How Imperialism Stole Christianity and Why We Should Steal It Back

 I haven't exactly kept my fraught history with organized Christianity a secret. In fact, in keeping with my weird tradition of publishing my numerous neuroses, it's kind of become a major part of my public persona, the jagged bend in my gonzo character arc. Girl gets born in boy's body, "boy" gets heinously tormented by the Catholic Church, boy becomes bitch, bitch burns down the world in search of revenge, flowers bloom from the ashes....

Truth be told, I actually owe that wicked church a lot more than just my multiple personalities. If they hadn't deflowered my faith in virtually every institution around me at such an obscenely impressionable age, I wouldn't have a fraction of the fuel that I require to fight every conceivable authoritarian construct from the Prison Industrial Complex to your local meter maid with the ferocity of a freshly molested child with a pickaxe. I fight that which triggers me, and nothing triggers me more severely than the shadow of the church. Even in our secular age that shadow looms long and dark. 

The latest fad in American totalitarianism is a sick little parochial fetish known as Christian nationalism. With the more secular schools of rampant rape politics like neoconservatism irredeemably tarnished even in the eyes of the faithful, right-wing imperialists have decided to double down on their violent Jesus-speak and use the facade of Evangelical populism to cloak their globalist agenda in something that feels a little more homespun than the responsibility to protect the new world order with constant warfare.

The new agenda involves openly embracing the massive machinery of the federal government as a means to transform Washington into a kind of Christian Riyadh so it can cleanse the empire of the elitist scourge of all things deemed woke. In reality though, this new jihad still serves the same old masters, it just does so in ways that seem tailor made to piss me off. The only thing more sickening to a Queer anarchist than a thriving police state is a state that thrives on policing my fucking gender identity when it isn't busy blowing up the Middle East.

The most maddening thing about this moronic grift is that it actually seems to be working. MAGA has gone from one edgelord oligarch's prank gone wrong to a bulldozer for the once comatose Christian right to crash the Supreme Court and pack it with insane zealots who see nothing unconstitutional about the fusion of church and state because the framers were nuts too.

So, now Jesus is back like 1984, and the GOP is too. The Republicans have redeemed themselves in the eyes of America's working class by combatting a facade of political correctness that the duopoly's shared corporate sponsors only used to infiltrate and neutralize the left. Trump has risen and the real "good news" is that we can blow up the world again just so long as we use the excuse of clearing the Holy Land for the rapture to do it. 

In my worst nightmares, I'm still trapped in that small town Catholic school in a tiny, scary body that every adult with a crucifix swinging around their neck seems to have a license to put their hands on. Not only has that nightmare come true, but it has somehow become far worse. In this year of our lord, 2024, the whole goddamn country has become Saint John the Evangelist Catholic School and I and my five personalities are officially overwhelmed.

Yet, believe it or not, I still consider myself to be a Christian. In fact, it's in times like these that I find myself turning to my mother's faded plaster Virgin Mary for shelter more than ever. That's because the Vatican isn't the only thing Jesus-shaped that defiled my faith in authoritarian institutions, the Gospels did too. No matter how hard those fucking pedophiles tried to peddle Christ as one of them, they couldn't cover up the fact that what that motherfucker was preaching was basically just spiritual anarchism.

Jesus walked the streets of Palestine when that dusty enclave was still an imperial province of Rome, the original shining superpower on the hill. He strolled from town to town, barefoot and filthy, passing over temples and banks to preach to lepers and whores, telling them the good news that they were the true people of God because they existed in the blind spot of a vile empire that used the bludgeons of church and state to rob the poor and rape the helpless. He taught the ancient lumpenproles that the kingdom of God was already within them and that any kingdom that stood outside stood for tyranny and should be torn down.

This was the kind of shit that got Jesus killed and it was a cabal of governors and priests who fucking killed him. Then, in the ultimate insult, the same empire that had this radical anti-imperialist nailed to a fucking cross hijacked his teachings and turned them into one of the deadliest weapons ever wielded in the hands of the powerful.

Christianity was commandeered by the Roman Empire during an age that was actually remarkably similar to the one we find ourselves in now. During the third century, Rome was on the brink of collapse in a period that became known as the Imperial Crisis. Stretched to the point of economic disintegration under the pressure of centuries of foreign invasions and increasingly violent civil strife, the people of Rome were poor, pissed, and powerless. 

A variety of spiritual movements that emphasized personal spiritual knowledge, or gnosis, over the teachings and traditions of more established religious institutions travelled from the battlefields of the Orient and began to grow in popularity in the crowded cities of an empire in crisis. Christianity stood out from its rival gnostic traditions largely because of its anti-authoritarian ethos. It became particularly hip amongst Rome's more impoverished denizens who incorporated further elements of homespun collectivism and anti-elitism into the practice.

At first, the Romans actually singled out Christianity for persecution with Emperor Decius even using the demonization of these radical mystics to try to restore stability and unity to a fractured society. But when this failed the state did what the state does best; it assimilated rebellion and twisted it into something almost unrecognizable from its humble grassroots origins.

Beginning with the very convenient conversion of an embattled Emperor Constantine in the year 312, Christianity underwent a radical transformation known as the Constantinian Shift which would see a radically anti-authoritarian doctrine favored by an unruly peasantry turned into a powerful tool for the elites who oppressed them. 

Thus, the Catholic Church was born as the official state religion of the Roman Empire and what followed was a bloodbath that continues to flood the world to this day. Rome used the cross to legitimize its conquests and elevate its leaders to the status of divinely appointed leaders. Then came the Crusades and the Inquisitions, the Conquistadors and Manifest Destiny, the Crown and the Pentagon and the Cold War and the War on Islam and Saint John the Evangelist.

