The Free Market Should be a Weapon Against the Rich

"Every victim of statism has internalized the state to some degree... Should the taxpayers completely cut off the blood supply, the vampire state would helplessly perish, its unpaid police and army deserting almost immediately, defanging the monster."

-Samuel Edward Konkin III

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

-Antonio Gramsci

Everybody hates the rich and why not? We have nothing, they have everything, and they fucking stole it from us. I may not be the Castro worshipping Bolshevik I was in my twenties but as the Russians like to say, the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. Just take a quick look around you if you don't believe me. As the world literally chokes and burns on the exhaust fumes of private jets and Reaper drones, contemporary global inequality continues to creep closer and closer to the rank levels of excess last observed at the peak of the Gilded Age and America still leads the heat with wider disparities of wealth between the rich and poor than any other major developed nation on earth.

From the Great Depression to the Great Recession, time and time again, the One Percent has dragged the rest of us to the edge of one abyss after another and they have learned absolutely nothing. If anything, they've gotten worse, exploiting every new crisis they provoke with another industrial complex that shakes us down for pocket change while they sodomize their cousins and bleach their assholes.

It's little wonder that class warfare has never been more popular. In fact, it's become downright mainstream with even the Republicans getting in on the outrage. As they desperately struggle to shed their well cultivated image as the greed-is-good party, the GOP is beginning to sound downright Maoist with their increasingly incendiary calls to use the heavy levers of big government to punish or even annihilate the coastal elites and their woke conspiracy to make working class heroes sit down to pee.

Naturally, it doesn't take Antonio Gramsci to realize that this is just another work. The Republicans despise big tech and their partners in the burgeoning green economy because those cocky new upstarts pose a threat to the GOP's own pet gangsters in the rusting industrial and extraction industries. What we're actually witnessing here isn't the working-class takeover of the GOP that populist gadflies like Steve Bannon like to wax philosophic about on their podcasts. What we're witnessing is a growing civil war between competing cartels of oligarchs during the collapse of the morally bankrupt western civilization that gave birth to them both. In other words, the silver spoon riding whores of the Second Gilded Age are building even more industrial complexes to exploit the crisis of their own demise. Dante wept for there were no more hells left to dream of.

The only real service that the Republican Party's new Hardhat Riot routine provides to the poor they seek to exploit is that this theater does a pretty fantastic job of exposing a lot of the long-standing myths about the GOP's relationship with socialism and the free market. Contrary to the ramblings of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Republicans actually love socialism as long as it is the statist variety that transfers private property from the cold dead grip of the individual to the greasy mitts of big government. That's because there is nothing particularly revolutionary about this mutant breed of socialism. It's all about empowering an untouchable taker class to rob working people of their agency and this kind of socialism is actually precisely how the rich became the rich in the first place.

Gore Vidal wasn't just being cheeky when he called capitalism "Socialism for the rich." Every single billionaire, every global conglomerate, every Fortune 500 company is the direct product of the state. Without big government there would be no big business. Without highway subsidies and eminent domain there would be no Walmart. Without copyright laws and patents there would be no big pharma. Without the World Bank and the Fed there would be no George Soros. Without standing armies and world wars there would be no Exxon Mobile, no Lockheed Martin, no nuclear arms race, no global fucking warming.

No, Gore Vidal wasn't being cheeky at all when he called capitalism "Socialism for the rich." If anything, he didn't take that logic far enough. Any form of state socialism ultimately becomes just another luxurious plaything for the rich. Hell, even Castro died a millionaire. But state socialism isn't real socialism and capitalism doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with the free market.

Socialism at its base is any system that grants workers full control over the means of production. The very existence of the state renders this feat impossible by putting a permanent bureaucracy between the workers and the means of production, essentially monopolizing these means in the process. The free market or at least any truly free market is likewise rendered impossible by the existence of the state. The free market is essentially just the free exchange of goods and services without the intervention of coercive forces.

Quite possibly the greatest kept secret in the history of modern civilization is the fact that real socialism actually requires a truly free market to thrive. The original socialists of western Continental Philosophy, your Godwin's and your Proudhon's, the motherfuckers Marx ripped off, bastardized and then conveniently demonized, were all free marketeers because they recognized the free market as the greatest weapon in the working man's arsenal.

This isn't to say that the free market is an end unto itself. That kind of foolish utopian navel gazing is precisely what turned the International into a league of flatulence huffing dogmatic assholes. I don't fetishize the free market as some kind of silly Randian Lalaland of flowing wine and low hanging fruit. It is a tool to get what I want and what I want is the autonomy for all poor people to live in any kind of voluntary society that doesn't force its will on others because this level of universal working-class autonomy is likely the closest thing to a guarantee of living free that my own little tribe of Queer agrarian freaks is ever going to find. A simple social contract that reads 'get weird as long as I can get weird too.'

