I like guns. I probably shouldn't like guns. I don't own guns. No one in my immediate family owns guns. And I'm just slightly to the left of Mao Zedong (just slightly). But I love guns. I love everything about guns. How they look. How they sound. I assume how they feel. I'd like to own one someday when I have the money. A revolver I think. Something in walnut and blue steel that really brings out my eyes. Maybe I've just seen too many movies. Call me a Tarantino leftist.
But I love guns. I love guns the way the Black Panthers, Hunter S. Thompson and Alex Cockburn loved guns. I love guns because they empower the poor. They empower the poor to defend themselves without having to rely on the state. More importantly, they empower the poor to defend themselves from the state, be they racist cops, Border Patrol Gestapo or compound torching feds. The Second Amendment is the one civil right that makes all the others possible. Guns insure that poor people can hold their government accountable when they choose to step on the Constitution.
I also love guns because I'm queer. I love guns because I don't look forward to being curb-stomped by a bunch of fucking skinheads for wearing a dress with a beard only to have some hate-fuck pig tell me in traction that I was asking for it. I love guns because I look forward to the opportunity to show such fag-bashing scum that I have a second cock beneath my skirt. One that blows holes in their skulls deeper than any Filipino surgeon could ever dig in my crotch. I love guns because assimilation is a joke queerer than I am and queer rights looks like a drag queen with a loaded Kalashnikov.
But guns are bad, right? Guns hurt people. People hurt people. People with guns hurt people. People with guns and no earthly idea how to use them hurt people. And people with guns hurt people without guns. An armed populace is a free populace and the more armed a populace is the freer a populace is. Guns are an integral part of any working democracy but a democracy only works when its people are engaged and informed. I see know reason why gun safety shouldn't be taught in public schools. I also see know reason why an inherently undemocratic premise like a standing army shouldn't be phased out and replaced by an inherently democratic premise like an organized civilian militia. It works for Switzerland. One of the safest and most democratic nations on earth. Oh and did I mention that they're also socialists. Just blew your mind, didn't I?
So this is a call to arms. To all my comrades on the left, be they anarchist, communist, socialist or libertarian. Black, brown and queer. Arm yourselves. Arm yourselves to the fucking teeth. What's left of our democracy depends on it. And love your guns. Respect your guns. Learn how to use your guns. Keep them holstered until you need them. Keep the peace and shoot any cunt in the ass who tries to take your piece away.
All power to the people, dearest motherfuckers, all power to the people.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.
* Ten Dollar Bill By Cop Shoot Cop
* I Shot The Sheriff By Bob Marley
* Fuck The Police By N.W.A.
* Kick Out The Jams By The MC5
* Fight The Power By Public Enemy
* That's When I Reach For My Revolver By Mission Of Burma
* Power To The People By John Lennon
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Monday, March 20, 2017
Falling Back In Love With Anarchism
My political compass has always leaned left but, truth be told, it hasn't always leaned against the state. I was a teenage anarchist but somewhere along the road to adulthood I fell off that wagon and out of love with black flags and Molotov cocktails. I became a democratic socialist before I went full Bolshevik and became a fist-throwing communist. It's only recently, over the last several years, that I've come full circle and rediscovered my anti-statist roots. Yes, dearest motherfuckers, I have fallen back in love with anarchism and it really is even better than the first time. But in order to really understand why you have to understand where I've been.
The one constant through out my political journey has been Marx. I discovered the brilliant, bearded bastard in the oddest of places. In a seventh grade Catholic classroom Mrs. Williams taught us that Karl Marx stood against everything that America and the Catholic Church represented. Unfortunately for her, in those halcyon days of the Iraq War and my burgeoning queer-dom, that was the best sales pitch I had ever heard. That summer I bought a yellowed paperback copy of the Communist Manifesto from a church basement sale of all places and devoured it like a sacrament. I didn't understand every word but its homilies against the evils of empire and organized religion and the state that held it all together rang true. His calls for a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat however did not. So I kept looking for answers.
I found them in Chiapas where I first fell in love with anarchism. The Zapatista Army Of National Liberation, better known as the Zapatistas or the EZLN, were founded in the early/mid Eighties when a handful of North Mexican urban guerrillas traveled south to teach the Indians about Marx's dream of a post-state society only to discover that the natives were already living it. Together they developed a post-Marxist anarchist philosophy that was both brand new and centuries old. Neozapatismo, as it became known, preached that a truly communal society needn't rely on vanguardism or "temporary" dictatorships but could be better achieved through direct and leaderless democracy. They took this philosophy public in 1994 when the EZLN launched a largely symbolic and bloodless armed uprising in response to the devastation rought against agrarian Southern Mexico by NAFTA. Led by the daring and mercurial Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas were the gateway drug that introduced me to Che, Zapata, Bakunin and the Flores Magon brothers.
But my teenage tryst with anarchism proved to be short lived. Around the end of my senior year in high school I became infatuated with the rise of democratic socialism in South America known as the Pink Tide. Around the same time I also became overwhelmed by a series of devastating nervous breakdowns that caused me to lose a lot of the faith I once had in people and humanity as a whole. It took nearly a decade for me to realize the connection between the two. At a time when the world became a very uncomfortably chaotic place strong class warriors like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and the Kirchners became very appealing to me. But as my world continued to fall apart and I retreated further and further into myself, soon even the safety net of state socialism wasn't enough to sustain me.
I have always had a keen fascination with the Soviet Union. The adversary. The exotic dark horse. A superpower supposedly devoted to some notion of equality rather than conquest. During the darkest days of my twenties this fascination mutated into a strange form of Soviet nostalgia by proxy. At a time when I had nothing and nothing made sense, the idea of an orderly society where no one was rich but no one was left behind really turned me on. I use to dream about a simple life in Brezhnev Era Leningrad. Traveling home from some comfortably non-descript job at a railway depot on the Metro to my cozy fifth floor hovel in a suburban concrete Krushchyovka which I shared with my charming proletariat bride and our beautiful twin daughters (always twins, always daughters). Living a comfortably non-complex life straight out of 'The Irony Of Fate'. Getting drunk on Stoli. Getting fat on Pelmeni rations. Watching 'Nu, Pogodi!' on our tiny black and white TV. Celebrating New Years with our comrades at a local public banya. It sounds kind of twisted now but back then it was the only thing that made sense. A perfectly anti-American dream with little pink Dachas for you and me. Communism fit like a slipper at the bottom of a black hole.
Somehow, miraculously, I bounced back from rock bottom. I managed to claw my way out of that agoraphobic black hole and once my flesh tasted the blinding light of freedom my flirtation with communism soured rather quickly. I found it particularly hard to play red make-believe when I finally came to terms with my gender dysphoria and that there were plenty of days where I felt much more like a Nikita than a Nikolai which likely meant that the only dacha I would ever know in my formerly beloved USSR would be a padded cell in a sanitarium. But I'd always have Caracas, right?
Not so much. After years of struggling against every kind of American funded skulduggery imaginable and the suspiciously sudden death of my hero Hugo Chavez, the Bolivarian Revolution seemed to run out of steam. The very state that late democratic revolutionaries like Hugo and Nestor Kirchner had used to restore justice and equality to their impoverished nations was just as easily manipulated by their enemies to regain power and demolish everything they had worked so hard to achieve. I was forced to face the conclusion that it was the state itself that was the problem. Leaders came and went, some good, some bad, but as long as the state remained in tact the revolution could only be temporary at best. The Zapatistas had been right all along.
Just as I became painfully aware of how truly wrong I was, a new revolution came along that blew me away. A revolution that felt oddly familiar. Out in the dust-lands of the Levant, as the Wilson-era Pseudo-state of Syria disintegrated beneath the boots and truncheons of Uncle Sam's latest jihad Frankensteins, The regions long oppressed Kurdish population rose up and established a stateless society in what has become known as the Rojava Revolution. The seeds of this uprising where sewn by a fellow exiled ex-Marxist-Leninist who had become similarly disgruntled with the false promises of the state. From his prison cell on the Turkish Island of Imrali, veteran Kurdish revolutionary Abdullah Ocalan developed the anarchist philosophy of Democratic Confederalism which, just like Neozapatismo, saw centuries old tribal democracy as the best pathway to something roughly resembling Marxian utopia. Ocalan built the bomb behind bars but it took the brave pilgrims of Rojava to light the fuse and once again set my world on fire.
