I've been running with a bad crowd lately. Too many libertarians. Too many capitalists. They've had a bad influence on my commie Marxist ass. I use to be redder than Trotsky's cock in an ice storm. Now I'm dissing taxes, questioning single-payer and tossing around words like voluntaryism and panarchy like Murray goddamn Rothbard. What the hell happened to me? I use to be a regular limonka chucking Bolshevik. What would my childhood idols, Che Guevara and Abbie Hoffman say about me now? Have I sold out?
Hardly. I've simply broadened my horizons a little bit. I think the kids call it woke. I may not be the same welfare state loving democratic centralist that I use to be but I still believe in essentially the same values. I still despise capitalism and I still believe that things like healthcare, education and housing are fundamental human rights. I've just lost faith in the state at a time when I happened to make friends with some exceptional libertarians. This has lead me to a rare terrain for most Americans. A scary place called thinking outside the box. You're average American of any political political ideology would sooner swallow a fist full of live hornets then spend more than five minutes with an opinion that doesn't jibe with their preferred world view. But the more time this Marxist has spent among libertarians, the more I've come to realize that they offer the best solutions to the problems of capitalism.
The fundamental source of all class oppression is authority and when you boil it down to the marrow, the state itself is little more than authority institutionalized and capitalism as we know it cannot exist without the institutionalized market authoritarianism of the state. Multinational conglomerates only exist thanks to the largess of big government and their so called "free trade" bills. Long story short, big government is the best friend big business could ever ask for and the longer one or both of these creatures exists the more incestuously interchangeable they become. This is why in state communist societies the party members essentially take the place of the oligarchs. Even with the most radical of intentions, the state's number one objective will always be to justify its own existence and those who pull the levers behind this behemoth will always become the complicit benefactors of this power imbalance with the workers remaining exploited regardless of whether or not their bosses wear pressed red roses on their lapels.
This is why even in the welfare wonder-states of Scandinavia the living standards of the working class are being eroded by the menace of neoliberal austerity. In the end, it didn't matter how much the government gave the workers. As long as they remained unempowered by the authority of the state, their rights where always just one prime minister away from being flushed down the toilet. Sweden. Norway. Venezuela. Brazil. They all ultimately fell victim to the offspring of their own liberators. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.
So what's the alternative? We kill the lord. The Libertarian Party essentially advocates the total liquidation of the federal government. Most of the rank and file believe this to be a boon for unfettered capitalism. But that's really all dependent on how we the people choose to exercise our right to free assembly. There is nothing wrong with welfare in and of itself. It just needs to be divorced from the state. Successful stateless welfare systems have been launched in this country from the Wobblies to the Black Panthers. In Southern Lebanon Christians and Muslims alike prefer the welfare services provided by the Shia militia Hezbollah to that of their own socially derelict government. These kinds of programs not only take care of those who can't take care of themselves but they strengthen their sense of community and empower them to become active participants of a movement rather than numbers in a faceless bureaucracy. It also fosters the kind of mindset necessary to achieve the kind of voluntary egalitarian society Marx dreamed of in his more lucid years.
In general, most if not all things done by big business or big government can be done better by civilian collectives witch carry the added benefit of being entirely voluntary, thus negating the need to rob people through taxation (I make an exception for certain forms of reparations, but that's a topic for another post). All of this jibes with the Libertarian Party's objectives but it fails to jibe with the overall objectives of any other current party on the left, all of whom support increased regulations that would only stagnate the civilian welfare system if not strangle it to death with red tape. Thus I've come up with a three step goal for achieving a truly Marxian society through a libertarian revolution.
Step 1: The radical left must shift focus from state reform to creating voluntary communal alternatives to both the predator-capitalist-profit system and the welfare state. This will involve the construction of a massive, intricate, but grass roots network of trade unions, collectives, free clinics, free schools, co-ops, mutual aid societies and credit unions. This will also require a massive social movement that will require us to rethink the very way we live our lives and organize society. This is the hardest step and it won't be easy but nothing worth fighting for ever is.
Step 2: Once we have a viable civilian safety net in place we throw the full weight of our support entirely behind the Libertarian Party both locally and nationally, under the strict condition that they hold up their end of the bargain by remaining true to their antiwar and anti-statist roots. That means no more limp-wristed, dope-smoking, Republican poseurs like Gary Johnson, Bob Barr or Bill Weld. The Libertarians will have our support but only if they earn it. This means a return to the golden age of Harry Browne and Karl Hess. No more half measures.
Step 3: We wait until the minarchist night watchman state is weak enough to snap like a twig and then we crush it with a massive bloodless Luxemburgian general strike. A revolution that with any luck will spread like a wildfire across the globe. We start over with a million little stateless republics and a population free to chose how to live their lives in peace.
I'm not sure about Che and Abbie but somehow I think old Karl might approve. Either way, true Marxism is about evolution. The dialectic never sleeps. The hustle doesn't stop until the boss-man's off the block and that boss-man has gotten pretty fucking fat off our sweat and taxes. We're gonna need a little help from our friends to roll his ass. We better get to work. See you in the streets, dearest motherfuckers. Viva la Revolucion!
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.
* The Concept By Teenage Fanclub
* Bad Kids By Black Lips
* Soon By My Bloody Valentine
* Walk On The Wild Side By Lou Reed
* Corona By The Minutemen
* Neat Neat Neat By The Damned
* Freak Scene By Dinosaur Jr.
