The Terrorism of Self-Defense: A Brief Lesson in Imperial Double Standards

 It seems like just yesterday that our newly minted president, Joe Biden, was promising this country and the world at large a brand spanking new era of peace for Yemen. After watching two consecutive administrations facilitate Saudi Arabia and their fellow Gulf State ghouls in blockading, starving, bombing, and systematically slaughtering the poorest country in the Middle East to the tune of some 377,000 mostly civilian bodies, even the generally callous hypocrites in Joe's own party were screaming, "Enough!" 4 million people were forced to flee their homes, 75,000 children under the age of five starved to death, and 2.5 million people languished in the worst cholera outbreak in modern history. All because a rag-tag tribe of anti-imperialist Shiites dared to overthrow an American and Saudi backed dictatorship.

What has occurred in Yemen since 2015 isn't so much a war as it is a slaughter and Joe Biden, a man who was vice president to Barack Obama when he greenlit this bloodbath, is intimately responsible for his share of the dead, was finally making a big show out of displaying a little goddamn mercy. He lifted the Trump era designation of the Houthi rebels as a terrorist organization that promised to choke off what little international aid actually managed to get into the country, and he made a solemn promise to end all American support for the Saudi coalition's "offensive operations" in the country while working towards a peace deal. Looking back, the vague language Biden used in this declaration of peace should have tipped us off to the fact that we were being bullshitted by a career bullshitter.

I wish I could tell you folks that Joe Biden hasn't done dick to end the ongoing slaughter in Yemen, but the reality is actually far more heinous than that. In almost mincing spite of his hollow little words, Biden has continued in his predecessors' footsteps by actively facilitating what can only accurately be described as a Wahhabi holocaust against the peasant population of Yemen. He has approved the sale of a billion dollars in American killing machines to Riyadh as Save the Children has seen a 60% increase in civilian casualties during the last three months of 2021 alone. And all this horror could be ended tomorrow with the snap of that neoliberal chickenhawk's boney fingers if he simply lifted the crippling blockade and stopped servicing the Saudi coalition's warplanes. That's it. It's that fucking simple. This nightmare would grind to a screeching halt.

Under these circumstances one would be a fool to come to any other conclusion than that Joe Biden wanted his "peace" and to eat the malnourished bones of starving children too. It was all just another put on. A heavily publicized act of contrition for Joe's soulless dregs in the mainstream media to ooh and ah over. "Look how presidential our new monster is. He's so much classier than that vulgar circus gimp, Donald Trump!" Well, starving children can't eat class and the Houthi rebels have been left with no other choice but to break through Joe's cellophane "peace" and defend themselves.

Over the last several months the Houthis have launched a series of desperate but brazen drone strikes targeting the airports and oil industries that have facilitated Saudi Arabia's and the United Arab Emirates' remorseless slaughter of their people. Civilians have died and this is always unconscionable but under such desperate circumstances I can't see how these ravaged people had little other option. Unsurprisingly, the Houthi's gall to actually fucking defend themselves is the only crime heinous enough to earn a response from the Biden White House. They are blaming the victims like a varsity rapist, and they are openly threatening to renew the Houthi's terrorist designation, a decision that aid groups continue to scream at that deaf monster would result in the starvation of millions. That's because the Houthis are not a terrorist organization. They are Yemen's rightful government and an attack on them is an attack on the Yemeni people themselves.

Why do you think the Saudis have been busy bombing school buses and hospitals for the last seven years? It's not just because they're fucking animals. It's because the Houthi rebels are Shiite populists who took their nation back from a puppet in a popular uprising. Their success would have been impossible without the support of the Yemeni people. So, the Yemeni people themselves had to die. Otherwise, other oppressed people living under the yoke of Salafi whack jobs like say the Shia majority in oil rich Bahrain might find themselves empowered to follow in their footsteps. It's the old domino theory all over again and in spite of what certain well-intentioned pacifists may have tried to tell you, that Nixonian trope is 100% accurate. When the Vietcong dared to fight back, the Pathet Lao followed. This threat isn't about the specter of creeping communism or the Shia Crescent. It's about the dreaded threat of a good example. If the US and its flunkies let one ragged tribal peasant give us a black eye, then soon the whole playground is going to want a piece. 

