The Road to a Stateless Axis of Resistance

 "Modernity is one of the most delicate and vital issues confronting us, the people of non-European countries and Islamic Societies. A more important issue is the relationship between an imposed modernization and genuine civilization. We must discover if modernity as is claimed is a synonym for being civilized, or if it is an altogether different issue and social phenomenon having no relation to civilization at all. Unfortunately, modernity has been imposed on us, the non-European nations, in the guise of civilization."

-Ali Shariati

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write."

-Michel Foucault

The American Empire has really fucked up and they have fucked up pretty predictably, in a way that so many empires before it have fucked up that it's downright cliche. America, in its infinite exceptionalism, has bitten off way more than it can chew on the world stage and created a downright formidable alliance devoted to its destruction in the process. I speak now of the Axis of Resistance, a loosely affiliated, ragtag coalition of rogue states and militias who, after decades of crushing western Frankenstein monsters like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, have finally trained their sites on America's original Middle Eastern terrorists in Israel. At first glimpse it may appear that Babylon and their Zionist proxies are winning this war, what with the mountain of dead children reaching the clouds above Gaza, but I implore you to look again.

While Israel horrifies a world with too many smartphones to ignore the Nakba anymore, Houthi rebels have launched over 60 attacks against imperial shipping in the Red Sea, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq has launched over 150 airstrikes against American bases across the Middle East, Hezbollah has made the northern region of Israel virtually uninhabitable with their own artillery barrage, and Iran has joined the melee by throwing over 300 rockets and drones into Israel's Iron Dome, all while all of the above remain under heavy sanctions and military siege by the United States and its western partners. 

The material results of this unprecedented onslaught are far less relevant than the propaganda that these deeds has delivered to a watching world and that propaganda tells us all that the power of the American Empire is worthless in the face of a few pissed off peasants with homemade drones and nothing left to lose. And while these renegades rage, those of us in the west who have stumbled over our conscience in the coverage of the slaughter in Gaza rage with them, creating the most formidable antiwar movement any empire has seen in decades.

Even if Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden manage to succeed in ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, the damage to American prestige and its malignant influence over the Islamic world may be irreversible. Israel, Babylon's bloody jewel in the desert, could very well become Uncle Sam's Waterloo and it won't be China or Russia dancing over his grave either. Those overworked wannabe superpowers are far too busy policing their own increasingly rambunctious and ungovernably massive populations. 

No, the true victors of this third-world third world war will be the militias, modern day reflections of the ancient tribes that once roamed these deserts freely before some WASP in beige short pants drew a bunch of lines all over them. We really should have seen this coming. Even before America gave those militias a crash course in three-dimensional warfare with the War on Terror, all the pieces of this set match were already firmly in place, but somehow Michel Foucault seemed to be the only white man who knew the chessboard.

You see, Iran is not the primary source of the Axis of Resistance's momentum. If that were true, their own republic wouldn't be as corrupt and toothless as any of their neighbors. While Iran has actually done very little in response to Israel's mounting atrocities, the Shia militias who are supposedly their proxies have set a thousand raging dumpster fires across the region, often while the Mullahs begged them to tone it down. That's because the Houthis and the Popular Mobilization Forces don't actually answer to Iran. 

They answer to the Islamic Revolution, a popular uprising against a wealthy and decadent western monarchy that succeeded with zero backing from any foreign world power thanks to an eclectic united front of young anti-imperialists galvanized against the spiritual emptiness of the colonial Enlightenment. This was the original Axis of Resistance, a weird coalition of communist college students and Shia clerics who looked not to Moscow or Beijing for influence, but inward towards their region's own tribal traditions that strove for solidarity through diversity. 

Tehran was never meant to be the final destination of this strangely old revolution. The more radical founding fathers of the Iranian Islamic Guards like the Fatah-trained Mohammad Montazeri and the Fidel Castro influenced Mostafa Chamran strove to form an "Islamic International" against capitalism, Zionism, and Wahabism, drawing on Ali Shariati and the Ayatollah Khomeini's notion of the "solidarity of the oppressed." 