Christianity became a surprisingly durable device for spreading western ethnocentric values across the globe and instilling a divinely ordained state of cultural universalism upon its vast unwashed masses. All those who rejected this state modified Franken Christ were deemed savages, perverts, heretics, faggots, and lunatics who needed to be converted, controlled, or destroyed. 

Sickeningly, these are the Christian values that continue to define the west to this day. Even during the secular age, this cocky culture of conformity informs progressives to reorganize society in the name of humanitarian interventionism and propels conservatives to kill the Queer and save the child. 

But Christianity has another history. One that runs parallel to empire and completely against it. I speak of the Christianity of ancient Jerusalem described in the Acts of the Apostles in which anarcho-communist collectives lived in harmony and shared their labor and capital equally amongst the faithful. I speak of the Christianity that inspired an illiterate, 17-year-old crossdresser named Joan of Arc to force the British Empire from French soil after a century of occupation and choose death by fire over gender conformity. I speak of the Christianity that inspired John Brown and Nat Turner to take up the gun against chattel slavery and take no prisoners. 

The Christianity of the Diggers, the Catholic Workers, the Quakers, Liberation Theology, and the Universal Life Ethic. The Christianity of William Loyd Garrison, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Dorothy Day, and Nikolai Berdyaev. 

The Christianity that gave a little girl trapped inside a molested boy the strength to hold onto her humanity and her empathy for thirty years until she could safely manifest herself in the form of an alternate personality who still prays to Mary to protect the snakes and the spiders and all the other little creatures that so many Christians seem to have forgotten come from God too.

I am not a typical Christian. I am not a typical anything. My spiritual beliefs are a complex and at times contrarian concoction of early Celtic churches like the Culdee and even earlier mystical gnostic sects like the Valentinians and the Collyridians. I am a Christian in the same sense that those who practice Voodoo, Santeria, and Candombe are Christians. My Christianity is the Queered folk Christianity of the conquered and the oppressed, the bloodied and the unbowed. 

But I am still a Christian and I believe very strongly that much like Rome in its own age of imperial crisis, America needs this kind of spirituality now more than ever before.

Any philosophy can be rendered toxic under the reigns of church and state. Marx can be reduced to Stalin and Mises can be reduced to Pinochet. But that process can just as easily be reversed by decentralizing those values and returning them to actual communities that can interpret them in ways that speak to individuals instead of subjects. Some may declare this practice of reading between the Scriptures to be radical heresy but isn't that precisely what Christ practiced when he turned the Old Testament into anarchism? 

Pray on it and get back to me. Me and my rosary beads will be here all Armageddon.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground

* Something Beautiful by Sinead O'Connor

* Faith Healer by Julien Baker

* Give You My Lovin' by Mazzy Star

* Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

* Love Love Love by the Mountain Goats

* Jesus by the Velvet Underground

* The Parting Glass by Boygenius

* My Wandering Days are Over by Belle & Sebastian

* All Apologies by Nirvana

A Few Lessons that Anti-Imperialists Should Learn from the Collapse of Assad

 I've been closely following the labyrinthine chaos in the Levant for most of my adult life now and I honestly didn't see this latest twist coming, at least not this fast and certainly not this soon. After surviving nearly half a century on Uncle Sam's shitlist and nearly 14 years in a turbulent proxy war with the last seven in a stalemate frozen in their favor, the seemingly indestructible regime of the Baathist Assad Dynasty collapsed like a rusty lawn chair after a 12-day putsch from an al-Qaeda derived coalition of Salafi throat slitters who have never governed a territory larger than Cleveland.

What the fuck? Seriously, what in the literal goddamn fuck just fucking happened here? This is like the Baseball Furies getting out of the ICU to take out the Gramercy Riffs in the final scene of The Warriors. Naturally, America seems pretty fucking pumped and why not, they've invested a pretty hefty portion of the national debt in this shitshow and now they're breaking both arms jerking themselves off for finally winning a prize. They even let Biden out of his cryogenic chamber to take credit for the birth of a kinder, gentler Islamic State as if he had planned it out this way all along.

Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to the Trump-approved Golan Heights to make similarly grandiose claims. And for once those two mincing, daylight vampires aren't totally off-base. Destabilize the shit out of an entire fucking time zone with a gory smorgasbord of genocide, famine, sanctions, quagmires, and other sundry imperial curiosities and even Denmark could fall to jihadi pirates, let alone a third world gangster state run by a cut-rate Corleone with a rapist's moustache. 

But the absurdly abrupt collapse of Assad is way too complex to be the fruit of any one conspiracy. A lot of people can take credit for this clusterfuck and that includes Bashar himself as well as a lot of his buddies. I'm not a vodka soaked tankie anymore. I kicked that unfortunate lifestyle choice right around the time I switched genders and turned back to anarchism. I'm not about to sit here and pretend that HTS and their numerous sponsors deflowered a secular utopia with their shockingly successful little uprising. However, it is hard to avoid the bitter fact that their victory serves far greater evils than anything the Baathist Party could ever conjure. HTS or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are an openly genocidal cult whose roots lead straight back to ISIS.

It's also hard for me as an armchair anti-imperialist not to grieve the further marginalization of the Axis of Resistance, a rag-tag coalition of mostly Shia militias that have proven to be the gnarliest thorn in the side of Pax Americana since those charming rice farmers in the Vietcong. All of this madness sets the table quite perfectly for a direct conflict with Iran that everyone will lose no matter who proclaims "mission accomplished" before the bodies stop dropping and the Axis of Resistance wasn't just a bulwark to this dismal outcome, it was one crowdsourced by dozens of local grassroots coalitions that Iran could only pretend to govern. 