Needless to say, this unorthodox philosophy finds me at the awkward crossroads of some very strange territory. I now consider myself to be not just post-Marxist but post-left because I don't feel like any current left-wing movement has much to offer my people aside from crass tokenism and pandering assimilation. 

Quite frankly, Queer people seemed to be a hell of a lot better off in indigenous heathen tribes that pre-existed this whole left-right paradigm by a millennia. But I do believe that if the left wants to have any chance of achieving their goals, which are still largely my goals too, then they need to do the polar opposite of what the populist right is doing right now. They need to embrace the free market as a weapon against the rich as do we all.

We need to stop voting and start organizing. We need to diversify our tactics and we need to target the fixed capitalist market itself with a revolutionary campaign of guerrilla counter-economics. What the left-libertarian Gramsci, Samuel Edward Konkin III, called agorism, a complex and expanding network of voluntary exchanges that occur completely outside of the state's grasp. This wild territory already exists in the form of the black market with sex work, cryptocurrencies, dark web chatrooms, digital silk roads, undocumented labor, bootlegging and counterfeiting.

But this market needs to be radicalized with the inclusion of co-ops, homesteads, mutual aid associations, communes, free schools, squats and syndicalist trade unions. We need to integrate the underground into a united front of divided tribal organizations that can exist and thrive without the state and then we need to drop out, sit back, crack open a cold bottle of knock-off Coke and watch the billionaires of the vampire class starve without a neck to suck dry.

Because when and only when egalitarians of all stripes return to their free-market roots will the pigs of the One Percent's days of plenty truly be numbered and this is one free-market post-Marxist who's looking forward to that day with bated breath and a sharpened butcher knife.

Free the market! Fuck the rich!

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful by Morrissey 

* Beautiful Ones by Suede

* Eat the Rich by Motorhead

* Here Comes Success by Iggy Pop

* Veronica Mars by Blondeshell

* Bohemian Like You by the Dandy Warhols

* Lasting Friend by Samia

* Daddy Was a Bank Robber by the Clash

* Beginning to See the Light by the Velvet Underground

Dancing with Sharon Tate on Vincent Bugliosi's Grave

 "Where there is official censorship, it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers."

-Paul Goodman

America is a nation that loves its folklore and God help me, I do to. Who doesn't love a good bedtime story? The Good War that saved the free world from fascism, the benevolent reign of the Kennedy Dynasty over the grassy knolls of Camelot, the Space Race that put American democracy on the moon... These tales are all as much a part of the fabric of my childhood as Paul Bunyan, Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny. 

The tricky thing about folklore though is that just because it's fun to believe doesn't mean that it represents reality and American folklore is no exception to this rule. After all, America only entered the Good War after communism had already kicked fascism's skinny white ass and the Kennedy's were just a bunch of drunken rapists who hired the leftover Nazis to put us on the moon just to stick it to the Soviets while we lost in Vietnam.

This August marks the 54th anniversary of one of my personal favorite American folk tales. One that has amazingly stood the test of time relatively unmolested by the ravages of reality. I speak of the legend of Helter Skelter, a horror story about a brutal spree of frenzied bloodbaths that claimed the lives of no less than seven innocent people including a beautiful blonde starlet named Sharon Tate and her four glamorous house guests in the Hollywood Hills. 

This story also gave America the sadistic gift of our most cherished supervillain, the hippie Rasputin, Charles Manson, who controlled the minds of a zombie army of quarterbacks and prom queens to do his evil bidding. The most incredible thing about this legend is that nearly every detail that we think we know about it comes from a single source; Vincent Bugliosi, the valiant prosecutor who used Helter Skelter to jail Charlie and his Family and turned the case into the highest selling work of "true crime" literature ever published.

The basic story goes that Charlie Manson used LSD to brainwash a bunch of all-American teeny-boppers into slaughtering several B-list celebrities and a middle-class suburban couple in order to spark a race war foretold in the lyrics of a Beatles' album. The Blacks would win but once it became clear that they couldn't handle the reins of power, they would gladly hand them over to Charlie and his Family who would rise from their hole in the desert to take their place as the rightful rulers of a post-apocalyptic utopia. This is the "official story", and most Americans still buy it even though the man who wrote it doesn't. 

