The Lesser of Two Evils is a Democracy for Psychopaths

 Donald Trump has to be stopped. The man is a menace to democracy with an insatiable appetite for debauchery, a geriatric career gangster with a rap sheet longer than his Freudian phallic tie. The bastard has left a gruesome trail of mutilated corpses in shallow graves from Atlantic City to Jerusalem and has grievously molested nearly as many institutions as he has teenage sex workers with his greasy little orange pussy grabbers. His crimes have all been absurdly well publicized and flamboyantly brazen, yet somehow all the available polls seem to indicate that this Hammer House monster of a political supervillain could very well take the White House back with a vengeance again in 2024. The mind boggles at such madness. How? How could any sane human being possibly justify voting for such an unapologetically revolting sewer mutant? 

The answer is actually pretty simple, because Joe Biden has to be stopped. After all isn't he also a geriatric career gangster with an insatiable appetite for debauchery? Pretty much every mortal sin that Donald Trump has ever committed, Joe Biden has committed at least twice. The man is a barely veiled racist sexual predator and serial plagiarist who has built a seemingly endless career pushing Black children in front of armored police trucks before posing for selfies with Bono and telling a crowded Baptist church that he was the first white member of the Jackson Five. 

And now that crusty old bitch has added full-blown dementia to his routine. This is why the Democrats store him in a warehouse freezer in Delaware for most of the year and only cart him out when the wreckage of his administration needs to be publicly surveyed in order to prevent an all-out riot. The reasonably dire need to stop a creature like Donald Trump is the only reason why a creature like Joe Biden is even in the White House and the equally reasonably dire need to stop Joe Biden is simultaneously making Donald Trump's seemingly unthinkable return to the scene of the crime a very real possibility.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy in 2024 and everybody is doing it. While polls show the two grabbiest perverts in the convalescent home neck in neck in their crawl to the White House, they also show a country horrified by these options with CNN finding more people who despise both of these candidates than anybody who actually likes either one of them. This is the rotten fruit of the lesser of two evils, that despicably American fetish shoved down ever bored teenager's throat by jingoistic civics teachers since Jefferson was in nipple clamps.

"There are only two monsters to choose from and you have to vote for whichever one nauseates you the least, otherwise you forfeit the right to bitch about getting raped by one of them at your local drinking hole for the next four years." Fuck you, Mr. Fitzgerald, stop living in my skull. This is the twisted reasoning that has led us to a contest between the two most hated and depraved plutocrats since the last two war criminals who ran for Duce and Americans are beginning to resemble what they vote for.

In every living room, bar, and hair salon across the country you will find perfectly decent working-class human beings mounting passionate defenses for increasingly heinous crimes in the name of American democracy. You will find loving stay-at-home moms defending Donald Trump's attempts to shred the votes of other loving stay-at-home moms because Joe Biden had his flunkies in the media kick sand over the latest escapades of his crackhead son. You will hear hippie peaceniks justify Biden sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because Trump sold worse to the Saudis. This is sick and it just keeps getting worse. The lesser of two evils is nothing more than a mask of sanity to place on the face of an insatiable imperial beast, the kind of moral parlor trick that serves as the cornerstone for any psychopath and that is precisely the path that Americans have chosen. 

We are a country of descent people living comfortably in a spacious ranch house in the suburbs of the first world but there are bodies rotting in the basement and they have been there for a very long time. The imperial killer who built this house for us has done a masterful job of keeping its occupants detached from the crimes committed in our name across the globe but the chickens always come home to roost and the killers we sanction with our votes are increasingly bringing their work home with them, behaving like the dictators they sponsor in the third world while we all smile politely and wash the blood from our dishes before shouting "Everything's fine!" over the screams and power tools. We are living in a horror movie. We aren't the victims in this story yet, but we will be shortly if we don't find a way to flip the script and retake our dignity.

Had they stuck to politics, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy would have had a running shot at winning this game by 2028. After all, Ted was a handsome and charming Rockefeller Republican who worked as an assistant to the chairman of the Wahington state Republican Party and Gacy was a successful Chicago businessman whose work for the local Democratic Party earned him an audience with then First Lady Rosalyn Carter. So, which is the lesser evil? I'm fucking serious here, this is the system, isn't it? If it's Bundy vs Gacy 2028 then which is the responsible choice for American democracy? Bundy is great on taxes but pretty vile on women's lib but hey, at least he's straight and most of his victims are over the age of consent and somebody has to stop that killer clown.

