America's Secret War On Black Anarchism in Somalia

"All power is truly in the hands of the people, and in the end the people will win."

-Kuwasi Balagoon

With November rapidly approaching and a Biden victory appearing more and more plausible, Donald Trump, our petulant man-child in chief, looks to have chosen the Culture War as his Alamo, forgoing his previously hip harangues against those plague spewing Chinese communists for more homegrown boogeymen. It's now Chicago, not Beijing, that offers the true threat to American exceptionalism, and two time honored tropes of American conservative bigotry in particular have been dusted off to frighten elderly white suburbanites to their diseased polling places, the Blacks and the Anarchists. To hear Trump and company tell the tale, our Democratically run cities are being burned to the ground by a motley crew of nappy-headed Willie Hortons and their lawless Antifa-fied honky allies, and for once, the GOP has set their sites on a legit threat to their morally bankrupt way of life.

Anarchism has always been the deadliest foe to authoritarian structures for the simple fact that it's the hardest school of radicalism to commandeer. When done right, there are no leaders to be bought off, no central authority to sabotage, just an autonomous grab bag of pissed off kids shouting "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" Similarly, Black people have always been a minority treated as an existential threat to the majority because of their seemingly unstoppable resilience in the face of unimaginable odds and their generations of startlingly successful resistance to cultural assimilation. The White menace of Anglo-American Capitalism has claimed every pale negro from the Jews to the Irish, but the Blacks have remained its most stubborn foe. Everyone from Hoover to Lenin has observed that if America has a revolutionary class it is the one we brought in chains to build this infernal experiment rotting on the hill. The biggest mistake that Trump and both his slovenly followers and reactionary detractors alike make is assuming that these Turner Classic boogeys, the Anarchists and the Blacks, are mutually exclusive. You can just here crusty Old Man Biden retorting at a debate, "Anarchists ain't Black!" Oh yes they are, you pandering zombie, yes they most certainly are.

While the majority of the much hyped Antifa allies to Black Lives Matter are most certainly of the pale-faced variety, a growing contingent of young Black urban warriors are embracing a decidedly stateless mindset. One of the most effective and fearsome of this class combatting police aggression in the Seattle area are the Salish Sea Black Autonomists who have expanded the fight against the police state to its womb in the state itself, and this is no anomaly. Black folks have played pivotal roles in the larger American Anarchist Movement going back to Lucy Parsons, and the modern Black Anarchist Movement has its roots in the same gorey gears of the Prison Industrial Complex that the George Floyd Uprisings have rightfully placed front and center as the root of post-Jim Crow Black oppression.

Imprisoned veterans of the 60's/70's Black Liberation Movement like Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon found themselves disgruntled with the limitations of Black Panther Maoism behind bars and embraced a radical blend of Black Nationalism and Afrocentric Anarchism that looked towards traditional African tribal societies for inspiration above the White liberal chauvinists of the much celebrated European Enlightenment. This synthesis of post-modern identity politics and stateless resistance served as a major influence for my own idiosyncratic post-White interpretation of Queer Anarchism. But Black statelessness stretches well beyond our borders and Seattle isn't the first place America has declared war on it. Back in the Dark Continent of Africa itself, the American War Machine has waged a decades long campaign against Black Anarchism on the Horn of Africa, and all anarchists do themselves and their comrades a great disservice to ignore this battle just because it rarely captures the attention of the mainstream media. 

Somalia's turbulent modern history is sadly less than unique for a former African colony. Once a prosperous guild of sultanates maintaining one of the regions most important shipping routes, by the Twentieth Century Somalia had been chewed up and spit out by the Portuguese, the Ottomans, the British, and the Italians. After the empire shifting cataclysm of the Second World War, the British arbitrarily partitioned the Muslim Somali people between what is now recognized as Somalia and the Western allied Christian Monarchy of Ethiopia. The US consistently sided with the deeply Islamaphobic Ethiopians in there numerous attempts to subjugate the quasi-socialist Somali Republic until Ethiopia itself fell to a Marxist-Leninist military junta known as the Derg in 1974. 

It didn't take us long to not only shower Somalia's creepy Hitler-stashed strongman Siad Barre in American Dollars and weapons but to also back a suicidal attempt by him to retake Ethiopia's long oppressed Somali Ogaden Region, which ended with the decimation of most of Somalia's military, leaving them conveniently crippled and dependent. This was actually one of the milder acts of savagery by Barre who would also use his American guns in the long forgotten Isaaq Genocide of the late 80's, which claimed the lives of unknown hundreds of thousands of members of the Isaaq Clan, largely to solidify Barre's post-Ogaden dominance amongst the nation's increasingly disgruntled clans. Just another manic Monday for American funded Cold war savagery.