Vincent Bugliosi admitted within a couple years of prosecuting the Manson Family that he didn't buy a single word he used to sentence them all to death. Over the years, while continuing to collect royalty checks for Helter Skelter, Bug has sported another popular version of the events that made him famous, claiming that Charlie Manson's real goal was to get revenge on record producer Terry Melcher and the music industry who screwed him out of a record contract by murdering a bunch of random people living in Melcher's former mansion on Cielo Drive. However, thanks largely to the hard work of Tim O'Neill's myth busting Manson tell-all CHAOS we now know for a fact that not only is this version bullshit too, but Bugliosi knew it and helped construct it anyway just like he did Helter Skelter.

There are numerous documented accounts of Terry Melcher and his celebrity friends like Beach Boy Dennis Wilson communing with Manson and his underage harem well after the mass slaughter that was supposed to have driven fear into their hearts and Bugliosi covered it all up, instructing Melcher and others to commit perjury under oath in the process. When O'Neill's findings became known, the venerable prosecutor turned true crime celebrity hounded the dogged sleuth with threats of million-dollar lawsuits and pederast slander that only ended when that crook finally dropped dead. But why? Why all these years of lies? And why does most of this nation continue to insist on believing them?

Vincent Bugliosi's motives are actually a hell of lot clearer than Charlie Manson's. The man had well known ambitions of becoming a powerful California politician and he saw this sensational case as his golden ticket to glory. This is why that scheming scoundrel began writing his bestseller before the trial even began. He even had his co-author, Curt Gentry, in the courtroom front and center every day taking notes. The only problem was that the victims at 10050 Cielo Drive weren't just well connected to Hollywood royalty but most of them were also nearly as guilty as the people who killed them, and their own crimes likely sealed their fate.

It has been an open secret in Hollywood for decades that Sharon Tate's husband, Roman Polanski and his buddies, celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring and gutterland gadfly, Wojciech Frykowski, were little more than sexual predators and wannabe gangsters. Vincent Bugliosi revealed as much to Tim O'Neill when he told him early on in the latter's investigation that detectives investigating the murder scene at Cielo Drive had discovered a tape in Polanski's loft showing Sharon being raped by two other men with her husband presumably behind the camera. Bugliosi further displayed his willingness to cover up the crimes of the rich and famous when he told O'Neill that he had instructed the cops to put the tape back. Sadly, this was far from an isolated incident. 

Friends and family of Sharon have reported that Polanski was an abusive control freak, with many believing that Sebring, Frykowski and Frykowski's heiress girlfriend Abigail Folger were not at Cielo Drive as mere houseguests but as babysitters, tasked with making sure that the pregnant Tate didn't flee while Polanski was off shooting a movie in Europe. During this time those creeps were given the full lay of the land and according to friends and enemies alike, they turned that mansion into a den of depravity well before Manson crashed the party.

Roman's good friend, famous actor/director Dennis Hopper told reporters "They had fallen into sadism, masochism and bestiality and they recorded it all on tape." Hopper claimed that police had confirmed this when he was interviewed in the days following the murders. He also claimed that three days before the slaughter, 25 people were invited to the house to witness a "mass whipping" of a drug dealer who had allegedly sold Sebring and Frykowski bad dope. 

This dealer was a character named Pic Dawson, a Canadian career criminal who led a gang of notorious drug smugglers who were all sexually involved with Cielo Drive regular, Mama Cass. According to Frykowski's lifelong friend and accomplice, Witold Kaczanowski, who was also the last man to see him alive, Pic and his crew were not just the primary source of the mansion's drug supply, they were also staking out their claim as the primary source of a trendy new Canadian amphetamine known as MDA and Frykowski had ambitions of becoming their Hollywood connect. But Dawson wasn't the only career criminal who was a fixture of this increasingly freaky Hollywood party scene. According to none other than Neil Young, "A lot of pretty well-known musicians around LA knew Manson, though they'd probably deny it now."

That's because Charles Manson wasn't a cult leader, he was a pimp who hustled underage girls to the Hollywood elites like a fringe leather Jeffrey Eppstein. The ugly truth about the Manson murders is that the people who killed the residents of Cielo Drive were likely also on a first name basis with them and this is probably why they were hired out to do it. We will likely never know for sure. Too much time has passed, too many lies have been told and most of the people who know the truth are dead. The only two things that I know for sure are that Vincent Bugliosi was a goddamn liar and Sharon Tate did not deserve to die with her captors. But every bad folk tale deserves a good one to counter it, so here's mine for you.

Charles Manson was not some criminal mastermind. He was a career con artist who was very much a man of his times. Manson began his Family as a hustle to pimp out teenage runaways to Hollywood bigshots, but he needed muscle to keep them in line, so he hired a small-time drug dealer from the Lone Star State named Charles "Tex" Watson. Watson made a failed attempt to rob a competing Black dealer named Bernard Crowe, but Crowe got the drop on Tex, kidnapped his girlfriend and threatened to come down to the derelict movie ranch that Manson and his girls occupied with his crew and wipe the whole place from the map.  Manson decided to act first and gut shot Crowe, falsely believing that he had killed the gangbanger in the process. For reasons that remain unknown, Manson, a lifelong white supremacist, also came to believe that Crowe was a Black Panther, and that this terrifying militia of heavily armed brothers was now gunning for him.

