The Inspiringly Insatiable Rage of Ansar Allah

 I've often mocked the hyperbole trafficked by the Trump alarmists in the mainstream media, but even I can't deny that the first few months of Donald Trump's second run in the White House have been terrifying and the most terrifying thing about them is just how successful they've been. After spending a calamitous first term carrying on his life's work as a well-publicized serial failure, the Donald has returned to the scene of the crime with a cabal of technofascists and Christian Zionists who appear to be slightly more adept at taking potshots at what's left of democracy in this country then they are at shooting each other in the foot.

In a glutinous binge of executive overreach, they have kidnapped hairdressers for having suspicious tattoos and sent them to third world dungeons in direct and almost flamboyant defiance of court orders. They have used similar powers to declare war on students who use the First Amendment to offend MAGA megadonors in the Israel First lobby. And they have manipulated the levers of world trade to turn the globalized economy into a weapon of fiscal terrorism to keep America's foreign flunkies in line.

They have pushed the limits of centralized power in a collapsing empire to the brink, and they have done so to resounding ovations from the peanut gallery. Even with Trump's reckless trade war hobbling checkbooks across the country like James Caan in Misery, the vacuous cult of personality known as Donald J. Trump remains stronger than the dollar, with most polls showing this cut-rate Ceasar's approval ratings hovering close to fifty percent and for much of the last few months these numbers were actually record breakingly high.

Middle Americans seem to be so psyched to get shit done after four years with a vegetable for a president that they don't seem to be particularly concerned by what that shit is or how likely it is to blow back in their fucking faces when Trump's new and improved Deathstar is handed over to someone willing to turn its lasers on rural white trash in Trumplandia. These people seem to have totally forgotten that Reagan's escalation of the War on Crime supplied Janet Reno with the tanks used at Waco.

As a genderqueer anti-Zionist in the Appalachian foothills of Gummo Country, I've born witness to this strangely popular reign of terror firsthand. My tiny rural Queer community has been badly battered by Trump's openly genocidal avalanche of executive orders commanding the federal government to deny our existence and target our children in their compulsory school system. I have found-family receiving death threats in middle school while their classmates' cycle in and out of other juvenile carceral systems for the crime of failed suicide pacts that aren't likely to fail a second time.

Hope is in short supply for Trump's chosen scapegoats and what's left of the Democratic Party isn't particularly interested in the plight of trans kids, undocumented labor, and members of the BDS Movement. They made that pretty damn clear when they chose the Cheney's over us during their last campaign. But some people are still giving our dayglow duce well-deserved angina, and I refuse to deny being thrilled by this simply because of political correctness.

He doesn't seem to have realized it quite yet, but Donald Trump has driven directly into a brick wall in Yemen. After Benjamin Netanyahu tore up his short-lived ceasefire with Hamas and escalated his genocide in Gaza with a total blockade and Donald Trump joined him to announce his intentions to build condos on the rubble, the Houthi rebels also known as Ansar Allah announced their intentions to restart their own guerrilla blockade against Israeli shipping in the Red Sea unless the Nakba stops. 

President Trump, who had already redeclared these men to be terrorists in one of his noxious executive orders, didn't even wait for the first drone to take off before beginning a merciless bombing campaign against largely civilian targets in Yemen. Heavy airstrikes have been going on daily since and a heavy civilian death toll has come with them, but all signs of victory remain elusive at best.

While Trump and his minions belched proudly of the "incredible success" of their war crimes, hundreds of thousands of Yemeni citizens have been seen taking to the streets of Sadaa to publicly celebrate their defiance of empire. Meanwhile, the Houthis have actually expanded their maritime attacks to once again include American targets while the Pentagon has quietly warned Congress of the "limited success" of Trump's bombing campaign which is expected to cost taxpayers over $1 billion dollars in the near future.

If anything, the Houthis only seem to become more defiant with each proceeding escalation. However, it should be understood that this is the unshakable courage of the living dead, of a people launching rockets from a crypt where the soil is still loose from freshly dug graves. The reason that Yemen does not fear Donald Trump is because they have already survived the very worst he has to offer, and they have nothing left to lose but rusty chains.

