Ted Kaczynski We Hardly Knew Ye

 On June 10th, 2023, a madman died alone in his cell at the age of 81 in a federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina. This morbid list of details wouldn't exactly be considered news if it wasn't for the fact that this lone madman also happened to be named Theodore Kaczynski. Better known as the Unabomber, Ted was quite possibly the most notorious domestic terrorist in American history, dueling with the FBI in a 17-year game of cat and mouse that would ultimately become the longest and most expensive investigation in that agency's history by the time of his arrest at his one room shack in rural Montana.

However, even with those legendary stats and all the hyped-up true crime mythology that comes with them, at the end of another crowded news day, Ted Kaczynski was still just another number in America's perpetually swelling human zoo and after the world took a moment to spit on his grave with the cameras rolling, they gleefully returned to their business-as-usual of masturbating to celebrity car crash footage while setting the rainforest on fire. Maybe I'm the sick one here, but I just can't seem to bring myself to join them back in the daily grind. Something about leaving that broken old man hanging in his cell gives me a dull ache in the pit of my heart.

I won't sit here and try to pretend that Ted Kaczynski was some kind of folk hero. He was a killer and most of his victims were just innocent civilians. So, why then should I mourn the death of such a ghastly creature? If I had to answer this vexing question in the simplest of terms, I would say that it's because Ted was a fellow outsider and in spite of all his many sins, he was also right about far more things than any truly evil person ever could be. Burn me at the stake if you must but I feel that this lonesome bastard has at the very least earned himself the right to one obituary that acknowledges the uncomfortable fact that he was indeed a human being.

Theodore Kaczynski was born to a working class Polish American family in Chicago on May 22,1942, and it didn't take very long for the world around him to recognize that he was different. Ted was a childhood mathematic prodigy with an IQ of 167. He entered Harvard at 15, completed his PHD in mathematics at 25, became the youngest professor to be hired in the history of UC Berkley that same year and went on to publish several successful mathematical treatises before the age of 30. 

On paper Kaczynski appeared to be riding high but just beneath the surface he found himself chafing against the restraints of the academic rat race that he felt forced into by birthright. These feelings of loneliness and disconnection were only exacerbated when young Ted found himself a guinea pig in what appears to have been an MKUltra study on the power of cruelty as a weapon for social engineering. For at least once a week over a period of three years, Kaczynski, who was still a teenager at the time of the study, met with Harvard psychologist and OSS veteran Henry Murray to be brutally berated and humiliated with an onslaught of verbal abuse while hooked up to machines only to have those traumatic encounters recorded and played back for him on a loop. 

Under these circumstances, it can hardly be considered shocking that Kaczynski developed an intense repulsion to academia, authority and human beings in general. By 1969, Ted had enough. He left his illustrious career and three years later he attempted to leave civilization altogether. Deciding to devote himself to self-sufficiency and simple living, Ted moved to a remote cabin near the small town of Lincoln, Montana with no electricity and no running water, and for a moment he actually appeared to have found peace.

This is the most fascinating part of Ted Kaczynski's story and it's the part that generally gets glossed over by the media in favor of the more incendiary details. For nearly a decade, between the years of 1971 and 1978, Ted lived in virtual harmony with his harsh surroundings. After years of praise and celebrated material achievements from modern society, he had gladly erased himself from existence and found contentment in absolute isolation. In hindsight, I believe that Ted was well aware of his violent tendencies and went as far out of his way as humanly possible to divorce himself from the problem. Like a growing number of modern-day American misfits, Kaczynski found himself allergic to society, so Ted tried to make society go away. But society would not let Ted be.

It began with commercial airliners flying over his cabin and hunters piercing the peace and quiet of his beloved woodland surroundings with the staccato puncture wounds of their bullets. This slow-motion invasion of the modern world on Ted Kaczynski's self-imposed exile escalated with bulldozers and pavement, overpasses and strip malls. Ted initially only gave into acts of petty vandalism and construction site monkeywrenching, but a freeway thrown through his favorite meadow seemed to break Ted's already fragile spirit and he chose to devote himself entirely to a one-man campaign for revenge against the modern world.

Ted taught himself how to build explosives by hand using untraceable scraps of metal and wood that he had foraged on his property and between the years of 1978 and 1995 he carried out a veritable jihad of 16 bombings, killing 3 people and injuring 23 others. His targets were diverse; airlines, universities, academics and executives, but they were all people who in Ted's eyes symbolized the rapacious advance of technology on the natural world.

The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM, standing for University and Airline Bomber, but the press dubbed him the Unabomber and here a legend was born. A legend of an untraceably cagey mad bomber outwitting the experts and shaking the world with his seemingly random campaign of violence. Ted chose to exploit this legend for the sake of getting his message out to the masses. In 1995 he sent a letter to the New York Times promising to cease and desist his campaign under the condition that either they or the Washington Post agree to publish a manifesto.

Under the urging of an increasingly desperate federal government, the Washington Post agreed, and it took less than a year for Ted's own brother to recognize his prose and supply the FBI with everything they needed for a bust. After firing his lawyers for trying to convince him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, Ted Kaczynski pled guilty to 8 consecutive life sentences and spent the last 25 years of his life rotting in an artificially lit concrete tomb at ADX Florence Supermax.

As I've noted above, nothing excuses Kaczynski's undeniable savagery. I remain steadfast and committed to my opposition to any form of initiatory violence, but I am also a fellow casualty of civilized society. After twenty years of having meddlesome adult authority figures poke and prod and humiliate me in their attempts to shove me into a constricting modern gender construct that clearly didn't fit, I finally broke beneath the pressure and spent the first 6 years of my twenties as an agoraphobic hermit, and the last 8 years struggling to recover from the damage I did to myself in a misguided attempt at self-defense.

It was during this period of post-traumatic turbulence that I first discovered Ted Kaczynski's then-infamous manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, and decided to take the time to do what most of Kaczynski's loudest condemners in the vaunted fourth estate have never even bothered to do. I actually read the goddamn thing. What I discovered was startling and it only seems to become increasingly startling with every passing year.

Kaczynski lays down an airtight case against civilization in general as an existential foe of individual liberty and technology in particular as a steroid that has grown that invention to downright apocalyptic proportions. Ted's basic argument was that technology makes an already toxic civilization truly lethal by reducing the individual to a product with a barcode number. 

This epic drive towards technological slavery and endless expansion has become more massive than any other single human construct including politics and thus any attempt to use politics or technology to reign this runaway system in only serves to make it stronger. The only hope that humanity has for its salvation is to find a way to push this unsustainable machine to its inevitable collapse before it can completely destroy the planet and then exploit the resulting momentary ceasefire in "progress" to enlighten people on the dangers of the system before it can reboot.

But perhaps Kaczynski's most prophetic analysis was his assessment of the nature of human violence during which he seemed to have accidentally caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror of his own skewed perception. Ted posits that technological civilization has resulted in the creation of a superstructure that cannot function without total capitulation to conformity. Humanities inevitable inability to live up to the rigid standards of such a constraining system leads to a growing plague of increasingly crippling social sicknesses.

Symptoms of these sicknesses may include school shootings, suicidal ideation, workplace rampages, self-mutilation, child abuse, agoraphobia and of course terrorism. I am a survivor of this plague and society has chosen to label me mentally ill for the trauma it resulted in. That term is just one of a number of convenient labels that civilization has chosen to utilize to silence its discontents, and another is Unabomber.

What Ted Kaczynski did was undeniably evil, but it was also inevitable considering that it is precisely what civilization commits every single day on a massive scale with its infernal police-warfare machine. Ted's biggest mistake was foolishly believing that he could somehow liberate himself and the rest of us by matching the cruelty of our shared tormentors and speaking to us in the language of terrorism which they invented. Our biggest mistake, if we so choose to make it, is to disregard Ted's lessons simply because the messenger lost his soul to deliver them to us. I have to believe that it's not too late to make sure that all of this death is not in vain and that includes the madman who died alone in his cell.