But as the Cold War came to a close and, perhaps more importantly, Ethiopia's communist regime subsequently came apart at the seems, the US lost it's enthusiasm for Mr. Barre and left him to be run out of Mogadishu by the remaining clans he didn't exterminate. After a badly botched Clintonian "Humanitarian" intervention that ended in several massacres of Somali civilians and the frankly well deserved revenge ambush of Black Hawk Down mythology, America finally did Somalia a solid and fucked off for a minute. And here's where things get truly interesting. After a couple more years of violent infighting, Somalia found more stability than any communist or capitalist regime had ever provided them by leaning back on the pre-colonial and totally stateless Xeer legal system, overseen by what became known as the Islamic Courts Union.

Snide western journalists point to this era between 1994 and the American backed Ethiopian intervention of 2007 as being one governed by lawlessness and savagery, but ask any Somali refugee who actually lived through those years and they'll likely tell you that this was the closest thing to peace and prosperity that they had ever known. It was far from perfect. Fighting among rival clans continued as it always had, but over all, the Islamic Courts Era was one of unprecedented stability and it did indeed occur in a state of pure anarchy. A coalition of civilian tribal elders oversaw a fluid legal system that allowed the countries numerous clans to settle disputes between each other and otherwise essentially govern themselves. There was zero monopoly on police and judicial functions and the rule of law was upheld by agreements based largely on uniquely Somali takes on property rights and Sharia law. There were no prisons and no central governments but rather multiple tribal governments overlapping and coexisting in Somalia's notoriously pastoral and nomadic clans. Most of these clans were entirely voluntary in nature, and movement between clans was common, with many having more adopted members than those born into them. The legal system was largely compensatory in nature rather than vengeful and punitive. Crimes required victims and victims received compensation for their losses. Judges were largely autonomous and those who didn't command the respect of their communities simply weren't sought to oversee disputes.

It's entirely too common for white western anarchists to look at such indigenous systems and anything outside the official dogma of traditional Eurocentric theory as some kind of blasphemy. The idea of Sharia Law coexisting with statelessness boggles the Chomskyite mind, but this is the solution to the biggest flaw in most anarchist thought. A stateless society on a global level will inevitably be local and thus largely cultural in nature. True anarchism can only succeed if it is aloud the ability to change shape from clan to clan. Internationalism is just a heap of bunk, an idea that is far more authoritarian in nature than any tribal custom. It's also quite racist. White left anarchists need to get off their high red horse and embrace the fantastic dangers of diversity. The Islamic Courts worked because it followed the only true anarchist value deserving of the concrete universalism of dogma, it was entirely voluntary in nature. This is why it succeeded and this is why it had to be crushed. The Islamic Courts failed because its western anarchist allies failed to defend them from the arsenals of our own empires, the ones we're supposed to appose. We chose phony internationalism over inconvenient solidarity and Black lives were crushed for our closed minded dogma.

It didn't take long for America and its quislings in Kenya and Ethiopia to realize that the only true threat posed by the Courts was the threat of a good example. If Somalia could thrive without a western government babysitter then why not the next clan or the one after that. The farce of arbitrarily drawn borders and jerry-rigged nationalism would disintegrate like sand. It had to be stopped. In 2005 a strange wave of assassinations and disappearances plagued the judges of the Courts. Rumors began to spread of US black ops lurking in the region. Local warlords, displaced and disempowered by the Courts, began to cry "Terrorism!" to western money changers, pointing to the presence of fundamentalists on the Courts. They conveniently left out the fact that the majority of the judges and the majority of the judges disappeared were in fact moderates. Regardless, the warlords and westerners alike seemed keen to frame their war on Black Anarchism as part of the amorphous and endless War on Terror. It paid off when a ragtag coalition of local extremists sympathetic but largely separate from the Courts emerged to lash out in revenge. Al-Shabaab proved to be the perfect boogeyman and the perfect excuse for the US to greenlight a brutal neocolonial Ethiopian intervention in 2007 that crushed the Courts and empowered the terrorists they supposedly came to confront.  

