The Hypocrisy of Condemning Political Violence in a Violent Empire

 Some kid took a shot at an ex-president the other week and apparently, we're all supposed to feel bad about it. The same news jackals who cobbled together half a career on pretending to be outraged every time Donald Trump tweets something racist are now pretending to be concerned that someone would even dare to shave that fascist baboon's ear with one those AR death machines they usually love to howl about. Why, even rival politicians, just finished telling packed churches full of old Black ladies that Trump is on the cusp of reanimating the corpse of Andrew Jackson if they fail to vote for a demented dinosaur who used to shoot pool with him, automatically switched gears and called for calm.

All I can say to these censorious theatrics from the fear mongering class is you can all kiss my fat, Queer, Irish ass. A man does not cease to be a dick the moment the chickens come home to roost. Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate firing fucking rifles into crowds of people, and I think it's tragic that some decent seeming people got shot just for attending a rally, but I am not about to watch my language just because a baby killing rapist has made himself a magnet for the bullets he sells.

I honestly don't even get why this is so fucking shocking. The only shocking thing is that it didn't happen sooner. Aside from the fact that Donald Trump is an overprivileged loudmouth who goes out of his way to jam his tiny orange pecker into the eye of anybody with their arms tied behind their back, the man was an American president and the last time I checked, that was still a criminal title. 

If you don't fucking believe me then just ask Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Chile or any of the other 40+ governments that ours has overthrown over the last 80 years. Or maybe you should go ask the ghost of Patrice Lumumba or Salvador Allende, who were actually successfully murdered with American presidential approval just for being fairly elected in a third world democracy. And this ain't just some ancient history lesson either. 

On any given day, the American war machine slaughters entire families in Somalia with glorified toy planes, trains fascist goons in the Donbass to lob ATACMs at tourists in Crimea, sends truckloads of tank shells to verified hospital bombers in Israel, teaches Kenyan police officers how to hook jumper cables up to peaceful protestor's junk, facilitates sanctions on starving earthquake survivors in Afghanistan, and illegally occupies Syria's oilfields so they can't rebuild schools that ISIS leveled with our rocket launchers. 

And every single one of these crimes and a thousand more comes with the stamped approval of the highest office on earth, the Presidency of the United States of America. So, when I tell you that any motherfucker who has ever held that office is a goddamn mafia don, I am not being hyperbolic or engaging in inflammatory rhetoric. If anything, I'm underselling the danger and Donald Trump spent four years engaging in that institutional danger with all the hopped-up giddiness of a crackhead on Christmas. 

This is a man who took Barack Obama's drone strike arcade and somehow buried that previous war-criminal-in-chief's high score in one term. We'll never have the exact number of civilians killed because that orange bastard also made the death toll a state secret but in just four years the Trump White House openly declared 205 drone strikes in Yemen, 196 strikes in Somalia, and broke the twenty-year record in Afghanistan two years in a row, with 7,362 bombs dropped in 2018 and 7,423 in 2019.

This murder spree included a drone strike in the Khost province in 2019 that wiped out an entire family on their way home from the maternity ward and another massacre the same year in Nangarhar that killed 30 farmworkers and injured 40 more. So, when does that sick bastard kiss their helmets and comfort their widows and orphans? And when does the media who only shuts up about Trump when he's killing children or being killed by them call for a pause on demonizing the Taliban or the Houthi rebels?

Let's also not forget that Donald Trump is an assassin in his own right and one with much better aim than Thomas Crooks. This is the man who had Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani, wacked in an extrajudicial execution along with 9 others at a busy international airport in Bagdad and he still brags about it at every fucking rally. He was probably warming up to make jokes about the leaders he's assassinated when Crooks Reservoir Dogged his ear. So, what makes this ex-president any different than his own would-be killer?

The ex-president is all powerful. America's despots and murderers are the most powerful despots and murderers on the planet and that makes them special. That makes them above the law or even serious moral scrutiny and even a mass media apparatus that despises Donald Trump for soiling this illusion of omnipotence with his shameless decorum is committed to protecting the sanctity of his untouchable status in order to preserve the power it represents. 

