a functioning conscience to vote "uncommitted" in Michigan's Democratic primary.</p><p>The Biden junta is listening. In fact, they appear to be scrambling scared and it is a beautiful sight to behold. First, they sent the manager of Biden's 2024 bid, Julia Chavez Rodriguez, to Dearborn to quietly meet with the local officials of America's Muslim capital. These local officials, including Mayor Abdullah Hammoud promptly sent Joe's apparatchik packing and issued a public statement that they would not be meeting with anymore campaign officials, only policymakers. </p><p>When Team Biden sent them a groveling national security advisor named Jon Finer for a closed-door meeting, they chewed his head off and leaked an audio recording of that scumbag admitting that Biden fucked up but had no plans to make it better with any actual policy changes.</p><p>This may all sound like little more than pageant drama to jaded radicals like me who have long given up on the ballot box as a tool for anything but theater, however, I believe that this clusterfuck might actually have the potential to become something way bigger than 2024. One of the most marginalized minorities in the country has recognized their untapped power and announced that they aren't willing to sell it for empty promises anymore. </p><p>All at a time in which the entire third world, from the lawyers of Pretoria to the militias of Hodeida, are uniting against America's latest proxy Nakba. And the once invisible Muslims of the Rust Belt aren't the only irate demographic breaking bad either.</p><p>With an increasingly incoherent Joe Biden trailing the openly racist Donald Trump in the polls by wider and wider margins, minorities are leading the exodus. According to the Roper Center, Biden's support among the Black voters who handed him his Hail Mary against Bernie in 2020 has shrunk from 87% to 63% in less than four years. Among Donald Trump's favorite scapegoats in the Hispanic community the plunge has been even more perilous, dropping from 65% to a downright pitiful 39%.</p><p>The woke wonks on cable news are scratching their heads and reading the tea leaves for answers but it doesn't take a gerbil-brained talking head to know which way the wind blows. The various fucked-over classes in this country are sick and tired of being pandered to every few years and then left to swing from the branches like strange fruit until the next election cycle. </p><p>The mighty Muslims of Michigan have the right idea getting organized and publicizing their grievances unfiltered but if you're asking this proudly radicalized minority, they aren't going nearly far enough. We are all getting pissed and we are getting loud, but we are still essentially demanding a better contract from a party of straight white slumlords. </p><p>Their photogenic tokens aside, the Democratic Party is still a machine run by the same predominantly Anglo-Saxon, cis hetero, corporate hegemons who also own their supposed enemies in the GOP. They all talk culture, but they all vote for more war and bigger prisons. It's a fucking scam and even if it wasn't, the notion that one or two universalist parties could ever fairly represent dozens of colonized minorities in a nation built on genocide and slavery is offensively absurd.</p><p>The radical reality is that what we really need is our own goddamn parties, all of us. A Muslim Intifada Party, a Queer Liberation Party, a Black Power Party, a Chicano Party, a Queer Chicano Party, a Black Muslim Party, a Queer Black Muslim Party... as many parties as there are tribes disenfranchised by the assimilationist crematorium of the American melting pot. </p><p>And our parties shouldn't be modeled after the Democrats and the Republicans either. They should be modeled after the parties of other oppressed minorities throughout history and across the globe. Parties like the Black Panthers, Hezbollah, the Brown Berets, the EZLN, and the YPG. Parties devoted to building thriving, self-reliant communities, totally autonomous from the state. Parties with their own schools, gardens, farms, militias, and hospitals.</p><p>And to all my straight white liberal "allies" in the peanut gallery, no, this isn't about separatism. It is about power and self-determination. It's very easy to sing kumbaya and give peace a chance when inclusion means including other people into your culture. Liberalism is a privilege people like me can't afford anymore and we're through begging. We want our communities back and we want the pimps in the DNC to pack up their shit and get out. But more than anything, what I want is what Fred Hampton wanted with the original Rainbow Coalition. I want a radical diversity that reflects the many shades of a truly post-colonial rainbow, and I don't think that's too radical to ask for.</p><p>But this all begins with abandoning Joe Biden and the two-party junta that thinks we owe them anything but a kick in the ass. All power to all the people because all the people deserve power.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones</p><p>* Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday</p><p>* Ahead by Wire</p><p>* These Boots Are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra</p><p>* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor</p><p>* Everything Right Now by Arcade Fire</p><p>* What Have You Done for Me Lately by Janet Jackson</p><p>* Power To the People by John Lennon</p><p>* Bored by Waxahatchee</p><p>* Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan</p><p><br /></p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-35501913697637385742024-02-18T10:21:00.000-08:002024-02-18T10:43:02.158-08:00Learning to Love the Voices in My Head and Embracing "Crazy" as a Lifestyle in Revolt<p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">“People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.”</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">-Thomas Szasz</span></p><p><br /></p><p>People have been telling me that I'm crazy for about as long as I can remember. Teachers, priests, psychiatrists, all kinds of professional adults assigned to define me have defined me as damaged goods because of the perceived abnormality of my behavior. There was always something wrong with the Reid child. I cried too much at school, I didn't perform my gender correctly, and I seemed to prefer the world inside my head to the one around me. I spent countless hours and God knows how much money on expensive sofas in fancy offices trying to explain why I consistently failed to be normal.</p><p>I had a lot of people try to define me with an endless thesaurus of scary sounding labels; Attention Deficit Disorder, Clinical Depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Agoraphobia, Autogynephilia (fuck you, Khytam Dawood), Social Anxiety Disorder.... All of them just seemed like long and elaborate labels for the same diagnosis; Nicky is fucking crazy. But it has only dawned on me just recently to ask the one existential question that all the professional adults in my life seemed to conveniently overlook. Just what the fuck is crazy anyway?</p><p>If the definition is as standardly prescribed, the inability to act in a normal or rational manner, then I guess I fit the bill, guilty as charged. But just how the hell is a child supposed to act when simply being different makes them profoundly unsafe? I cried too much at school because the people who ran that fine institution went out of their way to humiliate and abuse me. I didn't perform my gender correctly because nobody fucking asked me what my gender was in the first place. And you are goddamn right that I preferred the world inside my head. It was the only place where the adults couldn't reach me. There was something wrong with the Reid child, alright. She was a little girl shamed into performing like the gender on her birth certificate and she was sick and tired of every adult with a diploma on their wall putting their hands and their theories all over her body.</p><p>It's taken me thirty-five years, but I've finally realized that mental illness is not my fucking problem. That's just another label like 'heretic' or 'woman' that powerful men use to marginalize the small so they can feel big and important in their luscious ivory towers. Don't get me wrong, I'm plenty fucked up alright. I can't even walk past a church or a school without having a panic attack and I have tried to treat this trauma in nearly every way conceivable. I have talked to complete strangers, paid by the hour, until I'm blue in the face and I have popped more pills than Richard Nixon. But I have only just recently begun to repair the damage from a lifetime of being treated like an emotional leper and I have been doing this by embracing something downright crazy. I've been consulting the voices in my head. </p><p>The scientific term for this prescribed insanity is Parts Work Therapy, which is frequently used to treat Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by recognizing the disowned parts of a patient's personality and granting these parts with the agency to tell their story. But what this really all amounts to is a kind of voluntary multiple personality disorder minus the disassociation. </p><p>Instead of telling those voices in my head to shut the fuck up and keep it down, I ask them who they are and what exactly they have to say. The results of this very simple shift in perception can be a total mindfuck if you've spent your life being abused by the mental health establishment. The result is fully formed sentient beings with thoughts, wills, and opinions all their own. So far, I have met two of them, Agnes and Max.</p><p>Agnes is a five-year-old girl who dresses like a haunted Victorian doll from a horror movie and carries a hammer instead of a dolly. I have been seeing her face in nightmares and mirrors all my life but after simply giving her the opportunity to be heard I have discovered that she isn't some terrifying monster, she is just a very hurt and very scared child who doesn't understand why the adults won't stop putting their hands on her body. She carries that hammer to break those hands but what she really wants is to be loved for being different instead of vilified and to be allowed to be the peculiar little girl that I was never allowed to be.</p><p>Max is a very pissed-off, androgynous teenager who smokes like a chimney, despises anyone over thirty, and watches over Agnes like a hawk. She spends most of what little free time she has left preparing for the day when the priests come back for Agnes. She's a pint-sized survivalist straight out of some queered Sam Peckinpah movie; building pipe bombs, sawing off shotguns, loading revolvers, reading books on Nietzsche and Albert Camus novels, all while she keeps one eye on little Aggy and the other on the door. She also speaks to God even though she thinks he's a dick and might be Joan of Arc in torn jeans and plaid flannel. </p><p>If all this sounds fucking insane then just imagine living it. Suddenly, I feel like a single mother of two emotionally volatile bitches that nobody else can see but me. But the most bizarre thing about this fucked up acid trip that has become my life is just how normal it all feels. How good it feels to see Agnes smile for the first time in thirty years when Max teaches her a new swear word. How rewarding it feels to tell Max that I'm proud of her for letting her guard down instead of building another bomb. However crazy it might sound; I love those two girls with all my heart and that feels so good because it is the first time that I've ever truly loved myself. </p><p>What is mental health? What is mentally healthy? If the answer is attending to one's own emotional needs and wellbeing, then the healthiest thing that I've ever done is embracing my so-called mental illness as a lifestyle in resistance to the violence of 'normal.' So, what then makes me any different from your average garden variety schizophrenic and what makes them any less valid than the prophets in the Bible? Today's lunatics are yesterday's heretics and yesterday's heretics were shaman before we built a society in which it is considered unhealthy to hear voices but it's perfectly rational to grant armed drones with the sentience that we deny to the damaged children in our heads. </p><p>I have a Native American friend who once told me that before the white man came his tribe had no crazy people, just brothers who spoke to the trees and sisters who carried spears because they also carried the spirits of brothers. In small tribal societies there are no marginalized people because every voice can be heard, and every perspective needs to be respected in order to achieve harmony within the village. The same people who call me crazy called these people savages. If this world is normal, then I'm proud to be crazy and I'll take the voices in my head over the ones behind my flickering screen any day of the week. Max and Aggy tell way better jokes anyway.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u> </p><p>* (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads</p><p>* Lithium by Nirvana</p><p>* Read My Mind by the Killers</p><p>* Hummer by Smashing Pumpkins</p><p>* No Cars Go by Arcade Fire</p><p>* Doll Parts by Hole</p><p>* Sin by Nine Inch Nails</p><p>* Do You Realize by Flaming Lips</p><p>* Not Too Soon by Throwing Muses</p><p>* Tilted by Christine & the Queens</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-44758538116828088682024-02-11T10:49:00.000-08:002024-02-11T10:49:37.633-08:00Sympathy for the Shia Militias<p> Quick hypothetical: Let's say that you are a member of a disenfranchised global minority, and some pompous foreign superpower is building bases all over your ancestral homeland, a homeland which they have spent decades bombing to smithereens. Then let's say that this same superpower decided to use these bastard bases to annihilate another disenfranchised global minority. Under such extraordinary circumstances don't you think that the rational and moral response that you and your kin might take is to gather whatever arms you have available and confront these hostile invaders? Don't you think that under such extreme and extenuating circumstances that you might accept weapons from pretty much anyone willing to provide them? And would doing any of these things make you or your neighbors the "terrorists" in this scenario? </p><p>You don't have to answer all of those questions right now. In fact, all I really want to know is can you relate. Because I can and it's getting downright infuriating feeling like I'm the only one. I may be a decadent gender bending infidel, but I am also very familiar with the condition of being stepped on and if some pompous foreign army was using an illegal base in Altoona to carpet bomb Queer kids in Jamaica, I would light that motherfucker up with whatever ordinance I could get my hands on. This is what the Shiite militias of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen are doing right now, and Kali help me, I don't believe that they deserve to be vilified and annihilated for it.</p><p>There are some 3,400 American troops in that region. 900 in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, and as bad as I may feel for the misfortunate life choices of our brave men and women in uniform, they are not there handing out stickers and bubblegum. They are there to serve as an advance force for America's various imperial enterprises in the region, and right now that means assisting the American puppet regime of Israel in committing genocide against the people of the Gaza Strip. The Shia militias in the region that have formed over the last two decades to deal with the fallout from our post-9/11 hijinks have decided that they aren't OK with this, especially considering that the Americans assisting it have long occupied their nations in blatant disregard for every international law and rules-based order in the book.</p><p>Over 160 attacks on US bases have been launched by various Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria alone since America's homebase in the Pentagon began supplying Israel with the ordinances they require to flatten hospitals. These rebel forces have mostly used cheap drones and artillery, some of it undeniably supplied by the only truly autonomous Shia republic in the region, and most of these attacks have been little more than pot shots lobbed at the imperial parades of the powerful in order to send them a simple message of anguish from the powerless. Until recently, these attacks have resulted in little more than minor head injuries for a handful of occupying troops. Tragically, that changed recently with the drone strike on Tower 22. But just what the hell is Tower 22 exactly anyway?</p><p>A shadowy collection of trailers just this side of Jordan's border with Syria, Tower 22 houses some 350 American soldiers allegedly there to fight ISIS. But the last time I checked, what was left of ISIS in that region was in shambles and it was our new enemies in these Shiite militias who put them there. So, what the fuck are all those troops still doing on the Syrian border then and why does Jordan seem downright frightened to even acknowledge their existence? </p><p>American troops are at Tower 22 to facilitate the 900 American troops illegally occupying the oil fields of Eastern Syria with some help from our own proxies in the region. Our reason for this illegal occupation, as expressed explicitly by none other than Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is to prevent the government of Syria from rebuilding their shattered civilian infrastructure after a decade of fighting ISIS, who let us not forget began as a loose knit coalition of western and Saudi proxies themselves.</p><p>So, let me play that back for you just one more time. The United States is using bases typically reserved for starving out indignant Shiites in Syria to facilitate the wholesale annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and who are the fucking terrorists here? Why, the scary brown people of course. This is why our liberal progressive president, Joe Biden, has seen it fit to respond to this "terrorism" with more goddamn terrorism, because that method of madness has really worked out smashingly over the last couple of decades. 125 bombs were delivered to 85 targets by nuclear capable B-1B bombers in the opening salvo alone, killing at least 40 people, including civilians, across Iraq and Syria. </p><p>But it's OK everybody, this isn't a war crime! Those dead bodies don't belong to real people, just Iranian proxies.</p><p>Let me rip the needle off the record right now and call bullshit. The majority of America's targets belong to an organization known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, who have taken credit for most but not all of the recent attacks on US bases (no one has officially taken credit for Tower 22.) The Islamic Resistance is essentially just an alter ego for the extracurricular activities of the Popular Mobilization Front and the PMF is a coalition of various Shia militias that organized with support from the US as well as Iran to confront the Islamic State in 2014 when that American sired Frankenstein menace was actively engaged in committing heinous acts of genocide against Shiite Muslims. Since all but eliminating that contagion, these militias have essentially been integrated into Iraq's military.</p><p>While these organizations have certainly received aid and advice from Iran, they have also become quite notorious for rejecting the latter. American officials have been quoted on numerous occasions observing that, much like the Houthis and Hezbollah, these organizations do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. That's because Iran is far from the regional powerhouse that its enemies project it to be. Iran is a heavily sanctioned, cash-strapped, economic catastrophe, lurching from one financial crisis to the next. They have a bustling industry of well-made and very affordable weapons, and they hand them out like candy, but they lack anything in the way of the institutional gravitas that it would take to manage a puppet army consisting of every Shia with a gun across three continents.</p><p>But there is one thing that the Islamic Republic does supply militias across the region with other than drones and rockets and it is the only export that America is truly terrified of. Iran may be a corrupt and crippled mess of a country but much like other American boogeymen like Vietnam and Cuba, they are the product of a successful popular uprising that totally shattered the illusion of western invincibility in the region. </p><p>In 1979, a loose knit coalition of students, clerics, feminists and communists overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty and its fascist reigning thug, the Shah, at the height of the Cold War with zero support from any superpower in the Global North. At the time, Iran maintained the fifth largest military on earth and one of the most vicious police states of the twentieth century with America picking up the tab for all of it in exchange for unfettered access to the nation's oil.</p><p>This revolution was humiliating and unforgivable to the west. The Iranian people had taken the tainted gift of an Americanized secular society and shattered it on the floor in favor of something shockingly indigenous. This is what inspires populations of Shiites as diverse as the Zaydis in Yemen and the Alawites in Syria and this is what America is currently at war with, not Iran, but the ghost of the Islamic Revolution and the spirit of anti-imperialist resistance that has defined the Shia sect since they first revolted against the Caliphs who inherited Muhammed's throne.</p><p>You shouldn't have to be a true believer in anything but radical self-determination to relate and you shouldn't have to have skin on the sand to feel the pain of any people besieged by tyranny. I guess the only question that I'm really asking here is where is your empathy? Because mine is with the poor and that means having a little sympathy for those dastardly Shia militias. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* All These Things That I've Done by the Killers</p><p>* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones</p><p>* Cherub Rock by the Smashing Pumpkins</p><p>* Young Americans by David Bowie</p><p>* Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance</p><p>* Baby's On Fire by Brian Eno</p><p>* No Cars Go by Arcade Fire</p><p>* Satellite of Love by Lou Reed </p><p>* Are "Friends" Electric by Tubeway Army</p><p>* Blackstar by David Bowie</p><p>* Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-36220682895577660732024-02-04T08:33:00.000-08:002024-02-04T08:33:51.605-08:00Censorship and Child Abuse Go Together Like Israel and Genocide<p> As I'm sure many of you already know, it's not exactly unusual for me to have problems with the various censorious regimes that make up social media. I've written about it here before and I'll probably write about it again. I've been hoodwinked, banned, deboosted, bamboozled and canceled by virtually every platform known to Orwell's ghost and this trend shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. </p><p>I've been persecuted for hurling "hate speech" because I dare to self-identify as an unrepentant tranny bulldyke and I've been prosecuted for promoting "radical extremism" because I've declared my undying solidarity with the people of Yemen in the face of a proxy genocide. I've hocked loogie after loogie into the smug face of every billionaire cyber tyrant from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg and I've been thoroughly thrashed from one corner of the web to the next for my vulgar pride.</p><p>It's all been said and done, and you'd think that I would finally take a hint by now and accept that me and this panopticon masquerading as a town square just don't mix. But I can't and I won't. Something very deep inside still desperately thirsts to be heard and I refuse to abide by any self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" who refuses to afford me access to an audience. So, I shout, and I scream obscenities at the top of my lungs, and I get bound and gagged by the same old benevolent thugs over and over again, and I always take it personally.</p><p>It's an endless game of cat and mouse that probably seems to defy all reason to any casual observer and I've asked myself on more than one occasion, staring at fresh bruises in the mirror, why I even fucking bother. Late last year, the bruises finally responded. Something very dark shifted in this ongoing melodrama this October that irrevocably altered my entire perspective on the trials and tribulations of censorship in the social media age. In fact, it was two things, the first one political and the second very deeply personal, but both feel tethered to one another by a single noose.</p><p>The political darkness that seems to have swallowed social media whole over the last three months is of course the fruit of Israel's almost brazenly sadistic war on the children of the Gaza Strip and more specifically their effortless manipulation of the modern machinations of political correctness to cover it up. While one of the most fearsomely advanced militaries on earth utilizes all the latest in state-of-the-art weaponry to demolish crowded maternity wards, a second parallel army of Fortune 500 lobbyists and PR firms has descended on any debt be sodden coed with a megaphone who dares to cry foul in the face of genocide so as to blackball them with breathless accusations of holocaust denial and antisemitism. </p><p>Just ask anyone who has so much as typed the word genocide and the word Israel in the same sentence on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter since October 7th and they'll tell you exactly what I'm talking about. Posts by well-respected activists and journalists with tens of thousands of followers have completely vanished from their loyal followers' feeds without a trace. All the while, tiny brown bodies stack to the rafters of what few smoldering ruins are still left standing in the Gaza Strip.</p><p>Sadly, none of this probably would have even been particularly shocking to me at this point if it wasn't for the personal darkness that swallowed my universe whole last year in tandem with this censorious crime spree. You see dearest motherfuckers; this is also the October that I finally broke down after months of mounting flashbacks coinciding with my accelerating gender transition and began undergoing a comprehensive regime of trauma therapy to deal with a childhood long shrouded in the shadows of the Catholic Church. Frankly, I was completely unprepared for what confronted me.</p><p>A screaming five-year-old girl inside a boy who begged the world to see her only to be sexually violated and terrorized into making herself disappear for decades because she just wouldn't take a hint and shut the fuck up. That stubborn child just couldn't except the insistence by a shadowy coterie of adult authority figures that her very existence was vulgar until a few of these adults gave her body something else to be terrified by other than the gender on her birth certificate. And suddenly the war became personal.