Since then Somalia has become a drone strike killing field littered with disposable black bodies. While anarchists rightly observe local victims of American white supremacy like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Freddie Gray as martyrs of the police state, why don't we afford the same respect to their brothers and sisters back in Africa? On April 6, just 49 days before the lynching of George Floyd, Abdl Osman Keerow, Goorar Maday, and a 70 year old woman named Xuailyo Muure Marow were slayn by three American missiles in a densely populated neighborhood of Jilib. Just over two months after Floyd, on July 29th, three children, 8 year old Abukar Ahmad, 12 year old Abdisamad Hussein, and 13 year old Abdullah Mohamad were slaughtered the same way in the same city by the same government that was firing live rounds into Blacks and anarchists and Black Anarchists at the same damn time in cities across America. My question, is where were their signs? Where was their graffiti? Where are the hashtags claiming their names and their black bodies as part of the same damn struggle?

I may not be Black but I am an anarchist, and those names and the courage of the Islamic Courts Union are part of my struggle to break free from the same imperial masters we share. I hope that someday those Black lives matter too, because they matter to me.

Peace, Love, Empathy, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

*  Killing in the Name Of by Rage Against the Machine

*  Paper Planes by MIA

*  Dancing Choose by TV on the Radio

*  Manic Monday by the Bangles

*  I'm a African by Dead Prez

*  Heroes by David Bowie

*  Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio

*  Walk Like a Panther by Algiers

*  Voices Carry by Sky Ferreira

*  Sailing On by Bad Brains

* Allah, Mohammed, Char, Yaar by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Party

Kamala Harris Is No Ally to Transwomen

 

“I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal. As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary."

-Assata Shakur

"It's not progressive to be soft on crime"

-Kamala Harris

All the shiny chattering skulls of Cablenewsland seemed to be beside themselves with an almost euphoric sense of inspiration. There didn't appear to be enough words in the English dictionary to properly express their head over heels infatuation with our next vice president and beyond, Kamala Harris. Every botoxed buffoon from Joe Scarborough to Don Lemon was rendered dreamy eyed and stupid by Biden's choice of human shield. To hear them gush about it you would think Rosa Parks had risen from the grave, dawned a smart power suit, and road on eagle's wings to save them from the nightly ritual of verbal necrophilia that was necessary to keep old Joe's corpse looking presidential. All of history could now be divided into two categories; Before Kamala and after the Neoliberal Enlightenment. After all, this was 'It' wasn't it? This was the proof of the oligarchy's color blind benevolence, and now, all across this great country, the winds of change could be felt. Little black girls woke up to a new day because now they knew that they too could aspire to run the most corrupt system on earth as long as they learned to step on other poor brown girls to get there. Wow! Just like a Lisa Frank folder with unicorns for wardens. Magical.

This whole fucking charade makes me fucking sick to my soul. I don't know what it's like to be a Black woman in America seeing a face like yours in the spotlight like that. Maybe it is neat. All that I know is that as a genderqueer transwoman in this country, the ecstatic adulation over Kamala Harris feels like a fucking slap in the face. This woman isn't a goddamn civil rights icon. She's a career menace. A declared enemy of my people and many others (including her own) with the human rights record of a Third World caudillo. The kind of inspiring figure that could only be the product of the Prison Industrial Complex. I mean, what the fuck have we been in the streets marching for for months? Did we really torch fucking cop cars and carve the words 'Black Trans Lives Matter' into this empire's fickle flesh just to shit our britches over Kamala the Top Cop starring in the role of graycare babysitter to the last of the crumbling Dixiecrats? Is this really enough for you?! Cornel West?!! Really?!!!

Do I have to remind you all that this was the California Attorney General who rose drug convictions in that state by 18%, denied clearly innocent death row inmates DNA testing, and refused to release non-violent offenders from unconstitutionally overcrowded prisons because she didn't want to lose the slave labor? Do I really have to remind you people, my own people, my Queer and trans sisters of any shade, that this is the "Ally" who callously tossed transwomen to the wolves in men's prisons and then refused them basic medical care. Do you think Michelle Norsworthy feels inspired today? The suicidal transwoman who Kamala personally attempted to screw out of confirmation surgery and then told to go see a fucking shrink. California's own jenky-ass court system found this decision to be a violation of the 8th Amendment, cruel and unusual punishment, but Kamala says a few nice words, makes the totally unsubstantiated claim that she was secretly working for us behind the scenes, and now we're supposed to be fucking cool?