Unlike Ted, I don't believe that I have all the answers, I don't think anybody does, but I do believe that his initial instinct to simply drop out of this disease we call civilization was a much more revolutionary solution than simply blowing people the fuck up the way the state does. The only problem was Ted dropped out alone. The real revolution only begins when we all pull the plug together. 

One man alone in the wilderness is a hermit, one Billion is a wildfire that no superstructure can contain. Just call this eulogy a spark and pass it along.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon

* Softer Softest by Hole

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire

* Veronica Mars by Blondeshell

* See No Evil by Television

* Shove by L7

* Hardline by Julien Baker

* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

* Sappy by Nirvana

* (I Blame) Society by Titus Andronicus

Uganda Can Only Be Liberated by Smashing Its Masters in Washington

 This June has been a dark month for the long embattled Queer folks of Uganda and no pinkwashed corporate Pride parade is coming to save them from the jaws of state sanctioned violence. While the paler people of my tribe celebrate another year of survival in the belly of Babylon, our darker comrades in Kampala are being fed to the dogs. This month the Ugandan government's long campaign to annihilate the Queer people within its borders has culminated in the final solution known as the Anti-Homosexuality Act which will undoubtably go down in history as one of the most heinously homophobic pieces of legislation ever written, putting Uganda in the proud company of Wahabi whack-job states like Saudi Arabia when it comes to persecuting those of us who fail to conform to puritanical zealotry.

Not only does the Anti-Homosexuality Act make all acts of same sex love a crime punishable by life imprisonment but it also sentences those found guilty of the ill-defined crime of "aggravated homosexuality" to death. Lumped into this largely subjective category with pederasts and date rapists is virtually anyone caught having sex with a member of the same gender while HIV positive regardless of whether or not they're transmittable. The law might also become an affective death sentence for all of the 1.2 million Ugandans who suffer from HIV thanks to another vaguely worded provision punishing the promotion of homosexuality with up to twenty years in prison, essentially putting anyone promoting safe sex between same sex partners in the crosshairs.

I won't deny for a second that this law and the American Christian jihadists who have actively sponsored it make sick to my very soul but our own dear leader Joe Biden's Pride-friendly virtue signaling response to this travesty actually makes me feel far worse. As word of Uganda's latest act of war on its own people hit the Queer blogosphere like a hammer, Biden quickly made himself available to play the role of our straight white knight in shining armor by calling on the government of Uganda to immediately repeal this law under the threat of international sanctions. I rabidly oppose this chauvinistic act of imperial posturing and the devastation that it promises to inflict if it proves to be anything more than just another idle threat during an election year, and I oppose it not in spite of my own Queerness but because of it and you should too.

All sanctions, regardless of their expressed goals, are acts of colonial terrorism that inflict the poorest subjects of the given nation they target first and foremost. In Uganda that means the Queer community that the Biden Administration supposedly cares so goddamn much about, especially those suffering from HIV. Regardless of what specific industries or individuals' sanctions target, they all have the impact of making the market those targets exist in toxic to foreign investment. The end result is the wholesale starvation of an entire population of its vital recourses, and I do believe that this is in fact the intent. After all, out of the scores of governments across the globe that America has and continues to sanction not one has ever corrected their wicked ways and agreed to toe the line and yet the sanctions continue. That is because economic sanctions have always been defined by a larger campaign to punish a government's civilian populace into conforming to outside influence while creating a level of instability that can be easily exploited to justify regime change.

This kind of brazenly inhumane behavior is immoral regardless of the target, but I have a hard time believing that the Biden regime would commit such a war crime purely out of a bottomless devotion to equality. If this were the case, then career imperialists like Joe and his handlers would have cut ties with Kampala decades ago. Uganda's so-called president, Yoweri Museveni, is currently serving in his sixth five-year term in office after another recent sham election marked by low voter turnout and violent crackdowns against his opposition. Museveni has run that tiny Central African nation like an organized crime outfit for 37 years since seizing power in a coup in 1986 and his continued rule is almost entirely dependent on a Washington slush fund of nearly $1 billion dollars a year in development and security assistance. 

In return for being delivered the tools necessary to bash his own people, Museveni has been a stalwart asset in Washington's imperial campaign to subjugate the African continent beneath its will during the waning hours of the American Century. This includes the deployment of the Ugandan People's Defense Forces to aid AFRICOM in its bloody terrorist campaigns in South Sudan and Somalia, and this also includes providing the CIA with black sites in Kampala to torture those Africans that America accuses of fighting its own terrorism with terrorism. During all this time Uganda has continued to openly maintain a consistently homophobic regime which has penalized homosexuality going back to its time as a device of the British Empire, and they are far from an exception to the rule. America has a long and storied history of sponsoring despotic tyrants who slaughter Queer people like animals, and this tradition continues to this day. 

In spite of the fact that the then freshly elected Biden-Harris administration released a feel-good memorandum in 2021 committing the US to promoting LGBTQ rights abroad, their regime has spent the last year alone forking over more than $12 billion dollars in foreign aid to nearly 50 nations that penalize consensual homosexuality, including $3 billion dollars to nations like Nigeria and Yemen who execute people convicted of being Queer and another $2 billion for regimes like Chad and Tanzania who merely punish our existence with a life sentence in one of their fabulous prisons.

This doesn't even include the trillions of dollars in supposedly private military contracts that the Biden administration has personally gone out of its way to secure for some of the most violently homophobic dictatorships in the Persian Gulf along with the downright genocidal jihadist proxies that they arm to the teeth with our weapons. All the while, the United States uses the hand not busy cutting checks to bigoted psychopaths to wag its boney finger at other bigoted psychopaths who just so happen to run countries who don't do our bidding. You see, the point here isn't that America hates fags or that America hates fag bashers. The point is that America genuinely doesn't give one solitary fuck whether people like me live or die. To them we are nothing more than disposable pawns to be played in order to justify their relevance on the world stage as a benevolent killing machine. 

In recent years this has increasingly meant using Queer rights and really any kind of human rights to justify America's multiplying forever wars to the weary but increasingly socially liberal straight white vote in suburbia. However, the result of this Kalashnikov cabaret hasn't been the betterment of the plight of Queer people at home or abroad. The result has been to make Queer people look complicit in western imperialism which conveniently only serves to proliferate more bigotry in the nations we bomb, thus giving us more conveniently humanitarian flavored excuses to keep fucking bombing them. Just look at Iraq where in less than twenty years they went from merely imprisoning Queer people for a couple years to hurling us from the highest rooftops. Simply put, my people are being used and we are being used to justify an evil to which our resistance has defined our very existence. 

Queer people have always been a colonized people. In fact, we were among the earliest victims of modern western colonialism. After Christianity was embraced and bastardized by the Roman Empire as a means of homogenizing all the world's tribes beneath the banner of a single monolithic religion, the first targets of their imperial conversion therapy were the European peasantry most resistant to centralized assimilation. These peasants, labeled Pagans from the Latin word Paganus, meaning rural, celebrated the existence of a wide variety of third gender people as spiritual leaders and often practiced acts of drag and homosexuality in their rituals and festivals to celebrate their stateless heritage. 

Quite simply, these tribes were too proud to be governed so they were brutally subjugated beneath the cross of Christianity and ultimately forced to purge people like me from their ranks. Queer people are essentially the progeny of the last pagans. The peasant bastards too freaky to be assimilated. So we formed a new tribe in the shadows to survive with our pride intact. Even more beautiful freaks were added to our ranks when this heinous tradition of puritanical violence was continued long after Rome fell with the subjugation of the New World and the African continent, whose own diverse tribes similarly celebrated a wide variety of distinctive sexual and gender arrangements. This included the Langi tribe of Northern Uganda who recognized a third gender known as the Mujoko Dako who were biological males treated as females and aloud to marry men.