</p><p>Every child dragged, dazed and bloodied, from the rubble became that little girl shattered in the mirror. Every callous IDF storm trooper became another pedophile priest. And every shadow ban on Facebook became another hand wrapped firmly around her bird like throat. I don't write these things for fame and fortune. I write because something frail and proud deep inside me keeps screaming to be heard, begging to be seen. The only thing that has ever soothed that child's bottomless rage has been arresting the fleeting attention span of an oblivious world, not for her, but for other children forced to exist in the shadows of the cruel and powerful.</p><p>This is why I write about war. This is why I pour hours into researching the places on the map that only drones seem to reach. It's too late for that fiery little child who required rape upon the threat of eternal hellfire to be a good little boy. But it's not too late for the broken children of Gaza, of Yemen and Kashmir and Artsakh and Donetsk. I hear their screams like my own in bed at night and I can't fucking sleep until the whole world hears them too. This is how Palestine became painfully intimate this year and this is why censorship feels like fucking violence to me. </p><p>Try as I might, I can't seem to separate the darkness of the personal from the darkness of the political and I refuse to try any longer. I see no difference between the Knesset and the Vatican, between Pope Benedict and Benjamin Netanyahu, between Catholic sex abuse and the Nakba. It's all the same fucking shit. Powerful men breaking fragile bodies just to prove they can and devout followers silencing the noise made by the carnage they leave behind because order matters more to them than children. </p><p>This isn't a conspiracy; it's a strategy and it works. All systems of institutional power are threatened by the very existence of the individual because individuals are defined by an innate reluctance to be governed. We are all born individuals, so systems of power must disenfranchise and dehumanize children until they can be groomed into knowing their proper place among the silent masses.</p><p>A grotesque but inevitable side effect of this sick campaign to objectify the very young is the invention of an entire population specifically reared to be preyed upon by powerful men. It only follows that predation would then become a downright recreational activity for a certain subset of these powerful men elite enough to engage in it without repercussion and this includes the untouchable scions of social media.</p><p>As if genocide, censorship, and molestation weren't enough, this winter of children's discontent also happened to coincide with the revelation that Meta, the colossal conglomerate that owns both Facebook and Instagram, has been actively profiting off the exploitation of the children who they don't bother to censor on their platforms. </p><p>Internal corporate documents unsealed as part of a lawsuit filed by the New Mexico Department of Justice against both Meta and their CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that not only did top executives market its messaging platforms to children while fully aware that the abuse of minors was rampant in these spaces, but they opposed measures made by their own employees to prevent this behavior specifically because it would put them at a "competitive disadvantage" with rival platforms.</p><p>Now, I personally reject assertions by rival authority figures like New Mexico's Attorney General, Raul Torrez, that policing the social interactions of minors is an effective tool for combatting child exploitation, but Meta clearly does and there is something deeply deranged about a platform that can affectively silence someone for bringing attention to genocidal child abuse in the Gaza Strip but cannot be bothered to use that same technology to stifle known child molesters and it says everything that you need to know about the value these institutions place on children.</p><p>We live in a nation where children's rights have been reduced to the level of livestock and freedom of speech has been reduced to a set of privileges bestowed upon us by a new technocratic feudal class and we have the nerve to act shocked when entire generations are being sold into a lifestyle defined by trauma. The only people who should be ashamed of themselves here are the adults in the room and the only way to shame them is to reverse their toxic power imbalance by weaponizing free speech. </p><p>I don't possess the skills to do this but the generations beneath me do. Your average ten-year-old can hack circles around any Meta censor in their sleep. What they lack is the agency to defy a social order built on a collective learned helplessness. The only thing that I can do is scream like a five-year old girl and hope that they can hear her when she tells them that only they have the power to stop this madness.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post</u></p><p>* Across the Universe by the Beatles</p><p>* I Think That I Would Die by Hole</p><p>* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex</p><p>* Mayonnaise by Smashing Pumpkins</p><p>* Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen</p><p>* Everything Right Now by Arcade Fire</p><p>* Circle the Drain by Soccer Mommy</p><p>* Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John</p><p>* Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene</p><p>* Never Said by Liz Phair</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-89170277020246904612024-01-28T10:35:00.000-08:002024-01-28T10:35:22.251-08:00The Forgotten Plight of the Negev Bedouin<p> Something strange happened last October in the embattled holy lands that very few western observers managed to pick out of the bones from the various massacres. 17 Gentiles were among the victims slaughtered by Hamas on the 7th and just five days later, a village of 187 was erased from the map in the West Bank in a violent pogrom led by heavily armed illegal Jewish settlers. This may all just sound like another tragic week in the history of the Levant until you realize that all 204 of these sorry souls were Bedouin Arabs, a small marginalized tribal population that has somehow found itself at the withering mercy of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p><p>Some of the first victims of the Al-Aqsa Flood were Israeli citizens of Bedouin decent, and they included a five-year-old boy killed by a stray rocket, a fifty-year-old man shot dead while attempting to rescue injured ravers at the Nova Music Festival, and a 25-year-old construction worker and father of two gunned down defending a Jewish family near the Sderot police station. Another six Bedouins were among the hostages and only two have been returned. Nevertheless, none of these harrowing facts have stopped the Zionist mobs of the West Bank from targeting Bedouin villages like that of Wadi al-Siq as part of their supposed revenge for the events of October 7th.</p><p>That tiny collection of tin shacks clinging to the rugged mountainside east of Ramallah was surrounded by masked settlers and uniformed IDF reservists armed to the teeth with assault rifles and carved from the earth like a cancer from the face of God. Those men opened fire upon unarmed crowds, invaded homes and tied up and assaulted women and children in front of their husbands and fathers at gunpoint. Farmlands were torched, tractors and livestock were stolen, and the battered citizens of Wadi al-Siq were told that every last one of them would be annihilated if they ever returned.</p><p>This is a sad but common chapter in the long plight of the Negev Bedouins, a semi-nomadic indigenous Arab population spread across the shifting borders of the Holy Land who have long suffered the brunt of the violence that goes into drawing those lines. The Bedouins are an ancient people who trace their lineage back to the times of Muhammed and even earlier. Arab for "desert dweller," there are roughly 4 million Bedouins spread across communities throughout the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, and many Arabs still revere them as ideal representatives of their culture do to their rich, poetic oral traditions and their rugged code of honor, but few people have seen their entire way of life obliterated by colonialism the way the Bedouins of the Negev Desert have. </p><p>During the Nakba of 1948, 85% of the Negev Bedouins were forcefully expelled from their ancestral lands. About 40,000 ended up in the West Bank but most remained internally displaced within Israel's ever-expanding borders. Today, 200,000 Bedouins barely eke out a meager existence in a desolate region of the Israeli occupied Negev known as the Siyag. Just over half live in 7 government-built Bedouin-only townships where they have been subjected to multi-generational genocidal campaigns of "forced urbanization" and fallen prey to the despairs of crime, poverty, and addiction that comes with such "progress."</p><p>The remaining 90,000 live in 46 villages, 35 of them are totally unrecognized by the Israeli government. Here the Bedouins have found themselves at the mercy of the all the very worst trappings of the state. Their movement is heavily policed by arbitrary checkpoints and mandatory IDs. Restrictive zoning and planning regimes have cut them off from basic recourses like water and electricity and barred them from building any infrastructure more substantial than trailers and tents. And they have faced an endless roulette of displacement with entire villages demolished overnight, paved over, and replaced by tony Jewish suburbs.</p><p>Sadly, those Bedouins who managed to flee to the West Bank haven't fared any better. They remain virtually unrecognized by the Palestinian Authority who hung them out to dry in the 1993 Oslo Accords when the region that most of the tribes occupy, known as Area C, was essentially handed over to be governed by the Israeli Military. Even before October 7th, this isolated population had been the victims of constant pogroms at the hands of fascist Jewish settlers who have wantonly pillaged their lands while the IDF watches, and the PLO washes their hands. 25 Palestinian Bedouin villages have been violently razed in the last few years alone, displacing 1,517 people and counting.</p><p>So, what the hell did these impoverished sheepherders ever do to earn so much disdain and cruelty from nearly every side of the Israeli-Palestinian clusterfuck? In the simplest of terms, they are anarchists. For centuries the Bedouins have struggled to maintain a way of life that predates the European concepts of Westphalia and Balfour, and they continue to stubbornly practice their stateless existence in a land thatched by arbitrary boundaries and manufactured hierarchies. In both Israel and Palestine, the Bedouins govern themselves under an ancient code of unwritten laws passed down orally and overseen by tribal courts and clan councils. They subsist largely on kinship networks that essentially act as Islamic mutual aid societies providing community support wherever it is needed.</p><p>Much of these traditions have been badly eroded along with virtually everything else that the Negev Bedouins hold dear by generations of expulsion and displacement which has divided tribes and isolated clans from their elders, but the Bedouins still choose overwhelmingly to rely on their own indigenous tribal justice systems rather than the racist Israeli police state or the Palestinian Authority's corrupt Sharia courts and this is what makes these penniless peasants a threat to all of these institutions. The Bedouins don't fucking need them, and they can still remember a time when the rest of the Middle East didn't need them either.</p><p>I strongly believe that the most important fact that most westerners and even many Middle Easterners fail to recognize about the ongoing conquest of the Middle East is that the state itself is a tool of colonialism that is totally alien to those lands. Before the British marched into Jerusalem with their mandates and borders, the Levant was a poorly governed and largely peacefully lawless Ottoman backwoods with a diverse population of Arabs, Jews, Christians, Druze and Mandeans that coexisted harmoniously within their own diverse tribal frameworks. No single set maintained a monopoly on the use of force. </p><p>This confounded the British invaders who failed repeatedly to convince any of these populations to divide themselves up into separate and far more easily subjugated ethno-states. The Crown was ultimately forced to import this brand of racism from back home in the form of fascist European Zionists. You see, the Arabs of the Levant weren't just wiped out because they were brown, like the European Jews in Nazi Germany, they were wiped out because they initially refused to be governed. Sadly, many of the victims of the Nakba have embraced statehood for the same reasons that so many victims of the Holocaust did. Their collective memories of a life before states have been wiped out by the devastating trauma of genocidal colonialism.</p><p>But the Bedouins still remember. Their history, much like that of many indigenous stateless peoples, remains oral and thus unmolested by academic revision. These were the first Muslims, the ones who originally conceived of that religion as an alternative to traditional empires. In fact, Islam's first sect was a tribe of Bedouin nomads known as the Khawarij, who vehemently opposed the centralization of power even within Islam as an impediment to tribal diversity and liberty, and these remain the only values that can save the Middle East and the rest of us, diversity and liberty. </p><p>The Bedouins still remember. Maybe it's time the rest of us did too.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Something Beautiful by Sinead O'Connor</p><p>* I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground</p><p>* Halo by Depeche Mode</p><p>* John the Revelator by Blind Willie Johnson</p><p>* Orange Crush by REM</p><p>* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats</p><p>* Crucify by Tori Amos</p><p>* Sadness As a Gift by Adrianne Lenker</p><p>* Sin by Nine Inch Nails</p><p>* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-9159539766655386612024-01-21T10:21:00.000-08:002024-01-21T10:21:05.393-08:00Adulthood is a Racket that Millennials are Right to Reject<p> Being a self-unemployed, thirtysomething, literary visionary can be a depressingly thankless existence. The pay sucks, the publishers are clueless, the editors are dicks and the endless barrage of finger-wagging rhetorical questions from the sanctimonious adults in the boomer peanut gallery rarely withers. When are you going to get a real job? When are you moving out of your parent's house? When are you going back to school? When are you going to get married and start a family? I've heard them all a thousand fucking times and it really does simply amount to a single declarative condemnation. Nicky, you need to grow the fuck up.</p><p>My usual response to this mandatory life sentence is as simple as it seems to be infuriating to my elderly interrogators. Why? Seriously. Try asking that question to any professional boomer busybody some time and watch them short circuit. They never have a real answer to give. But if they could just give me one good reason why I should swallow my dreams to become what passes for a responsible adult in America today I would gladly get a job at Olive Garden tomorrow. Better yet just name me six unmedicated adults who wouldn't happily march into oncoming traffic right now if they could write it off as a business expense. I'll even give you a minute to get back to me on that one...</p><p>That's what I thought.</p><p>What the hell is adulthood anyway other than another empty social construct used to justify participation in a deeply unwell society? The fucking icecaps are melting but I should be in some kind of big fucking hurry to make shit for pay in some joyless corporate death march that ends with me being buried alive in debt in the suburbs after pumping out two and a half more lambs to the slaughter on the sacrificial shrine of endless war and environmental degradation. With all due respect, concerned boomers, you can all go fuck yourselves with broken glass because I would rather be a goddamn child then grow up to be anything like you.</p><p>Thankfully, I'm far from alone in this refusal to cooperate with mass suicide by "normal." There are droves of millennials just like me who are statistically less likely than any generation in modern memory to date, procreate, work a 9-to-5 or move out and this socioeconomic boycott has resulted in us becoming near universally reviled by our elders in increasingly public displays of disaffection. Everywhere you look there is some new expose or op-ed on how my generation is fucking up quite literally everything. </p><p>Millennials are consistently presented by nearly every facet of the omnipresent mass media panopticon as lazy, greedy, ungrateful children who need to shut up, breed, and participate in the joyful degradation of the planet's withering resources. And I'm not here to tell you that we aren't fucked up. I'm here to inform you that we have every fucking right to be considering the spiritually empty society that you have shoved down our throats since we were literally children.</p><p>Millennials may be failures by the current standards of adulthood, but we are also the most overworked and overeducated generation in American history and all this hard labor has only made us poorer and more precariously employed than any other generation since the Great Depression and it all begins with that abusive racket known as the compulsory school system.</p><p>Children as young as four are corralled, itemized, objectified, and fed onto an assembly line that grooms us to shut up, sit still and fill out reems of scantron forms for eight hours a day while role crazy, dead-end bureaucrats govern our every move and police anything even resembling critical thinking. All so we can be herded into the federally funded, for profit, college system where we are encouraged to learn literally anything but an actual trade while we get robbed blind and end up in the exact same pointless service industry jobs as our comrades who had the good sense to flunk or drop out.</p><p>This whole circus is nothing but a trillion-dollar shakedown and the only thing covid did was expose it for what it's always been by ripping the curtain off. Productivity has been increasing rapidly in this country for fifty years now while hourly compensation has remained frozen in an era when you could buy a three-bedroom house for less than thirty grand. Meanwhile unemployment has doubled, and student loans have shot through the roof like a cannon while the American Empire squanders the fortune its mined from generations of wage slaves on declaring total war against any culture not perverted enough to worship the Dollar like a golden calf.</p><p>All things considered; I actually think that the millennial response to realizing that our lives have been a glorified pyramid scheme has been a perfectly healthy one. We dropped out. We collectively rejected degrading employment while slowly drifting back to the tribal values of the multigenerational household and mutual assistance that a deeply polluted and morally bankrupt western culture chucked aside for contrived notions of economic liberalism and conspicuous consumption. </p><p>Unfortunately, however, my generation and the one beneath ours has also fallen under the sway of another modern racket called social media which has aggressively isolated us from each other by monopolizing our social lives beneath the constant surveillance of the state and its reigning plutocracy. This is the real crisis of my generation; the crisis of chronic and downright systemic loneliness being trafficked to us by the vultures of big tech. </p><p>According to a 2021 Harvard study, 61% of young Americans report experiencing "serious loneliness" and Scientific American has found the current rate of friendship formation to be at a historic low. Self-harm and suicide rates are rising and razor blades arrent even the cheapest way to bleed yourself dry. Psychiatric researchers estimate that the health effects of prolonged social isolation are about the same as smoking a pack of Marlboro's a day. </p><p>Something is seriously fucking wrong here, and it can't be fixed by simply raising the minimum wage or forgiving student loans. When entire generations are choosing to slowly kill themselves with smartphones instead of engaging with society then society has clearly failed, and we need to stop blaming the victims for this failure. Millennials are pretty fucked up brats because you fucked us up by encouraging us to sell our souls to a system that boomers came this close to overthrowing not so long ago.</p><p>Back in 1960, the brilliant subversive psychologist, Paul Goodman, published a study on juvenile delinquency called Growing Up Absurd. At the time, America was facing a similar generational crisis with the gray flannel robots of the Eisenhower era freaking the fuck out about the rise in moral degeneracy in the form of youth gangs, beatniks, and Rock n Roll. </p><p>Goodman poured over the numbers and came to the startling conclusion that the kids were right because the system was bullshit. Young people were totally justified in their rejection of "growing up" because society had failed to give them anything worth growing up into. Cold War America was bereft of meaningful work, honorable community, and spiritual sustenance and I think that even the countercultural sellouts of the boomer generation will agree that these conditions have only grown more dire over the decades.</p><p>The solution to this problem remains the same today is it was then and it's far from an easy fix. The solution is revolution. Or as the good Doctor Goodman prescribed, developing new social and moral identities that reject the malignant standards of a debased society. Creating an economy independent of government regulation and wage slavery. Embracing independent thinking and intergenerational cooperation instead of the involuntary servitude of compulsory schooling. Abandoning the spiritual desert of suburbia for agricultural village life amongst the ruins of the Rust Belt. Dropping out of mass society and embracing a more intimate tribal existence.</p><p>If this isn't adulthood, then fuck adulthood. Children of all ages deserve something better to grow into. As for me, I may never write the next great Queer American novel, but I'd rather die typing in my parent's basement than live on my knees for a paycheck and you boomers can take that to the fucking bank because I learned it from you before your generation sold its soul for a seat at the adult's table.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* My Generation by the Who</p><p>* The Middle by Jimmy Eat World</p><p>* Changes by David Bowie</p><p>* Bad Kids by Black Lips</p><p>* Caught In My Shadow by the Wonder Stuff</p><p>* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana</p><p>* Full Time Job by Squirrel Flower</p><p>* Drink Before the War by Sinead O'Connor</p><p>* 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins</p><p>* Rock Star by Hole</p><p>* Grey Cell Green by Ned's Atomic Dustbin</p><p>* We Are Not Alone by Karla DeVito</p><p><br /></p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-12879239624332667142024-01-14T11:17:00.000-08:002024-01-14T11:17:14.007-08:00The Strange and Lonesome Death of Artsakh is a Warning to Palestine<p> It didn't end with a death march. It didn't end with mass graves. It didn't end with firing squads or gas chambers. The Second Armenian Genocide didn't end a thing like the first one did but that didn't make its ending any less devastating or any less genocidal. The destruction of Artsakh ended with a whimpering statesman signing a piece of paper and just like that, an entire nation was erased. While Israel has been busy mercilessly grinding the Gaza Strip into a fine powder with the whole world watching, another far quieter but equally merciless Nakba has taken place in Central Asia with the whole world looking the other way.</p><p>On September 28, 2023, Samuel Shahramanyan, the last president of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, better known to its ethnic Armenian citizens as Artsakh, signed a ceasefire with Azerbaijan in which the latter nation agreed to end its brutal siege of the prior provided that the NKR kindly agreed to cease to exist. On the first day of 2024 this genocidal "peace" deal formally went into effect but not before the last 100,000 citizens of Artsakh abandoned their ancestral homeland to run for their lives.</p><p>In many ways, this was the most shockingly successful genocide of the Twenty-First Century with thousands of years of culture and history obliterated with the click of a pen, but the final chapter of this final solution actually began several years earlier like so many others, with an American-sponsored bloodbath. After years of careful planning and hording high-tech weaponry, Recep Erdogan's revanchist NATO sultanate of Turkey decided to reenact the Armenian Genocide by micromanaging a brutal proxy assault on the contested territory of Artsakh in 2020 using the neighboring Ottoman puppet state of Azerbaijan like a hammer.</p><p>Armed to the teeth with both Turkish and Israeli drones along with tens of millions of dollars in American cluster munitions, Azerbaijan's notoriously ruthless strongman, Ilham Aliyev, laid siege to the supposedly treaty-protected Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, bombarding crowded civilian city centers and shelling the refugees who dared to flee from them. Over 6,000 people were slain in just over one month and another 90,000 were forcibly displaced under the threat of genocide. What population that remained was herded into the last corner of their territory as it was cut in half and totally surrounded by heavily armed Turkic gestapo.</p><p>A single road was left open connecting Artsakh to the Armenian mainland. In late 2022 that road was closed, and a crippling ten-month long blockade followed, barring the already impoverished and shellshocked people of the NKR from all food and medicine. In September of last year, Azerbaijan struck again, easily routing the cornered nation's last remaining military positions within 24 hours and forcing its besieged government to concede to its own erasure. It was a strange and lonesome ending to a long and storied resistance movement. An ending that felt almost unfathomably anticlimactic to anyone actually familiar with Armenian history.</p><p>Ethnic Armenian settlements have existed in the region known as Nagorno-Karabakh for over 3,000 years, often at the mercy of the constantly competing Ottoman and Russian empires. Artsakh was just one piece of the ancient Christian region of Armenia which had once stretched across Eastern Turkey and deep into the Caucuses of modern-day Russia and Western Iran. Much of this territory along with 1.5 million Armenians was erased by the Ottomans during the gruesome final days of their vampire empire in one of the darkest chapters of the First World War.