And how did Biden's heroes in the Gulf respond to the Houthi rebels meager act of "terrorism?" Well, with an act of shockingly disproportionate terrorism of their own of course. Just three days after the Houthis killed three people at an Abu Dhabi oil facility with a jerry-rigged RadioShack drone strike, the Saudi coalition lead a sophisticated assault on Yemen that would amount to their deadliest bombing in seven years and nearly single-handedly turn that January into the war's deadliest month since 2016. 

It all started with an airstrike on a telecommunications center in Hodeida that killed three children playing nearby. But the true intention of this attack was to cripple civilian communications and local media coverage for the next several hours to limit the coverage of their true target. In direct violation of the Geneva Convention, Biden's beloved coalition bombed a detention center in Sadaa housing innocent African migrant workers transitioning through Yemen to Saudi Arabia, slaughtering at least 91 helpless civilians and wounding 237 others. The western media and the State Department who had screamed bloody murder at the top of their lungs over the relatively miniscule Abu Dhabi drone strike were as silent as tombstones. Not one word from the typically chatty imperial peanut gallery.

That's because the mass slaughter of a migrant detention center isn't terrorism. The western world's definition of terrorism has nothing to do with dead civilians or using fear as a political weapon. Terrorists aren't the death squads who ethnically cleanse whole tribes in the jungles of Colombia, they're the communist guerrillas who sling coke to defend them. Terrorists aren't the Turkish secret police who rape and torture children, they're the Kurdish rebels who avenge them. Terrorists aren't the Zionist gestapo who ethnically cleanse the West Bank, they're the Islamic rebels who launch desperate firebombings with kites and balloons just to give voice to their anguish. 

And terrorists sure as shit aren't the powerful men in the clean white buildings of Washington who casually decapitate entire civilizations with their industrial complexes the way you or I would order a goddamn pizza. Terrorists aren't even the oil rich sultans who brainwash pissed off kids into throwing commercial airliners into American skyscrapers in revenge. No, no, terrorists are desperate people of color like the Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, the Vietcong, the Pathet Lao, Ho Chi Minh, Muamar Gaddafi, Che Guevara, Geronimo, and Nat Turner. In the eyes of Uncle Sam, the only real terrorists are the peasants who fight back. But maybe they wouldn't have to if the people of this country grew a goddamn conscience and stood up to the state that slaughters in our name, but I guess that would just make us terrorists too.  

What America and its malignant beneficiaries do in places like Yemen, Afghanistan, Palestine, and the Donbas essentially amounts to the collective punishment of entire races of people for the revolutionary acts of their bravest citizens. There is another word for this form of state sanctioned terrorism and its genocide. If that makes the Houthi rebels and all those like me who dare to defend their resistance against tyranny terrorists, then what does that make the partisans of the Warsaw Uprising? And who are the Nazis in this tragic story?

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  Pillar of Salt by the Thermals

*  People of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine

*  Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

*  In a Big City by Titus Andronicus

*  Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

*  Holiday Song by the Pixies

*  TV Eye by the Stooges

*  Kool Thing by Sonic Youth

*  Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

*  Ocean Size by Jane's Addiction

Forty Acres and an Arsenal: A Radical Libertarian Approach to Reparations

 I don't believe in taxes. I know that's not exactly the trendiest take on the left these days, but I just can't justify giving any institution that kind of power. I would love nothing better than to play Robinhood and jam a pistol in the gut of some corporate welfare thief like Jeff Bezos, but anarchy just doesn't work that way. The moment the ends start justifying the means is the moment the revolution dies. I oppose taxes because I believe that class is the basis of all tyranny and that by creating a group of people who are afforded a monopoly on the use of violent behavior like theft, you are creating a class that degrades the position of the proletariat. 