It's a little soon to know just how successful this new revolution will be and I'm more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that it's been infiltrated by American soldiers and Peshmerga nationalists, but Rojava has already survived ten times the blood and guts as the Bolsheviks and the Bolivarians combined, relatively speaking, and it has done so by doing the one thing that Lenin and Chavez lacked the courage and vision to do and that's trust the people. The Russian Revolution died the day the Bolsheviks banned the Soviets and the one piece of Chavez's dream likely to survive the fall of Bolivarianism are the autonomous communes he established in his countries poorest favelas. We'll never know for sure if these revolutions would have proven more successful if the strongmen who lead them had taken a leap of faith by trusting the people they were supposedly fighting for just a little bit more and loosening their grip on the reigns of power but at the very least they would have failed with a little more honor.
I turned to the state for comfort when I felt too crippled with fear to fight for the world I believed in and it is precisely this kind of fear that allows the state to flourish while true democracy suffocates on its fumes. Democracy takes work. Democracy requires the constant engagement of its citizenry to remain vital and it is only through this kind of full spectrum democracy that a better world is possible. And that's what anarchism is really all about, not black flags or Molotov cocktails, but democracy, unfiltered and unterrified. I know the sway that charismatic demagogues can wield, especially in times of fear and uncertainty. I've fallen victim to them myself. But you can't be given freedom like a brightly wrapped Christmas gift. You have to take it and embrace it every day. To paraphrase the late, great, syndicalist, Rudolf Rocker, I didn't fall back in love with anarchism because it's the final solution. I fell back in love with anarchism because I realized, that at least as far as I can see, there is no final solution.
It's never too late to go back home again, dearest motherfuckers, and your never too big to admit that you were wrong.
Peace, Love, Empathy and Anarchy- CH
P.S. This post is devoted to the loving memory of my former hero Justin Raimondo and all the other fine folks who lost their goddamn minds during the 2016 Presidential Election. Here's hoping for their speedy return to the light of sanity. We'll be here waiting with open arms and open hearts when they do.
Soundtrack: Some songs that influenced this post-
* Teenage Riot By Sonic Youth
* Bulls On Parade By Rage Against The Machine
* I Was A Teenage Anarchist By Against Me!
* I Fought The Law By The Clash
* Death Valley '69 By Sonic Youth
* The House That Heaven Built By Japandroids
* Testify By Rage Against The Machine
* What A Wonderful World By The Ramones
The one constant through out my political journey has been Marx. I discovered the brilliant, bearded bastard in the oddest of places. In a seventh grade Catholic classroom Mrs. Williams taught us that Karl Marx stood against everything that America and the Catholic Church represented. Unfortunately for her, in those halcyon days of the Iraq War and my burgeoning queer-dom, that was the best sales pitch I had ever heard. That summer I bought a yellowed paperback copy of the Communist Manifesto from a church basement sale of all places and devoured it like a sacrament. I didn't understand every word but its homilies against the evils of empire and organized religion and the state that held it all together rang true. His calls for a Dictatorship Of The Proletariat however did not. So I kept looking for answers.
I found them in Chiapas where I first fell in love with anarchism. The Zapatista Army Of National Liberation, better known as the Zapatistas or the EZLN, were founded in the early/mid Eighties when a handful of North Mexican urban guerrillas traveled south to teach the Indians about Marx's dream of a post-state society only to discover that the natives were already living it. Together they developed a post-Marxist anarchist philosophy that was both brand new and centuries old. Neozapatismo, as it became known, preached that a truly communal society needn't rely on vanguardism or "temporary" dictatorships but could be better achieved through direct and leaderless democracy. They took this philosophy public in 1994 when the EZLN launched a largely symbolic and bloodless armed uprising in response to the devastation rought against agrarian Southern Mexico by NAFTA. Led by the daring and mercurial Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas were the gateway drug that introduced me to Che, Zapata, Bakunin and the Flores Magon brothers.
But my teenage tryst with anarchism proved to be short lived. Around the end of my senior year in high school I became infatuated with the rise of democratic socialism in South America known as the Pink Tide. Around the same time I also became overwhelmed by a series of devastating nervous breakdowns that caused me to lose a lot of the faith I once had in people and humanity as a whole. It took nearly a decade for me to realize the connection between the two. At a time when the world became a very uncomfortably chaotic place strong class warriors like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and the Kirchners became very appealing to me. But as my world continued to fall apart and I retreated further and further into myself, soon even the safety net of state socialism wasn't enough to sustain me.
I have always had a keen fascination with the Soviet Union. The adversary. The exotic dark horse. A superpower supposedly devoted to some notion of equality rather than conquest. During the darkest days of my twenties this fascination mutated into a strange form of Soviet nostalgia by proxy. At a time when I had nothing and nothing made sense, the idea of an orderly society where no one was rich but no one was left behind really turned me on. I use to dream about a simple life in Brezhnev Era Leningrad. Traveling home from some comfortably non-descript job at a railway depot on the Metro to my cozy fifth floor hovel in a suburban concrete Krushchyovka which I shared with my charming proletariat bride and our beautiful twin daughters (always twins, always daughters). Living a comfortably non-complex life straight out of 'The Irony Of Fate'. Getting drunk on Stoli. Getting fat on Pelmeni rations. Watching 'Nu, Pogodi!' on our tiny black and white TV. Celebrating New Years with our comrades at a local public banya. It sounds kind of twisted now but back then it was the only thing that made sense. A perfectly anti-American dream with little pink Dachas for you and me. Communism fit like a slipper at the bottom of a black hole.
Somehow, miraculously, I bounced back from rock bottom. I managed to claw my way out of that agoraphobic black hole and once my flesh tasted the blinding light of freedom my flirtation with communism soured rather quickly. I found it particularly hard to play red make-believe when I finally came to terms with my gender dysphoria and that there were plenty of days where I felt much more like a Nikita than a Nikolai which likely meant that the only dacha I would ever know in my formerly beloved USSR would be a padded cell in a sanitarium. But I'd always have Caracas, right?
Not so much. After years of struggling against every kind of American funded skulduggery imaginable and the suspiciously sudden death of my hero Hugo Chavez, the Bolivarian Revolution seemed to run out of steam. The very state that late democratic revolutionaries like Hugo and Nestor Kirchner had used to restore justice and equality to their impoverished nations was just as easily manipulated by their enemies to regain power and demolish everything they had worked so hard to achieve. I was forced to face the conclusion that it was the state itself that was the problem. Leaders came and went, some good, some bad, but as long as the state remained in tact the revolution could only be temporary at best. The Zapatistas had been right all along.
Just as I became painfully aware of how truly wrong I was, a new revolution came along that blew me away. A revolution that felt oddly familiar. Out in the dust-lands of the Levant, as the Wilson-era Pseudo-state of Syria disintegrated beneath the boots and truncheons of Uncle Sam's latest jihad Frankensteins, The regions long oppressed Kurdish population rose up and established a stateless society in what has become known as the Rojava Revolution. The seeds of this uprising where sewn by a fellow exiled ex-Marxist-Leninist who had become similarly disgruntled with the false promises of the state. From his prison cell on the Turkish Island of Imrali, veteran Kurdish revolutionary Abdullah Ocalan developed the anarchist philosophy of Democratic Confederalism which, just like Neozapatismo, saw centuries old tribal democracy as the best pathway to something roughly resembling Marxian utopia. Ocalan built the bomb behind bars but it took the brave pilgrims of Rojava to light the fuse and once again set my world on fire.
It's a little soon to know just how successful this new revolution will be and I'm more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that it's been infiltrated by American soldiers and Peshmerga nationalists, but Rojava has already survived ten times the blood and guts as the Bolsheviks and the Bolivarians combined, relatively speaking, and it has done so by doing the one thing that Lenin and Chavez lacked the courage and vision to do and that's trust the people. The Russian Revolution died the day the Bolsheviks banned the Soviets and the one piece of Chavez's dream likely to survive the fall of Bolivarianism are the autonomous communes he established in his countries poorest favelas. We'll never know for sure if these revolutions would have proven more successful if the strongmen who lead them had taken a leap of faith by trusting the people they were supposedly fighting for just a little bit more and loosening their grip on the reigns of power but at the very least they would have failed with a little more honor.
