The Conscience of a Contrarian

Some months are harder than others to be a poorly trained anarcho-gonzo visionary. During these last couple months of the hellishly hot post-apocalyptic summer of this year of our lord Xenu, twenty-hundred-and-nineteen, I couldn't seem to write a blog post that didn't smack one class of my dearest motherfuckers or another across the face like a goddamn dead cat. I attempt to make an argument that Ilhan Omar voters and Tucker Carlson viewers have far more in common in the realm of war and peace than they do with any carcinogenic class of moderates in their own parties and the leftists act like I'm some kind of crypto-fascist Rudolf Hess apologist. The very next month, I make an argument that the white race is little more than a violent social construct that does a grave injustice to all poor people and the same paleos who applauded my daring and seemed primed to declare me their genderfuck Phyllis Schlafly last month are taking their turn tying the fucking noose. I just can't win with you people. It's not every month that you manage to piss off people you admire on both ends of the aisle, but what can I say? I'm a regular Renaissance bitch.

It's months like these that I get saddled by my friends on both the left and the right with the dreaded C-word, and I ain't talkin bout See-You-Next-Tuesday. The word reserved for cantankerous ideological perverts like me is contrarian. Such a universally reviled slur, but what the hell does it actually mean. The popular consensus among the mainstream politicos is that a contrarian is simply a childish rebel who picks confrontational opinions based largely on their radical cache or lack of popularity among the scions of the centrist wonkgeist. A contrarian zigs when the rest of the country zags. A contrarian picks fights just for cheap kicks and the verbal exercise.

And I'll own up to some of this. I've always been a rebel, distrustful of any and all authority, I mean, shit, I'm a lapsed Irish Catholic raised on punk rock and cowboy movies, it's practically in my fucking DNA. But the fact that this distinction is seen as some kind of vice is just proof positive to me of how far down that proverbial rabbit hole our nation's special genre of bipolar bipartisanship has taken us. To your average partisan American dupe, a contrarian is essentially someone who refuses to comply with our toxic left-right paradigm. A leftist who refuses to blindly back Russiagate just because they recognize the well established fact that Trump sits somewhere on the psycho branch of the anti-social personality tree. Or a conservative who doesn't require endless war or organized fag-bashing to satiate his or her own personal biblical philosophy.

When it all comes down to it, a contrarian is really just anyone across the political spectrum devoted to consistent anti-authoritarianism, regardless of who holds the reigns of power. A contrarian is an ideological skeptic who rejects the poisoned fruit of dogma, and there was a time before antifa when all true anarchists were contrarians. Generally, politically speaking, most of the major continental ideologues, left, right, or whatever have both positive and negative qualities. Their ideas only become dangerous when they're viewed as literalist scripture. Proudhon, Marx, Spengler, Freud, Stirner and Nietzsche are all brilliant thinkers who's works provide a profound insight into the human condition that should be valuable to everyone and anyone. The problem comes when their works are given the untouchable biblical status of the word of god.

Communism failed because the Bolsheviks took Marx's Dictatorship of the Proletariat way too goddamn literally and the free market mutated into crony capitalism when western bankers mistook its amoral lawlessness for all out Social Darwinism. Any idea, no matter how morally valuable, can become malignant once it's appropriated by an established status quo and assimilated into that aristocracies world order. In no place is this vampiric phenomena more severe than in the false utopia of liberal democracy, where authoritarianism has been perfected through the softcore violence of assimilation. A brave old world where the name of the game is 'If you can't beat em, kill em. And if you can't kill em, then bring em into the fold.' This crafty strategy can and has been applied virtually everywhere with devastating results.

When the Labor Movement in this country became too dangerously successful to suppress with Vickers' and thugs alone, FDR, America's original fascist president so revered by the Sandernista left, assimilated these organizations into the federal government with the New Deal and turned them into the mafia-friendly glorified corporations that blindly back outsourcing politicians today. When the Civil Rights Movement grew fangs in the late sixties, that racist old Texas pigfucker, LBJ, dumped water on the riots by paying off desperate black folks with the consolation prizes of dead-end welfare programs and high-rise prisons billed as subsidized housing. When the Women's Movement began to pick up steam, it got hijacked by a bunch of tranny-bashing, slut-shaming, bourgeois puritans who tag-teamed with the Christian Right to battle the scourge of free speech, sexual liberation and working class red light districts. And when peace finally began to sell after the horrors of Vietnam and the failures of Iraq, the war machine appropriated the language of human rights to justify their war crimes as being necessary to prevent other war crimes. Even the anarchists who once shook the streets in black blocs have been domesticated into antifa censorship squads, "deplatforming" the fascism of controversial speech while pigs keep tabs on both them and their right wing targets.

In an age when the mainstream is defined by its appeasement to violent globalism in the name of progress and the various industrial complexes it feeds, and even subversive subcultures are being gobbled up, coproratized and sold as another commodity of a beige mass culture of the crumbling First World, contrarianism is the only viable mode of rebellion resistant to subsidization. The outdated faux tribalism of left vs right, black vs white, must be swapped by a less divisive solidarity which only recognizes the bottom vs the top, the subjugated vs the subjugators, the powerless vs the powerful. Mormons and drag queens and paleos and anarchists must unite to reject the false inclusion of assimilation into a degraded society and defend our tribes and each other's against those who seek to appropriate and destroy them. Deplorables must become feminists. Black Panthers must become sovereign citizens. Conservatives need to adopt the drop-out subculture of the New Left and leftists need to adopt the localist isolationism of the Old Right. We must all embrace a culture too radically idiosyncratic to be commandeered and a skepticism to all sacred cows deemed unquestionable.

Contrarianism in defense of liberation is no vice, dearest motherfuckers. It's a goddamn necessity. Question everything and advocate the devil. After all, isn't every devil just another renegade angel in horns?



Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.

*  Just What I Needed by the Cars
*  Alternative Ulster by Stiff Little Fingers
*  Kids In the Dark by Bat For Lashes
*  Friend or Foe by Adam Ant
*  Firestarter by the Prodigy
*  Sympathy For the Devil by the Rolling Stones
*  Sweet Jane by the Cowboy Junkies
*  Slowdive by Slowdive
*  Stay With Me by Faces
*  I Love You, I'm Going to Blow Up Your School by Mogwai