As strange as it may sound to partisan ears, it is my Marxist values that have led me to embrace some of the more radical aspects of libertarianism. This doesn't mean that it's always easy. Voluntaryism can feel like a form of monasticism amidst the most violent society in civilization's malignant existence and in no place is this more true than on the hot button issue of reparations which I remain an unapologetic supporter of. 

If you wanna talk about theft, let's talk about 400 years of theft. That's how long this savage empire used slavery to build the foundation for the wealthiest nation in human history and these people never saw a fucking dime for their forced labor and all the bloodthirsty barbarism that went with it. This would be evil enough if that was the end of the story, but this story has no end. 

The sick truth is that America's enslavement of African people didn't end with emancipation, it just changed shape. Chattel slavery was simply swapped out for more politically correct forms of subjugation like sharecropping and mass incarceration. 400 years of slavery gave way to 90 years of Jim Crow which gave way to 60 years of separate but equal which gave way to our current apartheid state of law and order embraced by both major parties to this day. 

Reparations are needed, not to save this wretched nation that continues to thrive on white power but to empower its victims to rise above the damage its done to help us destroy it. But how do we achieve this goal without empowering the same kind of authoritarian structures that made sins like slavery possible? This is the primary problem with traditional monetary reparations. By relying on the same forces that have thrived on white supremacy to forcibly extract compensation, even from the guilty beneficiaries of just such a system, you are only empowering its continued existence and doing nothing to repair the systemic racial power imbalance it created. 

These kinds of reparations amount to little more than charity at best and imperial hush money at worst. The government has been paying poor people for years not to hold it accountable for making them poor and this has done nothing to empower us. So how do we ensure compensation from a corrupt government without perpetuating its hostile existence? Simple, we gut it like a carp and give the spoils to those it has wronged the worst. My suggestion for totally stateless reparations essentially amounts to a sentence pretty much designed to give pigs gastric distress. Give Black people land and arm them to the fucking teeth.

This should have happened a long time ago. As the Civil War came to a close, Union General William Sherman signed Field Order 15, promising the newly liberated slaves 40 acres and a mule to compensate them for being mugged for two and a half centuries, and some 400, 000 acres of confiscated Confederate plantations that Black people had worked with their own hands were rewarded to them in an act that relied on very little state intervention. When the Confederacy collapsed many slaves simply rose up and took back what was rightfully theirs. 

But after Lincoln was assassinated his replacement, Andrew Johnson, reversed the order and forcibly removed freemen from their rightful land so it could be given back to the slave driving thieves the Union supposedly shattered habeas corpus to topple, leaving impoverished and traumatized Black farmers little option other than to head north or seek employment as wage slaves from their former masters. In one last stinging act of racist irony, the only people to ever receive reparations in regard to slavery were well connected former slave owners in the District of Colombia who were compensated for their loss of human property.  

Land is power and the Federal Government still occupies plenty of it. Translating 40 acres to compensate the modern inheritors of this debt requires dividing 47 million Black folks into families of four and giving them 40 acres each. My math game is far from precise, but a rough estimation brings that to about 500 million acres of land. The Federal Government currently owns roughly 640 million acres, most of it in sparse western states like Montana and Nevada. This includes everything from national parks to military bases and considering that as an anarchist I don't even respect the right for such institutions to exist, I have much more faith in the ability of systemically deprived populations to manage these resources themselves as they see fit.

But in order to acclimate largely urban populations to the wilderness of the wild west it might be best to reward at least some of this property to be shared with what remains of the local indigenous tribes who once lived in balance with it before it was monetized. There is more than a little precedence for this kind of cooperation between America's most oppressed classes. The first people to tame the wilds of Florida were a coalition of depleted tribes and Maroons known collectively as the Seminole Nation. But a percentage of this land should be allocated to Blacks and Blacks alone who have never even received the paltry reparations afforded to this stolen nation's indigenous population.  