This is why, even after whacking the leaders of his own client states in the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam, the Fourth Estate insisted that we all get traumatized when someone popped off JFK. This is why, after a summer packed full of racist police riots, the political class only really lost their shit when a bunch of diabetic boomers tore up the Capitol Building on January 6.

The sanctity of American power must be preserved at all costs. Otherwise, who would pay those idolatrous scions of the self-proclaimed free press in speedboats to lick boots? They might be forced to slum it with their brethren in the North Korean news corps instead. 

So, a killer shooting another killer and a gang launching a riot at another gang's clubhouse have to be rendered unspeakably shocking. Otherwise, people might use their God given common sense to recognize that the only thing that makes powerful people any different than the rest of us is that powerful people have constructed a propaganda empire designed to fool us into believing that the rules don't apply to them.

But they do, and if petty psychopaths like Mr. Crooks or Lee Harvey Oswald or that QAnon Shamen serve any real purpose it's that they remind us that every mammal is made of meat and every building can be burned down. If the masses were left alone by the propagandists to figure this out for themselves, truly shocking things might occur. The most heavily armed nation on the planet might all aim their AR-15s at Washington at once and demand their money back. The nation's swelling homeless population might just decide to crash at the White House and keep it.

Even worse, the next time some draft-dodging pussy in presidential robes demands that some kid from the sticks go kill other poor people in some far away country, that GI might tell him to go fuck himself and wouldn't that just be so goddamn offensive?

So, I'll say it again, just one more time, so even the censors in the cheap seats can hear me loud and clear; Every American president is a killer and every killer lives and dies by the same sword. If saying this out loud makes me so damn dangerous then why don't you just fucking shoot me. Or maybe you're just not presidential enough to be that big of a hypocrite yet.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* This Charming Man by the Smiths

* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

* Lawyers, Guns & Money by Warren Zevon

* Charmless Man by Blur

* Dot Dash by Wire

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* 21 by Samia

* God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols

* Public Image by Public Image Ltd.

Rethinking Antifascism in an Age of Constitutional Despotism

 America is supposed to be the greatest democracy on earth, right? I know this because we have at least fifty goddamn holidays a year shouting it at us from the night sky in burning lights. Still, I feel compelled to ask, because it only took five unelected judges to declare our president to be infallible and his Executive Office to be above the law. 

I speak of course about the first attempted criminal prosecution of an American president for his actions in office, in which the Supreme Court largely sided with one Donald J. Trump along partisan lines by declaring that the President of these great United States of America enjoys near absolute immunity for any crime which he or she deems to be an "official act." 

In the dissent to this absurd ruling, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor summed up the likely results of the decision quite succinctly. "When "the President" uses his official power in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

The conservative justices balked like braying gulls at high tide over the supposed hyperbole of this dissent but if anything, it doesn't go far enough. While Trump V. United States certainly makes it frighteningly clear that the White House is essentially a despotic device, this can only be construed as a revelation to someone who spends two thirds of the year hibernating two miles up their own asshole. 

In fact, it was actually under Donald Trump's much-beloved predecessor, Barack Obama, that the Executive Office was first officially awarded the authority to murder American citizens by decree through a shadowy drone strike program which has already been used to kill thousands of innocent civilians across the globe.

And when this extrajudicial assembly line of despotic slaughter was finally brought before a federal judge in 2016 by the ACLU in a lawsuit on behalf of three slain Americans, one of them a 16-year-old boy, the judge openly admitted that Obama likely violated the due process of a child but threw out the case anyway, spouting off about the sanctity of national security and executive power.

This is an absurdly despicable opinion which Mrs. Sotomayor herself apparently shares as she chose to defend herself from charges of hyperbole by fellow lifetime members of her unelected judicial junta by protesting that Trump was not "doing it like President Obama... to protect the country from terrorism, he's doing it for personal gain." 