I turned to the state for comfort when I felt too crippled with fear to fight for the world I believed in and it is precisely this kind of fear that allows the state to flourish while true democracy suffocates on its fumes. Democracy takes work. Democracy requires the constant engagement of its citizenry to remain vital and it is only through this kind of full spectrum democracy that a better world is possible. And that's what anarchism is really all about, not black flags or Molotov cocktails, but democracy, unfiltered and unterrified. I know the sway that charismatic demagogues can wield, especially in times of fear and uncertainty. I've fallen victim to them myself. But you can't be given freedom like a brightly wrapped Christmas gift. You have to take it and embrace it every day. To paraphrase the late, great, syndicalist, Rudolf Rocker, I didn't fall back in love with anarchism because it's the final solution. I fell back in love with anarchism because I realized, that at least as far as I can see, there is no final solution.
It's never too late to go back home again, dearest motherfuckers, and your never too big to admit that you were wrong.
Peace, Love, Empathy and Anarchy- CH
P.S. This post is devoted to the loving memory of my former hero Justin Raimondo and all the other fine folks who lost their goddamn minds during the 2016 Presidential Election. Here's hoping for their speedy return to the light of sanity. We'll be here waiting with open arms and open hearts when they do.
Soundtrack: Some songs that influenced this post-
* Teenage Riot By Sonic Youth
* Bulls On Parade By Rage Against The Machine
* I Was A Teenage Anarchist By Against Me!
* I Fought The Law By The Clash
* Death Valley '69 By Sonic Youth
* The House That Heaven Built By Japandroids
* Testify By Rage Against The Machine
* What A Wonderful World By The Ramones
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Are You There God? Its Me, Comrade Hermit
Are you there god? Its me, Comrade Hermit. You know, the bearded broad with the blog (cant have too many of those to keep track of). I'm not asking to be cute. I seriously want to know; are you there god? And if you are then whats the fucking deal with the silent treatment? I mean, 2000 years without so much as a phone call or a burning bush? I've tried hard to believe in you for most of my life but your not exactly making it easy. Truth be told, I really don't know if you exist and I cant play make believe just because I want you to.
Ten years in Catholic school. Ten years of Ten Commandments and twice a week mass. A solid decade of my childhood was devoted to trying, ultimately in vain, to ignore the absurd nature of faith; believing in something totally devoid of all facts and reason and I nearly lost my proverbial shit in the process. I lived in fear of my own gender and sexuality. I lived in fear of a kind and loving god willing to reduce cities to ash heaps because their citizenry refused to fuck each other in your preferred orifice.
I don't want to believe in these parts of the Bible. I don't want to believe that you would allow a place like Hell to exist just so you wouldn't have to get your hands messy torturing the rule breakers for eternity, ferrying out your dirty work to a subterranean black site like the US government. I don't want to believe in a god who would drown the entire planet in a hissy fit because.... Wait? Why did you do that again? I don't want to believe in such a god because that could only mean that god is a despotic and pathologically unbalanced dick. I get enough of that from my government. I don't need it from my religion. Frankly, I'd rather worship Satan under such a scenario. Shit, maybe his rebellion was called for. A coup d'etat against a smite-happy spiritual strongman gone bat-shit with unchecked authority. I don't want to say these things, god, but I feel like someone has to.
But I can also tell you what I do want to believe in. I want to believe in the god introduced to us by Jesus Christ and Muhammad. I kind, loving father who denies no one a seat at his table. A force for good and justice that no state can contain. I want to believe that the Old Testament and even some parts of the New are false propaganda conjured up by false prophets using your name in vain attempts to rule and manipulate the weak at heart. I want to believe in a god who doesn't need to be omnipotent to get her rocks off. Oh yeah, and I want to believe that god is a chick.
I want to believe that Hell doesn't really exist, at least not in a literal sense. That in reality Hell, Earth and Purgatory are one in the same. A test that we have to take over and over again until we get it right. I want to believe that no one is beyond redemption. That even the very worst among us are simply not prepared or evolved enough to except the higher truth of your love. Reincarnation, the Hindu's call this and I'm sure your all too aware that my own soul is more than a few life cycles from enlightenment. Which is why I also want to believe that next time around I come back a little more whole. Perhaps as a biological woman with a few less mental illness' or at least a seabird, soaring high above the white caps of the Atlantic and living off shellfish and junk food in some trashy Jersey Shore town. I want to believe in a god that believes in second, third and fourth chances. A god as flawed and forgiving as the best of her children. A god like Gandhi, Tolstoy and MLK.
Most of all, I want to believe that this all isn't for nothing. That all the pain and suffering and death and bullshit adds up to something at the end of the day and that we're not all just wasting our time here spinning wheels and jerking off into socks. I want to believe that I'm not just sitting here at my computer talking to myself again. So I'll ask again, just one more time. Are you there god?.... I'll be here waiting, ready to listen, when your ready to answer.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-
* Sympathy For The Devil By The Rolling Stones
* No Cars Go By Arcade Fire
* Highway 61 Revisited By Bob Dylan
* All These Things That I've Done By The Killers
* Gloria By Patti Smith
* All Apologies By Nirvana
* Straight To You By Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
* Cherub Rock By The Smashing Pumpkins
Ten years in Catholic school. Ten years of Ten Commandments and twice a week mass. A solid decade of my childhood was devoted to trying, ultimately in vain, to ignore the absurd nature of faith; believing in something totally devoid of all facts and reason and I nearly lost my proverbial shit in the process. I lived in fear of my own gender and sexuality. I lived in fear of a kind and loving god willing to reduce cities to ash heaps because their citizenry refused to fuck each other in your preferred orifice.
I don't want to believe in these parts of the Bible. I don't want to believe that you would allow a place like Hell to exist just so you wouldn't have to get your hands messy torturing the rule breakers for eternity, ferrying out your dirty work to a subterranean black site like the US government. I don't want to believe in a god who would drown the entire planet in a hissy fit because.... Wait? Why did you do that again? I don't want to believe in such a god because that could only mean that god is a despotic and pathologically unbalanced dick. I get enough of that from my government. I don't need it from my religion. Frankly, I'd rather worship Satan under such a scenario. Shit, maybe his rebellion was called for. A coup d'etat against a smite-happy spiritual strongman gone bat-shit with unchecked authority. I don't want to say these things, god, but I feel like someone has to.
But I can also tell you what I do want to believe in. I want to believe in the god introduced to us by Jesus Christ and Muhammad. I kind, loving father who denies no one a seat at his table. A force for good and justice that no state can contain. I want to believe that the Old Testament and even some parts of the New are false propaganda conjured up by false prophets using your name in vain attempts to rule and manipulate the weak at heart. I want to believe in a god who doesn't need to be omnipotent to get her rocks off. Oh yeah, and I want to believe that god is a chick.
I want to believe that Hell doesn't really exist, at least not in a literal sense. That in reality Hell, Earth and Purgatory are one in the same. A test that we have to take over and over again until we get it right. I want to believe that no one is beyond redemption. That even the very worst among us are simply not prepared or evolved enough to except the higher truth of your love. Reincarnation, the Hindu's call this and I'm sure your all too aware that my own soul is more than a few life cycles from enlightenment. Which is why I also want to believe that next time around I come back a little more whole. Perhaps as a biological woman with a few less mental illness' or at least a seabird, soaring high above the white caps of the Atlantic and living off shellfish and junk food in some trashy Jersey Shore town. I want to believe in a god that believes in second, third and fourth chances. A god as flawed and forgiving as the best of her children. A god like Gandhi, Tolstoy and MLK.