As for the mules, this odd form of compensation was to originally come in the form of surplus animals owned by the army left over from the Civil War. Considering that the police-warfare state is the primary beneficiary of white supremacy and that the liquidation of all standing armies, including the police, should be at the top of any self-respecting anarchist's to-do list, I would suggest trading in those mules for the firepower necessary for any newly liberated people to protect what's rightfully theirs. 

The Pentagon has dumped $7.5 billion dollars in military equipment into local police forces alone. I say tell those welfare queens in blue to hand it over. In the wake of the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020 there is a growing proliferation of Black militias like the Not Fucking Around Coalition heavily staffed with veterans of both the American Military's War on Islam and the inner city's black-market war on prohibition who are more than capable of handling advanced firepower and training their own people how to properly utilize it. 

What the descendants of slaves do with these spoils of a shattered empire should be left completely up to them. I imagine we might see a diverse array of experiments and not all would likely be successful. But it would be their land to live or die on and considering the resourcefulness the Black community has already shown in turning what little they have into money-printing touchstones of the American experience, from barbecue to rock and roll, I have more than a little faith that we'll see some wild shit springing from this new wild west, from homesteads built on African-America's latest grey-market cash crop cannabis to sovereign nations like the Republic of New Afrika. 

Too many white people forget that these are the motherfuckers who built the goddamn Pyramids in lands no more hospitable than the deserts of Nevada and with the inevitable collapse of Western Civilization upon us, this autonomy could very well put a marginalized underdog population in the perfect position to finally get the upper hand on their former slavers. Assholes like Jeff Bezos come and go but stateless tribal nations like the kind already built by freemen like Malcolm X and Kwame Ture are indestructible. 

We can never make up for the horrors visited upon the survivors of slavery. Even if this broke ass empire could afford to simply print trillions of dollars that would be worth more than the glorified toilet paper it's printed on, it still wouldn't even make a dent in repairing what essentially amounts to a post-traumatic industrial complex. But rewarding a people for their unpaid labor with complete and unconditional self-determination while dismantling the government institutions that brought their ancestors here in chains in the process is probably the best we're ever going to be able to do. But hey, this is just the five cents of one Queer libertarian Marxist honkey. Do with it what you will.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  The Payback by James Brown

*  All My Friends by LCD Soundsytem

*  Rise Above by Black Flag

*  Brand Nubian by Brand Nubian

*  Sailin' On by Bad Brains

*  Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat) by Digital Planets

*  Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry

*  Me Myself  and I by De La Soul

*  Will Do by TV on the Radio

*  Guerrillas in the Mist by Da Lench Mob  

 

Weaponizing the Other: Why Black Power Still Matters to All Marginalized Outlaws

"Black power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny."

-Huey P. Newton

 Growing up as a secretly Queer white kid in a predominantly white conservative community can be a profoundly surreal and downright unsettling experience. You look like everyone you know but from a very young age it becomes frighteningly clear that you're not one of them. I distinctly remember feeling like a space alien abandoned on a foreign planet. I remember feeling like an existentially unwelcome visitor among family and friends and not knowing why. I didn't know what Queer was. I had never even heard of words like genderfluid or nonbinary. I grew up under the terrifying assumption that there was no one else out there like me. Whatever the hell I was didn't exist outside my head but somehow everyone around me seemed to see it. 

I remember being treated by adults as if I were somehow a dangerous child. Teachers at my little Catholic school would periodically hold meetings to discuss what should be done with me. Parents stared and whispered when I got anywhere near their children, especially the ones younger than me, as if they could somehow catch whatever it was that made me so unsettling. My skin may have been the same color as theirs, but they made it very clear that whatever I was, was something else. I was something dangerously other. These confusing experiences with childhood alienation and felt stigma made it very hard to maintain anything resembling a self-esteem well into adulthood. Uncoincidentally, my heroes during this frightening time in my life were predominately Black.