Manson conspired to hire his own army for protection. He befriended a Canadian greaser named Danny DeCarlo, who served as the treasurer for a local outlaw biker outfit called the Straight Satans, by plying him and his friends with free underage scootch. Danny even took Manson's psychotic bottom bitch Susan Atkins for a lover, but his fellow bikers soon tired of jailbait and VD, so Manson needed another way to earn their favor. Bobby Beausoleil, who served as a sort of go-between for the Satans and the Family, managed to secure the bikers with 1,000 tabs of mescaline from a local basement chemist who he had bunked with named Gary Hinman. When the mescaline turned out to be toxic, DeCarlo roughed up Beausoleil and demanded their money back. Manson's attempt to squeeze Hinman ended up with Hinman dead and Beausoleil in prison for his murder.

So, what is a paranoid racist pimp to do when he has managed to conjure up the wrath of both the Black Panthers and the Straight Satans? Perhaps pick up a hit job on some Hollywood rapists that even the Satans were afraid to touch and try to make it look like part of a Black Panther murder spree by targeting a random white couple in the burbs the next night. Sure, it's a conspiracy theory but so was Helter Skelter and, knowing what we know now, which one do you find more plausible? 

But there are still more unanswered questions and terrifying possibilities on hand here. What gave Manson the idea that Bernard Crowe, a lowly two-bit hustler, was a Panther? And why the hell did it take the cops so long to bust the Family? Manson was a violent repeat offender and a documented sexual predator, yet he was allowed to violate his parole repeatedly without so much as having a charge brought against him. Manson's own playpen at Spahn Ranch was under heavy police surveillance before becoming the target of what was then the largest raid in Los Angeles law enforcement history just weeks after the Tate-Labianca murders. A cache of semi-automatic weapons, credit cards and stolen cars were recovered from the scene, but Charlie and his Family were all released without a charge.

Call me paranoid but this list of bewildering facts screams just one word loud and clear in my ears and that word is INFORMANT. A word that coexists quite uncomfortably with COINTELPRO, an FBI/law enforcement mission to destroy the sixties counterculture by sicking its various unruly factions against each other with lies and disinformation that frequently ended in paranoid bloodbaths. 

But perhaps the scariest possibility of all is that Charles Manson, snitch and pimp to the stars, may not have even been the devil after all but rather just another bit player in a melodrama far less climactic than anything Bugliosi could build a career on. After all, it was Tex Watson who actually committed most if not all of the murders and it was Tex Watson who was the Hollywood drug dealer with a recorded history of pulling disastrously violent burns against his rivals. But unlike Manson, Tex was not a camera-ready supervillain that Vincent could galvanize voters in the Valley against.

In fact, Tex could have easily been one of his constituency's native sons; a star quarterback and honor roll student who found himself so disenfranchised with the monotonous suburban purgatory that the Greatest Generation killed and conspired with Nazis to build that he chose to voluntarily throw in his lot with the freaky people they sneered at. This more than any other folktale about the Summer of Hate seems to be the hardest and darkest for the American mind to comprehend which is precisely why it demands comprehension otherwise another Helter Skelter remains just a kiss away.

When you raise your children on lies and throw them out like trash for not believing them, don't be shocked to find them recycled into blowback when the freaky people tell them the truth. As for this storytelling freaky person, I'm just a messenger spitting in Roman Polanski's eye while I wait for my turn to dance with Sharon Tate's ghost on Vincent Bugliosi's grave.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Happiness is a Warm Gun by the Beatles

* Expressway to Yr Skull by Sonic Youth

* Loaded by Primal Scream

* Dear Prudence by Siouxsie & the Banshees

* Frankenstein by New York Dolls

* Garbage Dump by Charles Manson

* Golden Hair by Slowdive

* Teenage Riot by Sonic Youth

* Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Vapor Trail by Ride

* Helter Skelter by the Beatles

* My Monkey by Marilyn Manson

Bowe Bergdahl, Sinead O'Connor and the Virtue of Mental Illness

 

“Madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.”

-Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

It has been said that these are dangerous days, to say what you feel is to dig your own grave. Truer words have never been spoken by saints or sinners. Lately, it feels like all I do is dig and no matter how deep I sink my shovel, I never seem to hit rock bottom. 

