NATO Monsters (and Super Creeps)

 America loves its monsters. We love to make em and we love to blow em up. For all our high talk of freedom and democracy, we are a superpower with a long and storied history of building up and breaking down authoritarian lunatics in Third World countries. Some of histories vilest dictators, from Pinochet to Suharto, were built with made-in-America stamped on their right foot like a goddamn GI Joe. Back in the good old days we would spend decades showering one of these psychopaths in praises and weapons and then use the bloody exploits we financed to justify going to war with the same bastard. We used Noriega down in Panama to launder our filthy Iran-Contra dollars and then invaded his banana republic in the name of the War on Drugs. We armed Saddam to the fucking teeth with weapons of mass destruction so he could wipe out whole villages of Kurds and Iranians and then used the receipts to justify three decades of rape and pillage in Iraq. And don't even get me started on our cross continental love affair with Mr. Bin Laden....

Those certainly were the good old days. The all or nothing days, as Frank Miller would say. America still loves its scary monsters and super creeps but now we need them more than ever to fight our forever wars for us. With an American populace increasingly weary of direct conflicts and a national debt soaring higher than eagles dare, American might has become increasingly dependent on proxy warfare. Long story short, we actually need the fucking scum we arm now. We need Nazis to bash babushkas on the Russian border of Ukraine. We need blood drinking Wahhabi lunatics to chop off heads in every other country in the Muslim world. And we need sadistic strongmen to micromanage the madness indefinitely while we try to figure out what the fuck we're doing anymore.

For decades this meant Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud has long been a reliable source of self-fellating pseudo-monarchs ready and willing to ship psychos to all corners of the globe. It was a win-win. We got to spread violent chaos and destabilization to any nation who wouldn't take our money and behave, and the Saudis got to spread their own perverted bastardization of Islam to more kids who couldn't afford shoes. Mohamed Bin Salman aka MBS seemed like the perfect monster to bring this vile tradition into the 21st Century and for a minute he was. The western media swooned over his swarthy date-rape charms and his empty promises of social reform while he helped us turn Syria, Libya, and Yemen into blood belching bungholes from hell. But then the little cunt got cocky. He began breaking the script and behaving like us, a dusty little superpower in his own right. He went bonkers blockading Qatar and kidnaping Lebanon's prime minister before really crossing the line and hacking up a Washington friendly journalist named Jamal Khashoggi over a slight. Even worse, he began losing control of the war in Yemen, getting his ass kicked by Houthi rebels and falling out with the UAE.

America can't afford to overthrow proxies like the Saudis anymore, but with their monopoly on the energy market slipping, we can afford to replace them as our go-to proxy and I believe that we may be in the process of doing so with that wannabe sultan Recep Erdogan and his fledgling Turkish empire. Erdogan may seem like an odd choice at first glance. He's killing our Kurds in Rojava and buying military hardware from the Russians, both of which we've lightly sanctioned him for. But over the last few years, Erdogan has been hauling ass across the map, keeping things heavy in all our hot spots. He's propped up our slave-trading thugs in Libya. He's kept Assad bleeding in Idlib. He's sent drones to our Nazis in Ukraine. He's even shipped armored vehicles to our failed Saudi backed militias in Yemen.

There are a lot of harsh words being tossed back and forth between Erdogan and their NATO allies, including us. But on paper, aside from a few slaps on the wrist, that is about all this supposed animosity amounts to, words. Words that make Erdogan look good to brown nations through with our shit while he plays the avenging rebel. This narrative totally flies in the face of the fact that Turkey has become a shining star for NATO advancement in the Western Asian theater. The coalition's second largest member was awarded this year with command over NATO's prestigious Very High Readiness Joint Task Force followed by America's newly proxied mission in Afghanistan being turned over to Turkish Brigadier General Selcuk Yurtsizoglu. These are not rewards you give to a problem child. These are tasks given to a trusted proxy. The kind of proxy that could best both Russia and Iran with an ambitious proxy war of it's own in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Just last year Turkey successfully micromanaged Azerbaijan's sacking of the sovereign region of Artsakh. A region under the protection of Armenia, both one of Russia's and Iran's most important allies, not to mention a member of the Collective Treaty Security Organization, Russia's own answer to NATO. What Erdogan achieved with relative ease wasn't just the ethnic cleansing of a supposedly protected minority, but a successful do over of what NATO hopeful and American proxy Georgia failed to do to South Ossetia in 2008. Turkey helped Azerbaijan purge themselves of a slice of contested territory keeping them from becoming a full NATO member in their own right. This wasn't just a gift to a historical Ottoman ally. It was a display to the United States that Turkey could achieve what they couldn't. Turkey could bitch slap Putin and get away with it.