This is our tradition, and this is our jihad. Queer people are not defined by a single culture but by a commitment to a decentralized diversity of cultures, to gender and sexuality being a practice defined by a radical commitment to individual spirituality above state defined biological conformity. This tradition of a thousand traditions can never coexist with any form of colonialism or the various states that such a perversion against nature produces. This includes states like Uganda that only continue to exist at the behest of fickle colonial overlords like Joe Biden and his puppet masters in the deep state. But if we truly want to free these people from bondage, we must first free ourselves and destroy the new Rome in Washington. Regardless of whether they choose to drape their sins in crosses or rainbows, they are our true enemy and they must be destroyed in order to give colonized people across the globe the power to take back their own shattered cultures and stand proud in defiance to puritanical cultural hegemony.

Being a proud heathen outlaw has long meant being colonized but being Queer has always meant bashing back against the colonizers. Kampala cannot be liberated until Washington burns like Stonewall and that's the gift that just keeps on giving all year round.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

* Who by David Byrne & St. Vincent

* You Can Have It Back by Wild Pink

* Fight the Power by Public Enemy

* Say Yes to Heaven by Lana Del Rey

* November Spawned a Monster by Morrissey

* Sepsis by Blondeshell

* Satellite of Love by Lou Reed 

* American Society by L7

* Everybody Wants to Love You by Japanese Breakfast

Eleven Dangerous Queers They Don't Want You to Know About

 The worst thing that can happen to any minority in this twisted empire in decline is to be integrated into the official zeitgeist of mainstream history because that inevitably means being neutered post-mortem and turned into some taxidermy fairytale designed to prove the supremacy of our exceptional national order. We've all seen this grotesque fate delivered upon the revolutionary progeny of the slaves forced to build Babylon with that revisionist obscenity that we dare call Black History Month and we have much more recently seen this post-colonial minstrel make-over performed on my own tribe with the Disneyfication of Pride Month.

Centuries of struggle against puritanical conformity have been condensed down to a vapid parade of limp-wristed corporate divas. An empty celebration of the inclusive spirit of the American nightmare set to the ballads of Celine Dion and ending at police gunpoint on the wedding alter. This isn't us, is it?  Where have all the wild faggots gone? Where are all the pissed-off dykes and fearless freaks and perverted provocateurs who died emaciated and diseased but defiantly unbowed with one boney finger extended to the stars and stripes that continue to imprison and violate our bodies? Where are all the dangerous Queers?

Well, they're all right here of course, for I may be but a petty genderfuck malcontent eking out a meager existence in the shadows of this empire's colossal rustbelt ruins, but I have devoted myself entirely to performing the role of a gonzo historian, a wild-eyed amateur sleuth compiling the names and stories of my lupen outlaw class and regurgitating them back directly into your eye sockets with my acidic prose. What I perform may not fulfill the high-minded qualifications of a collegiate historiographer but that isn't my aim. My aim is to construct a counter-mythology to inspire my people to revolt against the elitist mythos designed to sedate us. That is why I still celebrate Pride. To hijack the parade and steer it back to the flaming cop cars of Stonewall. To teach my children the sacred legends of their profane elders. This is my thankless jihad, and these are eleven dangerous Queers that they don't want you to know about. Tattoo their names on your soul and rage in the glow of their flaming spirits.

Leslie Feinberg- Leslie taught me how to do this. He was the original keeper of our tribe's hidden history. After living a brutally punishing life as a blue collar transmasculine butch lesbian, Leslie told the world his story in heart wrenching detail with his semi-autobiographical debut novel, Stone Butch Blues. But that influential diary was nothing more than a beautiful brick hurled through the plate glass window of this nation's gnat-like attention span. Like me, Leslie was a committed revolutionary populist on a mission to take back Queer history from the bourgeoise intellectual elites and tell it in our native tongue. Leslie spent sleepless nights after twelve-hour factory shifts pouring over newspaper stories, books and historical documents at public libraries so he could shed a scolding light on the bones of our forgotten heroes, whether it be in the pages of books like Transgender Warriors, which completely rearranged the way I see the world, or in his tireless tirades in the Workers World newspaper. He is why I write this list, in a quixotic attempt to carry on his massive legacy into another generation of sexual mavericks and gender outlaws and tell them our stories. 

Storme DeLarverie- Storme smashed her fist through the snout of history when she threw the first punch of the Stonewall Uprising, but her legacy extends well before and well beyond that glorious weeklong orgy of faggot rage. A biracial child of the Jim Crow South born in the Queer chocolate Gomorrah of New Orleans; Storme first made a name for herself as the lone drag king in the Jewel Box Revue, the nation's first integrated drag troupe. She also sparked a butch lesbian revolution by bringing her performance to the streets, boldly wearing her three-piece zoot suits and fedoras off-stage and turning female masculinity into a way of life. After Stonewall, Storme added a loaded pistol to her wardrobe and spent nearly fifty years stocking the streets of the Village like a bleach blonde panther, serving as the unofficial bodyguard of her tribe and becoming a breathing symbol of Queer Power and butch strength that lives on to this day. Storme DeLarverie is our John Henry only she was real, and she swung a much bigger dick.

Valerie Solonas- Valerie was a creature of conflict and contradiction. Her legacy is defined by two events that remain as combatively contested as her own spirit: the creation of the infamously incendiary SCUM Manifesto and the near fatal shooting of Andy Warhol. What we know is that Valerie survived an abusive childhood to come out as an aggressively butch lesbian during the gray flannel purgatory of the Eisenhower Era. She graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland before relocating to the radical hotbed of Berkley where she wrote and self-published the SCUM Manifesto. Here is where things get a bit murky. SCUM stands to this day as the most seething and vitriolic critique of the patriarchy ever written, a call for women to abandon the boredom of domesticity to overthrow the government and destroy the male sex. This screed only entered infamy after Valery shot a Queer celebrity for allegedly trying to steal the publishing rights to her work. The questions that still define her legacy are, was this an act of a vengeful artist pushed too far or the manifestation of the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic? And was the SCUM Manifesto meant to be a misandric sermon or a dark satire of Freudian chauvinism in reverse? 

We may never know the answers to these questions for sure but to both, I say why not all of the above? Solonas was a feminist provocateur in an age when women were rendered completely mute by society. I believe her goal was to make enough noise with both her writing and her actions to end the silence, to obliterate the sexist myth of a weaker sex by any means necessary. It's a shame that she felt that she needed to obliterate another brilliant Queer artist to achieve this goal but it's hard to deny that she succeeded. Perhaps she was just trying to speak to America in the only language it seems to understand. Either way, I feel that she has more than earned our undivided attention. 

Michel Foucault- Traditionally, the intellectual class has done very little for Queer folk other than to label and categorize us away into easily tokenized objects, but Michel Foucault was the consummate anti-intellectual, raging virulently against all absolutes and systems of intellectual power. And this, more than any sexual preference, is what made him our intellectual. Foucault's work as an activist professor and groundbreaking philosophical provocateur laid the foundation for generations of radical Queers to liberate themselves from the rigid sexual identities and gender essentialism that the good professor boldly rejected as tools of coercive power structures. Foucault set us free by erasing the barriers of his peers and telling his students to make up their own damn rules. The AIDS virus stole him from us too soon and cretins within the intellectual elite continue to sully his name with baseless slander but Michel's true legacy lives on in every teenage rebel who builds a new gender identity on Dischord over the weekend just to dismantle it on Monday for the lulz. 

Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson- Without these two fearless genderqueer sex workers of color there would likely be no Pride to pinkwash. After breaking their heels off in the ass of the fascist pig state at Stonewall, these two transgender warriors took the raw rage of that spontaneous uprising and used it to sculpt a movement. Sylvia and Marsha founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries to provide Queer street kids with the same kind of solidarity and protection that the Black Panthers brought to the projects and they often sold their own bodies to do it. STAR also collaborated closely with other outlaw organizations like the Panthers and the Young Lords because Sylvia and Marsha were true fucking soul sisters of the greater revolution that defined Queer Liberation, turning tricks and raising fists not just for Christopher Street and the Peirs but for Algiers, Harlem and Saigon. They were the original power bottoms of bottom unity and we still have so much to learn from their legacy.

William S. Burroughs- With his fluid, non-linear sagas about drug-addled perverts confronting the tyrannical menace of bureaucratic conspiracies with chaos magick and a lifetime of libertine exploits to match, Billy was far more than just a groundbreaking novelist. He was a post-modern priest with a shotgun for a scepter, reminding the collective Queer mind repeatedly and mercilessly of the necessity for eternal rebellion. Burroughs didn't just give us Junky and Naked Lunch. He gave us Bowie and Genet and CBGBs and glam rock. He gave drug-addled perverts everywhere the shovels we needed to dig our own underground and then dig another one and then another once the mainstream managed to colonize it. Thanks to the narcotic seeds planted by that mild-mannered lunatic in gray flannel scales, the pesticides of civilized monotony will never sink deep enough to kill the roots of Queer liberation. Praise him.

Kuwasi Balagoon- Many brave radicals fought for Queer Liberation, but Kuwasi Balagoon literally picked up a fucking gun and went to war for it. After serving as a loyal foot soldier for the Black Power Movement with the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, Kuwasi came out of the closet as an openly bisexual anarchist behind bars and then literally broke out of prison to serve openly in the revolution against Babylon. He would die behind bars from that wicked virus that Reagan stoked but not before breaking out his sister-in-arms, Assata Shakur, who spits on the empire from her front stoop in Havana as a free woman as we speak. Kuwasi Balagoon was the Nat Turner of Queer Liberation, taking our struggle to its natural conclusion as an armed assault on the master's plantation. He didn't live to see that motherfucker burn, but a few of us wilder faggots still carry his fire through the fields.

Vaginal Davis- If you don't know that name, you're not alone but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be ashamed of yourself. Vaginal Davis is the Iggy Pop of drag. She did it first and she did it worst and basic bitches are still ripping off her swagger. Going back to her teens in late-seventies South Central Los Angeles, Vaginal Davis has been a tireless renaissance monster. A self-proclaimed sexual repulsive and proud social threat, this bitch basically single-handedly invented the Queercore scene with an endless avalanche of provocative club performances, raucous punk bands, subversive Queer zines and experimental pornography. And did I mention that RuPaul stole her wig?! As she would say, "Too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays", Vaginal Davis embodies Queer as a downright dangerous lifestyle that never rests and burns its laurels by turning race, gender and sexuality into a cabaret of gleefully shameless provocation. RuPaul can eat her fucking make-up. Bow down to the real Queen Bitch or feel the fury of a thousand unwashed fists.

 Max Stirner- "I love men, too, not merely individuals, but everyone. But I love them because love makes me happy. I love because loving is natural to me. It pleases me. I know no commandment of love." These are the frequently forgotten words of Johann Kaspar Schmidt aka Max Stirner, the 19th century German father of individualist anarchism who turned on everyone from Friedrich Nietzsche to Emma Goldman. So, was Max a fag? It's literally impossible to say considering that what little we know about the man comes second hand from pissed-off Hegelian breeders like Karl Marx and one openly Queer anarchist named John Henry Mackay. But we do know that regardless of his bedroom antics, Mr. Stirner was quite possibly the Queerest philosopher in the pantheon in that he settled for nothing short of the complete and total emancipation of the individual from everything but what drives their liberation, even if that requires a full-frontal assault on conventional biology itself. Stirner's distinctive brand of egalitarian egoism has inspired Queer anarchists like me for centuries and his concept of the "Union of Egoists" as a totally voluntary, non-systematic association of misfits in militant contradiction to the state is probably the best description of what it really means to be Queer ever conceived. I love Max Stirner. But I don't love him because he might be Queer. I love him because anarchy pleases me, and anarchy makes me Queer.

Malcolm X- A lot of people still don't want to hear this, but Malcolm X was probably one of us. Long before taking the helm as the outspoken spokesman for the notoriously puritanical Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was Malcolm Little and Malcolm Little was a rambunctiously effeminate kid who schoolmates remember openly engaging in sexual acts with other boys. He would go on to spend his early twenties as a gay hustler and even allegedly held an ongoing relationship with an openly gay transvestite named Willie Mae.

So, what exactly does all this contentious pillow talk have to do with Queer history? From his pulpit in the closet, Malcolm inspired most of the people on this list to bash back with his fiery sermons against internal American colonialism and he probably taught me personally more about being Queer than any other human being on the planet. Malcolm X taught me about the power of otherness weaponized and the ability of any tribe of outnumbered outsiders to take on the system and win through nothing but the sheer ferocity of our collective grit. Go ahead and call it wishful thinking if you like but the fact that Malcolm also appears to have been a fellow prisoner of the closet just feels too profound to be a coincidence. I have to believe that he would have at least followed Huey Newton's lead in recognizing the fire of his other tribe if J. Edna hadn't have had him wacked for empowering a whole generation of marginalized outlaws to get too wild to be governed. 

The least this generation can do is pay it forward with a Molotov cocktail to keep that fire burning. Here's hoping this list reads like a book of eleven matches.

You may say that I'm a dreamer, dearest motherfuckers, but I prefer to self-identify as a national security threat and thank Allah herself that I'm not the only one.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

The Need for a Queer Power Movement

 I know this sounds gay, but I'm in love with being Queer and I'm kind of gross about it. I celebrate my flamboyant tribal freakiness in everything from the fluorescent pink color of my hair to the words that I hurl into the shocked faces of basic bitches like glimmering confetti. I didn't choose to be this fucking weird, but I did choose to embrace my spiritual otherness with the obnoxious bravado of a house on fire and that choice and the tribe for which it stands saved my life.

After barely surviving a bleak Catholic childhood pock marked by casual atrocities committed in the name of divine conformity, I spent the better part of my twenties as a hollowed-out husk; numb, depleted and totally devoid of hope. I took long drives through the countryside praying for a car crash to save me from the dull ache of my suffocating agoraphobic existence. It was only after I discovered that I actually come from a long line of proud freaks who violently straddled the fickle lines between acceptable gender boundaries like meth-addled cowgirls that I truly started living my life for the first time.

To me being Queer is about so much more than who you fuck or which bathroom you piss in. It's a sacred pagan tribal identity for those of us who were purged from our old tribes for transgressing the norms of civilized Christian society. It is a place for misfit toys who were never designed for mass production. Those of us too weird to live but too goddamn pissed-off to die. Above all else though, its home, the first one that I've ever really known and it's under attack from two sides of a schizophrenic empire in decline.

Queer people find ourselves at an existential crossroads at the intersection of annihilation and assimilation. In one direction we face an openly genocidal GOP who are vigorously advocating for our forced internment back into the closets which are now fortified by a growing arsenal of legislative boobytraps. More laws are passed every day in states across this country that utilize the tools of America's formidable police state to terrorize anyone who dares to transgress what certain zealots consider to be properly gendered behavior.

They began their assault by targeting the rights of our children to have a marginally less abusive childhood than we did but their laws only grow bolder by the second, regulating the medical decisions of adults as old as 26 and declaring our public displays of existence to be "drag" punishable by prison sentences measured in years. And with 2024 creeping over the horizon like a rapist on the skylight, all the major-league Republican candidates are promising to make this regional jihad national with none other than Orange Man Bad himself leading the pack as he promises to unleash the full powers of the federal government to enshrine the gender binary in depleted uranium.