Transgender children are being mauled by legislation that brazenly invalidates their existence, my friends are being thrown out into the streets by their so-called kin, Ukrainians are peppering their neighbors' playgrounds with cluster munitions for membership in a social club that openly despises them, my found family of misfit Queers can't seem to find a vehicle that can carry us for longer than a mile without catching fire, the Sahara Desert is slowly crossing the Mediterranean Ocean onto the scorched shores of Southern Europe and it all feels so goddamn personal to me that I could fucking scream bloody murder for hours on end without ever going hoarse.

It's moments like this when I feel like I just can't fucking do this anymore. Everything I do hurts. Everywhere I step is a landmine. Everything I hear shatters my brittle heart into a thousand little pieces. And every time I lose my shit, the world stares at me like a leper at a pool party and tells me to just calm the fuck down. Every week is a new nervous breakdown, another crying fit in a well-lit public space, another fist fight with an army of angry ghosts who never seem to get tired of watching me swing my bloody fists in the wind. And it was at the bruised ass end of another one of these weeks of being thrown curve ball after curve ball that I can only seem to catch with my face that two stories seemed to hit me just hard enough to put all this carnage into perspective.

After what feels like centuries of well-publicized disgrace, former army sergeant-turned-deserter Bowe Bergdahl had the bullshit charges against him vacated just days before Sinead O'Connor lost her own 56-year battle with ghosts alone in a London apartment. Try as I might, I can't seem to separate these two stories any more than I can seem to separate the endless trials of my loved ones with the suffering of the world around us. Much like me, both Bowe Bergdahl and Sinead O'Connor are complicated characters who have been defined by their struggles with mental illness. They have been branded by friends and foes alike as being unwell. But were they really? 

Bowe Bergdahl was a soldier who walked away from his post one day in 2009 and hasn't stopped being punished for that decision since. He spent five years as a prisoner of war in the custody of the Taliban, being flogged with copper wires and kept in a cage too small for an animal before finally being released as part of a prisoner exchange in 2014. Then-President Barack Obama celebrated this shallow victory in a pointless war he actively continued to stoke with Bowe's parents at the Rose Garden but when Obama's partisan adversaries succeeded in cajoling the military into persecuting the 44th president's political football he quietly washed his hands like Pontious Pilot and ignored Bowe's parents' pleas for a pardon as a man who had openly called for their son's execution prepared to take Obama's place in the White House.

"I am sorry for everything here... The people need help. Yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live... We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks." These were the words that Bowe Bergdahl sent his father in an email before he walked away from a war that would take his country another decade to admit we lost before it even began. A group of his fellow veterans who left those same battlefields to seek employment on Capitol Hill sending other people's children to die in their place are now begging the Defense Department to retry Bowe and lock him up this time. But Bowe Bergdahl is the man that we call crazy. Just like we did Sinead O'Connor.

While the music industry loudly sings the praises of their fallen prodigal daughter, 'that poor crazy girl', they conveniently neglect to mention that it was they who hurled her out into the cold for defying their decree of silence in regard to the crimes of the powerful against the voiceless. Sinead sold seven million records for these gutless jackals and was showered with trophies and trinkets before she threw it all away by tearing up a single picture on live television. That picture was of a man named Pope John Paul II. A man in charge of a church whose crimes against children were rocking Sinead's home country of Ireland to its very core at the time of her performance on Saturday Night Live in 1992. The same church that robbed her of a childhood and me as well. In fact, 1992 was also the year that I was molested in the basement of one of the Catholic Church's schools in rural Pennsylvania.

For the crime of so much as even speaking our names, Sinead O'Connor was shunned by the waking world and turned into an international pariah. She spent the last thirty years of her life being heckled and mocked and belittled as mad, ill, unstable... Even after the crimes she threw herself on the flames to warn you people of were made horrifically public, Sinead remained persona non grata while John Paul was canonized as a saint. 

But Sinead also remained brazenly unapologetic, insisting that she "fucked up their career, not mine." And perhaps that was the craziest thing about this woman. She never wanted the shallow idolatry of her vapid peers. As she proudly proclaimed of the fallout from that telltale event, "There was no doubt about who this bitch is. There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star." Clearly, the words of a crazy woman. For daring to utter such blasphemy, Sinead would only be honored in death.

What the fuck is crazy anyway? And who exactly gets to decide? Insanity is defined as a deviation from normal behavior. But what would have been "normal behavior" for a soldier and a pop star? Had Bowe Bergdahl been sane, he would have kept his mouth shut and his rifle steady while children continued to die in the streets and turned his career as a hired gun for the state into something to brag about in a resume for public office. Had Sinead O'Connor been sane, she would have kept her mouth open but allowed nothing but silly nonsense to escape it for the thoughtless pleasure of the masses. Thank God that Bowe Bergdahl and Sinead O'Connor were insane because when sanity is defined by a society that values blind patriotism and vapid cultural ephemera above the lives of children there is no virtue more honorable than insanity.