Do you feel sick yet? Are you ashamed of yourself? Good, that's a start. It's a sign that you still have a functioning conscience but mark my words, you won't for long if we continue to use democracy as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable fact that America is a fundamentally evil institution, one built on genocide and slavery, one that exports mass murder and fascism to every corner of the globe, and both parties are in on it. The candidates are irrelevant. They all serve the same masters, but they are getting worse because America is getting worse, and America is getting worse for the simple reason that evil is not sustainable. Human beings are not designed to live in an amoral cesspool indefinitely. We all crack eventually beneath the weight of our sins.

So, what do we do? Who do we vote for? Here's a radical idea, how about no one? This is a rigged system, and we all know it, so, let's stop justifying its increasingly demented existence by refusing to participate in it. Even if some knight in white shining armor from a third party managed to jump the barricade, what difference would it make? You could put Eugene goddamn Debbs in charge of a slaughterhouse, and it would still be a fucking slaughterhouse. So, let's boycott the slaughterhouse and demand something better as loudly as humanly possible. Let's protest the debates. Let's hold sit-ins outside the polling stations and demand direct referendums on the war in Ukraine and the runaway police state instead of ferrying these responsibilities out to known psychopaths.

Or just simply stop engaging the American government at all. Use your campaign donations to buy a patch of dirt in the sticks and start your own goddamn government. Turn the nearest abandoned box store into a squat and turn that squat into a commune. Do what the real hippies and the Amish did, drop out of a sickening system and start living like human beings again. But whatever you do, stop making excuses for people that we all know are evil just because the other guy sickens you more. That kind of relationship is abusive and believe it or not, you deserve better than to be governed by a democracy of psychopaths. We all do.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* The Future by Leonard Cohen

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers

* Evil by Interpol

* People II: The Reckoning by Andrew Jackson Jihad

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* The House That Dripped Blood by the Mountain Goats

* Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who

* The Ballad of Jim Jones by the Brian Jonestown Massacre

* Like Dylan In the Movies by Belle & Sebastian

Revo: Portrait of an Unrepentant All-American Junkie

 "...You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good..."

-Lou Reed, American

Hey, have I ever told you guys about my friend Revo, the pansexual recovering everything-addict with a thousand lives and at least twice as many stories? There are so many, it's almost hard to know where to start. There's the time Revo stole his dealer's car with his dealer's girlfriend in it and trashed them both. Or how about the time that Revo got court martialed on terrorism charges after he threatened to blow up the Army base he was stationed at when they refused to serve him a Big Mac at the commissary during a bad acid trip? Or what about the time that an entire gang opened fire on Revo's shitty Toyota during a drug burn and the only one who caught a bullet was one of the stick-up artists? Then there's the time Revo crashed on the couch of a county sheriff in the Deep South for a whole month before that motherfucker even realized that he was harboring a wanted Army deserter. And the time that Revo's deadbeat dad faked his own death for the second time and only told his favorite bastard that he was still alive on Father's Day. Or the time that Revo woke up in a mental institution after a bender only to discover that his wife put him there so she could shack-up with his best friend. 

That's my buddy Revo, the all-American super junkie who will fuck anything that moves with an eight ball up their ass and that's probably the version of him that both he and America wants you to see. The dangerous and insatiable menace to society covered from head to toe in a shadowy camouflage of prison ink and track marks. Revo isn't even his real name, it's a nickname picked up in the joint that's short for Repeat Violent Offender. Naturally, the two of us got on from day one like a house on fire. Afterall, both of us are lifelong misfits who turned to anarchism after every other form of social arson failed to sooth the rage that we share for the society that discarded us like trash. Playing the role of the villain can feel like a safe place when you spend your life running and that's the other side of Revo that very few people ever see. My buddy Revo was born Justin Pomeroy and Justin has just as many stories.

