The New Cold War is a War on the Poor and the Poor Need to Fight Back

 The shit is getting real again in Ukraine and every neoliberal and his lobbyist seems super stoked about the carnage. After months of pulverizing battlefield gridlock and mounting global war fatigue, the Western warmongers finally have a tangible victory to point at while they're robbing us all blind of our pocket change for Raytheon Boom-Boom Bucks (TM). Their sweeping propaganda campaign promoting an inevitable epic counteroffensive to end all counteroffensives has finally bore fruit with the Ukrainian Military taking back roughly 2,300 square miles of Russian occupied territory in the northeastern Kharkiv region, pushing Putin's boys back to the border and capturing the strategically important logistics hub of Izyum. It was indeed a humiliating defeat Vlad the Failure, but it was one that came at a very steep and telling price that Volodymyr Zelensky's bombastic cheerleaders on cable news haven't bothered to mention during their long-anticipated pep rallies. 

While the reports on Kharkiv have been nothing but flowers, few have mentioned that this counteroffensive actually began days before a shot was even fired in the region with a massive campaign against Russia's southern stronghold of Kherson that resulted in a bloodbath of upwards of 5,000 Ukrainian casualties. A heinous slaughter by any morally sane sentient being's standards but a sickeningly necessary one when you prize giving Putin a blackeye over the sanctity of human life. It was only with flocks of Russian troops redirected from the relatively low priority territory in the north to protect the high priority territory in Novorossiya that the Ukrainians were able to outnumber the Russians in a region that Putin has been slowly abandoning since he declared the beginning of Phase Two of his Special Military Operation (TM). Meanwhile, Russia has continued to make gains in Donetsk as the Ivans slowly march towards the rebel oblast's centrally pivotal city of Slavyansk.

Thousands of Ukrainian peasants, conscripted into Zelensky's army by the barrel of a gun were mercilessly fed into a Russian buzzsaw just to gunk up the gears long enough for a popcorn headline and this is supposed to be a victory for Ukraine? No, this is a victory for NATO and their bloodthirsty vendetta against Putin's Russia and it only comes at the tragic expense of Ukraine. It also comes at the expense of tens of billions in American and Western European tax dollars that have been dumped into remaking Ukraine's already decimated armed forces in Washington's and London's image. 

The war in Ukraine has become a defacto NATO operation from top to bottom, with Ukrainian soldiers trained, armed, fed and led by the same Russophobic death cult that promised those people membership in their little cool-kids club only to leave them hanging like a red flag before a Kremlin bull. Russia sees this. They've gotten the message loud and clear and they're more than prepared to obliterate even more impoverished Ukrainians with their own slave army of impoverished conscripts just to prove that their dicks are still big enough to swing with the Western superpowers and if all else fails, they can always just strap on a nuclear marital aid for the same effect. 

The New Cold War is a class war and oligarchs on both sides are waging it against the poor, not just in Ukraine but across the world. America's sweeping sanctions regime, directed at fomenting Russia's growing poor into conceding to Western regime change, has tanked the entire world's economy and put us all in the grips of catastrophic economic peril. Europe is already in the full throws of an epic recession and staring down the barrel of a very bitter winter. Russia has responded to Western price caps on its natural resources by turning the tap off on the Nordstream pipeline and sending the electricity and heating bills of everyday Europeans skyrocketing into the stratosphere. Working class people from Walloon to Warsaw have found themselves dipping into their own meager savings and even skipping meals just to keep the lights on and all the weathermen with their heads screwed on straight are predicting a similar forecast across the Atlantic.

Naturally, the results of this global class war are set to be far more lethal for the people of the Third World who still depend on Russian and Ukrainian grain for their very survival. Even with Turkish brokered deals to allow shipments of food and fertilizer to leave the bombarded Black Sea ports, nations like Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan are still facing famine thanks to another senseless pissing match between rich white assholes and those rich white assholes on both sides of this proxy abortion are doing just fucking dandy while they burn the rest of the world around them to the fucking ground.