Under such dire circumstances, many of my people aren't just turning to the liberal elites in the Democratic Party, they are running to their arms like frightened rabbits, but America's other breeder party is actually trafficking in something far more insidious than good old-fashioned genocide. That warm blanket they are wrapping around your bruised and battered shoulders is actually a straitjacket called assimilation and if you aren't careful, it will strangle you into submission to the very same forces that you're running from.

The Democrats advocate for the creation of a new Queer. A clean and respectful Queer who abides by a single set of pronouns, gets married, minds their manners, pays their taxes and kills other shades of poor people in the straight man's army. Stumbling onto the scene of your nearest major metropolitan Pride parade, you'd be forgiven for thinking that you crashed a roving rainbow-colored policeman's ball sponsored by the scions of the military industrial complex. Next year the drag queens will be straddling Patriot missiles headed for our latest apocalyptic pissing match in Taiwan.

What the Democrats are offering isn't salvation, it's just a softer brand of erasure. They want us to settle down and embrace the same imperial police state that we scraped our knuckles smashing in the face at Stonewall. The very same imperial police state, I might add, that can, will and has been sicked on us at a moment's notice the second we fail to deliver a Democratic victory. 

If the two parties really are just two heads of the same colossal corporate serpent, then what we are really looking at here is a concerted effort to domesticate the last breed of feral heathens, with the DNC holding the carrot and the GOP holding the stick. No matter which hand we choose, we lose everything that defines us as a people in the process. We can either return to the noose hanging in the closet or become the latest mascot advertising the diversity of collars available to the servants of the new world order. Kali help me, I almost prefer the noose in that Faustian bargain.

But there is a third way, a path to true Queer liberation. However, it will require both a revolution and a history lesson. Today's Disneyfied LGBTQ(TM) movement wasn't the first attempt by Queer people to tame other Queer people in the name of inclusion. Before the mid to late sixties, the self-proclaimed leaders in civil rights for gender and sexual minorities referred to themselves as "homophiles" and consisted largely of affluent white cis men in tasteful suits lobbying shrinks and cops to give us a break if we agreed to keep it down.

Thankfully that dreadfully vanilla era ended in a crash with two riots, the one at Stonewall in 1969 and another lesser-known throwdown in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco three years earlier known as the Compton's Cafeteria Riot. Both were led by ragtag coalitions of irate drag queens, sex workers, bulldaggers and trannies who stopped being polite to their abusers in the police state and beat those fucking pigs black and blue. Uncoincidentally, both uprisings were also comprised overwhelmingly of gender outlaws of color and a few of their pale lovers.

From this maelstrom of blood dripping stiletto heels and bruised butch fists rose radical organizations like the Gay Liberation Front and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries who didn't call for integration or assimilation. They called for revolution in concert with their oppressed brothers and sisters fighting for their own liberation in the jungles of Vietnam and the streets of Watts. The original Queer Movement, the one that blasted open the closet door with a twelve-gauge shotgun for millions of proud freaks like me, was inspired not by Martin Luther King or the Southern Poverty Law Center but by Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. Gay Liberation was the kinky lesbian sister of Black Power, and we can all still learn a lot from this era of love and rage.

Black folks found themselves at a similar crossroads to the one that Queer folks face today during the mid-sixties. In spite of massive gains made in the arenas of civil rights and popular opinion, the Black Freedom Movement found themselves staring cross-eyed down two barrels of the same gun. Down one barrel was an increasingly violent campaign of police state repression in the Jim Crow South that had been adopted by the Republican Party in the form of opportunistic creeps like Barry Goldwater and Dick Nixon. And down the other was a newly de-Dixiefied Democratic Party that wanted the assimilated negro to be seen but not heard at the DNC as they used the poorest among them to wipe out the rest of the Third World. Then a few brave brothers and sisters said, 'fuck you' and started a revolution.

This revolution earned its title when Stokely Carmichael chose to purge the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committe of pious white liberal interlopers and led the crowds of the 1966 March Against Fear in Mississippi in a chant of 'Black Power!' on national television. The point of this movement wasn't to segregate Black folks but to empower them to build their own autonomous network of organizations, small businesses and cultural institutions right in the belly of Babylon. A network that could co-exist with radical white folks without having to rely on their approval. This model proved terrifying enough to the white power structure that it ultimately smashed segregation to bits and indirectly led not only to Stonewall but to the end of the Vietnam War when it inspired radicals of every shade to bring that war home to the streets.

This is precisely what Queer people need right now. We need a Queer Power Movement to build a network of stateless Queer autonomous zones across the country, free to act without interference from straight government or corporate intervention. We need our own schools in which students are given at least as much authority as the adults tasked with guiding them on the path to forging their own identities. We need our own medical services governed through mutual aid and informed consent rather than pharmaceutical gatekeepers and whitecoat authoritarians. And we need a well-trained and heavily armed civilian militia to defend these Queer institutions from any attempt by the breeder state to interfere with our lives and our communities.

We also need to fortify our own culture with a full metal jacket commitment to anti-authoritarianism and radical diversity. We need to embrace the fact that there is actually great power in being a minority because only minorities contain the kind of intimate tribal societies capable of achieving the level of stateless autonomy that we all deserve. This means rejecting the genocidal notion of the melting pot once and for all and advocating for a coalition of a million minorities, be they Queer, Black, Chicano, Redneck, Zaydi or Palestinian, to declare our independence from any other world order, old or new. Because either we all get free, or we all get fucked and that's one form of sodomy that this proud faggot is not down with.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that inspired this post

* Queen Bitch by David Bowie

* Is It Really So Strange by the Smiths

* Describe by Perfume Genius

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* Rockstar by Hole

* The Drowners by Suede

* Trash by New York Dolls

* Some New Kind of Kick by the Cramps

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

Queering Mental Illness into a New Revolutionary Consciousness

 Jordan Neely was kind of a weird kid. If you ever saw him, you would know what I mean. There was just something profoundly 'other' about his spirit and through the right set of eyes, it was something beautiful to behold. He looked just like Michael Jackson back when Michael Jackson still looked like Michael Jackson. Joyful, genderless, racially ambiguous. He could dance to absolutely no music at all, and my God could he dance. Perhaps you have seen him, in the subway station or beneath the shimmering lights of Time Square, moving so effortlessly, as if his body had a language all its own that could say all the words that forces beyond his control wouldn't allow him to say. And smiling, always smiling...

I had a friend kind of like that once. His name was Osaze Osagie but to me he was always just Ozzy, and he was kind of a weird kid too. He stood as tall and as dark as an oak tree and dressed like every day was Sunday. You never saw him without a Bible in his hand, but you never heard him preach. I'm precisely the kind of creature that Ozzy's church warns their parishioners about, a gutter mouthed gender outlaw with a profoundly profane disdain for anything even remotely resembling authority. But Ozzy never made me feel uncomfortable. He seemed to exude an aura of gentle wisdom that said far more about the mysterious ways of Christ than conventional diction could ever express. And he was always smiling. That same smile that could be seen on Jordan Neely's face before the world caved in on him.

I met Ozzy at a psych rehab where I was recovering from decades of spiritual abuse that had rendered me an agoraphobic hermit by my mid-twenties. Ozzy had been diagnosed with several words that failed to accurately capture his spirit any better than the Catholic Church managed to capture mine. During one of his darker days his father called the police. Ozzy was talking about hurting himself before he stopped talking at all. The police came to his apartment, covered the peephole on his door and knocked without identifying themselves to someone they knew was already terrified. They claim that Ozzy attacked them with a steak knife. They claim that three heavily armed men required a taser and three bullets to defend themselves. One of those bullets landed in Ozzy's back. He was 29 years old when he was murdered by the state in 2019. I can still see him smiling when I close my eyes.