Apparently the assimilationist section of my community is cool with this shit. Treacherous pinkwashing cartels like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign have already washed their hands of Michelle and endorsed the Wicked Warden of the West. These are the same groups, mind you, who tarred Tulsi Gabbard for defending her father's homophobic religious beliefs in her early twenties. I guess if she just stuck to torturing Queer folk within the prison system she would have been groovy for take-off. Even more sickening, a few prominent transwomen of color like Pose's Angelica Ross have even gleefully allowed themselves to be commodified into tokens of Kamala's late term wokeness. "She's changed!" they plea to the rest of us like battered spouses while they conveniently ignore that even Kamala's newly LGBTQ friendly propaganda neglects to even address the healthcare needs of transwomen, most of them black, still rotting away in her fucking gulags for the high crime of selling their own bodies for survival. THIS is your ally?

If that was all I would still be pissed, but there's more, there's way fucking more. Even in her proto-presidential senatorial re-alignment phase when she broke her back to look progressive as fuck, Kamala was neoliberal trash through in through. Just like she turned a deaf ear to the cries of my people in her Golden State dungeons, Kamala has routinely spit on the convicts of another prison called Gaza, defending Israel's existential right to "defend" itself by carpet bombing that starving penal colony into oblivion. She even took time out of her busy virtue signaling schedule to entertain the genocidal goblins at AIPAC and pose for glamour shots with their Fuhrer, outspoken Jewish supremacist, Bibi Netanyahu. But who fucking cares about all these inconvenient details when we have the opportunity to elect another white supremacist pussy grabber for president with the first woman of a color as VP.?

This is what our so called democracy has come to. As both parties lurch further and further towards the direction of globalist authoritarianism, the GOP keeps its base in line with phony bromides to nativism and mythical wonder walls that never quite materialize in the desert. And the Democrats take the equally racist and condescending position of weaponizing tokenism. They can sell their woke children police state apartheid and nuclear holocaust as long as they get an autistic genderqueer paraplegic to inspiringly make the pitch. The candidates in the Democratic Primaries have taken on the cheesy multicultural kumbaya culture of the cast of Barnie and Friends, only every token minority has a body count that would make a T. Rex look like a damn gecko, and this is progress? Fuck that shit.

Call me politically incorrect, call me culturally insensitive, call me a bitter tranny bitch, call me whatever the fuck you want, dearest motherfuckers, but I don't give a shit what color you are, who you fuck, or how you self-identify, if you have made yourself rich, fat, and powerful oppressing my people or our comrades in the Third World, then you are my enemy, and I'd rather go to one of Kamala's jails for burning the ballot box then be caught stuffing your name in it.

Peace, Rage, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this rant.

*  Happy Shiny People by REM

*  Doll Parts by Hole

*  Everything Right Now by Arcade Fire

*  Your Best American Girl by Mitski

*  Under the Table by Fiona Apple

*  Blue Orchid by the White Stripes

*  Volcano Girls by Veruca Salt

*  Wonder Wall by Oasis

*  Modern Girl by Sleater-Kinney

*  Imitation of Life by REM

*  Softer Softest by Hole

Trump Isn't the Worst President, But He is the Most American

Donald Trump is the worst president in American History! That seems to be the downright unanimous opinion of every left wing wonk from here to Noam Chomsky, and I might have a bit more respect for the view if these throngs of progressive intellectuals weren't so goddamn smug about it. After all I've never been particularly tame in my criticisms of the son of a bitch myself. His penchant for pure evil is pretty well documented. Any human being who fucks with children the way he has at the borders deserves things I can't publicly advocate without being shipped off to Gitmo. As if that weren't enough, his role in the ongoing genocide in Yemen, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the downright apocalyptic baiting of Iran and China should make it crystal clear to anyone with half a working soul that Donald Trump is a world class bastard in the first degree. But the worst president in American history? I don't know, the Donald has some pretty stiff competition there.

First of all, we have to seriously ask ourselves what makes an American president the worst? Are we talking about intent or results? If worst is simply another word for failure than Trump leads the pack by a mile. But what does it really mean to fail when the job is essentially running the most violently despotic empire in human history? It's a bit like asking who's the worst Mafia don in Little Italy. If morality has anything to say about it then I would make the argument that the worst is the best. The most successful presidents are men who have done the most catastrophic damage at home and abroad and have completely gotten away with it with their reputations and the reputation of the evil empire they rep perfectly in tact. If this is the test, Donald flunks with flying colors. The man has been an absolute human tire fire, making an ass of himself on a daily basis and dragging the totally undeserved good name of the nation for which he stands down with him. Good. The world has lost respect for America on the world stage? Fucking great! They never should have respected this prolapsing anus of a genocide factory to begin with. In fact, allow me to be the first commie faggot to say, thank you Donald Trump, for setting the record straight, you psychotic race-bating imbecile. I really don't know what else to say. Karma couldn't do a better job.