While the Military Industrial Complex is practically printing their own goddamn money at this point, the oil industry is using their latest imperial rampage as an excuse to jack their prices up sky high. BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron are all making record shattering profits while their captive customers teeter on the brink of economic oblivion. Meanwhile, their fellow oligarchs in Moscow are doing just smashingly as well. In spite of a colossal embargo the likes of which the world has never seen, Russian banks have already bounced back to profitability as Gazprom reports a 100% increase in profits over the first half of the year and the Ruble reaches a five-year peak. The only winners in this sick fucking charade of a world war are the rich while the rest of us are expected to just grin and bear the brunt of what essentially amounts to their twin campaigns of class terrorism.

This is a world war alright and it is a world war against all of us. Every single one of us have become proxies in this twisted game of thrones. Perhaps the only good news is that I'm not the only prole kicking over the TV set and growling 'fuck this shit' between clenched teeth anymore. There is a growing discontent percolating across multiple continents, and it isn't directed at either side of this war's prescribed boogeymen either. It's directed at the very nations those people live in who all conspire against the will of their own people in the name of imperial conquest. Protests against the global class war over Ukraine have been growing in both size and ferocity in places like Austria, Germany and Serbia. Just last month, the Czech Republic saw no fewer than 100,000 working class people marching through the streets of Prague while NATO's Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has been blowing the whistle on a coming wave of civil unrest set to rock the Western World like a hurricane. 

This is precisely what the Antiwar Movement needs to reclaim the lethality that empowered it to shut down the Vietnam War. Back then poor people on both sides of the aisle were incensed over being drafted to fight and die in a rich man's bloodbath. This is why America had no choice but to freeze their military slave trade in carbonite in a sadly successful attempt to disconnect America's working class from the slaughter of our comrades in the darker nations. But with our rapidly disintegrating Atlantic empire's global jihad for full spectrum domination finally reaching the doormat of the Eurasian Century that has long inspired our backwoods crusades, we have all been drafted into what is quickly shaping up to be a downright apocalyptic final showdown between East and West.

Every war is a class war. It's only ever the poor who have to die for rich men's lies. But much like climate change, the wreckage has finally reached proportions too massive to cover up with jingoistic propaganda and bald-faced racism. It isn't Putin's name alone on the pump where working class stiffs get fiscally raped twice a day. It's Exxon, Shell, Biden, NATO, Raytheon. And these motherfuckers would be wise to watch their backs while they're cashing our paychecks because history has a cruel tradition of coming back around again like a boomerang. 

The First World War was an eerily familiar blitz of dying empires firing poor people out of howitzers into castle gates and feeding the unobliterated increasingly incoherent excuses for a rapidly expanding global clusterfuck. Millions died without ever understanding why and the impoverished survivors finally got fed up with killing each other and turned their rifles around to bring the war home where it belonged. The result was a Peckinpahesque shooting spree of popular revolutions destabilizing the capitols on both sides of this twisted international holocaust. Slaves in uniform turned their guns against their masters in the officer corps and beyond and began blowing away the real enemy. The biggest cataclysm to come out of this global mutiny was the Russian Revolution in which the Bolsheviks were powered to an unexpected victory after decades of failure by a lethal working-class antiwar movement to shatter one of the biggest empires on the planet. 

It could happen again. 2023 could be the year of the boomerang and I for one am counting on it, but if we foolishly follow the same path as the Soviets our best-case scenario will be replacing bankers with politburos like the last time, and we'll just end up repeating this same cycle of bloodshed in another century. Frankly, I'm not convinced that we have another century of this bullshit left in us. Poor people across the globe must not only realize that imperialism is a tax on human life that only ever falls on our broken shoulders but that this industry of violence only exists at the behest of the state and that this madness only ends with the states destruction.

There is no end to war without anarchy and there is no time left for half-measures on a dying planet. We can end this Cold War today by ending the rich, but we can only prevent the next one by ending the state. Now let's stop talking and fuck some shit up for peace.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Raw Power by the Stooges

*  Speeding 72 by Momma

*  I Gotcha by Joe Tex

*  The Seether by Veruca Salt

*  (Nothing but) Flowers by Talking Heads

*  Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells 

*  Candy Sam by Ty Segall

*  Year of the Boomerang by Rage Against the Machine

*  The Inside Game by Royal Trux

How Weaponizing Identity Politics Ended the Vietnam War

 I'll tell you a secret, dearest motherfuckers, if you promise to tell everyone else. The two-party system is nothing but a great big fucking distraction. When it comes down to the big money issues like war and peace, there is virtually zero difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and both of these thieving cliques of corporate sluts use the decidedly divisive masquerade of identity politics to obscure their own malignant identities as mirror vessels of the same apocalyptic war machine.