We live in uncertain times. A tumultuous era where new powers are crashing and old powers are rising from the grave. The American Empire may not be down but it is on the ropes. It desperately needs to refocus it's ambitions. Turkey can help them do this in more ways than one. With Erdogan's unique blend of Sunni pan-Islamism and Turkic revanchism, they can help the US keep their bloody fingers on the pulse of the Middle East, while also helping them open up new veins in Russia and China where long oppressed Turkic minorities like the Uighurs continue to serve as an exposed Achilles heal for the Eurasian Century. America would also be wise to remember however that proxies have a long history of replacing dying empires in times of collapse. After all, isn't that what we did once upon a time to the British? What goes around has a nasty little tendency of coming back around again. Yesterday's scary monster is tomorrow's Camelot.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie

*  Where Eagles Dare by the Misfits

*  Famous Monsters by Chromatics

*  Fashion by David Bowie

*  Nasty Good Boy by Japanese Breakfast

*  Thieves by Ministry

*  Soon by My Bloody Valentine

Rethinking Godwin's Law in Gaza

 It's an inevitability if you're an online muckraker. It happens all the time. You get dragged down the rabbit hole by some malignant grandstanding troll and, regardless of what the devolving conversation was actually about, somebody gets called a fucking Nazi. It's so common that it has it's own name, Godwin's Law, created by attorney, author, and Electronic Frontier Foundation veteran Mike Godwin. Godwin's Law was originally an internet adage that declared that any online squabble, if allowed to go on long enough, would inevitably lead to someone or something being inappropriately compared to Hitler or the Nazi regime.

However, like many the internet adage, Godwin's Law has taken on another unofficial meaning. A more punitive meaning that essentially goes that anyone who makes such a comparison has already lost the argument and in some cases may indeed be an anti-Semite for having taken it there. But what happens when just such a comparison, however ugly, is completely appropriate? What happens when the similarities to the Third Reich become so appallingly obvious that ignoring such a fact becomes an exercise in absurdity? And what happens when those similarities are in fact an indirect result of histories greatest horror? The rotten fruit of the Reich. Are we to ignore such inconvenient truths? And if so, at whose expense and to whose reward?

After two weeks of Israel's latest hideous bombing campaign against the Gazan prison camp, I find such uncomfortable comparisons hard to resist. The bloodbath began with the ongoing ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, in this case the embattled Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the IDF's storm trooper assault on the peaceful Ramadan worshippers of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. In response to such brutish behavior, Hamas decided to launch a volley of rockets into Israel after issuing an ultimatum calling on Israeli soldiers to leave the mosque and the Sheik Jarrah protesters be.

Israel chose war and used Hamas' puny attempt at self-defense as an excuse to launch a blitzkrieg carpet bombing over one of the most densely populated places on earth, a gigantic ghetto under permanent lockdown by a totally criminal blockade, giving it's inmates no place safe to hide. It was like shooting fish in a barrel with a goddamn Uzi. Schools, hospitals, whole apartment blocks, nothing was off limits. Whole towers were demolished 9/11 style, including one housing the offices of international journalists. Homes in refugee camps were obliterated without warning before the routes to the nearest hospitals were mined. Hundreds of civilians, many of them helpless women and children, annihilated without mercy.

Hamas attempted to negotiate a ceasefire on day two of the eleven day massacre. Their ceasefire was rejected and the attacks were intensified to spite their efforts. Israel's zeal for sadism knew no bounds. According to them, every bombing target, every school, tower, and hovel contained a hidden Hamas asset and in a way they were right. In spite of how you or I may feel about them, Hamas is the rightful democratically elected leadership of Gaza. They enjoy the popular support of a broken populace desperate to strike back against their tormentors like Warsaw partisans even if it means dying in the process. Any death is better than life in internment. For this sometimes misguided sin of pride, Israel sees fit to punish an entire population. Gaza's greatest sin has been resisting their Judaization, refusing to be liquidated for the greater good of the chosen people.

Under such devastating circumstances, how is any historical observer not supposed to make the connection between the actions and ambitions of Israel's master race and Nazi Germany, especially when you consider the intimate connections between the two. I have long argued that the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust was that many of the children of it's survivors were doomed by international forces to become the new Nazis. Like an abused child, Israel developed into the shape of its tormentors and the American empire exploited this sickness to wage war on the Arab world. Just like the Nazi's Third Reich, this war is doomed by its own ambition to fail and this failure is doomed by its reaper's cruelty to devolve into increasingly genocidal policies before the new Nazis can collapse beneath the weight of their horror.