Then who is the worst president in American history, you ask? It's kind of a trivial question, but I'm a petty bitch with way too much goddamn time on my hands thanks to Trump facilitated COVID hysteria, so fuck it, I'll go there. Why not? But you're probably not gonna like what you asked for. In my book, the title for worst, at least in modern history, goes to a three way tie between the widely celebrated progressive presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, for the very simple fact that no other three presidents did more to establish America as a successfully violent modern day Rome abroad and a carefully centralized executive dictatorship at home. That was the real point of both World Wars and all the millions of bodies they claimed. It didn't have a goddamn thing to do with mom, apple pie, or fighting them over there so we didn't have to fight them over here. It was about preparing our plucky little ex-slave colony to take the place of the British on the world stage and the results extend well beyond the blast radius of Hiroshima. They include Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. 

I would also argue that a close second place tie actually goes to Trump's three slovenly vaunted predecessors, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and yes, the left's beloved Barack Obama. These are the administrations, more than any others, who have gone to the most hysterically despotic and hyper-violent lengths to preserve Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman's blood speckled American Century well after it has become abundantly clear that the party is over and keeping it going means a global Jonestown scenario. There is no resuscitating an empire in the throws of stage four decline. Any attempt to do so is beyond suicidal, it's downright genocidal. Another word for this self-destructive form of geostrategic denial is fascism. 

With America's pristine veneer of liberal democracy in a heap, Clinton, Bush, and Obama spent three successive administrations in total harmony creating a high tech dystopian global police state complete with shadow courts, armed drones, supermax prisons, and Patriot Acts galore. Every evil deed the Donald has actually shown a modicum of success with achieving was a gift from one or more of these three giants among bastards. Clinton turned the feds into an army, Bush invaded the Middle East, and Obama, the great progressive hope the left still seems to be so hopelessly in love with, built those fucking camps where Trump shipped the migrant children, began America's sponsorship for that damn genocide in Yemen, and provided that syphilitic orange man-child with a fleet of manhunting armed drones to stalk black lives with. These are great presidents, and that's precisely why they are the worst.

Lets face it children, the last three bastards made this orange bastard possible, and what has every leftist's least favorite president done with this bounty of lethal gifts? He's fucked it up. He's fucked everything up. He's failed to start a single war and he's tied most of the existing ones into knots with his completely incoherent foreign policy. He's reeked havoc at home, but it's not like he's even come close to getting away with it. Obama deported more Mexicans than Trump probably ever will and he won a fucking Nobel Peace Prize. Rolling Stone has given the psychopath his own nostalgia drenched collectors issue like Paul damn McCartney. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has made the American Empire a laughing stock with his buffoonery and this is the guy who makes Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin desperate enough to endorse a century old white supremacist to defeat him? Apparently Biden isn't the only one who's gone and lost his damn mind over the last four years. 

Donald Trump is not the worst president in American history. He's just not. That presumptuous notion is just categorically and empirically untrue and I don't give a fuck how unpopular it makes me to say so out loud. What Donald Trump is is the most American president in American history. Think about it, he's the perfect fiendishly decrepit mascot for an empire in free fall. A fat, greedy, pussy grabbing, Big Mac gobbling, corporate welfare cashing, old shyster on his last grift. A flatulent, race-baiting, social media trolling, double-dealing, megalomaniac who thinks he's never looked sexier sprayed Dorito orange and loudly shitting himself on live television. Donald Trump is America. He's Uncle Sam without the airbrushing, and that is precisely why the most evil people in this country, from Barack Obama to Dick Cheney, despise the motherfucker as much as we do, if not more so, because he is them. He's them without the charming mask of imperial sanity to hide behind. He's Wilson in a Klan hood. He's Truman giggling like a schoolgirl over Nagasaki. He's Bill without the saxophone and Obama without the charming diction. Donald Trump is America's mirror, look upon ye mighty and despair.

The most tragically hilarious thing about the American left's imperial anti-Trump hysteria is that it's the byproduct of the very lesser evil mental illness that the Donald thrives on. Responsible American propagandists have been shoving the sick delusion down our throats for generations that the patriotic thing to do is not just to vote but vote for one of two pre-approved, corporate sponsored, oligarchs in our two party duopoly. They don't even try to deny the fact that both choices are downright evil anymore. Of coarse they are! Democracy, they tell us condescendingly, is picking the least destructive psychopath, and that is precisely what America did in 2016. When the Rust Belt was given the option between a clearly incompetent psychopath who pissed off all the right people for all the wrong reasons, and a smashingly successful psychopath who spent the last two decades complicit in shipping their jobs to Mexico and their children to Iraq, these good old boys did exactly what they were instructed to do. They picked a man too goddamn stupid to be as evil as another fucking Clinton.  