But an impoverished nation like Iran, crippled by mounting international sanctions and sabotage, never would have been able to sustain this wild dream without the help of a meddlesome American empire constantly crashing into their backyard and changing the property lines. There would be no Sadrists without Saddam Hussein's American backed rampage against the Shia tribesmen of modern Mesopotamia. There would be no Hezbollah without the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon. There would be no Islamic Resistance in Iraq without the War on Terror.

And as this Axis of Resistance to western imperial chaos stretched and grew increasingly diverse, the Iranian government's influence over its actions and ambitions began to wane. The Sadrists lashed out openly against the Mullahs' influence over Bagdad, the Houthi rebels overthrew a dictatorship that Tehran still wanted to groom in Sanaa, and Hezbollah refused to bow to the Mullahs' corrupt quislings in Beirut. 

The Axis of Resistance may not be a traditionally anarchist arrangement, it has always been an uneasy alliance of rogue states like Iran and Syria and non-state actors like the Houthis and Hezbollah, but the fascinating thing about this arrangement is that the longer the American war machine overstays its welcome in the region, the more rogue these non-state actors seem to become, to the point where the supposed proxies are beginning to overpower the influence of their funders back in Tehran.

Both Hezbollah and the Sadrists have formed fully functioning parallel governments to the states that Iran props up within their nation's borders and the populations that they serve have rallied around these stateless alternatives to central governance, forming thriving, diverse, and autonomous communities while the states they reject rot. This same strategy of crowdsourced Islamic rebellion has proven equally successful in the new war on Zionist terrorism as well. Poorly armed militias from Hodeida to Fallujah have gone rogue to cripple international maritime trade and pin down illegal American troop movements while Washington fails miserably to stop them. Just look to the Red Sea if you don't believe men.

After bombing Houthi targets in Yemen over 148 times since January, Joe Biden has thrown up his hands and openly admitted defeat. Tim Lenderking, Biden's special envoy to Yemen, announced in early April that the administration was open to "diplomatic solutions" including ending certain sanctions and recognizing the legitimacy of the Houthi government. The Houthis thought about it for a couple of weeks and then started shooting again, even expanding their targets to the Indian Ocean while informing condescending jackals like Biden and Lenderking that they weren't interested in engaging their humanitarian blackmail.

Western anti-imperialists can learn a lot from this Axis of Resistance and at the risk of once again being declared a heretic by my fellow anarchists, maybe we should even consider swallowing our ideological puritan pride and fucking join them. After all, wasn't it a broad and diverse coalition of third world states and first world stateless actors that nearly turned the movement against the Vietnam War into an international revolution? You will never defeat a massive conglomerate of oppression like the American Empire with a single ideology. Foucault, himself a proudly decadent Queer anarchist heretic, recognized this fact and was roundly ridiculed by his fellow comrades on the left for suggesting that Islam could be a viable force against imperialism that should be taken seriously. But shouldn't it be? 

What we really need now is to make the Axis of Resistance increasingly stateless by increasing the involvement of a diverse array of stateless actors across the globe, from street fighting anarchists like antifa and the black blocks to modern day militias like the Boogaloo Boys and Black Guns Matter. From third world liberation movements like the EZLN and the YPG to first world black market entrepreneurs like the Hell's Angels and the Latin Kings.

The dream is not simply to create a stateless international coalition against empire, but to create a thousand stateless tribes that can peacefully coexist with radically divergent neighbors regardless of the empire's existence. Once we render this superpower and all superpowers irrelevant, ending their reign of terror will be as simple as blowing them away like the dead seeds of a dandelion. And the Mullahs will   evaporate into the ether right along with them.