I say none of this with glee or even anger. I draw my conclusions with great sadness and pray to various gods that I'm wrong. But to declare me an anti-Semite among other foul slurs just for invoking such unpleasant historical observations is the truly lazy and callous position to take. The second interpretation of Godwin's Law is simply another excuse to silence debate on a sensitive subject and even the first interpretation refuses to acknowledge that the greatest example of humanities capacity for cruelty in the last century can serve as a perfect scale to measure our sins by so long as it's done analytically. Otherwise we raise the horrors of the Holocaust to a height in which no crime could ever possibly compare, thus assuming that just such a crime cannot possibly repeat itself. Surely the risk offered by just such an ultimatum far outweighs that posed by the insensitivity of douche bags on the internet.

You be the judge, dearest motherfuckers. I for one welcome the debate. I only hope it's not in vain.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  They Walked the Line by Joy Division

*  The Metal East by Lightening Bolt

*  The War Dance by Killing Joke

*  Nightclubbing by Iggy Pop

*  My War by Black Flag

*  Atmosphere by Joy Division

*  All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Let's Have a War by Fear 

Down with Woke Imperialism!

 I am a transwoman of no color. I am an agoraphobic welfare queen. I am a genderqueer millennial who has been diagnosed with virtually every mental illness in the DSM. I am intersectional but my existence is not a box checking exercise, though I have been diagnosed with Obsessive Box Checking Disorder. I used to struggle under the assumption that much of the above made me a target of the white cis male status quo, but at 32 it has come to my attention that my status as a marginalized American has made me bate for the Military Industrial Complex. Somewhere along the line, diversity became a tool for the very same people who benefit most from systemic oppression.

This is the conclusion that I'm forced to make from the CIA's new "Humans of the CIA" add campaign, a painfully hilarious collection of online videos trafficking Langley as a woke bastion of hip tolerance for Queers, feminists, people of color, and the white hetero crowd who fetishize us. Speaking as part of the target demographic, the whole thing creeped me way the fuck out. I'm a Queer feminist who also happens to be a virulent anti-imperialist. These are the same sick fucks behind MK-Ultra and the Nazi ratlines, and now they want me for as their new recruit. What the hell happened here? When did people like me go from being outcasts to exotic house pets for the mainstream elites?

Queer and anti-racist movements in this country use to be a threat to these people. Our struggle was defined by a radical devotion to autonomy, self-determination, and solidarity with third world victims of the same hideous power structure that oppressed us stateside. Sometime in the last few decades we got lost. We started cutting deals with the man and started making concessions for privileges from the same system we once promised to destroy. I use to think that we just got lazy after winning the Culture War but lately I've come to the disturbing conclusion that the Culture War won us.  

Queer people in particular lost the Culture War when we stopped raging for Queer liberation and settled for LGBTQ tolerance. We embraced inclusion into the very system we sought to destroy by devoting our struggle to statist trinkets of assimilation like gay marriage, military conscription, and prison feeding hate crime legislation. In this sick Shyamalan twist, that system we once sought to destroy destroyed us by making us a domesticated member of their nuclear family; the family faggot who gets scraps from the table just as long as we keep it down and don't demand a table of our own. Identity politics became a series of hip new accessories for the elites to prove how tolerant they and their precious system are. It was only a very short matter of time before the war machine got in on the craze.

But nothing really changed. Queer kids and people of color are still oppressed. Transwomen still make up a disproportionate percentage of the prison population where we're routinely raped, violated, and abused by the same people who drive home in Hybrids with rainbow bumper stickers. Black and Brown kids are still shot like dogs in the streets by cops who receive woke racial sensitivity training. And the CIA continues to drone, torture, and destroy the third world while wearing feminist t-shirts and inclusive lanyards. I am sickened to see my people used to legitimize the same system that enslaves us all and I refuse to play good dog to this benevolent master.

Identity politics has gotten a bad rap for some good reasons, but their is nothing inherently wrong with devoting yourself to the betterment of a specific tribe. Coming out saved my life. If it wasn't for my community, I likely wouldn't even be here to bitch at you today. I refuse to feel bad for putting my people first but I also refuse to do so at the expense of others struggling for the same strength and salvation for their own communities, and this includes communities struggling to survive my countries foreign policy on the other side of the planet. This is what being intersectional is truly fucking about. It's not a keychain, it's solidarity among all the tribes. It means a death in Gaza is a death on Christopher Street. Either we all get free or we burn the prison down together.

We need to take back our movements and make them radical again. We need to make Black lives and Trans lives synonymous with Palestinian lives and Columbian lives. We need to ditch rights in favor of liberation and devote ourselves to the global struggle against imperialism. Not just because it's the right thing to do but because the same Military-Prison Industrial Complex that feeds on our children threatens to destroy us all. We must stand up to these glad-handing hucksters and refuse to be complicit in their crimes for a place at the table.

I am a genderfuck anti-imperialist. I am a mentally unstable thorn in the ass of the man. I am a neo-tribalist Queer anarchist and my tribe isn't for sale. I used to struggle under the assumption that the above made me a token of the white cis male status quo, but in 2021 I realized that that was only true if I agreed to be a good girl and not bite the hand that feeds me. By 2022, I swear I'll gnaw that hand off. Because their is nothing woke about imperialism and true Queer power means 'fuck the CIA!'

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Shelter Song by Iceage

*  Your Dog by Soccer Mommy

*  The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails

*  Loaded by Primal Scream

*  Queen by Perfume Genius

*  List of Demands by Saul Williams

*  Heads Will Roll by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

*  Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

*  Without You by Perfume Genius

*  Hot and Heavy by Lucy Dacus

We Need to Talk About Destroying America

 Dearest motherfuckers, we need to have a serious talk about America. I've been tapdancing around this subject for years like a genderfuck Shirley Temple but I think we've come to the point where we can't afford to mince words anymore. America is a runaway empire and it needs to be stopped. For a long time I have openly held out hope that the inevitable collapse of such a gargantuan killing machine was upon us and that all peace loving anarchists like me really had to do was prepare for the inevitable and wait. While I continue to maintain that any superpower as bloated and unforgiving as the American empire is certainly doomed to collapse, I have come to fear that our elites are savage and depraved enough to take us all down with them in a colossal mass suicide by cold war. We can't afford to fuck around anymore folks. We need to have a serious conversation about destroying America once and for all before it destroys us all.

It's important that we cleanse ourselves of any illusions pertaining to this country of ours. America was born an empire and it will die an empire. There is no once great nation to be saved. This creature began as a hideous mistake at best and a despicable conspiracy at worst. As flagrantly politically incorrect as I clearly enjoy being, those wokesters in the critical race theory market are right about at least one thing, this countries foundation wasn't built on freedom and liberty. It was built on conquest, rape, slavery, and genocide, and the hustle never stopped. Over the centuries, we've evolved from small pocks and cotton to gunboat diplomacy and Manifest Destiny to a new world order and American exceptionalism. 

It is all part of the same narrative of power and violence. We dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan as they attempted to surrender. We bombed bridges in Korea and then machine gunned the survivors with babes in arms. We crippled half of Southeast Asia for generations with blankets of Agent Orange. We trained baby killers to rape nuns in Central America and then helped them to get away with their crimes. We carpet bombed miles of fleeing civilians on the Highway of Death in Iraq. We starved the survivors for a decade and then bombed them some more. Any one of these crimes should be sufficient enough to damn us all to hell, but it wasn't like we all took it sitting down.

America, for all its sins has a proud tradition of both individual and collective resistance to its own tyranny. We have had barracks raiding abolitionists, race traiting injun lovers, starved and shackled Anabaptist war resistors, limp wristed nudist transcendentalists, bomb throwing immigrant anarchists, prison dwelling democratic socialists, peace loving old right isolationists, long haired hippie freaks, draft dodging peaceniks, empire busting Black nationalists, officer fragging GI insubordinates, pink mohawked flag burners, rifle toting American Indian occupiers, anti-nuke Catholic Workers, lowriding Chicano anti-colonialists, state smashing libertarian stoners, Che loving communist metalheads, and even a few gender bending gonzo muckrakers, and it is this renegade tradition of many renegade traditions that makes America-the-place redeemable in the eyes of any deity, but only if we collectively hold America-the-government accountable before it's too late, and that clock just keeps ticking louder and louder with each preceding presidency.

The last three- Obama, Trump, and Biden, have all devoted their foreign policies, or at least attempted to, to confronting the last governments capable of resisting our rapacious global advances- Iran, Russia, and especially China. This campaign accelerated with Obama's Pivot to Asia, continued with Trump's blustering trade wars, and now appears to be approaching a fever pitch with the Biden regime's Great Power Competition. All of this insanity adds up to one sick reality, America is prepared for nuclear war with Eurasia. These words sound insane but just watch the seas if you don't believe me. From the Black Sea to the South China Sea to the Straight of Taiwan, America's naval forces are shadowing Russian and Chinese warships and daring them to strike first in the most provocatively obvious come ons since the Gulf of Tonkin. We are surrounding the Pacific and Arctic theaters with missiles and encouraging Yankee bitch states like Ukraine and the Philippines to throw the first punch. We are playing chicken with nuclear warheads and nobody is flinching.

We have reached a fork in the road where our two options read destroy the beast or destroy the world and America is most definitely the beast. It is high time that American anti-imperialists of all stripes embrace the reality that our government is the bad guy in this movie and we need to defeat it. I realize the risk I'm putting myself in just saying something this incendiary out loud in today's hyper censorious online climate, but goddammit, it needs to be said. America must be stopped and Americans must be the ones to stop it. I'm not saying we march directly from our computer screens to the barracks but this is the conversation we need to be having. This world war that our leaders are openly and actively pursuing is a recipe for human extinction even more immediate than the cataclysm of climate change and it needs to be treated as such.

So what do we do? The first thing we do is ditch the melodramatic theatre of electoral politics. All the money and energy that goes into campaigns of worthwhile candidates like Ron Paul or Tulsi Gabbard would be much better spent on creating grassroots movements in the model of Extinction Rebellion or BDS. We need to first educate the world, particularly the brainwashed first world, on the immediate existential threat of American imperialism. This means mass walk outs, forced occupations, direct action, and civil disobedience to be followed by a movement that preaches to drop out, boycott, and divest from the United States Government and all major corporations doing business with her. We need to create decentralized stateless alternatives to everything from banking to healthcare so we can put ourselves in a position where we can afford to threaten the world's greatest economy with certain destruction without losing everything in the process. And while peace should always be the priority, we need to prepare ourselves for the very real possibility that posing even a peaceful threat to world order will put us in a position in which we may need to defend ourselves to survive. 

And that is what this is truly all about, survival. If we simply allow our government to exist in its current colossal form, it will continue to advocate for expansion because that is what empires do. If it's not China or Russia it will be India or Europe. America is the only superpower capable of playing this game to the brink of apocalypse and it must be stopped by resistance from within if there is to be any hope for the world at large. America must be broken down into pieces small enough to coexist peacefully with the rest of the world and Americans need to make this happen before it's too late. This will likely mean radical decentralization and popular secession, an America unlike any we've ever seen before, but an America we can afford to be proud of. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Under Pressure by David Bowie & Queen

*  The World at Large by Modest Mouse

*  Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

*  N.W.O. by Ministry

*  Party at Ground Zero by Fishbone

*  Suffragette City by David Bowie

*  Time Bomb by Rancid

*  Let's Have a War by FEAR

Gun Control Wont Cure America's Addiction to War

 There is a deadly virus on the loose in this country. An unstoppable plague rampaging through communities big and small like an untrammeled beast, picking us off day by day, two, three, four at a time. The news gorges itself on the gorey statistics every night, teasing us with expanding body counts and daring us not to touch that dial and miss another gruesome tidbit. This disease is their plaything. They pretend to cover it because they care but they can barely contain their glee every time it claims another victim, because another victim almost always means another ratings hike, desperately needed for Fourth Estate subsistence in the post-Trump era, and they're not disappointed. The bodies just keep on dropping everyday as this virus grows closer and closer to us all.

I'm not talking about COVID. I'm talking about America's other epidemic, gun violence. Or at least liberals like to frame this problem as an epidemic and for once I agree with them and not just to fulfill my sick zeal for clever allegories either. While America has experienced a precipitous drop in most forms of violent crime over the last two decades, we retain a uniquely high body count compared to our other first world neighbors and seem to be a deadly playing field for genres of mass slaughter that seem peculiarly American in character. I've never made my disdain for gun control of any kind a mystery. I come from the Alex Cockburn school of artillery friendly leftism. But even I have to admit their is something going on here.

2021 has only just begun but it's already been a banner year for America's other national pass time, the mass shooting. In just four months we've seen over 150 of those goddamn things, 50 in the weeks following the Atlanta Spa Shootings alone. This is enough to freak even the staunchest gun nut out a bit and naturally the Democrats are pouncing on this excuse to roll out more kneejerk gun control regulations. "What's the problem with that?', my left wing friends might ask. Well, aside from being patently immoral to deny working class class people the right to defend themselves, it completely ignores that other very American genre of gun violence known as the police shooting.

Any logical form of gun control depends on an armed class to maintain it. Americans will never just throw away their Glocks like a bunch of drunken Australians, so that leaves the job of regulating American firearm rights up to the state, which means the police. That's right, hippie, the same thugs you've been protesting all year and righteously calling to defund will be the paladins in charge of defiling the constitutional rights of more minorities like me. These are the same psychos who lynched George Floyd. The same remorseless killing machine that took another 64 lives during the trial of Derek Chauvin alone. They killed 1,127 people last year. That is more than twice as many as those killed by civilian active shooters and I honestly see very little difference between the two.

If you ask me what the source of America's gun violence epidemic is, I would have to turn to Brother Malcolm and suggest that the chickens are coming home to roost. America is a violent colonialist nation in decline that lashes out at unarmed populaces across the globe to cover up its increasingly obvious inadequacies on the world stage. Is it really so shocking that it's citizens handle their problems the same way? Suburban cops stalk the streets of poor neighborhoods like soldiers on patrol. Active shooters target unarmed civilian market places the same way and often for the same reasons. Your average cop and your average active shooter are both middle class white men in their thirties. No subset is more likely to feel the decline of American supremacy first hand. These are all scared men (and women) losing control in a rapidly changing world and desperately struggling to take it back by any means necessary, leaving the rest of us cowering in their crossfire.

So what's the solution then? How do we cure this epidemic? I really hate to piss on your parade, dearest motherfuckers, for once I really do, but their likely is no easy cure. America is a nation that had it all and now, do to its own hubris, like every empire before it, it is going to slowly and excruciatingly lose it all. And people are going to lash out in the darkness. Cops are going to get more trigger happy and active shooters are going to follow their lead regardless of gun control to reenact America's glorious massacres from yesteryear at a shopping mall near you. All the while, the vampires of cable news will continue to gorge themselves into a bloody drunken stupor over the lurid details.

The closest thing I have to a solution is not one the left is gonna like because it involves more guns. Americans are lost. They need a sense of direction. They need something to fight for. At the same time we find ourselves at the mercy of a standing army in blue. Our wiser founding fathers warned us of this very threat. They told us their was no greater threat to peace than a professional army. This has proven to be true both at home and abroad. Ask any unterrified Jeffersonian what the solution to the scourge of the standing army is and they will tell you that it is the civilian militia. Huey Newton understood this. Karl Hess understood this. Black Panthers and Sovereign Citizens offered lost Americans something positive to belong to. They offered something greater than a nation to fight for and that was their own communities.

I don't believe that all cops are bad anymore than I believe that all mass shooters are irredeemable psychopaths, though many if not most surely are. The fact that we see more people abandoning the police force now than ever before is proof of this. Those who really truly want to protect and serve their communities can do so by protecting them from the police and other war junkies as part of democratic organizations directly answerable to the public through civilian councils and reversible contracts. This is the best way to combat the dangers of a dying toxic society, build a new thriving one within that crumbling shell and give people something worth fighting for. It may not be a cure for America's gun violence epidemic, but it's a start.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Hey Joe by Jimi Hendricks

*  Come As You Are by Nirvana

*  $10 Bill by Cop Shoot Cop

*  Kerosene by Big Black

*  Rock n Roll N*gger by Patti Smith

*  Can You Read My Mind by Boygenius

*  Jeremy by Pearl Jam

*  Negative Creep by Nirvana

*  London Calling by the Clash

Joe Biden's Fabulous Fool's Peace

 Oh sweet lord Satan, is this it? Is this really how it ends? With Joe Biden struggling to pronounce Pashtun words on badly shuffled cue cards. Is this it? After twenty long years that could only accurately be described as goddamned, is this finally mercifully it? Twenty years! Twenty years in Afghanistan! Has it really only been twenty years? It feels more like forty or four hundred. Twenty years. Twenty years of drone strikes and bombing hospitals and wedding parties. Twenty years of digging graves for men who came home broken but alive. Twenty years of propping up dope lords, rapists, and pederasts. Twenty years of insisting that such beasts were moderates in the business of women's lib. Twenty years of stacking corpses too high to accurately count the dead. Higher than those merciless mountains standing like gallows made from god's serrated fangs. Twenty years of the longest war in America's storied history of geostrategic bloodletting.

And now you say it's over? Poof! Just like that. With a wave of Lady Liberties extinguished torch, with a wave of Joe Biden's bony finger, this is how it ends? With that sad broken old fool of a death merchant announcing that he may be the fourth president to preside over this atrocity but he will also be the last. And just like that, on September 11, 2021, this forever nightmare is over.  Yeah, I'm not fucking buying it either.

For starters, this plan carries the bizarre distinction of being a peace deal that violates a preexisting peace deal. Donald Trump's diplomatic wunderkind, Zalmay Khalilzad broke his back doing back flips over buzz saws in Doha to get the Taliban killing machine to agree to a cease fire, and for an entire year, those grizzled imperium slayers sustained from murdering a single solitary pig-dog American based on the promise that we would finally fuck off by May 1, 2021. It was all set and ready to go. All the work had already been done. And Biden just drops in and wipes his ass with the thing, and for what? Another four months and a photo-op? You're gonna put our precious boys and girls in uniform on the chopping block for that? Why? Seriously, what the literal fuck?

But that's not all folks! Biden's little speech, and that is indeed all this peace plan amounts too, a speech from a killer in Depends, promised the removal of all US and NATO coalition troops. It said absolutely nothing about the Pentagon's 13,000 contract killers. It said nothing about the unknown number of CIA agents and black-ops operatives active in country. It said nothing about the lethal air war that kills more women and children than all the M4's and AK's combined. Peace? What fucking peace? This thing that has been pompously promised to us isn't peace. It's a lie. Fool's peace. If I were just a little more paranoid, I might suspect that this deal was designed to fail. Then again, is that really so far fetched considering the Biden regime's hundred day history of duplicitous diplomacy?

If I could boil Joe Biden's fool's peace doctrine down to an easy formula, I would say it goes something like this. Make a great big ambiguously worded media friendly peace announcement without ever signing anything on paper. While those imbeciles in the Fourth Estate fawn over the majesty of geriatric Camelot, stall and drag your feet on what few details you provided and leave ample room for tax funded third parties to sabotage the thing. Then once the other side loses patience with this nonsense and lashes out, blame them from your high horse for spoiling your glorious peace offering and continue the violent status quo with the newly minted pedigree of "Hey man, we tried." Like I said, this would all sound paranoid even to a tinfoil hat Yippie like me if we hadn't done it twice already.

We did it with Yemen, where Biden made another vague and flowery speech about ending all American support for 'offensive' Saudi military operations in the region while promising a commitment to aid in that psychopathic kingdoms defense against their victims. Since then there has been virtually zero discernable change in our involvement with that ghastly holocaust. The Saudis continue to pulverize Yemen with American war toys and the United States continues to aid those butchers in their decidedly offensive blockade which threatens to starve children under the age of 5 in the hundreds of thousands. And as if that weren't diabolical enough, we simultaneously deny the very existence of a blockade while fingering our own puppet in exile, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi for the the crime that isn't happening. And naturally, every time a Houthi gets lucky enough to nail a Saudi gas station we blame them for not being serious about peace.

And we're doing the same goddamn thing to Iran. Biden ran on restoring the 2015 JCPOA Nuclear Deal that Trump unilaterally violated. But the moment Biden shuffles into office, he finds all kinds of reasons to keep the Trump era sanctions cooking. Meanwhile, Iran is left economically crippled while COVID ravages their people like blanket-born small pocks and Israel chucks cyber terrorist attacks at them like tomahawks. Under those dire conditions, Iran has seen it fit to raise plutonium levels to grades never even attempted before. Contrary to Biden's campaign promises, relations have gotten worse with Tehran even while we engage in pussyfooting peace talks through EU negotiators.

What the shit? Can we just have Trump back? At least he trampled on peace deals without all the crazy mind games. But that's what Joe Biden's fabulous fool's peace is really all about, achieving the same stupid results while looking smart doing it. You see, nothing substantial ever really changes with America's foreign policy. The same unelected professional war mongers maintain their footing in the Pentagon, State Department, and the CIA. The same goals are always in place, dismantle the Muslims, isolate the Chinese, and destroy the Russians. What American's vote for is the PR team for these hellacious shenanigans, and with Biden they hired the same clean up crew that made America look professional again after 8 years of Bush overplaying his hand in Iraq. What we're seeing now is another session of imperial cleanup after Trump's single term abortion. That's what you idiots really voted for, the propaganda of a lesser evil.

What? You didn't think they were serious about change, did you? Silly Americans, democracy is for kids. Peace is for tinfoil hat Yippies like me. But I'll keep ranting if you keep reading.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Stuck Inside Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again by Bob Dylan

*  Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde

*  Rock and Roll by the Velvet Underground

*  Sabotage by the Beastie Boys

*  California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys

*  Shell Game by Bright Eyes

*  No Children by the Mountain Goats

*  Control by Mannequin Pussy

Why Donbass Matters

 Dark storm clouds are gathering over the contested Ukrainian border regions of Donbass and Crimea as two antiquated superpowers surge headlong towards a conflict that could easily end in nuclear oblivion. It may take two dinosaurs to tango but it doesn't take a paleontologist to tell you that this disaster in waiting has 'made in America' written all over it. After months of belligerent violations, it was a flurry of press releases from the White House, Defense Department, and NATO that finally empowered the American funded puppet regime of Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev to finally torch the Russian brokered Minsk Peace Agreement and openly seek to rid itself of Russian influence over Crimea and local autonomy over Donbass by any means necessary. And why not? The White House openly admits that during their first phone call on Good Friday, Biden offered Zelensky, "unwavering support for Ukraine sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia's ongoing aggression in Donbass and Crimea." For those of you who don't speak fluent NATO, that's code for, 'Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!'

And NATO membership is what this growing disaster is all about. According to NATO bylaws, a nation cannot be absorbed into the NATO blob until it first purges itself of all territorial disputes and foreign military presence. That means the Russian annexed region of Crimea and the independent republics of Luhansk and Donetsk need to be obliterated. Russia naturally can't stand for such foreign villainy on its borders and thus we find ourselves in Doctor Strangelove country with 40,000 NATO troops knocking at the door and two Russian armies and three airborne units ready to greet them.

This colossal shitstorm has been a long time coming. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US has been dumping billions of dollars through the National Endowment for Democracy into influencing Ukraine to join the NATO fold in ganging up on their Russian neighbors. We lost patience with simply perverting democracy in 2014 when the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych chose closer ties with Russia over Euro servitude. The US called in its allies in the nation's fledgling neo-Nazi movement and they launched a coup that chased that nations democracy to Moscow and ended with an openly racist junta in power in Kiev.

America underestimated the nation's ethnic Russian population in Ukraine's east however. The already autonomous region of Crimea chose to return to Russia before Obama's favorite fascists could purge Russia's Black Sea Fleet from the peninsula which had been Russian territory for centuries before Khrushchev unceremoniously gifted it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic decades before an independent Ukraine had ever existed. The Novorossiyans of the Donbass attempted to follow suit with their own referendum in 2014, but Russia left them high and dry when they chose independence over rejoining the motherland. The result was a violent civil war that's claimed over 14,000 bodies in the name of assimilation.

The western media blames Russia for every mortar out of Mariupol, though they've offered absolutely bupkis in the way of evidence for their cockamamie conspiracy theory of a Russian invasion. If Russia had invaded, this thing would have ended like Georgia's 2008 attempt to purge itself of ethnic undesirables for NATO membership. Russia kicked their ass back to Tbilisi before John McCain could get his dick hard. If anything, Russia has shown enormous restraint in Ukraine, but I'm less than impressed with their motives for doing so.

NATO is an imperial protection racket and it always has been. Contrary to popular mythology, the Warsaw Pact was constructed to defend the Soviet Union from western intervention. The US never gave a shit about communism. NATO was always about lynching Russia and lynching Russia was always about denying Asia a viable land bridge to the European economic integration which would have spelled out the end of Atlantic supremacy once and for all. This is why the Cold War never really ended. It just got colder with NATO's obliteration of Yugoslavia and its expansion deeper and deeper into Russia's sphere of influence to the point where Moscow has now found itself literally surrounded on all sides with no one left to turn to but China, the real powerhouse at the top of our shitlist.

This is why the tiny impoverished border region of Donbass matters so much to both sides of this conflict. To those rusted old Cold War juggernauts, it's just another domino in NATO's conspiracy against the Eurasian Century. But Donbass is more than just a game piece. It is a proud autonomous region which has struggled valiantly for its dignity against both western and eastern influence for generations, going all the way back to the stateless tribal proto-anarchism of the Cossacks who suffered harsh persecution from the Bolsheviks. This persecution only multiplied when the region became an unsurprising stronghold for Nestor Makhno's Anarchist Black Army. Donbass was further punished for their intransigence with devastating famines under Stalin, but this didn't stop them from becoming the backbone of Khrushchev's Ukrainian front against the Nazi invaders who slaughtered Novorossiyan civilians by the millions. 

This proud history of hard-headed rebellion continued when the region voted overwhelmingly to leave the Soviet Union and help build an independent Ukrainian republic. However, when Donbass discovered that they were simply trading one set of masters for another, they did what they do best and rebelled in a bloody coal strike that nearly ended in a civil war during the early-mid nineties. Finally, after years of abuse from Kiev, the last straw fell with the coup against Yanukovych, whom the region had voted for by 90%. When the same fascist flags their fathers died beneath went up over Kiev and announcements were made to ban their indigenous Russian language, the Novorossiyans said enough. From across the region they returned to their hometowns, taking a huge chunk of Ukraine's working class military with them, and they voted to finally declare independence as the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic in 2014.

They expected Russia to have their backs like Crimea. But when the region chose independence over annexation, Russia left their ethnic brethren with the cold war shoulder. Even the Moscow brokered Minsk Agreement ignored the popular will of the People's Republics and suggested reintegration back into Ukraine as part of a Russian style federation. And now, once again, the Donbass stands alone between two warring masters. As a Panarchist who views popular secession as a sacrament of a truly free society, this breaks my heart. Like the Armenians in Artsakh, the Novorossiyans in Donbass did everything right and now face certain punishment for doing so. The voice of the people has been made loud and clear by generations of Novorossiyans, but all Russia and NATO can hear is each other talking over their perceived lessers.

The solution to this tragedy is not a unipolar world or a bipolar world, it's a thousand polar world. Only when the small tribes of this planet stand united under the solidarity of massive stateless autonomy will the world truly see how big we really are. Only when the people of Luhansk and Donetsk can look to the people of Chiapas and Chechnya and Rojava and Artsakh for solidarity will they truly be heard in every language. The only solution to a world governed by several flags is a world governed by a million. I just pray it's not too late for the proud people of the Donbass. They deserve better than obliteration. They deserve liberation. We all do.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Declare Independence by Bjork

*  Back In the USSR by the Beatles

*  Today by Smashing Pumpkins

*  Haven't Got a Clue by Dramarama

*  All These Things That I've Done by the Killers

*  High and Dry by Radiohead

*  Shitlist by L7

*  Wake Up by Arcade Fire

*  U-Mass by the Pixies

*  Expressway To Yr Skull by Sonic Youth