* Lithium By Nirvana
* With A Little Help From My Friends By The Beatles
* The Diamond Sea By Sonic Youth
Monday, January 29, 2018
Sunday, January 21, 2018
It's The Decline Of The West As We Know it (And I Feel Fine)
Somewhere in the swamps of Washington, deep in the white pillared bowels of the imperial Camelot we call the White House, there lurks a vile and twisted nocturnal beast pacing the dimly lit hallways manically like a rabid jungle cat in heat. It's hide; nicotine orange. It's main; a mangled shock of strawberry blonde straw. It subsists on a steady diet of processed meat, caffeine, and garbage television. Alone, it binges and purges a barrage of toxic black bile in barely legible bursts of social media vitriol. Making petty threats against both states and the stateless. Bragging of the mythical superiority of its weapons and its organs. Gripping its Blackberry like Gilles de Rais with the throat of a child. Tiny knuckles mercilessly slamming into the machine, greasing its matte black gears with an oily slick of French fried slime and beet red blood. Its handlers, a decrepit coven of rapidly decomposing old generals who've created a thousand battle fields that they've never stepped foot on, tread lightly on fractured egg shells, taking care not to disturb the ravenous animal left in their charge by a desperate Electoral College. Together they plot in the shadows of the American Century, planning wars that will never come, dreaming of triumphant victories that will never be, rapping wistfully of past glories that they're brittle hearts ache to relive. Their lives are all but over. Their empire is crumbling while they struggle in vain to keep a leash on the thing they call president.
America the beautiful has never looked so ugly. That shining city on the hill has never looked so dim. After a year in the Oval Office, orange supremacist and reality TV rapist Donald J. Trump has presided over an imperial city in chaos. A Roman inferno the likes of which the world has not witnessed since Nero's last concerto. The world order is rapidly unraveling. Faith in the specter of liberal democracy has never been lower. Dullards who once looked to Uncle Sam for guidance now look else ware or inwards. Meanwhile the Chinese dragon rises triumphantly from its slumber, flexing its wings audaciously like a creature from a Lovecraftian nightmare. Its humble neighbors look upon this creature not with fear but with hope. The decline of the West is finally upon us. And while the moneyed literati of the Beltway think tanks screech with terror, I have never slept better. It's the end of the world as we know it, dearest motherfuckers. And I feel fine.
Trump's America is nothing new. Its always been there. Always. All of it; the casual racism, the bombastic threats of unparalleled ultraviolence, the daily degradation of women for nothing more profound than pure sport. America has always been ugly. The only difference now is that the whole world can see our sins. Donald Trump, in his childlike ignorance, has done nothing more than rip the mask of sanity from Lady Liberty's face, revealing the disgusting rapacious harpy that has always hid just beneath the surface. Rather than waxing poetic about America's god given duty to protect liberty across the globe through glossy acts of humanitarian tyranny, Trump has resorted to reducing these platitudes to their bassist meanings- blurting out expletives about America's colonial charges and making schoolyard threats of nuclear annihilation like a sixth grade sociopath. The result? The world finally sees this country for the cruel and bombastic empire its always been and I say good fucking riddance. Rip the veil off and let the necrosis of the American Century begin.
Trump is a monster, a pathologically deranged malignant narcissist in the tradition of Richard Nixon and Caligula. But he's also a moronic train wreck. A slave to his own desperate thirst for attention with a complete inability to commit himself to anything even resembling a strategy more complex than a plot to eat a second Big Mac. Under his watch, the Pentagon has squandered numerous opportunities for international terrorism across the globe do to the folly of their own disorganized hubris. In nowhere is this fantastic reality more undeniably apparent than on the Korean Peninsula, where Trump's manic tough talk of nuclear holocaust has inadvertently driven the two warring tribes of that once great nation together to seek peace beneath the guidance of Moscow and Beijing while America stands by powerless to obstruct it. The closest thing to a successful imperial venture that the administration who couldn't shoot straight has managed to achieve is that ugly little genocide in Yemen which is rapidly devolving into the House of Saud's own well deserved Vietnam.
The American Empire finally appears to be on its last legs, with China just strong enough to accomplish a coup-de-grace but not strong enough to keep it's own people under it's thumb, let alone the world. We are entering a rare moment of opportunity here, dearest motherfuckers, between the collapse of one empire and the rise of another. It is here that the historic dialectic presents us with a fleeting moment of revolutionary opportunity. A moment when the specter of the state becomes visibly weaker than the people it controls. I see these days of black smoke and crumbling marble not with the dread of our establishment mandarins but with the hopes of a patient revolutionary finally presented with an opportunity to achieve the unparalleled greatness of a truly stateless society.
The time is now, dearest motherfuckers, for us to construct a whole new world atop the ashes of the old. There is no time to waste on the frivolity of reforming a hopelessly broken system. We must abandon the state as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and create a resilient panarchic regalia of grand alternatives; collectives, communes, mutual aid societies, autonomous zones both temporary and permanent, syndicates and councils and pirate utopias. In the eternal words of that great American mystic, Timothy Leary- It is time to turn on, tune in and drop out.
It's the decline of the West as we know it, dearest motherfuckers, and I feel fine.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: Songs for a joyful apocalypse.
* What A Time To Be Alive By Superchunk
* It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) By REM
* Everyone Wants To Live Forever By The Flaming Lips
* Dance Yourself Clean By LCD Soundsystem
* Here Comes Your Man By The Pixies
* Crash Years By The New Pornographers
* Surf Wax America By Weezer
* Freedom! '90 By George Michael
* Malibu By Hole
* Entitlement Crew By The Hold Steady
America the beautiful has never looked so ugly. That shining city on the hill has never looked so dim. After a year in the Oval Office, orange supremacist and reality TV rapist Donald J. Trump has presided over an imperial city in chaos. A Roman inferno the likes of which the world has not witnessed since Nero's last concerto. The world order is rapidly unraveling. Faith in the specter of liberal democracy has never been lower. Dullards who once looked to Uncle Sam for guidance now look else ware or inwards. Meanwhile the Chinese dragon rises triumphantly from its slumber, flexing its wings audaciously like a creature from a Lovecraftian nightmare. Its humble neighbors look upon this creature not with fear but with hope. The decline of the West is finally upon us. And while the moneyed literati of the Beltway think tanks screech with terror, I have never slept better. It's the end of the world as we know it, dearest motherfuckers. And I feel fine.
Trump's America is nothing new. Its always been there. Always. All of it; the casual racism, the bombastic threats of unparalleled ultraviolence, the daily degradation of women for nothing more profound than pure sport. America has always been ugly. The only difference now is that the whole world can see our sins. Donald Trump, in his childlike ignorance, has done nothing more than rip the mask of sanity from Lady Liberty's face, revealing the disgusting rapacious harpy that has always hid just beneath the surface. Rather than waxing poetic about America's god given duty to protect liberty across the globe through glossy acts of humanitarian tyranny, Trump has resorted to reducing these platitudes to their bassist meanings- blurting out expletives about America's colonial charges and making schoolyard threats of nuclear annihilation like a sixth grade sociopath. The result? The world finally sees this country for the cruel and bombastic empire its always been and I say good fucking riddance. Rip the veil off and let the necrosis of the American Century begin.