Our twisted society persecutes those of us brave enough not to conform to its collective sickness by making us feel bad just for feeling bad about living in a world that they made bad. Well, I'm through with feeling bad about feeling bad anymore. I am ill and I am ill because this world, this society, this civilization that we all hold in such high regard makes me ill. Quite frankly. it should make you ill too. And if saying these words out loud makes me crazy then I am proud to be crazy. Just remember what I told you, dearest motherfuckers, because if they hate Bowe, Sinead and me then they will hate you too. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* War by Bob Marley & the Wailers

* Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor

* Vampire Empire by Big Thief

* I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones

* The Day After Tomorrow by Tom Waits

* Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor

* Suffer Little Children by the Smiths

* Crazy by Patsy Cline

* Bug Like an Angel by Mitski

* Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana

Bringing the War Home to the Border to Make Imperialism Great Again

 There is no use arguing that Donald Trump hasn't existentially altered the conversation on war in this country and sweet Kali knows that I've tried. I've been crying bullshit in all caps on that swinging bologna salesman's phony isolationist, Pat Buchanan-with-dick-jokes act since he crashed the GOP primaries on his golden escalator in 2016. The man is a pathological liar with a long and well documented career of saying quite literally everything and anything to make a buck and keep his cojones out of the fire. Just try taking a jog through the ruins of Atlantic City without a fully automatic Uzi if you don't fucking believe me.

Orange-Man-Bad's America First strip tease was just his latest sales pitch but after eight years of George W. Bush and another eight of his mentholated doppelganger, Barack Obama, a lot of disgruntled conservatives and independents were just pissed off enough to buy it, hook, line and sinker. This included one of my heroes, paleolibertarian muckraker and co-founder of antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, who literally went to his grave believing that Donald J. Trump would be the man who brought American conservatism back to its populist non-interventionist roots. Watching that brilliant son of a bitch go down with that ship is one of the most painful things I've ever witnessed but he was only half-wrong.

Donald Trump may have turned out to be every bit as ghastly and cravenly opportunistic as I smugly predicted he would be, increasing civilian drone strike casualties by 330% and overseeing a Saudi holocaust in Yemen which claimed the lives of over 300,000 starving peasants, but that walking jack-o-lantern did succeed in lighting a fire under right-wing isolationism that has significantly altered the DNA of America's bipartisan combat addiction. Trump may be full of shit but the wave of rural disgust with America's runaway war machine that he inadvertently gave license to is not and the recent wave of conservative dissent against Joe Biden's reckless proxy war in Ukraine proves it. 

Pew Research has found that 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that America is sending entirely too much murder machinery to that hopeless death march to a third world war and that number seems to be growing daily. The opportunistic money changers in both the GOP and the right-wing media sphere have recognized this trend and some of them are cashing in.

Before running afoul of his corporate overlords, Tucker Carleson built a veritable tabloid empire trashing transgender freaks like me while simultaneously cussing out the wars that I've been raging against since he was busy deep throating Deepak Chopra on CNN. This included trashing Trump himself when he bombed Syria and apparently even talking him out of a full-scale air war against Iran. It was a crazy Malcolm McLaren-esque gamble that would eventually blow up in Tucker's face and send him to the wilderness of whatever the fuck twitter self-identifies as this week but if the almost exclusively conservative opposition to a nuclear holocaust in the Wild Steppes proves anything it's that he and Trump were following the money even when the system wanted to pretend that it didn't exist.

This is the real reason why Wall Street sewar mutants like Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney despise the MAGA phenomenon and it's actually the same damn reason why Wall Street sewar mutants like Hillary Clinton and Ted Turner despise the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Because even a fraud can be a threat to the status quo when they empower the peasants to revolt against it. Now we have to contend with the bizarre spectacle of confirmed rapists and Zionist fuckboys like Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis chumming the waters of the partisan zeitgeist with brazenly antiwar legislation and campaign promises. I can just hear that old bastard Justin Raimondo now, hissing in my ear "I told you so!" before bumming another cigarette off Ayn Rand in the fires of hell.

But spectacle is not always reality, and you don't have to scratch the GOP's newfound isolationist rhetoric very hard to smell an illusion. While half the GOP may be running for reelection on cutting arms shipments to Ukraine, the entire party remains frighteningly united on redirecting them much closer to home with an open shooting war at the border. This terrifying bait-and-switch was made revoltingly graphic by the new lord of isolationism himself, Tucker Carlson, during an interview he did for the Blaze with 2024 GOP Primary darling, Senator Tim Scott. 

