It's getting harder and harder to be a brutally honest muckraker in this country. It seems like you can't objectively cover anything related to foreign policy without being blackballed as a Putin puppet or an advocate for totalitarianism. According to even many alternative news outlets, you can't afford to point out the complexities of geopolitics in a dying empire without trafficking in "Fake News", a loaded term that started out as a way for the falling Fourth Estate to tar the rising Fifth, only to be turned into a political football that has lost all meaning in the era of Trump. Fake News has basically become shorthand for news that you don't like and when journalism becomes a popularity contest that no one can win, you know that despotism can't be far behind.
Well, I don't write to tell people what they want to hear. I write to tell people what they need to here. And sometimes what the people need to here is that the "Bad Guy" didn't do it. I'm a queer anarchist, I have zero love lost for authoritarians like Putin or Assad. But I also have zero love lost for authoritarians like John McCain and Nikki Haley, so you'll have to forgive me for not taking their word as bond. The gross reality of the new Cold War landscape is that, as fucked up as Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be, they're not nearly as fucked up as the establishment press would have us believe and, even grosser, they're far from the sickest fucks on the block.
Putin's Russia is far from heaven. Truth be told, in many ways it's worse off than the Soviet Union. Say what you will about Brezhnev but at least he kept his prisoners fed. Putin is the top dog in a Social Darwinist oligarchy that would make Ayn Rand's panties wet (Think Hunger Games.With vodka!). You better believe he had to steal, fuck over and even kill to get to where he is today but, contrary to popular belief, Mr. Putin is not in fact the devil. Their is a reason that man is so goddamn popular in Russia and it's not just those saucy Tom of Finland pics. The main reason Russia loves Putin is that he isn't Boris Yeltsin, Putin's drunken predecessor that today's most hysterical Putin-phobes couldn't get enough of. This was a man who liquidated the constitution, literally bombed congress and sold entire Soviet industries to Mafioso's. He also stole an election, and we helped!
Putin may be a cold blooded, fag-bashing, autocrat but he also mopped up a lot of Yeltsin's mess and refused to take orders from his former handlers back in Brussels and Washington. This is the real reason why he gets blamed for everything from Hillary's biological unelectability to those meddling kids in Black Lives Matter. I could care less about Putin but when the mass media becomes an echo chamber for our own derelict government's lies about the motherfucker I'm gonna fucking say something. The one thing that Russiagate, the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Skripal poisonings have in common is that there remains zero proof connecting these dirty deeds to Vlad the Terrible. That doesn't mean that the man isn't a first class cunt, he's just not likely guilty of putting a lunatic in charge of the bombs pointed at his head or wasting a critic across the street from his house or setting free a rat from the gulags just to wack him in a hostile country. Their's a big difference between evil and strategically retarded and Putin didn't climb his way from being a burned out KGB taxi driver to the top of the Kremlin pile by being stupid.
Assad is another grotesque creature that I wouldn't piss on if he were on fire (I'd probably wait until he's nice and crisp and then wash away the ashes). Like his daddy, he's a barrel bombing sociopath who's zest for torture porn is so great that he outsourced his black sites to Uncle Sam. Sadly, as far as the hellscape that we turned the Levant into is concerned, he's also the lesser of several evils. The basic math that our human rights loving media seems incapable of solving is that if Assad goes, the Salafi whack-jobs will take his place and a half dozen genocides will begin. Say what you will about Assad but the creepy pencil-stashed bastard has kept the minorities of his country (Christians, Alawites, Druze, etc.) relatively safe, albeit for largely self-serving reasons. And in spite of his decidedly inconsistent commitment to humanity, the chemical attacks he's been blamed for remain shrouded in the noxious fog of war. We know for a fact that both he and the so-called rebels likely have access to chemical weapons but with Assad's victory all but a forgone conclusion, only the rebels have a sane reason to use them.
Try and remind most people in this country of these uncomfortable truths and you get treated like a goddamn goose-stepping fascisti. But is there anything more fascist than people who take their government at its word with the unblinking obedience of a small child? These same small children with big microphones now seek to regulate the internet, the last bastion of America's moribund free press, to silence anyone who questions the infinite wisdom of the state with "Fake News". And these are the same children who have helped this same state lie us into war repeatedly with their own fake news, from the Gulf of Tonkin to Yellowcake. Putin and Assad must be so jealous. Maybe we should work on reigning in our own despots before we set our sites on others.
Just a thought. But you don't have think about it, dearest motherfuckers. After all this is only Fake News.
Peace, Love & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* This Time by Land of Talk
* Roseblood by Mazzy Star
* Dive by Beach House
* The Crying Game by Boy George
* Kill For Love by Chromatics
* I'll Be You're Mirror by the Velvet Underground & Nico
* When I Was Done Dying by Dan Deacon
* Gobbledygook by Sigur Ros
* Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction
* Fireworks by First Aid Kit
* Shark Smile by Big Thief
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