Trump is a monster, a pathologically deranged malignant narcissist in the tradition of Richard Nixon and Caligula. But he's also a moronic train wreck. A slave to his own desperate thirst for attention with a complete inability to commit himself to anything even resembling a strategy more complex than a plot to eat a second Big Mac. Under his watch, the Pentagon has squandered numerous opportunities for international terrorism across the globe do to the folly of their own disorganized hubris. In nowhere is this fantastic reality more undeniably apparent than on the Korean Peninsula, where Trump's manic tough talk of nuclear holocaust has inadvertently driven the two warring tribes of that once great nation together to seek peace beneath the guidance of Moscow and Beijing while America stands by powerless to obstruct it. The closest thing to a successful imperial venture that the administration who couldn't shoot straight has managed to achieve is that ugly little genocide in Yemen which is rapidly devolving into the House of Saud's own well deserved Vietnam.
The American Empire finally appears to be on its last legs, with China just strong enough to accomplish a coup-de-grace but not strong enough to keep it's own people under it's thumb, let alone the world. We are entering a rare moment of opportunity here, dearest motherfuckers, between the collapse of one empire and the rise of another. It is here that the historic dialectic presents us with a fleeting moment of revolutionary opportunity. A moment when the specter of the state becomes visibly weaker than the people it controls. I see these days of black smoke and crumbling marble not with the dread of our establishment mandarins but with the hopes of a patient revolutionary finally presented with an opportunity to achieve the unparalleled greatness of a truly stateless society.
The time is now, dearest motherfuckers, for us to construct a whole new world atop the ashes of the old. There is no time to waste on the frivolity of reforming a hopelessly broken system. We must abandon the state as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and create a resilient panarchic regalia of grand alternatives; collectives, communes, mutual aid societies, autonomous zones both temporary and permanent, syndicates and councils and pirate utopias. In the eternal words of that great American mystic, Timothy Leary- It is time to turn on, tune in and drop out.
It's the decline of the West as we know it, dearest motherfuckers, and I feel fine.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: Songs for a joyful apocalypse.
* What A Time To Be Alive By Superchunk
* It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) By REM
* Everyone Wants To Live Forever By The Flaming Lips
* Dance Yourself Clean By LCD Soundsystem
* Here Comes Your Man By The Pixies
* Crash Years By The New Pornographers
* Surf Wax America By Weezer
* Freedom! '90 By George Michael
* Malibu By Hole
* Entitlement Crew By The Hold Steady
Monday, January 15, 2018
Queer Against Empire
An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I cover an almost absurdly wide terrain of subject matter on this humble little blog- Guns. Drugs. Horror Movies. Courtney Love. But the lion share of my posts seem to be focused on two primary subjects- The American war machine and my equally tumultuous gender identity. To a lot of people these two things couldn't be more different and they're not completely off base to make that assumption. Over the last couple decades the queer rights and antiwar movements have become largely separate entities. Gone are the halcyon days of Sixties solidarity, when any gay pride parade would be incomplete without a Vietcong flag. This division has even resulted in a degree of tepid hostility between the movements. I've experienced this first hand from fellow members of the antiwar community who I've encountered online, who seem to view queer rights along with feminism as being largely a distraction from the more pressing issues of war and peace.
On the flip side, many queer folks, particularly in the trans community, are so busy trying to maintain their basic survival that the rest of the world becomes peripheral. This is totally understandable when you have to ask yourself every time you leave the house, "Is today the day when someones gonna hurt me? Is today going to be the day they go all the way and finish the job?" Many members of the antiwar movement have the privilege of not having to live with these kinds of existential questions. It can be a little hard to worry about folks on the other side of the fucking globe when something as basic as taking a leak can get you raped and castrated. But it's all connected and I contend that being an anti-imperialist should be a prerequisite for any self respecting queer activist. After all, don't Palestinians and Yemenis have to live with the same kind of existential questions before they leave the house, "Is today going to be the day they drone strike the market? Is today going to be the day they take what's left of my family with their bombs?"
Imperialism and it's crude cousin colonialism cut to the bone on both sides of the border. The state cannot exist without whole classes of people to subjugate and oppress. These people aren't just the foreign targets of death squads and drone strikes but the domestic targets of police violence and mass incarceration. This includes queer people, my people, who are singled out and violated by the state for rejecting their established status quo on sexual and gender etiquette. In other words we refuse to play by their rules and lead a bad example to the rest of the proletariat expected to toe the company line. Controlling a sizable population of people becomes a lot harder when you can't divide and conquer and when your very existence shreds notions as basic as the gender binary you find yourself pretty close to the top of the establishment's shitlist. After all, if boys aren't boys and girls aren't girls then how will the state know who to oppress? This is why the incarceration and whole sale slaughter of the gender non-conforming community is so staggeringly high. And this is why the destruction of the American Empire should be every bit as important to trannies, fags and dykes as it is to Arabs, commies and isolationists.
The same goes for blacks, Latinos, women and even rednecks. These are the people queer folks should be looking to for solidarity, not the state with their assimilationist consolation prizes of domesticated marriage and foreign military service. And our visibility in expressing solidarity with these other oppressed classes will go a long way towards taring down the stigma that remains persistent against the queer community without having to sell out and assimilate. When conservative Muslims see trannies pounding on the walls of Gaza, it'll be just that much harder for them to pick up a stone against their own children. When ranchers find themselves joined by AR toting bull-dykes in defense of their land, they'll be hard pressed to toss off homosexuality as a metropolitan social virus. And when queers and blacks and Muslims and feminists and militiamen and gangbangers and trailer trash and migrant workers join together in the streets in solidarity with Palestinians and Zaydis and Kurds and Novorossiyans and Catalans and Tuaregs and Zapatistas and Arab Nationalists the empire will finally know without a shadow of a doubt that their days of plenty are numbered.
