Panarchy is the Universal Peace Deal

 The winds of March are roaring and everywhere you look peace is in the air, or at least that's the impression you might get from eyeballing the latest headlines. Every other day it seems like another batch of barrel bomb-flipping butchers is getting together over finger sandwiches in the banquet room of a different five-star hotel to draw up plans for another ceasefire here or another peace deal there, but somehow people are still getting blown to bits all over the goddamn map.

We keep hearing how committed everyone is to peace in the Middle East and yet Benjamin Netanyahu seems to invade a new neighbor every other week, blasting through one red light after another and daring a very concerned international community to pull him over. The Europeans all shake their heads, but they keep cutting that psychopath checks instead of tickets between the endless procession of toothless interventions and talks about more toothless interventions. And we see a lot more of this same kind of shit going on over at the other global catastrophe in Ukraine.

While Donald Trump makes little secret about his desire to pave over the Gaza Strip and build a second Boca Raton on the mass graves, he's hustling like a shit-eating European to keep Putin and Zelensky on the phone together. Every day we're told by one of his sycophants that the mythic peace deal he promised to deliver on day one of his presidency is coming a little bit closer and yet cluster bombs are still dropping on both sides of Dnieper River. 

In the latest peace fake out, just hours after agreeing informally to halting attacks on energy infrastructure, both Putin and Zelensky launched massive drone attacks deep into each other's air spaces against pretty much every other kind of target. Yet the only time Trump ever turns off the tap of American artillery to Ukraine is when Zelensky hurts his feelings during another one those endless goddamn peace junkets.

The depressing reality here is that while peace talks may be in the air, talk is cheap among imperial death merchants. Powerful warlords like the ones in charge of the US and the EU frequently adopt a pacifist posture when their crusades begin to become toxic among their constituents back home, but this rarely amounts to much more than smoke and mirrors. 

In no Babylonian hellhole is this truer than it is in Washington, where every president is a pacifist until his first war crime and sometimes even for a while after that. Richard Nixon was elected to end a war he would drastically escalate to downright genocidal proportions in Indochina. George W. Bush ran against the reckless Balkan interventionism of the Clinton regime before declaring war on pretty much everybody and Barack Obama ran on moving Dubya's troops out of Iraq and back into the jaws of the Hindu Kush only to ship many of them back to Mosul anyway.

In spite of all the attempts by more liberal warmongers to paint Trump as some kind of Putinist Nevelle Chamberlain he is no exception to the rule. Donald spent his first term throwing freedom of navigation drills off the Russian coasts of the Black Sea while he shredded one Reagan era nuclear armistice after another. This Zionist rodeo clown isn't a non-interventionist, he just poses like one for the cameras so he can appear vaguely principled while shaking down our fatted allies for spare change.

The really gross thing is that all this isolationist posturing, and empty peace talk seems to be souring entire generations of otherwise thoughtful people on the notion of minding our own goddamn business as a virtue. In Europe, the communists are turning to fascism again and in North America many of my fellow anarchists are beginning to sound like neoliberals. I see it online every day; well-intentioned social anarchists adopting a posture of hyper-internationalism that views isolationism with contempt and interventionism as woke, and all this does is push more equally well-intentioned rural populists away from the real solution to the globalism that they are perfectly right to detest.

The biggest problem in one warzone after another, from Yugoslavia and Iraq to Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, is that the Westphalian nation state makes citizenship an involuntary life sentence delivered at birth. If you look at maps of Ukraine and Israel over the last century alone, their borders convulse and contract like a cartographic cancer, trapping hundreds-of-thousands of people on either side of them like wayward sheep based on the arbitrary whims of whichever asshole signed the last peace deal between bloodbaths. Why should any population be expected to respect such flagrant madness?

Ukraine's current borders are essentially a freeze frame of something slapped together by Stalin's errand boys and then divided from Russia with Yeltsin's equally unilateral divorce of the Soviet Union. No one in that cockamamy country had a say on any of this and the strife caused by chaining Novorossiyans and Ukrainians together before throwing away the key is what set the stage for opportunistic psychopaths like Victoria Nuland and Vladimir Putin to turn this region into a free fire zone.

The situation in Israel is even worse but fundamentally similar with the big thinkers of the so-called international community carving a hunk off of the Ottoman Empire's corpse and then declaring it a Jewish homeland in spite of the fact of the Jewish population being a peacefully stateless minority in the region until the British began flooding it with Zionist lunatics from Europe. More recently, the same western know-it-alls of the global north have been giving lip service to the notion of a two-state solution, but even the ones who are serious about this posture fail to recognize that no matter where you draw the border, somebody gets cut off and fucked over just like the people of the Donbass and Ukraine.

If you study the demographic maps of both of these regions you will recognize that there are no straight lines to be drawn. Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox, all spattered across the board in pockets and enclaves like a Jackson Pollock painting. It looks like chaos until you realize that violence didn't break out between these groups on any massive scale until other people began to organize them into states. Many empires rampaged across the Steppes and the Levant over the centuries but for the most part these regions remained largely decentralized and self-governed for thousands of years before the Nakbas and Holodomors started up.