This sick moral logic actually cuts right to the dark heart of liberal Trump hysteria. People like Sonya Sotomayor and her fellow dissenting judges aren't really frightened at all by the gross power wielded by the Executive Office, a power they all know and acknowledge is a matter of life and death. They are simply offended that an oafish lout like Donald Trump doesn't bother to shield his despotism with lofty peons to national security and the greater good.

This is because America has long been a fascist state that uses a scalped constitution like Buffalo Bill's "woman suit" to conceal its nasty bits, and this ghastly practice is far from unusual. While America certainly tucks its despotism with all the poise and skill of a world class drag queen, it is far from the first fascist state to use liberal democracy to facilitate its rise to absolute power. It's actually a pretty standard procedure in this trade and you can look no further than Nazi Germany for the blueprint.

After the November Revolution brought down the German Empire during the waning hours of the First World War, its military elites in the Freikorps and their bourgeoise industrialist patrons made a deal with the supposed liberal progressives in the Social Democratic Party to form a constitutional democracy provided that these Social Democrats sold out their more radical comrades and allowed the same elites they raged against to retain their status and power behind a more politically correct facade.   

For a while it worked, with the so-called Weimar Republic enjoying what at least held all the trappings of a very socially tolerant secular society. But the seeds of the Third Reich were sown right into the Republic's constitution which afforded its own executive office with the right to override the Reichstag through emergency decree with its infamous Article 48. 

The nation's first president, a Social Democrat named Friedrich Ebert, made regular use of this democratic device for despotism to keep the rabble in line, as did his predecessors, including Paul Von Hindenburg, whose presidency the SPD backed in the name of national unity and who paved the road to the Holocaust with democratic pavement by appointing Adolf Hitler as his chancellor. And how did young Hitler justify his proceeding attempted takeover of Europe? With a call for national security of course after the Reichstag burned down during his own little January 6.

None of this is coincidental nor anomalous. Nearly every fascist state is midwifed by a liberal democracy because both are little more than the playthings of the same greedy elites attempting to hoodwink the powerless while they rob them stupid. 

The one thing that the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany all had in common was that they all shared the exact same nest of conniving oligarchs running the show behind the curtains. Monied creeps who simply shifted the excuses to maintain their grip on power with different parties and ideologies. In fact, many of these vermin even helped the United States to "rebuild" the Europe they blew to bits as part of the newly liberal government of West Germany.

All of this is part of a cyclical process of degenerative statism that often begins with some kind of divinely inspired monarchy, matures into a more secular republic, and then embraces an openly militant call to despotism as its public begins to catch on to the charade, often before simply repeating the cycle all over again. 

The communists often refer to the fascistic stage of this process as "late capitalism" and their analysis of its liberal roots remains right on the money, but these Marxist historians also typically fail to recognize that state communism is merely another part of the same cruel process. After all, didn't Czarist Russia become a social democracy before the Bolsheviks crashed in to preserve the order by declaring the Comintern to be the new aristocracy until it was time for Stalin to play Further?

This isn't to say that fascism isn't a problem. Fascism is an existential threat to basic human dignity, but it will never be stopped until we address the fact that it is merely the inevitable end result of the state itself, a system defined by giving a single sainted class a monopoly on the use of force. Once that precedent is set with standing armies and "national security," fascism essentially becomes a forgone conclusion. Therefore, the only way to truly confront the fascist menace is to confront the state itself, specifically the police state, and the only thing that committed antifascists really need to do to achieve this goal is to maintain their tactics while shifting their focus.

Targeting hooligans like the Proud Boys or even just one single wannabe Further like Donald Trump is little more than an act of treating the symptoms of a much larger disease and it often actually only tends to provide that disease with more opportunities to justify its own existence by offering its aid in fighting its own symptoms. This is how you get a career white supremacist like Joe Biden running to save us all from Satan's power while beefing up the same police state that Trump sicked on peaceful protestors, only this time in the name of preventing MAGA extremism.