The Republicans rail furiously against the epic scourge of trangenderism, trying to convince fine folks like you that fine freaks like me are a pack of mincing sexual predators chomping at the bit to chop your son's dicks off. Meanwhile, the Democrats work the other side of the room, selling themselves as the only hope broken trannies like me have of not being burned at the stake for walking into the wrong bathroom. And while we're all busy tearing each other's throats out over race and gender, we all get fucked in the ass by the bipartisan military industrial complex when they quadruple the deficit to sell bunker busters to fascist lunatics in Ukraine.

These yuppie pricks are fucking hustling us over our few differences but somehow, it's people like me and my comrades in the ghetto who get the lion share of the blame for this travesty. It's increasingly hip among principled anti-imperialists on both the left and the right to be openly dismissive if not downright derisive towards identity politics and part of me can't blame them. I get sick and tired of trigger-happy cretins like the Clintons using my people like a rainbow-colored human shield while they carpet bomb the planet in the name of humanitarian interventionism. It's almost enough to make even me want to bash me.

But that doesn't mean that things like trans rights and racial equity don't matter, it just means that they are convenient fodder for both parties to take advantage of because people like me don't have an industrial complex to contend with, but this is precisely why imperialism should matter to marginalized people like me and why marginalized people like me should matter to anti-imperialists. We are the only people in this country fucked enough to be downright Third World. In fact, it wasn't so long ago that being Queer and/or Black was virtually indistinguishable from being an anti-imperialist.

People in this country seem to suffer under the fevered delusion that the Vietnam War just sort of ended. That suddenly after sacrificing some 58,000 American soldiers and annihilating 3 million Indochinese peasants beneath a driving rain of poison gas and shrapnel, Nixon and Kissinger just decided to pack it up and fuck off back to Wahington in 1973. The truth is that the only reason why that war ever fucking ended is because anti-imperialist minorities led a downright revolutionary campaign to fucking end it. We would still be in Danang as we speak, slinging dope and aiming nukes at China, if Blacks, Latinos, Queers and women hadn't radicalized the Peace Movement and turned it into a veritable threat to national security.

Before Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, America's antiwar movement was an ineffectual band of white milquetoast suburbanites strumming banjos and politely begging pitiless psychopaths to knock it off and give peace a chance. The Black Power Movement gave these longhairs fangs and taught them how to use them. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King were some of the boldest voices among the pacifist milieu but it was the more militant splinter sect of his movement that first called out the war in Vietnam for what it truly was, naked racist imperialism, and declared their allegiance with the bombed.

The Black Power Movement was built on abandoning tedious partisan politics in favor of creating autonomous communities of Africans right here in America by expanding their awareness of their place in a larger global struggle against colonialism. This struggle didn't just include other Africans engaged in liberating their continent from European oppressors, it included poor people who stood their ground beneath Western bombs wherever they dropped.

Just before he was savagely slain by federal government infiltrators, Malcolm X abandoned the reactionary Nation of Islam and called for the creation of an African American led freedom movement defined by playing their part in a larger international struggle against colonialism. A couple years later, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee picked up Brother Malcolm's torch and used it to broaden their revolutionary horizons by officially declaring themselves to be more than just another civil rights organization. 

In 1967, the SNCC boldly redefined themselves as a human rights organization committed first and foremost to supporting "struggles against colonialism, racism and economic exploitation wherever those conditions exist." And then they picked up rifles and joined forces with the Black Panther Party and the shit really got wild. It was during this gunpowder baptism that the antiwar movement became the anti-imperialist movement. 