Ansar Allah began as a grassroots spiritual movement, emerging from Yemen's northern Saad Province in the early 2000s. Led by a former parliamentarian and religious scholar named Hussein al-Houthi, they remained a largely peaceful coalition of peasant tribal militias working to revive the Zaydi school of Shia Islam indigenous to the region and combat the corruption of American and Saudi influence on their homeland until the western-backed dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh made the fatal mistake of attempting to disarm them. 

A scuffle ensued, followed by a crackdown which turned into a full-blown insurgency in 2004 after an attempt to arrest al-Houthi resulted in his death. His brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi took his place and embraced a distinctly Third World ideology that seemed to have as much in common with the Zapatistas as it did the Mullahs. Unsurprisingly, the Houthis played a major role in the Arab Spring when it came around to Sadaa in 2011, which resulted in Saleh finally stepping down after decades in power. But when his replacement who also happened to be his vice president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, shockingly failed to make any real reforms, the Houthis chucked him out in a largely bloodless uprising in 2014.

This is when Hadi's Saudi sponsors stepped up their on-again-off-again attacks on their impoverished neighbors and America began to directly assist them with intelligence, arial refueling, and advance munitions. Obama drew first blood, but Donald Trump turned it into a driving rain of downright genocidal proportions. Between the years of 2015 and 2022, America and its proxies dumped literal tons of lethal hardware on the nation in the worst carpet bombing since Cambodia while enforcing a crippling blockade. 

Over 377,000 were killed, most of them civilians, while another 4 million were internally displaced and the entire nation was pushed to the brink of starvation. But the Houthi rebels didn't blink. They routed every jihadist mercenary we sent in on the ground and came out of a holocaust with the battle-hardened capability to confront their attackers after they retreated and started another bloodbath in Gaza.

Donald Trump and nearly every other swamp monster on the Beltway tries to blame all of this misfortune on Iran, but their own intelligence has admitted this to be bullshit, revealing that not only is the majority of Ansar Allah's fleet of tin can drones quite literally made of garbage in domestic workshops but that the Ayatollah had actually commanded their supposed proxies in Yemen to leave Hadi in power. The Houthi's message to him was the same as their message to Trump; fuck you, we won't do what you tell us.

I have little doubt that these bearded Moslem badmen probably wouldn't even know what to do with a genderfuck anarchist like me, but you don't have to be a Zaydi to be inspired by the brazen tenacity of their resistance, you just have to be someone who has been stomped on by the same jackboots. The Houthis have succeeded in surviving the very worst that Trump has to offer while making fools of their tormentors because they have taken that old maxim of 'think globally, act locally' to the next level.

The territory they govern is far from substantial, but it includes the Bab-el-Mandeb, the southern gateway to the Red Sea, and when the men who killed their children began killing the children of other men in Gaza, they used little more than a squadron of RC planes to cripple international trade until a ceasefire was finally pushed through, turning the tables and blockading the blockaders. Now, they're at it again and I'm all for it.

If Zaydi sheepherders can grab this wicked empire by the balls than why not rural Queers or undocumented workers or pissed-off college kids? Why not all of us? I hear the call of agora again, the awesome roar of counter-economics as a weapon greater than bombs. Undocumented immigrants could smuggle hormone blockers over the border with genderfluid coyotes teaching them how to shift their gender presentation to throw off ICE. The BDS Movement could expand their targets to anyone profiting off the subjugation of Yemen while they use the dark web to purchase enough Houthi khat to make the stimulant a staple of every campus rave and Pride parade.

My people are getting hammered by an administration that openly seeks our erasure, but I refuse to play the victim begging callous breeders in the DNC for scraps. I'd rather die like a Houthi on my feet than live like a Democrat on my knees. No more fucking around. It's time to fight back and that means hitting the only part of Uncle Sam with a pulse, his wallet.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Rusty Cage by Soundgarden