I don't know when this day will come, dearest motherfuckers, but you better fucking believe that my people will throw one hell of a parade the next day. Revolution will never look more fabulous.
Peace, Love, Empathy and Solidarity- CH
Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.
* Come Together By The Beatles
* And Saints By Sleigh Bells
* Today By The Smashing Pumpkins
* Lola By The Raincoats
* Rise Above By Black Flag
* Dive By Nirvana
* Sex Bomb By Flipper
* Drone Bomb Me By Anohni
* Land By Patti Smith
* Everybody Does By Julien Baker
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I cover an almost absurdly wide terrain of subject matter on this humble little blog- Guns. Drugs. Horror Movies. Courtney Love. But the lion share of my posts seem to be focused on two primary subjects- The American war machine and my equally tumultuous gender identity. To a lot of people these two things couldn't be more different and they're not completely off base to make that assumption. Over the last couple decades the queer rights and antiwar movements have become largely separate entities. Gone are the halcyon days of Sixties solidarity, when any gay pride parade would be incomplete without a Vietcong flag. This division has even resulted in a degree of tepid hostility between the movements. I've experienced this first hand from fellow members of the antiwar community who I've encountered online, who seem to view queer rights along with feminism as being largely a distraction from the more pressing issues of war and peace.
On the flip side, many queer folks, particularly in the trans community, are so busy trying to maintain their basic survival that the rest of the world becomes peripheral. This is totally understandable when you have to ask yourself every time you leave the house, "Is today the day when someones gonna hurt me? Is today going to be the day they go all the way and finish the job?" Many members of the antiwar movement have the privilege of not having to live with these kinds of existential questions. It can be a little hard to worry about folks on the other side of the fucking globe when something as basic as taking a leak can get you raped and castrated. But it's all connected and I contend that being an anti-imperialist should be a prerequisite for any self respecting queer activist. After all, don't Palestinians and Yemenis have to live with the same kind of existential questions before they leave the house, "Is today going to be the day they drone strike the market? Is today going to be the day they take what's left of my family with their bombs?"
Imperialism and it's crude cousin colonialism cut to the bone on both sides of the border. The state cannot exist without whole classes of people to subjugate and oppress. These people aren't just the foreign targets of death squads and drone strikes but the domestic targets of police violence and mass incarceration. This includes queer people, my people, who are singled out and violated by the state for rejecting their established status quo on sexual and gender etiquette. In other words we refuse to play by their rules and lead a bad example to the rest of the proletariat expected to toe the company line. Controlling a sizable population of people becomes a lot harder when you can't divide and conquer and when your very existence shreds notions as basic as the gender binary you find yourself pretty close to the top of the establishment's shitlist. After all, if boys aren't boys and girls aren't girls then how will the state know who to oppress? This is why the incarceration and whole sale slaughter of the gender non-conforming community is so staggeringly high. And this is why the destruction of the American Empire should be every bit as important to trannies, fags and dykes as it is to Arabs, commies and isolationists.
The same goes for blacks, Latinos, women and even rednecks. These are the people queer folks should be looking to for solidarity, not the state with their assimilationist consolation prizes of domesticated marriage and foreign military service. And our visibility in expressing solidarity with these other oppressed classes will go a long way towards taring down the stigma that remains persistent against the queer community without having to sell out and assimilate. When conservative Muslims see trannies pounding on the walls of Gaza, it'll be just that much harder for them to pick up a stone against their own children. When ranchers find themselves joined by AR toting bull-dykes in defense of their land, they'll be hard pressed to toss off homosexuality as a metropolitan social virus. And when queers and blacks and Muslims and feminists and militiamen and gangbangers and trailer trash and migrant workers join together in the streets in solidarity with Palestinians and Zaydis and Kurds and Novorossiyans and Catalans and Tuaregs and Zapatistas and Arab Nationalists the empire will finally know without a shadow of a doubt that their days of plenty are numbered.
I don't know when this day will come, dearest motherfuckers, but you better fucking believe that my people will throw one hell of a parade the next day. Revolution will never look more fabulous.
Peace, Love, Empathy and Solidarity- CH
Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.
* Come Together By The Beatles
* And Saints By Sleigh Bells
* Today By The Smashing Pumpkins
* Lola By The Raincoats
* Rise Above By Black Flag
* Dive By Nirvana
* Sex Bomb By Flipper
* Drone Bomb Me By Anohni
* Land By Patti Smith
* Everybody Does By Julien Baker
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
A Second Iranian Revolution?
I may be something of a pacifist (well, sorta) but I'm also a bit of a war nerd. Conflict fascinates me. Violence fascinates me. Politics fascinates me. So when these things all converge cataclysmically I find myself sucked in completely which often leads me to making the fatal mistake of picking sides. For better or worse, I usually go with the underdog. Call it a Marxist thing or a Christian thing or a queer thing or an Irish thing, for whatever reason, I frequently find myself inflicted with the unshakable urge to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. In Warsaw I'm a Jew. In Gaza I'm a Palestinian. In Turkey I'm a Kurd. And so on and so forth.
Which makes the current situation in Iran a little bit complicated. I have a general tendency to side with the Shia on most matters in the Persian Gulf do to their typically defensive position towards the US favored Sunni majority and when I saw another deluge of reports on the latest Iranian anti-government protests, dripping with the sentimental fromage the mainstream media usually reserves for it's neoliberal pet projects, I thought, "Oh brother, not another color revolution".
The last time I heard this story was back in 2009, during the so called Green "Revolution". When a handful of bourgeois brats in Tehran's toniest enclaves took to the streets to violently protest the completely legitimate reelection of right wing populist (and raging homophobe) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With their ties to US sponsored exile groups and their professional grade skill at media manipulation, it didn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that these poor dumb fucks where being manipulated by outside forces to cook up another Yankee approved neoliberal color revolution like the ones seen throughout the former Soviet Union.