The best way to respect the complicated diversity of these regions or any region for that matter is with a no-state solution based on the principles of pan-secession and panarchy. Allow any population of consenting citizens the right to form a nation anywhere at any time as long as that nation is governed by voluntary citizenship rather than geography. This way the members of a Palestinian caliphate could exist anywhere they herd their goats so long as any dissatisfied tribe of Bedouins is free to secede and form their own government whenever the spirit moves them.

That way Ukraine is free to secede from Russia, the Donbass is free to secede from Ukraine and Luhansk is free to secede from the Donbass without a single shot fired between them. This is the dream of panarchy or many anarchies; a world governed beneath a million flags with each flag free to represent any ideology or creed that its people desire so long as citizenship remains a choice, and boundaries are defined purely by who happens to occupy that patch of dirt at any given time.

This too would be a world of constant peace deals and ceasefires, but these would all occur daily and locally between neighbors over grazing rights and neighborhood charters. There would be little need for heavily armed jet sets of Bilderberg charlatans or massive global conglomerates like NATO and the European Union because people would no longer be governed by contrived cartels of belligerent bureaucrats that require industrial complexes just to wipe their ass. They would be governed by communities too small to bomb and markets too diverse to regulate.

You see dearest motherfuckers, at the end of the day, panarchy isn't a philosophy, it is a universal peace deal between consenting citizens because all citizens deserve the right to consent to what governs them. Leave it to a state to make peace a dirty word but leave it to a million tribes to smash the state and make peace common sense again. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Let's Start a War by Fear

* Drain You by Nirvana

* Runaways by the Killers

* I Don't Know Where to Start by Bully

* Declare Independence by Bjork

* Imagine by John Lennon

* What's Left of the Flag by Flogging Molly

* Zombie by the Cranberries

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

Confronting the Bigotry of Mental "illness" from a Queer Perspective

 Speaking from the precarious perspective of an obnoxiously androgynous genderqueer person both online and in the very rural real world, I'm not exactly a stranger to bigotry. Aside from the fact that getting called a monster in the supermarket is pretty much a side effect of taking Estradiol in Trump country, these people have been treating me like a sentient timebomb long before any of us had a nasty word for it. I've felt fundamentally toxic from an obscenely young age. My body has always felt weird and dangerous, and it always seemed to give off a smell that freaked out all the adults around me just before it spread to their children. It took a really long time just for me to put a finger on what exactly the fucking problem was but when I did it didn't exactly boost my popularity among the local townspeople.

On the other hand, by the time I was getting published as an out genderfuck personality I was already getting ran off the road by testosterone drunk lunkheads in pick-up trucks so, I was kind of beyond the point of words like 'tranny' and 'pervert' hurting my feelings in the comment section. Truth be told, as exhausting as it still is trying to get people to take my work seriously without smearing my make-up, there is a very twisted part of me that kind of enjoys the challenge. I've also learned to take a certain degree of pride in freaking out the neighborhood every time I take a walk around the block. I had honestly come to believe that I had seen the very worst of societies prejudices against the fundamentally strange and lived to write about it. Then I went crazy.

My official break with the sane world went off like a howitzer right around this time last year but in many ways, this wave of traumagenic neurodivergence was as long in the making as my burgeoning Queerness, likely because the two have always been tightly intertwined. I've struggled with a myriad of different maladies going back to early grade school. They came with all kinds of therapist approved labels like depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive this and attention deficit that, but their seemed to be a major fundamental shift when the simple notion occurred to me that I didn't have to be male. In many ways rejecting my diagnosed gender identity felt like taking off a strait jacket that I didn't even know I had been wearing for my entire life. A lot of my old phobias and anxieties simply fell apart but something far more terrifying seemed to take their place.

As I arrived at the conclusion that in spite of my obnoxious androgyny, I was indeed a female, I began suffering from all the symptoms typically associated with the kind of complex post-traumatic stress disorder associated with children of severe abuse even though I had no memory of any inciting incident profound enough to justify these reactions. My various therapists all seemed to agree that perhaps I was better off not remembering whatever I had apparently blacked out, so, I tried my best to make my peace with the unknown and move on with my gender transition. The first six months I spent on estrogen were quite possibly the happiest of my life but the moment my hormone levels reached the female range in the late fall of 2023, my world caught fire. 

The flashbacks I had been suffering from went from purely emotional to viscerally visual. I attempted to use parts work therapy to deal with this mayhem, but the parts started talking back and none of them had more to say than the wounded inner child I named Agnes. I began experiencing my flashbacks from her perspective and after I did, I would often feel like that violated little girl for hours at a time. Soon I became too much for my found family or even my therapists to handle and their rejection only fueled my descent into madness. However, through this maelstrom, slowly a coherent narrative began to take shape and amidst a three-ring circus fire of vivid flashbacks, epileptic style seizures, and multiple personalities, I remembered everything like it happened yesterday.