Most of all, I want to believe that this all isn't for nothing. That all the pain and suffering and death and bullshit adds up to something at the end of the day and that we're not all just wasting our time here spinning wheels and jerking off into socks. I want to believe that I'm not just sitting here at my computer talking to myself again. So I'll ask again, just one more time. Are you there god?.... I'll be here waiting, ready to listen, when your ready to answer.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-
* Sympathy For The Devil By The Rolling Stones
* No Cars Go By Arcade Fire
* Highway 61 Revisited By Bob Dylan
* All These Things That I've Done By The Killers
* Gloria By Patti Smith
* All Apologies By Nirvana
* Straight To You By Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
* Cherub Rock By The Smashing Pumpkins
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
War Of The Warlords
The first two months of Trump have been defined almost exclusively by chaos. So much so that it's been damn near impossible for even the most astute tranny wonk to keep up with. Secret Russian agents. Fake news. Jammed up airports. Incoherent executive orders. Jackbooted ICE-men. Swarms of locusts. Witch trials. Human sacrifices. And, of coarse, lies, lies and more goddamn lies, coming from all directions. Much of this chaos has been chalked up to the utter ineptitude of Trump and his rogues gallery of bush league morons. There's a grain of truth to this. Others have chalked it up to that mad maestro of mania, Steven Ilyich Bannon. All part of some finely constructed campaign to bring on the apocalypse. And there's probably a grain of truth to that too. But mostly I see this madness as a toxic byproduct of Trump's war on the establishment and the establishment's war on Trump. A civil war between two tribes of bloodthirsty imperialists, grappling for the future of Manifest Destiny. On the one side is the old-school, neocon, chicken-hawks demanding total war with Putin's Russia. On the other is Trump's raft of "realist" malcontents calling for detente with Russia in order to focus on who they view as the real obstacle to American primacy, namely Islam and more importantly China. I shall here forth refer to these dueling cabals of warlords as the Russophobes (aka the establishment) and the Sinophobes (Trump).
Before I go any further into my armchair analysis, I feel it important to remember that, in spite of their strategic differences, both of these sides have essentially the same goal- American global domination. They also have essentially the same foe, beneath their initial targets, and that foe is a united Eurasia. The full integration of the worlds greatest landmass spells out the end of American hegemony. If the rising dragons of the Orient can create a direct link to the Euro-zone then the Dollar is dead and the world is cursed to the peaceful coexistence of a multi-polar order. This harmony is what the Mandarins of Washington and Wall Street fear most and it is what motivates both sides of this war of the warlords. Where they differ is on who to shoot first.
The Russophobes represent the old school of American imperialism, which see's a united and independent Russia as the greatest threat to their dreams of world power, mostly do to its geographic position as the great land bridge connecting Europe to Asia. This was the true motivation behind the Cold War, which began when Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the Yankee puppet state of the Czar and attempted to forge their own bloody path forward, out of the Dark-Age feudalism of Kremlin serfdom and into the light of the Twentieth Century. This great leap towards modernism was what really terrified the western establishment, not communism. Wilson and his Atlanticists understood this threat to their international designs immediately and sent tens of thousands of dough-boys, fresh from the crimson trenches of the First World War, into the new Soviet experiment to supplement the Czar's disgruntled death squads in an epic bloodbath that came to be known as the White Terror. And it never really ended. The USSR developed into a frantic, violent and, above all else, paranoid warfare state under the unrelenting pressure of this siege, eventually cracking beneath its weight. Lenin's dream, however flawed it may have been, was finally snuffed out in 1991, after decades of sabotage and proxy wars, and a new puppet Czar was established. A vodka soaked buffoon named Boris Yeltsin, who gladly kept the Motherland good and backwards for his Washington handlers as long as he could fatten his wallet and fatten his ass while Russia was ripped inside out by crony shock capitalism and surrounded by the rapidly encroaching storm of NATO.
The Russophobes ultimate game plan was and still is to reduce Russia to Balkanized rubble, the same way they did to the former Yugoslavia. A dammed clusterfuck of impoverished ethno-states, too busy stabbing each other in the back to pose any viable threat to Dollar dominance. Vladimir Putin threw a wrench into these plans after he was chosen to replace Yeltsin by the power brokers of the deep Kremlin, who feared the further empowerment of Gennady Zyugnov's dogged Communists who would have easily defeated the increasingly despised Yeltsin in '96 if it wasn't for Clinton's flagrant meddling in that years presidential elections. Putin was originally Yeltsin's protege but once at the helm he quickly proved to be nearly as threatening to the Federation's status quo as Zyugnov. Reigning in the oligarchs, making peace with the Chechnyans and, most damningly, standing up to American meddling in Georgia and Ukraine. Naturally, Putin became persona non grata. The Russophobes, who by now, ruled not only Washington and Wall Street, but the mass media too, aimed all their guns at the Russian strongman's chrome dome and set their phasers to kill.
But not all the Mandarins of American power remained committed to this decades old plot to slay the Russian bear. Many came to see this policy as dated, wasteful and counterproductive. Among them, Donald J. Trump and a host of disgruntled veteran Cold Warriors who had grown impatient with the seemingly endless great chess game with the Kremlin. They rejected the old company line, proclaimed themselves "realists" and set their sights on the rising dragon of China as the real threat to American power. They boldly advocated collaboration with Putin's Russia in the eternally troublesome Middle East while they shifted their focus towards confronting China in the Pacific.
This deviation proved successful in the polls, helping Trump and his Sinaphobes to win the White House, but it proved toxic in the nostrils of the Russophobic old guard, some of whom even managed to infiltrate Trump's administration, including his fag-bashing zealot of a Vice President, Mike Pence. What has transpired is a tit for tat civil war, with both sides literally fighting over who to bomb first. Thus we see the intelligence leaks to the mainstream press, the sabotage of Trump's number one realist heavy, Michael Flynn, the banishment of certain "journalists" from the Press Corps. and a slew of disinformation coming from both sides.
This is the kind of madness that could only exist in the dying days of history's greatest empire. This morbidly obese giant has become demented with rage as it slouches slowly to it's grave. Many of my fellow anti-imperialists and anti-interventionists have made the foolish mistake of choosing sides of this blood tainted pissing match, figuring, childishly, that the enemy of their enemy is their friend and since Trump is pissing off all the right cunts, he must be some kind allie to our cause. The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Trump doesn't represent some new school of isolationism. He represents some new school of American Imperialism. Much as FDR tried to use the camouflage of socialism to save capitalism, Trump seeks to use the language of anti-interventionism to save the empire. We should not wish him luck in this endeavor, rather we should pray that both sides of this fight are to busy cutting each others throats to cut anyone else's.
So here's to the war of the warlords! May it last long and may it's casualties be many. May Michael Flynn's shit-canning be the first of many and may every putrid organ of the so called mainstream media discredit themselves in the process. I'm no fan of war. But when it comes to cunts burning cunts, I say let em burn and I'll get the marshmallows and the weenie-roasters.
Stay neutral, dearest motherfuckers. The Swiss inherit the earth and the only good warmonger is an impeached warmonger.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-
* My War By Black Flag
* The Wheel By P.J. Harvey
* I Against I By Bad Brains
* The Future By Leonard Cohen
* Home Again Garden Grove By The Mountain Goats
* Party At Ground Zero By Fishbone
Before I go any further into my armchair analysis, I feel it important to remember that, in spite of their strategic differences, both of these sides have essentially the same goal- American global domination. They also have essentially the same foe, beneath their initial targets, and that foe is a united Eurasia. The full integration of the worlds greatest landmass spells out the end of American hegemony. If the rising dragons of the Orient can create a direct link to the Euro-zone then the Dollar is dead and the world is cursed to the peaceful coexistence of a multi-polar order. This harmony is what the Mandarins of Washington and Wall Street fear most and it is what motivates both sides of this war of the warlords. Where they differ is on who to shoot first.