This victory for western backed Salafism should be seen as a major setback for anyone who isn't too lost in their own dogma to realize that a very complicated world is a much harder world for any one empire to govern. With that being said, this story is far from over and it might even open up the map to a few opportunities but before we can look towards the future, I think all sober minded western observers of imperium need to learn a few lessons from the near past that brought us to our current predicament.

1. It Was the Militias that Saved the Levant from ISIS and Israel Isn't the Only State that Diminished their Potency:

Much has been made of the fact that Israel's current war on pretty much everybody left Assad stranded without Hezbollah to save him and rightfully so. Hezbollah in many ways represents the Axis of Resistance at the pinnacle of its potency and I for one don't believe for a second that it's a mere coincidence that HTS chose to play Johnny-Bad-Ass when the toughest gang on the yard was locked into a ceasefire with one their allies. However, Hezbollah isn't the only force that reduced Assad's Salafi foes to a single ghetto in Idlib.

The Syrian Civil War was wrestled to the status of a frozen conflict for over half a decade by two other coalitions of militiamen. The first were the National Defense Forces who began as a diverse collection of popular committees formed by Alawites, Twelvers, Christians, and Druze to protect their own neighborhoods from genocide after Assad's government all but collapsed during the rise of the Islamic State. What was left of the Baathist regime decided to organize this coalition after Syrian officers began turning to them for more reliable foot soldiers than the usual corrupt cronies and terrified conscripts. Hezbollah stepped in along with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to train them under Khomeini's widely successful Basij model of civilian led guerrilla warfare, and they were deemed the National Defense Forces.

By 2013, the NDF's numbers had reached 100,000. By 2016 they served as the bulk of the ground force that took back Aleppo and turned the tide of the war against ISIS and in Assad's favor. So, what happened to this fearsome army? The Russian Military happened. When Putin joined the fight to save Assad in 2015, he did so under the condition that the National Defense Forces be integrated into Syria's stagnant standing army and put under Russia's direct command, reducing what had been a highly affective localized corps of civilian militias with skin on the field into just another demoralized faction taking orders from white men who couldn't even pronounce the name of their village before they carpet bombed it.

And pretty much the same goddamn thing happened to the other coalition of civilian militias who helped crush ISIS, the Kurdish People's Defense Units aka the YPG, who actually set up a fully functioning and self-sufficient stateless society in their region of Rojava when Assad's ability to govern them waned. But then America stepped in to fuck it up. Fresh off of losing another squad of so-called moderates to Islamic State recruitment, the United States threw their weight behind the YPG in 2015, going so far as to imbed Green Berets amongst their ranks and rebranding them as the Syrian Democratic Forces in a failed attempt to placate their genocidal NATO allies in Turkey.

The result was the bizarre spectacle of a bunch of once-proud anarchists becoming glorified errand boys for Uncle Sam, taking villages totally outside of their jurisdiction and holding Syria's largest oil field hostage. Now the US is strong arming the rebels formerly known as the YPG into handing over Manbij to Turkey while Anthony Blinken flirts with the Sultans back in Ankara and Turkish troops mass at the border. This leads me to my next lesson.

2. Trusting Any Superpower in the Third World is a Fool's Errand:

And this includes Putin's Russia. A lot of western analysts have observed that Russia couldn't be bothered to help their supposed allies in Syria because they were too busy engaging in their own quixotic imperialist adventures in Ukraine but a lot fewer of them have observed the fact that Russia's only Mediterranean naval port in Tartus has been largely untouched by the upheaval. In fact, according to Russia's own state media, Kremlin officials have been in touch with HTS representatives from the beginning of the uprising, who have surreptitiously guaranteed the continued security of Moscow's bases and diplomatic missions in the region.

This might explain why Assad slunk back to Moscow with his tail between his legs like a loyal dog without even making so much as a public statement to his own people. Russia could give two fucks and a hearty shit about the third world. They just want a cheap place to park their tanks. Che Guevara learned this the hard way when Khrushchev played Cuba like a poker chip during his little missile crisis, and he cursed the conspiracy of the "Global North" to his dying breath. As usual, Che was right but didn't take his critique nearly far enough. Cuba itself would become just another gulag because it invested the momentum of its indigenous populist uprising into the same model of European nation state that neutered Russia's own revolution. Which leads me to my final and most important lesson.

3. The State Itself is a Very Fragile and Illusory Construct, Especially in Post-Colonial Territories:

After decades of building one of the largest and most heavily armed war machines in the Middle East, Assad's Baathist regime crumbled like sand because that is precisely what Syria is. It is not a nation, at least not by the Spenglerian definition of a people united by common cause and culture. It is a series of lines that some Englishman drew all over the map in blood after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. You cannot expect anyone who isn't a certified borderline personality to die for something so synthetic. The Islamic State was equally transparent beneath all the macho posturing which is precisely why it disintegrated beneath the boots of one-hundred-thousand peasants and America and Israel's new and improved model can be expected to meet the same fate but only if the Syrian people give up on all this Westphalian nonsense.

The one thing that I have said from the beginning of this vexing conflict that has proven to be consistently true is that Rojava makes a far more sensible partner for the Axis of Resistance than any nation state precisely because Rojava is not just another convoluted nation state. Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned ideological leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party and the ideological inspiration behind the Rojava experiment, wisely rejected such notions along with his former creed of Marxist-Leninism as the fevered dreams of a colonialist master race. His dream was the creation of a Kurdistan united only by ideas and culture amidst a Near-East organized under a diverse federation of other stateless nations governed under their own ideas and cultures, overlapping without borders or standing armies.