* Waiting Room by Fugazi

* Reign in Blood by Tori Amos

* I Am the Black Wizards by Emperor

* It's a Mirror by Perfume Genius

* Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine 

* The Stand by the Alarm

* A Drug Against War by KMFDM

* Rise Above by Black Flag

Greenland Deserves Solidarity, Too

Something very strange has happened to American colonialism. Somewhere between the shock-and-awe of Dubya's New American Century and the explosive verbal dysentery of Orange-Sphincter-Bad, Uncle Sam's mask of sanity got cracked. Naturally, the neocons and neolibs will blame it all on Trump but the election and reelection of such an openly debauched hooligan would never be possible in a functioning empire. That would be like blaming Caligula alone for Rome's demise just because he stopped drawing the blinds before the orgies. The rot here clearly runs much deeper than 2024. Any nation that responds to a recession by reigniting the Cold War was already on its way down whether the fools calling audibles from their ivory towers realized it yet or not.

With that being said, the reign of Trump II is clearly defined by what I can only describe as a sort of imperial cognitive decline. Donald Trump has done more damage to this wretched empire's ill-deserved standing on the international stage in the first few months of his second term through his bombastic social media decrees and his deranged slurry of executive orders than Al-Qaeda, covid, Walmart, and American Idol sewn together. We are retaking the Panama Canal and renaming it the Gaza Gulch. We are declaring trade wars against anyone in the neighborhood who refuses to dig a flaming border moat. And we are preparing to add Denmark to the Axis of Evil if they refuse to sell us Greenland like a used Toyota.

As absurd as all this sounds and is, it does appear to be a part of a coherent if desperate late-stage capitalist gamble on restructuring American supremacy in an era of virtually unprecedented collapse. The Trump mafia has largely called it quits on our decades long crusade to obliterate the Eurasian land bridge with dueling forever wars in the graveyards of Ancient Babylon and the former Soviet Union in favor of betting the entire house on a final showdown with China. But first, we have to shore up our resources with a return to the gunboat diplomacy of the Monroe Doctrine. Basically, putting America first means strengthening our presence across the entirety of the Americas and that includes expanding our hemispheric hegemony to the rapidly thawing European colony of Greenland. 

This cheesy eighties action flick style throwdown may be a savage farce, but a farce shouldn't be confused with a joke, and nobody is laughing in Nuuk. This is an autonomous Inuit island nation that has been struggling gallantly for centuries against brutal European colonialism and just as the violence of climate change has unlocked the long frozen economic resources that may afford them the ability to slip the leash, every gangster with a cheap smile and a tailored suit is showing up at their doorstep with a stainless steel briefcase full of cash in one hand and a loaded Uzi in the other.

Cue JD Vance and the Second Lady for a splashy photo-op. Just days after Donald Trump refused to rule out the use of military force to kidnap 57,000 people in the name of national security, these two fine young Republicans, duded up like models for the LL Beam winter catalogue, show up with camera crews and cellophane smiles to make nice with the natives. The natives smelled them coming before their private jets could land. Every single door that the White House knocked on in the capital of Nuuk slammed shut the moment they heard the name Trump. The wealthiest empire on earth couldn't find a single native family or business willing to be seen on film with these yuppie pit vipers. So, the Second Couple ended up having to slum it over at the US military's barren Pltuffik Space Bace and play benevolent pilgrim on the set of The Thing.

This kind of pandering white savior bullshit is nothing new to Greenland. They have been dealing with the passive aggressive cruelty of Western Civilization going back to the 16th century when the then ascendent Danish Kingdom colonized the island shortly after Christian jihadist mercenaries arrived to convert the heathen Inuit fisherman who migrated there from Canada in the 12th century. What transpired over the next 300 years was a story all too familiar to the darker nations of the global south like Palestine. A story of genocide, apartheid, cultural erasure, and ecological exploitation. And it's a story that all too frequently included the United States as a less than silent partner.

The first major mining operation in Greenland was launched by Denmark and those fine folks over at Oresund Chemical Industries in the tiny village of Ivittuut in 1854. Danish workers were shipped in directly to the mine to extract a rare mineral known as cryolite, which was used to smelt aluminum. 400 billion Kroners of revenue was ripped from the earth by the time the mine closed in 1987 and one of their top customers was the United States Military who used this magic dirt to produce fighter jets for their own imperial adventures while also making sure to keep this useful Arctic territory under their thumb.