And here we are now in 2020, and even the anarchists are telling us to suck it up and save America from despair by giving it a slightly more respectable psychopath to steer it around the icebergs. To this my only response is to ask why I should do anything to keep this juggernaut from sinking? You want me to pick a lesser evil? Well, which one even is the lesser evil here? I honestly can't even fucking tell anymore. I vote for which ever candidate on the ballot opposes the empire the lesser evils turned this country into, and that ain't Donald Trump or Joe Biden, so y'all can just kiss my irresponsible anarchist ass goodnight. Peg me a dreamer, dearest motherfuckers, but I'd rather be a bad American with a clean conscience than a morally feckless dupe any day of the week. Enjoy your scumbag pageant. I'm opting out.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.

*  See No Evil by Television

*  Every Tradition by Bully

*  This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads

*  The Prisoner by Iron Maiden

*  No One Else by Weezer

*  The Seether by Veruca Salt

*  TV Set by the Cramps

*  Please Let That Be You by the Rentals

*  Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde

*  Closing Time by Semisonic

*  Holiday Song by the Pixies

Pick a Cold War, Any Cold War!

 Oh what a democracy we have in America! What a free and vibrant land of choices we've created for ourselves on the graves of more primitive civilizations. We just have so many goddamn choices to chose from, it's enough to make a conspicuous consumer downright dizzy. We get to choose which dead-end box store to slave in for minimum wage beneath the tutelage of a 10th grade tyrant named Chip. We get to choose between several bloodsucking insurance cartels required by the Heritage Foundation socialism of Obamacare. We get to choose which Impossible Glop fast food franchise to slowly murder ourselves with, and if that fails to do the trick, we get to choose which caliber of bullet to snack on instead.

But best of all, every four years, our fine dystocracy allows us to pick which millionaire or billionaire will be the face of the corporate junta that runs our lives. We're usually provided two whole choices of despotic mascot to sell empire and gobalism to the masses, with a couple more jokers too sincere to be taken seriously running on Bush League third party tickets, and this year the choices are truly divine. Such a fine representation of our diverse multicultural melting pot. We have a geriatric, degenerate, white supremacist, sex criminal and we have a geriatric, degenerate, white supremacist, sex criminal endorsed by Noam Chomsky! Our cup runneth over! Best of all, this time our two candidates for syphilitic Kevorkian in chief are providing us with the ultimate in democratic choices. Which cold war nuclear holocaust do we all want to die in! Wowee!! Let's have ourselves a looksee, shall we?

In Joe Biden's dusty corner we have the tried and true boogeyman of Mother Russia. Cruise missile Democrats have been pushing for war with this colossal hulk of a rust belt superpower since Kennedy was in short pants. Why fuck with a good thing now just because it's staler than the roofied hard candy in old Joe's basement? We've been on a nostalgic bender over the last decade, blaming everything that does or doesn't go bump in the night on that Hanna-Barbera grade supervillain, Vladimir Putin. He's fucking with the elections. He's fucking with the thermostat. He's breaking into your house every night and dry humping on the furniture. Haven't you noticed that the love seat now reeks of caviar and Drakkar Noir? Worst of all, he's committing the most heinous crime any Russkie can commit. That little almond eyed bastard is fucking defending himself. The nerve!....

We try to set up NATO Nazis in Ukraine and he welcomes Crimea back into the fold? We work so hard facilitating another bottomless Wahabi shithole two block over in Syria and he goes and props up the region's last secular strongman? What a dick! Who the hell does this guy think he is, a world leader? It wasn't supposed to be this way. Why couldn't Putin be more like his mentor, Yeltsin. Washing down Washington semen with gallons of vodka and firing rockets into his own congress. Now that was a democracy CNN could get behind! Worst of all, our own current democratically elected strongman has grown sweet on Putin. Who cares if Russiagate was little more than a shoddy Tom Clancy knock-off. Who's gonna deny Trump is a Russian agent when he's only slapped seven-thousand new sanctions on the home base, torn up every existing missile treaty he can get his tiny baby carrot fingers on, and sent our Banderist quislings in Kiev a baker's dozen doomsday devices? Those sound like the actions of a Manchurian candidate to me. Get him, Joe! Save us from the world's most Russophobic Russophile.