These stories just happen to be a lot less glamorous and a lot harder to tell with that cocky meth-head grin that makes Revo come across like an extra in a pirate film. The story of a sensitive effeminate kid raised by wolves in family clothing. The story of a little boy who was sold for drugs by his own mother and molested more times than he could count before he was old enough to even know what sex was. The story of a child bounced from foster home to foster home to juvenile detention center until he was too institutionalized to see straight. A white trash scale from a busted-up town who ended up in the Army because he didn't know any other way out of the holler. A crack shot marksman who watched nearly every brother in his platoon get blown to bits killing other poor people in Iraq. A disgraced veteran who turned back to his childhood friend heroin to make the screams stop before moving on to crystal meth and doing a decade in prison for killing a man who tried to kill him during a drug burn.

These are the stories about Revo that few people ever hear, not because Revo isn't willing to tell them but because most people can't be bothered to listen. Justin is Revo and Revo is an unrepentant veteran of the War on Drugs with all the scars to prove it, but he is also so much more than that. He is a gifted artist who hands out tattoos like party favors and writes songs that burn holes through your soul. He is one of the funniest and most resourceful people that I've ever met, and I am proud to tell anyone who'll listen that I love that twisted fucking bastard like a brother. My brother just happens to have an addiction to obliterating himself in nearly every single way imaginable and it breaks my heart that we live in a country that seems to agree that this is the hellish fate that he deserves.

All of these politicians wax philosophic and cry crocodile tears over the innocent victims of America's opioid crisis, but that notion is a contrived fiction pimped out for campaign dollars. There are no innocent victims of the opioid crisis because the War on Drugs has made them all guilty. Your average dealer and indeed your average repeat violent offender is your average junkie, and your average junkie is a child abused by the same system that both parties are currently engaged in using addiction to justify putting on life support.

The Republicans are the worst, calling for people like Revo to be shot in the streets as enemy combatants of the cartels, but the Democrats aren't much better. For every dollar they promise to spend on Narcan there is another ten that they want to hurl to the bevy of industrial complexes that take kids like Justin and convert them into menacing super predators like Revo and I'm not just talking about the armies, prisons and cops. I'm talking about the blatantly abusive compulsory schools and so-called child welfare programs like the foster care system that feed them with fresh recruits of broken and institutionalized little bodies every fucking day. And way too many of these bodies are Queer for that to just be a coincidence.

Nearly every study on the subject shows that Queer kids like me and Justin experience far higher rates of physical, sexual and emotional abuse then our heterosexual playmates. We are also more than twice as likely to experience foster care placement where the Supreme Court has decided that we should be many more times as likely to face violence, exploitation, discrimination and neglect as a price for the religious liberties of parental slavedrivers. From here many of my fellow Queer child abuse survivors like Revo graduate to other beloved American institutions of systemic violence like the military where their rage and boredom are mined and weaponized to kill even more broken kids until they too break beneath the weight of the trauma and get emptied out into the streets with nothing but a prescription to numb the nightmares and an endless procession of gladhanding assholes thanking them for their service before calling the cops to have them carted off the streets.

I wish I could tell you that there is a cure for addiction just like I wish I could tell you that my buddy Revo isn't going to return to the needle again, but fairytales are for politicians, and I refuse to traffic in those kinds of narcotics just to make myself feel better. What I can tell you is that the government has never done a goddamn thing for people like Revo other than to give them more reasons to use. I can also tell you that Revo stopped using narcotics for eight months straight after joining my little Queer anarchist tribe of broken toys because we are the first family that he has ever had that hasn't demanded his sobriety in exchange for our support. We've all been hurt too many times ourselves to pretend like we have any right to judge him that way. But we also love him too goddamn much to give up on him and let him believe all the bullshit institutions that convinced a scared child that he was too broken to exist without poison in his veins. And together we carry this weight so no one has to carry it alone.