The nineties seemed to be a profoundly surreal and downright unsettling time for Blackness as well. During the era of gangsta rap, rural white communities like mine generally saw Black people as being dangerous, but this danger seemed to somehow make them cool. Black pop cultural figures of that era from Eazy-E to Chris Rock seemed to embrace this aura of danger thrust upon them by mainstream white society and threw it back in their faces flamboyantly with middle fingers blazing. 

I didn't really know any famous Queer people like me. I didn't think they existed. But outrageously outspoken Black figures like Tupac Shakur and Dennis Rodman seemed to give me the strength to embrace my own unique otherness and throw it back in the faces of all the pious adults who seemed so terrified by it. It's not that I felt or acted Black, I just didn't feel like I belonged where I grew up any more than these people would have. So, in a very strange way, my first Queer heroes were relatively straight Black people. Grace Jones didn't look a damn thing like me, but she felt a hell of a lot more familiar than very cis-hetero friendly Queer people like Ellen DeGeneres and Grace got to kick Conan's ass.

As I grew older and slowly came to terms with my complicated and turbulent sexuality and gender identity, I discovered Queer culture and new paler icons to relate to like David Bowie and Lou Reed, but I also discovered the Black Power Movement of the sixties and seventies through the glossy yellowed time machine of the ancient magazines in my mother's basement thrift store. I became enamored with the culture and attitude of dangerous Black rebels like Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis. People who didn't ask for rights but demanded power from the system that enslaved their ancestors. The Black Panthers marched with loaded shotguns and nappy Afros and announced that they weren't just dangerous, they were beautiful, and they were willing to blow up the American Empire for their beautiful people and all the beautiful people who struggled against colonialism to be free. 

What Malcolm and Huey demanded for their people was precisely what I wanted for mine, not to be assimilated into the nation that abused us but for the autonomy, self-determination, and self-sufficiency to build a stateless nation of our own. The Black Power Movement inspired me to be a stronger Queer person. They inspired me not just to want more for my own maligned minority but to demand it by any means necessary. But to fully understand the magnificent achievements of the Black Power Movement and how it empowered a rainbow of multicolored outlaws across the globe you have to understand the harrowing history of Blackness itself.

Black and white weren't always concrete facts in this country, they were carefully manufactured social constructs designed to preserve the foul integrity of western colonialism. In the early days of the American colonies nobody considered themselves white. Status was defined largely by class and Christianity. There were African slaves and European indentured servants, and neither was thought to be much more human than the other by the English aristocracy. Whether you were from Ireland or the Ivory Coast, you were generally seen as dogs but still afforded some chance of upward mobility provided that you assimilated to Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. 

It wasn't totally unheard of to see an African landowner with European servants. Cruelty was strangely diverse. This all changed after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. What had started as a squabble between genocidal oligarchs very quickly turned into an open rebellion against the authority of the aristocracy itself with African slaves and European peasants uniting to burn Jamestown to the fucking ground.

The Crown back home in England was horrified by this spectacle of diverse working-class solidarity. Their bloody little experiment had quite simply fucked over too many people to build a cohesive kingdom of death upon and all the people they fucked were realizing the power they had in numbers. They had to be divided. So, the British invented the concept of race. Unlike ethnicity, which depended on more fluid cultural and historical traditions, race was a purely cosmetic social construction designed to divide and conquer. 

Most but not all people of European descent were declared white and afforded the privilege of not being slaughtered and identifying with the superiority of their masters. Our former African comrades were designated Black and became human property. Through the newly racialized slave trade these new Blacks lost everything. Not just what few rights they once had but their entire culture. Whole languages, religions, and ethnicities were erased in what can only be accurately described as a holocaust and one that white peasants became tragically complicit in.