Antifascists should be infiltrating, sabotaging, and doxing the police state itself along with its corporate sponsors and their role models should be post-modern cyber revolutionaries like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, who have risked their lives to expose the guts of the fascist machine, as well as hacktivist sets like Anonymous who have actively sabotaged it. This can even be taken a step further by taking a page from counter economic pioneers like Ross Albricht, who gave us a sample of a viable alternative to corporate state subsistence with the black markets of his new Silk Road.

Despotism at its most cerebral is a very creative beast that will require equally creative solutions to destroy it. Covert fascists like Justice Sotomayor are actually far smarter than their conservative counterparts to conceal their despotism behind a veneer of liberal democracy but the power will always belong to the people who are just creative enough to realize that they are only as powerless as they believe they are. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* People Have the Power by Patti Smith

* Power to the People by John Lennon

* Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols

* Big Wheel by Samia

* Funny You Should Ask by the Front Bottoms

* The Bends by Radiohead

* White Riot by The Clash

* The Crying Game by Boy George

* Where is My Mind by the Pixies

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

A Message to "Libertarians" Backing a Baby Killer to Spite Trans Kids

 It all began with a brazen and reckless pre-dawn raid in the desert wilds of Yemen. Seal Team 6 hit the ground shooting on the dusty streets of Yakla after lighting the village up with Reaper drones. The peasants put up a fight, one Seal was killed and two were wounded, but it was little use. By the time the sun rose on Yakla that morning it was strewn with body parts and smoldering in ashes. Among the dead were some 30 civilians including 8 women and 7 children, with the youngest slain by American heroes at the lethal age of 3 years old. 

But one victim of this onslaught stood out among the others. An 8-year-old American citizen named Nora al-Awlaki was the third member of her immediate family killed on military orders issued from on high with White House executive authority. Nora's father was the notorious Islamic propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, and in 2011 both he and her 16-year-old half-brother had been extrajudicially assassinated by drone strike within a week of one another under the orders of then-President Barack Obama.

Little Nora's own execution came under the orders of one Donald J. Trump however, at the end of that man's first week in the Oval Office in early January of 2017. She bled to death in agony in her mother's arms over a period of two hours while that knuckle-dragging fiend-in-chief gorged himself on Big Macs and Diet Cokes. Her last words were, "Don't cry, mama, I'm fine." 

And just like that, after less than one week in office, Donald Trump graduated from a sleezy, rapacious, corporate welfare queen to a full-blown baby killer. But anyone foolish enough to be shocked didn't have to dig deep to find that this brazenly cruel war crime was merely another campaign promise fulfilled. "The other thing with terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families." He had boasted vainly on the campaign trail. Mission accomplished.

But President Trump wasn't done killing babies in Yemen. In fact, he was just getting started. As Gulf State lobbyists carefully messaged his son-in-law's prostate, the Donald accelerated his predecessor's already genocidal proxy war on the poorest nation in the Arab Peninsula. With a little help from Trump's golf buddies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he and Obama slaughtered 377,000 people by the end of Donald's first term in office. 60% of these people died from starvation and disease made possible by a US facilitated blockade and more than half of the dead were children under the age of five. Now this orange baby killer is back and he's calling to take Genocide Joe's own proxy war on the children of Gaza to new levels of unapologetic cruelty. 

Biden has already aided and abetted the hyper-Zionist government of Bibi Netanyahu in committing what might just barely surpass the massacre in Yemen as the most heinous act of genocide of the 21rst century. The official death count stands at nearly 40,000 in just under a year, with 15,000 of those bodies belonging to children but the Lancet has recently projected those numbers to be closer to 186,000 dead, and this apparently isn't heinous enough for Donald Trump. In fact, he has actually accused Genocide Joe of being a "bad Palestinian" and has promised to help his old cronies in Israel to "finish the job."

And somehow, this is the man that many members of the leadership of the Libertarian Party, my party, are lining up to offer their support too. The only thing more bizarre than a bunch of so-called anarchists and minarchists backing a man who quadrupled the deficit to put undocumented children in concentration camps is that they actually have a solidly non-interventionist candidate on the ballot, a 38-year-old gay antiwar activist named Chase Oliver. 