This effort graduated to a military occupation in 1940 after a rival white supremacist named Adolf Hitler took Denmark in his Blitzkrieg rampage across Europe. The Allied Forces, led by Great Britain and the United States, swooped in to occupy Copenhagen's Atlantic colonies in the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. 6,000 troops were sent to occupy the latter which at the time contained a native population of about 20,000. FDR declared Greenland to be a part of America's expanding "defense" sphere of influence in 1941. His nuke dropping toady, Harry Truman would offer to buy the Island from Denmark just like Trump for $100 million dollars in 1946. The Danes would politely decline but they had no reservations about the United States turning the colony into a radioactive NATO playground.

America unilaterally expanded their sacred right to conduct widespread military operations on the Island with the 1951 Defense of Greenland Act and opened Thule Air Base the same year after forcefully evicting the local Inuit population from the site. Thule would become the depleted uranium tip of America's spear in our nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. It wouldn't be revealed until the 90s that the US had stashed doomsday devices at the base with the Danes full consent, in spite of that Nordic socialist nation's publicly anti-nuke stance. This is because Denmark's progressive secular democracy had far more important things to worry about than world peace, namely the brutal Danification of Greenland's native population.

Denmark used the awesome power of a centralized nanny state to fund major urbanization projects on the island, forcing rural Inuit communities into massive public housing blocks and compulsory public schools where they were forced to abandon their traditional subsistence lifestyles for something more modern. Inuit children were systematically removed from their families and placed into foster homes in Denmark for further indoctrination, but the Danish state didn't stop at killing the Indian, they targeted the child as well, fitting Greenlandic girls as young as 12 with intra-uterine devices, often without their knowledge and consent, leading to the sterilization of 35% of native women of child bearing age by 1970.

None of these grotesque efforts of forced assimilation managed to stifle the Greenlandic people's desire for liberation though. As the anti-colonialist movement of the Third World reached oppressed people in the heart of Babylon, inspiring uprisings from Watts to Stonewall, opposition to Danish rule and a desire for the revival of Inuit Power swelled in Greenland. The island managed to achieve home rule over domestic affairs in 1979 and used this power to withdraw from the neo-colonial monstrosity known as the European Union in 1985. Home rule was expanded further in a 2009 self-government agreement that granted the former colony control over its own mineral resources as well as the right to be consulted on NATO military maneuvers. But total independence has been affectively stymied by a 5 billion Kroner block grant from Denmark that still essentially keeps the lights on on the island.

In the ultimate sick twist of irony, the environmental rape perpetrated by Western Civilization and their numerous industrial complexes has given the island access to mineral riches long trapped beneath the glacial ices that could afford it the resources it needs to unshackle itself from Danish subjugation but as the Trump Administration's increasingly belligerent behavior proves, this still leaves Greenland at a treacherous crossroads, one not dissimilar to that faced by many newly decolonized Third World nations. On one hand, you have the quite openly rapacious advances of western powers in decline of which Trump is not alone. France has responded to Trump's nationalist caterwauling by raising the prospect of sending French troops to defend "EU territory", despite Greenland's clear rebuke against being unilaterally deemed European.

On the other hand, you have China and the ascendant economic powers of the BRICS coalition. As tempting as embracing this anti-western front against dollar supremacy may seem on the surface, it would sadly likely amount to little more than switching pimps. China is now the world's biggest creditor nation and BRICS looks a little bit more like a loan shark cartel dressed up in radical chic with each passing imperial creep state like Saudi Arabia and the UAE that it adds to the fold.

Greenland's best hope would be to go the way of their ancestors with a diverse tribal coalition that creates autonomy through sheer decentralized numbers, something similar to what the recently liberated Third World attempted during the last cold war with the Non-Aligned Movement, only this time avoiding the pitfalls of the Westphalian nation state by refusing to comply with global constructs of central authority like the UN and the World Bank. This would mean embracing a form of monetary diversity that would include the use of cryptocurrencies and admitting nations without traditional borders like Chiapas, Cheran, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah.

