The winds of March are roaring and everywhere you look peace is in the air, or at least that's the impression you might get from eyeballing the latest headlines. Every other day it seems like another batch of barrel bomb-flipping butchers is getting together over finger sandwiches in the banquet room of a different five-star hotel to draw up plans for another ceasefire here or another peace deal there, but somehow people are still getting blown to bits all over the goddamn map.
We keep hearing how committed everyone is to peace in the Middle East and yet Benjamin Netanyahu seems to invade a new neighbor every other week, blasting through one red light after another and daring a very concerned international community to pull him over. The Europeans all shake their heads, but they keep cutting that psychopath checks instead of tickets between the endless procession of toothless interventions and talks about more toothless interventions. And we see a lot more of this same kind of shit going on over at the other global catastrophe in Ukraine.
While Donald Trump makes little secret about his desire to pave over the Gaza Strip and build a second Boca Raton on the mass graves, he's hustling like a shit-eating European to keep Putin and Zelensky on the phone together. Every day we're told by one of his sycophants that the mythic peace deal he promised to deliver on day one of his presidency is coming a little bit closer and yet cluster bombs are still dropping on both sides of Dnieper River.
In the latest peace fake out, just hours after agreeing informally to halting attacks on energy infrastructure, both Putin and Zelensky launched massive drone attacks deep into each other's air spaces against pretty much every other kind of target. Yet the only time Trump ever turns off the tap of American artillery to Ukraine is when Zelensky hurts his feelings during another one those endless goddamn peace junkets.
The depressing reality here is that while peace talks may be in the air, talk is cheap among imperial death merchants. Powerful warlords like the ones in charge of the US and the EU frequently adopt a pacifist posture when their crusades begin to become toxic among their constituents back home, but this rarely amounts to much more than smoke and mirrors.
In no Babylonian hellhole is this truer than it is in Washington, where every president is a pacifist until his first war crime and sometimes even for a while after that. Richard Nixon was elected to end a war he would drastically escalate to downright genocidal proportions in Indochina. George W. Bush ran against the reckless Balkan interventionism of the Clinton regime before declaring war on pretty much everybody and Barack Obama ran on moving Dubya's troops out of Iraq and back into the jaws of the Hindu Kush only to ship many of them back to Mosul anyway.
In spite of all the attempts by more liberal warmongers to paint Trump as some kind of Putinist Nevelle Chamberlain he is no exception to the rule. Donald spent his first term throwing freedom of navigation drills off the Russian coasts of the Black Sea while he shredded one Reagan era nuclear armistice after another. This Zionist rodeo clown isn't a non-interventionist, he just poses like one for the cameras so he can appear vaguely principled while shaking down our fatted allies for spare change.
The really gross thing is that all this isolationist posturing, and empty peace talk seems to be souring entire generations of otherwise thoughtful people on the notion of minding our own goddamn business as a virtue. In Europe, the communists are turning to fascism again and in North America many of my fellow anarchists are beginning to sound like neoliberals. I see it online every day; well-intentioned social anarchists adopting a posture of hyper-internationalism that views isolationism with contempt and interventionism as woke, and all this does is push more equally well-intentioned rural populists away from the real solution to the globalism that they are perfectly right to detest.
The biggest problem in one warzone after another, from Yugoslavia and Iraq to Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, is that the Westphalian nation state makes citizenship an involuntary life sentence delivered at birth. If you look at maps of Ukraine and Israel over the last century alone, their borders convulse and contract like a cartographic cancer, trapping hundreds-of-thousands of people on either side of them like wayward sheep based on the arbitrary whims of whichever asshole signed the last peace deal between bloodbaths. Why should any population be expected to respect such flagrant madness?
Ukraine's current borders are essentially a freeze frame of something slapped together by Stalin's errand boys and then divided from Russia with Yeltsin's equally unilateral divorce of the Soviet Union. No one in that cockamamy country had a say on any of this and the strife caused by chaining Novorossiyans and Ukrainians together before throwing away the key is what set the stage for opportunistic psychopaths like Victoria Nuland and Vladimir Putin to turn this region into a free fire zone.
The situation in Israel is even worse but fundamentally similar with the big thinkers of the so-called international community carving a hunk off of the Ottoman Empire's corpse and then declaring it a Jewish homeland in spite of the fact of the Jewish population being a peacefully stateless minority in the region until the British began flooding it with Zionist lunatics from Europe. More recently, the same western know-it-alls of the global north have been giving lip service to the notion of a two-state solution, but even the ones who are serious about this posture fail to recognize that no matter where you draw the border, somebody gets cut off and fucked over just like the people of the Donbass and Ukraine.
If you study the demographic maps of both of these regions you will recognize that there are no straight lines to be drawn. Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox, all spattered across the board in pockets and enclaves like a Jackson Pollock painting. It looks like chaos until you realize that violence didn't break out between these groups on any massive scale until other people began to organize them into states. Many empires rampaged across the Steppes and the Levant over the centuries but for the most part these regions remained largely decentralized and self-governed for thousands of years before the Nakbas and Holodomors started up.
The best way to respect the complicated diversity of these regions or any region for that matter is with a no-state solution based on the principles of pan-secession and panarchy. Allow any population of consenting citizens the right to form a nation anywhere at any time as long as that nation is governed by voluntary citizenship rather than geography. This way the members of a Palestinian caliphate could exist anywhere they herd their goats so long as any dissatisfied tribe of Bedouins is free to secede and form their own government whenever the spirit moves them.
That way Ukraine is free to secede from Russia, the Donbass is free to secede from Ukraine and Luhansk is free to secede from the Donbass without a single shot fired between them. This is the dream of panarchy or many anarchies; a world governed beneath a million flags with each flag free to represent any ideology or creed that its people desire so long as citizenship remains a choice, and boundaries are defined purely by who happens to occupy that patch of dirt at any given time.
This too would be a world of constant peace deals and ceasefires, but these would all occur daily and locally between neighbors over grazing rights and neighborhood charters. There would be little need for heavily armed jet sets of Bilderberg charlatans or massive global conglomerates like NATO and the European Union because people would no longer be governed by contrived cartels of belligerent bureaucrats that require industrial complexes just to wipe their ass. They would be governed by communities too small to bomb and markets too diverse to regulate.
You see dearest motherfuckers, at the end of the day, panarchy isn't a philosophy, it is a universal peace deal between consenting citizens because all citizens deserve the right to consent to what governs them. Leave it to a state to make peace a dirty word but leave it to a million tribes to smash the state and make peace common sense again.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post
* Let's Start a War by Fear
* Drain You by Nirvana
* Runaways by the Killers
* I Don't Know Where to Start by Bully
* Declare Independence by Bjork
* Imagine by John Lennon
* What's Left of the Flag by Flogging Molly
* Zombie by the Cranberries
* Peace Sells by Megadeth