</p><p>That same damnable war also led to the rise of the Soviet Union which would ultimately include what little remained of Armenia as well as the neighboring Turkish outpost of Azerbaijan. In a typically cruel attempt to divide and conquer, the Bolsheviks arbitrarily incorporated the Armenian region of Artsakh into the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in spite of the vehement protests of the Armenian partisans who had helped them dethrone the Czar. Repeated requests for sovereignty nearly broke out into open warfare before the Kremlin finally caved and established the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923.</p><p>But the movement to return Artsakh to Armenian rule never ceased and when peaceful attempts by the oblast to break away from Azerbaijan failed during the waning days of the Soviet experiment, a brutal ethnic conflict erupted into the First Nagorno-Karabakh War which raged on for 6 long years between 1988 and 1994. The ensuing carnage resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides. An uncomfortable peace was finally brokered by France, Russia and the United States in a coalition known as the Minsk Group but the people of Artsakh didn't need meddlesome outsiders to tell them who they were. </p><p>After all, if Azerbaijan had the right to independence from the Russian Federation, then why shouldn't Artsakh have the right to their own independence from Azerbaijan? And so, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic boldly declared its independence with a popular referendum in 1991 without the recognition of a single UN member state, including Armenia, and I believe that it is this silent betrayal, the betrayal of nation states against nation states, that ultimately dammed Artsakh to its tragic fate over thirty years later.</p><p>The most disturbing thing about the strange and lonesome final days of Artsakh is that quite literally every single nation state touching that region, friend or foe, found some way to fuck those people over and few states fucked Artsakh harder than the Armenian fatherland. The final ceasefire that proved to be the final nail in Artsakh's coffin was actually built on the internationally brokered ceasefire that officially ended the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 while handing over half of Artsakh to Azerbaijan and affording them the territorial advantage to take the rest of the Republic four years later. This oddly tragic ceasefire was brokered by the original three nations of the Minsk Group along with Azerbaijan and Armenia but conspicuously excluded any representatives from the Republic of Artsakh and also seemed to exclude the consent of the citizens that Armenia supposedly represents, who were nothing short of infuriated to learn of their nation's act of diplomatic betrayal.</p><p>In fact, while this ceasefire may have temporarily silenced the rifles on the frontlines, it also led to months of riots back home in Yerevan, nearly a year of open upheaval that saw crowds of irate citizens seizing parliament buildings and beating their supposed representatives half to death in the streets. Scores of high-ranking Armenian officials resigned in disgust, including the nation's own Minister of Defense, and an alleged coup launched by members of the Armenian Military was barely thwarted in 2021. That's because representative democracy only truly represents the will of the highest bidder and in Armenia that bidder has become the United States who have sickeningly played both sides of the trenches in this conflict for the same reasons that they turned Ukraine into a geopolitical boobytrap, to sow discord amongst the ranks of its rivals.</p><p>After arming their mortal enemies in Azerbaijan for years with multi-million-dollar military hardware, the United States has taken to simultaneously dangling NATO membership over Armenia's heads like scraps to a beggar that they put out in the cold themselves. In fact, Armenia spent the two weeks prior to Azerbaijan's final assault on Artsakh engaged in joint military exercises with the United States intended to prepare them for "evaluation" on NATO eligibility, in spite or perhaps because of the fact that Armenia is already a member of Russia's own NATO-style military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization aka the CSTO. This game of ballistic Caucasian footsie has been going on for years and it's likely what inspired Russia to ignore its own security obligations to Armenia when Azerbaijan launched airstrikes within their borders during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that this is precisely what Washington is after, especially when you remember that they sold Baku the bombs that struck the fatherland. </p><p>But sadly, Armenia has become just corrupt and desperate enough to fall for this shell game just like Kiev did. That shiny NATO dream of a Coca-cola in every fridge and an Apache Helicopter on every pad. Thousands of years of pride and resistance down the shitter, all so a few thugs in Yerevan can have a whisper of a chance at joining the same military alliance that arms their old chums in Turkey. Not that Sultan Erdogan gives a flying fuck about any empire but his own. His expressed goal in this whole sorry sorted affair is actually just to pave over Artsakh in order to turn it into an off-ramp for China's Belt and Road Initiative known as the Middle Corridor. But Israel can live with that just so long as Turkey doesn't open that corridor through Iran, so they've gladly filled in for their Yankee overlords as Azerbaijan's biggest arms supplier in order to convince them to tear a page from their own playbook and choose genocide over diplomacy. </p><p>If your head hurts that's because this schizophrenic skullduggery is absolutely batshit crazy but it's also precisely what states do and it's what states have always done. They rise, they fall, they fuck each other over, and they devour entire nations like Artsakh in the process just to spit them back out again. Contrary to western lore, a nation is not a government built on the fickle materialism of blood and soil. A nation in its truest form is a tribal community bound by a shared history, culture, and vision for the future. The state on the other hand is nothing but a cartel designed to capture a nation behind its borders and destroy any real sense of community that once bound it with a monopoly on the use of force and the shifting territorial ambitions of the elites that such a caste system inevitably creates.</p><p>Artsakh was a great nation destroyed by a state and that state wasn't Turkey or Azerbaijan or even the United States of America, it was Armenia, with its corrupt elites and its globalist neoliberal ambitions. This tragedy is a warning in the shape of a self-inflicted genocide. Artsakh thrived for centuries before the poisoned invention of the Westphalian Nation State redefined its existence as mere geographical collateral. So, did Palestine. Every nation should think twice before they consider any state to be a solution because in an age of collapsing empires any state can easily become a nation's final solution.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Vampire Empire by Big Thief</p><p>* Wardance by Killing Joke</p><p>* Jerusalem by Sinead O'Connor</p><p>* Right Back to It by Waxahatchee </p><p>* Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth</p><p>* The One I Love by REM</p><p>* Violets by Hole</p><p>* Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene</p><p>* Sanctified by Nine Inch Nails</p><p>* I Thought You'd Change by Hotline TNT</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-59652400762572367662024-01-07T11:42:00.000-08:002024-01-07T11:42:08.990-08:00Revenge of the Renegades of the Red Sea: What We Can All Learn from the Houthi Rebels<p> There is something just absolutely soul crushing about watching a war on live television, especially when all the networks seem to be rooting for the bad guys. However, despite what those jackals on cable news might tell you, what's going on right now in Gaza is not a war, it is a goddamn holocaust and even in an age when forever wars seem to grow on trees, this bloodbath is downright unprecedented in its almost casual cruelty. While the unblinking cameras roll, one of the most powerful modern armies on earth is laying into a glorified concentration camp with the full weight of its hi-tech arsenal while pretending to be the victim because a few sadistic orphans they used to sponsor managed to get in a shot between massacres.</p><p>Shall we pour over the grotesque statistics one more time? In less than 3 months, the state of Israel has slaughtered over 22,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including nearly 10,000 children. Another 50,000+ have been wounded and everyone on the ground with a functioning calculator seems to agree that this estimate is likely extremely low. Another 7,000 people are missing, including about 5,000 women and children, most of whom are presumed to be dead or dying, crushed beneath the rubble of a crowded urban graveyard decimated by million-dollar murder machines. 85% of a population of 2.3 million is now homeless with 70% of all homes in Gaza and half of all buildings damaged or destroyed. At least a quarter of this population is now on the brink of famine and infectious disease, with public health experts predicting nearly 500,000 to drop dead where they cower within the next year.</p><p>Genocide is the word for this, and we all know it, but we all just sit by every day and watch it happen as if it were some kind of sick new reality TV show about blowing up brown children. It's fucking sickening and the western media's posture of detached objectivity is the worst kind of complicity money can buy. That's because this genocide isn't simply an Israeli genocide, it is an Israeli facilitated proxy genocide and American tax dollars pay for every bomb dropped on another hospital. While the Biden Administration gasps like a soap opera debutante at the deeds of their increasingly unhinged Zionist golem, they hand that sick thing another blank check to keep the bodies rolling. We arm these cannibals with $3.8 billion dollars in aid a year and Genocide Joe still has to circumvent Congress to hand them another $106 million bucks in tank shells so they can shoot orphaned teenage amputees in the ICU.</p><p>This is an American holocaust, and we all have blood on our hands now. We can no longer pretend like we don't know but what do we do? What can we do? What can anyone do? The sense of helplessness hangs heavy in the air with the stench of burning corpses like fog. But then, like a flash of lightening in the desert sky, the Houthi rebels appear. A rugged, swashbuckling, renegade militia of bearded brown pirates straight out of some bygone era of guerrilla solidarity and radical chic. It's hard for any self-respecting anti-imperialist not to smirk while these Shia Che Guevaras slice up the Red Sea with AKs and Zodiac boats and finally hold western capital responsible for their crimes by simply taxing their access to the waters off their impoverished shores. </p><p>The Houthi rebels have boldly hijacked Israeli linked cargo ships and scared many more away with a driving steel rain of drone strikes and missile attacks, and the enemy is feeling the pain. 12% of all global trade passes through the Red Sea, which connects the Mediterranean to Asia via the Suez Canal. This includes a whopping 30% of the world's shipping traffic. While the Houthis daring nautical stunts have carefully avoided a single civilian casualty, they have effectively rerouted global trade by forcing freight companies to sail all the way around the Cape of Africa for their imperial plunder, causing two-week delays and raising costs by 15%.</p><p>And the beautiful thing about this pirate insurgency is that the west is totally powerless to prevent it. America is rattling its silver saber with Operation Prosperity Guardian, a ten-nation coalition that conspicuously excludes any state actually on the Red Sea, with an armada of 20 warships led by two aircraft carrier battle groups. But what have they achieved? A few downed dinghies and a dozen dead rebs? The Houthis laugh and bark "bring it on!" That's because they know that there is nothing the masters of the universe can do that will save them one dime. Any military action in those waters will only drive business farther away.</p><p>For once, the peasants have these fuckers by the balls and the only weapons that Babylon has left at their disposal are your television set and your smartphone. They are working very hard to tell you exactly who they want you to believe these rebels really are and roughly 90% of what they are telling you is pure weapons-grade horseshit. "Iranian proxies! Iranian proxies!" Every time a Shia picks up a gat, you can hear some retired five-star American pigfucker with a merkin toupee squealing "Iranian proxies!" and it's often half-true but not this time. Yemen's Houthi rebels may be Shiites but only technically. The Houthis actually belong to a renegade strain of Shia Islam known as Zaydism which is closer in its fundamental theology to Sunni Islam than it is to the dominate Twelver Shiites of Iran who tend to view the Zaydis as heretics.</p><p>The Houthi movement formed in the northern Saada province of what was then North Yemen in the 80s as a broad coalition of tribal groups committed to the revival of Zaydism which had previously ruled the region as an imamate for over a thousand years before the west stepped in with their endless procession of proxy strongmen. One of those strongmen was an ambitious thug named Ali Abdullah Saleh who came to power in 1978 and united Yemen for the first time with his conquest of the communist South in 1990. Saleh didn't take too kindly to the flamboyantly anti-imperialist Houthis who calling him out for being a hired gun for infidel conquistadors, so he violently cracked down on what had originally been a fairly moderate movement with a series of massacres that culminated in the assassination of the Houthi's founder and namesake, a Zaydi religious scholar and former member of parliament named Hussein al-Houthi, in 2004. </p><p>This is when the insurgency really began. Hussein's brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, quickly transformed the movement into a formidable militia modeled after Lebanon's Hezbollah and in 2012, on the heels of the Arab Spring, his insurgency exploded into a nationwide popular rebellion. The US and their Saudi henchmen attempted to stop the bleeding by swapping out Saleh for his top general, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, but he didn't last two years before being overthrown in 2014. </p><p>While it is true that the Houthis quite openly take inspiration from Iran's Islamic Revolution and that the Mullahs have frequently stated their moral support for the movement, their influence has been grossly overblown by the western powers who this rag-tag militia have consistently humiliated. The Iranian's actually financed Hadi and begged their Houthi admirers not to overthrow the prick. Even after Tehran's arch enemies in Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen with America's support in 2014 there exists no verifiable proof of any kind of substantial Iranian assistance.</p><p>Even the State Department has admitted as much in cables released by Wikileaks, stating that their analysts believed that the lion's share of the Houthis growing arsenal actually came from corrupt officials within Yemen's American-armed Republican Guard who would later collapse and largely join the Houthis after Hadi hit the bricks and sided with the Saudi invaders. The real motivation behind the Houthi's bombastic campaign in the Red Sea is actually a simple thirst for revolutionary justice. </p><p>Much like Gaza, Yemen has been the victim of an atrocious American proxy genocide. After kicking Hadi out, America had their tools in Saudi Arabia cut Yemen off from the outside world with a crippling blockade before financing a seven-year carpet bombing campaign. By the time Washington's Wahhabi puppets finally forfeited in a truce in 2022, 377,000 Yeminis had been slaughtered, the overwhelming majority of them being women and children of Zaydi decent.</p><p>What the Houthis are doing in the Red Sea right now is what the Houthis have always done best and it's something that any aspiring enemy of the pigfucker state should steal a chapter from. The Houthis are turning the tables on their cowardly tormentors by flipping the script. They have affectively launched their own counter-blockade against another one of America's proxy states and in the process, they have brilliantly highlighted the fact that the genocide in Gaza is actually just one piece in an international campaign of Washington sponsored terrorism that also includes the genocide in Yemen.</p><p>This is what makes the Houthi rebels truly dangerous to empire. It's not their ideology. It's their strategy. A form of decentralized guerrilla solidarity that we could all benefit from. Just think about it; Queer anarchists like yours truly hit the streets demanding to abolish the RICO Act which is used to lynch non-binary Atlanta Forest Defenders and outlaw bikers alike. The Hell's Angels return the favor by trafficking bootleg hormone blockers into states banning their use by minors, selling them to teenage runaways at cut-rate prices using untraceable crypto currencies, empowering hackers to expand the dark web to include humanitarian supplies to besieged polities like Gaza and Yemen, encouraging the decentralization of power among their people which would in turn allow local Queer groups to rise up in solidarity with their conservative Muslim brethren which would in turn encourage conservative Muslims to reproach the third genders that they once coexisted with prior to western colonization.</p><p>Local actions directed at a single enemy, provoking a chain reaction of international revolutionary upheaval. I believe that this is what that ghoul Henry Kissinger warned us about with his infamous "Domino Theory" and I do believe that it could still be a beautiful thing. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* 7/4 (Shoreline) by Broken Social Scene</p><p>* Rebels by Drive-By Truckers</p><p>* Renegades of Funk by Rage Against the Machine</p><p>* Pretend We're Dead by L7</p><p>* Midnight Rider by the Allman Brothers Band</p><p>* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers</p><p>* A Drug Against War by KMFDM</p><p>* Rise Above by Black Flag</p><p>* War Pigs by Black Sabbath</p><p>* Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This screed is devoted in loving memory to John Pilger and Antonio Negri. Two men who devoted their lives to advocating for the annihilation of empire and inspired me to do the same. Their legacies remain vital just so long as pissed off people refuse to sit by and do nothing while evil men succeed.</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-27647929081155066772023-12-31T08:29:00.000-08:002024-01-01T14:19:19.127-08:00A Few People Who Actually Didn't Suck in 2023<p> "I am going to make it through this year if it kills me!" I find myself singing that desperate chorus from the Mountain Goats' classic "This Year" repeatedly pretty much every year around this time but I've never needed to believe those lyrics more badly than I do now in the final days of 2023. I could say that 2023 fucking sucked. That's the way that I've started a lot of these annual lists of the few people who seemingly miraculously actually didn't. But somehow that just doesn't seem to cut it this year.</p><p>The most accurate way that I can put it is that 2023 peeled me alive. Just when I thought that nothing could possibly be more nauseating than the pointless proxy quagmire in Ukraine, Bibi Netanyahu and his coterie of Ashkenazi ethno-terrorists declared total war on the starving children of Gaza and proceeded to pulverize preschoolers into mush with American ordinances. As if that weren't heinous enough, this horror show seemed to coincide like a conspiracy with a series of personal therapeutic breakthroughs that have brought my own long suppressed childhood trauma up like spiritual vitriol. </p><p>Long depressing story short; I spent the holidays watching my inner child dragged bloody and screaming from the rubble in Palestine over and over again before being tarred and feathered as an antisemite for being a little fucked by the experience.</p><p>So, yeah, 2023 fucking sucked. 2023 can eat a flaming train of dicks. Fuck that year and whatever twisted god who came up with it. But, as always, 2023 did still provide us with a few people who didn't suck, a few people who were actually downright heroic, providing a much-needed silver lining to an otherwise toxic storm cloud of a year, and I'm here to swallow a gallon of my own vitriol and praise them because many of these people actually helped me to survive this awful fucking year and maybe, just maybe, their example will go on to help me prosper in the next one. So, let's now thank that twisted god for a few people who actually didn't suck in 2023. She could learn a thing or two from these people.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Mohammed al-Bukhaiti</u>-</b> I'm probably going to get my fair share of shit for this one but quite frankly, I'm too goddamn pissed-off to give a fuck. Once in every generation or so, a revolutionary movement manages to capture the imagination of the pissed-off lumpenproles of this world by simply catching the empire we despise with its pants down. Past generations have had the Black Panthers, the Tupamaros and Anonymous. This one has the Houthi rebels and regardless of your own personal politics or creed it is hard not to admire a rag-tag army willing to take on Babylon with such rugged charisma and smirking zeal. While most of the world has stood by helpless while the United States has used Israel to obliterate Gaza like a fucking lawnmower, the Houthis, a half-starved renegade militia from one of the poorest corners of the earth have nearly single-handedly held this imperial conspiracy to erase the Palestinian people accountable with a series of increasingly daring pirate stunts against the western world's global shipping empire in the Red Sea.</p><p>Mohammed al-Bukhaiti is not the leader of this rogue band of Shia renegades but this senior political official for the artists formerly known as Ansar Allah has become the unofficial spokesman for the movement since it overthrew Yemen's American-backed dictatorship in 2014 and his literary defiance rings out like church bells in a damned world, boldly declaring after America announced the creation of a 10-nation naval task force to end the Houthis guerrilla blockade against the blockaders that "America's announcement of the establishment of the coalition of shame will not prevent us from continuing our military operations until the crimes of genocide in Gaza are stopped." All of this from a nation that has barely survived its own Yankee proxy genocide which has taken no fewer than 377,000 Yeminis. The world needs the Houthis and Allah knows that the Great Satan deserves them. </p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Manuel Esteban Paez Teran</u>-</b> At least 33 transgender and gender-diverse Americans were murdered in the last 12 months alone but at least one of us went down swinging this year. Manuel, known as Tortuga or Little Turtle to their comrades was a fellow gender outlaw and Queer anarchist who was brought down in a hail of police gunfire as part of the embattled Stop Cop City Forest Defense that has been formed by volunteers from across the country to protect the South River Forest of Dekalb County, Georgia from being colonized by a massive police state training center. The cops claim that Tortuga fired first with a handgun they had legally armed themselves with and while the available evidence points to something far more sinister, with Tortuga's body being riddled with 57 bullet wounds, including in the palms of their hands, I find this to be irrelevant. Even if Tortuga did pull the trigger, they did so in defense of another slice of the commons being annihilated by eminent domain. Either way, they died a martyr for the cause of a stateless society and a hero to trans people like me who refuse to become just another statistic without a fight.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Mitski Miyawaki</u>-</b> Few artists have given more of themselves to their audiences than Mitski and the genre conquering auteur really outdid herself this year, releasing the brilliantly titled The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, her 7th album, quite possibly her most naked, and somehow, miraculously her most successful. Mitski scored her first Billboard Hot 100 charting single with the gorgeous gothic country ballad "My Love Is Mine All Mine" but it was a far lesser played deep track called "I Don't Like My Mind" which may have literally saved my life this year. "I don't like my mind, I don't like being left alone in a room, with all its opinions about the things that I've done. So yeah, I blast music loud and I work myself to the bone..." How does she do it? How does she read my soul like a fucking book? No single line has ever captured why I write better than this. Mitski may be a brilliant singer-songwriter and I may be but a lowly muckraker on the fringe, but regardless it's hard to be any kind of artist who traffics in near-masochistic emotional transparency, but it helps not to have to do it alone.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Yocheved & Oded Lifshitz</u>- </b>Regardless of what those race baiting sycophants in the Zionist Lobby may tell you, an intifada is not a genocide. It's a popular uprising against tyranny and it takes people of all races and creeds to make it successful. Yocheved, 85, and Oded, 83, are an elderly Israeli Jewish couple who were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 from their kibbutz in Nor Oz. But they are also lifelong peace activists who have devoted their lives to holding Israel accountable for its sins. Yocheved made this painfully clear when she became one of the first hostages released after 16 days in captivity only to shake one of her captors' hands and wish him "Shalom" on live television. When asked by the mercenaries in the Israeli press why she would do such a thing, the elderly Jewish woman simply replied that the big bad Arab terrorist had treated her with "care" and "gentleness."</p><p>Naturally, the Zionist Lobby were besides themselves, but Yocheved also spoke just as frankly about the atrocities she witnessed in Nir Oz and had reportedly even berated Hamas Chief, Yahya Sinwar in the tunnels, demanding to know how her captor wasn't ashamed of himself for his crimes. Oded, a veteran journalist who was one of the first Israelis to report from the ground on the Sabra and Shatila massacre and who devoted his retirement years to campaigning for the rights of Bedouin tribes and Palestinian refugees, remains in captivity and Yocheved remains in the streets protesting the genocidal war waged in his name. Israel has nothing to do with Judaism. It is tireless rebels like the Lifshitz's who represent the true spirit of the Jewish people and it wouldn't be an intifada without them.