But the Black Power Movement wasn't alone. They may have represented the brightest spark in this nascent anti-imperialist movement, but it was actually women, especially women of color, who created some of the earliest and gnarliest racket against the empire's bloodbath in Vietnam. Groups like the Women's Strike for Peace and women like Gwen Patton who led the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union didn't just speak out against the war but brazenly declared their allegiance with the people who it was being waged against. 

Patton declared the women who played a pivotal role in the Vietcong "sexy" and many early women's libers saw the spectacle of Vietnamese mothers with their babies on their back and Kalashnikovs in their hands giving cigar chomping sexist thugs like General Curtis LeMay a run for their money as the perfect embodiment of female power, representing lethal strength through empathy, motherhood weaponized in defense of the children who were always the first to die in men's wars. 

And it was women who set the antiwar movement on fire, literally. The most revolutionary act a pacifist can comit is self-immolation and this brazen provocation was first imported to the United States by a badass bitch named Alice Herz in 1965. A Holocaust survivor and founding member of the Women's Strike for Peace, Herz was inspired by the iconic self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monks like Thich Quang Due to literally set herself on fire for peace amidst the factories that built America's arsenal in Downtown Detroit. She left behind only ashes and a searing letter declaring "Decide if this world shall be a good place to live for all human beings or if it should blow itself into oblivion."

Bold Black women like Gwen Patton, Angela Davis and Elaine Brown backed their pacifist sisters up with arms and held the empire's feet to Herz's fire by the barrel of a gun. So did furious transwomen of color like Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major and Sylvia Rivera who took the lessons they learned as part of the Black Power, Chicana and Women's Movement's and applied them to decolonizing Queer spaces like Stonewall by any means necessary. 

These weren't merely the actions of irate Queers against the police state. The Queer Liberation Movement was defined by its commitment to anti-imperialism from day one. It wasn't a mere coincidence that the loudest gang of fist-swinging faggots to come out of the flames of Christopher Street called themselves the Gay Liberation Front. This was an homage to the Algerian National Liberation Front and the South Vietnam Liberation Front, as well as a message to the pigs that a new Queer nation had been born and that it stood defiantly with the people of the Third World.

Huey Newton himself recognized our potential, defending our fight amongst Panthers still hostile towards the Queer experience and declaring that Queer people "might be the most oppressed people" in society and therefore should be considered potentially "the most revolutionary." Huey sharply saw the radical opportunity in weaponizing all oppression against his own people's oppressors and turning this opportunity into what Frantz Fanon called an "immense tyranny destroying wave."

Chicago Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton probably gave us the best example of what this wave might look like when he formed his Rainbow Coalition in 1969, which brought together the Puerto Ricans of the Young Lords, the Native Americans of the American Indian Movement, the Chicanos of the Brown Berets, the Chinese Americans of the Red Guard Party, and even the impoverished Southern whites of the Young Patriots Organization in a diverse coalition of militant identity political organizations united by the imperial enemy they shared with the people of Vietnam.

Even after that racist closet queen, J. Edna Hoover, had Freddy capped, this revolutionary virus spread. Suddenly white college kids were carrying Vietcong flags instead of daisies and organizations like the Weather Underground, the Youth International Party and the White Panthers were declaring their solidarity with the international tyranny destroying mission of Black Power. Soon, ROTC buildings across the country were going up in flames and even GIs were joining the revolution, fragging their commanding officers, refusing orders, sabotaging millions of dollars in equipment and launching uprisings in barracks across the globe.

The powers at be saw the storm clouds of revolution on the horizon. They pulled the plug on their genocidal war in Vietnam to save the empire from collapsing into the flames. It wasn't just the Vietcong who kicked Uncle Sam's ass, it was a revolutionary united front of Third World citizens stretching from Stonewall to Saigon. In 1975, the American Empire was defeated by identity politics.

So, the American Empire did what it does best, it colonized the problem. The Democratic Party enticed Black, brown and Queer people of every color to join their counter-revolutionary operation under two conditions; we forfeit our autonomy in exchange for tokens of bourgeoise assimilation, and we divorce our movements from the anti-imperialism that once defined them. By engaging in this Faustian bargain, we didn't just neuter identity politics, we removed a downright personal commitment to destroying colonialism from the Antiwar Movement in the divorce, sending those poor honky breeders back to the milquetoast purgatory that we had liberated them from.