Four years later it would be Jordan Neely's turn. After spending years being chewed up and spit out by the revolving gears of New York's various institutions for carceral readjustment, Neely finally lost his smile and begged the subways he once danced for to save him. "I don't have food. I don't have a drink. I'm fed up. I don't mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I'm ready to die." These were Jordan Neely's last words to society and society responded to his heated desperation with cold violence. A man trained by the state to kill poor people put Neely into a chokehold for fifteen minutes and two passengers held him down while the rest of the people on that train car calmly sat and watched him die. "You're gonna kill him now." They warned Neely's attacker as if he should be mindful while he takes the garbage to the curb. Jordan Neely may not have been murdered by the state, but the state trained a dozen human beings who could have easily saved him to stay in their seats and behave like a crowd.

Both my friend Ozzy and Jordan Neely were Black, but their race wasn't the only thing that made them disposable. As I said, they were both weird kids and western society considers this to be a condition that should be heavily policed. Osagie and Neely died because they are part of a growing caste of mentally ill Americans. The Surgeon General has declared our existence to be a public health crisis. Loneliness. A pathological disconnection with the outside world that was ferociously accelerated by the societal devastation of the Pandemic but didn't begin with it. 

Even before Covid, approximately half of all American adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness and all the available statistics show a tsunami of mental health issues in this country that has swelled precipitously between the 1930s and the 1990s before leveling off at historic highs. The most visible side effects of this surge have been homelessness and unemployment. Across the wealthiest nation on earth, city streets are cluttered with tent colonies and businesses sit vacant with help wanted signs left unanswered. Many Americans look upon this spectacle with confusion and even open disdain. What could possibly be the source of this crippling social contagion that has rendered 60 million Americans too ill to participate in the banal joys of civilized society? 

I just have to throw my head back and laugh like a lunatic when you people call us crazy and then wonder why we don't meet your approval. Take a look around you, stupid. We live in a world where burning down the rainforest for hamburgers and killing children with robots in Somalia isn't even considered newsworthy. A world where a police officer can lynch a man in his own community during broad daylight while he begs his neighbors to put down their cellphones and save him. A world teetering perilously on the brink of nuclear apocalypse and environmental devastation. And you have the fucking nerve to ask the people who take it personally what the big deal is? Read my lips very carefully so you don't miss a word. Fuck. You.

In case you haven't noticed, I take this shit kind of personally myself and it's not just because a bunch of pompous assholes in white collars and white coats have been diagnosing my feelings as an illness for my entire life. The people that you call mentally ill are essentially just people who are allergic to the arbitrary rules that define our declining civilization as normal. There is another word for this condition that is far more appropriate than ill, and it's called Queer. According to the masters of the universe over at the American Psychiatric Association, the desire to fuck someone with the same genitals as you was a mental illness until 1973 and the existence of third genders like mine was listed as a disorder until 2013. These fine folks in the therapeutic state didn't come to their senses out of a sudden epiphany of moral character. They were kicked into reforming these definitions by pissed-off Queer folk who were tired of being called sick and if you ask me, we should have kept fucking kicking.

Queer people have been indoctrinated by liberal society into believing that our removal from the DSM was some kind of great victory for civil rights, but it was really little more than a strategic PR stunt pushed by the APA to save the good name of a bad system and we all fell for it. In the years since we've disaggregated ourselves from the rest of civilization's malcontents, Queer people have been assimilated beyond recognition into mainstream culture as a lifestyle brand called LGBTQ, but we've also found ourselves more policed than we've been since Stonewall, with a growing asylum of laws that openly seek to strangle us like a straitjacket. This is the thanks that we get for betraying our fellow outsiders. Assimilation always comes at the price of throwing some lesser 'other' beneath the whirling blades of the wheat thresher to prove that you can be just as sadistic as the cool kids. This is how Catholic immigrants became white and this is how Queer people became sane, but it has only made us all weaker in the process because mainstream society is the problem. 

Weird kids like Jordan Neely and my friend Ozzy are just two of many casualties in a war against civilization's unwilling victims and it isn't the loud-mouthed bigots on Fox News leading the charge, it's sensitive liberal heroes like New York Mayor Eric Adams and California Governor Gavin Newsom who are bulldozing homeless encampments by the hundreds and pushing to institutionalize those deemed defective by the police state in the name of progress and liberal guilt. These people shouldn't be given floats in our Disneyfied Pride Parades, they should be chased off of our streets with the rest of the pigfucking fascist scum in a second Stonewall that doesn't stop until we burn down the asylum once and for all.

For generations radicals of every stripe have been searching high and low for a mythic revolutionary class to carry out the final execution of the state. Most leftists are still trapped in the 19th century with fantasies of the workers of the world uniting against their factory masters running through their dizzy skulls. But in 2023, what unites the dispossessed isn't labor, it's mental illness. However, this mindset, the one that finds more and more Americans incompatible with the drudgeries of western civilization by the second, isn't a sickness, it is a new revolutionary consciousness.

Queer people had the right idea by following the lead of Frantz Fanon and the Black Panthers and turning those of us who were too transgressive to be colonized into a stateless third world nation deep inside the belly of Babylon, but they shouldn't have limited our ranks to just five letters in the alphabet. We should have Queered the whole damn DSM and united all of us who find ourselves too pathologically divergent to conform to the dictates of a sick society beneath a single rainbow banner. It's not too late.

Jordan Neely and Osage Osazie may not have been Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender but they were two kids who were too weird and beautiful to be anything but Queer and you better believe that I take their deaths personally because no Queer person should ever be left behind by the revolution.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson

* Police Story by Black Flag

* Mad World by Tears for Fears

* Salad by Blondeshell

* Stop Whispering by Radiohead

* Scream by Michael and Janet Jackson

* See No Evil by Television

* Crazy by Patsi Kline

* Beautiful by Lana Del Rey

* If I Ever Leave this World Alive by Flogging Molly

West Papua's War with the Modern World Should Be All of Ours

 They say that a picture speaks a thousand words. If that's true, then a hostage video must speak at least a million. The only problem with this technology and indeed most technology is that most of these words tend to get garbled when they're all being shouted at once. This deluge of information often results in a sort of narrative overdose that makes my head spin. That is the dilemma I face when watching the videos that have surfaced online of Philip Mehrtens, a 37-year-old bush pilot from New Zealand taken hostage deep in the jungles of the Indonesian occupied region of West Papua this February. In the few clips of footage made available to the public to prove that this man is in fact still alive, Mr. Mehrtens appears wide eyed and dislodged, like a tourist lost on a different planet. He stands as tall and as pale as a ghost, dressed in a denim jacket and a Boonie cap, surrounded by dark men with bushy beards and furious eyes. 

One thing that is hard for anyone to deny about this footage is that those reems make it crystal clear that this captured Kiwi has stumbled smack dab in the middle of something which he too is struggling against reason to comprehend. However, I can't seem to ignore the fact that his captors appear to be just as frightened and out of place as their own hostage. Armed with an odd assortment of assault rifles, bows and arrows and dressed to the nine in a clashing hodgepodge of tribal headdresses, war paint and second-hand military fatigues, these men who the western media has largely written off as quixotic savages somehow look strangely familiar to my own furious eyes. 

The only words that my mind can collect to make sense of the fear and loathing that I somehow share with Philip Mehrtens' kidnappers tells me that on the other side of the planet there are men who are also at war with the modern world. The same one that haunts my dreams with menacing footage of freeways and skyscrapers that scream a million words a second in my face, that looming metropolis that holds my soul hostage and stirs a terror deep inside me that smug doctors in white lab coats diagnose as a mental illness. Those dark men with their bushy beards and furious eyes clearly share my private war but unlike me they refuse to lose it in the privacy of a psychiatrist's office, and they refuse to allow the terror we share to rob them of the dignity of not going down without a hostage. God bless them.