So when I began seeing similar reports on such uprisings a week ago, I figured this had to be round two. But the more research I did into this latest uprising the harder it became for me to disprove its legitimacy. For one thing, this movement didn't start in Tehran. It started in the working class city of Masshad (think Chicago with more mosques), generally considered to be a conservative stronghold, and it spread across a dozen other hard-scrabble hamlets that could be called Persia's Rust Belt. In other words, not prime territory for Western manipulation. This was Ahmadinejad country, populated by the kind of folks who keep portraits of the Ayatollah over the dinner table and wouldn't piss on Uncle Sam if he was on fire.
They also didn't spring out of nowhere over night. These protests had been building slowly for months and they weren't calls for liberal democracy and apple pie, they were protests against the austerity programs of the moderate leadership of Hassan Rouhani. After finding his dangerously one dimensional petro-state in dire straights after the Saudis had flooded the markets with cheap oil (in a likely act of revenge for Iran and Russia's efforts to squash their latest little jihad in Syria), Rouhani gambled on accepting a draconian nuclear deal proposed by Barack Obama that eased the crippling sanctions the US has used to punish Tehran for overthrowing our preferred despot, the Shah, since 1979. Rouhani subsequently moved to cut inflation by slashing subsidies that many working class Iranians depended on to afford bread and fuel. The market may have stabilized enough to make up for these cuts if Donald Trump hadn't gone out of his way to scare off foreign investment with his repeated threats to rescind the nuclear deal and his full throated support for tightening the still existing non-nuclear sanctions.
All this shit put Iran in a similar spot as Venezuela, economically sabotaged by forces both external and internal and bleeding like a civ. The Iranians who took to the streets were the working class stiffs left with the tab while members of Iran's theocratic aristocracy remained fat and happy, with excessive portions of Iranian subsidies still going to religious institutions and the military. Even so, these proletarian protests didn't explode into a full blown uprising until the Revolutionary Guard choose to suddenly and very violently overreact in Masshad last week.
This is where I believe outside interference may have come into play. Contrary to popular western mythology, protests are not an uncommon occurrence in Iranian life. In many ways Persian society is the Middle Eastern equivalent to France with it's twin cultures of social radicalism and religious traditionalism. Hell, the Iranian Revolution itself was part of this complicated tradition, with leftists like the late, great, Ali Shariati leading the fight against Western colonialism until they were back-stabbed by their Islamist comrades, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Regardless, the Iranian Revolution itself had its roots in a synergy of Islamic liberation theology and secular social democracy and this syncretic foundation continues to foster a decidedly metropolitan culture in the Islamic Republic, with female guards serving on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War and Iran leading the world, just behind Thailand, in sex change operations with the Mullahs footing a hefty chunk of the bill.
Under Rouhani this liberal attitude has only expanded which makes the totally unnecessary and counterproductive crackdowns against what were initially largely peaceful protests all the more perplexing. Here Iran stands, economically strained but on the verge of reaching an unprecedented level of legitimacy on the global stage, with their faithful obedience to the most restrictive regulations ever put on a nuclear state (one that, according to our own government, hadn't even sought nuclear weapons since the fall of Iraq in 2003) and their leading roll in shattering the Islamic State. And they choose now to overreact? After months of tolerating these protests, what changed?
Well, for one thing, our pathologically Persophobic president, Donald Trump, is rapidly approaching legal deadlines on the nuclear deal that he absurdly claims is offensively unfair... to us! Trump has made little secret about his desire to welch on his governments own deal but he can't do it alone without further isolating the crumbling American Empire in the eyes of the international community. His only hope is turning Western Europe against the deal. Then suddenly the Mullahs become convinced that protesters in the heartland who have been in the streets for months have just now become foreign puppets.
I don't believe this to be the case but I do believe that it is strongly possible that the Revolutionary Guard has fallen victim to a disinformation campaign designed by someone to turn them against their own base. The only person who doesn't appear to be drinking the Kool-aid on this charade is Rouhani himself, who has bravely contradicted the Ayatollah by voicing his support for the protesters and condemning the violence on both sides. In spite of being part of the initial problem, Rouhani does seem to be legitimately devoted to being a part of the solution. If he stands his ground, refuses to take the bait, and defies the Mullahs reactionary stance to legitimate dissent, Rouhani stands a heroes chance of strengthening his republics democratic roots while weakening the position of both the hardliners and the foreign crowd exciters flaming them on. And this would be truly revolutionary.
Here's hoping he stays the course. Regardless, dearest motherfuckers, this time I'm on the side of the protesters. I pray to the same god as them that Rouhani, in spite of his flaws, is too. A second Iranian Revolution may depend on it.
Viva La Revolucion!- CH
Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.
* Heroes By David Bowie
* Cochise By Audioslave
* Hummer By Smashing Pumpkins
* Children Of The Revolution By T. Rex
* The Beautiful People By Marilyn Manson
* Machine Gun By Slowdive
* I'm The Man By Joe Jackson
* Sweetness And Light By Lush
Which makes the current situation in Iran a little bit complicated. I have a general tendency to side with the Shia on most matters in the Persian Gulf do to their typically defensive position towards the US favored Sunni majority and when I saw another deluge of reports on the latest Iranian anti-government protests, dripping with the sentimental fromage the mainstream media usually reserves for it's neoliberal pet projects, I thought, "Oh brother, not another color revolution".
The last time I heard this story was back in 2009, during the so called Green "Revolution". When a handful of bourgeois brats in Tehran's toniest enclaves took to the streets to violently protest the completely legitimate reelection of right wing populist (and raging homophobe) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With their ties to US sponsored exile groups and their professional grade skill at media manipulation, it didn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that these poor dumb fucks where being manipulated by outside forces to cook up another Yankee approved neoliberal color revolution like the ones seen throughout the former Soviet Union.
So when I began seeing similar reports on such uprisings a week ago, I figured this had to be round two. But the more research I did into this latest uprising the harder it became for me to disprove its legitimacy. For one thing, this movement didn't start in Tehran. It started in the working class city of Masshad (think Chicago with more mosques), generally considered to be a conservative stronghold, and it spread across a dozen other hard-scrabble hamlets that could be called Persia's Rust Belt. In other words, not prime territory for Western manipulation. This was Ahmadinejad country, populated by the kind of folks who keep portraits of the Ayatollah over the dinner table and wouldn't piss on Uncle Sam if he was on fire.
