Opposing War Should Not Be a Partisan Issue

 America is deeply engaged in two simultaneous and rapidly expanding proxy wars that could both very easily end in a nuclear third world war... 

I want you to sit down with that sentence for a couple of minutes because it is a fact that no one denies and a point that gets chucked around a lot on the campaign trail of our current presidential election circus, but I don't feel like anyone with power is really homing in on the downright existential insanity at play here. 

NATO is supplying a conscripted slave army in Ukraine with deadlier and deadlier machinery as Kiev launches the first foreign invasion on Russian soil since Operation Barbarossa in the Kursk region. Meanwhile, America continues to arm Bibi Netanyahu to the fucking teeth and shield him with goddam aircraft carriers while he slaughters Arab babies on live television and bombs everyone and anyone in the neighborhood who tries to get involved.

Both of these conflicts are the result of America's vampiric imperial foreign policy. Both of these conflicts are pretty much guaranteed to drag the world deep into Dr. Strangelove country if they haven't already. And both of these conflicts would end in a week if Uncle Sam simply closed his checkbook. Where the fuck is the antiwar movement? Well, they're busy going to war with each other at your local diner over which candidate is a marginally less repulsive sack of shit and which nuclear Armageddon is worth being more freaked out about. 

An unprecedented amount of red meat rural Americans in flyover country are sick to death over seeing huge gobs of their tax dollars going to blow shit up in Ukraine but most of these same nouveau-isolationists have also been deluded into believing that we should send even bigger gobs of their hard-earned cash over to Israel so they can blow up orphanages and maternity wards in Gaza. On the flipside, kids on the left have never been more willing to confront the sacred cow of the Israel lobby on behalf of one of the most marginalized populations on the planet and yet they are still too terrified of being labeled as a Putin puppet to take down their Ukrainian flags and hold Volodymir Zelensky to the same standard.

Once again, dearest motherfuckers, we have come to the part of my weekly diatribe where I inform you that this is no coincidence. This is in fact the entire point of the two-party system, to divide and conquer, to sic poor people on poor people, to chop the country into color coordinated warring parties like the Crips and the Bloods so that you rubes are all too busy ripping each other's throats out and riding dirty on drive-byes to realize that the same oligarchs win no matter who's left standing because they supply the TEC-9s.

The only difference this time is that the empire they represent is getting too violently reckless to hide behind abortion clinics and gay bars alone. So, they have you fighting over which war to stop first. Which nuclear holocaust do you find more alarming? Do you want to die in the desert or the steppes? What form of imperial suicide are you willing to kick your neighbor's ass to defend?

Aside from what should be the fairly obvious notion of 'Hey stupid, let's just stop bombing people', there is also the fact that there is nothing particularly special about either one of these fatted proxies that we are being prodded into coddling with weapons of mass destruction. To put it simply, if you oppose one you should probably oppose the other for the same damn reasons. Israel and Ukraine, or rather what America's steady diet of missiles and lobbyists have turned these countries into, are equally grotesque fanged manifestations of Westphalian orthodontia.

Everything that conservatives hate about Ukraine they should hate about Israel. After all, what is Israel but the original Ukraine? A toxic, tax sucking, moocher state with about as much regard for the sanctity of human life as your garden variety back-alley abortionist. Israel slurps down $3.8 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars a year so they can build condos for Ashkenazi atheists on the ruins of Jesus Christ's tomb. And don't even give me that shit about these ghouls being America's number one ally. This is an ally that openly spies on our universities, businesses, and government facilities and has been directly implicated in tampering with CIA equipment in the Holy Land and in engaging in criminal espionage in the homeland.

This is an ally who has illegally acquired hundreds of nuclear warheads and literal tons of biological weapons and still demands that we go to war forever with any Arab on the block that they frame for possessing weapons of mass destruction. This is the ally that lobbied your local congress goon to vote for every bullshit war that your nephew lost a limb in. And these weren't the first Americans they've killed either, because this is also the ally who attacked the USS Liberty in 1967, murdering 34 American crew members and wounding 171 others with torpedoes and napalm in what appears to have been an attempt to hoodwink us into nuking Egypt for them during their Six-Day War. 

And to all my fellow social justice warriors righteously rising up against genocide in Gaza, everything that sickens you about Benjamin Netanyahu should also sicken you about Volodymyr Zelensky because the longer NATO's crusade cranks on in Ukraine, the more those two crooks look like the same fucking guy. Let's not forget that long before Russia invaded, America's coup-appointed proxies in Kiev launched a bloody eight-year war against the people of the Donbas, killing some 14,000 people, most of them Russian-speaking civilians, with cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and neo-Nazi mercenaries, all because they asked for a divorce when Kiev tried to ban their language.

None of this justifies Russia's own sickening behavior but Russia's sickening behavior hardly justifies Zelensky's either. A man popularly elected to end the savagery in the Donbas is now sending Ukrainian conscripts to die in Russia in an insane scheme to take it back by force. All the while this little Putin has used his unlimited war powers to nationalize Ukraine's tv news, lock up journalists, ban 11 opposition parties, shutter his nation's largest Orthodox church, and hold off presidential elections indefinitely. Does that honestly sound like the kind of "democracy" that you're willing to blow up the world to preserve?

This absurdity would all be pretty brazenly obvious to any sane population not being brainwashed into believing that even pacifism is a partisan sport that requires capitulation to some mythic lesser evil. And the worse thing is that neither party is actually particularly interested in peace in either theater. 

Donald Trump may talk a big game about peace with Russia, but this was the motherfucker who armed Ukraine to the fucking teeth during the height of Kiev's genocidal campaign in the Donbas. This is also the motherfucker who triggered the build-up of Russian troops on Ukraine's border by throwing dress rehearsals for World War 3 in the Black Sea with nuclear compatible battleships. And this is why Trump's supposed bosom buddy, Vladimir Putin, still refuses to endorse the Orange Bastard, wisely noting the total lack of any concrete peace proposals being put forward. 

As for Kamala Harris, while that wretch shook her ass on TikTok and gushed about ceasefires and Palestinian dignity for the cameras, her administration sent Israel another fat check for $20 billion dollars and tossed Arabs and Jews out of her DNC coronation just for holding up peace signs. The Democratic Party also used that sacred event to make Barack Obama's Memorandum of Understanding, promising Israel a standing order of $3.8 billion dollars a year in military aid until at least 2028, an official part of the party's platform, essentially guaranteeing that Kamala's first term will be one defined by empty threats and blank checks. Not to mention a warzone that can't possibly be maintained without expanding it directly to China's doorstep in Iran.

This is insane and we all know it. I am a genderqueer anarcho-feminist, a dick swinging daughter of the culture wars, but I will go to church tomorrow and break bread with fundamentalist fag-bashers if it means preventing nuclear oblivion and this is what it's going to take. America is an antiwar nation with a war machine that has grown into the greatest threat to humanity in recorded history. If we can't drop our tribal bullshit for five fucking minutes to keep this psychotic duopoly from blowing up the world then maybe that's the fate we deserve, but our kids deserve better. 

Fuck both parties and all their proxies. Opposing war should not be a partisan issue. We should all be a part of the same antiwar movement and that starts with us throwing these war parties beneath the treads of their own tanks before they can blow us all to kingdom come.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Hatebreeders by the Misfits

* Times Like These by Foo Fighters

* Eighties by Killing Joke

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* The Flaming Spear by Sonic Youth

* Party at Ground Zero by Fishbone

* Finest Worksong by REM

* Let's Have a War by Fear

* We Were Never Alive by Brigitte Calls Me Baby

* El Scorcho by Weezer