This should have been the tragic end of a very sad story but something strange and revolutionary happened. From the ashes of chattel slavery, Black people created a new tribe. They transformed an ambiguous label designed to dehumanize them into a race defined by its collective resistance to colonial tyranny. This tradition stretched from the slave rebellions of Nat Turner to the renegade free colonies of the Maroons to the radical philosophies of WEB Dubois. This rich culture crystalized into a modern movement that set fire to the world when renegades like Robert F. Williams, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X abandoned national inclusion in favor of global revolution. What made Black Power truly dangerous is that it was defined by its solidarity with all those oppressed by white supremacy, from Watts to the Congo to Vietnam and beyond. 

Black Power inspired an entire generation of diverse revolutionaries to embrace their own unique outlaw cultures from the Puerto Ricans of the Young Lords to the Indigenous peoples of the American Indian Movement to the Hillbillies of the Young Patriots Organization to the Queers of the Gay Liberation Front. This is why J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panther Party as, "Without question, the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and devoted decades to murdering and falsely imprisoning their leaders through the FBI's white supremacist jihad known as Cointelpro, not just because renegades like the Panthers empowered Black people but because they empowered us all to stand proud in our otherness and tell the empire to suffer while they burn.

It's this magnificent and often whitewashed history, the history of a people who invented a new race to liberate themselves from oppression against impossible odds that inspires me to this day to build an autonomous Queer nation to liberate my own people. Purged from the various tribes who once embraced and revered our individuality by the puritanical sexual tyranny of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, we were forced to come together in the shadows to build our own traditions from the ashes of our lost pagan cultures. 

We are a race unto ourselves built by the furious hands of many ethnicities including Black and brown sisters like Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, Sylvia Rivera, and Storme DeLarverie and we owe it to them as well as to ourselves not just to reject white supremacy but to reject whiteness itself. These petty privileges should be viewed by all of us for what they truly are- hush money, thirty pieces of silver to sell our dark-skinned comrades down the river so we can live in the finished basement of a master race. I spit on white privilege. It is worthless to my people. 

The sanitized hagiographers who have turned Black History Month into a jingoistic celebration of assimilation tell us all the time that Black history is American history. Well, I don't give a flying fuck about America but the sacrifices of real Black history, the kind not fit for government textbooks and cable television, saved my life. Human mountains like Huey P. Newton and Fred Hampton taught a traumatized genderfuck white child in hick country to be proud of what made me other, and I fully intend to return the favor by getting revenge on the empire that slayed them because Black power is people power and the people who burned down Jamestown are still here.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Doll Parts by Hole

*  Express Yourself by N.W.A.

*  Evil by Interpol

*  Changes by Tupac Shakur

*  Young Americans by David Bowie

*  Amerikkka's Most Wanted by Ice Cube

*  Perfect Day by Lou Reed

*  Say It Loud- I'm Black and I'm Proud by James Brown

*  Heroes by David Bowie

*  Fight the Power by Public Enemy

The War in Ukraine Will Not Take Place: The New Cold War as Simulacra

"Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real"

Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra"

Hit the fucking deck! Putin has been on the brink of invading Ukraine for 8 years now and the shit could hit the fan at any second. Everyone from the granola brained yuppies at MSNBC to the fist pumping cop worshippers at Fox News are slamming the fucking panic button and they're slamming it with their own heavily Botoxed faces while screaming, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" Those pervert Russians have been coming for about twenty goddamn years now, since right around the time the Kremlin swapped out the Fourth Estate's vodka swilling teddy bear, Boris Yeltsin, for a decidedly less compliant plutocrat named Vladimir Putin, but this time they really are coming. We totally mean it, you guys. Stinky pinky swear.

 A force of somewhere between 100,000 and 100 billion goosestepping Ivan soldiers are menacingly occupying pre-existing bases within their own borders. The State Department has ordered their diplomats to pack their bags and released an urgent travel advisory telling every Yankee coed to reconsider taking that trip to sunny Chernobyl for spring break. 3,000 American troops are being shifted from one end of Europe to the other while thousands more have been put on high alert for a potential deployment to NATO's Eastern Flank. 

