Once upon a time there was this place called Afghanistan, a mysterious, mountainous and magical land of endless poppy fields and warlords with beards thick enough to stop bullets. A place where white men feared to tread, and empires went to die.
In fact, no white man would likely have ever even heard of this hole in the Hindu Kush if it wasn't for the fact that every pale faced vainglorious crusader going back to Alexander the Great had chosen these valleys to fall on their swords, making it the perfect setting for a fantastic geostrategic conspiracy. And so, it was here in the year of our lord nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-eight that one empire conspired to bleed another one dry by turning this mystical graveyard into one great big trap.
It was the heat of the Cold War and America was still licking its wounds after a humiliating defeat at the hands of a bunch of starving rice farmers in the jungles of Vietnam. Washington needed a win, so then-President Jimmy Carter and his Machiavellian National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brezenski, cooked up a plot too despicable to fail. Why not, they queried mischievously, give their rivals in the Soviet Union their own Vietnam?
A tumultuous series of events had recently put a left-wing government in charge of Afghanistan, a nation nestled right in the crook of the Soviet Union's contentious Central Asian borderlands. This new secular government's reforms were actually quite popular in the cities but had stirred up conflict in the rural countryside where tribal warlords were not fond of handing over their opium plantations and women to a pack of European educated atheists.
So, Jimmy used this opportunity to arm these fundamentalist gangsters to the teeth with a little help from Pakistan's American-trained intelligence outfit, the ISI, while also securing them a steady flow of Salafi psychopath recruits from our friends in Saudi Arabia.
The idea, which both Jimmy and Zbigniew have shamelessly admitted to over the years, was to create a bubbling cauldron of Islamic extremism right next door to the Soviet Union's disgruntled Muslim republics, believing that the Kremlin's quite legitimate fear of the tumult spreading would lure them into a bloody and unwinnable quagmire. It worked.
Within six months of the CIA launching this conspiracy, which would come to be known as Operation Cyclone, the Russians invaded Afghanistan and the US spent the eighties dispensing some $3 billion dollars of military aid to the warlords who killed them, a ragtag coalition of fearsome zealots who would become renowned internationally as the Mujahideen.
After a decade of bleeding like stuffed pigs in those mountains, the Soviets finally fucked off in 1989 and that left-wing government in Kabul collapsed three years later shortly after their Kremlin sponsors imploded.
Empowered by their victory over the infidels in Moscow, the now hardened warriors of the Mujahideen quickly turned on their former sponsors in Washington for their own crimes in the region. Former "freedom fighters" like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar formed new organizations from the ashes of Operation Cyclone like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and within a year of America's Afghan trap snapping shut, its much-vaunted alumni began launching attacks on our shores.
In 1993 alone, Mir Aimal Kansi assassinated two CIA agents in Langley and Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center. Both of these gentlemen were veterans of the Mujahideen, and they weren't the last to haunt their former sponsors. By September 11th these motherfuckers were hijacking commercial airliners and ramming them into skyscrapers.
This disturbing phenomenon: when sponsoring, arming, and training dangerous people attracts them directly to your doorstep, is known as blowback. Any sensible human being would take this bitter medicine and learn a hard lesson about the dangers of starting fires in other people's neighborhoods.
But neither Washington nor Moscow is run by sensible human beings, so no one learned a goddamn thing from Jimmy Carter's catastrophic Afghan trap and in 2014, we started the same fucking process all over again in Ukraine with results that only seem to shock the people intimately involved with both episodes.
When a democratically elected thug in Kiev named Viktor Yanukovych chose a Russian economic package over one presented to him by America's flunkies in the European Union, the US used open neo-fascist hooligans in organizations like Right Sector to hijack a protest movement and use it to overthrow the Ukrainian government. The puppets we put in power then wasted little time antagonizing their neighbors to the east by terrorizing Ukraine's ethnic Russian population in the Donbas region.