But according to the Mises Caucus who now runs the party, Oliver is too "woke" for libertarian consumption. Some of this is just sour grapes. After allowing Donald Trump to turn their biennial Libertarian National Convention in DC into a MAGA circus by awarding him the keynote speaking slot, the Mises Caucus managed to secure the Party Chair for another term for Angela Mcardle but failed to get their candidate, Michael Rectenwald, the party's presidential nomination.

However, poor losers aside, I find it a bit hard to ignore the fact that most of the people publicly rejecting Oliver's candidacy, often in favor of tacitly backing Trump, list the man's support for respecting the rights of parents with transgender children to make their own medical decisions first and foremost among his unforgivably "woke" sins.

This includes both the Montana and Colorado state Libertarian Parties who have declared that they will not even put Oliver's name on the ballot. Idaho is contemplating doing the same and Chairwoman Mcardle appears to be right there with them. In a post-convention video address, the head of my party's national leadership appeared in a clown nose before a rainbow backdrop and proceeded to faun over a man who spent more tax dollars than nearly any other president in history like a lovesick fangirl. 

"Donald Trump says he's going to put a Libertarian in a cabinet position. He came out and spoke to us. He said he's a libertarian. He has basically endorsed us." Mcardle gushed shamelessly before making her loyalties crystal clear. "And so, in return, I endorse Chase Oliver as the best way to beat Joe Biden. Get in loser, we are stopping Biden. That's what I think this campaign is about."

Speaking as a genderqueer libertarian antiwar activist, I dearly wish that any of this trash was shocking to me, and it probably should be. The GOP has been on a big government jihad against trans kids for years now, violating every civil liberty imaginable to erase them from existence. But the Mises Caucus and their leadership in the Libertarian Party have made their feelings about my community very clear. 

After skuttling an attempt to add support for the civil liberties of trans people to the party's platform earlier this year, a leaked internal party memo labeled "transgenderism" as a Cultural Marxist conspiracy that needs to be thwarted and sadly this line of bullshit jibes perfectly with many of the Mises Caucus' ideological torch bearers like Rectenwald and Mcardle who spout baseless conspiracy theories about puberty blockers chemically castrating children.

Please allow me to rip the needle from the record right now. Puberty blockers have been used safely for decades to treat precocious puberty in cis children. The Mayo Clinic has found them to cause little to no permanent physical changes, but studies have consistently shown them to reduce suicidality in one of the most vulnerable populations of young people in this country by as much as 73% and I'm not even asking you fucking people to grow up and support a medical treatment proven to be effective in saving lives. I am merely asking that my party stand by its goddamn word and support the right for Queer kids and their families to exist without having the jackboot of the state stepping on our throats.

I am asking you to keep the government out of our schools where they are banning books and policing public bathrooms. I am asking you to keep the government out of our doctor's offices where some states are trying to interfere with the medical decisions of individuals well into their twenties. And I am asking you to keep the government off our streets where states like Florida and Tennessee want to use anti-drag laws to penalize any gender performance that they deem to be "male and female impersonation." But more than anything, I want you to put shutting down the war machine that mangles other people's children like little Nora al-Awlaki before your culture war bullshit and this is what the Mises Caucus itself was supposed to be all about. 

Formed in 2017 in revulsion to the Libertarian Party putting a known neocon warmonger named Bill Weld up for VP on the 2016 ticket, Mises was supposed to be a revival of the anti-imperialist values of anarchists like Murray Rothbard who founded this party. I have good friends and loyal allies in this caucus, fellow radicals who share my revulsion for compulsory schooling and my support for secession, both of which I view as indispensable tools for Queer liberation. 

But over the last few years I have seen this caucus polluted by the braindead talking points of Christian Zionist globalists and this is the other objective of the GOP's war on trans, to use cultural prejudices to hoodwink well-intentioned isolationist populists into supporting big government, baby killing scum like Donald Trump.