35,000 dead Gazans is enough. It's time for the stateless left in the west to step down from their soapboxes and look east again for inspiration. Let's end this Nakba and the next one by smashing the state that subsists on such carnage once and for all and let's make weird and dangerous friends doing it.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Stop Whispering by Radiohead

* Rock the Kasbah by the Clash

* Joiner by Blondshell

* Ahead by Wire

* Cannonball by the Breeders

* Rill Rill by Sleigh Bells

* Public Image by Public Image Ltd

* Elevate Me by the Pixies

* Bad Penny by Big Black

* Slow Dog by Belly

* Atmosphere by Joy Division

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Steve Albini, an artist who understood the power of terrorizing the powerful on a budget. Godspeed you brilliant bastard. We'll keep the radio blaring for you while you're out.

The Free Palestine Movement Could Finally Make the American Left Dangerous Again

 I grew up in the American far left and I'm really not exaggerating when I tell you that the movement saved my life. I discovered libertarian socialism and its various stateless sub species at an age when I was feeling increasingly endangered as the last genderqueer kid on earth in the thick of rural Pennsylvania's conservative Catholic pedophile country. I felt about as hopelessly 'other' as it gets until I discovered the Bush-era antiwar movement and began scraping the history books for other otherized voices like mine. 

I found them buried about a mile beneath the bullshit in the lost chapter on another antiwar movement, the very distinctly 'other' antiwar movement of the sixties and seventies. Boldly countercultural voices like those of Michel Foucault, Fred Hampton, Paul Goodman, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Russell Means gave me something to believe in when I didn't even believe in myself. The fight against American imperialism at the bloody birth of the New American Century gave me a place to belong and a jihad to devote myself to long before I discovered that I wasn't in fact the last genderqueer kid on earth, and I will remain grateful for this gift unto my dying breath.

But over the last several years I have found what passes for the left in this country, even the "far left", to be disturbingly unrecognizable. I have seen an increasing willingness by so-called social anarchists to embrace downright authoritarian statism as the solution to nearly every social ill. I have seen seemingly lucid libertarian socialists galvanized behind the DNC's elderly trojan horse, Bernie Sanders, and his chickenshit saplings in the Squad. I have seen these same so-called leftists lionize neoliberal darlings like the White Helmets and Volodymyr Zelensky while making excuses for sending bombs to their friends in Al-Nusra and the Azov Battalion. Meanwhile, I have seen more consistently antiwar voices, including my own, silenced, canceled, and removed from supposedly left-wing platforms. 

I've been left with little other choice but to gasp in horror as the left that once inspired a weird teenager not to slit her wrists seems to have mutated into a censorious cult of Herbert Humphrey-style softcore social democrats willing to nail Rosa Luxemburg to the cross themselves as long as the Freikorps purge Trump from their ranks and hang a rainbow flag over the caskets of less compliant former comrades.

This grotesquely strange display of downright counterrevolutionary behavior has led me down some very strange roads in search of allies against empire. I've taken to self-identifying as a post-left anarchist and devoting myself entirely to the typically right libertarian principle of bottom unity while reaching out to other ideological heretics like so-called anarcho-capitalists, boogaloo boys, pan-Islamic nationalists, and heathen radical traditionalists. Meanwhile, I've also struggled to build a more tribal Queer identity that defies the left-right paradigm entirely and harkens back to a more primitive communal pagan consciousness. 

But at the end of the day, my heart will always bleed left. I will always be that same pissed-off Yippie anarcho-transfeminist that the Catholic Church failed to gag, and this is why I look to YouTube footage of the anti-Zionist swarms now engulfing college campuses from coast to coast with a level of cautious hope that my broken bleeding heart hasn't experienced in years.

Some call this the Free Palestine Movement, others call them Anti-Israel, but regardless of the labels, these kids have laid siege to hundreds of campuses across the country and across the globe, building nearly 80 encampments in the US alone in less than three weeks. They are jamming up traffic. They are occupying buildings. They are literally ruining parades by supergluing their bodies to the fucking blacktop. They are shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge. They are trolling Joe Biden on the campaign trail at every corner with jeers of "Genocide Joe!" They are relentless, furious, shameless, and absolutely fucking obnoxious and I couldn't love them more if they were my own goddamn children. 