They also didn't spring out of nowhere over night. These protests had been building slowly for months and they weren't calls for liberal democracy and apple pie, they were protests against the austerity programs of the moderate leadership of Hassan Rouhani. After finding his dangerously one dimensional petro-state in dire straights after the Saudis had flooded the markets with cheap oil (in a likely act of revenge for Iran and Russia's efforts to squash their latest little jihad in Syria), Rouhani gambled on accepting a draconian nuclear deal proposed by Barack Obama that eased the crippling sanctions the US has used to punish Tehran for overthrowing our preferred despot, the Shah, since 1979. Rouhani subsequently moved to cut inflation by slashing subsidies that many working class Iranians depended on to afford bread and fuel. The market may have stabilized enough to make up for these cuts if Donald Trump hadn't gone out of his way to scare off foreign investment with his repeated threats to rescind the nuclear deal and his full throated support for tightening the still existing non-nuclear sanctions.
All this shit put Iran in a similar spot as Venezuela, economically sabotaged by forces both external and internal and bleeding like a civ. The Iranians who took to the streets were the working class stiffs left with the tab while members of Iran's theocratic aristocracy remained fat and happy, with excessive portions of Iranian subsidies still going to religious institutions and the military. Even so, these proletarian protests didn't explode into a full blown uprising until the Revolutionary Guard choose to suddenly and very violently overreact in Masshad last week.
This is where I believe outside interference may have come into play. Contrary to popular western mythology, protests are not an uncommon occurrence in Iranian life. In many ways Persian society is the Middle Eastern equivalent to France with it's twin cultures of social radicalism and religious traditionalism. Hell, the Iranian Revolution itself was part of this complicated tradition, with leftists like the late, great, Ali Shariati leading the fight against Western colonialism until they were back-stabbed by their Islamist comrades, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Regardless, the Iranian Revolution itself had its roots in a synergy of Islamic liberation theology and secular social democracy and this syncretic foundation continues to foster a decidedly metropolitan culture in the Islamic Republic, with female guards serving on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War and Iran leading the world, just behind Thailand, in sex change operations with the Mullahs footing a hefty chunk of the bill.
Under Rouhani this liberal attitude has only expanded which makes the totally unnecessary and counterproductive crackdowns against what were initially largely peaceful protests all the more perplexing. Here Iran stands, economically strained but on the verge of reaching an unprecedented level of legitimacy on the global stage, with their faithful obedience to the most restrictive regulations ever put on a nuclear state (one that, according to our own government, hadn't even sought nuclear weapons since the fall of Iraq in 2003) and their leading roll in shattering the Islamic State. And they choose now to overreact? After months of tolerating these protests, what changed?
Well, for one thing, our pathologically Persophobic president, Donald Trump, is rapidly approaching legal deadlines on the nuclear deal that he absurdly claims is offensively unfair... to us! Trump has made little secret about his desire to welch on his governments own deal but he can't do it alone without further isolating the crumbling American Empire in the eyes of the international community. His only hope is turning Western Europe against the deal. Then suddenly the Mullahs become convinced that protesters in the heartland who have been in the streets for months have just now become foreign puppets.
I don't believe this to be the case but I do believe that it is strongly possible that the Revolutionary Guard has fallen victim to a disinformation campaign designed by someone to turn them against their own base. The only person who doesn't appear to be drinking the Kool-aid on this charade is Rouhani himself, who has bravely contradicted the Ayatollah by voicing his support for the protesters and condemning the violence on both sides. In spite of being part of the initial problem, Rouhani does seem to be legitimately devoted to being a part of the solution. If he stands his ground, refuses to take the bait, and defies the Mullahs reactionary stance to legitimate dissent, Rouhani stands a heroes chance of strengthening his republics democratic roots while weakening the position of both the hardliners and the foreign crowd exciters flaming them on. And this would be truly revolutionary.
Here's hoping he stays the course. Regardless, dearest motherfuckers, this time I'm on the side of the protesters. I pray to the same god as them that Rouhani, in spite of his flaws, is too. A second Iranian Revolution may depend on it.
Viva La Revolucion!- CH
Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.
* Heroes By David Bowie
* Cochise By Audioslave
* Hummer By Smashing Pumpkins
* Children Of The Revolution By T. Rex
* The Beautiful People By Marilyn Manson
* Machine Gun By Slowdive
* I'm The Man By Joe Jackson
* Sweetness And Light By Lush
Monday, January 1, 2018
Yemen: Donald Trump's Genocide
By and large, all American presidents are war criminals. It comes with the job like Air Force One and JFK's secret sex dungeon (you didn't here that one from me). In fact, most presidents are repeat offenders, committing scores of atrocities across a global scale over the span of four to eight years, and many get passed down from administration to administration like a blood-drenched hand-me-down. But every president has their signature sin. That one act of barbarism that defines an administration's specific modus operandi. The one act of international evil that they're going to burn in hell for.
For some presidents this crime comes to define their legacy- LBJ's Vietnam, Nixon's Cambodia, Dubya's Iraq- But for others, for one reason or another, their greatest crimes go largely ignored and forgotten- Jimmy Carter's Afghan Trap, Bill Clinton's Iraqi famine, Gerald Ford's East Timorese Genocide (more on that little gem later)- And it is with each passing day becoming painfully clear to Yours truly, dearest motherfuckers, that our current president's defining act of barbarism will be the raging holocaust in Yemen. What's even worse is that I can't seem to shake the ugly gnawing feeling that it's a crime that will go largely unpunished by recorded history thanks largely to America's current cross-partisan zeitgeist of icy indifference to the suffering of the Third World.
Donald Trump didn't create the deepening bloodbath in Yemen. That honor goes to Nobel Peace Laureate and amateur wind-surfer Barack Obama, who gave our good buddies in Saudi Arabia the go ahead to invade their impoverished southern neighbors when a rag-tag militia of largely secular minded Shiites called the Houthis had the nerve to overthrow America's latest Yemeni quisling despot, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, and demanded their nations independence from foreign rule.