Sadly, it appears to have worked and this is why this post should not be misconstrued as an endorsement for Chase Oliver or any other candidate. A decade ago, I would have been happy to endorse this fatherfucker for the same reasons that I would have been happy to endorse Ron Paul or Eugene Debs for that matter. Because I would have wanted the most unapologetically antiwar candidate to have the loudest microphone that I could throw them. But in 2024, American presidential elections aren't even affective for protest votes. The process itself has become a device for dividing oppressed people of every stripe against each other.

Before the GOP's war on woke, I had no problem building alliances among even the most culturally conservative libertarians. Now, my own party treats me like a fucking pedophile because I want to keep other trans girls from getting molested in men's bathrooms like I was, and because I need to stop my government from killing any more children, whether their name is Nora al-Awlaki or Nex Bennedict.

If this is what democracy looks like, then I am done with fucking democracy and the morons it plays like one of Donald Trump's cheap casino games. 

You people can vote for whoever the fuck you want but don't you dare go calling your appeasement for genocide at home and abroad libertarian or I'll kick your fucking ass.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* (I'm) Screwed by Titus Andronicus

* See No Evil by Television

* All I Do by Bully

* Lexicon Devil by the Germs

* Someone Tell the Boys by Samia

* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voivods

* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus

* My War by Black Flag

* Bored by Waxahatchee

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

Every American War is Bullshit: Exposing the Myth of the 'Good War'

 America has a problem but don't worry, because we can stop anytime we want. I speak of course of America's bottomless appetite for warfare, the fact that we can't seem to go fifteen minutes without lighting up a third world country like a fucking spliff. But this doesn't make us addicts, we just like to fuck around and blow shit up once in a while to let off some steam after a long day. I mean, we quit Afghanistan after like twenty years and we kind of quit Iraq. We could totally go cold turkey and put America first if we wanted too. 

But let's just send a few more bombs to Ukraine first. And maybe just one more drone strike in Somalia, you know, for old times' sake. And then maybe just a quick invasion of Haiti and another freedom of navigation drill in the South China Sea and a few more sanctions on North Korea and a couple more NATO members and another base in Okinawa and a quick quagmire in Yemen and a few more child soldiers in Rojava and just one goddamn holocaust in the Holy Land, maybe two, or three, or five, or fuck it, give us World War Three!

OK, so maybe America has a tiny little addiction. Oh, let's just face it, we're fucking war junkies, Sid and Nancy grade shit, sucking off Raytheon behind the missile silo for just one last fix. But as long as we're having this moment of clarity here, why don't we just put it all on the table right now. We may be an empire of fiends who crave war crimes like a baby craves tits, but this is far from a new condition, and we are all infected. Even your average marching pacifist in this country seems to view America's appetite for destruction as little more than an aberration in an otherwise stoic national history and every so-called non-interventionist seems to carry room in their heart for at least one exception that proves the rule. That one good war, you know, the one where we played the good guys for real and saved the day for just one bright shining moment.

But this is all bullshit. Every single American war has been bullshit. They all come with different excuses and some of them are pretty goddamn convincing but every major conflict that this country has ever engaged in has been motivated by greed and power, and every single war we've fought has ended the exact same way, with piles of bodies, fewer civil rights, and a growing thirst for more.

Even our so-called Revolution, which so many otherwise peaceful libertarians hold in such high regard, was little more than another blood thirsty power grab. Let me be frank here, even I can get behind a good old-fashioned grass roots revolution as an act of societal self-defense, but the idea that you can have any kind of real revolution on illegally occupied territory is absurd. The American Revolution was really more of a colonial mutiny. A bunch of slave-trading Indian killers got tired of kicking up to the Crown and after catching wind that the British were making moves to curtail some of their slave trading and Indian killing, they went all Colonel Kurtz on their ass and declared their encampment to be a sovereign nation.

"But what about the Civil War?" I can hear some bright young social justice warrior call out from the back row. Surely, the fight to free the slaves is an exception, and maybe it would have been if that bloodbath was actually motivated by slavery. Don't get me wrong, the Confederacy was a racist cartel of genocidal scumbags who seceded specifically so they could keep buying, selling, raping, and killing human property. But the Union didn't give one solitary fuck about the slaves, and they pretty openly admitted as much on multiple occasions. 