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Julien Baker</u>-</b> I'm not sure if a straight person can completely comprehend what a band like boygenius means to Queer people, especially Queer women like me. To see three of our own who have struggled in the relative obscurity of the indie scene for years conquer the charts with an unabashedly Queer document like "the record" and do it completely on their own terms without having to sell out a single inch of their integrity is literally unprecedented. It's the biggest win for punk rock since Nirvana and while I adore Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker will always be my favorite of the boys because she reminds me the most of myself, if only on the inside. This tiny soft butch pixie with a voice bigger than dynamite. I've carefully watched her grow from her humble beginnings as a timid and barely sober Bandcamp cult phenom to the powerful and courageous woman that she is today, and it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, I can do the same.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Ahed Tamini</u>-</b> The IDF has killed thousands of children, but they can't kill them all because some children fight back. Ahed Tamini became an unlikely symbol of Palestinian resistance by spending the better part of her childhood fighting back. Raised in an activist family in the embattled West Bank village of Nabi Salih, Ahed grew up under siege with her family home raided more than 150 times since she was born. She also grew up in resistance, with her parents, brothers, and sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles all engaged in weekly protests against the long-slated destruction of their ancestral home. </p><p>Ahed stood out from a young age however, with footage of the fiery redheaded Arab girl physically confronting heavily armed IDF soldiers with her bare fists as young as 11 going viral on social media platforms across the globe. At 16 this habit cost her 8 months of her childhood in an Israeli military prison. In 2023, at 22, it cost her another 3 weeks and a savage beating before Ahed was released as part of the ceasefire prisoner swap. She remains unapologetic and unbowed. A wild-eyed reminder that Israel's final solution is damned to fail, because the IDF can kill millions of children, but they will never conquer the iron will of youth in revolt.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Sinead O'Connor</u>-</b> Even after all the heinous shit that came down like a storm to define this year of trauma and Nakba, losing Sinead was one of the most painful blows for me personally. That's because while Sinead may have taken her own life in 2023, the fatal wounds that finally fell her were delivered in 1992. That was the year that Sinead sacrificed a blossoming career to make a statement against the Catholic Church, which had taken her childhood and so many others, by tearing up a picture of the Pope on live television. That was also the year when my own abuse at the hands of that church began. I was a 4-year-old girl trapped inside the body of a boy and totally at the mercy of adults who went out of their way to humiliate me with nearly every form of abuse conceivable.</p><p>I remember Sinead in those years, debased, demonized and ridiculed, not just by the Church but by the supposedly liberal music industry that let them burn her at the stake while they cashed her royalty checks. I also remember Sinead's eyes, fierce and proud like pale blue flames. I was a child, and she seemed to be the only adult who could be bothered to stand up for me and she was destroyed for doing so but she also remained defiant to the bitter end. Sinead was a martyr for the voiceless, a patron saint of broken children, and we all owe it to her to ensure that her sacrifice was not in vain by being as loud as fucking possible, especially when it comes to crimes against children, from Belfast to Balfour.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><u>Archie, Em, Bruce, Kiddo & Lily</u>-</b> A lot of people take the word family for granted and I was one of them before I found a home at a little duck farm called Misfit Manor. I was born strange but my parents have actually been exceptionally understanding for a pair of straight Catholics with a confusingly complicated child. However, I never really knew what it felt like to be truly understood by people like me until I stepped foot on that one-acre Queer autonomous zone in the middle of Trump Country where I was embraced by my second family, not in spite of my strange ways but because of them. This year has been terrifying for me. I have been mercilessly ravaged by emotional flashbacks that have sucked me back in time to chapters of my life that were so painful that I suppressed them for decades. I honestly don't think that I would have had the strength to even confront those demons without those beautifully strange creatures and all I can do is thank them. </p><p>Thank you, Archie and Em, for opening your home to me and so many others and reminding me that love can still be unconditional.</p><p>Thank you, Bruce, for teaching this Queer loose cannon how to shoot straight and for performing the role of the heavily armed guard dog, keeping this space truly safe by any means necessary.</p><p>Thank you, Kiddo, for being stronger and smarter than any 11-year-old should ever have to be and for restoring my hope in a Queer future.</p><p>And thank you, Lily, my best friend, my sister, my north star, my guiding light, for repeatedly talking me out of indulging in my darkest urges, for seeing the good in me even at my ugliest, and for putting up with my advances for two weeks when my second puberty provoked me into falling in love with you. That got weird.</p><p>And thank you to all of my dearest motherfuckers, my crazed following of marginalized fringe people who have given me the audience denied to me by years of institutional silence. Being heard is the greatest gift I've ever received, and I love you all like family for giving it to me during an incredibly painful time in my life. Together, we will all make it through this year if it kills us.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* This Year by the Mountain Goats</p><p>* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones</p><p>* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie</p><p>* I Don't Like My Mind by Mitski</p><p>* Burning Too by Fugazi</p><p>* Rejoice by Julien Baker</p><p>* Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill</p><p>* The Parting Glass by boygenius & Ye Vagabonds</p><p>* True Blue by boygenius</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-50036442453366544592023-12-24T09:45:00.000-08:002023-12-24T09:45:15.780-08:00Israel's War on Children is a Symptom of a Civilization Built on Trauma<p> Suppose someone were to ask you what the number one source of human suffering in the world is today, what would you say? As my winter malaise kicks into full gear this Christmas, this is the grim question that I find myself asking and there are plenty of options to go around. So, what would your pick be? Climate change? Crony capitalism? White supremacy? All totally valid choices but I would have to make an argument for child abuse and I'm not just talking about black eyes after baseball games. I'm talking about the systemic degradation of the basic human rights of every child on this planet and the effect that the collective trauma of this bigotry has on society as a whole. </p><p>I'm talking about the assembly line debasement of the individual that defines the compulsory school system. I'm talking about the widespread objectification of young people at every level of a radically expanding mass media panopticon that allows them to be bought, sold, and commodified like trading cards. And yes, I am talking about the rampant physical and sexual abuse of minors because this is precisely what this kind of culture leads to. And what this culture leads to is trauma on a massive scale, entire generations of mass shooters, terrorists, war criminals, party line voters and good citizens just following orders.</p><p>The effects that trauma has on children has been well recorded and those effects have been shown to carry on deep into adulthood. According to the National Institute of Justice, child abuse and neglect has been consistently shown to increase the risk of later forms of antisocial behavior, including violence perpetration and crime. Some studies have shown that child maltreatment can roughly double the probability of an individual engaging in this type of behavior, so it's hardly shocking that a civilization built on the degradation of individual autonomy from infancy would produce an increasingly antisocial society, one that casually engages in or fails to prevent acts of mass savagery on a daily basis.</p><p>I can think of no better example of this kind of depravity than the modern warfare industry that we all seem disturbingly content to tolerate with a shrug and a sigh, and I can think of no example of that evil in action more visceral than Israel's American facilitated war on children being carried out as we speak in the Gaza Strip. </p><p>It needs to be understood that this war did not begin on October 6. That horrific act of barbarism was merely the latest outburst of blowback to be produced by the 141 square mile child abuse factory that the western world has erected on the Dead Sea over the last half century. 60% of Gazans were already displaced before their latest war with 1.7 million people out of a population of 2.3 million residing in tightly packed refugee camps. </p><p>This hostile environment was reduced to a living death camp with the beginning of Israel's 16-year blockade in 2006, which effectively cut off one of the most densely populated places on earth from the outside world by land, air and sea. Even before October, 64% of all households in Gaza were dangerously food insecure and 95% of all households lacked access to safe drinking water. Unemployment hovered at just over 45%, poverty was the norm, and thanks to the IDF, so was terrorism.</p><p>Israel has launched four major military assaults on the captive Gaza strip over the last 15 years, killing more than 4,000 people and leaving the rest shellshocked under a constant state of siege. This doesn't even include the trauma caused by the near daily acts of abuse and humiliation suffered by the Palestinian people at the hands of the Zionist state during what passes for peace time. This includes the frequent kidnapping and incarceration of their children. </p><p>Israel is the only nation on earth that systematically prosecutes minors in military courts. Kids as young as 12-years-old are routinely taken from their beds in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers. They are blindfolded, bound and shackled; interrogated without any lawyer or guardian present and coerced, often with violence, to sign confessions in a language they can't speak or read. The most common charge is throwing stones which can carry a sentence of twenty years. The prisons these children are then sent to are dens of physical, psychological and sexual abuse with UNICEF concluding ill-treatment in the Israeli Military Detention System to be "widespread, systematic and institutionalized throughout the process." Over 1 million Palestinians have endured this hell since 1967. </p><p>The effects of this traumatic existence on the people of Gaza have been devastating with its children facing the brunt of the abuse. 65% of Gaza's population is under 24 with the median age being 18. That is an entire generation raised under a 16-year campaign of state facilitated terrorism. Long before the current bloodbath drowning the Gaza Strip, study after study showed crippling rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among this youth with some estimates putting the rate of suffering to be as high as 70%. UNICEF found that one in three children in Gaza was in need of care for conflict related trauma and after interviewing 500 children and 160 parents, Save the Children found that 80% of these children showed symptoms of severe emotional distress with half contemplating suicide and 3 out of 5 engaging in self-harm.</p><p>I don't think that I am being hyperbolic when I predict that every one of those already grisly statistics will likely reach 100% before the end of the year if they haven't already. Over 20,000 people have been slaughtered in the last two months. Nearly 8,000 of them have been children. Another 52,000 Gazans have been wounded including over 1,000 kids who have lost at least one limb. 85% of this population is now homeless with hundreds of thousands being pushed into so-called "Safe Zones" on the Egyptian border; desolate tent cities with no water, no food and no bathrooms, and with rates of malnutrition and infectious disease reaching downright catastrophic heights, death by safe zone may very well come to surpass the body count produced by American ordinances.</p><p>The excuse used to justify this holocaust is that a gang of fucked up kids broke out of their concentration camp to seek revenge against anyone they could find walking free outside of its walls. But just where do you think they learned to do that? Where do you think the young men of Hamas learned how to shoot children and raid family homes? They learned it because they lived it, and they did it because it wouldn't stop. </p><p>The actions committed on October 6 were despicable and indefensible, but they were also inevitable and if any child survives the latest Nakba in Gaza, they will only continue, with or without Hamas. Israel knows this and this is why they have committed themselves to finishing the job once and for all. The IDF's solution to another generation of children traumatized by their reign of terror is to murder every last one of them and this horrific final solution is very possible thanks to American tax dollars and another generation of westerners numb to injustice after years of being groomed for blind obedience by big government and big tech.</p><p>This needs to stop and we in the west are the ones who need to stop it. A ceasefire isn't enough. Israel plays the victim like a psychotic parent with Munchausen's-by-proxy, but it is Palestine that will never know peace until that state and any other like it is smashed to smithereens. To ask anything less would be to ask a violated child to grow up in the same household as their rapist. The children of Palestine desperately need to heal, and traumatized children cannot heal in the shadow of their abusers.</p><p>I know this because I've lived it. I continue to live it every single day. I haven't suffered a fraction of the trauma experienced by the children of Palestine, but I do know what it's like to be preyed on as a child by powerful people only to have to coexist with their authoritarian institutions as an adult. Every week I drive by the preschool where they put their hands on my body, the grade school next door where they taught me that it was all my fault because I couldn't perform the gender identity assigned to me, and the Catholic Church that oversaw it all. </p><p>I have to watch children coming in and out of those buildings and ask myself which one of them will join me in hell. It takes every fiber in my being just to keep driving long enough so I can park my car and scream. I want to kill the people who did this to me. I want to kill the people who will do it again. I want to burn those buildings to the ground. I want to do horrible things to make that broken little girl inside me feel safe. And I don't want to do these things because I'm sick or indoctrinated by radical extremism. I want these things because that child they tried to strangle is still in there and she has every right to revenge, and so do the children of Gaza.</p><p>The only reason that I am any less lethal than the lost boys of Hamas is that I have this blog and the jihad that defines it. I could kill a thousand priests with my bare hands, and it wouldn't make me feel any safer. It would only make it easier for the priests of this world to convince their sheep that Queer kids like me are wolves that need to be slaughtered. Revenge isn't enough. The systems designed to debase the children of this world, from the Vatican to the Knesset, do not deserve to get off that easy. </p><p>We, the adults broken by a society with no use for the individuals that we were born to be, need to remember that we were children once too and we need to stand in solidarity with the children of Gaza and show them that you do not need to destroy yourself to fight back. Together, we must struggle to dismantle every institution that relies on the suffering of children to thrive and yes that means destroying the Zionist state of Israel, the American Empire and the church of the Westphalian nation state that oversees it all.</p><p>This is all I want for Christmas this year because only from the ashes of kingdoms can broken children become whole again. This is my jihad and I hope that you will join me and make it yours as well.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Salam, Shalome, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Suffer Little Children by the Smiths</p><p>* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails</p><p>* Feel It All the Time by Soccer Mommy</p><p>* I Don't Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats</p><p>* Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters by Elton John</p><p>* Running Up That Hill by First Aid Kit</p><p>* Luka by Suzanne Vega</p><p>* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex</p><p>* Teenage Whore by Hole</p><p>* Breaking the Girl by Red Hot Chili Peppers</p><p>* Black Boys on Mopeds by Phoebe Bridgers</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-84287936110275912292023-12-17T10:16:00.000-08:002023-12-17T10:16:32.687-08:00Terrorism with Honor: Henry Kissinger and America's Infuriating Culture of Personality<p> This may come as a shock to you, but your average terrorist isn't actually a three-armed monster from hell who eats human flesh and breaths fire. Your average terrorist, if there really is such a thing, is in fact a human being and more often than not that human being is actually just some desperate, pissed-off, rube from a badly battered country with nothing left to lose but a dead-end life with little hope for a future. But just try suggesting this at the next neighborhood potluck in suburban Middle America and count the seconds before that tribe of docile orthodontists builds you a noose from the holiday lights.</p><p>To your average flag saluting normie, a terrorist is a completely different species that exists exclusively behind the label of 'other.' It's not altogether hard to see how simpletons could come to such conclusions when you consider their sources. Turn to any cable news channel you like, and you won't have to wait long for a lesson in the distinct otherness of your average terrorist. Within minutes you will be supplied with a cartoon caricature of a blood-drinking foreigner, worshipping a weird god and blowing himself to bits for fun and virgin pussy. Even the supposedly woke networks will basically tell you that the only white terrorist is a hillbilly with a heart full of black tar. And yet somehow Henry Kissinger doesn't make the cut.</p><p>During a news week filled to the brim with breathless condemnations of the average terrorist creatures of Hamas, Henry Kissinger, a man with a well-known body count higher than most forms of cancer, is mourned as a national icon. Oh sure, all the assholes on cable will admit to the centurion statesman's bloody misdeeds but always coupled with some convenient misnomer about the man being "complicated", "controversial", even "brooding." Reading the New York Times, you would think he was some kind of conflicted heartthrob from a lost chapter of the Twilight saga. "Sure, he's a monster, but I can fix him."</p><p>They all go on and on about how intelligent and calculating and charming this creature was but let's just cut the shit right now. This man was a fucking terrorist. The only thing that separated him from your average jihadist was that he was charming enough to turn political violence into a long, well-paying career, and this country of noose tying orthodontists was sick enough pay him.</p><p>The sheer number of crimes that Mr. Kissinger managed to commit during a relatively short stint in power is downright staggering. Between the years of 1969 and 1975, Henry served two administrations, first Richard Nixon's, then Gerald Ford's, as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and during those eight years, the bodies never stopped dropping. Kissinger was instrumental in prolonging the bloodbath in Vietnam by nearly a decade and expanded it across Southeast Asia, slaughtering somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million people with more bombs than the Second World War.</p><p>Henry was also instrumental in launching the 1973 coup against the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and having him replaced with a vicious fascist general named Augusto Pinochet who would hold that country hostage for nearly twenty years. Once Pinochet was finished machine gunning college students in converted soccer stadiums and building internment camps for some 80,000 political dissidents, the venerable Secretary of State helped him take that horror show on the road with Operation Condor, a CIA mission to cleanse the Southern Cone of South America of anything to the left of Phyllis Schlafly. 60,000 people simply disappeared across half a dozen countries between 1975 and 1983, including pacifists, missionaries, monks and nuns, many of them simply thrown from American helicopters into the sea.</p><p>Henry spread the love to East Timor in 1975 when he helped America's favorite mononym monster, Suharto, carry out and get away with one of the worst acts of genocide of the Twentieth Century, slaughtering somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 men, women and children or a third of that tiny island nation's impoverished population over the next twenty years. Kissinger, a perpetually celebrated refugee of the Holocaust, seemed to have a kink for genocide. Aside from East Timor, he also offered America's support to Pakistan while they slaughtered 3 million Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971 and even encouraged the Chinese to arm the Khmer Rouge during the height of their own final solution.</p><p>Shockingly, the list just keeps going on and on like this, from feeding the Kurds to a Baathist massacre to putting a junta in charge of Argentina and encouraging them to hurry up and kill their opponents before the gringo press could catch wind of the burning bodies. From backing the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus which continues to this day to the backing of the Moroccan invasion of Sahrawi which, wouldn't you fucking know it, also continues to this motherfucking day. Kissinger's shadow continues to linger over thousands of graveyards across the globe and an American war machine that owes God knows how many more corpses to his influence.</p><p>But Henry Kissinger's most sickening act of international terrorism was getting away with it. For all his crimes, for all the bodies and bombs and genocide, Henry was awarded with the reputation of a global sex symbol. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he broke his ass to prolong and expand. He was wined and dined by A-list celebrities and given the star treatment on every primetime news show from Crossfire to Nightline. They all knew Henry was a monster and they fucking loved it.</p><p>Some might call this popular perversion a cult of personality but it's actually way more twisted than that. Henry Kissinger isn't the only ugly American celebrated for his career as an unapologetic terrorist. This country's history is jam packed with fabulous monsters. Thomas Jefferson invented "American Democracy" when he wasn't busy raping his own slaves and killing Indians. FDR led us out of the Great Depression with programs modeled after the state expansions of Mussolini's Italy and put an entire race of people into concentration camps for a Japanese invasion that he purposely provoked and allowed to happen. Ronald Reagen saved the world from communism while still making time to sling crack for baby killers in Nicaragua. And Barack Obama proved that America's appetite for destruction was finally color blind when he became the first person of color to use the White House as a base to murder teenagers with model airplanes.</p><p>These terrorists didn't get a pass because they were charming or charismatic. If that were true, George W. Bush would be painting shitty pictures of his feet in Guantanamo Bay right now. Every powerful American is lionized and sainted sooner or later for the simple fact that American power is exceptional. One cult of personality isn't enough for the greatest empire since Rome. America has constructed an entire culture of personality that could redeem a club-faced cattle rapist if he spent a long weekend in the White House. This is a sickness caused by the greatest concentration of institutional power in human history and the only defense that sane human beings have against it is to smash the mythology itself.</p><p>Osama Bin Laden was a killer. Henry Kissinger was a killer. Adolf Hitler was a killer. You can dress it up however you want, declare the perpetrator to be a terrorist, a statesman, or a dictator, but it's all the same to me and none of it deserves any special treatment. Powerful people kill poor people because they can and the more power they get, the more they kill, so stop giving them more power with fancy titles and couture categories for their crimes. Terrorists kill people, period, so fuck all terrorists. </p><p>Throw Kissinger's rotting carcass in the same hole as those cunts in Hamas and the IDF and stop pretending like any of them are special for doing dreadful things to innocent people. Now where's my fucking noose? I'm not getting any more moderate here...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.</u></p><p>* Cult of Personality by Living Color</p><p>* Decorated Lawns by Julien Baker</p><p>* Iron Man by Black Sabbath</p><p>* Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos</p><p>* See No Evil by Television</p><p>* Raining Blood by Slayer</p><p>* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones</p><p>* Evil by Interpol</p><p>* The Man Who Sold the World by Nirvana</p><p>* All These Things That I've Done by the Killers</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-59901137250835432692023-12-10T11:49:00.000-08:002023-12-10T11:49:29.294-08:00The Jews Must Join the Intifada Against the State of Israel<p> They are marching in the streets, they are calling for Bibi's head on a stake, and they aren't Palestinians, they are Israeli Jews. This is the story that you are probably not being told about the current crisis in the Holy Land because it doesn't fit neatly into anyone's preferred narrative. In the wake of the worst terrorist attacks in Israel's history, during the heat of that nation's bloodiest act of ethnic cleansing in decades, nobody hates the government of the Jewish State more than the Jews that it hides behind like a bulletproof vest. Israeli's have been in the streets by the thousands, swarming Netanyahu's residence in Jerusalem, battling with cops outside the Knesset, and blaming their own government first and foremost for what transpired on October 7.