Those men are the soldiers of the West Papuan National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement and I am not ashamed to admit that I admire them. They are a poorly armed and loosely affiliated collection of hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers from ancient rival clans who have been united over the last half-century by a shared struggle for the liberation of their own tiny corner of nowhere which has long been cruelly occupied by the colossal juggernaut of the Indonesian Army and its colonialist backers in the United States, the E.U., Australia and New Zealand. 

It is in fact the financial and military support of those western hegemons that has led this mighty little army to kidnap Philip Mehrtens from his single-engine passenger plane in a desperate attempt to hold one of Babylon's own for ransom. That ransom originally took the form of a bold demand for nothing less than full international recognition for West Papua's independence but has since been reduced to simple access to UN peacekeepers. Indonesia's counteroffer was delivered by heavily armed commandos sent to rescue Mehrtens Rambo-style, but the West Papuans sent these western trained killers back to Jakarta wrapped in body bags. In the only hostage video released since, Mehrtens appears alive and well to condemn Indonesia for resorting to dropping bombs on his position in the mountainous Nduga region in the wake of this failed raid.

The fact that most of the western media has covered almost none of this story is nothing new so I will do my very damnedest to catch you up on the modern world's long war against the stubborn people of West Papua. Indonesia is a vast archipelago of 38 provinces spread across thousands of Islands. West Papua is the easternmost territory in this expanse and the western half of the island of New Guinea which is the second largest island on earth after Greenland and home to the world's second largest rainforest after the Amazon. Like all too many third world inventions, Indonesia isn't so much a singular cohesive nation state as it is a colonialist conglomeration cobbled together by the Dutch when they took its islands by force in the late 19th century. 

After the fiery imperial implosion of the Second World War shattered the white man's grip on Southeast Asia, a former Japanese collaborator named Sukarno attempted to unite the many tribes of Indonesia under one flag in opposition to western imperialism. In doing so, this otherwise courageous leader secured his new nation's independence in 1949 but also sowed the seeds for decades of civil war and genocide by trying to use the western contraption of the Westphalian nation state to overcome the reach of his former masters.

The Dutch managed to retain control over West Papua in one last stand but with America's support, Sukarno invaded in 1961. The West Papuans attempted to declare independence the same year but quickly found themselves under attack by their supposed liberators for threatening the cohesion of the new Indonesian nation state. The UN officially took control of the region in 1962 and supervised what has been widely acknowledged by most international observers to be a totally fraudulent election on West Papua's fate in 1969. 

Only 1,026 representatives handpicked by the Indonesian military out of a population of 1 million were allowed to choose their nation's fate at barrel of a gun in what the UN had the gall to declare an Act of Free Choice.  Over 30,000 West Papuans had been slaughtered during the 8-year occupation that proceeded this vote. Considering that this slaughter was overseen by Suharto, the brigadier general chosen by the CIA to take Sukarno's place in 1965, it can hardly be considered shocking that his electoral hostages voted overwhelmingly in favor of their own subjugation.

1969 was also the year that Suharto held a conference in Geneva for the multinational elites who bankrolled his bloody coup. During this bougie soiree Suharto's fascist New Order junta essentially carved up Indonesia's natural resources and handed them over to the highest bidder piece by piece. In West Papua's case, that highest bidder would be the massive Anglo-American Freeport Mining Company whose board members included then National Security Advisor and future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Freeport would open what would become the world's largest goldmine in West Papua, reducing a sacred mountain to a bottomless pit and either murdering or displacing thousands in the process. This toxic hellhole would become Indonesia's single greatest source of revenue, pulling a million dollars a day from the earth before handing $33 billion dollars of the loot over to the jackals back in Jakarta between 1992 and 2004 alone.

Of course, none of this wealth would find its way back to the people of West Papua, 38% of which continue to live in poverty to this day. But the West Papuan people were treated to all the splendor of the modern world in a 50-year military occupation that continues to rage quietly as we speak. While Freeport counts their gold, over 500,000 civilians have been slaughtered in a massive spree of genocides against any indigenous tribe too proud to bow to progress. That's over 10% of the population. Women and children have been systematically raped, massive highways have been paved over mass graves, villages have been burnt to the ground during routine military sweeps, towers have been erected to house foreign investors and their mistresses, concentration camps have been carved out of the jungle and the Coca-Cola has flowed like wine and the sweet smoke of Menthol Marlboros has stained the air.

And of course, America the beautiful has been there every step of the way with her billions of dollars in guns and lethal aid awarded to the most savage death squads that money can buy, often all in the name of fighting terrorism. But most of the victims of Indonesia's final solution in West Papua don't even carry guns. In 1998, the entire village of Biak was loaded onto ships by the Indonesian Military and thrown into the ocean. Some 200 people, most of them women and children, drowned. Their act of terrorism was raising a flag that declared their independence from a cruel world that has violently intervened on their way of life. A way of life built on traditional Melanesian social contracts among hundreds of clans and marked by an absence of western style hierarchies or even Indonesian style chiefs. A way of life governed only by the will of the village.

West Papua's war isn't just a war against subjugation and genocide. It is a war against the forced homogeny of western civilization that those crimes serve. It is a war against a single world order with a single tribe of assimilated consumers. It is a war against the dislocation of humanity from the natural world and the dislocation of the natural world from the divine. It is a war against madness. I will concede that it is indeed a tragedy that innocent men like Philip Mehrtens have been caught up in this war, but I would also argue that it is far more tragic that the rest of us have not been considering that we too are the victims of this madness. Even with all the gold that we could steal from West Papua, the west is a desert of pathological loneliness, mass shootings and environmental devastation. We are literally choking on the fumes of the modern world that West Papua has decided they would rather die fighting than join. Maybe it is we who should join them.

Then again, maybe that's just the mental illness talking again. The narrative of another burnt out casualty of suburban decay during the heat of the Kali Yuga. But what else can I give when I find myself lost in the eyes of quixotic savages on the internet? My narrative is the only arrow that I have left in my quiver. This week that narrative belongs to West Papua for whatever little that's worth.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads

* Hey by the Pixies

* The Suburbs by Arcade Fire

* Back of a Van by Regina Spektor

* Gimme Gimme Gimme by Black Flag

* Safari by the Breeders

* Stand and Deliver by Adam & the Ants

* Search and Destroy by Iggy & the Stooges

* The Bends by Radiohead

* Human Behavior by Bjork

Why Anarchists Should Give a Fuck About Omali Yeshitela

“Sometimes our positions are unpopular in the short term, even among the masses, only to be vindicated as events unfold to reveal a truth that was obscured by the faulty analysis of the prevailing common perception. On such occasions we must move in opposition to the direction the masses are attempting to go. Otherwise, what is the meaning of leadership?”

-Omali Yeshitela

“The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat — & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you — so don’t play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr — accept the fact that you’re a criminal & be prepared to act like one.”

-Hakim Bey

 The name is Omali Yeshitela and maybe you've heard of him, but probably not. That's OK. It's not your fault. If you're reading this right now, odds are that you're only an American and the imperial zeitgeist demands a very short memory of its subjects, especially regarding the long history of badass motherfuckers who have resisted its dictates. I'm not special or anything, I'm just a marginalized geek with a lot of time on my hands. So, I'll do you a solid and fill you in, because in the pantheon of forgotten badass motherfuckers, Omali Yeshitela is about as bad as they come and he is currently on trial-by-empire for this sin, fighting for his life. So now seems about as appropriate a time as any for another one of my famous gonzo revisionist history lessons.