I remembered being horrified by my own body when I was barely old enough to walk. I remembered struggling to beg the adults around me for help but only being able to express these terrifying feelings by acting out. I remembered my preschool teacher beating me naked in the bathroom for these fits and a pair of Catholic priests taking advantage of them so they could molest and rape me. I remembered nearly choking to death on parts of their bodies in the process. And I remembered erasing myself and taking on the disguise of a meek and timid Catholic boy just to make it all stop. I remembered everything and it was almost too much to bear.

This is how I developed what is typically known as dissociative identity disorder. Early childhood abuse shattered my sense of self like a broken mirror, and I had to develop multiple distinct and autonomous personalities just to compartmentalize the horror into pieces that could share the load. Most of these personalities have likely been with me for most of my life but they remained stealth until I did the one thing that I believed I was being raped for doing and that was refusing to be a boy. As mind-bendingly terrifying as it was to realize all of this, especially in such a short span of time, my life finally made sense to me, it just took five of me to fully comprehend it. 

Aside from Nicky, there is Agnes, the five-year-old girl who carries most of the trauma as well as most of my empathy. There is Ophelia, a seven-year-old girl without a face who represents the state of extreme disassociation I experienced after the abuse. There is Max, an androgynous 14-year-old smartass with the soul of an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor, who helps manage the rest of us. And Mona, a heavily armed bulldyke in corpse paint who protects us and seems to personify both my rage and my fear of that rage hurting everyone around me.

I tend to experience "the girls", as I've taken to calling them, as projections that I can communicate with around me unless I get really triggered, then one of the girls, most frequently Agnes, takes control of the body and I become a helpless observer. As crazy as all this might sound, embracing this strange reality has allowed me to finally take control of my life. My endless list of neuroses finally makes sense and the tiny sisterhood in my head has taught me how to truly love myself for the first time in my life. Existing as five dykes in one skull gets complicated and downright exhausting at times but it has allowed me to take back my narrative and finally move forward from my treacherously murky childhood. 

This is because, in spite of the DSM label of "disorder" and all the baggage that comes with it, what I experience isn't an illness, it is a form of neurodiversity not unlike autism. Such an extreme amount of trauma at such an early developmental stage forced my brain to organize itself differently from the normal factory setting. I experience the same reality as everybody else, I just digest the information differently. Me and the girls have formed something of an internal collective to manage this and I'm quite proud of the progress that we've made together. However, what I was unprepared to deal with was the level of bigotry that we have faced because of our unorthodox existence.

I have been disrespected and disregarded more times in the last year as a result of my very public neurodiversity than I have been in the last seven years since I came out of the closet. Both in person and online, I am quite regularly belittled, talked down to, mocked, and cast aside. My numerous enemies have been given a golden ticket, a free pass to guaranteed supremacy, because nobody has to take a lunatic with four girls in her head seriously. But the worst bigotry that I have experienced has shockingly come from my own people in the so-called LGBT community.

I had volunteered for one of the most reputable LGBT rights organizations in the state of Pennsylvania for over a year when Trump took office for a second time and began lobbing hateful executive orders at trans kids like flaming lawn darts. For months I had been working to organize some kind of youth outreach program for the rural areas of the county where me and my tribe live, and this organization has been promising to help. Me and my girls have done our damnedest to be patient but when January became February, and I found out that these people were too busy to help the most fragile members of our community because they were preoccupied with securing sponsors for this year's Pride parade, I lost my patience and began demanding some fucking action. 

After wrapping my knuckles bloody on every door with a faggot behind it, I finally managed to get a meeting with the head of the board of this organization only to have that vile woman inform me to my face that she didn't feel safe allowing someone with my "condition" alone with the children that she was too busy with confetti to lift a finger for. And just like that, I became too Queer to be LGBT because I'm "mentally ill."

But what the fuck is mental illness but another word for Queer? At the end of the day, aren't we all just one big, disorganized tribe of freaks biologically compelled to obstruct the status quo? In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that Queer people were considered crazy by the same therapeutic state that has labeled my existence to be an illness. Members of the Gay Liberation Movement worked very hard to have every letter of LGBT removed from the DSM but what we should have done was burn that normie bible and declare all forms of neurodivergence to be expressions of Queer individuality. Instead, we left our comrades at the asylum behind in the name of assimilation and opened up a Pandora's Box that afforded an old white lesbian the ability to call me trash with a rainbow flag on her lapel.

Well, fuck her and fuck the rest of those pink capitalist conformists in the LGBT industrial complex, with their corporate sponsored parades and their bougie galas. Sylvia Rivera wouldn't recognize them as part of her tribe if they passed her poppers in the ladies' room and neither do I. So, let's just get the record straight right here, right now, I am not LGBT, I am Queer, and my queerness includes four little assholes with cunts who live inside my head. I am as proud of being a lunatic as I am of being a tranny or a dyke because all of these "disorders" are really just symptoms of the same disease. A diagnosis that reads that I am not normal and that the normal aren't safe anywhere I dare to sashay.