After rightly trashing Biden's recent decision to mobilize 3,000 reserve troops for possible deployment to Europe, Tucker exposed the real color of his peace flag, and it was anything but white. "Why not build a human wall with say, the reservists who were called up to go defend Ukraine- why wouldn't they be defending our border?" To which Scott responded like a good gimp with a drooling, ball gagged "Yup." before Tucker continued his messianic call to literally bring the war home to the Rio Grande. "If you've got millions of military age men coming into your country and hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying, why is that not the job of the military to stop?" After swallowing this salty load whole, Scott responded with another grinning, snaggle-toothed nod of approval, and I dearly wish that he was the only one.

Sadly, this isn't just some fringe position performed to turn on the Proud Boys. Even the most supposedly non-interventionist Republicans seem to be lockstep behind this insane plot to fight the failed War on Drugs with the failed War on Terror and it has become an early benchmark of the 2024 Republican Primaries with Donald Trump's only real challenger, Ron DeSantis, taking it to the edge and shoving it off with a demented proposal to conduct unilateral raids deep inside Mexican territory to disrupt fentanyl manufacturing , with or without their government's consent, along with throwing down a naval blockade on their ports to intercept raw materials from China.

Yep, that's right folks, the "isolationists" want to declare war on Mexico and the neocons and neoliberals do to. Longshot Ziocon heartthrob Nikki Haley has joined her critics in the chorus by calling to send US Special Forces into Mexico to attack the cartels "just like we dealt with ISIS." And none other than Hillary's 2016 VP pick, Senator Tim Kaine, is pushing bipartisan legislation to have fentanyl declared a "national security threat" as we speak.

I shouldn't have to tell you people how this tragic comedy ends because it already fucking ended with Plan Colombia, a Clinton/Bush era military crusade that was supposed to cleanse the Andes of the great white scourge of cocaine. The only thing it really achieved aside from mugging taxpayers of billions of dollars was help Colombia's despicably corrupt police state to expand its presence deep into the farthest reaches of the Amazon Jungle where they carried out multiple genocides against indigenous people who had the misfortune of existing on territory slated for rape by American mining conglomerates. In one final twist, Coca cultivation and cocaine production actually increased as it turned out that the fascist death squads that Plan Colombia armed and trained were far bigger pushers than FARC and Escobar combined. 

But the American war machine has never really been all that interested in results. They're much more interested in justifying their malign existence to an electorate that has clearly grown to hate their fucking guts. They achieve this goal by making war feel personal to the average, naturally isolationist, American prole. In 2001 that meant exploiting their own blowback at Ground Zero on 9/11. A lot of people forget that old Dubya actually ran against Al Gore in 2000 as a quasi-isolationist promising an end to feckless globalist campaigns like Clinton's "humanitarian" disaster in the Balkans. Then a few Saudis chucked some jetliners into Manhattan and the feeding frenzy began all over again.

In 2024, the closest thing the war machine has to 9/11 is the Fentanyl Crisis. Another colossal clusterfuck of imperial blowback brought on by Big Pharma and Big Prohibition. Their hope is to sell forever war back to MAGA isolationists by cleverly labeling it as a matter of territorial integrity. But if paleos foolishly believe that this thing is going to stop with a few drone strikes in Sinaloa then I have some swampland in Guantanamo Bay to sell them. 

We are talking about declaring war on an entire black-market industry here. An industry that reaches far into the Heartland and employs hundreds of thousands of American citizens, most of whom are just desperate addicts trying to get by. We are also talking quite glibly about expanding this war to China by blaming a rising superpower for our nation's appetite to alter its own consciousness just because Beijing happens to be home to the labs that make the best precursors for our current fix of choice. 

Long story short; once again, all roads lead back to derailing the Eurasian Century. Rabid animals like Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis don't want peace and isolation. They want to make America great again and prevent a nuclear confrontation with Russia by making forever war great again on our own borders and provoking a nuclear confrontation with China. This isn't populist regime change; it's imperial rebranding and you people should be smart enough by now not to buy this trash for the fiftieth goddamn time in a row. Justin Raimondo weeps.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Search & Destroy by the Stooges

* Shell Games by Bright Eyes

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

* Just Like Henry by Dressy Bessy

* I'm Waiting for the Man by the Velvet Underground

* Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* Human Behavior by Bjork

* Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols

* Breathe by the Prodigy

This screed is devoted in loving memory to Sinead O'Connor, a ferocious woman with a loud voice who gave a frightened little girl inside a broken man the courage to stand taller than towers. She will not be forgotten and that is a promise you will have to kill me not to keep.