The Russophobes represent the old school of American imperialism, which see's a united and independent Russia as the greatest threat to their dreams of world power, mostly do to its geographic position as the great land bridge connecting Europe to Asia. This was the true motivation behind the Cold War, which began when Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the Yankee puppet state of the Czar and attempted to forge their own bloody path forward, out of the Dark-Age feudalism of Kremlin serfdom and into the light of the Twentieth Century. This great leap towards modernism was what really terrified the western establishment, not communism. Wilson and his Atlanticists understood this threat to their international designs immediately and sent tens of thousands of dough-boys, fresh from the crimson trenches of the First World War, into the new Soviet experiment to supplement the Czar's disgruntled death squads in an epic bloodbath that came to be known as the White Terror. And it never really ended. The USSR developed into a frantic, violent and, above all else, paranoid warfare state under the unrelenting pressure of this siege, eventually cracking beneath its weight. Lenin's dream, however flawed it may have been, was finally snuffed out in 1991, after decades of sabotage and proxy wars, and a new puppet Czar was established. A vodka soaked buffoon named Boris Yeltsin, who gladly kept the Motherland good and backwards for his Washington handlers as long as he could fatten his wallet and fatten his ass while Russia was ripped inside out by crony shock capitalism and surrounded by the rapidly encroaching storm of NATO.
The Russophobes ultimate game plan was and still is to reduce Russia to Balkanized rubble, the same way they did to the former Yugoslavia. A dammed clusterfuck of impoverished ethno-states, too busy stabbing each other in the back to pose any viable threat to Dollar dominance. Vladimir Putin threw a wrench into these plans after he was chosen to replace Yeltsin by the power brokers of the deep Kremlin, who feared the further empowerment of Gennady Zyugnov's dogged Communists who would have easily defeated the increasingly despised Yeltsin in '96 if it wasn't for Clinton's flagrant meddling in that years presidential elections. Putin was originally Yeltsin's protege but once at the helm he quickly proved to be nearly as threatening to the Federation's status quo as Zyugnov. Reigning in the oligarchs, making peace with the Chechnyans and, most damningly, standing up to American meddling in Georgia and Ukraine. Naturally, Putin became persona non grata. The Russophobes, who by now, ruled not only Washington and Wall Street, but the mass media too, aimed all their guns at the Russian strongman's chrome dome and set their phasers to kill.
But not all the Mandarins of American power remained committed to this decades old plot to slay the Russian bear. Many came to see this policy as dated, wasteful and counterproductive. Among them, Donald J. Trump and a host of disgruntled veteran Cold Warriors who had grown impatient with the seemingly endless great chess game with the Kremlin. They rejected the old company line, proclaimed themselves "realists" and set their sights on the rising dragon of China as the real threat to American power. They boldly advocated collaboration with Putin's Russia in the eternally troublesome Middle East while they shifted their focus towards confronting China in the Pacific.
This deviation proved successful in the polls, helping Trump and his Sinaphobes to win the White House, but it proved toxic in the nostrils of the Russophobic old guard, some of whom even managed to infiltrate Trump's administration, including his fag-bashing zealot of a Vice President, Mike Pence. What has transpired is a tit for tat civil war, with both sides literally fighting over who to bomb first. Thus we see the intelligence leaks to the mainstream press, the sabotage of Trump's number one realist heavy, Michael Flynn, the banishment of certain "journalists" from the Press Corps. and a slew of disinformation coming from both sides.
This is the kind of madness that could only exist in the dying days of history's greatest empire. This morbidly obese giant has become demented with rage as it slouches slowly to it's grave. Many of my fellow anti-imperialists and anti-interventionists have made the foolish mistake of choosing sides of this blood tainted pissing match, figuring, childishly, that the enemy of their enemy is their friend and since Trump is pissing off all the right cunts, he must be some kind allie to our cause. The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Trump doesn't represent some new school of isolationism. He represents some new school of American Imperialism. Much as FDR tried to use the camouflage of socialism to save capitalism, Trump seeks to use the language of anti-interventionism to save the empire. We should not wish him luck in this endeavor, rather we should pray that both sides of this fight are to busy cutting each others throats to cut anyone else's.
So here's to the war of the warlords! May it last long and may it's casualties be many. May Michael Flynn's shit-canning be the first of many and may every putrid organ of the so called mainstream media discredit themselves in the process. I'm no fan of war. But when it comes to cunts burning cunts, I say let em burn and I'll get the marshmallows and the weenie-roasters.
Stay neutral, dearest motherfuckers. The Swiss inherit the earth and the only good warmonger is an impeached warmonger.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-
* My War By Black Flag
* The Wheel By P.J. Harvey
* I Against I By Bad Brains
* The Future By Leonard Cohen
* Home Again Garden Grove By The Mountain Goats
* Party At Ground Zero By Fishbone
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
I Suck At Love
To say I'm unlucky in love is probably as big of a fucking understatement as anyone will ever hear. Truth be told, strip this post bare of all its poetic pretensions and you can pretty much sum it up in a single solitary sentence. I suck at love. I suck at a lot of things, volleyball, algebra, emotional boundaries. But I suck at nothing as badly or as painfully as I suck at love. I'm a hopeless romantic with a capital H. I've never had a girlfriend. I've never even had a date. I'm a 28 year old virgin and this life I'm living is beginning to feel like the cruelest Woody Allen movie never made. This Valentines Day, like all Valentines Days, I'm alone and you, very dearest of motherfuckers, are my only company. So buckle-up for a heart-shredding bitch-fest, because I desperately need to vent.
I have been fascinated by the female species for as long as I've been aware of their existence. Needless to say, it's a rather complicated obsession, considering my own gender fluidity. My feelings towards the not-so-opposite sex have always been a rather dizzying cocktail of lust, adoration and green-eyed jealousy. I never went through a period of time in my childhood where I found girls to be gross. Even as a young boy who couldn't even pronounce gender dysphoria, let alone comprehend it, I looked upon my female classmates as enjoying a degree of simple intimacy between each other that frustrated me to no end. Mostly because, try as I might, I couldn't seem to reenact it with the male playmates I felt trapped with out of some kind of unspoken obligation to an interpretation of normal that felt anything but. I had plenty of male friends growing up. In fact I seemed to collect them in some doomed attempt to feel whole. But I would have gladly traded them all for just one girl who knew my name and spoke it like it brought her as much joy and peace as it brought to me. Childhood was nice, but it was also more than a little lonely for a boy who couldn't understand why he couldn't find sanctuary in scraped knee's and little league games.
High School was better. I found pieces of myself that I didn't know existed in the brief moments of emotional intimacy I shared with girls I felt honored to call my friends. I loved many of them, in ways that they sadly couldn't or wouldn't love me back. I never left that gilded cage known as the friend zone. I wanted desperately to make a break from this emotional prison, but fear became a strong and sly warden, too much so for me to overcome. A warden who knew that these long sought-after friendships were too precious for me to risk losing over the tension of unrequited love. So I stayed silent. I suffered quietly with a gentle smile on my face while I enjoyed a sense of solemn camaraderie that I wasn't yet prepared to fully comprehend. Deep down, I didn't just want to be with the girls. A deep, secret part of me wanted to be one of them. I was a secret girl, secretly in love with girls who I still love to this day. I can recite their names like Catholic saints- Sara, Alison, Dana, Jennifer, Kayleen- Their all still part of me. I miss them everyday.
College would be the traditional place for an nontraditional person such as myself to find them-self, sexually speaking. But the growing storm of my mental illness had other plans. Before I was ever given the opportunity to stumble through an awkward, drunken sexual encounter or a drug fueled transgression into smudged make-up and frilly lingerie, I pulled a full Tony Soprano and emotionally short-circuited, falling apart in an epic nervous breakdown brought on by my inability to grow up at the same pace as my piers. Dazed and confused, I tried in vain to reach my feet and face my demons but they were too strong. So I spent the next seven long years alone in my house trying gather the strength I needed to defeat them. Ultimately, it was the unbearable weight of my gut-wrenching loneliness that eventually forced me back out into the terror of the real world. After spending several consecutive months lying beneath a veil of tears, imagining a warm body in bed next to me just to get to sleep, I finally stepped outside of my house.