This dream really isn't all that far removed from the "Islamic Internationalism" of the Ayatollah's more radical comrades who inspired militias like Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and much of the rest of the Axis of Resistance to govern themselves in warzones devoid of state infrastructure. America and Russia both seem to agree that they would much prefer an emir to either democratic coalition, so, maybe it's time that all democratic coalitions unite around lynching the latest emir and the next twelve too.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that inspired this post

* Holy Mountain by Sleep

* Take Me Away from Here I'm Dying by Belle & Sebastian

* Down on the Street by the Stooges

* Charmless Man by Blur

* No Values by Black Flag

* Everything is Embarrassing by Sky Ferreira

* Inside the Sun by Sleep

* Fox On the Run by Sweet

* If You're Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian

* In the City by Joe Walsh

* Rockin' in the Free World by Neil Young 

Forever Again: How Holocaust Survivors Become Holocaust Revivors

 I realize that I've said this before but there really is no more room left for interpretation. Israel is engaged in a concerted effort to annihilate the Palestinian people, an American financed and facilitated genocide playing out in real time across a million flickering screens. The bombs never stop and there is no place left to hide that they won't hit twice. The violence is so relentless that it's impossible to keep track of it without becoming frighteningly desensitized to the endless horror in the process. Every day is another massacre. Every day is another mangled mosaic of screaming children and obliterated limbs. It's just hospital after hospital, refugee camp after refugee camp, bomb after bomb after bomb after goddamn bomb.

The official death toll currently hovers somewhere near the middle of the forty-thousands but even the conservative body counters know that number is bullshit. A group of 99 American healthcare workers who have volunteered on the ground in Gaza recently sent our current president an open letter based on the extensive data that they have painstakingly collected estimating the death count to be at least 118,908. That is 5.4% of Gaza's entire population. And as grotesque as those numbers alone may be, the doctors who came up with them the hard way still readily admit that they are likely dismally below the total count lost in the ruins.

The worst part of this is that the Israeli military machine barely even tries to hide it anymore. In fact, there is a plot being bandied about quite openly among the nation's elites known as the General's Plan, a depraved outline for the deliberate ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip which earned its cruelly beige sounding title from the fact that it was drawn up by a coterie of respected IDF generals. The CliffsNotes to this final solution include the complete evacuation of all Palestinian civilians from Northern Gaza to below a strip of Israeli controlled territory known as the Netzarim Corridor. Any and all civilians who refuse to comply with this death march are to be treated as enemy combatants and summarily murdered either by bullet or by starvation. 

While some Israeli power brokers still scoff at the very suggestion that such a blatantly heinous campaign is even being considered, many more don't even try to deny that it is already in progress and the IDF's actions on the ground over the last two months seem to be following the blueprint for this conspiracy to the last detail.

At the beginning of October Israel ordered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still living in Northern Gaza to head south. Most of these people were already refugees several times over and thus totally lacked the means and ability to comply. Regardless, not long after the order the IDF began a thorough and focused arial assault on the Northern cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia. The results have been as well-documented as they are horrifying. 

The IDF openly admits and even celebrates the fact that they have expelled 55,000 Palestinians from the Jabalia Refugee Camp and that they have zero intention of giving it back. Meanwhile, the well-respected Israeli paper, Haaretz, has reported from the ground in Beit Lahia that not only is this once thriving metropolis a virtual ghost town with only a few thousand shellshocked civilians remaining but that nearly every residence in that zip code has been either obliterated or rendered unlivable by nightly showers of indiscriminate artillery fire. 

The brass on the ground made little attempt to conceal their actions nor their intentions with one IDF spokesman, a Brigadier General named Itzik Cohen, telling reporters "There is no intention of allowing the residents of the Northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes" and the IDF commander in charge of Beit Lahia, Colonel Yaniv Baret, openly admitting that the city they were crushing carried zero evidence of militant infrastructure, no tunnels, no arms caches, no weapons manufacturing sites.

But Bibi's own former Defense Minister, Moshe Yaalon, probably summed it up in the most chillingly certain terms. "The path they're dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse..." before adding "There's no Beit Lahia, there's no Beit Hanoun. They're now operating in Jabalia, they're basically cleansing the territory of Arabs"

And we sadly have every reason to believe that this campaign will not end at the Netzarim Corridor either. Documents drafted by Israel's Intelligence Ministry leaked early in this siege describe another plot to remove all 2.3 million Arabs from the Gaza Strip and place them in a massive camp in the deserts of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula with a "sanitized" buffer zone of several kilometers separating them from their former territory. 

Cryptically, this document suggests evacuating the population of Northern Gaza as the first step to its final solution. Egypt for their part has balked at the suggestion, but this is a nation lorded over by a military dictatorship totally dependent on American firepower and President Elect Donald Trump appears to be even more slavishly beholden to the Zionist lobby than Genocide Joe.

The sheer enormity of this brazen campaign by an American client state to erase an entire population may be grotesquely overwhelming but we can't pretend that it began on October 8th. Much like their Yankee doodle masters back on Turtle Island, Israel is a nation founded on theft and annihilation. 

Much of the territory now declared to be Israel was seized by force between the years of 1947 and 1949 under another Generals Plan now known as the Nakba. After a vicious campaign of mass slaughter that killed some 15,000 civilians in cold blood, another 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.9 million were made homeless, with 350 villages and cities leveled and 78% of historic Palestine unilaterally declared to be a Jewish homeland. And it is actually those last two words which have historically made this 80-year genocide so hard for many westerners to grasp.

The Nakba, though rooted in a campaign of Zionist terrorism that both predated and colluded with the Third Reich, began only two short years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Some 7 million European Jews were systematically exterminated by Nazi Germany. How in any god's name could those same people just turn around and commit the same horrors against another totally unrelated population of stateless people? 