Those smashing elites in the western media-government-conglomeration will have you believe a lot of nasty things about those dastardly Houthis and most of them are pure weapons-grade horseshit. They will tell you that they are Iranian agents when in reality not only do the Houthis have zero proven contact with Tehran but they are also members of a sect of Shiia Islam, Zaidism, which is largely viewed as heresy by the Twelvers back in Iran. They will tell you that the Houthis are Islamic extremists when in reality not only are they a decidedly syncretic movement that takes their ques from everyone from Hezbollah to the Bolivarian Revolution but they have seen more success fighting Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula than the last two Yankee approved Yemeni strongmen combined.
The real threat posed by the Houthis lies in the simple fact that they seek a truly independent Yemen, free from the stern grip of the United States and its royalist proxies in the Gulf. After decades of struggling to simply be left alone, Yemen's long abused Zaydi minority (40% of the overall population) came to the conclusion that the only way they would ever know peace is to take the fight to Sanaa, a conclusion reached by similar minded revolutionaries from the Minutemen to the Bolsheviks. The relative ease with which they overthrew the American backed dictatorship of Hadi was proof positive that they enjoyed broad support from more than just the Zaydis. Of course, this couldn't stand. Obama gave the Saudis the go ahead and offered them his support with drones and subsidized American firepower but it was Trump who would make this bloodbath his own and push it from war to all out genocide.
Trump made this grotesquely clear on week one of his presidency, when he sent a Navy Seal death squad to kill a fourth-grader and a couple dozen members of her family in what became known as the Yakla Raid. But this disgusting act of imperial cowardice in the first days of the Trump presidency was only the beginning. In the months proceeding it, the poorest country in the Middle East was treated to thousands of Yaklas, with American supplied and fueled Saudi bombers launching an unprecedented onslaught of heavy metal against Yemen's already bleak civilian infrastructure- Roadways, markets, mosques, hospitals, schools, sewage and sanitation plants, farms, slums and wedding parties- Over ten thousand lie dead already. What's even worse is the Saudis near total blockade of the tiny nation, plunging 7 to 8 million Yemenis to the brink of starvation and triggering a cholera outbreak affecting at least a million more and it only gets worse from here.
With the UN projecting 150,000 dead from starvation alone before the years end and international aid groups uncharacteristically blunt in their condemnation of America's and the UK's direct involvement in the collective punishment of an entire race of people, President Trump and his English accomplice Theresa May have been making a big ado about condemning the Saudis for carrying out their orders. But they have both done jackshit to stop it. All America would have to do to end this nightmare is refuse to refuel Saudi Arabia's bombers. The war would grind to a screeching halt within days if not hours. But no. Nothing. Nothing but empty calls for mercy while the gas keeps flowing. Trump, the man who promised to put America first has not done one goddamn thing to remove American soldiers from the scene of his holocaust. Quite the contrary, he's promised to send more Navy Seal death squads to take the genocide to the cracked streets of Yemen's impoverished villages. Apparently more fourth-graders need to be shot in the throat.
Meanwhile, the Saudis are rapidly closing in on the port city of Hodeidah which supplies Yemen with 70% of their food. The results of this would be nothing short of catastrophic, creating a genocide the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the height of the American backed starvation of East Timor which left over 300,000 dead or 44% of that equally impoverished little nation's population. Like Yemen, East Timor's only crime was demanding their hard fought independence from foreign rule. And like Yemen, East Timor was crucified by a notoriously duplicitous American allie (Suharto's Indonesia) with the full approval of a dickless, do-nothing president (Gerald Ford). Thanks to Trump, Yemen has become the new East Timor. Maybe this is what he meant by Make America Great Again.
But few Americans have even heard of East Timor and even fewer seem to really give a shit about Yemen. This is a goddamn genocide for Christ's sake, with our Commander in Chief presiding over the dusty killing fields. And where is the goddamn outrage? Where is the sense of immediacy that should come with millions of lives hanging in the balance? Why isn't Black Lives Matter launching protests in support of their brown brothers and sisters being murdered by the very state that puts a permanent target between their own shoulders? Why isn't the "Resistance" calling for an impeachment trial for a crime there nemesis is actually fucking guilty of? Why isn't the NRA defending the rights of localist Zaydi militias exercising their right to defend their communities with small arms against the onslaught of big government. And why do Trumpian "isolationists" like Justin Raimondo continue to insist on defending a war criminal who is using their support as a mandate to murder thousands of men, women and children in cold blood. Am I really the only one who takes intersectionality seriously?
Where is the antiwar movement that came a cunt's hair away from overthrowing the government in the early Seventies over another malignant narcissist's genocidal policies?- Yippies, Panthers, Libertarians, veterans and queers standing united against tyranny both at home and abroad. When did the rest of the world stop mattering to everyday Americans? Donald Trump is financing Saudi Arabia's final solution to the Yemen problem to the tune of $110 billion and sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who fucking gives a shit.
Prove me wrong, dearest motherfuckers. Please, please, please, for the love of all that remains sacred on this hell-scorched earth, prove me wrong. This is one agoraphobic peacenik who can't fathom watching another American genocide play out from the safety of my frozen prison cell while the world looks the other way.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.
* Go Home By Julien Baker
* Turtleneck By The National
* Linda Blair Was Born Innocent By The Mountain Goats
* Pillar Of Salt By The Thermals
* Holiday Song By The Pixies
* Watch The Corners By Dinosaur Jr.
* Edge Of Town By Middle Kids
* Burning Too By Fugazi
* Wicked Game By Chris Isaak
* Turn Out The Lights By Julien Baker
For some presidents this crime comes to define their legacy- LBJ's Vietnam, Nixon's Cambodia, Dubya's Iraq- But for others, for one reason or another, their greatest crimes go largely ignored and forgotten- Jimmy Carter's Afghan Trap, Bill Clinton's Iraqi famine, Gerald Ford's East Timorese Genocide (more on that little gem later)- And it is with each passing day becoming painfully clear to Yours truly, dearest motherfuckers, that our current president's defining act of barbarism will be the raging holocaust in Yemen. What's even worse is that I can't seem to shake the ugly gnawing feeling that it's a crime that will go largely unpunished by recorded history thanks largely to America's current cross-partisan zeitgeist of icy indifference to the suffering of the Third World.