So, color me guilty as charged and stay the hell out of my way, me and the voices in my head have our own hell to raise.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Shadowboxer by Fiona Apple

* Personality Crisis by New York Dolls

* Sacrilege by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Crazy by Patsy Kline

* Hood by Perfume Genius

* All I Do by Bully

* Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag

* Soft Sounds from Another Planet by Japanese Breakfast

* Paranoid by Black Sabbath

* Carry Me Home by Mitski

Kiss My Ass, I'm Irish: Celtic Pride Against White Supremacy

 White supremacy remains a very potent weapon for the powerful in this country and I don't think that the far left should stand alone in confronting it. Many of my more libertarian readers tend to cringe at such notions and I can't completely blame them. Sadly, there are a good number of self-proclaimed leftists who use combatting white supremacy as an excuse for building up the state, but this doesn't change the fact that traditionally white supremacy has been a far more lethal excuse to do the exact same thing, and it still is. 

It's not even that the powerful in this country are necessarily racist, many are but for the most part bigotry is just an easy way to manipulate poor people into forfeiting their agency to authoritarian structures in the name of combatting other poor people.

Donald Trump's current war at the border is probably the best example of this in progress. The economy is shit and Americans in general are getting fucked left and right in every hole that bleeds. In a sane world, Wall Street welfare queens like Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be the focus of their rage. Instead, these same vile gangsters have hoodwinked half the country into getting behind an insane conspiracy to quadruple the size of the federal police state so they can sic gestapo on itinerate border hoppers who we're told are destroying this country with a massive crime wave that quite simply does not exist.

After surging during the economic shitstorm of the Pandemic, violent crime rates in this country have largely dropped back to where they were in 2019 and there is zero evidence that increased immigration at the time had anything to do with sparking that temporary bump. Quite the contrary, violent crime appears to have spiked across the Western Hemisphere because of the Pandemic, hitting hardest in the most impoverished nations of Central America and provoking many of their people to flee to safer sections of the map. All available statistics actually suggest that not only are undocumented immigrants less likely to commit violent crime than natives, but they are also more likely to be the victims of it too.

Sadly, none of these inconvenient facts stopped Donald Trump from using the potent imagery of increasingly dark vagrants spilling across the Rio Grande to get elected by wide margins of my fellow libertarians. However, I don't take this shit so personally simply because my post-left anarchist inclinations have driven me to adopt increasingly libertarian tactics to combat the white power state. 

I tend to take this shit a little more personally than your average libertarian honkey, especially around Saint Patrick's Day, because I am a historically literate nerd of Irish Catholic ancestry, and I am well aware of the fact that my people were the original wetbacks in this country before we assimilated beneath a banner of white supremacy.

You wouldn't think it by looking at a South Philly Trump rally, but Irish people weren't even considered white when we first stepped foot on American soil. After centuries of violent colonial rule under the British Empire, my ancestors left their homeland in the mid 19th century to escape a blight that English authorities deliberately manipulated into a genocidal famine. About a million of us died and millions more flooded America's shores aboard floating coffins, starving and riddled with disease, and when we got here, we faced a lot of the same perils faced by Hondurans and Guatemalans today. 

We were subjected to alarmist tabloid headlines and baseless conspiracy theories. We were herded into squalid tenements and targeted by violent mobs. And we were singled out for the simple fact that there was just too damn many of us to assimilate into America's cultural purgatory of Anglo-Saxon conformity all at once.  In fact, an entire political party was built on this hysteria; the so-called American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, who waged a holy war on Irish Catholics both literally and electorally beneath the banner of "Americans must rule America!" 

This proto-MAGA sect swept the country in the mid 1850s, electing over 100 congressmen as well as mayors in major cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They eventually even took the White House with our 19th president, Millard Filmore, being a former Know Nothing. During this time, these pseudo-populist despots passed egregiously anti-democratic laws that mandated teaching the King James Bible in public schools and barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent at least 21 years in the country. 

They also literally murdered people, especially at the ballot box, like they did at the Bloody Monday Riots of 1855 in Louisville, Kentucky, when Catholic homes were burnt to the ground and as many as 100 Irish people were killed in cold blood while thousands more were left with little choice but to flee the city for their lives. 

So, what the fuck happened then? How did my people go from being called "white niggers" and digging ditches in the ghettoes alongside our darker counterparts to being a major part of the same system that was once devoted to expelling us from its shores by any means necessary? Well, we did the same thing that the Italians and the Jews did; we got busy being white. We achieved this dubious goal in a number of ways but most of them essentially amounted to us convincing our masters that we could be trusted to do their bidding for them. 

We murdered our fellow Catholics during the Mexican American War when 40% of the United States Army was made up of immigrants. We rose up the ranks of the New England chapters of the Democratic Party by becoming the loudest advocates for chattel slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And we dutifully savaged the next influx of American refugees, leading violent race riots against Chinese railway workers accused of stealing our jobs.