But hold on to your horses, freedom loving patriots, because old Orange Tits over there has got himself his own cold war to pimp. A fresh, new, vibrant, sexy cold war designed for today's frisky empire on the decline. A cold war best sold by Trump's Secretary of Swamp, Mike Pompeo at some fertile garden party surrounded by other lively rich white people in floral hats and pressed white gloves. Mike shuffles his Gambino button man frame over to a single podium and proceeds to belch out a hoagie fart of grave warnings about the growing threat of an increasingly aggressive Chinese menace. To hear him say it, you would think the Red Army was goose stepping through the sewers of Peoria as we speak and they very well may be. After all, all the signs of an imminent threat to our precious bodily fluids are bright and garish, as John Darnielle once howled, far too many in number to ignore.

I mean, isn't it China who's been throwing aggressive "freedom of navigation" drills with their battleship fleet in the Gulf of Mexico, while stirring up support from our Caribbean neighbors over age old territorial water disputes? Wait, no, that's us in the South China Sea. Well those commie bastards are sticking their boney fingers in our mess, raising an international fracas over our immigration concentration camps out in our desert hinterlands. No? That's our game in Xinjiang, where we're running to the aid of the same Uyghurs we once shipped off to Gitmo? OK then, well what about the millions of dollars they've spent propping up violent protests in Portland under the onus of supporting democracy? What about that, smart ass? No? Well then where exactly do we get off financing violent riots in Hong Kong with the National Endowment for Democracy? Jeez, when you lay it all out like that, we kind of come across as the assholes here. Well, they have been going pee pee in our Coke for years, that we know for sure, and everyone knows bats are fluent in Mandarin.

So put on your government issue tinfoil hats and pick a cold war, dearest motherfuckers, any cold war. The best thing about this kind of once in a lifetime democratic decision is that it really doesn't matter much which one you pick. Either way we're pushing for suicide by empire as a solution to the unthinkable fate of a multi-polar Eurasian Century. The choice has never been more dire. Just remember, if you don't vote, not only are you a toxic garbage person that even Jesus couldn't love, you don't get to complain about the cannibalism when the CHUD's come to finish off our radiated corpses. The choice is yours, dearest motherfuckers. Choose wisely.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

*  Back In the USSR by the Beatles                                                                                                              *  China Girl by Iggy Pop                                                                                                                              *  Party At Ground Zero by Fishbone                                                                                                          *  Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones                                                                                                        *  Old College Try by the Mountain Goats                                                                                                  *  Do You Wanna Dance by the Ramones                                                                                                    *  Mariana Trench by Bright Eyes                                                                                                                *  Holland 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel                                                                                                        *  The Words That Maketh Murder by PJ Harvey                                                                                        *  (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads

When the Chickens Came Home to Roost In Portlandistan

Well folks, it's official, Donald Trump has declared war on America. Probably should have saw that coming. After all, I've long argued that our dayglow duce isn't an isolationist but merely the world's shittiest imperialist. After trying and failing miserably to bring fascism to Nicaragua and Venezuela, Trump has set his sites on targets much more suited to his America First brand of colonialism. The one war our asshole in chief has managed to wage successfully after all has been the federal government's war on undocumented brown children. He may have failed to give Israel Iran but he succeeded swimmingly at giving ICE Aztlan, setting up a veritable gulag archipelago of Chuckie Cheese concentration camps on the Rio Grande that would make Woodrow Wilson wet with envy. Now he's sicking those same feds on America's more belligerent third world neighborhoods, turning Seattle and Detroit into Managua and Caracas in a sad and evil attempt to fellate his flaccid poll numbers by publicly thrashing black people and their allies for demanding an end to police state apartheid. 

In no metropolis has this spectacle of tyranny been more blatantly grotesque than in the throbbing streets of Portlandia, where a long tradition of protest and direct action has been met with all the bleak and eerie force of an Orwellian dystopia. Crowds of mothers, hipsters, activists, and veterans have been repeatedly provoked into defending their right to free assembly nightly by category 4 storms of teargas, rubber bullets, and flashbang devices, often fired directly into waves of unarmed civilians. A bevy of unmarked mystery meat in full combat regalia has swelled the streets in formation like paunchy, Slim Jim chomping, gestapo in heat. Some of them cruising the café lined avenues in windowless glorified rape vans, kidnapping random baristas and disappearing them like Operation Condor while a swarm of hopefully unarmed drones watched it all unfold from above. This is the kind of war Trump believes he can win. Portlandistan! Where the war comes to you...  