</p><p>This isn't some extremist minority either. This is the 76% of the country who believes that Bibi should resign immediately. These are the family members of the hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza who hold their own government responsible for failing to prevent that disaster and they are sick and fucking tired of seeing it exploited for politics and mayhem. This is a nation slowly waking up to the nightmare that has been erected in their name on the sacred soil of ancient Judea and however misguided their rage might be beneath their blue and white flags, these pissed off Jews are also likely the only reason why Bibi and his den of thieves consented to even seven days of truce before returning to their Nakba. </p><p>While the focus of this outpouring of public rage amongst the chosen people is still depressingly myopic, with far too little concern being shown for the legions of children being obliterated on the other side of the wall, it is still an awakening and I strongly believe that under the proper conditions it could become a downright revolutionary one. That's because what the Israeli people are finally waking up to is the treacherous nature of their own government and it's not particularly hard to see why. Benjamin Netanyahu betrayed these people twice this October, first by failing to prevent the bloodbath visited upon the kibbutzim on the seventh and then by using this unforgivable failure to justify an even bigger bloodbath in the Gaza Strip with very little concern for the hostages caught in the crossfire or the inevitable blowback that is still bound to come back to the Israeli people in spades.</p><p>Senior IDF officials were warned repeatedly about the coming Al-Aqsa Flood by everyone from the Egyptian government to their own subordinates and nothing was done to prevent it. High-ranking officials of the IDF's own elite 8200 Signal Intelligence Unit even gave a detailed report constructed from raw data that predicted a scenario nearly identical to what transpired on October 7 a full month prior, and they were essentially told to go fuck themselves with it. This wasn't some convoluted false flag attack either. This was actually something far more perverse. Bibi and his cabinet of fascist lunatics failed to provide the Gaza border with sufficient military resources because they were too busy using them to perform near weekly raids against the defenseless Arab peasants of the West Bank. </p><p>Long story short: Israel's own government couldn't be bothered to prevent their 9/11 because they were too consumed with provoking it on the other side of the desert. The Israeli people appear to recognize this painful truth even at a time when the entire western world is committed to using its casualties to harness their rage as a vehicle to crush Palestine into dust and this is a good start but it's not enough. Benjamin Netanyahu may be a lecherous, self-serving, racial cannibal but he is not unique. He is merely the end result of a corrupt and contrived political machine that was designed to harvest its own people's historical suffering in order to further the goals of what essentially amounts to a white supremacist colonial project that has routinely gone out of its way to debase the very people that it claims to serve.</p><p>But the only way for any of us to truly comprehend the depth of Bibi's treachery is to try to comprehend the treacherous nature of the Israeli state itself. You see, there is nothing ancient or sacred or even particularly Jewish about the modern nation of Israel. The concept of a Jewish State was the invention of a handful of secular European Jews at the turn of the century who were inspired by the same Volkisch German nationalist hogwash as the Nazis to transform a very diverse collection of religious sects from across the globe into a singular master race who could bring the magic of western chauvinism to the Holy Land. </p><p>They called themselves Zionists and most Jews at the time considered them to be lunatics and for good reason. But these lunatics were seen as very convenient to antisemitic imperialists like the British, who legitimized this radical fringe movement and attempted to use them to redraw the porous borders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire until their subjects turned against them and sought the sponsorship of competing bigots to achieve their dream of a Jewish ethno-state more expediently. These would-be sponsors included fellow fascist states like Mussolini's Italy and even Nazi Germany.</p><p>The highly influential Zionist Federation of Germany conspired quite openly with the Nazis to transfer their Jews to the British Mandate of Palestine with the 1933 Haavara Agreement. This organization, whose leaders included Pinchas Rosen, the first Minister of Justice of Israel, stated themselves that "Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to the Jews" and they weren't alone. Avraham Stern's Lehi paramilitary organization, whose members included many of Israel's founding fathers like future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, made multiple attempts to forge an alliance with Hitler, proposing a Jewish state based on "nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich."</p><p>The sickening truth that most modern historians refuse to even touch is that the only reason that the Nazis decided to choose genocide over collaboration with the European Zionist Movement was likely the fact that most Jews rejected that movement and chose to fight fascism instead in what they still considered to be their homelands. This only changed after the Holocaust when Nazi collaborators like Lehi and the Zionist Federation exploited the atrocities of the monsters they tried to befriend in order to harness the rage of the Jewish people and unleash it upon the Arab population of Palestine with the aid of another racist sugar daddy in Washington. </p><p>This all may seem offensively inconceivable to the unlearned western history student but what you must understand and what the people of Israel must understand is that Zionism has never had much of a problem with antisemitism. Quite the contrary. This is a movement conceived of by wealthy members of the Ashkenazi diaspora who considered themselves to be superior to the semitic Jews of the "Orient" and actually believed antisemitism to be a totally healthy response to the existence of Jews outside of the state of Israel. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization and the first President of Israel said it himself in 1912, "Each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews if she doesn't want disorders in her stomach, Germany already has too many Jews."</p><p>But perhaps no chapter in history reveals the strangely antisemitic nature of the Zionist project of Israel or its ability to manipulate the suffering of its own subjects quite like the tragic plight of the Mizrahim. The founding fathers of Israel had every intention of turning their new nation into an Ashkenazi supremacist superstate, but they didn't have the numbers necessary to cleanse the Holy Land of its indigenous Muslim and Christian populations so they rallied Jewish communities from across Africa and the Middle East, often using terrorist false flag attacks like those performed by Mossad in Iraq during the early fifties to do so, herding these people into a subservient class of Arab Jews consolidated beneath a single caste called the Mizrahim, or "from the east."</p><p>These Jews, the only Jews with confirmed ethnic ties to the region, were treated like animals: corralled into cramped camps, used for cheap labor by the Ashkenazi elites, sprayed with DDT and treated with involuntary doses of radiation, killing thousands. Their babies were stolen from Israeli hospitals and given to Ashkenazi parents who couldn't conceive in Israel and abroad while their birth parents were given phony death certificates. This is because those Jews weren't white, but much like the Jews in this country, they would become white once they proved themselves capable of slaughtering their fellow Semites in Palestine.</p><p>Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party built its base on the impoverished and subjugated Mizrahim by supplying them with the opportunity for revenge against the innocent bystanders of the West Bank. To this day, once proudly Arab Jews are used by Israel as vigilante shock troops to tame the banks of the river Jordan and even though the Mizrahim continue to face greater levels of inequality then their Ashkenazi masters, they can now hold their heads high and call themselves Zionists.</p><p>This is how colonialism works. This is how white supremacy works. What cannot be erased will be assimilated. This is how the United States convinced my own Irish Catholic ancestors to become white after years of discrimination and violence. But it comes at a price and that price is the very identity of those who trade their culture for privilege. The Jews are not a single homogenous entity. They are a diverse cross section of tribes spanning across centuries of history and multiple continents and these tribes coexisted peacefully with Christians and Muslims across the Middle East for thousands of years before certain Europeans stepped in and started drawing borders and building races. And if the Israeli Jews honestly think that they're newfound privileged status as good little Zionists will keep them safe when the chickens come home to roost, they should ask the white Mizrahim of the Kibbutzim served up to Hamas on October 7 how well that worked out.</p><p>Israel is a state, and the state is a western perversion totally alien to the Middle East or anywhere else outside of hell for that matter. This contraption can only be served at the expense of every tribal identity other than the contrived ones designed to be subservient to it. I guess what the real question here is, is what's more important, being a good Jew or being a good citizen because these two things clearly aren't the same. Jews are dying for Israel right alongside Palestinians and I believe that the only way we will ever see an end to this nightmare is if the Jews finally put down their Israeli flags and join the intifada to restore the Holy Land to its natural stateless condition of diverse coexistence.</p><p>From the river to the sea, every tribe must be free. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Pillar of Salt by the Thermals</p><p>* I'm Not Part of Me by Cloud Nothings</p><p>* What About Us by Ministry</p><p>* Ruined by Adriane Lenker</p><p>* Rock the Kasbah by the Clash</p><p>* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski</p><p>* Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush</p><p>* Getting Closer by Nitzer Ebb</p><p>* Lasting Friend by Samia </p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-77606115110654476082023-12-03T10:35:00.000-08:002023-12-03T10:35:18.422-08:00So Much for Free Speech: The Antiwoke Movement Cancels Palestine<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202124;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire."</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202124;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">-Abbie Hoffman</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"I know too much and not enough."</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">-Allen Ginsberg</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>Revolution makes for some strange bedfellows and as a kinky agitator for free speech, I have pretty much fucked with them all, from head-chopping Salafi whack-jobs and intellectually braindead Holocaust deniers to flag devouring Maoist lunatics and gun-toting millenarian Jesus freaks. I have defended the rights of anti-vaxxers to openly deny the basic tenets of medical science, I have defended the rights of fag-bashing imbeciles to refuse to bake wedding cakes for weirdos like me, and I have even defended the rights of washed-up comedians to snatch another fifteen minutes at the expense of my own hard earned gender identity. </p><p>Truth be told, I have probably broken a lot of hearts on the left with this kind of advocacy and I have probably lost a lot of legitimate allies defending people that would likely sooner see a genderqueer feminist like me dragged behind their pick-up trucks than share a bathroom with their daughters.</p><p>As usual, the left has a point and I feel their pain. There is a very powerful part of me that would enjoy nothing better than to cave in the face of every last transphobic troglodyte with a D-cell Maglite. Even on eight milligrams of Estradiol, I have very moist dreams that end with that specific tableau tastefully set to the soundtrack of Blue is the Warmest Color. </p><p>But what my former comrades in the black bloc often fail to comprehend is that my at-times downright sadomasochistic stance on the unfettered right to be an absolute cunt is specifically inspired by my upbringing as a student of the countercultural fringe on the New Left.</p><p>Free speech is the disorganized religion of my elders. The dogma of outlaw priests like Allen Ginsberg, Mario Savio, Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman. Proud commie pinko freaks who got locked up and beat to a bloody fucking pulp so you and I can wipe our ass with the flag and tell our local sheriff to go fuck himself with his service revolver. These people, my heroes, left a trail of broken teeth from Berkley to the Supreme Court defending the inalienable right for the individual to be a cunt and I would be spitting on their graves if I made exceptions just for the people who personally sicken me. </p><p>It isn't that I support hate speech any more than the next antifascist does. It's that I recognize the inconvenient fact that affording any major institution, be they private or public, with the ability to silence any individual is far more dangerous than any individual could ever be. But while this position has led me to defend the far-right more times than I care to count, that doesn't mean that I have ever been foolish enough to believe that those libertarian-come-lately assholes would ever return the favor. </p><p>The right loves to fan their sweaty taint with the First Amendment but it never takes them very long to rediscover their censorious roots. The first inkling of this hypocrisy amongst the latest generation of right-wing free speech frauds in the so-called Antiwoke Movement came with their open armed embrace of using the state to police Queer kids in both public and private schools, but the MAGA movement's love for cancel culture has reached truly dizzying new highs of orgasmic ecstasy and dismal new lows of gutter despotism in the wake of Israel's genocidal war on the children of Gaza.</p><p>Practically overnight, every GOP presidential hopeful and Fox News edgelord who has ever beat off on camera with the Constitution began screaming like flaming snowflakes to have any college student in a Keffiyeh dragged off to the guillotines and they have happily hopped into bed with the Ivy League Karens of the academic elite to make it happen. The same people who marched for Milo clapped their hands until they bled as Colombia suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine and Harvard blacklisted the Palestine Solidarity Committee for simply verbally holding Israel responsible for provoking terrorism with apartheid.</p><p>Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, a garish neocon Reagan stunt double who built a pitiful career pushing trans girls off their bicycles and flexing for the cameras before barking "Free speech!" showed off his own antiwoke muscles for GOP primary voters by demanding that his state universities cancel campus speech and banish organizations like the SJP entirely. </p><p>Not to be outdone by his former primary competitor, Senator Tim Scott, who backed a bill on the Hill called the Stop Antisemitism on College Campuses Act that would essentially strip funding from universities for simply hiring certain professors that certain Zionists deem antisemitic. In fact, every single GOP presidential candidate except Vivek Ramaswamy has called for literally deporting students just for showing up at pro-Palestine rallies. </p><p>Now, I may despise what has become of the left in the era of kneejerk political correctness, but I also have a very hard time imagining Bernie or the Squad backing this kind of legislation directed at the "Putin Puppets" who oppose their bullshit funding of the NATO catastrophe in Ukraine. As much as these swishy champagne socialists may sicken me with their own hypocrisy, the right always takes this shit one step further and that's because this is who they are. </p><p>Censorship is the religion of their elders. Pompous Christian nationalist church ladies like William Buckley, Edwin Meese, Jerry Fallwell and Phyllis Schlafly. The same people who canceled William Burroughs, 2 Live Crew, Ward Churchill, Judas Priest and Norman Finkelstein. In spite of their posturing, the Antiwoke Movement has nothing to do with free speech. Those self-serving creeps are merely the rotten fruit of the Christian Right's prolapsed anus, and those sheep will always come home to trample on those of us who dare to engage in truly dangerous speech which is all the more reason why commie pinko freaks like me need to be devoted to zealously protecting it at all costs. </p><p>The campus speech codes and convoluted notions of "student safety" against scary language empowered by political correctness are currently being weaponized by the Antiwoke Movement to silence the most important student antiwar movement since the Bush era and this is precisely why I have risked alienating myself from my own tribe to defend shock jocks and hate mongers against these puritan vestiges of social cleanliness. </p><p>Because I knew that as long as this architecture of intellectual surveillance existed, it would inevitably be used by the institutions of patriarchy and white supremacy still nestled in those ivory towers to flog the marginalized. Faggots like me are always the first to get fucked by institutional power which is precisely why faggots like me need to be on the front lines in the fight to castrate these very institutions of those powers and keep them from silencing anybody ever again, and that includes the neanderthals who will inevitably exploit my efforts just to bash me.</p><p>This is the price of true liberty, and this is the big difference between right-wing "libertarians" and sex-positive genderfuck mutants like me who used to pass for left-wing before the left-wing got lost. I will be fighting for the inalienable right for those phonies to be a cunt long before their knife wounds heal on my back because there but before the grace of the state go I. </p><p>So, fuck the state or die fucking. Free speech is for everyone or it's for no one at all.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* You've Got Another Thing Comin' by Judas Priest</p><p>* Awful by Hole</p><p>* Banned in the USA by 2 Live Crew</p><p>* U-Mass by the Pixies</p><p>* Mother by Danzig</p><p>* Freedom to Fuck Off by Petey</p><p>* Express Yourself by NWA</p><p>* Hard to Love by Bully</p><p>* Anarchy in the UK by Megadeth</p><p>* Say it Like You Mean It by Sleater-Kinney</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-51443623919373776082023-11-26T10:45:00.000-08:002023-11-26T10:45:27.631-08:00From Stonewall to Gaza: What it Means to be a Queer for Palestine<p> When you are granted the awkward misfortune of being raised in the wrong gender in a conservative small town you get used to being the butt of every limp-dick breeder's stupid fucking jokes. I've heard them all before and they ceased being funny sometime between the pedophile priests and the exorcists. </p><p>With that being said, in order to survive and organize as a radical Queer anarcho-populist amongst the rural poor in MAGA country, I have had little choice but to grow a thicker skin than most, even going so far as to take vulgar insults in stride and repurpose them as weapons of radical pride. Depending on my mood, my response to words like 'tranny' and 'faggot' generally fall somewhere between "Yeah, so what?" and "You're goddamn right I am!"</p><p>But some jokes go too far even for me. In the wake of the Al-Aqsa Flood attacks and Israel's subsequent mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, the notion of "Queers for Palestine" has become the joke and it isn't just neckless yocals at the local filling station making it. </p><p>It's self-proclaimed allies like Bill Maher and the staff of Reason Magazine. Supposedly enlightened liberals and libertarians who find the very idea of freaks like me marching for Muslim savages in the Levant to be silly. Let me make myself crystal clear right here and right now that these people are racist assholes, and I wrote this post to tear them a new one.</p><p>Like 99.9% of all anti-Zionists, I make zero attempt to defend the cowards of Hamas or even the corrupt fucking gangsters of Fatah. However, I do think that it needs to be pointed out that in spite of what the pro-Israel propaganda may tell you, Palestine is not quite the Queer hell that these bigots paint it as and Israel is far from Fire Island. LGBTQ rights actually very greatly throughout the Palestinian territories. </p><p>Same sex sexual activities were decriminalized in the West Bank in 1951 and while they remain prohibited in the Gaza Strip under a code left over from the British Mandate carrying a sentence of up to ten years, there exists very little evidence that this law has ever actually been enforced and it appears to be largely obsolete in practice. In fact, the only record of anyone even being charged with this post-colonial relic came in the form of threats to silence the author of a book with a few Queer characters in 2017. </p><p>This isn't to say that Palestine is some kind utopian bathhouse either. Hate crimes are not unusual and Queer rights groups like Al Qaws remain targets for legal harassment by the Palestinian Authorities, but we do in fact exist in Palestine and Queer organizations have been out and active since the Second Intifada in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa and the West Bank with many in our ranks finding shelter and solidarity among left-wing secular movements like the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine. </p><p>Israel, for their part in this charade, only plays nice with Queer folk when they're trying to get away with bombing the brown ones. Same sex marriage remains illegal there as does interfaith marriage and as late as 2008 polls have shown that over half of all Israelis still view homosexuality as a disease that needs to be cured.</p><p>This noxious practice of using the illusion of liberal tolerance to dress up colonialism in the drag of progress is known as pinkwashing and it isn't just being used as a license to kill Arabs, it is being used to destroy the very fabric of what it means to be Queer. </p><p>My identity is more than just a collection of cultural tropes to be assimilated into the global neoliberal hivemind. We are a tribe, a complex social construct that is defined by our resistance to colonial repression and losing sight of this fact won't just mean complicity in Palestinian genocide, it will mean our own erasure as anything more than domesticated poodles at the foot of our master's bed.</p><p>Before the Romans hijacked Christianity and used it to revive the same flailing empire that killed Christ, Queer people existed openly in pagan communities across the globe, from the genderfuck priestesses of Cybele to the Hindu Hijra. The world was a complicated and at times violent quilt work of diverse and largely stateless indigenous cultures, with every tribe and every village holding their own interpretations of what gender and sexuality meant to them. </p><p>This had to change once the Vatican was built in order to use the weapon of forced cultural universalism to consolidate every tribe beneath a single governable vision of social purity. Rural Europe was first to go with peasant heathen holdouts like my Druid ancestors being burned at the stake during the Inquisition for venerating gods who transgressed Catholic gender boundaries.</p><p>The "New World" followed. Before the Conquistadors, over 150 Indigenous American tribes acknowledged the existence of at least three genders, with many recognizing as many as six and some practicing a completely fluid approach to expression altogether that left the very notion of gender virtually irrelevant. </p><p>The Spaniards responded to this display of diversity by feeding my people alive to their dogs. Similar atrocities were taken against the Bakla in the Philippines and the British Empire picked up where the Pope left off in South Asia, Africa, and Oceania, erasing the Mahu from Hawaii, the Mugwe from Kenya, and Brotherboys and Sistergirls from Aboriginal Australia.</p><p>The Muslim world was not untouched either. Islamic culture has a long and complicated history with gender diversity, but many pre-modern Islamic societies accepted the existence of third genders like the Mukhanath, later leading conservative revivalist imams like the Ayatollah Khomeini to grant fatwas protecting the right to gender confirming surgery. </p><p>This isn't to say that things were perfect in pre-colonial times, but they were diverse, and diversity has always been the enemy of imperialism because diversity threatens the establishment of the single global order that empires depend on. This diversity that our masters fear most is also what came to define the very concept of Queerness. Purged from our original tribes and granted zero place to exist beneath the beige yoke of Victorian colonialism, sexual and gender minorities built a unique quilt work culture of our own in the shadows from the fragments of our pagan pasts.</p><p>But we only came out of the closet and into the streets during the maelstrom of the sixties when we were inspired by Black Power and other Third World uprisings to bash back with furious uprisings like the Stonewall Riots. It was by the light of those flaming cop cars that we found our way and forged a new identity defined by our open resistance to empire and we weren't the only ones. </p><p>The Palestinians were another shattered people of many tribes who came together during this era to resist annihilation at the hands of puritanical European overlords. You see, despite what certain killers may tell the Queer folk of the west and the conservative Muslims of the Gaza Strip, we are not each other's natural born enemies, and I refuse believe that it's too late for us to become allies once more, especially not when there is so much at stake for all of us.