So, now Irish Catholics can stand proud as white people but was it really worth it? What did we as a people really gain from this Faustian bargain beyond a slightly lower rank on the police state's shitlist? The right to identify with the same globalist Anglo-Saxon monoculture that kept our people in chains for centuries and continues to divide our ancestral homeland? 

For this we forfeited a proud culture of Celtic pride built around agrarian peasant resistance to colonial rule. We sacrificed everything that made us Irish just to conform to a crass commercial culture that still fundamentally hates us, that paints us as drunkards and mooks and turns our sacred holidays like Saint Patrick's Day into an excuse for Protestant frat boys to binge themselves sick on green beer and vomit into plastic leprechaun hats.

This is the other side of whiteness that the left often forgets to acknowledge. The first ethnicities that the master race erased were actually the European peasant cultures that they reduced to a single color. There is no such thing as white culture. This is nothing but a purposely vague conglomeration of secular universalist Protestant hogwash that essentially amounts to little more than kneejerk conformity and an evangelical devotion to institutional power. 

That and the constantly evolving demonization of the "other" which is basically just any outgroup that fails to comply with its own erasure and generally makes the world too diverse to govern. That used to be us, and as far as I'm concerned it still should be.

We were all minorities once, a million little tribes scattered to four corners of the wind. This only became a problem when a few powerful people decided that just one city state full of servants wasn't enough to satiate their power lust and decided to build empires spanning many tribes so they could play God with the poor people in the next village too. From this rapidly expanding cesspool came America and from America came the concept of the white race, invented by the same imperialists who sacked Ireland so they could sack Virginia too. 

During the early days of American colonialism there was no black or white. Slaves and servants came in a wide variety of colors and their status could evolve through subordination to the current puritanical traditions favored at the time by the royals back home in London. It wasn't even totally unheard of to find slaveowners of African descent provided that they said their prayers and paid their taxes.

Then a wealthy landowner by the name of Nathaniel Bacon decided that he was tired of kicking up his fortune to the Virginia colonial elites and formed a militia made up predominantly of European indentured servants and African slaves to overthrow the government. Bacon's Rebellion quickly got out of hand however and became something of a multicultural populist referendum on life under empire. The uprising was suppressed relatively quickly but not before Bacon's unruly slave army had succeeded in burning Jamestown to the ground. 

The planter class got scared and sought to divide the peasantry against each other. They did this by inventing whiteness as an ethnic concept. And just like that, all Europeans were spared the whip while those Africans deemed Black were reduced to a permanent slave caste.

But not every European embraced assimilation. Some of us wanted to remain ungovernable. And some of us were even insulted at the very notion of becoming complicit in reducing other human beings to property. This included a handful of Irish Catholic conscripts during the Mexican American War who deserted their posts to join the Mexican Army in resisting the Protestant expansion of chattel slavery in Texas. These unruly Micks ended up forming a ferocious artillery unit known appropriately as Saint Patrick's Battalion and while many were captured and executed as traitors, they didn't die white servants of American imperialism, they died free, and they died Irish.

I may be but a genderfuck heretic, but this is what I celebrate on Saint Patrick's Day, a culture of proud peasant renegades who stood with the oppressed not just because it's the honorable thing to do but because it's the only way to break free from the shallow culture of our ancestral oppressors. So, if you're truly as proud of being Irish as I am then you'll join me in standing with the latest class of wetbacks and spit your ill-gotten whiteness back in the face of the Know Nothings of the GOP.

The only thing great about America is all the weird little tribes who resist it. So, you motherfuckers can keep your white power and kiss my ass, because I'm not white, I'm Irish.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* This is a Rebel Song by Sinead O'Connor

* November Spawned a Monster by Morrissey

* The Parting Glass by the Pogues

* My Heart is in Ireland by the Wolfe Tones

* Tommy Gun by the Clash

* Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats

* Fire on Babylon by Sinead O'Connor

* Free the People by the Dubliners

* What's Left of the Flag by Flogging Molly

Ukraine Deserves Better Than Trump and Zelensky

 It was the imperial bitch fest heard round the world. Two of Babylon's finest Frankenstein monsters dueling it out on live tv over a mythic peace deal that neither creature seemed to prioritize over their respective egos. In one corner of the Oval Office, we had Volodymyr Zelensky, sulking and rolling his eyes in an ill-fitting black muscle shirt like a sullen teen caught masturbating in the family gym. In the other corner, we had Donald Trump and his almost deliriously sycophantic toady, JD Vance, taking turns blowing each other for saving the world. 

It was supposed to be a photo-op, a press conference celebrating a supposedly agreed upon deal for Ukraine to fork over half of their embattled nation's rare mineral rights as a thank you to the United States for talking them in and out of World War 3. How this strange colonial tax was supposed to lead to lasting peace is beyond me, but Zelensky clearly wasn't interested in bootlicking for the cameras that day.