We have been slamming our fucking brains out against the western-style nation state for thousands of years now and its greatest achievements aside from climate change and nuclear bombs are global peace treaties that recognize kingdoms run by trust fund cadavers before the people they enslave and the miracle of modern medicine that allows them to shove eugenics machinery into children. Maybe we should all try governing a little bit more like the Innuits before modern liberal democracy boils us all alive in our own glacial juices and maybe this begins with us all showing the same level of solidarity to Greenland that we do Palestine.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Song that influenced this post

* Security of the First World by Public Enemy

* Human Behavior by Bjork

* Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones

* Raping a Slave by Swans

* Karma Police by Radiohead

* World Peace is None of Your Business by Morrissey

* Burning Too by Fugazi

* Rape Me by Nirvana

* Hyperballad by Bjork

* The Payback by James Brown

Trump's Fascist Immigration Regime Will Fuck You Too, Gringo

 It's a debate that has been raging between left and right libertarians for Kali knows how long; that age old question of just how libertarian are borders? Naturally, being a Situationist-cum-Agorist, the answer seems pretty fucking obvious to me, and it can be best delivered by another question. What the fuck does chucking people in jail for crossing invisible lines have to do with liberty? The entire premise just feels dizzyingly arbitrary to me, not to mention just plain mean, like a game of red-light-green-light with German shepherds and concentration camps.

However, in today's toxic climate of big government overreach and partisan color blindness, it is also becoming increasingly obvious to me that leaning on empathy towards the 'other' as a debate tactic isn't working very well and it may not have too either. That's because, in the age of Trump, it doesn't take a bleeding heart to realize that a strong border means weaker civil liberties for everyone. In fact, in the long run, American citizens may even stand to have as much to lose as the undocumented.

After winning an election with a downright shocking amount of support from self-proclaimed libertarians, Donald Trump is openly and flagrantly using our nation's fascistic immigration police state to banish green card holders who speak ill of his Zionist masters. 

Miriam Adelson, billionaire widow of Ashkenazi supremacist casino cancer, Sheldon Adelson, has been the single largest financier for all three of Trump's presidential campaigns, dumping a reported $600 million dollars into that pussy-grabbing rapist's coffers since 2016. Now, she and others like her are delivering the administration they paid for lists of student activists speaking out against their genocide in the Gaza Strip and Donald Trump is dutifully using the hammer of the state to crush them like glass.

This may have begun with Mahmoud Khalil, the green card holding student activist and husband of a pregnant American citizen, shipped off by ICE to a private prison in Louisiana without being accused of a single crime, but it is rapidly expanding into something far more monstrous. 

Trump's border gestapo are now invading campuses across the country while they use AI-assisted reviews of social media accounts to detect and deport any student Visa holder engaging in what is vaguely deemed to be "pro-terrorism" speech. And just like that, Mahmoud has been joined in the barracks by Rasha Alaweih, Rumeya Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Rajar Khan Suri, and Lequa Kurdia, and the list continues to grow.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has proudly announced that he has personally intervened to cancel the Visas of more than 300 students over campus activism, referring to them as "lunatics" in a recent press conference. But it's OK folks, because these aren't people, they're only immigrants, so, there's nothing to see here. 

The only problem with that logic is that human rights are either universal or they are meaningless, and the Bill of Rights provides no exceptions to this rule. In fact, there is zero language in the Constitution referencing citizens or non-citizens at all when it comes to free speech and habeas corpus. That's because the whole point of these documents, however flawed they and their authors may be, wasn't to protect certain kinds of citizens with certain kinds of rights but to protect all of us from the dangers of irreversible government power.

The Trump Administration is actually supporting depriving activists like Mahmoud Khalil of basic human rights with the excuse that the anticipated impact of their free expression "would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States." These creeps are openly using military justifications to liquidate basic democratic principles, and this is far from the only place where this is being done either. This is also the same administration using innocuous war powers to ship people by the hundreds off to foreign gulags without spending so much as an hour in court.

I speak of course of Donald Trump's revival of the Alien Enemies Act to declare war on a Venezuelan street gang called Tren de Aragua. Passed in 1798 in anticipation of a potential conflict with France, this act grants the Executive Office broad sweeping powers to detain and deport non-citizens during wartime. 