Not long after, I also stepped outside of the closet. After years of running and fooling myself, I finally embraced the fact that being male was one prison cell too many for my soul to bare occupying. I accepted the terrifying truth that an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic like myself, who fears nothing more than change of any kind, had a gender too wild and free to fit under a single fixed label. I'm a man. I'm a woman. I'm one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand things in between. I'm gender fluid and perhaps more than anything else, I'm a lesbian. My sexuality is defined by my fluctuating femininity and it always has. It's the only label that makes any sense to me, even if it makes sense to no one else. I'm not pretty. I have a beard and I have a prick and I feel little incentive to get rid of either anytime soon. But none of those facts makes me feel like any less of a dyke, I've found a shaky peace in this complicated truth but I have yet to find love. I've yet to even come close and this fact burns me to the very core of my being.
But what can I do? I leave my house now but I don't drink, I don't dance, I don't go to church (the only thing more obnoxious than a dancing drunk is a dancing preacher.) I still lack the emotional fitness to handle school or even part-time work. Where do I go? What do I do? Online dating? I'm a little bit of a tough sell on paper, to say the least- Charming, unemployed, bearded bull-dyke with a dick seeks lipstick lesbian, manic-pixie-dream-girl to share make-up and get stoned with- Yeah! That one pretty much sells itself. I could lie, but, in case you haven't noticed, that's not exactly my thing. So for the 28th Valentines Day running I am bitterly and unhappily alone. My only hope is that some you out there can find some kind of comfort in my pain. Your hearts may be broken, but none are as broken as mine. And if you do have someone? Stop bitching about the price of flowers, grab them, hold them tight, fuck them crazy, tell them you love them and, above all else, be thankful. You have no idea how fucking lucky you are.
Be good to each other, dearest motherfuckers, and take care of yourselves, cause you're all this loveless loser's got to keep shimself warm tonight.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-
* Crazy For You By Slowdive
* Dance Music By The Mountain Goats
* Just Like Heaven By Dinosaur Jr.
* About A Girl By Nirvana
* Something I Can Never Have By The Jesus & Mary Chain
* Chick Habit By April March
I have been fascinated by the female species for as long as I've been aware of their existence. Needless to say, it's a rather complicated obsession, considering my own gender fluidity. My feelings towards the not-so-opposite sex have always been a rather dizzying cocktail of lust, adoration and green-eyed jealousy. I never went through a period of time in my childhood where I found girls to be gross. Even as a young boy who couldn't even pronounce gender dysphoria, let alone comprehend it, I looked upon my female classmates as enjoying a degree of simple intimacy between each other that frustrated me to no end. Mostly because, try as I might, I couldn't seem to reenact it with the male playmates I felt trapped with out of some kind of unspoken obligation to an interpretation of normal that felt anything but. I had plenty of male friends growing up. In fact I seemed to collect them in some doomed attempt to feel whole. But I would have gladly traded them all for just one girl who knew my name and spoke it like it brought her as much joy and peace as it brought to me. Childhood was nice, but it was also more than a little lonely for a boy who couldn't understand why he couldn't find sanctuary in scraped knee's and little league games.
High School was better. I found pieces of myself that I didn't know existed in the brief moments of emotional intimacy I shared with girls I felt honored to call my friends. I loved many of them, in ways that they sadly couldn't or wouldn't love me back. I never left that gilded cage known as the friend zone. I wanted desperately to make a break from this emotional prison, but fear became a strong and sly warden, too much so for me to overcome. A warden who knew that these long sought-after friendships were too precious for me to risk losing over the tension of unrequited love. So I stayed silent. I suffered quietly with a gentle smile on my face while I enjoyed a sense of solemn camaraderie that I wasn't yet prepared to fully comprehend. Deep down, I didn't just want to be with the girls. A deep, secret part of me wanted to be one of them. I was a secret girl, secretly in love with girls who I still love to this day. I can recite their names like Catholic saints- Sara, Alison, Dana, Jennifer, Kayleen- Their all still part of me. I miss them everyday.
College would be the traditional place for an nontraditional person such as myself to find them-self, sexually speaking. But the growing storm of my mental illness had other plans. Before I was ever given the opportunity to stumble through an awkward, drunken sexual encounter or a drug fueled transgression into smudged make-up and frilly lingerie, I pulled a full Tony Soprano and emotionally short-circuited, falling apart in an epic nervous breakdown brought on by my inability to grow up at the same pace as my piers. Dazed and confused, I tried in vain to reach my feet and face my demons but they were too strong. So I spent the next seven long years alone in my house trying gather the strength I needed to defeat them. Ultimately, it was the unbearable weight of my gut-wrenching loneliness that eventually forced me back out into the terror of the real world. After spending several consecutive months lying beneath a veil of tears, imagining a warm body in bed next to me just to get to sleep, I finally stepped outside of my house.
Not long after, I also stepped outside of the closet. After years of running and fooling myself, I finally embraced the fact that being male was one prison cell too many for my soul to bare occupying. I accepted the terrifying truth that an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic like myself, who fears nothing more than change of any kind, had a gender too wild and free to fit under a single fixed label. I'm a man. I'm a woman. I'm one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand things in between. I'm gender fluid and perhaps more than anything else, I'm a lesbian. My sexuality is defined by my fluctuating femininity and it always has. It's the only label that makes any sense to me, even if it makes sense to no one else. I'm not pretty. I have a beard and I have a prick and I feel little incentive to get rid of either anytime soon. But none of those facts makes me feel like any less of a dyke, I've found a shaky peace in this complicated truth but I have yet to find love. I've yet to even come close and this fact burns me to the very core of my being.
But what can I do? I leave my house now but I don't drink, I don't dance, I don't go to church (the only thing more obnoxious than a dancing drunk is a dancing preacher.) I still lack the emotional fitness to handle school or even part-time work. Where do I go? What do I do? Online dating? I'm a little bit of a tough sell on paper, to say the least- Charming, unemployed, bearded bull-dyke with a dick seeks lipstick lesbian, manic-pixie-dream-girl to share make-up and get stoned with- Yeah! That one pretty much sells itself. I could lie, but, in case you haven't noticed, that's not exactly my thing. So for the 28th Valentines Day running I am bitterly and unhappily alone. My only hope is that some you out there can find some kind of comfort in my pain. Your hearts may be broken, but none are as broken as mine. And if you do have someone? Stop bitching about the price of flowers, grab them, hold them tight, fuck them crazy, tell them you love them and, above all else, be thankful. You have no idea how fucking lucky you are.
Be good to each other, dearest motherfuckers, and take care of yourselves, cause you're all this loveless loser's got to keep shimself warm tonight.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-
* Crazy For You By Slowdive
* Dance Music By The Mountain Goats
* Just Like Heaven By Dinosaur Jr.
* About A Girl By Nirvana
* Something I Can Never Have By The Jesus & Mary Chain
* Chick Habit By April March
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
The Emerald Belt Project (Dreaming Is Free)
I get a lot of flack for being a pretty negative prick, and rightly so. I could probably sniff out a conspiracy at a goddamn Easter egg hunt. If you read my last three posts in a row, you'd probably think I wrote them with a loaded revolver in my mouth. If you read the last six, you'd probably fight me for the piece so you could put it in yours. What can I say? What do you want from me? I'm an obese, fluid, basket case who cant even take his own junk for granite. So, yeah, I'm a bit edgy. You try being fucking chipper under those circumstances.
But it is important, even for a genderfucked, post-goth, drama-queen like myself, to at least make an attempt to look on the bright side. The best way I know how to do this is to dream. After all, as Debbie Harry once mused, dreaming is free. Only, as an unrepentant Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist, my dreams are a little bit different, to say the least, and my favorite dream is what I like to call the Emerald Belt Project. Now, I'm not exactly a political scientist, so don't give me shit about the logistics, after all this is dream, not a goddamn manifesto. Manifesto's are for people without ADD.
It all starts with the collapse of the American Empire, which, lets face it, is an inevitability. All capitalist societies are built to self-destruct. It's a system built on the naive premise of never ending expansion on a planet with a finite amount of space and resources to expand upon. A capitalist state has know choice but to become an empire in order to feed it's perpetual fix for growth. And all empires inevitably collapse beneath their own weight, just like Chris Christie. No one can eat the entire worlds supply of cannolis and live to tell about it.