He came out swinging with a barely coherent diatribe about the evils of diplomacy that included the usual CNN approved revisionist history of Putin's invasion that carefully deleted all the NATO provocations that inspired it. Donald Trump and his Wall Street rent boy responded exactly the way Zelensky probably hoped they would, by lecturing the Ukrainian strongman like the help caught pocketing the silver, browbeating another world leader for over ten minutes for disrespecting his imperial masters with the inconvenience of a dissenting opinion and just generally making complete and total asses of themselves.

By the time this embarrassing shitshow was finally over, Volodymyr Zelensky was being hurled out of the White House like a common hooligan and Donald Trump was badmouthing him on social media like a scorned middle school debutante. Apparently, this is American diplomacy in 2025. Somehow, I'm less than shocked that I'm less than shocked.

The really fucked up thing here is that the ceasefire itself was actually a really good idea for everyone regardless of how the war in Ukraine started. Its continuation in perpetuity solves nothing for the legions of young conscripts dying daily on both sides over a quarter mile of bloody trenches and bombed out ruins. Donald Trump ended up leaving this episode stinking like a soiled conquistador with Tourette's syndrome but most of his criticisms of Volodymyr Zelensky were more true than false.

This handsome kid isn't the Joan of Arc of liberal democracy that the progressive universe sells him as. He is an increasingly authoritarian kleptocrat who hasn't just held off elections indefinitely under martial law but has banned most of his nation's formidable opposition parties and essentially nationalized Ukraine's media under a single heavily censored government conglomeration. The real reason this asshole is allergic to the peace table is that he knows that without a war and the torrential slush fund of dissent crushing weaponry that comes with it he won't last a week before being overthrown by his own goddamn generals.  

But peace was never the real motivation here. It very rarely is with Trump. As if his demand for a bounty of shiny things weren't suspect enough, Trump made this fact even more obscenely clear right in the middle of his screaming match with Zelensky when he jumped from warning about the dangers of World War 3 to bragging about initiating it by sending Ukraine Javelin missiles at a time when even Barack Obama felt this was going too far. These were the first offensive weapons shipped to Kiev, $47 million dollars of them to be exact, and it wasn't the only assistance Trump provided to provoking the war he suddenly wants to end either.

The Donald also dutifully approved the continued build-up of NATO forces on Russia's borders started by Obama after his Maiden coup led to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. This included the Cuban-Missile-style Navy patrols on the Black Sea using battleships capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Trump spent 82 days off Russia's shores in 2020 alone, provocatively buzzing Sevastopol's Black Sea Fleet like a teenage greaser playing chicken with doomsday.

Trump further highlighted his less than peaceful motives in this region by endorsing the UK's recent insane suggestion of putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine and has even flirted with the possibility of sending in US troops as well to secure his precious goddamn minerals which is what he's really after here. Donald Trump may put on a big show of aping like Pat Buchanan with dick jokes, but his foul-mouthed isolationism usually amounts to little more than a hustle. The fucker is basically just against any war that he can't personally profit from, and Trump's ties aren't made in sweatshops in Kharkiv.

What Trump really wants to do is to strip Ukraine of the copper wiring before he shifts the American Empire towards consolidating its flagging control over the Western Hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine on Drug-War steroids then launching his own world war against Russia's sponsors in China.

His Fox approved Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said as much: "Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe... the US is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, reorganizing the reality of scarcity and making the resourcing trade-offs."

But not all of the Donald's fellow imperialists agree. Many are heavily invested in turning the war in Ukraine into an endless gauntlet of grotesque horrors simply so they can justify handing forklifts full of American tax dollars over to their friends in Raytheon while they keep churning out more toys that blow up the moment they land on Ukrainian soil. 

Volodymyr Zelensky has become the figure head of this deeply sick set, a sexy Semitic action figure regurgitating neoliberal talking points in roguish broken English while he sells one generation of Ukrainians after another into forced military prostitution. The man has become a monster but unlike Trump he didn't start out that way.

The biggest lie Donald Trump barked at Zelensky was the absurd notion that he started this war. Russia didn't even start this war, America did. We started it by promising Ukraine NATO membership in 2008 before using romper-stomping skinheads to overthrow the country's democratically elected government in 2014. This is when the Donbass, whose citizens had overwhelmingly voted for that government, seceded and the US encouraged their puppets in Kiev to launch a glorified race war to root out the regions ethnic Russians with a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire.

Zelensky was actually elected specifically on the promise to end this madness by granting the Donbass autonomy and reigning in the neo-Nazi battalions reenacting Operation Barbarossa on Russia's borders. Zelensky would chicken out on the frontlines of this civil war before Russia invaded but returned to reason during negotiations held by Israel and Turkey in Istanbul a few months into that disastrous imperial excursion.