Trump has decided to exploit this already dangerously vague and rarely used law by essentially changing the definition of wartime, claiming this gang is part of some cockamamy conspiracy to conduct "irregular warfare" within the United States in concert with their sworn enemies back home in the Madura regime. 238 men have been shipped off to Nayib Bukele's drug war banana republic in El Salvador based on evidence as trivial as football tattoos and happening to be in the same car as a motherfucker who has them.

"But what does this have to do with American citizens?" the ethically retarded dregs of the Mises Caucus will brey like goats at a funeral moon. Well, the last two times this sick law was used thousands of legal immigrants were rounded up and tossed in concentration camps, first by progressive nazi Woodrow Wilson during the First World War, then by progressive nazi FDR during the Second, and that time the Alien Enemies Act was only the beginning. 

After sweeping up tens of thousands of German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants, Roosevelt went after citizens too, using the AEA as the legal basis for Executive Order 9066 which saw over 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to camps in the desert on the whims of a single despotic regime with a rapacious war lust.

Like I said, rights either mean everything or they mean nothing, and the Trump Administration couldn't make it clearer how little they give a shit about human rights based purely by the company they keep. Warden Bukele, the aforementioned dictator Trump has paid six million dollars to disappear over 200 men in El Salvador's swollen prison system, oversees a massive penitentiary known as CECOT or the Center for Confinement of Terrorism as part of his bloody civil war with MS-13. 

This is a veritable city behind bars with a capacity of over 40,000 from which no prisoner has ever left alive, and the Shawshank sheriff who runs this mega-gulag is Donald Trump's numero uno partner in the war on crime, a man who has publicly announced opening his prisons to any prisoner across the globe for the right price. Marco Rubio himself has loudly praised Bukele's offer to house American citizens, all while Trump pushes to combine the War on Drugs with the War on Terror in order to sic Seal Team 6 on the Cartels.

I really shouldn't have to tell anyone that all of this sick shit is a bad recipe for a level of despotism the likes of which this country has never seen before, especially not libertarians radicalized by the excesses of America's various forever wars. What we are looking at here is the very real possibility of the American Government making CECOT the new GITMO and expanding war powers into a continental dragnet that could easily include any pro-Palestine bro lighting up a doobie in the quad of your local junior college. 

There is quite literally no other word in the English language for this militant absurdity but fascism and the most absurd thing about it is that our orange Fuhrer was given a mandate to do all of this by hordes of so-called libertarians based on an immigration crisis that occurred during times of unprecedented border security.

Funding for our border police state has been increasing pretty consistently for over forty years now and it continued to increase under Joe Biden who spent over $8 billion dollars more on border and immigration enforcement than Trump did during his first term. Meanwhile, during this same age of total border war, the population of undocumented immigrants has more than doubled in this country and that trend too continued under Trump who saw border apprehensions double during his first term while got-aways increased every fucking year.

The only thing we have to show from all of these military industrial shenanigans besides debt is a Rio Grande lined with defective Israeli surveillance towers and a border army armed to the fangs with battle tanks and a jurisdiction that includes two thirds of US territory, and this is where my latest diatribe comes full circle.

So, you wanna keep brown people off your front lawn? I could tell you to go fuck yourself all day long and a part of me would really enjoy that, but perhaps it would be a little more productive for me to point out that you're already fucking yourselves senseless. 

Policing human movement on a massive scale has proven to be about as affective as policing the use of narcotics. You don't have to love crystal meth to recognize that the War on Drugs has failed to do anything but grow government to Godzilla size proportions and you don't even have to be a decent human being to recognize that the war at the border is just another fascist ankle grab with the word 'blowback' stamped all over it.

You just have to be a goddamn libertarian in more than name only. You think you can handle that, gringo? Because they'll be coming for your ass next week if we don't draw the line today.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Cult of Personality by Living Colour

* Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine

* Personal Jesus by Johnny Cash

* Into Dust by Mazzy Star

* Under a Funeral Moon by Darkthrone

* I Love You, I'm Sorry by Gracie Abrams

* Danny Nedelko by IDLES

* Runaways by the Killers

* See No Evil by Television

* Americon Czar by Brujeria

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