Abraham Lincoln himself was an outspoken white supremacist and he and pretty much all of his Republicans whole heartedly endorsed the original 13th Amendment, passing it in both the Senate and the House, which explicitly prohibited the federal government from interfering with southern slavery and served as a much-touted justification by Dixie to secede on constitutional grounds. The South may have been motivated by slavery, but the North was motivated by consolidating their power and fortifying the Executive Office. The biggest results of that slaughterhouse, aside from millions of dead bodies, was the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the transplanting of Black bodies from the agrarian chattel slavery of the plantation to the industrial wage slavery of the factory. Frederick Douglass himself proclaimed in horror that he couldn't tell the difference, but the industrialists who lined Lincoln's pockets sure as fuck could.

And then of course we have our sainted World Wars, where America the indispensable saved humanity from fascism in the name of world peace and global democracy. Yeah, sorry progressives, but that's just more imperial bullshit. The First World War was a senseless imperial clusterfuck with a bunch of antiquated empires like France, Germany, Russia, and the UK clawing each other's eyes out over their dwindling spheres of influence. After about three years of this shit, everybody involved was pretty much ready to call it quits and negotiate a settlement. Then Woodrow Wilson jumped into the mosh pit to keep the bloodbath running so he could achieve his dream of establishing America as a progressive global superpower and use his massive new war powers to reorganize the economy beneath a cartel of massive corporations while simultaneously reorganizing the Constitution beneath an engorged police state.

That white devil also set the stage for the next World War by putting all the debt from the first one on Germany with the Treaty of Versailles. But wasn't America attacked at Pearl Harbor? Technically, yes, but FDR and his thugs went out of their way to make this attack inevitable, goading the Japanese with a crippling oil embargo, shaming their Diet when they visited Washington to negotiate, and placing the US Pacific Fleet on their doorstep by relocating it to the recently colonized territory of Hawaii. Germany never would have declared war on the US if it wasn't for Pearl Harbor. Hitler had already basically lost the war in Stalingrad and was actually pretty committed to avoiding stretching himself any thinner in the Atlantic.

But the US wanted to finish what Wilson started. So, once again, we jumped into another imperial bloodbath between dueling monsters at the last minute to cravenly poach the spoils of war and we did so with a campaign of shocking terrorist attacks designed to send a message to the world that we were the Nazis now. Entire cities were torched to the ground in massive napalm attacks. 100,000 people in Tokyo, another 600,000 in Hamburg, Dresden, and Cologne. By 1945, Japan was begging for a peace deal, but we dropped two nuclear bombs on them anyway just to make sure that Stalin got the message. 

Sound like a pretty good fucking war to you?

Over the decades, the battlefields and the boogeymen kept changing but the results were always the same. Another 4 million people burnt alive in Korea, another 5 million in Vietnam, dictators and death squads and mujahadeen armed to the teeth and trained in butchery, all in the name of fighting the evils of communism. But then communism falls, and we start more wars with those same dictators and death squads and mujahadeen. The so-called War on Terror creates another killing field for another 4.7 million bodies and America gets bigger, our corporations get richer, and our police state becomes more severe.

Enough! Enough bullshit wars already. America needs to end this demented addiction before it ends us all in a nuclear overdose. The first step isn't just admitting that we have a problem. The first step is ripping up the toxic mythology of the good war and admitting that we've always had a fucking problem, that war itself is the problem. The only good excuse for violence is self-defense and you can't defend yourself when you are constantly crashing someone else's property. It's time for a different kind of intervention. It's time for dope-sick Americans to join the rest of the world in defending ourselves from the disease of American imperialism. And it all starts with us finally admitting that every American war is bullshit.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Killing in the Name Of by Rage Against the Machine

* Just One Fix by Ministry

* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

* I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground

* Sick of Myself by Matthew Sweet

* Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth by the Dandy Warhols

* Head On by the Jesus and Mary Chain

* Faith Healer by Julien Baker

* Hit So Hard by Hole

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