Donald Trump didn't create the deepening bloodbath in Yemen. That honor goes to Nobel Peace Laureate and amateur wind-surfer Barack Obama, who gave our good buddies in Saudi Arabia the go ahead to invade their impoverished southern neighbors when a rag-tag militia of largely secular minded Shiites called the Houthis had the nerve to overthrow America's latest Yemeni quisling despot, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, and demanded their nations independence from foreign rule.
Those smashing elites in the western media-government-conglomeration will have you believe a lot of nasty things about those dastardly Houthis and most of them are pure weapons-grade horseshit. They will tell you that they are Iranian agents when in reality not only do the Houthis have zero proven contact with Tehran but they are also members of a sect of Shiia Islam, Zaidism, which is largely viewed as heresy by the Twelvers back in Iran. They will tell you that the Houthis are Islamic extremists when in reality not only are they a decidedly syncretic movement that takes their ques from everyone from Hezbollah to the Bolivarian Revolution but they have seen more success fighting Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula than the last two Yankee approved Yemeni strongmen combined.
The real threat posed by the Houthis lies in the simple fact that they seek a truly independent Yemen, free from the stern grip of the United States and its royalist proxies in the Gulf. After decades of struggling to simply be left alone, Yemen's long abused Zaydi minority (40% of the overall population) came to the conclusion that the only way they would ever know peace is to take the fight to Sanaa, a conclusion reached by similar minded revolutionaries from the Minutemen to the Bolsheviks. The relative ease with which they overthrew the American backed dictatorship of Hadi was proof positive that they enjoyed broad support from more than just the Zaydis. Of course, this couldn't stand. Obama gave the Saudis the go ahead and offered them his support with drones and subsidized American firepower but it was Trump who would make this bloodbath his own and push it from war to all out genocide.
Trump made this grotesquely clear on week one of his presidency, when he sent a Navy Seal death squad to kill a fourth-grader and a couple dozen members of her family in what became known as the Yakla Raid. But this disgusting act of imperial cowardice in the first days of the Trump presidency was only the beginning. In the months proceeding it, the poorest country in the Middle East was treated to thousands of Yaklas, with American supplied and fueled Saudi bombers launching an unprecedented onslaught of heavy metal against Yemen's already bleak civilian infrastructure- Roadways, markets, mosques, hospitals, schools, sewage and sanitation plants, farms, slums and wedding parties- Over ten thousand lie dead already. What's even worse is the Saudis near total blockade of the tiny nation, plunging 7 to 8 million Yemenis to the brink of starvation and triggering a cholera outbreak affecting at least a million more and it only gets worse from here.
With the UN projecting 150,000 dead from starvation alone before the years end and international aid groups uncharacteristically blunt in their condemnation of America's and the UK's direct involvement in the collective punishment of an entire race of people, President Trump and his English accomplice Theresa May have been making a big ado about condemning the Saudis for carrying out their orders. But they have both done jackshit to stop it. All America would have to do to end this nightmare is refuse to refuel Saudi Arabia's bombers. The war would grind to a screeching halt within days if not hours. But no. Nothing. Nothing but empty calls for mercy while the gas keeps flowing. Trump, the man who promised to put America first has not done one goddamn thing to remove American soldiers from the scene of his holocaust. Quite the contrary, he's promised to send more Navy Seal death squads to take the genocide to the cracked streets of Yemen's impoverished villages. Apparently more fourth-graders need to be shot in the throat.
Meanwhile, the Saudis are rapidly closing in on the port city of Hodeidah which supplies Yemen with 70% of their food. The results of this would be nothing short of catastrophic, creating a genocide the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the height of the American backed starvation of East Timor which left over 300,000 dead or 44% of that equally impoverished little nation's population. Like Yemen, East Timor's only crime was demanding their hard fought independence from foreign rule. And like Yemen, East Timor was crucified by a notoriously duplicitous American allie (Suharto's Indonesia) with the full approval of a dickless, do-nothing president (Gerald Ford). Thanks to Trump, Yemen has become the new East Timor. Maybe this is what he meant by Make America Great Again.
But few Americans have even heard of East Timor and even fewer seem to really give a shit about Yemen. This is a goddamn genocide for Christ's sake, with our Commander in Chief presiding over the dusty killing fields. And where is the goddamn outrage? Where is the sense of immediacy that should come with millions of lives hanging in the balance? Why isn't Black Lives Matter launching protests in support of their brown brothers and sisters being murdered by the very state that puts a permanent target between their own shoulders? Why isn't the "Resistance" calling for an impeachment trial for a crime there nemesis is actually fucking guilty of? Why isn't the NRA defending the rights of localist Zaydi militias exercising their right to defend their communities with small arms against the onslaught of big government. And why do Trumpian "isolationists" like Justin Raimondo continue to insist on defending a war criminal who is using their support as a mandate to murder thousands of men, women and children in cold blood. Am I really the only one who takes intersectionality seriously?
Where is the antiwar movement that came a cunt's hair away from overthrowing the government in the early Seventies over another malignant narcissist's genocidal policies?- Yippies, Panthers, Libertarians, veterans and queers standing united against tyranny both at home and abroad. When did the rest of the world stop mattering to everyday Americans? Donald Trump is financing Saudi Arabia's final solution to the Yemen problem to the tune of $110 billion and sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who fucking gives a shit.
Prove me wrong, dearest motherfuckers. Please, please, please, for the love of all that remains sacred on this hell-scorched earth, prove me wrong. This is one agoraphobic peacenik who can't fathom watching another American genocide play out from the safety of my frozen prison cell while the world looks the other way.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.
* Go Home By Julien Baker
* Turtleneck By The National
* Linda Blair Was Born Innocent By The Mountain Goats
* Pillar Of Salt By The Thermals
* Holiday Song By The Pixies
* Watch The Corners By Dinosaur Jr.
* Edge Of Town By Middle Kids
* Burning Too By Fugazi
* Wicked Game By Chris Isaak
* Turn Out The Lights By Julien Baker
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