Or, in other words, how could a nation of holocaust survivors become a nation of holocaust revivors?  And this is where I take a sad sad song and make it death metal because as horrific as that scenario might be, it is not the least bit unusual. It actually happens a lot and Israel's real founding fathers back in Washington actually have a long history of exploiting such horrors in the name of globalist brinksmanship. Two more recent campaigns come to mind.

Most educated westerners are well schooled in the details of the now legendary Cambodian Genocide committed during the short reign of the Khmer Rouge between the years of 1975 and 1979. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians were killed in a frenzied campaign of mass executions, starvation, disease, and overwork. That's a whopping 25% of the nation's population. However, few westerners seem to be privy to the fact that the bloodbath didn't actually begin with Pol Pot or that his rise was only made possible by another campaign of mass extermination.

Beginning in 1969, the American military machine expanded its already genocidal campaign in Indochina to include Cambodia. This began with that nation's secret saturation bombing enacted illegally without congressional approval by Dick Nixon and his sociopathic National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. By 1973, 532,000 tons of American ordinances had been dropped on the rural population of Cambodia, more than three times that dropped on Imperial Japan during the Second World War.

Meanwhile, the CIA took the violence to the nation's more metropolitan regions by overthrowing the popular and neutral Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Phnom Penh in 1970 and then replacing him with a military dictatorship run by the brutishly fascist General Lon Nol, who enthusiastically approved of an American-led ground invasion of his country a month later. The gruesome result of this brutal campaign was the complete and systematic decimation of Cambodian society outside of a handful of cities that were largely occupied by the nation's elites.

Over 600,000 people were killed. Another two million out of a population of just seven million were rendered refugees with many taking shelter in caves just to avoid the bombs that seemed to obliterate any two stones standing atop each other. Rice production dropped by over 80% and malnutrition became the norm. It was also during this heinous campaign that Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge grew exponentially, from a rag-tag militia of fewer than 5,000 in 1970 to the massive army of 70,000 who took Phnom Penh in 1975. 

The majority of these soldiers weren't even communists. They were just starving peasants desperate for revenge and that is precisely what the Cambodian Genocide amounted to; a feverish rampage launched by the victims of mass slaughter against anyone who they perceived to be complicit in their suffering.

As if triggering a holocaust weren't bad enough, America then actively milked the carnage that their actions made inevitable as well. The Pentagon very quietly shifted their support over to the Khmer Rouge the moment they took power in a successful effort to destabilize Vietnam, leading to that newly liberated colony's invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and a summary Chinese Invasion. 

This may have officially ended the reign of the Khmer Rouge, but it didn't end America's support for the remnants of that regime who largely enjoyed the full support of Doctor Frankenstein throughout the late 70s and 1980s, or as Jimmy Carter's own private Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski once so eloquently confessed, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot... Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could." 

America played similarly heinous games during the nineties in a little African country called Rwanda. Once again, many westerners know the basics of the 1994 chapter of the Rwandan Genocide quite well. They know that during a 100-day campaign of terror, militias composing of the nation's Hutu majority slaughtered around one million ethnic Tutsis. What most of them don't know however is that this massacre was actually much larger and far more complex.

The tragedy actually began in 1990 when an army of American and British trained Tutsi refugees invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, led by the former Director of Ugandan Intelligence, Paul Kagame, who was conveniently trained in psychological warfare at Fort Leavenworth. For 42 long months, the RPF launched a brutal campaign of ethnic terror against Rwanda's Hutu population. Villages were raided, refugee camps were torched, tens of thousands were carted away by the truckload to be slaughtered in soccer stadiums or tortured to death in Akagara National Park which had been transformed into a colossal open-air crematorium.

The goal for Kagame was to return the Tutsis to the privileged status that they had once enjoyed under Belgian colonial rule. America, for their part just wanted to edge out the French for influence over the mineral rich region. We got our wish when Kagame had a private jet carrying Rwanda's Hutu President, Juvenal Habyarimana, along the Hutu President of neighboring Burundi and much of the Rwandan Army High Command, shot out of the sky with a missile. It was only then that Rwanda descended into chaos and ungoverned Hutu militias began to slaughter any Tutsi they could sink their machetes into. 

Then President Bill Clinton actually ordered the removal of UN forces after the Habyarimana assassination specifically so Kagame's RPF could exploit the mayhem to take power, which they did but only after killing several hundred thousand more Hutu civilians during the resulting melee. 

And Paul Kagame still runs Rwanda today like an African Pinochet, opening his markets to foreign plunder while he continues to pursue the final solution to the Hutu question deep inside the Congo where his men and their own proxies are responsible for the deaths of millions.

This is what we are witnessing in the Gaza Strip as we speak, and it is a horror story as old as colonialism itself. Genocide has long been a common tool for imperial aggression. Race itself is merely a colonialist construct initiated to facilitate this cruel strategy. Pitting one tribe of impoverished people against another is how the Europeans tamed the "New World" and enslaved much of the old one. And when one genocide leads to another and another and another, the self-anointed powers at be simply exploit the blowback to bankroll their next final solution. And so, it goes... But it doesn't have to.

This madness only stops when we all stop and recognize that we are all getting played here and that the people playing us don't give a flying fuck about any color but green with no tribe is exempt from this capital supremacy. It's a hard lesson to learn but it will only get harder if we double down on ethnic carnage and refuse to fucking learn it. For all of the slaughter and apartheid that European Jews have achieved in Israel, they are still outnumbered and surrounded by the victims America supplied them with in the wake of a Holocaust that many of our own corporate elites directly profited from.

What do you think is going to happen when Uncle Sam goes the way of Hitler and retires to his Further Bunker after going broke bankrolling his 89th genocide? The cycle starts all over again with the survivors who became the revivors becoming the victims again, only this time those victims will still have their guards' fresh blood beneath their fingernails.