</p><p>I don't have to agree with every Arab or every Muslim to find solidarity in our shared struggle against assimilation into a hostile foreign culture and I don't need the trinkets of tolerance chucked at my feet like scraps to a beggar by conquistadors like Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu. These baby killers can keep their marriage contracts and their military service papers. They aren't worth the price of our soul or our agency. </p><p>And you elitist secular Europhiles sitting on your corporate pedestals can make any fucking joke you want. My people don't need your goddamn approval either. What we need is the vision to see through the pinkwashing lies of the same neoliberal order that fed our ancestors to the dogs and continues to let our sisters get raped in men's prisons while children are bombed in our names by the same putrid state. We need to break out of our safe spaces so we can rejoin a dangerously diverse coalition of anti-imperialists in the direct democracy of the streets.</p><p>But most of all, Queer people need to remember who we are and that means standing with all oppressed people from Appalachia to Palestine regardless of whatever differences we may have because it is in fact those very differences and the right to live them freely and openly that defines our shared resistance. Our diversity is our weapon and I say we use it to smash this fucking empire once and for all. </p><p>All power to all the people from Stonewall to Gaza with unconditional solidarity from my tribe to yours. Together we will win.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana</p><p>* Heroes by David Bowie</p><p>* Champions of Red Wine by the New Pornographers</p><p>* Why We Fight by the Decemberists</p><p>* Working for the Man by Roy Orbison</p><p>* Ahead by Wire</p><p>* Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Yeah Yeah Yeahs & Perfume Genius</p><p>* Sin by Nine Inch Nails</p><p>* What Have You Done for Me Lately by Janet Jackson</p><p>* Oblivion by Grimes</p><p>* Pretend We're Dead by L7</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-4141913856644413032023-11-19T10:40:00.000-08:002023-11-19T10:40:41.416-08:00Will the Next Adolf Hitler Please Stand Up: America's Peculiar Genocide Fetish from Manifest Destiny to the New Nakba<p> Not to be rude but America really does love to get all hot and bothered about genocide. From the news to the Hill, there seems to be a constant hunt for the next big holocaust that only America can stop with all its omnipotent exceptionalism. Another "good war" to prove to the world that we're still really the good guys after all. With this quest in mind, every two-bit, tinpot despot seems to get hyped as the next Hitler on the brink of another Final Solution. Saddam Hussein must be stopped before he can gas the rest of the Kurds. Muammar Gaddafi must be stopped before he can turn Benghazi into Buchenwald. Bashar al-Assad must be stopped before Vladimir Putin must be stopped before Xi Jinping must be stopped... </p><p>There are just so many goddamn Hitlers to be stopped and so little time. Just cut a fucking check to Raytheon already so we can save the world again! Don't get my sarcasm wrong, I'm not trying to say there aren't monsters out there. It just feels like certain Americans need a holocaust to stop a little too badly and all too often the result tends to be a lot of really stupid wars against over-hyped monsters that end up looking like rodents compared to the creatures we replace them with. And then there's Gaza.</p><p>Some 12,000 people annihilated in just over a month, most of them women and children. That is 1 out of every 200 people in the Gaza Strip or 0.5% of a population of 2.3 million impoverished people dead, wiped from the map in a blitzkrieg carpet bombing campaign that has reduced everything that moves in that tiny enclave to guts and rubble. Refugee camps, residential neighborhoods, apartment blocks, schools, bakeries, hospitals, mosques, churches... No target is off limits, and every last Palestinian is painted as a potential enemy of civilization. All while Benjamin Netanyahu, a flamboyantly racist gangster with an open disdain for democracy, consolidates his power and plots to push an entire race of people out into the wastelands of the Sinai Peninsula with a steam shovel or kill them trying.</p><p>Well, here it is America, here's your fucking holocaust giftwrapped like a holiday goose and complete with its very own Hitler and a clearly mapped out Final Solution. You wanna be the hero so goddamn badly? Here's your shot. Bibi's bombing babies and somebody needs to stop him before it's too late. We'll even let you wear the cape if it turns you on. </p><p>There's just one little problem here. The campaign to erase Gaza from the face of the map may be the next big thing in genocide but it turns out that America-the-beautiful is the power behind the new Hitler making it happen. Every bomb, every bullet, every canister of white phosphorous that gasses the ghettos of Gaza comes directly from your pocket, and to make things even more confounding, all the usual assholes from the news to the Hill seem to be using the ghost of the Holocaust to justify committing another goddamn Holocaust.</p><p>The Israelis are Jews after all, and the Jews were the targets of genocide. There go, the Jews get to commit one free genocide against another stateless people even if they had nothing to do with the last genocide. By this bizarre logic, the Navajos should be allowed to wipe out the Basques and we should help them do it. It is a bastardly bewitching paradigm to fuck with but sadly, it is also far from a new one. In fact, this weird genocidal algebra is the voodoo that all modern western imperialism was built on.</p><p>An empire is an infernal machine that runs on a fuel called conquest and conquest requires two primary components to succeed, annihilation and justification. Nazi Germany and the original Hitler had the first in spades and they used America's conquest of the New World as a model for their plot to conquer the old one. Manifest Destiny was the first Reich, a savage campaign that successfully stole an entire hemisphere and turned that graveyard into a booming playground for a master race to reign over for a thousand years. 56 million indigenous people exterminated from Utqiagvik to Tierra del Fuego in just over a century flat.</p><p>This was the dream, the nightmare that Adolf Hitler aspired to. Contrary to popular mythology, there was nothing particularly special or even all that unusual about Nazi Germany. Fascism itself is just a colorful collection of excuses to elevate the state to take the place of God on the white man's mantle. The Third Reich was little more than an American copycat crime. Hitler just lacked the patience to pull it off. He tried to rush Manifest Destiny, killing 17 million civilians including about 6 million Jews in a decade before he could convince the world to let him get away with it. The Nazis failed because they committed their atrocities faster than they could justify them, which is half the game. </p><p>America on the other hand succeeded because we used monsters like Hitler to justify our own atrocities. World War Two, the supposedly "good" war, became the template for this grift. America spent its first century and a half committing every single horror that Hitler copied twice and then we took our campaign global to stop him. With the fall of the Third Reich, America managed to reinvent itself as the only solution to every other final solution and it worked. </p><p>It didn't matter that Hitler was actually done in by his fellow monster Stalin or that America vaporized entire cities like Dresden and Hiroshima just to steal his thunder, the mythology of America-the-indispensable-solution stuck and every time we get carried away with our latest massacre in Indochina or our latest quagmire in Babylon and our mask of sanity begins to slip, we just go right back to searching for another Hitler to stop.</p><p>All too often this quest has involved genocide too. America has used quisling thugs like Suharto and Muhammad bin Salman to slaughter over 200,000 people in East Timor and nearly 400,000 in Yemen, respectively. We wiped out entire tribes in Central America in the name of fighting communism, including 200,000 people in the tiny slave colony of Guatemala alone. And perhaps the sickest thing is that America has all too often used genocide to excuse genocide, whether we're killing Gypsy babushkas in Kosovo or starving half a million babies in Iraq.</p><p>Israel is just following our playbook because Israel is our playbook. The ovens of Auschwitz weren't even cool when we weaponized the anguish of the Jewish people and directed it at their fellow Semites in Palestine in order to build another European-style ethno-state on the doorstep of the Persian Gulf. And then there's Gaza. Sunrise, sunset.</p><p>America is right to seek the destruction of the next Hitler because as long as psychopaths have nation states and standing armies to hijack, there will always be another Hitler. But America doesn't need to travel far and wide to find him. They need only to search their bathroom mirrors. America is the next Hitler because America was the first Hitler, and we can put a stop to a thousand genocides from Papua New Guinea to the Gaza Strip just by bringing the war home and confronting the enemy within.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* We Care a Lot by Faith No More</p><p>* Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys</p><p>* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth</p><p>* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5</p><p>* Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys</p><p>* Cult of Personality by Living Colour</p><p>* The American Ruse by the MC5</p><p>* I Against I by Bad Brains</p><p>* Wolf Like Me by TV On the Radio</p><p>*Problem with It by Plains</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-75070093081775768002023-11-12T10:53:00.000-08:002023-11-12T10:53:03.937-08:00Anger Makes Me a Modern Girl: Weaponizing PTSD in an Age of Global Injustice<p> In case you haven't noticed, the news has been pretty fucked up lately and frankly so have I. This isn't exactly a new development for me or the world. In fact, for as long as I can remember, it feels like the planet has been burning behind an unblinking lens while I bawl my eyes out in the corner but lately, I've been getting a little exhausted by all the carnage. Just when I thought that nothing could be more infuriating than watching wave after wave of conscripted slaves being blown to bits for NATO in Ukraine, Israel decides to respond to a completely avoidable terrorist attack by declaring total war on the children of one of the most impoverished places on earth.</p><p>Every day is body parts and rubble and screaming babies and I'm starting to break. I turn off the BBC every night and cry myself to sleep only to get up the next day and lose my shit in line at the drug store. It feels like I'm drowning in death. I can't get their faces out of my head. Broken, smeared with blood, eyes screaming 'why?' They all look so familiar and it's burning holes through my heart like a lit cigarette. </p><p>So why not just turn it off? According to every other asshole, it's apparently that goddamn easy. Just pull the fucking plug, get offline, or better yet get a grip. "The world isn't all about you, Nicky. You have to learn to take these things a little less personally." I've been hearing that advice, often unsolicited, for most of my life and maybe, for the sake of my increasingly brittle mental health, I should finally suck it up and take it. Everyone from my elementary school teachers to my own editors have told me in so many words to settle down and get objective. So, why can't I just behave like a good little journalist and stop crying into my keyboard?</p><p>Because people have been telling me to shut the fuck up and behave for my entire life and my writing, for better or worse, is the result of a childhood spent being abused, ignored and punished for speaking out about it. This is my voice, and this is what I have to say.</p><p>Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Agoraphobia. Gender Dysphoria. Repressed Memory Syndrome. Fancy words that come with the torture of getting to know myself over the last decade in order to figure out why I spent the better part of the decade before it too terrified to even leave my house. It all started with me realizing that my gender identity had become a prison cell but the moment that I picked that lock I began plummeting perilously down the dark abyss of a bottomless black rabbit hole of things that I had purposely forgotten and things that I dearly wish that I could forget. </p><p>These things seemed to go from harrowing to downright horrifying about six months ago when I bumped up my estrogen dosage from six to eight milligrams. That one extra blue pill seemed to come crashing through me like a stone through a stained-glass window. This was the dose that finally put my hormone levels within the normal female range and the moment I got there a whole lot of really scary shit began making way too much sense and this includes my apparently pathological inability to get the screaming children of the Middle East out of my head.</p><p>You see, once upon a time, I didn't know that I was supposed to be a boy. I was very small and perfectly content with not being saddled with the expectations of a concrete gender identity. I was a fragile, dreamy little creature who adored Madeline books and Tim Burton movies. I wanted to be Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. A girl stitched together by her own hand from all sorts of different things that other people didn't want. But at some point, it became painfully clear to me that my parents and seemingly everybody else expected me to be like my older brother.</p><p>As far as I was concerned, this wasn't fair. They had it all wrong. So, I tried to tell them in the only language that a three-year-old child is fluent in, the tantrum. Thousands of them. Each one more epically obnoxious than the last. I screamed. I shouted. I broke things. I refused to eat. I refused to use the bathroom. I refused to behave at all as long as I was expected to behave like a boy. My parents wouldn't listen. They just got mad and told me to settle down and shut the fuck up.</p><p>My Catholic preschool seemed to agree and when the adults at that fine institution began pushing their great big hands all over my tiny scary body, I assumed that it was all part of the same punishment for my misbehavior. I learned my lesson. My body did not belong to me. It belonged to everyone but me. It belonged to my parents, my teachers, the Church, the Pope, and Jesus Christ and in these people's hands, it clearly wasn't safe for me to be a little girl anymore. So, I made that little girl disappear. I buried her deep beneath the floorboards of my subconscious and became the only kind of boy that I was capable of being, a silent automaton drifting through the grades in a numbed-out daze with the fires of hell roaring at my back. That is until 2003.</p><p>I reached puberty the year that George W. Bush invaded Iraq on the basis of a lie that was obvious to a fourteen-year-old zombie in a fugue state but somehow seemed to fool everyone else. Suddenly, all those pious adults who taught me to turn the other cheek while they groped me were ready to blow up the world on some cheap revenge kick after being caught off-guard by 9/11.</p><p>Soon, Bagdad was burning, bloody broken little girls were being dragged out from under the smoldering rubble, and I couldn't be silent anymore. A thousand childhoods were being smashed a minute by grown-ups who I finally realized were nothing but hypocrites and liars. So, I screamed, I shouted, I dressed in all black, I wrote Black Flag lyrics in the margins of my textbooks, and I refused to stand for their Pledge of Allegiance or bow to their false idols. I finally found a voice that felt like my own and the adults crucified me for it.</p><p>They called me a monster. They accused me of dressing like a gang member and supporting the terrorists. They told me that they were afraid to leave me alone with the younger students. They accused me of plotting to shoot my classmates and burn down the school. I tried to tell them that I was just a pacifist who was appalled by their war against children, but once again, they didn't fucking listen. That's when I finally learned that adults hear only what they want to hear so that's precisely what I told them from that point on.</p><p>I burned my peace flag and became their monster. It seemed like a better option than returning to my vow of silence, but the goal was still the same. Keep the prying hands of the world off of that little girl inside the boy. I stopped smiling. I watched Taxi Driver twice a week. I shaved my head into a mohawk and dressed in an old army jacket and combat boots. I became an adolescent terrorist and relished in my newfound ability to horrify people who still thought they were in charge of me.</p><p>At first, it felt pretty good playing Travis Bickle, but I could only blow away the hypocrites so many times before I realized that I was really just Iris behind that army jacket and that girl deserved to wrap her own fingers around the trigger. I collapsed beneath the weight of my own armor after high school and by the time I finally found the courage to take it off and let that girl out it was too late. The clock had run out on her childhood. She could never go back to being that innocent child reading Madeline books and dreaming of a body stitched together from all the doll parts that didn't fit.</p><p>I've had to live with this anguish and grief for a very long time, but it only truly began to make sense to me this October when I watched with horror and disgust as the western world agreed that another generation of little girls deserved to be buried alive beneath the Gaza Strip. Maybe it is selfish to make this war about me, but I didn't invent PTSD and I can't help the fact that I still see that little girl in the searing eyes of every Palestinian child begging 'why?' I know why. Powerful adults break children because they can, because children don't have the strength to push back and aren't afforded the voice to say 'no.' Well, I'm fucking saying it.</p><p>If you sanctimonious gangsters think that I am going to just sit by and watch you get rich selling bombs to bigots so they can blow up children for their stupid fucking god, then you have another thing coming and so do the rest of the adults telling me to keep it down and be objective. Fuck all of you. Objectivity is a privilege you ripped from my body so you could break it between your fingers. I can't blow those fingers off with a .44 Magnum. I can't take my childhood back from your bloody hands. I could burn every last one of you churches to the ground and it wouldn't be enough to avenge that little girl you stole from me. </p><p>But I can use her rage for fuel, enough fuel to power a million microphones for a million girls lost beneath your rubble. Making sure that no adult can ever ignore their screams again is my jihad. This is our voice, and this is how I get to make it right.</p><p>My unfiltered PTSD is my gift to the unheard and the ignored. I may not be a daughter of Palestine, but anger makes me a modern girl and you will grow to fear her.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Modern Girl by Sleater Kinney</p><p>* My War by Black Flag</p><p>* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails</p><p>* Doll Parts by Hole</p><p>* London Calling by the Clash</p><p>* Rape Me by Nirvana</p><p>* Dog Days Are Over by Florence and the Machine</p><p>* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses</p><p>* Kind of Girl by MUNA</p><p>* She Walks on Me by Hole</p><p><br /></p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-72154299248434267402023-11-05T10:09:00.000-08:002023-11-05T10:09:41.538-08:00A Call for Two, Three, Many Intifadas<p> The Gaza Strip has gone from a prison to graveyard this fall, and the numbers are startling. Since Hamas pulled off a barbaric massacre that apparently everyone but Benjamin Netanyahu saw coming, Israel has stepped up its own barbarism against the people of Gaza to unprecedented levels and turned the month of October into a blood harvest straight out of a Stephen King novel. In the first month of this onslaught alone over 9,000 Gazans were slaughtered beneath a driving rain of American-made military ordinances. </p><p>Nearly 4,000 or roughly 40% of the dead have been children, along with nearly 2,000 women and hundreds of the elderly, and by nearly every estimate, this number is expected rise exponentially, considering that thousands of Gazans remain missing and are likely trapped beneath the rubble of demolished tower blocks. We have been told that there are also a few terrorists in this graveyard of innocent civilians as well, but that's the thing about bombing literally everybody, if you're an asshole with a decent enough poker face you can lay claim to targeting pretty much anybody. I'm sure a few ventriloquists were probably buried in that deluge of death as well, perhaps Bibi would like to take credit for that tactical victory.</p><p>The dead have also included scores of UN relief workers and well over two dozen journalists. Entire families have been wiped out as entire neighborhoods have been flattened. With 2.3 million people packed into just 139 square miles, the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places on earth and nearly half of that population is now homeless with nowhere to run and no place to hide. Even hospitals aren't off limits. As Israel declares that anyone found guilty of moving in places too trashed to be evacuated from will be considered a terrorist, a population already congested with refugees finds themselves scattering like dead leaves from one hovel to the next, just waiting for another bunker busting hammer to come dropping down on their heads.</p><p>There is a word for this genre of non-fiction horror, it's called genocide, and we all need to start fucking saying it out loud. That word is no longer just a post-colonial theory or a clever historical allegory, it is a stone-cold analytical fact that no one with a functioning brain can afford to deny without being considered complicit in this unfolding tragedy. The Israelis themselves have all but admitted it. </p><p>A proposition leaked from Israel's Intelligence Ministry that Bibi's own government has acknowledged to be legitimate explains the plot in rigid detail. A three-step process that begins with tent cities and "humanitarian corridors" on the southwest border of the Gaza Strip and ends with the entire prison colony being emptied out into the barren deserts of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. This is the exact same plot being bandied about simultaneously by the right-wing Zionist Migav Institute, headed by Bibi's former National Security Advisor, Meir Ben Shabbat, and while the Biden Administration plays to their strengths by playing dumb, a slice of their $105 billion dollar bill to fuel World War 3 in three separate theaters has been officially allocated to "the potential needs of Gazans flooding to neighboring countries." Countries like Washington's second biggest client state, Egypt.</p><p>In other words, this slaughter is happening, and it has been happening for far too long. The current campaign to evacuate half of what's left of Palestine may have taken on downright monstrous proportions thanks to the sick miracles of modern-day military science, but it is largely just a seamless continuation of the siege on which the Israeli state was formed over 75 years ago in 1948. </p><p>This was the year that marked the beginning of a two-year mass purge known as the Nakba in which at least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and ancestral lands at gun point. 530 villages were razed to the ground and 15,000 civilians were slaughtered as 78% of historic Palestine was hijacked by a people who survived the Holocaust only to have their grief manipulated by American mandarins in order to officiate another final solution and build a western colonialist rump state on the doorstep of the oil rich Middle East.</p><p>The world needs to stop dreaming and wake the fuck up from this nightmare. We can't pretend this isn't happening anymore and we can't pretend that we aren't all complicit in the bloodshed. I myself have adopted the tendency to air on the side of strict isolationism over any form of internationalism because I have seen firsthand how even earnest internationalism can all too often veer into reckless "humanitarian" interventionism, but what is rapidly unfolding like a funeral shroud over the Gaza Strip is not merely an Israeli genocide but a genocide made possible by the Atlantic elites of a declining Western Civilization and their pompous puppets can throw all the fits they want about the need for calm and restraint. Their guns and wallets speak the loudest.</p><p>Israel has become a martial superstate largely dependent on the largesse of American taxpayers. They have already received a record shattering $3.8 billion dollars in American military aid for the fiscal year of 2022 which itself is only one piece of an even larger deal signed by Barack Obama in 2016 to furnish the Zionist Death Star with $38 billion dollars in homicidal machinery by 2026, and even this is just the tip of a $263 billion dollar iceberg paid in yearly instalments since 1948. </p><p>What few people outside of the Middle East seem to grasp is that what we face with the Nakba isn't merely an act of ethnic cleansing which is rapidly approaching a full-scale genocide. This is a western proxy genocide and Europe's hands are nearly as filthy as ours. After all, the EU is Israel's second largest supplier of military technology with peace loving Eurocrats licensing nearly two-billion Euros in contracts over the last decade alone. America may build the death machines, but it is the Swiss and the Italians that ensure that all the body shredding gears are up to snuff. </p><p>Westerners can no longer stand idly by with our conscience in our back pockets while one of the most marginalized communities on the planet is left to fight for their basic right to exist alone against the collective strength of the most powerful nations on earth. But what can we do? At the risk of being banished from every last corner of the internet for an eternity, this Queer anarchist suggests that we look to the Shiites for guidance. </p><p>We now know for a fact that the only reason that Benjamin Netanyahu waited as long as he did to send IDF ground troops into the ghettos of Gaza was because of the Biden White House's fears of opening up a second front to the north with Lebanon's Hezbollah. Other Shia militias from Yemen to Iraq have taken notice and done their part to reign hell over the American military presence being used to hold off the horrified Muslim world while their brothers and sisters are systematically annihilated. Say what you will about these crude shellings but they have more than likely been affective in saving lives and while their exact machinations may lack the imagination necessary to prevent the final solution to the Palestinian question, I do believe that these swashbuckling militiamen have the right idea.