This is the only real defense that any of us have against the state, its trauma, and the addictions that they feed, and that defense is called community, any group of people more committed to each other's mutual aid than any other ideology or institution. If you really want to help a junkie, then start by remembering that addicts are just human beings doing what they feel they have to do to get by and maybe try throwing some empathy their way before pushing a bunch of laws that just make them somebody else's problem. Just a few thoughts from an unrepentant misfit who happens to love an all-American junkie. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Fall Back Down by Rancid

* In the Garage by Weezer

* Like a Friend by Pulp

* My Way by Sid Vicious

* If I Ever Leave This World Alive by Flogging Molly

* Joiner by Blondshell

* I Am Trying to Break Your Heart by Wilco

* Doll Parts by Hole

* Hardline by Julien Baker

* Pictures of Success by Rilo Kiley

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

* See a Little Light by Bob Mould

* Perfect Day by Lou Reed

The Long Shadow of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Ghost or: How the New Cold War Became Another Slave War

 And just like that, they declared the Devil dead. After a meteoric career that found him playing the role of the bane of quite literally everyone's existence, Yevgeny Prigozhin: Russian super mercenary was annihilated in a death straight out of an eighties action flick. Burnt beyond recognition in a fiery plane crash with nine of his goons just north of Moscow in the rural Tvor Oblast.

Much like the rest of Yevgeny Prigozhin's biography, his demise seemed downright improbable but that doesn't mean it isn't true. A Soviet gangster-turned hotdog vendor who had climbed his way to the top of Yeltsin's crony capitalist dystopia to spin a catering empire into a globetrotting crypto-fascist death squad, Yevgeny the Terrible burst into flames as one of the most universally despised men on the planet. A real-life supervillain whose fearsome Wagner Group nearly single-handedly turned the tide of Putin's hopeless jihad to conquer Ukraine only to bite the hand that fed him caviar and human flesh by launching a mutiny against the Kremlin that ended as quickly and as weirdly as it had begun. But then in a poof of smoke, he was gone.

My first response was 'Bullshit!' There had to be a different angle here. The whole thing just didn't add up to me. On the two-month anniversary of his highly publicized and humiliating 24-hour uprising against Putin's rule, a career killer, all-but marked for death, gets on board a private jet headed straight for enemy territory with his fucking name on the charter. I'm just not buying it. 

How do we even know if this motherfucker is really dead? The paranoid side of me is thinking that Nosferatu is living it up on a steady diet of Johnnie Walker and brown-brown down in some Sub-Saharan outback, playing warlord to a bunch of teenage dope fiends in Toyota technicals. And I tend to trust the paranoid side of me. That bitch has a pretty tight record. 

But the rest of the world seems strangely content to just except the Devil's mysterious death at face value and move on. After making a few mincingly maudlin remarks designed to cream the panties of his tankie war-blogger fan-club, Putin publicly washed his hands like Pontius Pilate and disappeared back into his hole in the Kremlin. For his part, Putin's dilapidated Yankee counterpart, Joe Biden, basically just grumbled 'Putin did it" and declared the whole thing to be a "sideshow" before cautioning us all not to get too distracted from the big picture of blowing Ukraine to bits.  

Regardless of Prigozhin's true fate, both sides of an increasingly paranoid proxy war in Eastern Europe seem to be in complete agreeance that there is nothing to see here, and this fact fascinates me more than any conspiracy theory. Usually, the moneychangers in the war rooms of Babylon jump on any narrative that makes Vladimir Putin look like Ra's al Ghul with ICBMs and their doppelgangers in the Kremlin generally aren't too far behind them, declaring every body that shows up on their doorstep to be an American false flag operation. So why not this time? Why is the burnt offering of Prigozhin's presumed corpse the only smoldering heap that these creeps refuse to poke with a stick? 

If I were a gambling gal, I would hedge my bets on the possibility that this has something to do with the fact that what old Yevgeny represents is actually a whole lot more terrifying to a world at war than anything he actually was. Contrary to popular lore, the Wagner Group were a relatively insignificant horde of neo-Nazi hitmen for the lion's share of their putrid existence, but world wars have a tendency to make mountains out of mutants. 

Founded by Prigozhin following the 2014 NATO coup in Ukraine as a way for Moscow oligarchs to hijack legitimate popular dissent among ethnic Russians in the Donbass, Wagner evolved into a cruel posse of career sadists tasked with carrying out the dirty work that even a wanna-be despot like Vladimir Putin couldn't afford on his rap sheet. This all changed in 2022 when the Kremlin once again used the plight of the Donbass as an excuse for imperial plunder. This is when Putin opened the gates of his gulags to Prigozhin and Wagner transformed overnight into a formidable army of modern-day gladiators. 