This is the part of the story where I tell you dearest motherfuckers that it's not too late. Well, it's not. The vision of tragically forgotten martyrs like Fred Hampton and Sylvia Rivera, a wild dream of a diverse coalition of identity outlaws united by our shared awareness that the empire which colonizes the Third World colonizes its fucked cousins back home as well, remains this world's greatest hope for preventing an Ozymandias Century. If a bunch of thugs from the hood can end a war with a ragtag army of drag queens, rice farmers, cholos and dope smoking hicks then I see no reason why we can't end them all with a new global Rainbow Coalition of Black militias, Antifa arsonists, Boogaloo Bois, Shia sectarians, Russian separatists, genderfuck evangelists, Kurdish autonomists and trailer park isolationists.

So, what do you say, dearest motherfuckers? Let's get together and make this fight personal again before it's too late. Let's burn this classist, racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist motherfucker down once and for all and dance in the flames like it's 1975.  

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Down in the Streets by the Stooges

*  Keep the Car Running by Arcade Fire

*  Softer Softest by Hole

*  Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

*  Freddie's Dead by Curtis Mayfield

*  Breed by Nirvana

*  Sweet Jane by the Velvet Underground

*  Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene

*  Everyday People by Sly & the Family Stone

*  Heroes by David Bowie

*  Lola by the Raincoats    

You Can't Fight MAGA Fascism Without Smashing Biden's Republic

 Joe Biden is pissed off again and coming out swinging and it isn't those pesky Russkies  or dastardly Chinamen this time either. It's those stupid assholes who voted for the other moron, you know, the orange fella. But this is no laughing matter. Joe is deadly serious. Pounding the pulpit before a crimson lit background, flanked by sharply dressed Marines like a white Louis Farrakhan with Alzheimer's, Joe proselytized to us on primetime television about a grave threat to our democracy, an existential threat to "the very foundations of our republic" and then the President used the F-word. 

No not the fun one that I chuck around like hatchets at the Gathering of the Juggalos. The one that pretty much everyone else chucks around like hatchets at the Gathering of the Juggalos. Fascism, well, semi-fascism at least. According to Joe Biden, the greatest threat to our exceptional empire isn't climate change or nuclear holocaust but the scourge of MAGA Republicans, and only you can stop them with a check to your local Democratic Party and a vote for whatever marginally lesser evil that they've sanctioned this year. 

It's at this moment when you catch your breath and realize that you've been terrorized into another pledge drive for America's other imperialist party. "With just three easy payments of 99.99 you too can save American democracy and advertise that fact to all the other bougie Karens in line at Starbucks with this stylish "I Fought the MAGA Republicans!" tote bag." Goddamnit! You fuckers got me again. I'll take two. But just because Biden's midterm saber rattling is just a rather obvious if garish act of partisan theater doesn't mean that the threat isn't real. Donald Trump is a nefarious gangster with a devoted posse willing to get themselves shot in the face at the Capitol just to do his bidding. Hell, some of them may very well be deserving of that other F-word. But that poses a question that probably doesn't get asked enough in hatchet country. What the fuck is fascism anyway?

Nobody seems to be able to give a straight answer on that one and the few who do all seem to have very different definitions. We all know what fascism looks like, with the marching and the jackboots and the torches and the flags. It's basically racist S&M without the safe words and nobody ever gets off, they just get more pissed off. But aside from the violent theatrics their really doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot holding it all together and that's largely by design. Fascism isn't so much of a philosophy as it is an excuse for rich people to use poor people to kill other poor people. The few things that most of these excuses have in common are demonizing minorities in order to justify the militarization of civilian society and consolidating unchecked corporate power within the federal government. All of this twisted nonsense fits Donald Trump like a fun sized condom. The only problem is that it fits most of his opponents too, including Antifa's latest member, Joe Biden.

Think about it. What are all the sins that make MAGA reek like Mussolini's drawers? The demonization of opponents. The weaponization of the border. The use of law and order to contain irate minorities. The proclamation of absolute power. The glorification of militaristic nationalism. All of this is straight out of the Clinton-Obama-Biden playbook.