Volodymyr had essentially signed off on the outline of an agreement that would have seen Russia withdraw back to the Donbass in exchange for Ukraine's neutrality. It was the United States and the United Kingdom that convinced him to rip it up. Trump's old buddy, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson actually travelled to Kiev in person during these talks in April 2022 to tell Zelensky himself that he couldn't expect western support if he signed on to the ceasefire, but he would receive an endless allowance of Atlantic artillery if he kept the war burning indefinitely.  

The result was Zelensky taking the momentum from his victory against Putin's initial invasion of Ukraine and investing it into his own invasion of the same regions in the Donbass that he was elected to let go of, and the result of this insane crusade within a crusade was the seemingly impossible feat of Russia successfully annexing nearly every other Russian speaking region of Ukraine over the last two years, the same regions that ferociously resisted Russia's initial rapacious advances and helped Zelensky, a man they overwhelmingly voted for, to humiliate the nearly undefeated Putin the Terrible without a single goddamn ATACMS. 

Now the entirety of those border-fluid bloodlands face certain conquest regardless of who wins, or which deal does or doesn't get signed. If Donald Trump's heavily televised flogging of Volodymyr Zelensky doesn't convince the Ukrainian people that NATO is a glorified protection racket on a good day, then I don't know what will. It's also increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that regardless of his initial intentions, the longer Zelensky rules the more like Putin he becomes. So, how can peace be a solution when it's being decided by such despicable despots?

This isn't to say that all is lost for Ukraine and the Donbass, but I believe that the quickest way out of World War 3 might actually be the kind of mutinies that helped bring an end to World War 1. People forget that the Bolsheviks came to power on a promise to end Russia's involvement in that imperial shitshow and that the German Empire was dissolved almost simultaneously by a conspiracy of "soldier's councils" formed to resist their own officers. Both of these bold campaigns would end tragically in capitulation and another world war, but Ukraine was always the last region to fall in line.

These are the Wild Steppes after all. The home of the Zaporizhian Sich, a stateless polity of renegade Cossack mercenaries and escaped serfs who challenged the authority of every other state in the neighborhood for centuries and ruled like honorable thieves on the high seas of an ungovernable wasteland. So why should world wars be the only chapters of history to repeat themselves?

Both Ukraine and the Donbass deserve better than to be the follies of a nest of lecherous hoodlums wrestling over borders and minerals. My only advice as a shit-talking armchair anarchist is to stop shooting each other and turn your guns against the real enemies in the wheelhouse. Kill the captain, save the ship. The Sich lives when the bitch dies, and we all know who the bitch is.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Rebels by Drive-By Truckers

* Cochise by Audioslave

* Queen Bitch by David Bowie

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Trash by New York Dolls

* Where Did You Sleep Last Night by Nirvana

* Courtesans by the Magnetic Fields

* Bad Mouth by Fugazi

* The Bitch is Back by Elton John

* You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told) by the White Stripes

The Un-Banality of MAGA: Trump is Not Unprecedented, He's Just Obnoxious

 Before I begin my latest act of contrarian journalistic blasphemy, I feel morally obligated to observe the basic fact that Donald J. Trump is a completely grotesque piece of human filth. Unspoken ethical obligations aside, I do know this fact to be existentially true. America's current Commander in Chief is a pathologically heinous human being and the evidence to this fact is quite overwhelming. The Donald himself barely even tries to conceal it. In fact, he often seems to be downright proud of his Gotham-grade villainy.

This is a man who took his daddy's slumlord kingdom and turned it into a multibillion-dollar empire by defrauding entire zip codes with corporate welfare schemes that left South Jersey in the shadows of a colossal graveyard of gawdy gutted casinos. This is a literal serial rapist with over two-dozen accusers who was also a known confederate of Jeffrey Epstein during the peak of his own nefarious career as a child sex trafficker to the stars. And this is man whose almost demonically derelict pathology extends far beyond ancient history; it informs his leadership as a modern-day Caligula who has merely taken his kinks and made them public policy.

The man wantonly threatens a global economy still reeling from the pandemic he oversaw during his last reign of terror with a massive trade war unless every other nation agrees to aid and abed his insane conspiracy to ethnically cleanse the Rio Grande and turn the War on Drugs into the new frontier of the War on Terror. He is threatening to recolonize the Panama Canal, buy Greenland from Denmark like an Arctic slave plantation, and pave over Gaza while children still writhe in the rubble.

You would have to be ethically anesthetized not to detest such an obviously loathsome beast but the only thing more horrifying than this pathological trainwreck's still buoyant popularity is the fact that he actually isn't all that unusual among his fellow elites who seem to only begrudgingly tolerate his existence when they aren't using their dying news empires to openly declare him to be the reincarnation of Gilles de Rais.

We all seem to forget that Donald is in fact one of them, the gilded class of American aristocracy that floats effortlessly back and forth through the revolving doors of big business and big government. This is largely because both Trump and his ilk of swampland predators have quite a bit invested in the notion of him being exceptional. But he's not. 