Between February and December of 2022, western intelligence sources estimate that Wagner's ranks swelled from just several thousand to nearly 50,000 with the majority of the new recruits being Russian convicts offered the opportunity to fight for their freedom. To these men, Putin's "special operation" in Ukraine wasn't about denazification or national chauvinism, it was about their own liberation from one of the most heinous prison systems on earth and they fought like starving lions to receive it. 

But Mother Russia never had any intention of living up to their end of the bargain. To the Kremlin, Wagner's new recruits were nothing but expendable sacks of meat to be chucked into NATO's woodchipper. Tens of thousands of these desperate convicts were eviscerated in waves in Bakhmut alone and even after they actually managed to win that holocaust, they found themselves under attack from the regular Russian infantry who they were ordered to hand the territory back over to.

This isn't to say that Prigozhin was some kind of Spartacus, he just played one online to keep his men in toe, bragging about his own checkered past as a convict and playing the part of the rebel warlord for the camera phones. During a period of near universal consensus on the omnipotence of Putin's military brilliance among the Russian intelligentsia, Yevgeny stood virtually alone in provocatively thumbing his nose at the Czar with social media posts trashing his Kremlin sponsors. 

I'm of the opinion that this performance only became real when Prigozhin's star grew too bright and brazen for his master's comfort. He had to be reined in, but Comrade Spartacus was having too much fun to stop. The last straw came when the generals ordered Prigozhin to hand over his private army to the regular command structure before he was done playing the bad motherfucker.

This is when Prigozhin decided to launch his mutiny, a high octane hissy fit that saw an army of heavily tattooed war slaves take a major Russian army town like Rostov-on-Don with shocking ease before being met in the streets by local civilians like heroes. It turns out that Prigozhin's populist schtick sold big with the rest of the Russian population as well. A population who clearly hates NATO but hates their own nation's military industrial complex even more. And why shouldn't they? After all, Yevgeny's Heroes weren't the only indentured servants coming home in pine boxes. 800,000 Russian citizens have been conscripted against their will in this war and over 200,000 of them have died for the vanity of the same elites whom that former hot dog vendor dared to piss on.

Even after Comrade Spartacus was bought off in some strange deal brokered by Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, the specter of a renegade army of motley slaves bringing a former superpower to its knees remained toxic to forces far greater than the Kremlin. Joe Biden and his handlers have little interest in highlighting Putin's cantankerous slave army because they themselves are currently lording over one of their own in the nation NATO loves to burn with Raytheon matches. 

The official number of Ukraine's conscripts remains a tightly guarded secret, but Volodymyr Zelensky has sealed off his borders to all men between the ages of 18 and 60 and has declared his own dirty war against a growing tide of Ukrainians trying to escape an endless fucking war that makes less and less sense to the average prole with each passing hour.

In the beginning, Ukrainian conscripts were simply tasked with defending their own cities and these poorly trained civilians kicked ass for the same reason the gulag refugees in Wagner did, they were literally fighting for their own freedom. But after Putin's army retreated back to the Donbass, these victorious freedom fighters were sent to die in someone else's city. 

Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 largely on the strength of his promise to uphold the Minsk Agreement that was supposed to end NATO's war on the Donbass by granting that region the nominal autonomy they deserve. Now, after declaring martial law and being fed a steady diet of American tax dollars, Zelensky has declared his intention to fight forever to conquer that same damn territory and the Ukrainian people are calling bullshit by deserting in droves. 

Biden and Putin don't want anyone paying close attention to this because it all highlights the fact that neither side of this stupid fucking war is actually interested in fighting it anymore and they would both prefer that Yevgeny Prigozhin simply evaporate like a hot fart in a stiff wind because alive or dead he is a terrifying reminder that any army of slaves is just one mutiny away from a revolution. 

The antiwar war movements in both the east and the west need to approach ending this holocaust like abolitionists because whether they are convicts or conscripts or just desperate teenagers from dead-end towns, your average standing army is comprised largely of what any sane anarchist should recognize as a slave. The best hope we have to end this war and all wars is to encourage the slaves on every side to revolt the same way we did with the GI Movement that sabotaged the Vietnam War in a beautiful wave of officer fraggings and mass desertions.