We must all learn that the enemy of every tribe is power. Whether they self-identify as Nazis or Zionists or Democrats or Republicans, those who rule through a monopoly on the use of violence are the real problem and the final solution is a stateless society with no tribe powerful enough to dominate another. 

Don't get me wrong, this will be nothing short of a massive tectonic shift that won't happen overnight, but I can't think of a better way to get it started than by having the sons and daughters of Auschwitz turn their guns against the towers of Tel Aviv.

Enough is enough. Let every Reichstag burn brightly for its sins and let every shade of humanity rejoice in the glow of indiscriminate justice.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Lexicon Devil by the Germs

* Reign in Blood by Slayer

* Machine Gun by Slowdive

* Lay Lady Lay by Ministry

* North by Clairo

* Angel of Death by Slayer

* Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedys

* Ghost Town by Madness

* Evil Spells by Morbid Angel

* Hitsville UK by the Clash

So, What the Hell is Post-Left Anarchism Anyway?

 I have spent the better part of my life as a bomb-throwing, dyed in the wool, radical leftist and there was a time when I would have gladly laid down my own life for that cause, probably because there was a time when that cause quite literally saved my life. Growing up Queer and strange in a very small, spiritually abusive community, I didn't have a whole lot to live for but the far-left, at least as I understood it, gave me something to fight for and gave me something to fight with. 

In a profoundly unsafe environment where I was surrounded by institutional authoritarianism, in a place where literally everyone I knew and every institution that I engaged with on a daily basis was strictly governed by the same church that oversaw my molestation, it was the analysis of iconoclastic creatures like Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, and Frantz Fanon that gave me the means not just to comprehend the cruelty of my existence, but to overcome it as well. 

These values were driven home even further by my exposure to early punk rock and 60's counterculture absorbed through the unlikely medium of moldy old magazines in my mother's basement vintage clothing store. Time and Life may have intended for those articles to demonize someone else's youth culture, but I was electrified by their shocking stories about Black Panthers and Sex Pistols. 

Fearless degenerates going toe to toe with the same high-minded culture of moral decency which had forfeited my scary body over to a pair of pedophile priests and gagged my screams with balled up pages of the Old Testament. These were junkies and juvenile delinquents with shotguns and Stratocasters, taking pot shots at the greatest empire on earth and then shouting 'fuck you' from the ramparts when the beast came roaring back. 

This was the left as I knew it. One that existed, much like my bewitching gender identity, somewhere else, on the periphery, but one committed to doing battle directly with the forces of authoritarianism on every conceivable front, and it was under this influence that I committed myself entirely to the social anarchisms of libertarian Marxism and libertarian socialism. But lately I've been coming to believe that either the left has changed, or I never really understood the movement to begin with.

During an age when the Atlanticist war machine is suing for nuclear holocaust on multiple battlefields and the prison state is digging its claws into every pocket carrying a smartphone, most self-proclaimed leftists seem to be more concerned with quibbling over the petty details of 19th century dogma, that is when they're not busy virtue signaling on a soapbox of collegiate cultural superiority and labeling any portion of the map that has fallen under the poisonous sway of Trumpism to be irredeemably fascist. 

Meanwhile, even professed social anarchists seem eager to hop into bed with any big government solution that gets them laid with cute hippie chicks on the quad. Sure, just give the federal government unfettered access to every school, hospital, and computer lab, just so long as they promise to make it free for the proletariat because that's leftism, right? Not smashing the institutions of upper-class domination but handing them even bigger hammers in exchange for a conditional allowance of free shit.

Maybe. Maybe not. But in this environment, I can no longer call myself a leftist without cringing and so, in this environment, I have increasingly come to self-identify as post-left. But what the hell is a post-left anarchism anyway? According to some typically brilliant social anarchists like Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky, it's all just "lifestyle anarchism", a bunch of horny faggots and luddites playing Rousseau and getting their "noble savage" on by smashing computers in gawdy face paint. 

A decidedly less grouchy-grandpa interpretation would be a return to non-sectarian 19th century style anarchism, what was once referred to as anarchism without adjectives, only updated with a critique of modern anarchism's problematic relationship with traditional left-wing politics. But if you're asking me personally, I prefer to refer to my old mentor Johnny Rotten, at least before he sold out.

When the Sex Pistols failed to serve as anything but a shallow parody of the iconoclasm that they once represented, John Lydon, the artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten, didn't give up on punk rock to sell patio furniture in Cornwall. He formed Public Image Ltd and helped re-invent punk rock with post-punk, a subgenre that sought to revitalize punk not just by looking back to its founding fathers in acts like the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, but by expanding its revolutionary potential with some assistance from noisy troublemakers that existed totally outside of the genre like Yoko Ono, Alice Coltrane, and Captain Beefheart. 

The result was returning punk rock to its avante garde roots while also encouraging kids like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye in the burgeoning hardcore scene to build their own revolution in their parents' garages.

To me, this is the true meaning of post-left anarchism. It is not a wholesale rejection of leftism but an attempt to expand upon its original vision by thinking outside of the rusty lockbox that has become the increasingly antiquated left-right paradigm. It's about returning to the deeper critiques of mainstream society and modern progress as a whole laid out by often overlooked left-wing thinkers like William Morris, Emma Goldman, John Africa, and the Situationist International while also daring to expand upon those ideas under the influence of provocateurs totally outside of traditional leftist dogma like Michel Foucault, Murray Rothbard, Malcolm X, and Ted Kaczynski.

But more than anything, it is about expanding the far-left's critique of power dynamics to every institution in which one class is made the master of another. This means confronting the tyranny of psychiatry over those of us deemed insane. This means confronting the tyranny that teachers maintain over their students and the tyranny that doctors maintain over their patients. This means confronting the fact that these institutions are no more redeemable than the prison or the police. 