It was under Obama that a merciless campaign was waged against whistleblowers and the few journalists left who dared to publish them. By weaponizing the century old Espionage Act and sicking it on more dissidents than every other previous president combined, Mr. Hope-and-Change sent a brutal message to critics of empire across the planet that the price of the truth won't just be your freedom, it will be your sanity. Julian Assange, quite possibly the greatest journalist of his generation, continues to physically and emotionally disintegrate in a cement box at Belmarsh as we speak while awaiting his live burial at Florence Supermax. All part of an international campaign spearheaded seamlessly by the regimes of Obama, Trump and Biden to destroy a man for telling the truth about unchecked power.  

Trump definitely took the weaponization of the border to new lows by going well out of his way to target children, but those crimes too were built on the precedents of his predecessors and his successors alike. The foundation for the current racist military regime that we see at our southern border was first established by Bill Clinton's 1996 Immigration Law and reached its zenith if not quite the height of its cruelty under Biden and Obama. This lethal liberal tag-team still holds the world record for wrangling desperate people like alligators for crossing an invisible line in the fucking desert before shipping them back to the swamps we turned their shithole countries into with our imperial foreign policy. They also built the concentration camps which remain open and designed for the primary purpose of traumatizing migrants into never returning to the land we stole from their ancestors. 

If you want to talk about the white supremacist school of law and order that the MAGA set are so stoked on than ask the motherfuckers who wrote the goddamn book. Joe Biden spent the eighties working closely with his allies in the moderate wing of the Republican Party to turn America's finest thugs in blue into a heavily armed army of colonialist occupation complete with machine guns, battle tanks, three-strikes laws and mandatory minimums and he used openly racist rhetoric to earn the support of white Americans on both sides of the aisle to make it happen. 

In the decades since the landmark 1994 Clinton-Biden Crime Bill, America's prison population has doubled into the largest population of incarcerated people on the planet. It has also decimated inner city communities of color to a level of economic depravity that made them fodder for a pandemic that turned this whole country inside out. The fallout from this perfect storm of carceral apartheid and systemic neglect is our current crime wave which Biden himself seeks to fix with more cops, more prisons and more law and order.

The unchecked power enjoyed by Fuhrer Trump was yet another byproduct of this much-sainted regime which took the already muscular Executive Office of Biden's moderate allies in the Bush junta and pumped it full of steroids by endowing the President with the right to kill on demand with nothing but a rubber stamp court and a fleet of toy planes standing between the Commander-in-chief and a 16-year-old dead Arab boy. Can you honestly blame a breying moron like Donald Trump for assuming that he was elected dictator considering that even self-proclaimed progressives sat on their hands while Barack played Saddam for eight goddamn years and then passed the ball to Orange-Man Bad?

As for the glorification of militaristic nationalism, take a look around honey, because that's what this country was built on. From Manifest Destiny to the New Cold War, America's foreign policy has been one seamless imperial jihad for global domination that has killed more brown people than most openly fascist regimes combined, and we have long fostered a shrill culture of bipartisan white supremacy and cultural hegemony at home to bolster it with the mythology of American exceptionalism. Every day we force our children to pray to a flag like a fucking cargo cult. We throw more parades and holidays glorifying warfare than North Korea. If Trump is Hitler, then both parties are the Kaisers who put the truncheon in his pussy-grabbers.

The difference between Trump and Biden is purely a matter of cosmetics. There is no difference in substance because there is no substance. The platitudes of the so-called mainstream establishment to human rights and racial equity amount to little more than kabuki theater. Behind every pretty mask is another ugly Trump. The MAGA Republicans have simply done what fascists have always done best, they've stripped the nation state bare of its costume and celebrated its vulgar nudity with totally unabashed pride. This is what happens when an empire becomes a failed state. This is what happened to Weimar Germany and Italy and Spain. 

Fascism isn't some kind of satanic aberration built from black magic; it is a desperate attempt by a dying state to revive itself with the overt use of the kind of mass violence that was used covertly to build it. Donald Trump didn't lead his march on Washington to make America great, he led it to make America great again. MAGA isn't about ending wars, it's about winning them like we used to, and this or any other genre of fascism can't possibly threaten the very foundation of Joe Biden's republic when the violent globalist despotism that defines that republic also defines the very foundation of American fascism.