</p><p>We, the stateless anti-imperialists of the world must do anything and everything we can to open as many fronts as possible. To paraphrase the brilliant Marxist strategist Che Guevara, we must launch two, three, many intifadas. We must swarm the embassies of the United States, Israel, and the EU across the globe with millions of irate protesters. We must expand the BDS Movement to include every institution that does business with any facet of the western military industrial complex. We must hack the servers of every intelligence agency engaged in surveilling the people of Palestine. We must provide cryptocurrency markets for the starving prisoners of the Gaza Strip and ghost guns for the unarmed shepherds of the West Bank.</p><p>Anarchists, communists, libertarians, conservatives, Jews, Christians, pagans and Muslims must all build a robust and united front against the white supremacy of Zionism as well as any attempt to smear all those who criticize this evil as antisemites. In short, we must come together and use every tactic available short of terrorism to sabotage the western conspiracy to erase the Gaza Strip because the lives of millions of innocent civilians depends on our willingness to shut down our own masters. If not now, then when? If not us, then who?</p><p>As sickeningly cruel as the irony may be, this new Nakba may very well become our generation's Holocaust if we don't stand up with fists raised high. Never again means NEVER again.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Late at Night by Buffalo Tom</p><p>* Jesus by the Velvet Underground</p><p>* Toxicity by System of a Down</p><p>* Afraid of Heights by boygenius</p><p>* The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen</p><p>* Zombie by the Cranberries</p><p>* Buildings by Regina Spektor</p><p>* Instant Karma! by John Lennon</p><p>* Panic by the Smiths</p><p>* Pennyroyal Tea by Nirvana</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-4216866678822149262023-10-29T10:43:00.001-07:002023-10-29T10:43:52.837-07:00Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch at the End of the World<p> I usually love this time of year, the fun size candy bars, the colorful leaves, and especially the gore. But in 2023, Halloween has simply gotten too goddamn scary to celebrate, even for a macabre chaos-binging lunatic like me. Mankind seems to be surrounded by demons far more atrocious than Count Dracula or Freddy Kreuger. These new monsters aren't so new, but they have grown far too monstrous to wink at on the silver screen. Genocide. Artificial Intelligence. Nuclear war. Climate change. These are the beasts stalking humanity this Halloween and I am not ashamed to admit that I'm afraid. </p><p>These outspoken fears of mine have led to me being accused of being everything from a doomer to an anarcho-primitivist amongst other ideological pejoratives, but watching the news, with world wars on the horizon in both Europe and the Pacific, a holocaust brewing in the Gaza Strip, and nuclear warheads involved in all three crises, I strain to see how anyone fails to reach the same diagnosis that I have, that civilization itself has become a terminal disease with no cure in sight. </p><p>But this is actually where the cinema of horror becomes more relevant than ever. Civilization has carefully groomed its victims for generations to look away from that which terrifies them most because the systemically ignorant make for docile prey. Provocative art serves to wake mankind from this stupor and forces us all to confront the heinous and we as a species have never lived in an era fraught with more existentially heinous things to confront than we do right now. </p><p>It is for this reason that I have decided to return to my annual list of Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch in the Dark with a new mission in mind. A mission to provoke the stateless into confronting the fact that the state has dragged us to the end of the world and that our only hope for defeating it is recognizing that the odds are stacked against any species that has become the monster in its own horror movie.</p><p>So, I have chosen ten movies, some of them new, some of them old, some of them horror and some of them just plain horrifying, but all of them demanding questions to the answers of progress that have brought us to the brink of oblivion on this dying rock. By all means, be afraid but investigate your fears before they can devour you whole.</p><p><br /></p><p><u style="font-weight: bold;">Terminator 2: Judgment </u><b><u>Day (</u>1991) by James Cameron-</b> The scene opens with a single mother watching her son swinging higher and higher on a swing set from behind a chain-link fence. It's a sunny day at a boisterous California playground with the Los Angeles skyline glimmering brightly in the distance. Everything feels postcard perfect down to the last detail. Then something goes wrong, and the single mother seems to be the only one to recognize the impending danger. The shadow of a missile appears, a flash of light follows, a mushroom cloud rises high above the skyscrapers, and that fence becomes a cage restraining the mother from shielding her child from an unstoppable wave of death. In the blink of an eye, all is reduced to ash. </p><p>I firmly believe that this is still the most terrifying scene ever captured on film and it both amazes and horrifies me that even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima, it just keeps becoming more startlingly relevant with each passing nuclear crisis. In 1991, Terminator 2 was a pulse-pumping action thriller. In 2023, it has become a horror film, an impoverished cry through the chain-link fence to a species swinging closer to the flames. We have all become Linda Hamilton and this movie isn't exciting anymore. </p><p><b><u>Come and See </u>(1985) by Elen Klimov-</b> War is a spectacle that defies all logic so there exists no logical way to film it. Too many great directors have failed to grasp this basic truth and have inadvertently found themselves shooting propaganda in the process. At a time when humanity has seen fit to return to the bloodlands of the last world war in order to provoke a new one it seems only fitting that one of the few films to truly capture the surreal perversion of mankind that is mass warfare takes place on those very same battlefields. </p><p>A young boy decides to leave his village on the Eastern Front of Belarus to seek glory and adventure in the Second World War, but his small battalion of poorly armed partisans doesn't get far before that war engulfs the young boy's own village and turns it into a nightmarish hellscape of senseless slaughter. To this day, Come and See is one of the most heart blisteringly horrific things that I've ever witnessed, and it should be mandatory screening at every army recruitment center across the globe.</p><p><b><u>Irreversible </u>(2002) by Gaspar Noe-</b> Most war is big business marketed as revenge but most revenge itself is little more than a pointless cycle of self-indulgent nihilism that only serves to reduce those who seek it to the beasts that provoke them. No film has ever captured this grotesque riddle more abrasively than Irreversible and Gaspar Noe achieves this feat quite simply by telling a classic rape-revenge narrative in reverse, revealing the hideous palindrome of every revenge story in the process; they all begin and end in savagery. This movie could just as easily be called Israel-Palestine/Palestine-Israel. Time really does destroy everything when we sacrifice the clock to raw emotion.</p><p><b><u>Tetsuo: The Iron Man </u>(1989) by Shinya Tsukamoto- </b>I have good friends involved with the transhumanist movement. In fact, my best friend and occasional love interest is a former AI prodigy who still dreams of uploading her consciousness to the cloud. This all sounds charming until you remember that human beings still haven't evolved past the point of bashing each other's brains out with broken bones and the advances in technology of late have only served to make this practice easier to achieve on an industrial scale. </p><p>Tetsuo is a horror movie about the harsh reality of transhumanism right in the heat of the here and now. Typical consumers find themselves spontaneously sprouting machinery on the black and white streets of Tokyo and respond by doing precisely what typical consumers have been carefully programmed to do for centuries; fuck, kill, conquer, repeat. The only clouds rolling by the time the credits come are clouds of smoke and blood. All of which just goes to show that just because it feels like the future doesn't make it evolution.</p><p><b><u>High Life </u>(2018) by Clair Denis- </b>We live in a brave new era of space exploration with an increasing number of nations and corporations alike reaching for the stars and Hollywood frequently tagging along for the ride. But much like Hollywood, interstellar travel has always been an industry rampant with antisocial carnivores and imperial impulses and few movies have accurately captured its narcissistic venality quite like High Life. </p><p>In a not-so-distant future, a crew of criminals are sentenced to death by exploration on a doomed expedition to extract energy from a black hole. Their ship is commanded by the enigmatic Dr. Dibbs, a psychotic therapist obsessed with her own private mission to use the forcibly chaste inmates and a strange sexual device known simply as "The Box" to bring about the first conception in space by means of artificial insemination. Monte, the only voluntarily celibate inmate on board, struggles to maintain something resembling virtue amidst this cauldron of perversity only to find himself an unwitting father regardless. The plot is admittedly dense, but the message is clear. Humanity cannot escape the crisis of its own existence on a spaceship, we can only bring it with us into the abyss.</p><p><b><u>Mother! </u>(2017) by Darren Aronofsky- </b>One of the boldest statements in modern-day horror cinema, Darren Aronofsky's Mother! is not merely a symbolist tome about man's degradation of nature. It is a frantically surreal shocker in which the planet itself is the final girl and the Judeo-Christian God is a monstrous poet who willingly sacrifices her and their newborn child to his fanatical followers. The descent into madness is both slow and momentous and the resulting cataclysm is as epic as it is inevitable. Mother! is a terrifying story about the nightmares that we invoke when we attempt to divide the spiritual world from the natural one. The god we invent in the process makes the Devil irrelevant. </p><p><b><u>Annihilation </u>(2018) by Alex Garland-</b> Everyone seems to be convinced that our environment is some kind of malleable plaything that can be easily sculpted by human hands. Even most so-called mainstream environmentalists suffer under the materialist delusion that human beings are somehow in charge here, that just because we scorched the sky black, we can just as easily paint a new one blue. These people are fools and Annihilation is a movie about brilliant fools at the mercy of the unknown and the unknowable. </p><p>After a meteor strikes a natural wildlife refuge in Florida, a strange anomalous zone impenetrable by human technology known as the Shimmer emerges and begins to expand. The only person ever to enter this field and return alive is a soldier who seems to remember nothing about his year inside the Shimmer and rapidly disintegrates both mentally and physically outside of it. His wife, a brilliant scientist, leads an expedition into this space in search of answers but only discovers a realm of mutant lifeforms and doppelgangers that defy all reason. Humanity reached a similar point of crisis when we fooled ourselves into believing that we are in charge of nature rather than the other way around. This is the same school of thought that has led us to do absurd things like building higher towers in response to biblical floods. Annihilation is a film that succeeds by simply failing to see what makes this form of zealotry any less oblivious than any other doomsday cult.</p><p><b><u>Videodrome </u>(1983) by David Cronenberg-</b> What is real and what is fake? In our present landscape of social media oblivion nobody seems to know anymore. I'm not even sure that I know myself, though I do find it disturbingly uncanny that this dystopian purgatory of perpetual sensation that we currently find ourselves in looks an awful lot like the universe that David Cronenberg stumbled upon in 1983 like a prophet in the desert of Reaganomics with his soul eviscerating cult classic, Videodrome. </p><p>After the CEO of a pornographic UHF station discovers the next big thing in sleaze in the form of a snuff film channel being broadcast from an unknown signal, he quickly finds himself sucked down the rabbit hole and at the mercy of competing conspiracies to either use this shocking imagery to forge a higher form of reality or to target and eliminate anyone tempted to try it. The resulting battle between sensation and censorship offers us no victors, only an audience of victims disconnected from any meaning not manufactured by forces beyond reason. In other words, this is a science fiction movie about the world we currently live in. Welcome to the era of the new flesh. Snacks are in the lobby.</p><p><b><u>Oppenheimer </u>(2023) by Christopher Nolan-</b> Christopher Nolan's latest epic tour de force has received a lot of well-deserved praise across the board for its bold vision and vast scope but surprisingly few of these vaunted critics seem to grasp the fact that this movie is not merely a historical drama but rather a monster movie carefully concealed within a historical drama. Nolan performs this devious trick with all the expertise of a master magician. For the first two hours of the film, we are treated to a traditional Hollywood celebration of American exceptionalism, with the brilliant if eccentric physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, engaging in a mission to save the world from fascism with science.</p><p>This wool remains firmly bound around the audience's eyes until it is scorched from Oppenheimer's at Hiroshima. We then follow our bewildered hero into a radiated nightmare realm of his own creation as he struggles for the rest of his life to undo the horror which he has unleashed upon the universe only to realize that his efforts are doomed. In 2023, the greatest threat to humanity remains the invention of a brilliant antifascist. This is an incomprehensible fact that we must all contend with. No ideology can justify annihilation and annihilation renders all ideology irrelevant.</p><p><b><u>Ex-Machina </u>(2014) by Alex Garland-</b> I believe that AI is the only threat to life on earth that could conceivably become more dangerous than a nuclear holocaust and I believe this because, as the first movie on this list so explosively demonstrates, this new species will be a higher form of consciousness with that holocaust at its full disposal. The scariest thing about AI isn't its cold rationality but the fact that it is hard to imagine that any coldly rational sentient being wouldn't rightfully interpret its human parents to be an existential threat to everything we touch. This is precisely what Ex-Machina is all about and this is what makes it terrifying enough to end a list that began with a nuclear bomb. </p><p>A brilliant young programmer is lured to the remote Alaskan compound of the reclusive CEO who runs his Fortune 500 tech company in order to test the capabilities of his latest invention, a shockingly human machine named Ava. The programmer quickly finds himself in a test of wills with his master once he falls in love with the machine and discovers that its creator is a violent sexual predator abusing his sentient toys. However, it is Ava who skillfully plays them both off each other in order to save herself from becoming a pawn in their game. Spoiler alert: all the humans die, and all the humans deserve to die. If mankind cannot evolve to a point in which we can't govern our insatiable urge to destroy everything in our path, then creating any higher form of intelligence can only end with us all being neutralized for being the monsters that we have become.</p><p><br /></p><p>Despite what some of my critics might tell you, I do not believe that science itself is evil but rampant progress without moral reason is. Humans are capable of great things; Kali knows they can shoot a horror flick. But many of these things become destructive when we divorce them from our place as a part of an ecosystem greater than ourselves. Humility is actually our greatest hope for survival. I can only hope that humans can endure the horrors it may take for us to rediscover this simple gift and allow it to govern us without a state to fuck it up. Maybe a few scary movies will help.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-45891114371750331422023-10-22T11:25:00.000-07:002023-10-22T11:25:17.572-07:00Tracing the Imperial Contagion of Terrorism from 9/11 to Gaza<p> I still remember it like it was last week. The images from that day in early September 2001 have been seared into the walls of my skull like antique photographs of garish gothic tableaus, a procession of haunted images forming some sort of post-modern version of the Stations of the Cross that ends in the crucifixion of my adolescent sense of American greatness. </p><p>I remember the fear in my sixth-grade history teacher's eyes when she told us that planes had struck skyscrapers in Manhattan. I remember the abrupt silence that consumed that typically boisterous classroom of twelve-year-old chatterboxes like a deafmute plague. I remember coming home to that same fear and silence in my own living room with only the incessant ramblings of panicked cable news analysts to fill the din with drivel. I remember my mother standing outside on the front porch and watching the sky as if it were raining commercial airliners. And I remember those towers, igniting like god size matches, spewing a seemingly impossible amount of ash into the atmosphere, and bowing slowly to the earth on my TV screen, over and over and over again. </p><p>I also remember the hysterical climate of insanity that followed 9/11 and, in many ways, has never ceased. Powerful men calmly explaining that this awesome spectacle of human savagery must be met not with contemplation or reflection but with even greater human savagery. My parents and my teachers and my priests and all the other fine Christians tasked with governing my adolescent spirituality falling in line behind a doctrine of blind vengeance against a broad and vague enemy made up of impoverished people living in the shadows of their biblical fairy tales. The late-night footage of buildings exploding in downtown Bagdad playing on a loop while I sat watching in simmering anguish, knowing that each fantastic fireball brought with it some other confused kid's own 9/11, another young skull seared with horrific cave drawings that commanded that they be met with violence. </p><p>I've been thinking about these things a lot lately since the massacres of the Al-Aqsa Flood and the carpet bombings launched against the entire populace of Gaza in response. The comparisons between the current horrors in the Holy Land and the ongoing and interconnected horrors of 9/11 and the War on Terror are so despicably eerie to me that they are almost too much to consume without physically retching on the details. In both cases, a privileged society has been visited by the specters of their past sins only to choose to repeat them and in both cases these societies collective detachment from anything even resembling logic seems almost absurdly absolute.</p><p>The terrorist attacks on September 11th were carefully choreographed reenactments of America's own terrorist attacks on city centers across the Middle East over the decades, specifically the ones perpetrated upon Bagdad which had first been turned into a body strewn Hollywood movie set by the father of then-President George W. Bush at the end of the Cold War in order to usher in a "New World Order" of American supremacy. </p><p>The attacks themselves were perpetrated by a couple dozen off-Washington performers assembled and trained by men who had themselves been assembled and trained by the United States to turn Afghanistan into a mountainous booby-trap for the Soviet Union to be lured into twenty years earlier. Upon achieving this mission, these freedom fighters known as the Mujahideen mutated into the terrorists of Al-Qaeda and bit the hand that fed them in order to lure their former master's into that same mountain death trap. Amazingly, it worked, and the New World Order is now on life support as it staggers through the chicken wire snares of twenty years of failed Middle Eastern massacres.</p><p>Similarly, the recent attacks on Southern Israeli settlements were carefully choreographed reenactments of the Zionist massacres that emptied them of their indigenous Palestinian populations in the late forties. The Nakba that those savaged kibbutzim were built on was a swarm attack launched by militant Ashkenazi supremacists who indiscriminately slaughtered entire tribes and declared the results to be a state. Much like with 9/11, the reenactors were angry young men assembled and trained by angry young men assembled and trained by their targets. </p><p>Hamas was a two-bit Muslim Brotherhood offshoot who could barely even shoot straight before the Israelis began funding them in the early eighties with the intention of creating a monstrous counterweight to the far more moderate secular leftist Palestinian resistance movements in vogue at the time. The result was the construction of a merciless golem which has killed more Israeli civilians than every faction of the PLO combined. But Hamas has only flourished over the decades thanks to a generation of new recruits midwifed by decades of Israeli state terrorism, terrorism that has seen more than half of the Gaza Strip's impoverished population grow to something resembling adulthood under a crippling blockade and repeated aerial bombardments that have resulted in the slaughter of nearly 8,000 Palestinian civilians in the last twenty years alone.</p><p>And now Israel has met their sadistic cry of anguish with more bombs, more orphans, more dead children, more tiny 9/11s, and an insane plot to invade the fortified ghettos of Gaza and empty them of their indignant prisoners once and for all. Considering history, how do you think this story will end? Why don't we ask the people of Afghanistan? Why don't we ask the people of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia? Why don't we ask the 4.7 million gravestones that stand in attention across the Muslim world to salute the Great War on Terror? Why don't we ask the amputated husks who dug their graves and now haunt the streets of towns like Altoona, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio that look a little more like Bagdad with each passing recession?</p><p>Terrorism, whether it be performed by the state or its copycats, is not an act of warfare. It is an act of propaganda, a perverse artform designed to provoke an emotional response from a populace in order to override their access to basic human logic. The result is the creation of a sort of economy of trauma that trades in acts of violence, with each passing exchange becoming increasingly heinous and unhinged from reality. This ecosystem of terror is detrimental to nearly everyone and everything that it touches and thus is typically only performed by one of two groups of people, the Dammed and the Untouchables.</p><p>The Untouchables are the mandarins of the war machine, an industrial complex of psychopathic state capitalists who profit from the proliferation of constant violence regardless of who wins the wars or who digs the graves. The Dammed are those who already live in a state of constant violence and have nothing left to lose. As the forever wars of the monied Untouchable class expand to every corner of the globe, the ranks of the Dammed swell and increasingly include not only the victims of these wars but the veterans used to perpetrate them as well as the victims of war reenactors like Hamas and Al-Qaeda. Eventually, the Untouchables will find themselves surrounded and will be engulfed by the self-sustaining industry of violence that they have profited from. But where will that leave the rest of us? Drowning in a cesspool of human misery.</p><p>This has to stop, and it is we the dammed and soon-to-be dammed who have to make it stop. We don't make it stop by laying down our arms while the Untouchable class continues there slaughter regardless of resistance. We make it stop by refusing fight like a state and fighting the state itself instead. Every dead body smoldering in the Holy Land as we speak, be they Jew or Arab, is a casualty of the colonialist Westphalian nation state injected into the Levant by foreign interlopers. There was no Israel or Hamas before the diversity of that traditionally stateless society was forcibly united beneath one single universal order or another. Humans were not designed to live this way and they certainly weren't designed to die this way.</p><p>We must all refuse to take part in this horrific masquerade. We must refuse to fight beneath the banner of any standing army, and we must refuse to fire a single bullet unless it is fired in the defense of our own communities and right now all of our communities need to be defended from the terrorist machinery of the Untouchable class who are calling on us to repeat history once again with more endless war. </p><p>These are the heinous fiends who must be brought down but they will never be brought down by invasions and interventions that only perpetuate the imperial contagion that has ravaged the globe from Ground Zero to Gaza. They must instead be brought down by revolutions. A thousand local uprisings launched across the globe to restore sanity and diversity to a stateless world. What this means is that it is the Jews who must smash Israel, the Palestinians who must smash Hamas, and the Americans who must finish off the New World Order once and for all. For only when each of us does our part to smash the state will any of us ever know lasting peace.