This means holding all means of class division accountable including those created by the tax code and the welfare state, regardless of whether that squares with whatever the hell leftism is or whatever the hell leftism has become. And yes, this means smashing computers in gawdy face paint because theater is a weapon accessible to everyone and civilization is a weapon of the rich. 

That's what being post-left means to me. It's not a rejection of leftism but a reassessment of what leftism means and that means not only being willing to confront old school leftism on its bullshit but also being willing to learn from its triumphs as well. 

Post-left anarchists who choose to reject leftism in its entirety do so to their own detriment because there is still a great deal that leftism has to teach us that we all seem to forget, perhaps the most important of which is solidarity and intersectionality across all lines, including ideology. This means being willing to stand by Islamists in Palestine, Orthodox traditionalists in the Donbass, anti-modern tribalists in New Guinea, and yes, even Maoists in the Philippines. 

And this is why I feel very strongly that panarchy is the strongest tactic that post-left anarchists can utilize in our struggle to smash the tyranny of the modern nation state. Rejecting the traditional propertarian model of governance entirely in favor of thousands if not millions of totally voluntary governments that exist without boundaries, allowing a tribe of grumpy Bookchinites to operate a busy system of social services in the same neighborhood as my pack of feral Queer luddites, just so long as neither of us attempts to impose our system on anyone without their consent, including our own citizens. 

I believe that this is the way out, the escape hatch in the current apocalyptic nightmare of our dystopian age and it doesn't even require a bloodbath to achieve it. The revolution could be as simple as a million communities becoming self-sufficient and removing themselves from a deeply polluted society en mass.

My favorite quote by a stodgy old social anarchist comes from Rudolf Rocker, the father of anarcho-syndicalism who also happened to be an anarchist without adjectives. Rudolf once proclaimed quite sagely that "I am not an anarchist because I believe that it is the final solution, I am an anarchist because I believe that there is no final solution." 

Well, I suppose that you could say that I am not a post-left anarchist because I believe that rejecting the left is the final solution, I am a post-left anarchist because I believe that the true legacy of the left lies in a world with a million final solutions. Pick twelve and pay it forward.

Peace, Love, & Anarchy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Public Image by Public Image Ltd.

* Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols

* Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash

* Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

* Loose by the Stooges

* Walking On Thin Ice by Yoko Ono

* Minor Threat by Minor Threat

* Blue Nile by Alice Coltrane

* Dropout Boogie by Captain Beefheart

* Death Disco by Public Image Ltd.

The Isolationist Shuffle: How the GOP Became the New Fake Antiwar Party

 Kamala lost for a lot of reasons. Having the vibrant personality of a power-hungry high school principal in a cheesy 80s movie and playing second banana to a poorly reanimated racist come to mind. Cackling like an animatronic banshee flunking the Turing Test every time she was asked a question harder than 'what's your favorite color?' probably didn't help either. 

A little humility might actually come in handy in a situation like this but since the Democrats don't do that dance anymore they've chosen a bit of a different direction, calling everyone who didn't vote Harris a swastika licking white supremacist while they shamelessly gaslight young Black men reluctant to vote for a crooked cop who spent the better part of three decades feeding them to the prison industrial complex.

No one, however, not even the most hardcore MAGA Republicans, seem to be putting much focus on the fact that while there were indeed plenty of reasons not to vote for Kamala Harris, war was a big one of them and it was an issue that helped sink Hillary too. In fact, Donald Trump seems to win every time that he can successfully present himself as an isolationist and the Democrats just fucking handed him this costume in 2024. 

Even after over 100,000 registered Democrats voted uncommitted over Joe Biden in protest of his genocidal policies in Gaza, the DNC still insisted on running a candidate with virtually zero foreign policy skeletons in her closet as a neocon with gay friends. During the final weeks of the campaign, while Trump was wisely ramping up his antiwar rhetoric at every stop, Kamala was busy barnstorming Michigan hand-in-hand with the Cheney's and sending Bill Clinton to Benton Harbor so he could shout Zionist propaganda at disloyal Arab activists. 

Racism, sexism, and all manner of cultural phobias may very well have played some role in Trump's victory on certain sections of the map but that clearly wasn't true in Dearborn, Michigan, where Trump walked away with 43% of the vote and Rashida Tlaib, the Arab feminist backbone of the Squad, was reelected to the same damn district with 62% of the vote. In fact, our 47th President only won Michigan by 82,000 votes in an election where he got less votes than he did when he lost to a virtually comatose Joe Biden in 2020, and this is far from an anomaly.

I have said it before and I will say it again, having spent my entire life in the post-industrial graveyard of Pennsyltucky, I know for a fact that the people I know who voted for Trump in the first place back in 2016 voted to chuck a screaming orange brick into the stained glass window of the Clinton Dynasty that sold everything they had to NAFTA and then sent their sons to die in Iraq. 

In fact, a lot of this shit can be traced directly back to Bill and Hillary's front door. These are the assholes after all who revamped the Democratic Party's image in the nineties, transforming Reagan's commie pinko foils into a globalist juggernaut of pantsuit-clad crony capitalist thugs slinging Hellfire missiles into Somalian tent cities in the name of equity and inclusion. With that being said, the Democrat's term as America's designated hippie peace party was a dismally short one pock marked by little commitment to peace beyond flowery rhetoric. 

In fact, the Democrats were the original war party of the Twentieth Century, the party of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman, jumping into every world war with a trench knife in their teeth to remake the global order in their sparkling secular progressive image. On the flipside, the old school, old right Republicans were actually once the real isolationists calling for the preservation of conservative values in this country by avoiding reckless foreign entanglements. 