My biggest problem with the Never-Trumpers in both parties has always been their hysterical insistence that Donald Trump is special. Fascism isn't even special. It's the inevitable blowback of late-stage imperialism and if you really want to fight it you should forget about Joe Biden's fucking tote bag of empty rhetoric and save your money for a hammer to smash the state that birthed that rough beast slouching towards Washington to be born.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Like I Used To by Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen

*  Joke Ya Mind by Insane Clown Posse

*   Ahead by Wire

*  All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

*  Buildings by Regina Spektor

*  Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

*  Gray Cell Green by Ned's Atomic Dustbin

*  You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

*  I Put a Spell on You by Marilyn Manson

The NATO Sultanate of Recep Tayyip Erdogan: The Proxy Becomes the Master

 The right of self-determination of the peoples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development.

-Abdullah Ocalan

Russia is really out of control lately, throwing its weight around the neighborhood like a suburban bully with a battle tank instead of a John Deere, crushing any blue-haired busybody who dares to eyeball Putin's azaleas the wrong way, invading sovereign backyards and redrawing the property lines, all to restore the good name of some long dead empire that's never coming back. The only people worse are those goddamn Chinese commies, building their multicontinental New Silk Road and ethnically cleansing any tribe of inconvenient Muslims who stand in the way of construction.

I mean, who does things like this? Who do these Eurasian barbarians think they are, the United States? Just thank White Jesus that we have the Sacred Knights Templar of Western Neoliberal Civilization to put such autocratic beasts back in their place among the squaller we carefully erected for them with our cannons and opium. America may be an insane fucking murder machine but if there is one thing we won't put up with its obnoxious upstarts jacking our playbook to set up new empires of their own. NATO is all about preventing this kind of rude dark-skinned revanchism, except when they're not. 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's relatively open dirty little secret. Under his increasingly autocratic rule, Turkey has committed every single crime that Russia and China have been accused of by less than reliable sources and they've done it all with American weapons and the official NATO stamp of approval. As we speak, Turkey is engaged both directly and by proxy in the invasion of no fewer than four sovereign nations depending on the given week as well as the subsequent implementation of what could very quickly escalate into two separate concurrent genocides.

Erdogan has been openly proclaiming his intentions to launch a full-blown ground invasion of Kurdish held territory in both Syria and Iraq since earlier this spring and considering that his forces already hold large swaths of this territory after the last three invasions they've thrown over the last six years, we have every reason to take him at his word. We also have every reason to believe that the next illegal incursion could be part of a final solution to Turkey's long lingering Kurdish question.  

As punishment for defeating his friends in ISIS and jumpstarting the greatest experiment in modern-day anarchism since Catalonia, Sultan Erdogan has proclaimed his intentions to dig a thirty kilometer deep "buffer zone" into what is currently the autonomous region of Rojava and what is still internationally recognized as Syria where he will use the millions of Arab Syrian refugees he hosts to ethnically cleanse the region of its millions of ethnic Kurds. Erdogan's multinational jihad against the Kurdish people has already displaced hundreds of thousands, not just from Rojava but the Kurdish region of Iraq as well where just this summer he bombed the tourist village of Perex, killing 9 civilians including two children, one of them a year-old infant.

This isn't exactly an isolated intervention either. It is part of a rapidly expanding international plan for Erdogan's Turkey to reestablish the Ottoman Empire and slaughter every man, woman and child who stands in his way. This includes the revival of the Armenian Genocide with help from Erdogan's Stalinist sock puppet in Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. Together these two Turkic supremacists made the Ottoman great again in 2020 by invading the Armenian autonomous region of Artsakh and emptying it of nearly half of its ancient Christian population. 

90,000 of the 150,000 citizens who have occupied those sacred hills centuries before NATO was just a glimmer in Satan's eye have been forced to flee for their lives from the same armies who buried their ancestors by the millions. This international rampage has also included Erdogan's drone war in Libya and his increasingly aggressive Blue Homeland Doctrine which has him jockeying with fellow NATO allies like Greece for control of the Mediterranean.