The western media is teeming with tales of secret Kremlin coups and elaborate false flag attacks, all furnished to them by those trusty anonymous sources in the so-called intelligence community. Some people say the invasion is coming next week, some people say next year, but you better bet your bottom ruble that it's coming and anyone who tells you otherwise is a dangerous peddler of Russian misinformation who should be forcibly gagged with their own mouse and permanently purged from the ranks of every social media platform known to mankind, from Twitter to JDate. So, for the love of White Jesus, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and all that our indispensable nation holds dear, stay glued to your TV sets! 

Now this is how an empire throws a war in the breathless era of the 24/7 news circus. You don't need guns, you don't need bombs, hell, you don't even need a willing adversary, all you really need is lights, cameras, action! Repeat. Get enough yacking heads to repeat the same damn lie over and over and over again, and even seemingly intelligent people start to buy the bullshit by the truckload. Putin is not going to invade Ukraine. Anyone who takes the time to turn off the TV and look at the facts rationally can tell you that. There is quite simply nothing to gain that would be worth the fall out. Ukraine is a rusted out economic basket case and Russia, a nation the size of a small planet with an economy the size of Italy's, isn't doing much better.

If Russia was going to march on Kiev, they would have done it back in 2014 when a US backed coup overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and replaced him with a gaggle of neoliberal gangsters and crypto-fascist babushka bashers. Instead, Putin just calmly excepted the already constitutionally autonomous region of Crimea's popular decision to return back to Mother Russia, thus securing Moscow's single warm water naval base in Sevastopol and left it to the hyperventilating jackals in the western press to make up the rest. Putin hasn't even lifted a finger to recognize the sovereignty of his supposed comrades in the Donbass, not because he's some kind of fucking pacifist but because he's some kind of fucking capitalist and there are just simply no rubles to be made there in post-Soviet rustbelt country.

What we're witnessing now with the relatively marginal increase of Russian troops on Ukraine's border is the desired result of imperial gaslighting, one of Uncle Sam's favorite dirty tricks. First you launch a massive campaign of wargames on the target nation's borders, what essentially amounts to a well-armed dress rehearsal for a hypothetical US invasion. Then you wait until said target nation responds with their own show of military force, the western media covers the latter while pretending like the prior never happened, and when the target tries to tell the world that they were the ones who were provoked, we act like they're the fucking crazy ones. 

We've done this to China in the Strait of Taiwan, we've done this to Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, shit, we do this to North Korea pretty much every other year, you can practically set your watch to it. And the US spent the better part of 2021 doing this to Russia. American warships spent 182 days in the Black Sea last year off Russia's shores. Can you imagine the American response if China did the same thing in the Gulf of Mexico? Biden would build Trump's stupid fucking wall faster than you can say buyer's remorse. If anything, Russia has shown tremendous restraint in the face of such uncurdled American hysteria. 

If you don't want to believe an evil transgender anarcho-Putinist like me, just take the west's beloved Ukrainian baby lambs' word for it. After begging Biden for weapons and NATO membership back in September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is clearly having buyer's remorse of his own. According to none other than those flaming Russophobes at CNN, Zelensky recently spent the better part of a phone call with Biden begging him to calm the fuck down and stop ruining his nation's tinpot economy with his hysteria. Ukraine's own foreign ministry has even come forward and admitted that they have seen no radical changes in the security situation on their borders since their regime took power in 2014. Zelensky and pals are learning the hard way that becoming a part of the Euro-NATO orbit essentially just means being Washington's dog. Yanukovych could have told them that if Victoria Nuland's skinhead army had given him more than fifteen minutes to pack his shit and fuck off.