This script only flipped during the Cold War when the GOP's bible thumping base became terrified of the semitic scourge of global Bolshevism, and the Democrats tried on love beads and patchouli for a while to shore up the youth vote. But even here, the Democratic devotion to dovishness was paper thin at best.

The closest thing that either of these parties has ever come to running an antiwar candidate in the post-world war era was Senator George McGovern who only went hippie after voting for every military appropriations bill sought by the founding fathers of the Vietnam War, JFK and LBJ. 

Jimmy Carter, the one term dove that even Democrats use as a scarecrow against military restraint, actually armed the Mujahedeen so they could suck the Soviets into their own Vietnam in Afghanistan and OK'd the use of American tanks to crush pro-democracy protestors in South Korea during the Kwangju Uprising.

And even during the Bush-era antiwar revival that radicalized a lot of kids on the left like me, the closest thing the Democrats could come to pushing an antiwar candidate was John Kerry, a mealy-mouthed flip-flop artist who marched for peace for exactly fifteen minutes between committing war crimes in Vietnam and facilitating them in the Washington career that posing as a reluctant warrior afforded him.

So, the Democrats embracing their increasingly unpopular role as the custodians of globalism is less of a sea change and more of a return to form after a brief stint as an Uzi-packing Beatles cover band that always followed "All You Need Is Love" with "Helter Skelter." This wardrobe change may hand the GOP back the title belt of isolationism on a silver platter but anyone who actually buys the Donald as a babyface peace candidate is a rube with a very short memory.

While Trump may have made his triumphant return to the Oval Office billed as a man who managed the mild miracle of not invading a single country during his first term, the cold hard reality is that every single foreign policy disaster that Biden and Harris have recklessly inflamed was made possible by the policies of the "isolationist" elected before them to make America great again.

In spite or perhaps even because of the DNC's campaign to paint Donald Trump as a Kremlin puppet, the man's actual policies regarding Russia were bombastically hawkish and likely led Putin to decide to invade Ukraine. Trump actually ramped up sanctions on Moscow while increasing NATO's presence in Ukraine exponentially, providing Kiev with offensive weaponry to fling at babushkas in the Donbass and buzzing the shores of Crimea with nuclear compatible battleships. 

As if all this weren't demented enough, "Putin's puppet" also sabotaged multiple Reagen-era arms control agreements that have essentially given Vlad the license he needs to jam ICBMs into Europe's temple every time shit goes south in the bloodlands. 

As for Israel-Palestine, the only reason why the Al-Aqsa Flood was even possible was because Trump encouraged Israel to shift nearly half of their hardware to the West Bank when he the greenlit the largest expansion of illegal settlements in thirty years with a pu pu platter of policies tailor made to please his MAGA Zionist overlords over at the House of Adelson. 

Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. Recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights. Declaring moonlight pogroms against Arab villages to be consistent with international law... This is the kind of batshit lunacy that Donald's old buddy Bill Clinton could only dream of being able to get away with back in the day. Just add ripping up the JCPOA and assassinating Iran's top general and you have the perfect recipe for world war inducing blowback.

Trump doesn't appear to be taking his antiwar rhetoric any more seriously the second time around either, at least not if his cabinet picks are any indication. While wisely resisting hiring more obvious neocon battle junkies like Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, and former flunkies like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, the Donald's new White House hit squad still reads like a rogue's gallery of rabid hospital bombers. 

Marco Rubio, the Contra-style neocon who was being groomed to be the next Bush when the Donald crashed his party in 2024, will finally have his opportunity to make Latin America bleed again as Secretary of State. Elise Stefanik will be sent to the UN to declare any nation that refuses to kick up to the new Nakba antisemitic. And don't even get me started on Michael Waltz, a National Security Advisor who has openly called for reinvading Afghanistan and putting boots on the ground in Ukraine.

Of course, all my isolationist friends on the right will roll their eyes and say, "What about Tulsi?" and I'm more than a little ashamed to admit that the bitch once had me fooled too, but Miss Gabbard has spent the last four years proving that her antiwar credentials come with a shit ton of asterisks, the biggest one being Israel which she seems to think America owes enough military hardware to cripple Cthulhu just so long as they use it to rid the deserts of every Muslim man, woman, and child that offends her weird brand of Hindu nationalism. 

This is also a woman who supports torture, drone strikes, and "very limited" counter-terrorism campaigns which basically makes her about as antiwar as Jimmy Carter and that is exactly as antiwar as any Democrat or Republican is allowed to get in this country without being excommunicated.

So, the Republicans have indeed replaced the Democrats, just not as the new antiwar party. Donald Trump's GOP has merely become the new "antiwar" party, and this is actually a very important dance move in America's bipartisan imperial hustle. There needs to be at least one party who pretends to be antiwar in this country because more than half of Americans are smart enough to realize that a globalist foreign policy offers absolutely nothing of value to a nation with only two borders and two oceans dividing it from the rest of the world. 

The fact is that Manifest Destiny is completely illogical to any sentient creature who doesn't make a living selling missiles, so, somebody has to sing "Give Peace a Chance" just so long as all they're doing is singing. But when it's all said and done, both parties in this country are owned by the same military industrial complex. 

Donald Trump hasn't changed that fact just because he shakes his fist at his fellow swamp monsters in between chumming the waters. That's just another twist in the isolationist shuffle.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Give Peace a Chance by the Plastic Ono Band

* Sonnet by the Verve

* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival

* Peace Sells by Megadeath

* You Don't Know the Shape that I'm In by MJ Lenderman

* Helter Skelter by the Beatles

* Just Like Kicking Jesus by the Brian Jonestown Massacre

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* What's the Frequency, Kenneth? by REM

* Last Caress by the Misfits