Some sharp white dude with a nifty haircut once observed that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable. Then some other white dude with a nifty haircut blew his brains all over Dealey Plaza with a cheap, Italian, mail-order rifle. In case you haven't guessed, the first quotable white dude was President John F. Kennedy, his far less quotable killer was an angry little man named Lee Harvey Oswald and regardless of what your pet theory on their last tango in Dallas may be, it's pretty hard to deny that it had something to do with the ultraviolence that defined Kennedy's first and only term in office.
No matter how badly Oliver Stone may want JFK to be Mark Twain with a bigger dick that doesn't change the uncomfortable truth that between poetic soliloquys and boozy sexual escapades, the king of Camelot was little more than a garden variety terrorist, having elected officials whacked and firebombing rice paddies to the last day of his presidency.
This was the man who followed up the fantastic and nearly apocalyptic failures of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis with Operation Mongoose, an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks on Cuba's civilian infrastructure by CIA trained fascist bandidos. oil refineries were bombed, railroads were sabotaged, and innocent people were slaughtered in cold blood.
So, even if you want to believe that there were Cuban exiles on the Grassy Knoll to deflower a generation of milquetoast liberal dreamers, who do you think loaded them up on ludes and Carcanos? Malcolm X called it best when he nonchalantly described Kennedy's demise as chickens coming home to roost. Then he got shot too.
Sixty some years later and America still hasn't learned a goddamn thing about the karmic political violence that decapitated Camelot. In fact, political violence is higher now than it's been since the Days of Rage that followed the JFK assassination, and the tide just keeps swelling higher and higher.
We barely survived a frantically chaotic presidential election season which saw not one, but two serious attempts made on the front runner's life when he wasn't busy organizing lynch mobs to stock mythic Haitian cat eaters only to see the new year kicked off by not one, but two terrorist acts, both committed by men trained to kill like Oswald by the United States Government.
At 3:15 AM on January 1rst, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 13-year veteran of the US Army welcomed in the New Year by crashing a pickup truck with an ISIS decal into the packed crowds of New Orlean's French Quarter, killing 14 and injuring 35 before he could be shot dead by police. Just six hours later, an active-duty Green Beret named Matthew Livelsberger parked a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with fireworks at the front entrance of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and shot himself while detonating his rented vehicle, injuring 7 in the process.
The media on both sides of the aisle seems to be utterly perplexed by this carnage even while they replay the footage in slow-motion to "Oh Yeah" by Yello. The gnashing heads of Snuff TV are quick as silver to blame it on the far-right, the far-left, and their rivals on social media but they've all conveniently forgotten the words of John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X.
When powerful people make peaceful change impossible while spreading violent change across the world it is only a matter of time before those chickens come home to roost.
All of the violent acts listed above were inspired by a vast array of motives. The only conspiracy connecting them all is that they were all launched against perceived representatives of the most violent empire on the planet. For a nation actively stoking the flames of a full-blown holocaust in Gaza and a possible apocalypse in Ukraine to expect anything less than violence is really nothing short of absurd.
This is the same kind of almost mystical, dewy-eyed, double-standard that the Westphalian nation state tried to apply to the kings and emperors of Old Europe with the specter of monarchism and it worked for a while. Killers were kings and kings were gods until gods started getting killed by their own irate subjects. Empress Elisabeth in 1898, King Umberto in 1900, King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luis Filipe in 1908. It was all oh so very shocking but not nearly as shocking as the October Uprising that shattered Czarist Russia into a thousand shards in 1917.
Violent change made inevitable.
What exactly is terrorism? What constitutes "political" violence? We're told that it is an act of violence perpetrated with an explicitly political motive. Well, then what about the tax resistor being thrown in prison for refusing to feed the war machine his pocket change? What about the Black man shot dead in cold blood for failing to genuflect to the kings in blue?
549 Americans were killed in the United States between 9/11 and 2019 during designated terrorist attacks, all during an era in which we were commanded by outrage over political violence to fight a violent War in Terror. Those deaths were the tragic fallout of the state that this forever war grew. So, were the 1,164 civilians murdered during fatal police shootings in 2023 alone but where is their outrage? Where is their war on terror?
This level of downright dizzying injustice cannot be silenced and stifled by the legacy media anymore. Even while the Supreme Court shrugs at banning TikTok and pigfucking oligarchs like Elon Musk buy off Twitter, there are simply too many camera phones for them to govern. We have all become digital witnesses to police stranglings and hospital bombings, and the more the elites attempt to pretend that it's all just not happening or it simply doesn't matter, the less legitimacy they can afford to clothe their naked greed and hubris with.
In a "free world" like this, with a global corporate state apparatus that is this omnipresent and inescapable, the rage becomes like fumes and every act of violence becomes political. Smash and grabs become acts of revenge against the mass gentrification of box stores. Workplace shootings become one-man uprisings against cubicle despotism. And every spark threatens to ignite a Bolshevik size prairie fire amidst the busted ovens of a failed technostate.
We can't pretend that any of this is shocking anymore without being complicit and I refuse to join the gasping class in their breathless chorus of virtue signaling awe, but I won't advocate carnage either even if I do understand it. Not only is it gruesome and dehumanizing even for the perpetrator who has reduced themself to fighting like a state, but it isn't particularly affective either.
Firing three bullets into a CEO feels fantastic but so what? Then what? What changes when we simply remove a single cog from the machine? And what did the Bolsheviks really achieve with their bloodbath beyond merely replacing one massive death machine with another?
The state itself is the source of the mass violence of the political and it cannot be replaced; it must be disengaged. A real war on terror would be a grassroots movement of citizens who refuse to pay taxes, refuse to buy their goods from corporate thieves, refuse to invest in banks or elections.
A growing collection of autonomous communities who only trade, share, and barter between others who refuse to validate any institution which benefits from the systematic monopolization of the use of force. A counterculture of counter governments rendering the violent authority of the state irrelevant once and for all.
And when the state comes to defend terrorism against the peaceful, and it will come, then and only then do we fire back while the whole world is watching.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins
* Digital Witness by St. Vincent
* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry
* We Appreciate Power by Grimes
* A Drug Against War by KMFDM
* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode
* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails
* Karma Police by Radiohead
* Kerosene by Big Black
* Zombie by the Cranberries
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