Signs of this collapse are everywhere, from the Great Recession to our loss of influence on the global stage to the fact that even the most ignorant of American's doesn't take our three ring circus of a plutocracy seriously anymore, I mean, shit, they even elected one of the clowns to be the ringleader. The cracks are all there and growing larger day by day. It's simply a matter of time before those cracks become breaks and those broken pieces disintegrate like sand between Uncle Sams bloody finger tips. To most people this all probably sounds pretty terrifying. But to a degenerate like myself, it sounds better than Christmas fucking morning. It's what I've been waiting half my life for.
My dream is to take advantage of this chaotic opportunity and gather the continents leftist malcontents, be they communist, anarchist, socialist or libertarian, provided that they're all anti-statist in nature, and unite them under one banner. Then, together, we repatriate my local Rustbelt ruins along the Great Lakes, forgotten cities like Erie, Cleveland and Detroit, with nothing to offer but abandoned land and untapped opportunity. Here we make our stand and create a confederacy of stateless artist colonies with the backbone of a new post-capitalist economy built on an industry I can only describe as AgriPunk.
With literally thousands of square miles of unused indoor factory space we could create the worlds largest hydroponic grow operation on the planet with the Great Lakes serving as a near bottomless source of irrigation. With this we can provide ourselves and a hungry globe with a huge cache of organic fruits and vegetables, and naturally enough cannabis and opium to put those sheep-shagging warlords in Central Asia out of business for good, thus turning the Rustbelt into the Emerald Belt. All governed democratically through an interwoven network of grass roots syndicates and workers councils, making leaders as obsolete as the empire they once served. Income taxes will be replaced with union dues, standing armies and police forces will be replaced by local civilian militias and apartment complexes will become autonomous communes for the workers.
The profits made from herbs and narcotics alone would provide more than enough capital finance for a vibrant network of free autonomous social welfare programs like schools, clinics, hospitals and nursing homes as well as public transportation and infrastructure projects, centrally funded through the councils and syndicates but independently and democratically run by the communities that utilize these services.
As for all the empty lots, warehouses and abandoned homes, these will be forfeited to any rugged settler or collective with the balls and brains to rebuild them and create mutualist homesteads. Living off the land and devoting themselves to the creation of life and art, rather than the soulless management of pointless government bureaucracy and multi-national corporate servitude. The result? Something like L.A.'s fateful South Central Farm or Copenhagen's Freetown Christiania times a million. Miles and miles and miles of gigantic social art projects with their artists living inside them, all governed cooperatively without a single banker or IRS man breathing down their necks.
There would be a central, gold-backed, currency, mostly for trade purposes, but people would be free to make their own money and decide what it's worth. Or they can simply barter and trade goods for services. And this would be just one of many utopias stretching across the post-American Western Hemisphere. Classic Liberals and more market oriented anarchists may set up their own independent projects in New England or Alaska. Primitivists might do the same in the Pacific Northwest. More traditionalist paleoconservative minded folks could set up their own colonies in Utah or Montana. And so it goes. Libertarian communist campesinos in El Salvador. Black nationalists in Mississippi. Indigenous tribalists in the Badlands. A colorful collage of radical experiments in direct democracy competing peacefully for the favor of a populace free to pick and choose which society makes sense to them.
What's missing from this picture? Give up? War. With no more standing armies and stateless nations to small and decentralized to dominate even their own populaces let alone anyone else's, wars will be rendered to relatively minor skirmishes between tribes and militias. There would still be violence. There will always be violence. But without the apparatus of a centralized state and with communities busy with the joyful work of their own self determination, war as we know it may simply cease to exist.
I know, I know, it sounds nuts right? But why not? Why not dream big and swing for the fucking fences. Everything new started out as something "crazy", from Maknovia and Catalonia to Chiapas and Rojava. I'll fully admit to not having all the kinks worked if you'll admit to being at least a little intrigued by my wild dream. And by all means, feel free to punch wholes in it. But the Emerald Belt Project is what I dream about when I grow weary of dead girls and bad leaders and, like I said, dreaming is free.
Dream big, dearest motherfuckers. Only dreamers can change the world.
Peace, Love, Empathy and Anarchy- CH
But it is important, even for a genderfucked, post-goth, drama-queen like myself, to at least make an attempt to look on the bright side. The best way I know how to do this is to dream. After all, as Debbie Harry once mused, dreaming is free. Only, as an unrepentant Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist, my dreams are a little bit different, to say the least, and my favorite dream is what I like to call the Emerald Belt Project. Now, I'm not exactly a political scientist, so don't give me shit about the logistics, after all this is dream, not a goddamn manifesto. Manifesto's are for people without ADD.
It all starts with the collapse of the American Empire, which, lets face it, is an inevitability. All capitalist societies are built to self-destruct. It's a system built on the naive premise of never ending expansion on a planet with a finite amount of space and resources to expand upon. A capitalist state has know choice but to become an empire in order to feed it's perpetual fix for growth. And all empires inevitably collapse beneath their own weight, just like Chris Christie. No one can eat the entire worlds supply of cannolis and live to tell about it.
Signs of this collapse are everywhere, from the Great Recession to our loss of influence on the global stage to the fact that even the most ignorant of American's doesn't take our three ring circus of a plutocracy seriously anymore, I mean, shit, they even elected one of the clowns to be the ringleader. The cracks are all there and growing larger day by day. It's simply a matter of time before those cracks become breaks and those broken pieces disintegrate like sand between Uncle Sams bloody finger tips. To most people this all probably sounds pretty terrifying. But to a degenerate like myself, it sounds better than Christmas fucking morning. It's what I've been waiting half my life for.
My dream is to take advantage of this chaotic opportunity and gather the continents leftist malcontents, be they communist, anarchist, socialist or libertarian, provided that they're all anti-statist in nature, and unite them under one banner. Then, together, we repatriate my local Rustbelt ruins along the Great Lakes, forgotten cities like Erie, Cleveland and Detroit, with nothing to offer but abandoned land and untapped opportunity. Here we make our stand and create a confederacy of stateless artist colonies with the backbone of a new post-capitalist economy built on an industry I can only describe as AgriPunk.
With literally thousands of square miles of unused indoor factory space we could create the worlds largest hydroponic grow operation on the planet with the Great Lakes serving as a near bottomless source of irrigation. With this we can provide ourselves and a hungry globe with a huge cache of organic fruits and vegetables, and naturally enough cannabis and opium to put those sheep-shagging warlords in Central Asia out of business for good, thus turning the Rustbelt into the Emerald Belt. All governed democratically through an interwoven network of grass roots syndicates and workers councils, making leaders as obsolete as the empire they once served. Income taxes will be replaced with union dues, standing armies and police forces will be replaced by local civilian militias and apartment complexes will become autonomous communes for the workers.
The profits made from herbs and narcotics alone would provide more than enough capital finance for a vibrant network of free autonomous social welfare programs like schools, clinics, hospitals and nursing homes as well as public transportation and infrastructure projects, centrally funded through the councils and syndicates but independently and democratically run by the communities that utilize these services.
As for all the empty lots, warehouses and abandoned homes, these will be forfeited to any rugged settler or collective with the balls and brains to rebuild them and create mutualist homesteads. Living off the land and devoting themselves to the creation of life and art, rather than the soulless management of pointless government bureaucracy and multi-national corporate servitude. The result? Something like L.A.'s fateful South Central Farm or Copenhagen's Freetown Christiania times a million. Miles and miles and miles of gigantic social art projects with their artists living inside them, all governed cooperatively without a single banker or IRS man breathing down their necks.
There would be a central, gold-backed, currency, mostly for trade purposes, but people would be free to make their own money and decide what it's worth. Or they can simply barter and trade goods for services. And this would be just one of many utopias stretching across the post-American Western Hemisphere. Classic Liberals and more market oriented anarchists may set up their own independent projects in New England or Alaska. Primitivists might do the same in the Pacific Northwest. More traditionalist paleoconservative minded folks could set up their own colonies in Utah or Montana. And so it goes. Libertarian communist campesinos in El Salvador. Black nationalists in Mississippi. Indigenous tribalists in the Badlands. A colorful collage of radical experiments in direct democracy competing peacefully for the favor of a populace free to pick and choose which society makes sense to them.