America further baited this trap by sending literal shiploads of weaponry to neo-Nazi mujahideen like the Azov Battalion while dangling NATO membership over Kiev like a matador with a red flag. After eight years of this game, Putin fell for it and launched a full-scale invasion into another neighboring nation that America had rigged up like the cottage in Straw Dogs.
The results were heinous and still ongoing. Gruesome war crimes have been committed by both sides and both Russia and the United States have armed and trained foreign extremists to commit the worst of these acts. This time however the target demographic is something far closer to home; pissed-off, jobless, white bros who were promised the world from their nation's respective elites and chose to take white supremacy into their own hands when their masters failed to follow through.
And it is precisely because of this proxy intimacy that the blowback has come to both sides before the war has even ended, with the fascists in the Wagner Group launching a short-lived but humiliating putsch against their sponsors in Moscow and one career loser with connections to the Azov Battalion attempting to take potshots at former President Donald J. Trump at one of his ritzy golf courses in West Palm Beach.
Ryan Wesley Routh is no fascist. He's a 58-year-old petty criminal whose political compass seems to shift with the dial of the clock. But Routh is a veteran of America's fascist proxy war in Ukraine, spending time in Kiev attending neo-Nazi rallies in the name of humanitarian interventionism and trolling the dark web for recruits on behalf of Ukraine's International Legion.
After being rejected by the Legion himself do to his age in 2022, Routh started up an organization known as the International Volunteer Center which attempted and failed to gain Visas for lunatics from Iran to Pakistan. Routh also appeared in a propaganda film made by the aforementioned Azov Battalion, posing next to boot boys with Wolfsangel flags.
While both Azov and the International Legion have worked hard to distance themselves from this globetrotting fabulist in the weeks following his aborted assassination attempt of a former American president, none other than Semafor cited Ukrainian intelligence sources in a 2023 article confirming begrudgingly that Routh was indeed authentically involved in their recruiting efforts.
Naturally, MAGA types have gone berserk trying to paint Donald Trump as an innocent isolationist victimized for his mealy-mouthed criticism of the Ukrainian crusade but they're only half right at best. It does appear that, like many Democrats and neocons, Mr. Routh blames the former president for Volodymyr Zelensky's mounting failures on the battlefield, but Trump is about as innocent of Ukrainian skullduggery as most of his critics. Truth be told, Ryan Wesley Routh is essentially just another in a long line of disgruntled employees of the Donald.
After all, it was Trump who approved the first shipment of Javelin missiles to Ukraine in 2017. It was also Trump who sent the first American naval vessels to buzz the Russian coasts of the Black Sea through his Free Transfer Program. In fact, around $850 million dollars of US military aid made its way to Ukraine under Trump's watch and the only time he even attempted to interfere with it was to get dirt on Joe Biden and his crackhead son before the 2020 election.
The only thing that Donald Trump is a victim of beyond his own pathological delusions of grandeur is the same kind of blowback that befalls all warmongers who outlive their usefulness to the extremists they arm, and he won't be the last.
Neo-Nazis with connections to Azov have already been busted smuggling weapons from the Ukrainian battlefield into both France and Italy, and that same battalion has also hosted get-togethers with America's Atomwaffen Division, a White Power outfit recently caught plotting attacks on the power grid. And with every tirade that Donald Trump launches against pet-devouring Haitian migrants, he only hands another bucket of fuel to this fire.
You see dearest motherfuckers, America loves convoluted conspiracy theories, which I guess is the privilege of people throwing stones in iron domes, but we really don't need Manchurian candidates or inside jobs to explain why our elected psychopaths keep getting shot at. America is a nation that ships war to every corner of the globe and every once in a while, that war follows us home and cracks the shell of our iron domes. And someday, maybe someday soon, those domes are going to shatter just like they did in Moscow in 1992.
Wake up and smell the napalm people, it's coming back around again.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Baby Blue by Badfinger
* Provisional by Fugazi
* The Pretender by Foo Fighters
* White Minority by Black Flag
* Dirty Boots by Sonic Youth
* Sacrilege by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
* Back In the USSR by the Beatles
* Runner by Alex G
* Triptych by Samia
* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground
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