Before you can really understand Yeshitela and his importance to imperial apostates like me you have to understand exactly where he came from. Omali is a militant foot soldier in the struggle for Black Power who fought on the same battlefields as Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, H. Rap Brown and Mutulu Shakur and somehow lived to shout about it unbound. He was on the streets, in the shit, deep in the guts of Babylon during the height of J. Edgar Hoover's white supremacist jihad against the struggle for a New Afrikan consciousness and he's still fucking here. After Cointelpro and crack cocaine and Reaganomics and HIV/AIDS and the War on Drugs, Omali Yeshitela stands virtually alone as the last badass motherfucker swinging above ground and outside of a maximum-security plantation from the original Movement. All the snipers missed, and J. Edna died cursing his name. Statistically speaking, this is nothing short of a miracle.

So, above all else, Omali is a militant survivalist. Born Joseph Allen Waller in St. Petersburgh, Florida, the man who would become affectionately known by comrades as Chairman Yeshitela weathered a childhood in the ghettos of that sunny cities impoverished Gas Lamp District and four years in the white man's imperial army to become a founding father of St. Petersburgh's chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. After initiating a rash of successful boycotts to desegregate local business', Waller was infamously charged with a felony for tearing down a racist mural from the walls of St. Petersburgh's city hall. In spite of winning a landmark Supreme Court case that would help solidify this nation's standing on the use of double-jeopardy in persecuting his fellow political prisoners, Joseph Waller still spent two years in prison and over thirty years as a convicted felon before finally being granted clemency in the year 2000.

During that time, Joseph Waller became Omali Yeshitela and Omali Yeshitela declared total war against the system that wronged him and his people. He created the Burning Spear newspaper and formed and lead both the African People's Socialist Party and the international Uhuru Movement. He led the fight to free Dessie Woods after she was sentenced to 22 years in prison for killing her white would-be rapist with his own gun. He led campaigns that freed wrongfully convicted death row inmates like Wilbur Lee and Freddie Pitts from the gallows. He was on the frontlines of an uprising in the streets of St. Petersburgh when that city's finest murdered an innocent Black man named Tyron Mark Lewis in 1996. He ran for mayor in 1973 and 2001 on insanely revolutionary platforms that included emptying Florida's prisons and forming a goddamn African People's Liberation Army, and did I mention that motherfucker is still fucking hear!

More importantly, so is the movement he sired, and this movement is why a reactionary post-left tranarchist like me still counts this hardcore communist as a hero in my book. I may have abandoned my traditional Marxist-Leninist dogma along with my penis years ago for a weird gumbo of post-civ Queer tribalism and radical free market agorism, but I remain inspired by any movement that can create a revolutionary alternative to modern corporate supremacy right in the here-and-now and that is precisely what Chairman Yeshitela's African People's Socialist Party has done with their groundbreaking Black Power Blueprint.

They have built a complex and self-sufficient network of institutions across three states that has successfully weaponized the free market in order to create a thriving alternative to capitalism. Women's health centers, community gardens, doula programs, ex-con workforce operations, affordable housing co-ops and scores of non-profit Black-owned small businesses. This is how you win a revolution, by creating autonomous stateless nations inside the belly of the beast and showing the people that living without a master really is as simple as just living without a fucking master. This is what drew a genderfuck hillbilly like me to embrace the values of the Black Power Movement to empower my own people in the first place. I don't care if you call yourself an anarchist, a Maoist or a goddamn Mennonite, if you can sustain a community outside of the system then you are my ally and you have won.

But all of this hard work is in peril now as Omali Yeshitela and his movement find themselves in the crosshairs of Joe Biden's Department of Justice. Nearly a year ago, the FBI conducted a series of heavily armed pre-dawn raids on the homes and offices of the APSP in St. Lois and St. Petersburgh as part of a scant 25-page indictment against Aleksandr Ionov, a Russian citizen and Moscow resident who will conveniently never have to stand trial. Ionov operates an organization barely affiliated with the APSP called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia which the State Department claims has connections to Putin's Kremlin. The original charge was a vague allegation of "conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States." This was only replaced with a slightly less skimpy 37-page indictment last month that continues to offer just as little in the way of actual proof of wrongdoing. 

The Department of Justice now charges Chairman Yeshitela and three of his Uhuru comrades along with Ionov and two other alleged FSB agents with conducting a "multi-year foreign influence campaign in the United States." This baseless accusation basically amounts to the Russian government paying a bunch of pissed-off Black people to talk smack about the United States. But pissed-off Black people like Yeshitela have been flamboyantly calling out the United States Empire on its bullshit for over half a fucking century without requiring a Kremlin paycheck to do so. If you don't believe me, just read that motherfucker's almost hilariously bold rap sheet.

In 1968, shortly after being paroled for the high crime of desecrating minstrel art, Omali Yeshitela was arrested again for asserting that the "assassin's bullet that killed Dr. Martin Luther King also killed nonviolence." That same year, he was arrested once more for yelling "White pig!" during a sanitation strike. And in 1988, Omali was arrested again for his inappropriate comfortability with the First Amendment, this time for chanting "The police and the Klan work hand-in-hand!" in response to the police shooting of an APSP member named Kenneth Harrington. I'm not sure what part of the term 'Black Revolutionary' you people don't fucking understand but Omali Yeshitela's job is to shout theater in a crowded fire, to paraphrase another honkey fellow traveler by the name of Abbie Hoffman. 

Chairman Yeshitela has also made no secret of his willingness to meet with foreign agents over the years, a conspiracy better known as Freedom of Association. The APSP quite publicly held close relations with the sadly short-lived New Jewel Movement-led government of Grenada as well as Nicaragua's Sandinista's both during and after their revolution against the US-backed Somoza Dynasty. Omali also visited Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles to secure the endorsement of the Irish Republican Socialist Party for the APSP's long fight to secure reparations for slavery. Once again, the American Government is essentially just accusing Russia of paying a bunch of people to do what they've been doing for free for decades and this isn't the first time either. It seems like every time a charismatic Black person shouts "Black Power!" in this country they get charged with being a Kremlin spy. That's how they got rid of Marcus Garvey, that's how they indicted WEB Dubois and that's how they ruined Paul Robeson. 

The million-dollar question here is why? Why the hell is Black Power still so goddamn scary to the biggest fucking empire on earth? After all, these are the most radical of the most marginalized. As I pointed out at the beginning of this revisionist history rant, most of you motherfuckers have probably never even heard the name Omali Yeshitela before some white bitch shoved it in your face. Some of you are probably still googling Marcus Garvey, for Christ's sake. So, then what's with the big bad wolf routine from the DOJ? The answer lies in why an anarchist like me does know those names and why an anarchist like you should. These people get it. The basic core philosophy of the Black Power Movement is that all poor people are the victims of the American Empire, and we can only win when we unite, not as one globalist hegemon but as a thousand stateless third world tribes who just want to be left the fuck alone so we can live free and take care of our own in peace and dignity.

Babylon has to crush any motherfucker bad enough to speak this truth like bug before the word gets out that their temples are all made of paper and are mouths are all full of matches. Anyone who hates the state should give a fuck about the persecution of Omali Yeshitela because anyone who hates the state IS Omali Yeshitela. Let this rant be categorized as a hymnal to unapologetic solidarity across all tribes, weird and small.  Sing along if you know the words and we'll burn Babylon to the ground for a song.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Banned in DC by Bad Brains

* Hip Hop by Dead Prez

* Fall Back Down by Rancid

* Keep Ya Head Up by Tupac Shakur

* Joiner by Blondeshell

* Nazi White Trash by Leftover Crack

* Who We Be by DMX

* Anti-Curse by boygenius

* Sailin' On by Bad Brains

* Wolves by Dead Prez