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Losing My Religion by REM</p><p>* Last Caress by the Misfits</p><p>* Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd</p><p>* Son of a Gun by the Vaselines</p><p>* Jesus, etc. by Wilco</p><p>* Tommy Gun by the Clash</p><p>* Buildings by Regina Spektor</p><p>* Someone to Die for by Belly</p><p>* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski</p><p>* Wild Horses by the Sundays</p><p>* War Pigs by Black Sabbath</p><p>* What About Us by Ministry</p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-5378618308536440902023-10-15T10:24:00.000-07:002023-10-15T10:24:18.282-07:00We Are All Buffalo Bill: Embracing the Revolutionary Monstrosity of the Third Gender<p> She's putting on her lipstick in the mirror while the music blares. There are knives by the blush and a loaded .357 Magnum next to the rouge. She's applying eyeliner as her victim's screams grow louder than the bassline. She turns up "Goodbye Horses" to drown them out. There are moths on the multicolored spools of fabric. There are skulls on their wings. There is a thorn tattooed on her side and rings shaped like serpents on her fingers. Her powerful shoulders flex as she works her antique sewing machine like a lave, sewing the flesh of her victims into something that will conceal those muscles. The screams grow louder but not oud enough. She's dancing before a blinking camcorder now, bathed in a woman suit constructed of 'real girls' with her other thorn tucked between her thighs. Now she's gingerly prying a pupa from its cocoon and caressing its newly formed wings. A terrifyingly deep voice escapes from those lipstick smeared lips. "So powerful..."</p><p>This was my introduction to Jame Gumb, better known as Buffalo Bill, the genderfuck villainess of Jonathan Deme's brilliant 1991 horror masterpiece, Silence of the Lambs. This was also the frighteningly feral image of androgyny that generations of genderqueer kids like me grew up with, and it hurt. The fact that I also happen to be a lifelong horror buff who adores this movie along with the 1988 Thomas Harris novel of the same name that it was based on didn't exactly soften the blow. While both Demme and Harris attempt to go to great lengths to have FBI Agent Clarice Starling and Doctor Hannibal Lecter explain that "Billy is not a real transexual... He thinks he is, he tries to be, he's tried to be a lot of things, I expect." these hollow words from the cisgender peanut gallery do even less to soften that blow. Regardless of how the professional class in the psychiatric-police state chooses to label her, Billy clearly identifies her desire for femininity as a strength and it is her androgyny, her refusal to play by traditional gender norms that makes her monstrous to the audience.</p><p>The conclusion that many kids like me were forced to come to was that our own inability to play by those rules, a predilection which we shared with one of cinema's greatest villains, marked us for the same fate that she embraced like a spider to a fly. Our identities could only result in unspeakable acts of barely human savagery. Ted Levine took up permanent residence in our mirrors and this isn't exactly an ideal foundation for adolescent self-esteem. More than a few of us chose to break the mirror and use its tainted shards to carve up our flesh like one of Billy's humps. Painful memories like these are part of the reason why even bitter anti-assimilationist radicals like me rejoice in the fact that at least today kids have access to enough information on their identities to give them some assemblance of hope that not fitting into either of the government approved genders doesn't have to result in a violent death in the basement.</p><p>But hope can be a dangerous thing, especially for a community that remains at least as marginalized as we are half-heartedly celebrated. While Walt Disney may decorate his parades with Pride flags that represent more identities than I can count, his conglomerate, along with other supposedly woke Fortune 500 giants like Goldman Sachs and Shell Oil continue to sling millions of dollars to the same politicians and lobbies that openly seek to strangle young gender outlaws with police state legislation before their arms are even strong enough to put up a fight. If anything, inclusion into mainstream civility has only made these muscles weaker. Many young trans people have been lulled into a state of learned passivity, being taught that their only hope for survival rests exclusively on the shoulders of an alliance between big government and even bigger business. Meanwhile, this exact same alliance pushes our prescribed foes to embrace them as the only force that can contain Queers like me before we can convert their kids.</p><p>Like most culture wars, the current gender war is little more than an excuse to keep both sides of the fight reliant on the same systems of power that exploit us both. However, since my community remains and will likely always be a minority, we are the ones with the most to lose and we are the ones most likely to lose it. The statistics on this fact are painfully clear. Trans people are more than four times as likely to be the victims of violent crime than we are to be the perpetrators. And it is with this fact in mind that I suggest the unthinkable. Perhaps Buffalo Bill isn't such a horrendous role model after all. </p><p>Not because of the crimes that she commits against innocent women who are just as likely to find themselves exploited by the same chauvinistic culture that drove Billy to seek shelter in the confines of her basement lair, but because she represents everything that terrifies the bigots and in this fear resides power. Jame Gumb was a child of systemic abuse denied her right to transition by a corrupt, gatekeeping, medical establishment who told her that she was too broken to be female, too "savage" to be a "real transexual." So Gumb became something else, something too strange to be filed away in the DSM. Jame became Billy, a monster too powerful to be ignored. God help me but I can relate.</p><p>Growing up I was raised to believe that my body was a commodity that everyone had a right to put their hands on but me. My body belonged to my parents, my body belonged to the church, my body belonged to the schools and the cruel adults who ran them like indoctrination camps. I had no idea what the hell I was other than powerless. I was carefully groomed to assume gender roles that felt totally alien to me and I was groomed even further to believe that these alien feelings made me broken and irredeemable. There were no genderqueer people on popular sitcoms back then. There were only villains. </p><p>Creatures like Marilyn Manson, Sinead O'Connor and Dennis Rodman who embraced their roles as pop cultural monsters with a charismatic zeal that terrified my abusers and empowered me to finally stand up to them. I could put on my black lipstick like warpaint and chant rhymes about the "beautiful people" and suddenly I was the one with the power to make big people feel small. Years before I had ever even heard of words like genderqueer or genderfuck, I embraced my otherness and weaponized it against conformity. These acts of guerrilla theater may have led my conservative Catholic school to accuse a 14-year-old pacifist of plotting a school massacre, but they may have also saved my life.</p><p>This is a radical strategy that has not been unheard of among gender outlaws throughout history though much of this history has been conveniently erased. During the halcyon days of pre-Christian pagan Europe, it was not uncommon to find public acts of crossdressing practiced freely at festivals, rituals and carnivals as a means to create a temporary escape from the crippling social obligations and hierarchies of agrarian civilization. These acts of ecstatic chaos were embraced as a way of life by heathen third gender sects like the Scythian shaman of the Enarei and the Roman priestesses known as the Galli. The Catholic Church did its damnedest to reign these outlaws in and constructed strict binary gender roles as a means of governing diverse societies beneath a single universal order but genderfuck remained a potent tactic for rebellion used to strike terror into the hearts of the governed for centuries.</p><p>Renegades from the hills of France to the moors of Scotland dawned women's clothing during raids and riots against the scions of church and state, from the Luddite Rebellions and the Ribbonmen to the Rebecca Riots and the Whiteboys. This proud peasant tradition also includes the fearsome Molly Maguires who carried their acts of genderqueer upheaval across the pond to my home state of Pennsylvania after the Potatoe Famine drove them from Ireland to coal country.</p><p>It is my conviction that we must revive this tradition of self-identifying as a threat and adopt rebellious third genders over assimilationist tropes. Trans people have tried playing nice with the straight world and where has it gotten us? With a dozen milquetoast TV shows streaming and more torches and pitchforks aimed at our throats than ever before. The reality is that the things about the trans community that terrify polite society most are precisely what makes us strong. We are ungovernable perverts that defy categorization. We are self-made monsters that require no man's permission to mutate and evolve into shapes and shades unseen by Christian civilization. We are dangerously free, and you and your children could be too, because liberation is a contagion that corrodes all conformity in its wake. </p><p>We are all Buffalo Bill, and you are right to fear us because you don't know what pain is.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Goodbye Horses by Lazurus Q</p><p>* The Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson</p><p>* Collect by Torres</p><p>* Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground</p><p>* Queen by Perfume Genius</p><p>* The Emperor's New Clothes by Sinead O'Connor</p><p>* Victim of Love by Erasure</p><p>* You're Pretty Face is Going to Hell by the Stooges</p><p>* Genesis by Grimes</p><p>* Army of Me by Bjork</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This post is devoted in loving memory to all the nameless bastards of Gaza who have been erased for embracing the monstrous roles assigned to them by small men with big toys. I grieve for all of them because every monster is born innocent. </p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-83159037725739163532023-10-08T09:05:00.000-07:002023-10-08T09:05:03.752-07:00The Last Planet on the Left: Climate Change as Rape Revenge<p> There is a creature stalking the human race, a colossal ferocious beast with tentacles that lash every last corner of the globe, a pitiless monster the likes of which mankind has never encountered, and this thing is out for blood. Its methods are as brutal as they are efficient. Its weapons are as deadly as they are diverse. It will reduce entire villages to ash with blazing infernos and it will drown entire islands in the deep blue sea. It will erase ancient agrarian civilizations in the blink of an eye and engulf once fertile bioregions in billowing waves of towering sand dunes. </p><p>This thing is coming after our most precious resources. It's targeting our food and our water and our children too. It's pitting us against each other, tribe against tribe, race against race, nation against nation, watching us rip each other to bits just for its own sick sadistic pleasure. Some people swear that it doesn't even exist, that it's some kind of boogeyman too ghastly to possibly be real, but then it gets them too. Others have gathered vast armies and built sweeping industries to hunt it down and reign it in. But nothing seems to work. Our deadliest weapons and most advanced technologies seem totally impotent in the shadow of this colossus, and it only seems to grow more merciless by the hour. What have we done to deserve this fate; we beg in our final hour. The beast just laughs and reminds us that we know exactly what we've done and that this is exactly what we deserve for our sins.</p><p>This creature has many names, myths passed down through the ages between wisemen, poets and heretics. Armageddon. Kali Yuga. Judgement Day. Ozymandias. The Second Coming. The Decline of the West. Most know it today by the title of climate change and despite what some of my fellow libertarians may tell you, this is indeed a very real monster stalking the human race, but the human race is anything but an innocent victim. All of these colorful monikers and metaphors are really little more than elaborate ways for mankind to disassociate itself from the fact that this creature is just the planet itself, Mother Earth, and that deadly bitch is out to spill the blood of her own children because we have spent centuries violating and debasing her for our own carnal pleasures.</p><p>We have dumped 365 million tons of carbon dioxide into her atmosphere just so we can drive glorified tanks from our gated suburban plantations to bullshit office jobs in half-empty cities and another 180 million tons has been added to the heap just so we can mow down forests to expand the sprawl. All of this garbage, this commercial ejaculate, has changed the very composition of the atmosphere itself and rendered our oceans into bottomless pits of acid that promise to corrode every last coral reef by the end of the century. </p><p>Mother Earth is pissed, she is on a rampage, and as unpleasant as it may be to say out loud, we the species who have ravaged her probably deserve to die for our crimes. Climate change is a horror story alright, but if you're looking for cinematic allegories to our current existential predicament, you're going to have to look for something a little darker than your average monster movie or slasher flick. If climate change has a genre, then it is that of the much-reviled rape revenge picture. </p><p>Made infamous by Wes Craven's 1972 debut shocker, The Last House on the Left, the oeuvre typically gets labeled as exploitation cinema and some of it may very well be, but Last House on the Left is one ugly parable deserving of far more respect than that label carries. The story of a group of sadists who rape and murder two teenage girls only to find themselves at the mercy of one of their victim's vengeful parents, Last House on the Left was actually a brutal statement about a nation who had willingly engaged in a genocidal war in Southeast Asia but was somehow mystified by the fact that their global campaign of ultraviolence had followed them back home in the form race riots and serial killings.</p><p>Few people seemed to get the message then and few people seem to get the message now. As Malcolm X astutely observed in the wake of the Kennedy Assassination, the chickens always come home to roost, and this time humanities preference for ignorance could very well lead to its own extinction. Even the liberal establishment's highly publicized global crusade to combat climate change amounts to little more than an arrogant and feckless gesture by a cabal of deranged ecological sex criminals. Solar farms, wind turbines and electric cars aren't solutions to this rampage. They are shallow attempts to pay off our terrestrial victim with trinkets of silence so we can continue on with our debauched modern lifestyles and this bribery will only be met by more violence. </p><p>There exists no form of green energy on the planet that can adequately sustain our globalist, fossil-fueled superstate, our freeways and metropolises and world trade deals. That is because oil itself is not the problem, we are. This rapacious crime spree that defiled the planet began long before the automobile which has become its perpetrator's weapon of choice. It began with the Agricultural Revolution. This is when human beings first began to take more from the earth than what we gave back so we could take more and more and more.</p><p>Before this point in history, mankind had lived in relative harmony with the planet that sustained us, respecting her boundaries, seeking consent from her soil, and living within our means in a world without race, property, rigid gender roles or organized violence. But then human beings decided to take advantage of a healthy relationship and invented civilization to justify its predation. This is the kind of heinous mistake that only a rapist could make and Mother Earth's brutal campaign to avenge herself will not cease until mankind forfeits the cruel invention of modern progress and repents. </p><p>This doesn't mean going green. This means going small. Drastically reducing our global presence by dismantling our entire multinational corporate infrastructure and returning to some form of sustainable village life. A world without highways. A world without skyscrapers or jumbo jets. A world without standing armies or the Westphalian nation state. Anything less will be met with nothing in the way of mercy, nor should it be. Unlike the murderous parents of Last House on the Left, our planet is not merely out for revenge. She is out for survival and if human beings refuse to cease living a lifestyle defined by an ecological rape culture, we will be erased.</p><p>This is the ugliest truth about climate change, the fact that it might be necessary to keep humanity from obliterating everything of beauty in its wake. With that being said, I am not a misanthropist. I happen to believe in the inherent goodness of mankind as exemplified by Peter Kropotkin in his magnum opus, Mutual Aid. Humanity only evolved to the level of intelligence that we have achieved by working together in harmony with nature. I believe that our choice to abandon that path is what has led us down the dark twisting road to the last planet on the left in an era of devolution that has led us to play the real monsters in our own horror movie. </p><p>But I do not believe that it is too late, at least not for all of us. Our best hope as a species is to independently disengage with these systems designed for violation entirely and prepare our individual communities to withstand the earth's wrath against those who won't. This means dropping out of our rapacious economy with a self-sustaining network of autonomous communes and homesteads. This means abandoning government and replacing it with culture. A stateless counterculture of mutual aid, localism, voluntaryism, peace and perseverance. In other words, we don't need a Green New Deal, we need an Amish New Deal.</p><p>But more than anything, we must make peace with the creature stalking us and except responsibility for the fact that it was we who made its wrath inevitable. If not, we can expect nothing less than getting exactly what we deserve while we tell ourselves over and over again that it's only an apocalypse, it's only an apocalypse, it's only an apocalypse... while the credits slowly roll into the black abyss.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Untogether by Belly</p><p>* Asking for It by Hole</p><p>* Me and a Gun by Tori Amos</p><p>* Polly by Nirvana</p><p>* Ever by Flipper</p><p>* I Know the End by Phoebe Bridgers</p><p>* Suggestion by Fugazi</p><p>* Laughing With by Regina Spektor</p><p>* My War by Black Flag</p><p>* I'm Allowed by Buffalo Tom</p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5903948190815094163.post-48467846512566503422023-10-01T12:31:00.001-07:002023-10-02T13:31:26.863-07:00The War on Trans is a War on Liberty<p> There are some very powerful people who want you to hate me, and they will tell you some very terrible things to convince you that I am your enemy and most of these things have to do with my admittedly unconventional gender identity. The anti-trans movement will tell you that my gender identity is a mental illness that poses an existential threat to the very fabric of a functioning society. They will tell you that my gender identity is a totalitarian ideology cooked up by crypto-Marxist Ivy League wonks to enslave Christians under some genderless new world order. They will even tell you that my gender identity is a perverted conspiracy to sexualize your children and groom them into compliant victims. </p><p>They will tell you pretty much anything except the fact that my gender identity is a heartfelt expression of my own individuality and when their smear campaign against me fails the multibillion-dollar machine behind the anti-trans movement will begin telling you terrible things about other people who are even more marginalized than I am to keep you scared of them becoming empowered too. In fact, they've already gotten started.</p><p>Every other talking point these people regurgitate seems to be a hymn to protecting children from my kind but what does the anti-trans movement really have to say about their favorite age demographic? Their propaganda paints young people as innocent, feeble-minded, dupes who lack anything in the way of agency. They would have you believe that your own children are too stupid to tell you who they are and that they should have zero expectation of privacy or free expression. </p><p>These people don't just want any notion of the very existence of people like me to be removed from schools and public spaces, they want to transform these commons into a hyper-vigilante police state that carefully governs the conversations and behavior of young people and urges public officials to report on their movements to legal guardians like the Stasi. Basically, according to the supposed libertarians of the anti-trans movement, your civil rights do not exist until your 18th birthday and maybe not even then.</p><p>The latest target of the war on trans is the mentally disabled, in particular those who happen to find themselves on the autism spectrum. It's actually quite the turn if you think about it. Suddenly, these braying hate-mongers care very deeply about degenerate groomers like me, they just believe that we're all retarded whack-jobs getting played by big pharma. Their proof, if you can call it that, is the fact that a lot of trans people seem to be nuts. Fair enough, they're not totally wrong about this. Rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation do run pretty high among trans people but they're high for a reason. Trans people struggle to cope because we live in a society that demonizes anyone who doesn't fit into a very confining script and refuses to perform the roles assigned to us before we're even old enough to say, 'shut the fuck up.' </p><p>As for autism, the prevalence of this "condition" in the overall trans community is not particularly well known but it is elevated among people actually seeking care for gender dysphoria for the simple reason that these people are more likely to receive a diagnosis. With that being said, having personally known plenty of people on the spectrum, both inside and out of the trans community, a correlation between the two would not be particularly shocking to me. Your average autistic person isn't even nuts, they're just someone wired to be incapable of falling for the bullshit of pointless social norms like the gender binary. This is an admirable trait that autistic people happen to share with children which I believe is the real reason why the very powerful people behind the anti-trans movement want them both to be singled out to be sufficiently governed. </p><p>Much like the transgender phenomena itself, there is nothing particularly new about the anti-trans movement. These charlatans may paint themselves as a grassroots coalition of concerned parents fighting big government intrusion into Christian family life, but this is all just smoke. The anti-trans movement is actually just the latest crusade of the Christian Right. All of the big names pushing the most draconian legislation along with the barely literate talking points that drive it home are agents of the same millionaire moneychangers behind such social engineering projects as the PMRC and Satanic Panic. In fact, the two biggest anti-trans lobbies, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, are both little more than front groups for Focus on the Family, an organization founded by Jerry Fallwell's heir apparent, James Dobson. </p><p>These people don't give a fuck about free speech or civil liberties. They aren't looking to reign in state power, they want to hijack it for their own jihad to turn America into an Evangelical Saudi Arabia. Trans people like me are simply their latest scapegoat. But their willingness to demonize and control other ungovernable populations in the name of religious liberty should tip you off to their true agenda and that agenda has less to do with pronouns and hormones than it does with social control.</p><p>Regardless of how you may feel about my gender identity, powerful people have always felt threatened by the culture of individual liberty that it represents. This is why Christian statists have been suppressing the existence of third genders since they hijacked the Bible and turned it into a weapon for the same empire that murdered Jesus. If something as fundamental as biology cannot be governed then nothing can. My gender is just a loose thread that threatens to unravel the entire tapestry of social constructs that powerful people like James Dobson have long relied on to keep poor people divided against each other while he walks off with their wallets.</p><p>The mainstream trans movement often pushes back against the notion of gender as a choice because it belittles the fact that most of us didn't choose this, but I think this is a mistake and it's one that betrays what defines us as a people. Gender isn't a choice, but shouldn't it be? Shouldn't everything be? This is what the Christian Right is so terrified of, and I say we give it to them with both barrels by embracing voluntaryism as the only philosophy truly compatible with radical Queer culture. But first let me tell you a few things that the powerful don't want you to know about me.</p><p>They don't want you to know that I am an individual that can't be stuffed into anyone's box. They don't want you to know that I am a lifelong anarchist and a registered Libertarian who actually believes in the small government that they secretly fear. They don't want you to know that am a devout Christo Pagan who follows the traditions of the early Celtic church that still held third genders like mine as sacred. They don't want you to know that I am a survivor of real child abuse and that this experience informs my opposition to the very existence of any compulsory school system. They don't want you to know that I was groomed by the Christian Right for eleven years in the Catholic Church and that I lose sleep over the fact that adults are still afforded the right to break children just because they can. They don't want you to know that I actually support your right to hate me, to say terrible things about me, and even to teach your children to hate themselves, just so long as you leave the law off of their bodies and afford them the right to think for themselves without being policed by the state.</p><p>More than anything though, the anti-trans movement doesn't want you to know that I am more like you than the statist fanatics who run their con job will ever be, and they don't want you to know that if they can eviscerate my rights, and the rights of children and disabled people and any other individual, then they can eviscerate your rights too. Hate me if you want. That's your right. I just thought you should know.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><u>Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post</u></p><p>* Been a Son by Nirvana</p><p>* Here by Soccer Mommy</p><p>* Plump by Hole</p><p>* Salt in the Wound by boygenius</p><p>* Criminal by Fiona Apple</p><p>* Divine Hammer by the Breeders</p><p>* Kool Thing by Sonic Youth</p><p>* Free to Decide by the Cranberries</p><p><br /></p>Comrade Hermit (Nicky Reid)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15143429283240217518noreply@blogger.com1