Thank god for anarchists, who live to prove pompous bullies wrong. Every time the feds picked a fight with peaceful protesters, furious gutter punks in black weren't far behind to throw it back at them like a fucking teargas canister, victoriously denying Trump his cheap victory by making fools of his overarmed goons with little more than keffiyehs, firecrackers, and that attitude the Bad Brains use to shout about. Daniel Ortega should be proud. Say what you want about these kids but for 60 days Trump brought the war home and for 60 days these motherfuckers fed it back to him. Now he's forced to take Portlandistan on the road with his tail between his legs. 

We may have won this battle but the war is far from over. The biggest mistake the left can and all too often does make about the Donald's failed American interventions is to assume that they represent some kind of aberration, a nightmare we can all wake up from once November comes. This notion is absurdly childish. Donald Trump himself is the product of the inevitable decline of American imperialism. Everything he's done, everything he is, is anything but unprecedented. The only reason Trump has the power to declare war on our fed-up nation is because past regimes provided him the weapons designed to do just that. 

It was progressive do-gooders and never-Trumpers like Barack Obama and George W. Bush who militarized the executive office and turned the White House into an iron citadel with a ready squadron of armed drones at El Presidente's fingertips, not to mention the right to use them on any 12 year old American with a name scary enough for the papers to overlook. And it was glad-handing neoliberal racists like Bill Clinton and our feeble minded savior Joe Biden who turned our prison system into the finest plantation money can buy, and our police force into the kind of broken window fucking superbeasts that can keep this chattel industry populated with an endless supply of brown bodies to feast on. If you honestly believe that this shit is going to stop or even slow down with Trump gone then you're dumber than he is and probably shouldn't vote for anything less trivial than one of his reality TV competitions. Biden's gray-care handlers will turn down the more histrionic theatrics and keep this thing rolling on mute while the news conveniently finds something else to get upset about.

This is just what happens when imperialism comes home after decades of failure abroad. It brings all the charming trappings of it's garish banana republics home with it. With each passing day, as the American Century reaches its bloody twilight, Camelot looks more and more like Pinochet's Chile or Somoza's Nicaragua. The NSA, FEMA camps, ICE, warrantless wiretaps, black sites, no-knock raids, unmarked paramilitarios, these are all but chickens coming home to roost, and they expose the biggest flaw I see in otherwise heroic movements like Black Live Matter and many of their left-anarchist allies. They seem to suffer from a total lack of awareness that their struggle extends far beyond this nations faulty borders. I have yet to hear any of the supposed leaders of these movements point out that the prison industrial complex, which they righteously condemn, is inseparably intertwined with the military industrial complex, which they refuse to acknowledge. They exist on a continuum of corporate state power that feeds the same fat masters and keeps us all in chains from Angola to, well, Angola. 

Quite possibly the fiercest foe modern American tyranny has ever faced off against were the Black Panthers that BLM is often derisively compared to, but Huey Newton let it be known from day one that his party was a paramilitary movement developed to combat imperialism both at home and abroad. The Panthers and their allies across the Rainbow Coalition spectrum recognized that America's most impoverished communities, from Oakland to Appalachia, were nearly indistinguishable from the Third World nations that America sought to crush overseas, and they boldly declared allegiance to those oppressed comrades above their own occupying nation. I see this fire in the streets of Portlandistan, but where is the fury that connects it to our brothers and sisters struggling valiantly against the same beast in Yemen and the West Bank? Why do leaders in Black Lives Matter break bread with Fortune 500 monsters before that of the Houthi dragon slayers? I'm not grandstanding here, I seriously want to know.

I'm a devout anti-imperialist, dearest motherfuckers, the proud citizen of a stateless Queer nation, a third world nation of teenage runaways and streetwalking prostitutes. I want this movement to work, like many marginalized people, in many ways, I need this movement to work. I want the kids in the streets of cities across this fascist police state to win like they did in Portlandistan, only bigger. But a true revolution just isn't possible if you refuse to address the giant blood drenched elephant in the room, and I'm not talking about Trump.

Peace, Love, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Garret Foster, who died building bridges between white libertarians and Black Lives Matter. His selfless courage stands bright and tall as a beacon of light in a bleak world. His death will not be in vain. Rest in power, comrade, rest in power.

Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.

*  Mountain Song by Jane's Addiction

*  Grounds by IDLES

*  Attitude by Bad Brains

*  In a Big City by Titus Andronicus

*  Surface Envy by Sleater-Kinney

*  Roll Me Through the Gates of Hell by Mischief Brew

*  Lexicon Devil by the Germs

*  Epic by Faith No More

*  Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

*  Superbeast by Rob Zombie