All of this chaos is being raised not on behalf of some woke cause celebre, but on behalf of the most marginalized people on the planet, the 34,000+ Palestinians slaughtered in cold blood with American weapons by every liberal's favorite racist apartheid state in Israel. And the lives of millions more hang in the balance as Benjamin Netanyahu attempts to starve the Gaza Strip into submission in an open plot to push those Arab refugees into the desert wastelands of the Sinai Peninsula.

The only reason why any politician or media personality is even paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire to this holocaust is because these beautiful obnoxious brats have gotten up in their fucking faces and refused to behave until the adults in the room address the mass grave of bodies decomposing in the backyard. They have burned every bridge, crossed every Rubicon, and crushed the toes of every institution of power within stomping distance and the system is stomping back with every jackboot they can shove their bloody feet into.

Every single newspaper and network from left to right has baselessly slandered these kids as antisemites with both parties joining the synergistic corporate chorus of condemnation. The universities who rely on their student's debt to turn a profit have teamed up with local police forces taking their marching orders directly from the Department of Homeland Security to brutally evict this anti-Zionist question by any means necessary. Batons, pepper spray, tear gas, flashbang grenades, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, everything south of cluster munitions seems to be on the table and I'm sure Tom Cotton is working on that.

Sadly, this story just seems to grow more sinister by the hour with each passing detail. In Ohio and Indiana, snipers have been photographed on the rooves of campus buildings with high-powered rifles trained on unarmed students and in Denver, CBS Colorado has reported that the state's National Guard are already among the law enforcement presence, which is precisely what GOP chickenhawks like House Speaker Mike Johnson are quite openly calling for, a repeat of Kent State.

Democrats and their neocon allies however seem to prefer a more federal final solution. Joe Biden, a man whose own political rap sheet would make a grand wizard shout "goddamn!" like a Black Baptist in a white whorehouse, is calling to "aggressively implement the first ever national strategy to counter antisemitism" which would include "the full force of the federal government" to crack down on dangerous speech which that old bitch tells us has "no place on college campuses." 

Meanwhile, a bipartisan effort in the House of Representatives is being waged to send government "antisemitism monitors" to every college campus funded by the federal government as part of their College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigation and Accountability or COLUMBIA Act, which would essentially turn the Department of Education into a veritable police force in charge of stamping out anything certain racists like Joe Biden and Mike Johnson deem antisemitic.

This may all sound terrifying, but it is also the fruit of a job well done. We haven't seen so many institutions of power gang up on teenagers like this since the age of the freaks who inspired me to spit in the Pope's eye. What these kids need now is us, the scary veteran extremists who the news loves to label as outside actors, but what we really are is a sort of campus counter-police force, elders with guns and skills. We need to join these brave kids, listen to what they have to teach us and pay it forward with black blocks and AR toting militias. The left is finally coming back around again to a grade of anti-imperialism that even the Squad can't seem to assimilate, and we should take this opportunity to welcome them home with loaded arms.

And to some of my new allies outside of the left who will bitch that the campus Free Palestine Movement is little more than a different strain of identity politics; I say so the fuck what. The culture war may have corrupted the antiwar movement, but the culture itself was never really the problem, the emphasis was. The truth is that it was the culture warriors of the Black Power Movement who radicalized the antiwar movement into something Nixon needed tin soldiers to put down and both the Chicano and Gay Liberation Movements were defined by their own indigenous oppositions to imperialism. 

This is what the radical left really needs right now to become truly radical again, not politics, but a culture defined by resistance to colonialism. This is what turned me on and turned me dangerous because it made the fight for peace in far-off places deeply personal. To put another long rant short: if we can convince Generation Z that smashing the American Empire is woke, then Babylon is officially fucked. Maybe that's a big 'if' but what else do we have to lose but bodies at this point?

We've got the momentum, freaky people, so let's make it fucking happen. Let's finally make the American left dangerous again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Free Radicals by the Flaming Radicals

* For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield

* The Beautiful Ones by Suede

* All Born Screaming by St. Vincent

* Instant Karma by John Lennon

* Only by Nine Inch Nails

* I've Been Tired by the Pixies

* Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

* Riot Rhythm by Sleigh Bells

* Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young