Biden or rather that idle brained neoliberal scarecrow's handlers wanted this manufactured crisis to distract the public from Joe's plummeting poll numbers and the fact that they have been every bit as inept in handling the pandemic as that orange Nazi rodeo clown he was elected to replace. But the main drivers of this potentially catastrophic game of Cold War chicken have been the media itself. A big part of the reason that Biden's numbers are in the toilet is because his once loyal fan club in the so-called liberal media gave him a savage swirly just for finally pulling out of that bottomless hellhole in Afghanistan. It was probably the first remotely descent thing that demented old white supremacist has ever done with his life and the media gleefully joined the Republicans in tarring him as a pussy for doing it.

Ukraine is Biden's big opportunity to prove what a big dick swinging badass he is and every time he goes off script and even hints that maybe he won't drop atom bombs on Moscow over the junkyards of Luhansk, the screaming banshees at CNN threaten to cut that dick clean off. It's the Fourth Estate that's been polluting the zeitgeist for months with the totally self-fabricated notion of an imminent Russian invasion. It was the Fourth Estate that cooked up that Russiagate hoax over Donald Trump's fleeting man-crush on Putin. It was the Fourth Estate that pressured that same impressionable egomaniac into becoming the most anti-Russian president in history just to prove his defunct manhood. Now they're at it again with another thin-skinned imbecile. Ukraine has become a virtual battlefield of Cold War simulacra because our media has been invaded by the military industrial complex.

The American press has never exactly been the model of democratic checks and balances that gladhanding Hollywood dullards like George Clooney have painted them as but at least they used to chase the wars instead of make the wars. Even if they didn't connect the dots all the way back to General Westmorland, at least they covered the My Lai Massacre and the Pentagon Papers and even risked prison time doing so. That all changed with the first Persian Gulf War. At the advent of cable news, CNN made a Faustian bargain with the US Military to trade objectivity for access. 

The Pentagon would give the fledgling Chicken Noodle News-hole exclusive interviews with all the top brass and footage of all their latest high-tech gadgets and gizmos and rockets and fighter jets provided that CNN agreed not to cover the horrors they resulted in on the ground. And thus, we had what the brilliant French post-modernist Jean Baudrillard controversially but accurately described as a war that did not take place, except on cable television. While the American TV audience was dazzled by a technicolor fireworks show in the sky, a totally defenseless Iraq was treated to 177 million pounds of depleted uranium munitions on the ground, wiping a modern industrial nation from the map in a totally one-sided massacre without us even having to get our nails dirty. This was the catalyst which set the course for the media driven lies that brought us back to that wretched radiated desert in 2003 and gave us their simulated cold war in Ukraine in 2022.

In the decades that followed their little desert holocaust, the relationship between the media and the war machine became increasingly intimate until the line between the two disappeared altogether. The foreign policy desks at every major news network and paper are now run by former generals and admirals who remain wealthy beneficiaries of the arms industry. To military industrial scumfucks like NBC's Carlyle Group admiral, James Stavridis, and CNN's McNeil Technologies general, James "Spider" Marks, it really doesn't matter if the war in Ukraine doesn't exist or if it ends in a nuclear apocalypse. Either way, they've already sold the bombs. 

As we speak, the Democrats are putting the finishing touches on a bill that will send Ukraine $500 million in military funding in 2022, making our newly unwilling accomplices in Kiev the third largest recipients of American boom-boom after those fine vampires in Israel and Egypt respectively and you better fucking believe that those war whores at CNN and NBC are gonna get their cut. The mainstream media loves to play the card of the tireless crusaders against the evils of misinformation, but what about their misinformation? Last time I checked, Alex Jones never triggered a third world war with his hysterics. If these ghastly gangsters really are the first line of defense in America's war to preserve our precious democracy, then maybe American democracy doesn't exist either.

Ain't simulacra grand, dearest motherfuckers?

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influence this post

*  99 Luftballons by Nena

*  Monkey Gone to Heaven by the Pixies

*  Panic by the Smiths

*  Your Dog by Soccer Mommy

*  Eve of Destruction by the Dickies

*  Holiday Song by the Pixies

*  At the Bottom of Everything by Bright Eyes

*  Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire