The Forgotten Plight of the Negev Bedouin

 Something strange happened last October in the embattled holy lands that very few western observers managed to pick out of the bones from the various massacres. 17 Gentiles were among the victims slaughtered by Hamas on the 7th and just five days later, a village of 187 was erased from the map in the West Bank in a violent pogrom led by heavily armed illegal Jewish settlers. This may all just sound like another tragic week in the history of the Levant until you realize that all 204 of these sorry souls were Bedouin Arabs, a small marginalized tribal population that has somehow found itself at the withering mercy of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Some of the first victims of the Al-Aqsa Flood were Israeli citizens of Bedouin decent, and they included a five-year-old boy killed by a stray rocket, a fifty-year-old man shot dead while attempting to rescue injured ravers at the Nova Music Festival, and a 25-year-old construction worker and father of two gunned down defending a Jewish family near the Sderot police station. Another six Bedouins were among the hostages and only two have been returned. Nevertheless, none of these harrowing facts have stopped the Zionist mobs of the West Bank from targeting Bedouin villages like that of Wadi al-Siq as part of their supposed revenge for the events of October 7th.

That tiny collection of tin shacks clinging to the rugged mountainside east of Ramallah was surrounded by masked settlers and uniformed IDF reservists armed to the teeth with assault rifles and carved from the earth like a cancer from the face of God. Those men opened fire upon unarmed crowds, invaded homes and tied up and assaulted women and children in front of their husbands and fathers at gunpoint. Farmlands were torched, tractors and livestock were stolen, and the battered citizens of Wadi al-Siq were told that every last one of them would be annihilated if they ever returned.

This is a sad but common chapter in the long plight of the Negev Bedouins, a semi-nomadic indigenous Arab population spread across the shifting borders of the Holy Land who have long suffered the brunt of the violence that goes into drawing those lines. The Bedouins are an ancient people who trace their lineage back to the times of Muhammed and even earlier. Arab for "desert dweller," there are roughly 4 million Bedouins spread across communities throughout the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, and many Arabs still revere them as ideal representatives of their culture do to their rich, poetic oral traditions and their rugged code of honor, but few people have seen their entire way of life obliterated by colonialism the way the Bedouins of the Negev Desert have. 

During the Nakba of 1948, 85% of the Negev Bedouins were forcefully expelled from their ancestral lands. About 40,000 ended up in the West Bank but most remained internally displaced within Israel's ever-expanding borders. Today, 200,000 Bedouins barely eke out a meager existence in a desolate region of the Israeli occupied Negev known as the Siyag. Just over half live in 7 government-built Bedouin-only townships where they have been subjected to multi-generational genocidal campaigns of "forced urbanization" and fallen prey to the despairs of crime, poverty, and addiction that comes with such "progress."

The remaining 90,000 live in 46 villages, 35 of them are totally unrecognized by the Israeli government. Here the Bedouins have found themselves at the mercy of the all the very worst trappings of the state. Their movement is heavily policed by arbitrary checkpoints and mandatory IDs. Restrictive zoning and planning regimes have cut them off from basic recourses like water and electricity and barred them from building any infrastructure more substantial than trailers and tents. And they have faced an endless roulette of displacement with entire villages demolished overnight, paved over, and replaced by tony Jewish suburbs.

Sadly, those Bedouins who managed to flee to the West Bank haven't fared any better. They remain virtually unrecognized by the Palestinian Authority who hung them out to dry in the 1993 Oslo Accords when the region that most of the tribes occupy, known as Area C, was essentially handed over to be governed by the Israeli Military. Even before October 7th, this isolated population had been the victims of constant pogroms at the hands of fascist Jewish settlers who have wantonly pillaged their lands while the IDF watches, and the PLO washes their hands. 25 Palestinian Bedouin villages have been violently razed in the last few years alone, displacing 1,517 people and counting.

So, what the hell did these impoverished sheepherders ever do to earn so much disdain and cruelty from nearly every side of the Israeli-Palestinian clusterfuck? In the simplest of terms, they are anarchists. For centuries the Bedouins have struggled to maintain a way of life that predates the European concepts of Westphalia and Balfour, and they continue to stubbornly practice their stateless existence in a land thatched by arbitrary boundaries and manufactured hierarchies. In both Israel and Palestine, the Bedouins govern themselves under an ancient code of unwritten laws passed down orally and overseen by tribal courts and clan councils. They subsist largely on kinship networks that essentially act as Islamic mutual aid societies providing community support wherever it is needed.

Much of these traditions have been badly eroded along with virtually everything else that the Negev Bedouins hold dear by generations of expulsion and displacement which has divided tribes and isolated clans from their elders, but the Bedouins still choose overwhelmingly to rely on their own indigenous tribal justice systems rather than the racist Israeli police state or the Palestinian Authority's corrupt Sharia courts and this is what makes these penniless peasants a threat to all of these institutions. The Bedouins don't fucking need them, and they can still remember a time when the rest of the Middle East didn't need them either.

I strongly believe that the most important fact that most westerners and even many Middle Easterners fail to recognize about the ongoing conquest of the Middle East is that the state itself is a tool of colonialism that is totally alien to those lands. Before the British marched into Jerusalem with their mandates and borders, the Levant was a poorly governed and largely peacefully lawless Ottoman backwoods with a diverse population of Arabs, Jews, Christians, Druze and Mandeans that coexisted harmoniously within their own diverse tribal frameworks. No single set maintained a monopoly on the use of force. 

This confounded the British invaders who failed repeatedly to convince any of these populations to divide themselves up into separate and far more easily subjugated ethno-states. The Crown was ultimately forced to import this brand of racism from back home in the form of fascist European Zionists. You see, the Arabs of the Levant weren't just wiped out because they were brown, like the European Jews in Nazi Germany, they were wiped out because they initially refused to be governed. Sadly, many of the victims of the Nakba have embraced statehood for the same reasons that so many victims of the Holocaust did. Their collective memories of a life before states have been wiped out by the devastating trauma of genocidal colonialism.

But the Bedouins still remember. Their history, much like that of many indigenous stateless peoples, remains oral and thus unmolested by academic revision. These were the first Muslims, the ones who originally conceived of that religion as an alternative to traditional empires. In fact, Islam's first sect was a tribe of Bedouin nomads known as the Khawarij, who vehemently opposed the centralization of power even within Islam as an impediment to tribal diversity and liberty, and these remain the only values that can save the Middle East and the rest of us, diversity and liberty. 

The Bedouins still remember. Maybe it's time the rest of us did too.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Something Beautiful by Sinead O'Connor

* I'm Set Free by the Velvet Underground

* Halo by Depeche Mode

* John the Revelator by Blind Willie Johnson

* Orange Crush by REM

* The Mess Inside by the Mountain Goats

* Crucify by Tori Amos

* Sadness As a Gift by Adrianne Lenker

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins

Adulthood is a Racket that Millennials are Right to Reject

 Being a self-unemployed, thirtysomething, literary visionary can be a depressingly thankless existence. The pay sucks, the publishers are clueless, the editors are dicks and the endless barrage of finger-wagging rhetorical questions from the sanctimonious adults in the boomer peanut gallery rarely withers. When are you going to get a real job? When are you moving out of your parent's house? When are you going back to school? When are you going to get married and start a family? I've heard them all a thousand fucking times and it really does simply amount to a single declarative condemnation. Nicky, you need to grow the fuck up.

My usual response to this mandatory life sentence is as simple as it seems to be infuriating to my elderly interrogators. Why? Seriously. Try asking that question to any professional boomer busybody some time and watch them short circuit. They never have a real answer to give. But if they could just give me one good reason why I should swallow my dreams to become what passes for a responsible adult in America today I would gladly get a job at Olive Garden tomorrow. Better yet just name me six unmedicated adults who wouldn't happily march into oncoming traffic right now if they could write it off as a business expense. I'll even give you a minute to get back to me on that one...

That's what I thought.

What the hell is adulthood anyway other than another empty social construct used to justify participation in a deeply unwell society? The fucking icecaps are melting but I should be in some kind of big fucking hurry to make shit for pay in some joyless corporate death march that ends with me being buried alive in debt in the suburbs after pumping out two and a half more lambs to the slaughter on the sacrificial shrine of endless war and environmental degradation. With all due respect, concerned boomers, you can all go fuck yourselves with broken glass because I would rather be a goddamn child then grow up to be anything like you.

Thankfully, I'm far from alone in this refusal to cooperate with mass suicide by "normal." There are droves of millennials just like me who are statistically less likely than any generation in modern memory to date, procreate, work a 9-to-5 or move out and this socioeconomic boycott has resulted in us becoming near universally reviled by our elders in increasingly public displays of disaffection. Everywhere you look there is some new expose or op-ed on how my generation is fucking up quite literally everything. 

Millennials are consistently presented by nearly every facet of the omnipresent mass media panopticon as lazy, greedy, ungrateful children who need to shut up, breed, and participate in the joyful degradation of the planet's withering resources.  And I'm not here to tell you that we aren't fucked up. I'm here to inform you that we have every fucking right to be considering the spiritually empty society that you have shoved down our throats since we were literally children.

Millennials may be failures by the current standards of adulthood, but we are also the most overworked and overeducated generation in American history and all this hard labor has only made us poorer and more precariously employed than any other generation since the Great Depression and it all begins with that abusive racket known as the compulsory school system.

Children as young as four are corralled, itemized, objectified, and fed onto an assembly line that grooms us to shut up, sit still and fill out reems of scantron forms for eight hours a day while role crazy, dead-end bureaucrats govern our every move and police anything even resembling critical thinking. All so we can be herded into the federally funded, for profit, college system where we are encouraged to learn literally anything but an actual trade while we get robbed blind and end up in the exact same pointless service industry jobs as our comrades who had the good sense to flunk or drop out.

This whole circus is nothing but a trillion-dollar shakedown and the only thing covid did was expose it for what it's always been by ripping the curtain off. Productivity has been increasing rapidly in this country for fifty years now while hourly compensation has remained frozen in an era when you could buy a three-bedroom house for less than thirty grand. Meanwhile unemployment has doubled, and student loans have shot through the roof like a cannon while the American Empire squanders the fortune its mined from generations of wage slaves on declaring total war against any culture not perverted enough to worship the Dollar like a golden calf.

All things considered; I actually think that the millennial response to realizing that our lives have been a glorified pyramid scheme has been a perfectly healthy one. We dropped out. We collectively rejected degrading employment while slowly drifting back to the tribal values of the multigenerational household and mutual assistance that a deeply polluted and morally bankrupt western culture chucked aside for contrived notions of economic liberalism and conspicuous consumption. 

Unfortunately, however, my generation and the one beneath ours has also fallen under the sway of another modern racket called social media which has aggressively isolated us from each other by monopolizing our social lives beneath the constant surveillance of the state and its reigning plutocracy. This is the real crisis of my generation; the crisis of chronic and downright systemic loneliness being trafficked to us by the vultures of big tech. 

According to a 2021 Harvard study, 61% of young Americans report experiencing "serious loneliness" and Scientific American has found the current rate of friendship formation to be at a historic low. Self-harm and suicide rates are rising and razor blades arrent even the cheapest way to bleed yourself dry. Psychiatric researchers estimate that the health effects of prolonged social isolation are about the same as smoking a pack of Marlboro's a day. 

Something is seriously fucking wrong here, and it can't be fixed by simply raising the minimum wage or forgiving student loans. When entire generations are choosing to slowly kill themselves with smartphones instead of engaging with society then society has clearly failed, and we need to stop blaming the victims for this failure. Millennials are pretty fucked up brats because you fucked us up by encouraging us to sell our souls to a system that boomers came this close to overthrowing not so long ago.

Back in 1960, the brilliant subversive psychologist, Paul Goodman, published a study on juvenile delinquency called Growing Up Absurd. At the time, America was facing a similar generational crisis with the gray flannel robots of the Eisenhower era freaking the fuck out about the rise in moral degeneracy in the form of youth gangs, beatniks, and Rock n Roll. 

Goodman poured over the numbers and came to the startling conclusion that the kids were right because the system was bullshit. Young people were totally justified in their rejection of "growing up" because society had failed to give them anything worth growing up into. Cold War America was bereft of meaningful work, honorable community, and spiritual sustenance and I think that even the countercultural sellouts of the boomer generation will agree that these conditions have only grown more dire over the decades.

The solution to this problem remains the same today is it was then and it's far from an easy fix. The solution is revolution. Or as the good Doctor Goodman prescribed, developing new social and moral identities that reject the malignant standards of a debased society. Creating an economy independent of government regulation and wage slavery. Embracing independent thinking and intergenerational cooperation instead of the involuntary servitude of compulsory schooling. Abandoning the spiritual desert of suburbia for agricultural village life amongst the ruins of the Rust Belt. Dropping out of mass society and embracing a more intimate tribal existence.

If this isn't adulthood, then fuck adulthood. Children of all ages deserve something better to grow into. As for me, I may never write the next great Queer American novel, but I'd rather die typing in my parent's basement than live on my knees for a paycheck and you boomers can take that to the fucking bank because I learned it from you before your generation sold its soul for a seat at the adult's table.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* My Generation by the Who

* The Middle by Jimmy Eat World

* Changes by David Bowie

* Bad Kids by Black Lips

* Caught In My Shadow by the Wonder Stuff

* Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana

* Full Time Job by Squirrel Flower

* Drink Before the War by Sinead O'Connor

* 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins

* Rock Star by Hole

* Grey Cell Green by Ned's Atomic Dustbin

* We Are Not Alone by Karla DeVito

The Strange and Lonesome Death of Artsakh is a Warning to Palestine

 It didn't end with a death march. It didn't end with mass graves. It didn't end with firing squads or gas chambers. The Second Armenian Genocide didn't end a thing like the first one did but that didn't make its ending any less devastating or any less genocidal. The destruction of Artsakh ended with a whimpering statesman signing a piece of paper and just like that, an entire nation was erased. While Israel has been busy mercilessly grinding the Gaza Strip into a fine powder with the whole world watching, another far quieter but equally merciless Nakba has taken place in Central Asia with the whole world looking the other way.

On September 28, 2023, Samuel Shahramanyan, the last president of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, better known to its ethnic Armenian citizens as Artsakh, signed a ceasefire with Azerbaijan in which the latter nation agreed to end its brutal siege of the prior provided that the NKR kindly agreed to cease to exist. On the first day of 2024 this genocidal "peace" deal formally went into effect but not before the last 100,000 citizens of Artsakh abandoned their ancestral homeland to run for their lives.

In many ways, this was the most shockingly successful genocide of the Twenty-First Century with thousands of years of culture and history obliterated with the click of a pen, but the final chapter of this final solution actually began several years earlier like so many others, with an American-sponsored bloodbath. After years of careful planning and hording high-tech weaponry, Recep Erdogan's revanchist NATO sultanate of Turkey decided to reenact the Armenian Genocide by micromanaging a brutal proxy assault on the contested territory of Artsakh in 2020 using the neighboring Ottoman puppet state of Azerbaijan like a hammer.

Armed to the teeth with both Turkish and Israeli drones along with tens of millions of dollars in American cluster munitions, Azerbaijan's notoriously ruthless strongman, Ilham Aliyev, laid siege to the supposedly treaty-protected Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, bombarding crowded civilian city centers and shelling the refugees who dared to flee from them. Over 6,000 people were slain in just over one month and another 90,000 were forcibly displaced under the threat of genocide. What population that remained was herded into the last corner of their territory as it was cut in half and totally surrounded by heavily armed Turkic gestapo.

A single road was left open connecting Artsakh to the Armenian mainland. In late 2022 that road was closed, and a crippling ten-month long blockade followed, barring the already impoverished and shellshocked people of the NKR from all food and medicine. In September of last year, Azerbaijan struck again, easily routing the cornered nation's last remaining military positions within 24 hours and forcing its besieged government to concede to its own erasure. It was a strange and lonesome ending to a long and storied resistance movement. An ending that felt almost unfathomably anticlimactic to anyone actually familiar with Armenian history.

Ethnic Armenian settlements have existed in the region known as Nagorno-Karabakh for over 3,000 years, often at the mercy of the constantly competing Ottoman and Russian empires. Artsakh was just one piece of the ancient Christian region of Armenia which had once stretched across Eastern Turkey and deep into the Caucuses of modern-day Russia and Western Iran. Much of this territory along with 1.5 million Armenians was erased by the Ottomans during the gruesome final days of their vampire empire in one of the darkest chapters of the First World War.

That same damnable war also led to the rise of the Soviet Union which would ultimately include what little remained of Armenia as well as the neighboring Turkish outpost of Azerbaijan. In a typically cruel attempt to divide and conquer, the Bolsheviks arbitrarily incorporated the Armenian region of Artsakh into the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in spite of the vehement protests of the Armenian partisans who had helped them dethrone the Czar. Repeated requests for sovereignty nearly broke out into open warfare before the Kremlin finally caved and established the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923.

But the movement to return Artsakh to Armenian rule never ceased and when peaceful attempts by the oblast to break away from Azerbaijan failed during the waning days of the Soviet experiment, a brutal ethnic conflict erupted into the First Nagorno-Karabakh War which raged on for 6 long years between 1988 and 1994. The ensuing carnage resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides. An uncomfortable peace was finally brokered by France, Russia and the United States in a coalition known as the Minsk Group but the people of Artsakh didn't need meddlesome outsiders to tell them who they were. 

After all, if Azerbaijan had the right to independence from the Russian Federation, then why shouldn't Artsakh have the right to their own independence from Azerbaijan? And so, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic boldly declared its independence with a popular referendum in 1991 without the recognition of a single UN member state, including Armenia, and I believe that it is this silent betrayal, the betrayal of nation states against nation states, that ultimately dammed Artsakh to its tragic fate over thirty years later.

The most disturbing thing about the strange and lonesome final days of Artsakh is that quite literally every single nation state touching that region, friend or foe, found some way to fuck those people over and few states fucked Artsakh harder than the Armenian fatherland. The final ceasefire that proved to be the final nail in Artsakh's coffin was actually built on the internationally brokered ceasefire that officially ended the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 while handing over half of Artsakh to Azerbaijan and affording them the territorial advantage to take the rest of the Republic four years later. This oddly tragic ceasefire was brokered by the original three nations of the Minsk Group along with Azerbaijan and Armenia but conspicuously excluded any representatives from the Republic of Artsakh and also seemed to exclude the consent of the citizens that Armenia supposedly represents, who were nothing short of infuriated to learn of their nation's act of diplomatic betrayal.

In fact, while this ceasefire may have temporarily silenced the rifles on the frontlines, it also led to months of riots back home in Yerevan, nearly a year of open upheaval that saw crowds of irate citizens seizing parliament buildings and beating their supposed representatives half to death in the streets. Scores of high-ranking Armenian officials resigned in disgust, including the nation's own Minister of Defense, and an alleged coup launched by members of the Armenian Military was barely thwarted in 2021. That's because representative democracy only truly represents the will of the highest bidder and in Armenia that bidder has become the United States who have sickeningly played both sides of the trenches in this conflict for the same reasons that they turned Ukraine into a geopolitical boobytrap, to sow discord amongst the ranks of its rivals.

After arming their mortal enemies in Azerbaijan for years with multi-million-dollar military hardware, the United States has taken to simultaneously dangling NATO membership over Armenia's heads like scraps to a beggar that they put out in the cold themselves. In fact, Armenia spent the two weeks prior to Azerbaijan's final assault on Artsakh engaged in joint military exercises with the United States intended to prepare them for "evaluation" on NATO eligibility, in spite or perhaps because of the fact that Armenia is already a member of Russia's own NATO-style military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization aka the CSTO. This game of ballistic Caucasian footsie has been going on for years and it's likely what inspired Russia to ignore its own security obligations to Armenia when Azerbaijan launched airstrikes within their borders during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that this is precisely what Washington is after, especially when you remember that they sold Baku the bombs that struck the fatherland. 

But sadly, Armenia has become just corrupt and desperate enough to fall for this shell game just like Kiev did. That shiny NATO dream of a Coca-cola in every fridge and an Apache Helicopter on every pad.  Thousands of years of pride and resistance down the shitter, all so a few thugs in Yerevan can have a whisper of a chance at joining the same military alliance that arms their old chums in Turkey. Not that Sultan Erdogan gives a flying fuck about any empire but his own. His expressed goal in this whole sorry sorted affair is actually just to pave over Artsakh in order to turn it into an off-ramp for China's Belt and Road Initiative known as the Middle Corridor. But Israel can live with that just so long as Turkey doesn't open that corridor through Iran, so they've gladly filled in for their Yankee overlords as Azerbaijan's biggest arms supplier in order to convince them to tear a page from their own playbook and choose genocide over diplomacy. 

If your head hurts that's because this schizophrenic skullduggery is absolutely batshit crazy but it's also precisely what states do and it's what states have always done. They rise, they fall, they fuck each other over, and they devour entire nations like Artsakh in the process just to spit them back out again. Contrary to western lore, a nation is not a government built on the fickle materialism of blood and soil. A nation in its truest form is a tribal community bound by a shared history, culture, and vision for the future. The state on the other hand is nothing but a cartel designed to capture a nation behind its borders and destroy any real sense of community that once bound it with a monopoly on the use of force and the shifting territorial ambitions of the elites that such a caste system inevitably creates.

Artsakh was a great nation destroyed by a state and that state wasn't Turkey or Azerbaijan or even the United States of America, it was Armenia, with its corrupt elites and its globalist neoliberal ambitions. This tragedy is a warning in the shape of a self-inflicted genocide. Artsakh thrived for centuries before the poisoned invention of the Westphalian Nation State redefined its existence as mere geographical collateral. So, did Palestine. Every nation should think twice before they consider any state to be a solution because in an age of collapsing empires any state can easily become a nation's final solution.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Vampire Empire by Big Thief

* Wardance by Killing Joke

* Jerusalem by Sinead O'Connor

* Right Back to It by Waxahatchee 

* Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth

* The One I Love by REM

* Violets by Hole

* Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene

* Sanctified by Nine Inch Nails

* I Thought You'd Change by Hotline TNT

Revenge of the Renegades of the Red Sea: What We Can All Learn from the Houthi Rebels

 There is something just absolutely soul crushing about watching a war on live television, especially when all the networks seem to be rooting for the bad guys. However, despite what those jackals on cable news might tell you, what's going on right now in Gaza is not a war, it is a goddamn holocaust and even in an age when forever wars seem to grow on trees, this bloodbath is downright unprecedented in its almost casual cruelty. While the unblinking cameras roll, one of the most powerful modern armies on earth is laying into a glorified concentration camp with the full weight of its hi-tech arsenal while pretending to be the victim because a few sadistic orphans they used to sponsor managed to get in a shot between massacres.

Shall we pour over the grotesque statistics one more time? In less than 3 months, the state of Israel has slaughtered over 22,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including nearly 10,000 children. Another 50,000+ have been wounded and everyone on the ground with a functioning calculator seems to agree that this estimate is likely extremely low. Another 7,000 people are missing, including about 5,000 women and children, most of whom are presumed to be dead or dying, crushed beneath the rubble of a crowded urban graveyard decimated by million-dollar murder machines. 85% of a population of 2.3 million is now homeless with 70% of all homes in Gaza and half of all buildings damaged or destroyed. At least a quarter of this population is now on the brink of famine and infectious disease, with public health experts predicting nearly 500,000 to drop dead where they cower within the next year.

Genocide is the word for this, and we all know it, but we all just sit by every day and watch it happen as if it were some kind of sick new reality TV show about blowing up brown children. It's fucking sickening and the western media's posture of detached objectivity is the worst kind of complicity money can buy. That's because this genocide isn't simply an Israeli genocide, it is an Israeli facilitated proxy genocide and American tax dollars pay for every bomb dropped on another hospital. While the Biden Administration gasps like a soap opera debutante at the deeds of their increasingly unhinged Zionist golem, they hand that sick thing another blank check to keep the bodies rolling. We arm these cannibals with $3.8 billion dollars in aid a year and Genocide Joe still has to circumvent Congress to hand them another $106 million bucks in tank shells so they can shoot orphaned teenage amputees in the ICU.

This is an American holocaust, and we all have blood on our hands now. We can no longer pretend like we don't know but what do we do? What can we do? What can anyone do? The sense of helplessness hangs heavy in the air with the stench of burning corpses like fog. But then, like a flash of lightening in the desert sky, the Houthi rebels appear. A rugged, swashbuckling, renegade militia of bearded brown pirates straight out of some bygone era of guerrilla solidarity and radical chic. It's hard for any self-respecting anti-imperialist not to smirk while these Shia Che Guevaras slice up the Red Sea with AKs and Zodiac boats and finally hold western capital responsible for their crimes by simply taxing their access to the waters off their impoverished shores. 

The Houthi rebels have boldly hijacked Israeli linked cargo ships and scared many more away with a driving steel rain of drone strikes and missile attacks, and the enemy is feeling the pain. 12% of all global trade passes through the Red Sea, which connects the Mediterranean to Asia via the Suez Canal. This includes a whopping 30% of the world's shipping traffic. While the Houthis daring nautical stunts have carefully avoided a single civilian casualty, they have effectively rerouted global trade by forcing freight companies to sail all the way around the Cape of Africa for their imperial plunder, causing two-week delays and raising costs by 15%.

And the beautiful thing about this pirate insurgency is that the west is totally powerless to prevent it. America is rattling its silver saber with Operation Prosperity Guardian, a ten-nation coalition that conspicuously excludes any state actually on the Red Sea, with an armada of 20 warships led by two aircraft carrier battle groups. But what have they achieved? A few downed dinghies and a dozen dead rebs? The Houthis laugh and bark "bring it on!" That's because they know that there is nothing the masters of the universe can do that will save them one dime. Any military action in those waters will only drive business farther away.

For once, the peasants have these fuckers by the balls and the only weapons that Babylon has left at their disposal are your television set and your smartphone. They are working very hard to tell you exactly who they want you to believe these rebels really are and roughly 90% of what they are telling you is pure weapons-grade horseshit. "Iranian proxies! Iranian proxies!" Every time a Shia picks up a gat, you can hear some retired five-star American pigfucker with a merkin toupee squealing "Iranian proxies!" and it's often half-true but not this time. Yemen's Houthi rebels may be Shiites but only technically. The Houthis actually belong to a renegade strain of Shia Islam known as Zaydism which is closer in its fundamental theology to Sunni Islam than it is to the dominate Twelver Shiites of Iran who tend to view the Zaydis as heretics.

The Houthi movement formed in the northern Saada province of what was then North Yemen in the 80s as a broad coalition of tribal groups committed to the revival of Zaydism which had previously ruled the region as an imamate for over a thousand years before the west stepped in with their endless procession of proxy strongmen. One of those strongmen was an ambitious thug named Ali Abdullah Saleh who came to power in 1978 and united Yemen for the first time with his conquest of the communist South in 1990. Saleh didn't take too kindly to the flamboyantly anti-imperialist Houthis who calling him out for being a hired gun for infidel conquistadors, so he violently cracked down on what had originally been a fairly moderate movement with a series of massacres that culminated in the assassination of the Houthi's founder and namesake, a Zaydi religious scholar and former member of parliament named Hussein al-Houthi, in 2004. 

This is when the insurgency really began. Hussein's brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, quickly transformed the movement into a formidable militia modeled after Lebanon's Hezbollah and in 2012, on the heels of the Arab Spring, his insurgency exploded into a nationwide popular rebellion. The US and their Saudi henchmen attempted to stop the bleeding by swapping out Saleh for his top general, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, but he didn't last two years before being overthrown in 2014. 

While it is true that the Houthis quite openly take inspiration from Iran's Islamic Revolution and that the Mullahs have frequently stated their moral support for the movement, their influence has been grossly overblown by the western powers who this rag-tag militia have consistently humiliated. The Iranian's actually financed Hadi and begged their Houthi admirers not to overthrow the prick. Even after Tehran's arch enemies in Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen with America's support in 2014 there exists no verifiable proof of any kind of substantial Iranian assistance.

Even the State Department has admitted as much in cables released by Wikileaks, stating that their analysts believed that the lion's share of the Houthis growing arsenal actually came from corrupt officials within Yemen's American-armed Republican Guard who would later collapse and largely join the Houthis after Hadi hit the bricks and sided with the Saudi invaders. The real motivation behind the Houthi's bombastic campaign in the Red Sea is actually a simple thirst for revolutionary justice. 

Much like Gaza, Yemen has been the victim of an atrocious American proxy genocide. After kicking Hadi out, America had their tools in Saudi Arabia cut Yemen off from the outside world with a crippling blockade before financing a seven-year carpet bombing campaign. By the time Washington's Wahhabi puppets finally forfeited in a truce in 2022, 377,000 Yeminis had been slaughtered, the overwhelming majority of them being women and children of Zaydi decent.

What the Houthis are doing in the Red Sea right now is what the Houthis have always done best and it's something that any aspiring enemy of the pigfucker state should steal a chapter from. The Houthis are turning the tables on their cowardly tormentors by flipping the script. They have affectively launched their own counter-blockade against another one of America's proxy states and in the process, they have brilliantly highlighted the fact that the genocide in Gaza is actually just one piece in an international campaign of Washington sponsored terrorism that also includes the genocide in Yemen.

This is what makes the Houthi rebels truly dangerous to empire. It's not their ideology. It's their strategy. A form of decentralized guerrilla solidarity that we could all benefit from. Just think about it; Queer anarchists like yours truly hit the streets demanding to abolish the RICO Act which is used to lynch non-binary Atlanta Forest Defenders and outlaw bikers alike. The Hell's Angels return the favor by trafficking bootleg hormone blockers into states banning their use by minors, selling them to teenage runaways at cut-rate prices using untraceable crypto currencies, empowering hackers to expand the dark web to include humanitarian supplies to besieged polities like Gaza and Yemen, encouraging the decentralization of power among their people which would in turn allow local Queer groups to rise up in solidarity with their conservative Muslim brethren which would in turn encourage conservative Muslims to reproach the third genders that they once coexisted with prior to western colonization.

Local actions directed at a single enemy, provoking a chain reaction of international revolutionary upheaval. I believe that this is what that ghoul Henry Kissinger warned us about with his infamous "Domino Theory" and I do believe that it could still be a beautiful thing. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* 7/4 (Shoreline) by Broken Social Scene

* Rebels by Drive-By Truckers

* Renegades of Funk by Rage Against the Machine

* Pretend We're Dead by L7

* Midnight Rider by the Allman Brothers Band

* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

* A Drug Against War by KMFDM

* Rise Above by Black Flag

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* Sea Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins

This screed is devoted in loving memory to John Pilger and Antonio Negri. Two men who devoted their lives to advocating for the annihilation of empire and inspired me to do the same. Their legacies remain vital just so long as pissed off people refuse to sit by and do nothing while evil men succeed.

A Few People Who Actually Didn't Suck in 2023

 "I am going to make it through this year if it kills me!" I find myself singing that desperate chorus from the Mountain Goats' classic "This Year" repeatedly pretty much every year around this time but I've never needed to believe those lyrics more badly than I do now in the final days of 2023. I could say that 2023 fucking sucked. That's the way that I've started a lot of these annual lists of the few people who seemingly miraculously actually didn't. But somehow that just doesn't seem to cut it this year.

The most accurate way that I can put it is that 2023 peeled me alive. Just when I thought that nothing could possibly be more nauseating than the pointless proxy quagmire in Ukraine, Bibi Netanyahu and his coterie of Ashkenazi ethno-terrorists declared total war on the starving children of Gaza and proceeded to pulverize preschoolers into mush with American ordinances. As if that weren't heinous enough, this horror show seemed to coincide like a conspiracy with a series of personal therapeutic breakthroughs that have brought my own long suppressed childhood trauma up like spiritual vitriol. 

Long depressing story short; I spent the holidays watching my inner child dragged bloody and screaming from the rubble in Palestine over and over again before being tarred and feathered as an antisemite for being a little fucked by the experience.

So, yeah, 2023 fucking sucked. 2023 can eat a flaming train of dicks. Fuck that year and whatever twisted god who came up with it. But, as always, 2023 did still provide us with a few people who didn't suck, a few people who were actually downright heroic, providing a much-needed silver lining to an otherwise toxic storm cloud of a year, and I'm here to swallow a gallon of my own vitriol and praise them because many of these people actually helped me to survive this awful fucking year and maybe, just maybe, their example will go on to help me prosper in the next one. So, let's now thank that twisted god for a few people who actually didn't suck in 2023. She could learn a thing or two from these people.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti- I'm probably going to get my fair share of shit for this one but quite frankly, I'm too goddamn pissed-off to give a fuck. Once in every generation or so, a revolutionary movement manages to capture the imagination of the pissed-off lumpenproles of this world by simply catching the empire we despise with its pants down. Past generations have had the Black Panthers, the Tupamaros and Anonymous. This one has the Houthi rebels and regardless of your own personal politics or creed it is hard not to admire a rag-tag army willing to take on Babylon with such rugged charisma and smirking zeal. While most of the world has stood by helpless while the United States has used Israel to obliterate Gaza like a fucking lawnmower, the Houthis, a half-starved renegade militia from one of the poorest corners of the earth have nearly single-handedly held this imperial conspiracy to erase the Palestinian people accountable with a series of increasingly daring pirate stunts against the western world's global shipping empire in the Red Sea.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti is not the leader of this rogue band of Shia renegades but this senior political official for the artists formerly known as Ansar Allah has become the unofficial spokesman for the movement since it overthrew Yemen's American-backed dictatorship in 2014 and his literary defiance rings out like church bells in a damned world, boldly declaring after America announced the creation of a 10-nation naval task force to end the Houthis guerrilla blockade against the blockaders that "America's announcement of the establishment of the coalition of shame will not prevent us from continuing our military operations until the crimes of genocide in Gaza are stopped." All of this from a nation that has barely survived its own Yankee proxy genocide which has taken no fewer than 377,000 Yeminis. The world needs the Houthis and Allah knows that the Great Satan deserves them. 

Manuel Esteban Paez Teran- At least 33 transgender and gender-diverse Americans were murdered in the last 12 months alone but at least one of us went down swinging this year. Manuel, known as Tortuga or Little Turtle to their comrades was a fellow gender outlaw and Queer anarchist who was brought down in a hail of police gunfire as part of the embattled Stop Cop City Forest Defense that has been formed by volunteers from across the country to protect the South River Forest of Dekalb County, Georgia from being colonized by a massive police state training center. The cops claim that Tortuga fired first with a handgun they had legally armed themselves with and while the available evidence points to something far more sinister, with Tortuga's body being riddled with 57 bullet wounds, including in the palms of their hands, I find this to be irrelevant. Even if Tortuga did pull the trigger, they did so in defense of another slice of the commons being annihilated by eminent domain. Either way, they died a martyr for the cause of a stateless society and a hero to trans people like me who refuse to become just another statistic without a fight.

Mitski Miyawaki- Few artists have given more of themselves to their audiences than Mitski and the genre conquering auteur really outdid herself this year, releasing the brilliantly titled The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, her 7th album, quite possibly her most naked, and somehow, miraculously her most successful. Mitski scored her first Billboard Hot 100 charting single with the gorgeous gothic country ballad "My Love Is Mine All Mine" but it was a far lesser played deep track called "I Don't Like My Mind" which may have literally saved my life this year. "I don't like my mind, I don't like being left alone in a room, with all its opinions about the things that I've done. So yeah, I blast music loud and I work myself to the bone..." How does she do it? How does she read my soul like a fucking book? No single line has ever captured why I write better than this. Mitski may be a brilliant singer-songwriter and I may be but a lowly muckraker on the fringe, but regardless it's hard to be any kind of artist who traffics in near-masochistic emotional transparency, but it helps not to have to do it alone.

Yocheved & Oded Lifshitz- Regardless of what those race baiting sycophants in the Zionist Lobby may tell you, an intifada is not a genocide. It's a popular uprising against tyranny and it takes people of all races and creeds to make it successful. Yocheved, 85, and Oded, 83, are an elderly Israeli Jewish couple who were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 from their kibbutz in Nor Oz. But they are also lifelong peace activists who have devoted their lives to holding Israel accountable for its sins. Yocheved made this painfully clear when she became one of the first hostages released after 16 days in captivity only to shake one of her captors' hands and wish him "Shalom" on live television. When asked by the mercenaries in the Israeli press why she would do such a thing, the elderly Jewish woman simply replied that the big bad Arab terrorist had treated her with "care" and "gentleness."

Naturally, the Zionist Lobby were besides themselves, but Yocheved also spoke just as frankly about the atrocities she witnessed in Nir Oz and had reportedly even berated Hamas Chief, Yahya Sinwar in the tunnels, demanding to know how her captor wasn't ashamed of himself for his crimes. Oded, a veteran journalist who was one of the first Israelis to report from the ground on the Sabra and Shatila massacre and who devoted his retirement years to campaigning for the rights of Bedouin tribes and Palestinian refugees, remains in captivity and Yocheved remains in the streets protesting the genocidal war waged in his name. Israel has nothing to do with Judaism. It is tireless rebels like the Lifshitz's who represent the true spirit of the Jewish people and it wouldn't be an intifada without them.

Julien Baker- I'm not sure if a straight person can completely comprehend what a band like boygenius means to Queer people, especially Queer women like me. To see three of our own who have struggled in the relative obscurity of the indie scene for years conquer the charts with an unabashedly Queer document like "the record" and do it completely on their own terms without having to sell out a single inch of their integrity is literally unprecedented. It's the biggest win for punk rock since Nirvana and while I adore Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker will always be my favorite of the boys because she reminds me the most of myself, if only on the inside. This tiny soft butch pixie with a voice bigger than dynamite. I've carefully watched her grow from her humble beginnings as a timid and barely sober Bandcamp cult phenom to the powerful and courageous woman that she is today, and it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, I can do the same.

Ahed Tamini- The IDF has killed thousands of children, but they can't kill them all because some children fight back. Ahed Tamini became an unlikely symbol of Palestinian resistance by spending the better part of her childhood fighting back. Raised in an activist family in the embattled West Bank village of Nabi Salih, Ahed grew up under siege with her family home raided more than 150 times since she was born. She also grew up in resistance, with her parents, brothers, and sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles all engaged in weekly protests against the long-slated destruction of their ancestral home. 

Ahed stood out from a young age however, with footage of the fiery redheaded Arab girl physically confronting heavily armed IDF soldiers with her bare fists as young as 11 going viral on social media platforms across the globe. At 16 this habit cost her 8 months of her childhood in an Israeli military prison. In 2023, at 22, it cost her another 3 weeks and a savage beating before Ahed was released as part of the ceasefire prisoner swap. She remains unapologetic and unbowed. A wild-eyed reminder that Israel's final solution is damned to fail, because the IDF can kill millions of children, but they will never conquer the iron will of youth in revolt.

Sinead O'Connor- Even after all the heinous shit that came down like a storm to define this year of trauma and Nakba, losing Sinead was one of the most painful blows for me personally. That's because while Sinead may have taken her own life in 2023, the fatal wounds that finally fell her were delivered in 1992. That was the year that Sinead sacrificed a blossoming career to make a statement against the Catholic Church, which had taken her childhood and so many others, by tearing up a picture of the Pope on live television. That was also the year when my own abuse at the hands of that church began. I was a 4-year-old girl trapped inside the body of a boy and totally at the mercy of adults who went out of their way to humiliate me with nearly every form of abuse conceivable.

I remember Sinead in those years, debased, demonized and ridiculed, not just by the Church but by the supposedly liberal music industry that let them burn her at the stake while they cashed her royalty checks. I also remember Sinead's eyes, fierce and proud like pale blue flames. I was a child, and she seemed to be the only adult who could be bothered to stand up for me and she was destroyed for doing so but she also remained defiant to the bitter end. Sinead was a martyr for the voiceless, a patron saint of broken children, and we all owe it to her to ensure that her sacrifice was not in vain by being as loud as fucking possible, especially when it comes to crimes against children, from Belfast to Balfour.

Archie, Em, Bruce, Kiddo & Lily- A lot of people take the word family for granted and I was one of them before I found a home at a little duck farm called Misfit Manor. I was born strange but my parents have actually been exceptionally understanding for a pair of straight Catholics with a confusingly complicated child. However, I never really knew what it felt like to be truly understood by people like me until I stepped foot on that one-acre Queer autonomous zone in the middle of Trump Country where I was embraced by my second family, not in spite of my strange ways but because of them. This year has been terrifying for me. I have been mercilessly ravaged by emotional flashbacks that have sucked me back in time to chapters of my life that were so painful that I suppressed them for decades. I honestly don't think that I would have had the strength to even confront those demons without those beautifully strange creatures and all I can do is thank them. 

Thank you, Archie and Em, for opening your home to me and so many others and reminding me that love can still be unconditional.

Thank you, Bruce, for teaching this Queer loose cannon how to shoot straight and for performing the role of the heavily armed guard dog, keeping this space truly safe by any means necessary.

Thank you, Kiddo, for being stronger and smarter than any 11-year-old should ever have to be and for restoring my hope in a Queer future.

And thank you, Lily, my best friend, my sister, my north star, my guiding light, for repeatedly talking me out of indulging in my darkest urges, for seeing the good in me even at my ugliest, and for putting up with my advances for two weeks when my second puberty provoked me into falling in love with you. That got weird.

And thank you to all of my dearest motherfuckers, my crazed following of marginalized fringe people who have given me the audience denied to me by years of institutional silence. Being heard is the greatest gift I've ever received, and I love you all like family for giving it to me during an incredibly painful time in my life. Together, we will all make it through this year if it kills us.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* This Year by the Mountain Goats

* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones

* Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

* I Don't Like My Mind by Mitski

* Burning Too by Fugazi

* Rejoice by Julien Baker

* Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill

* The Parting Glass by boygenius & Ye Vagabonds

* True Blue by boygenius

Israel's War on Children is a Symptom of a Civilization Built on Trauma

 Suppose someone were to ask you what the number one source of human suffering in the world is today, what would you say? As my winter malaise kicks into full gear this Christmas, this is the grim question that I find myself asking and there are plenty of options to go around. So, what would your pick be? Climate change? Crony capitalism? White supremacy? All totally valid choices but I would have to make an argument for child abuse and I'm not just talking about black eyes after baseball games. I'm talking about the systemic degradation of the basic human rights of every child on this planet and the effect that the collective trauma of this bigotry has on society as a whole. 

I'm talking about the assembly line debasement of the individual that defines the compulsory school system. I'm talking about the widespread objectification of young people at every level of a radically expanding mass media panopticon that allows them to be bought, sold, and commodified like trading cards. And yes, I am talking about the rampant physical and sexual abuse of minors because this is precisely what this kind of culture leads to. And what this culture leads to is trauma on a massive scale, entire generations of mass shooters, terrorists, war criminals, party line voters and good citizens just following orders.

The effects that trauma has on children has been well recorded and those effects have been shown to carry on deep into adulthood. According to the National Institute of Justice, child abuse and neglect has been consistently shown to increase the risk of later forms of antisocial behavior, including violence perpetration and crime. Some studies have shown that child maltreatment can roughly double the probability of an individual engaging in this type of behavior, so it's hardly shocking that a civilization built on the degradation of individual autonomy from infancy would produce an increasingly antisocial society, one that casually engages in or fails to prevent acts of mass savagery on a daily basis.

I can think of no better example of this kind of depravity than the modern warfare industry that we all seem disturbingly content to tolerate with a shrug and a sigh, and I can think of no example of that evil in action more visceral than Israel's American facilitated war on children being carried out as we speak in the Gaza Strip. 

It needs to be understood that this war did not begin on October 6. That horrific act of barbarism was merely the latest outburst of blowback to be produced by the 141 square mile child abuse factory that the western world has erected on the Dead Sea over the last half century. 60% of Gazans were already displaced before their latest war with 1.7 million people out of a population of 2.3 million residing in tightly packed refugee camps. 

This hostile environment was reduced to a living death camp with the beginning of Israel's 16-year blockade in 2006, which effectively cut off one of the most densely populated places on earth from the outside world by land, air and sea. Even before October, 64% of all households in Gaza were dangerously food insecure and 95% of all households lacked access to safe drinking water. Unemployment hovered at just over 45%, poverty was the norm, and thanks to the IDF, so was terrorism.

Israel has launched four major military assaults on the captive Gaza strip over the last 15 years, killing more than 4,000 people and leaving the rest shellshocked under a constant state of siege. This doesn't even include the trauma caused by the near daily acts of abuse and humiliation suffered by the Palestinian people at the hands of the Zionist state during what passes for peace time. This includes the frequent kidnapping and incarceration of their children. 

Israel is the only nation on earth that systematically prosecutes minors in military courts. Kids as young as 12-years-old are routinely taken from their beds in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers. They are blindfolded, bound and shackled; interrogated without any lawyer or guardian present and coerced, often with violence, to sign confessions in a language they can't speak or read. The most common charge is throwing stones which can carry a sentence of twenty years. The prisons these children are then sent to are dens of physical, psychological and sexual abuse with UNICEF concluding ill-treatment in the Israeli Military Detention System to be "widespread, systematic and institutionalized throughout the process." Over 1 million Palestinians have endured this hell since 1967. 

The effects of this traumatic existence on the people of Gaza have been devastating with its children facing the brunt of the abuse. 65% of Gaza's population is under 24 with the median age being 18. That is an entire generation raised under a 16-year campaign of state facilitated terrorism. Long before the current bloodbath drowning the Gaza Strip, study after study showed crippling rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among this youth with some estimates putting the rate of suffering to be as high as 70%. UNICEF found that one in three children in Gaza was in need of care for conflict related trauma and after interviewing 500 children and 160 parents, Save the Children found that 80% of these children showed symptoms of severe emotional distress with half contemplating suicide and 3 out of 5 engaging in self-harm.

I don't think that I am being hyperbolic when I predict that every one of those already grisly statistics will likely reach 100% before the end of the year if they haven't already. Over 20,000 people have been slaughtered in the last two months. Nearly 8,000 of them have been children. Another 52,000 Gazans have been wounded including over 1,000 kids who have lost at least one limb. 85% of this population is now homeless with hundreds of thousands being pushed into so-called "Safe Zones" on the Egyptian border; desolate tent cities with no water, no food and no bathrooms, and with rates of malnutrition and infectious disease reaching downright catastrophic heights, death by safe zone may very well come to surpass the body count produced by American ordinances.

The excuse used to justify this holocaust is that a gang of fucked up kids broke out of their concentration camp to seek revenge against anyone they could find walking free outside of its walls. But just where do you think they learned to do that? Where do you think the young men of Hamas learned how to shoot children and raid family homes? They learned it because they lived it, and they did it because it wouldn't stop. 

The actions committed on October 6 were despicable and indefensible, but they were also inevitable and if any child survives the latest Nakba in Gaza, they will only continue, with or without Hamas. Israel knows this and this is why they have committed themselves to finishing the job once and for all. The IDF's solution to another generation of children traumatized by their reign of terror is to murder every last one of them and this horrific final solution is very possible thanks to American tax dollars and another generation of westerners numb to injustice after years of being groomed for blind obedience by big government and big tech.

This needs to stop and we in the west are the ones who need to stop it. A ceasefire isn't enough. Israel plays the victim like a psychotic parent with Munchausen's-by-proxy, but it is Palestine that will never know peace until that state and any other like it is smashed to smithereens. To ask anything less would be to ask a violated child to grow up in the same household as their rapist. The children of Palestine desperately need to heal, and traumatized children cannot heal in the shadow of their abusers.

I know this because I've lived it. I continue to live it every single day. I haven't suffered a fraction of the trauma experienced by the children of Palestine, but I do know what it's like to be preyed on as a child by powerful people only to have to coexist with their authoritarian institutions as an adult. Every week I drive by the preschool where they put their hands on my body, the grade school next door where they taught me that it was all my fault because I couldn't perform the gender identity assigned to me, and the Catholic Church that oversaw it all. 

I have to watch children coming in and out of those buildings and ask myself which one of them will join me in hell. It takes every fiber in my being just to keep driving long enough so I can park my car and scream. I want to kill the people who did this to me. I want to kill the people who will do it again. I want to burn those buildings to the ground. I want to do horrible things to make that broken little girl inside me feel safe. And I don't want to do these things because I'm sick or indoctrinated by radical extremism. I want these things because that child they tried to strangle is still in there and she has every right to revenge, and so do the children of Gaza.

The only reason that I am any less lethal than the lost boys of Hamas is that I have this blog and the jihad that defines it. I could kill a thousand priests with my bare hands, and it wouldn't make me feel any safer. It would only make it easier for the priests of this world to convince their sheep that Queer kids like me are wolves that need to be slaughtered. Revenge isn't enough. The systems designed to debase the children of this world, from the Vatican to the Knesset, do not deserve to get off that easy. 

We, the adults broken by a society with no use for the individuals that we were born to be, need to remember that we were children once too and we need to stand in solidarity with the children of Gaza and show them that you do not need to destroy yourself to fight back. Together, we must struggle to dismantle every institution that relies on the suffering of children to thrive and yes that means destroying the Zionist state of Israel, the American Empire and the church of the Westphalian nation state that oversees it all.

This is all I want for Christmas this year because only from the ashes of kingdoms can broken children become whole again. This is my jihad and I hope that you will join me and make it yours as well.

Salam, Shalome, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Suffer Little Children by the Smiths

* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

* Feel It All the Time by Soccer Mommy

* I Don't Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats

* Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters by Elton John

* Running Up That Hill by First Aid Kit

* Luka by Suzanne Vega

* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

* Teenage Whore by Hole

* Breaking the Girl by Red Hot Chili Peppers

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Phoebe Bridgers

Terrorism with Honor: Henry Kissinger and America's Infuriating Culture of Personality

 This may come as a shock to you, but your average terrorist isn't actually a three-armed monster from hell who eats human flesh and breaths fire. Your average terrorist, if there really is such a thing, is in fact a human being and more often than not that human being is actually just some desperate, pissed-off, rube from a badly battered country with nothing left to lose but a dead-end life with little hope for a future. But just try suggesting this at the next neighborhood potluck in suburban Middle America and count the seconds before that tribe of docile orthodontists builds you a noose from the holiday lights.

To your average flag saluting normie, a terrorist is a completely different species that exists exclusively behind the label of 'other.' It's not altogether hard to see how simpletons could come to such conclusions when you consider their sources. Turn to any cable news channel you like, and you won't have to wait long for a lesson in the distinct otherness of your average terrorist. Within minutes you will be supplied with a cartoon caricature of a blood-drinking foreigner, worshipping a weird god and blowing himself to bits for fun and virgin pussy. Even the supposedly woke networks will basically tell you that the only white terrorist is a hillbilly with a heart full of black tar. And yet somehow Henry Kissinger doesn't make the cut.

During a news week filled to the brim with breathless condemnations of the average terrorist creatures of Hamas, Henry Kissinger, a man with a well-known body count higher than most forms of cancer, is mourned as a national icon. Oh sure, all the assholes on cable will admit to the centurion statesman's bloody misdeeds but always coupled with some convenient misnomer about the man being "complicated", "controversial", even "brooding." Reading the New York Times, you would think he was some kind of conflicted heartthrob from a lost chapter of the Twilight saga. "Sure, he's a monster, but I can fix him."

They all go on and on about how intelligent and calculating and charming this creature was but let's just cut the shit right now. This man was a fucking terrorist. The only thing that separated him from your average jihadist was that he was charming enough to turn political violence into a long, well-paying career, and this country of noose tying orthodontists was sick enough pay him.

The sheer number of crimes that Mr. Kissinger managed to commit during a relatively short stint in power is downright staggering. Between the years of 1969 and 1975, Henry served two administrations, first Richard Nixon's, then Gerald Ford's, as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and during those eight years, the bodies never stopped dropping. Kissinger was instrumental in prolonging the bloodbath in Vietnam by nearly a decade and expanded it across Southeast Asia, slaughtering somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million people with more bombs than the Second World War.

Henry was also instrumental in launching the 1973 coup against the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and having him replaced with a vicious fascist general named Augusto Pinochet who would hold that country hostage for nearly twenty years. Once Pinochet was finished machine gunning college students in converted soccer stadiums and building internment camps for some 80,000 political dissidents, the venerable Secretary of State helped him take that horror show on the road with Operation Condor, a CIA mission to cleanse the Southern Cone of South America of anything to the left of Phyllis Schlafly. 60,000 people simply disappeared across half a dozen countries between 1975 and 1983, including pacifists, missionaries, monks and nuns, many of them simply thrown from American helicopters into the sea.

Henry spread the love to East Timor in 1975 when he helped America's favorite mononym monster, Suharto, carry out and get away with one of the worst acts of genocide of the Twentieth Century, slaughtering somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 men, women and children or a third of that tiny island nation's impoverished population over the next twenty years. Kissinger, a perpetually celebrated refugee of the Holocaust, seemed to have a kink for genocide. Aside from East Timor, he also offered America's support to Pakistan while they slaughtered 3 million Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971 and even encouraged the Chinese to arm the Khmer Rouge during the height of their own final solution.

Shockingly, the list just keeps going on and on like this, from feeding the Kurds to a Baathist massacre to putting a junta in charge of Argentina and encouraging them to hurry up and kill their opponents before the gringo press could catch wind of the burning bodies. From backing the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus which continues to this day to the backing of the Moroccan invasion of Sahrawi which, wouldn't you fucking know it, also continues to this motherfucking day. Kissinger's shadow continues to linger over thousands of graveyards across the globe and an American war machine that owes God knows how many more corpses to his influence.

But Henry Kissinger's most sickening act of international terrorism was getting away with it. For all his crimes, for all the bodies and bombs and genocide, Henry was awarded with the reputation of a global sex symbol. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he broke his ass to prolong and expand. He was wined and dined by A-list celebrities and given the star treatment on every primetime news show from Crossfire to Nightline. They all knew Henry was a monster and they fucking loved it.

Some might call this popular perversion a cult of personality but it's actually way more twisted than that. Henry Kissinger isn't the only ugly American celebrated for his career as an unapologetic terrorist. This country's history is jam packed with fabulous monsters. Thomas Jefferson invented "American Democracy" when he wasn't busy raping his own slaves and killing Indians. FDR led us out of the Great Depression with programs modeled after the state expansions of Mussolini's Italy and put an entire race of people into concentration camps for a Japanese invasion that he purposely provoked and allowed to happen. Ronald Reagen saved the world from communism while still making time to sling crack for baby killers in Nicaragua. And Barack Obama proved that America's appetite for destruction was finally color blind when he became the first person of color to use the White House as a base to murder teenagers with model airplanes.

These terrorists didn't get a pass because they were charming or charismatic. If that were true, George W. Bush would be painting shitty pictures of his feet in Guantanamo Bay right now. Every powerful American is lionized and sainted sooner or later for the simple fact that American power is exceptional. One cult of personality isn't enough for the greatest empire since Rome. America has constructed an entire culture of personality that could redeem a club-faced cattle rapist if he spent a long weekend in the White House. This is a sickness caused by the greatest concentration of institutional power in human history and the only defense that sane human beings have against it is to smash the mythology itself.

Osama Bin Laden was a killer. Henry Kissinger was a killer. Adolf Hitler was a killer. You can dress it up however you want, declare the perpetrator to be a terrorist, a statesman, or a dictator, but it's all the same to me and none of it deserves any special treatment. Powerful people kill poor people because they can and the more power they get, the more they kill, so stop giving them more power with fancy titles and couture categories for their crimes. Terrorists kill people, period, so fuck all terrorists. 

Throw Kissinger's rotting carcass in the same hole as those cunts in Hamas and the IDF and stop pretending like any of them are special for doing dreadful things to innocent people. Now where's my fucking noose? I'm not getting any more moderate here...

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

* Cult of Personality by Living Color

* Decorated Lawns by Julien Baker

* Iron Man by Black Sabbath

* Caught a Light Sneeze by Tori Amos

* See No Evil by Television

* Raining Blood by Slayer

* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones

* Evil by Interpol

* The Man Who Sold the World by Nirvana

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