Yevgeny Prigozhin may or may not be dead, but abolition lives on in the throat of every soldier shouting "Sir! No sir!" to a bullshit war with zero winners outside of the fucking yacht club and that's a mutiny we should all get in on.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* All Along the Watchtower by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

* I'll Believe in Anything by Wolf Parade

* Wardance by Killing Joke

* White Collar Boy by Belle & Sebastian

* Can't You Hear Me Knocking by the Rolling Stones

* El President by Drugstore featuring Thom Yorke

* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

* This is Why We Fight by the Decembrists

* We've Gotta Get Out of This Place by the Animals

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

The Passion of Imran Khan and the Price of Aggressive Neutrality

 Imran Khan should not be confused with a hero. He is really more of a dick, which I believe is the politically correct term for 'politician' now that most westerners have soured on 'pig-raping cunt-devil.' An international cricket star with a flair for the camera, Khan was part of a global trend of wealthy conmen posing as populist savior figures. He successfully ran for Pakistan's perpetually embattled premiership in 2018 under the banner of his Movement for Justice (PTI) Party with the promise of taking on the financial gangsters in the IMF and overseeing the institution of a grand "Islamic welfare state."

What Khan delivered upon his victory was really more of a series of concessions to his fellow elites, asking Pakistan's working class to shoulder the weight of a globally mandated austerity regime while the oligarchs who financed Khan's campaign continued to count their bounty untaxed and unmolested. It's for these reasons and many more that it has been very easy to discount Imran Khan's claims to be the victim of an American conspiracy to keep him out of power as just another theatrical circus trick by a daft political acrobat but just because you're a dick doesn't mean that they're not after you.

Pakistan has been a nation in catastrophic upheaval since Imran Khan was ousted as Prime Minister after an abrupt no-confidence vote in parliament last year. Such an event can't exactly be seen as particularly shocking considering that in the last 75 years no prime minister of an elected government in Pakistan has ever completed a full fiver year term, but the timing of this latest legislative coup is more than a little suspicious. 

After Khan provoked the ire of the western foreign policy establishment by refusing to join them in freezing out Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, America's Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu, met with Pakistan's Ambassador to the United States, Asad Majeed Khan (no relation) the day before the telltale vote took place. Imran insists that the US demanded at this meeting that the Pakistani establishment, desperate for American aid, purge the prime minister from their ranks and cables recently leaked to the Intercept by anonymous military sources seem to corroborate this story. 

Unsurprisingly, Imran Khan has refused to go silently into that good night. In the months that have followed his ouster, with Pakistan teetering precariously on the brink of outright civil war, Khan's supporters in the PTI have held massive and at times downright violent demonstrations targeting the embattled playboy's former allies in the nation's notoriously corrupt military. The military in turn has lashed back with increasingly draconian crackdowns on dissidents that have seen thousands arrested and tried before military tribunals as a slew of laws have been passed crushing civil liberties, criminalizing criticism of the armed forces and granting those forces veto power over virtually all political and civil affairs.

During this time, Khan himself has been arrested, shot and arrested again as he continues an increasingly quixotic crusade to reclaim his leadership. His latest arrest on corruption charges has seen him barred from political office for five years in the months leading up to an election that most polls show Khan leading and this is where that dick's enemies find themselves in a potentially violent jam. The more aggressively the system opposes the former premier's demands for democratic restitution, the guiltier they look to a nation sick and tired of being the plaything of international power brokers, and confronting those powers was the one thing that Imran Khan did right.

For however you or I may feel about Mr. Khan and his dubious ambitions, the man is not being persecuted for the sin of corruption. That crime comes with the territory of running any state, especially in the post-colonial mire of the third world. No, Imran Khan was targeted because he is a neutralist, specifically in regard to the west's newly revived cold war against Russia and China. Secretary Lu made this quite clear during his thinly veiled threats at the Pakistani Embassy exposed by the Intercept. Before stating ominously that "I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington" that vaunted statesman mused in all his marbled omnipotence that "People here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position, if such a position is even possible."

Such a position is very possible as Khan has proved in spades. Not only had he refused to get involved in the NATO-Putin proxy war over Ukraine, but he had also strengthened ties with his neighbors in China and refused to offer the US military access to Pakistani bases as they fled their twenty-year clusterfuck with his other neighbors in Afghanistan. This is why America has slashed its military aid to Pakistan by hundreds of millions of dollars since Khan took power, sending a clear message to the Pakistani Military elites that America does not tolerate friends who refuse to share our enemies without reservation.