Of course, the United States and NATO are just incredibly concerned about all of this, offering up threats and protests and even a few sanctions but they show their true colors where the rubber meets the road. In spite of Erdogan's very chic anti-western posturing, his military machine is still largely dependent on Atlantic financing. The United States shills out millions in taxpayer dollars to Turkey every year, nearly every penny of which goes to putting more bullets in Kurdish and Armenian skulls. Joe Biden himself has called for the US to sell the F-16's he hasn't already promised to the Azov Battalion to Turkey. This is not how you treat an openly genocidal pariah unless of course that pariah is secretly doing your bidding. 

All in all, Erdogan's neo-Ottoman Reich appears to be a net win for American primacy. We were already finished with the Kurds for another generation and both of Ankara's appalling interventions in Rojava and Artsakh serve to weaken Iran and Russia's influence in the region. Turkey has long served a role similar to Saudi Arabia as a conduit of the kind of chaos America can't afford to be caught stirring up red handed. It was Turkey who helped us provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis by stashing nuclear tipped Jupiter missiles on their soil. It was Turkey who sabotage a neutral Greek democracy by invading and occupying half of Cyprus. And it was Turkey who spearheaded America's plot to overthrow Putin's little bro-bro Bashar al-Assad in Syria by arming a jihadist revolt that would quickly mutate into the Islamic State. So, what if Turkey has its own imperial ambitions. After all, that's how the American Empire got started, isn't it? While this is true, that's also how the English Empire ended.

Once upon a time, the United Kingdom swung the biggest stick on the world stage, fighting fifty wars at a time and lording over an empire that stretched across the globe from Belfast to Bangladesh. But taking over the world is fucking hard. If you don't pace yourself, you could easily end up like that hotdogging amateur Adolf Hitler. The sharper empires find proxies to pick up the slack. The United States began as one of those proxies, just a little backwater slave colony to keep the French and Spanish in line in the killing fields of the New World. Sure, occasionally they went too far with the Indian killing and slavery was becoming a bit of a dated industry once Africa was finally fully under Europe's control, but how much of a threat could a gaggle of grubby proxies like George Wahington and Thomas Jefferson pose to the greatest empire on earth?

Every single empire thinks it can't happen to them until it does. America is on the brink of collapse and Sultan Erdogan has become a master at playing both sides of the field. As we speak, he has his forked tongue jammed deep into Putin's ear, increasing Turkey's trade with Russia even while he sends Bayraktar drones to kill their troops in Ukraine. Erdogan has masterfully managed to establish himself as an indispensable middleman between the oligarchs of Moscow and Kiev. He's already brokered deals to allow Ukrainian grain to leave Russian encircled ports and if he can pull off brokering a peace deal to end a war that America is feverishly invested in making last forever than Erdogan could make his economically unstable upstart of an empire an irreplaceable partner in a Eurasian Century that promises to show America to the door and Turkey isn't alone.

Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are all American funded proxy states who show an increasing taste for geostrategic independence in an age of American decline. Solo, none of these ambitious little shits poses much of a threat to the Atlantic Colossus but together, with alternative streams of income being offered by a multipolar Eurasian conglomeration that just won't die, each one of these cherished and protected allies of American imperium could easily become another dagger in Ceasar's back.   

Buck up Uncle Sam and keep in mind as the streetlights fade over the gutter where your blood flows like wine that what goes around comes around. Your Judas proxies will someday join your shattered bones on that same dust heap where you left the Crown, that is if the melting ice caps don't drown them first. This is the way of empire, and the hustle doesn't stop until the poor people of this world join Rojava and Artsakh in thinking small and smashing the state into democracy sized pieces.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes by Soccer Mommy

*  Fake Empire by the National

*  Territorial Pissing by Nirvana

*  Livin' Thing by Electric Light Orchestra

*  Evil by Interpol

*  See No Evil by Television

*  Mountain Song by Jane's Addiction

*  Just by Radiohead

*  Bulldog Front by Fugazi

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls 

*  Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome by the Mountain Goats