After all, the Donald was old friends with Bill Clinton at a time when he too was an active sexual predator and a frequent flyer on their co-conspirator Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express. The upper echelon of both parties is riddled with tax cheats and inside traders, some of whom are afforded the unquestioned status of respected elder statesmen like Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi while they rifle through our wallets like dope sick junk fiends. And critically acclaimed presidents with virtually untarnished reputations have been proven guilty of all manner of diplomatic gangsterism.

Barack Obama, the man generally held in esteem by the legacy media as a sort of sainted anti-Trump, had democracies in Honduras and Ukraine overthrown over relatively minor disagreements on how their leaders should pay the rent and the only reason that Donald Trump even has a graveyard to build condos on in Gaza is because Barack's VP, Joe Biden, filled it with corpses by bankrolling Bibi's final solution.

So, yes dearest motherfuckers, Donald Trump is guilty as shit, but he is guilty as shit of the exact same fucking shit that nobody could be bothered to give a shit about until his dayglow ass was the one sitting on the toilet. The only thing that makes Donald Trump any different from the rest of these thugs is that he has the nerve to be proud of the sick fucking things that they all do.

While the Kennedy's tactfully pay for another abortion for the help in one of the more shadowy neighborhoods of Camelot, Trump boasts bombastically about their shared ability to "grab them by the pussy." While the Bush's and the Clinton's lean on their NATO tricks to kick up the rent in the backrooms of Brussels, Trump shakes them down in front of a live audience like Paulie Walnuts bathed in bronzer. And while America's mandarins have been carefully prepping the Gaza Strip for fumigation for nearly a century while pretending to sue for peace, Trump announces plans for a Holocaust memorial theme park by the Levantine Sea before the blood has even dried on the beach.

The only thing really unprecedented about Donald Trump is his total lack of shame. He is the one overprivileged despotic asshole who is actually proud of being an overprivileged despotic asshole. Sadly, this cocky bravado is also what seems to convince an electorate despondent after decades of empty promises and cheesy pick-up lines to believe that Donald Trump is some kind of Beltway outsider even though he once bankrolled most of his supposed rivals.

This is also the only reason that certain classes of Donald's fellow elites despise him. They don't oppose his sickening behavior; they oppose his refusal to keep it behind closed doors like the rest of them. The last thing that a bunch of greedy imperialists want is to advertise to the world exactly how the sausage is made but at the end of the day, doesn't the world deserve to know? Shouldn't the people of Egypt and Ukraine know exactly what they're selling their souls to put in their stomachs?

This is the one silver lining on the toxic smog belching from Donald Trump's smokestacks and the results are occurring in real time as we speak. Europe's leaders are openly discussing cutting ties with Washington and courting their own more regional spheres of influence rather than delegitimizing their own slippery grip on power by licking an irate imbecile's boot. America has never been more openly despised by the typically compliant quislings on its borders and the Middle East is more united than ever over their opposition to a more public Nakba than what they have become accustomed too. This is how empires die but this is also how democracy degenerates into open authoritarianism. 

My argument here isn't that Donald Trump is not the new Hitler; it's that his opposition in the Democratic Party are the new Social Democrats too. People forget that Adolf Hitler wasn't all that special either. Germany had long been an empire defined by cruelty and authoritarianism. The first concentration camps were actually built in Namibia during the 19th century to cure that German colony of the tribes most resistant to its rule. 

Hitler's own rise to power was paved by his rivals in Weimar Germany's Social Democratic Party who decimated the plutocracy of the Reichstag with emergency orders like Article 48 that allowed the Chancelor to rule without consent. This device was used to restore order after Hitler's 1923 Beer Hall Putsch only to be used by the Devil himself a decade later to declare himself Further.

When it's all said and done, fascism is little more than the state without shame. It comes about when empires like America and Germany run out of excuses for their vile existence and are left with nothing more inspiring to resort to than exploiting the gross sense of entitlement they have cultivated in their long-suffering subjects along with more naked displays of longstanding repulsive behavior that tend to impress a population still clinging to a toxic relationship with its leaders.

Donald Trump may not be any less vile than his predecessors but much like with Hitler, the popular mandate given to his open venality could be one thing that pushes him to take it one step further into the abyss. However, it must be understood that this fate is only the end result of the sanctified state anointed by his predecessors and still trafficked as a panacea by his rivals. When we fail to recognize that Donald Trump is merely one of them with less table manners, we make his return or the return of another like him inevitable. 

We have to recognize that the state itself is the problem and that its existence in any form is one defined by violence and barbarism. Otherwise, this cycle of "legitimate" authority followed by "illegitimate" authority will only continue until there is nothing left to rule but graveyards dug next to a rising sea.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails

* Frankenstein by New York Dolls

* Shitty Ballet by Bleached

* Sweet 69 by Babes in Toyland

* Joiner by Blondshell

* All Hail Me by Veruca Salt

* Shadowboxer by Fiona Apple

* Revenge by Ministry

* Bad Boy by New York Dolls

* Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

This post is devoted in loving memory to David Johanson and Michelle Trachtenberg. Two odd souls who made this odd soul feel a little less odd.