This is the primary reason that a jaded anarchist like me was willing to take a pig-raping cunt-devil like Imran Khan at his word on his cries of American conspiracy even before the evidence began piling up with the dead bodies in the streets. As an obsessive-compulsive student of empire, I have heard this story before, and it doesn't end well for anybody. The only thing more severe than Washington's hatred for the mortal sin of neutrality are the downright grotesque lengths that they seem willing to go to snuff it out. You can ask the ghost of Sukarno if you don't believe me.

Much like Khan, Sukarno was no hero. He was an authoritarian dick who came to be Indonesia's first president for life by collaborating with the Japanese and was more than happy to accept gifts from the American Military Industrial Complex to help him solidify his rule over a massive archipelago that never should have been consolidated beneath a single centralized authority in the first place. But Sukarno was also a wildcard with an independent streak. You know, the type of dick you'd like to share an opium pipe with. A founding father of the Non-Aligned Movement that sought to keep the third world out of the original Cold War, Sukarno insisted on maintaining ties to China and the Soviet Union and refused to crackdown on his nation's communist party, the PKI, which at 3 million strong was the largest cadre of its kind outside of the Sino-Soviet Bloc.

For these heinous alliances, our boy Sukarno had to go. After years of failed plots that involved everything from bankrolling worthy secessionist movements to producing phony sex tapes with Sukarno stunt doubles (seriously), the US used the murder of six top Indonesian generals in what now appears to have been a false flag attack to put Sukarno's top general, Suharto, in power in 1965. What followed was a year of savage bloodlust that should go down in history as one of the worst acts of mass barbarism of the past century.

Under the explicit direction of the CIA and the American Embassy in Jakarta, Suharto's military carried out the liquidation of an entire political party, slaughtering somewhere between 1 and 3 million men, women and children for their affiliation with the PKI as American officials gleefully checked thousands of names off a detailed hit list supplied to the killers. This is how America responds to aggressive neutrality. Sukarno got off easy, dying relatively comfortably under house arrest in 1970. The nation he founded has never recovered and I fear the same fate for Pakistan, specifically the mostly working-class proles in the PTI fighting for Khan in the streets. They're already being rounded up like animals. How long before America decides to finish the job with another friendly visit to the Pakistani embassy?

Dicks like Imran Khan and Sukarno don't deserve such loyalty and their willingness to sell it out has been well recorded. But this is bigger than the egos of powerful mavericks or even the empires that they chafe. This is about poor people who are sick and fucking tired of being caught between the rich and their stupid fucking wars. Why should Pakistan get involved in the Donbass any more than Ukraine should get involved in Kashmir? 

Wouldn't we all be better off if we just ended these imperial military alliances once and for all and stuck to our own goddamn neighborhoods? Wouldn't that send a far stronger message to meddling thugs like Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden? This commonsense populist approach to anti-imperialism is what a truly aggressive neutrality is really all about and this is why empires like America have to stamp it out in places like Islamabad and Jakarta. Because they know how affective the threat of a good example can be on their own unruly proles in places like Pittsburgh and Warsaw.

Our best hope as stateless anti-imperialists is to divorce these movements from the dicks and their parties as well as any other form of institutional leadership for that matter, to recognize neutrality as the only form of globalism that works because it encourages the diversity and self-sufficiency that all other forms of political universalism crush. When the non-interventionism of this civilized autonomy finally surpasses the political and returns to its proper role as a basic cultural trait implicit in every village, not only will imperialism fail, it will be rendered totally obsolete. 

My stubborn commitment to revolutionary optimism leaves me with few other choices but to grind my teeth and look forward to this day, with or preferably without Imran Khan.

Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding by Elvis Costello

* Rainy Day Woman by Bob Dylan

* Geppetto by Belly

* Your Little Hoodrat Friend by the Hold Steady

* Give It Up for Love by Georgia

* The Man Who Sold the World by Nirvana

* I Bet on Losing Dogs by Mitski

* Voices Carry by Sky Ferreira

* Victim of Love by Erasure

* See No Evil by Television

* Fire Eyed Boy by Broken Social Scene