What's missing from this picture? Give up? War. With no more standing armies and stateless nations to small and decentralized to dominate even their own populaces let alone anyone else's, wars will be rendered to relatively minor skirmishes between tribes and militias. There would still be violence. There will always be violence. But without the apparatus of a centralized state and with communities busy with the joyful work of their own self determination, war as we know it may simply cease to exist.
I know, I know, it sounds nuts right? But why not? Why not dream big and swing for the fucking fences. Everything new started out as something "crazy", from Maknovia and Catalonia to Chiapas and Rojava. I'll fully admit to not having all the kinks worked if you'll admit to being at least a little intrigued by my wild dream. And by all means, feel free to punch wholes in it. But the Emerald Belt Project is what I dream about when I grow weary of dead girls and bad leaders and, like I said, dreaming is free.
Dream big, dearest motherfuckers. Only dreamers can change the world.
Peace, Love, Empathy and Anarchy- CH
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Her Name Was Nora
Her name was Nora. She was an 8 year old American girl. And she was murdered last Sunday. I wish I could tell you more about her. I wish I could tell you her favorite color and the songs she liked to sing on her way to school. I wish I could tell you that she loved horses and lilacs and dreamed of being a doctor when she grew up. But I cant. All I can tell you is that her name was Nora. She was an 8 year old American girl. And our new president, Donald J. Trump decided that she had to die. Just the latest in a seemingly endless procession of innocent victims of our seemingly endless war on terror.
Nawar al-Awlaki, affectionately known to family and loved ones as Nora, was the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American born cleric murdered in an Obama ordered drone strike in 2011 for the crime of using his freedom of speech to advocate violence against the United States, which, in my mind, made his assassination about as justified as Charlie Hebdo. What's even worse is that his 16 year old son, Nora's older brother, was murdered in a similar strike just weeks later. Which makes the idea of Nora's own tragic demise being just a horrific coincidence more than a little hard to swallow. Nora was one of as many as 57 people slaughtered, most of them also relatives of al-Awlaki, on the morning of January 29th by a Seal Team 6 death squad in an operation planned under the presidency of Barack Obama and approved by his successor, Donald J. Trump. The objective of the strike was supposedly to attain important information on Al-Qaeda but after an alleged firefight, the Seals, our heroes, apparently found it necessary to kill everything that fucking moved. Of the 57 killed only 14 have been confirmed as enemy combatants by the Pentagon. Even if you believe that to be true, that still leaves another 43 innocents, mostly women and children. Nora was one of the first to be shot but one of the last to die. Suffering from a bullet wound to her neck, Nora spent the last two hours of her tragically short life bleeding to death in her wounded mothers arms.
The braying parasites of the evening news could care less about any of these ugly details. The only part of the story that they found worthy of their fleeting attention was the single solitary death of one of their beloved Seals, which, considering their Wild Bunch approach to warfare, was more than likely a case of friendly fire. My late grandfather was a career officer in the Marine Corps. A commitment I didn't agree with but respected regardless. I have a full respect for the fact that there are a good many righteous men and women serving at all levels and branches of the American military machine, however foul it may be. But these men were not soldiers. They were terrorists who clearly came to Yemen to kill anything that got in their way. I have a hard time feeling remorse for a slain terrorist, especially while the bullet riddled corpses of their victims remain callously ignored. One has to wonder if Saudi Arabia reported on the tragic death of a dozen or so amateur pilots on September 12th.
I won't lie to you, dearest motherfuckers, this story got to me on a very deep personal level. When I first read about it I cried and I've been writing Nora's name on my right hand ever sense in tribute. I don't know why the death of that little girl feels so damn personal. She wasn't the first child to fall victim to America's never-ending terrorist war on terror and sadly she won't be the last. But something about her still haunts me. Maybe it's just the Winter depression. I've even gone so far as to chalk it up to my gender dysphoria. As far fetched as it may seem, something deep inside tells me that in another life I could have been a Khanith and me and Nora could have been childhood friends. But more than anything, I think what bothers me most is the unbearable fact that no one but me seems to really fucking care. 57 people are dead. 57 people will never breath again. 57 people will never sing another song on their way to school. 57 people will never spend another Sunday afternoon with their loved ones. And no one fucking cares. When did life become so goddamn cheap. Even on many of my favorite alternative news sites, people seem more concerned with partisan bullshit than the 57 caskets being laid to rest in war-torn Yemen. Including one very small box reserved for a little girl who's only crime was standing in the way of American bullets.
I don't know what motivated Barack Obama to plan this raid and I don't know what motivated Donald Trump to make himself the 45th war criminal to occupy the Oval Office by approving it and, quite frankly, I don't fucking care. The only thing I know, the only thing that I care about this week, is that her name was Nora. She was an 8 year old girl slain by her own country. And sometimes I really hate to call myself an American.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
Nawar al-Awlaki, affectionately known to family and loved ones as Nora, was the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American born cleric murdered in an Obama ordered drone strike in 2011 for the crime of using his freedom of speech to advocate violence against the United States, which, in my mind, made his assassination about as justified as Charlie Hebdo. What's even worse is that his 16 year old son, Nora's older brother, was murdered in a similar strike just weeks later. Which makes the idea of Nora's own tragic demise being just a horrific coincidence more than a little hard to swallow. Nora was one of as many as 57 people slaughtered, most of them also relatives of al-Awlaki, on the morning of January 29th by a Seal Team 6 death squad in an operation planned under the presidency of Barack Obama and approved by his successor, Donald J. Trump. The objective of the strike was supposedly to attain important information on Al-Qaeda but after an alleged firefight, the Seals, our heroes, apparently found it necessary to kill everything that fucking moved. Of the 57 killed only 14 have been confirmed as enemy combatants by the Pentagon. Even if you believe that to be true, that still leaves another 43 innocents, mostly women and children. Nora was one of the first to be shot but one of the last to die. Suffering from a bullet wound to her neck, Nora spent the last two hours of her tragically short life bleeding to death in her wounded mothers arms.
The braying parasites of the evening news could care less about any of these ugly details. The only part of the story that they found worthy of their fleeting attention was the single solitary death of one of their beloved Seals, which, considering their Wild Bunch approach to warfare, was more than likely a case of friendly fire. My late grandfather was a career officer in the Marine Corps. A commitment I didn't agree with but respected regardless. I have a full respect for the fact that there are a good many righteous men and women serving at all levels and branches of the American military machine, however foul it may be. But these men were not soldiers. They were terrorists who clearly came to Yemen to kill anything that got in their way. I have a hard time feeling remorse for a slain terrorist, especially while the bullet riddled corpses of their victims remain callously ignored. One has to wonder if Saudi Arabia reported on the tragic death of a dozen or so amateur pilots on September 12th.
I won't lie to you, dearest motherfuckers, this story got to me on a very deep personal level. When I first read about it I cried and I've been writing Nora's name on my right hand ever sense in tribute. I don't know why the death of that little girl feels so damn personal. She wasn't the first child to fall victim to America's never-ending terrorist war on terror and sadly she won't be the last. But something about her still haunts me. Maybe it's just the Winter depression. I've even gone so far as to chalk it up to my gender dysphoria. As far fetched as it may seem, something deep inside tells me that in another life I could have been a Khanith and me and Nora could have been childhood friends. But more than anything, I think what bothers me most is the unbearable fact that no one but me seems to really fucking care. 57 people are dead. 57 people will never breath again. 57 people will never sing another song on their way to school. 57 people will never spend another Sunday afternoon with their loved ones. And no one fucking cares. When did life become so goddamn cheap. Even on many of my favorite alternative news sites, people seem more concerned with partisan bullshit than the 57 caskets being laid to rest in war-torn Yemen. Including one very small box reserved for a little girl who's only crime was standing in the way of American bullets.
I don't know what motivated Barack Obama to plan this raid and I don't know what motivated Donald Trump to make himself the 45th war criminal to occupy the Oval Office by approving it and, quite frankly, I don't fucking care. The only thing I know, the only thing that I care about this week, is that her name was Nora. She was an 8 year old girl slain by her own country. And sometimes I really hate to call myself an American.
Peace, Love and Empathy- CH
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