Ukraine is a Land Lynched by Borders

 "From these unfolding vistas of human misery and from personal misery, man must forge convictions, call other men his brothers, and fight for freedom. Man is only free if he is prepared to kill every hangman and every power magnate if they do not wish to stop their shameful tasks."

-Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on the planet who has noticed that pretty much everyone seems to be losing the war in Ukraine. You would never know it from all the shameless cheerleaders on the mainstream news, but this thing is a downright ghastly dumpster fire and Vladimir Putin isn't the only one getting burned. The entire Eurasian landmass is gagging on the toxic fumes of that endless proxy war and the pollution is spreading fast. 

We're all generally kept abreast of Putin's imperial blunders but just because the NATOcrats on CNN publicly jack off to the details doesn't mean they're not true. That mincing little shit isn't fucking up nearly as bad as Zelensky's English-speaking fanboys would have you believe but he's still fucking up. Desperately trying to advertise himself as some kind of heroic patriot for sucking his people into an unwinnable crusade that any first-day Kremlinologist should have been able to deduct was a trap designed by Russia's western adversaries to ensnare them into the kind of imperial regime change nightmare that usually only neocons are thick enough to act on.

Not that Volodymyr Zelensky has fared any better from this hideous conspiracy. If last week's NATO summit in Vilnius should have made anything painfully clear it is that Kiev is getting poned by this plot every bit as Badly as the Kremlin is if not worse. Nation after nation at that satanic shindig took turns thanking Ukraine for feeding an entire generation into their woodchipper before announcing that their country club isn't excepting any new members until old members drop dead. Meanwhile, Ukrainian-born strippers are jumping out of cakes and blowing Sweden in the next room while "Celebrate Good Times" ushers in their rushed membership. 

Basically, if Putin is playing Carry in this Disney remake of a Brian De Palma classic, then Zelensky is the hunky dud in the feathered hair getting nailed in the dome by the blood bucket and that bucket is coming down hard in the Donbass where this waking nightmare started and refuses to end.

Even with Putin's favorite neo-Nazi privateers in Wagner pulling pranks on him in the motherland, Ukraine is still getting savagely bushwacked in their long-anticipated spring offensive. With an arsenal of Lucifer's finest toys and a price tag three times higher than most of their neighbor's GDPs combined, Zelensky's plucky conscripts haven't managed to move their trenches more than an inch to the east. But fuck it, maybe a fresh batch of cluster bombs will do the trick. Hell, why not napalm and agent orange too while we're pimping out the civilian killing winners? 

No, the only winners in Ukraine are the pimps themselves in the arms industry and they don't even have to sully their ring fingers with peasant's flesh just so long as they can draft more Slavic teenage slaves to smack their bitch up for them.

This shit is fucking depressing me. As a lapsed-tankie war-nerd turned collapsitarian Putin-skeptic, I never thought I'd get sick of analyzing my old ideological stomping grounds in the former Soviet Union, but no one seems to be heeding my observations and they're actually pretty fucking basic. Everyone is losing this stupid goddamn war because everyone is on the wrong side of the wrong border. Russia has no right to run roughshod over Ukraine regardless of what twisted john they allow to cum in their unprotected asshole and Ukraine has no right to do the same damn thing to the Donbass for the same damn reasons.

All people have the right to secede when their nation acts without their consent and that nation has the right to get blown to bits like a bully in Straw Dogs for trying to stand in their way. Russia gets their ass kicked every time they forget that Ukraine doesn't want to play Soviet Union anymore and Ukraine gets their ass kicked just as hard every time that they forget that "liberating" the Donbass with cluster bombs is how this sick quagmire got started in the first place. 

There are no more heroes left alive in this war, only imbeciles that refuse to take a time-out from murdering each other to read a history book and what history should teach everyone in this campaign of carnage is that the biggest villain in Ukrainian history has and always will be that imperial contraption known as the border.

Borders have lynched these wild steppes for centuries. Putin likes to play up the fact that Ukraine has never been able to hold those imaginary lines on his fancy maps in place for longer than a few decades but more often than not it has been his own nation moving them back and forth at will to serve their own fleeting imperial pretensions. Most of the territories that comprise present-day Ukraine have been Russian property for at least fifteen minutes but large portions of them have also been Polish, Ottoman, and German too. 

The current Russified colonies of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhya, and Crimea were all part of a Russian territory known as Novorossiya aka New Russia after being acquired throughout the 18th century and Catherine the Great pumped them full of their current ethnic Russian populace to secure this new vassal state.  Ukraine's borders and the impoverished tribes trapped between them continued to be warped beyond recognition by moneyed outsiders throughout the bloody World Wars, with English armed Czarist henchmen reigning White Terror over ethnic Russians, Stalin starving insubordinate ethnic Ukrainians, Hitler arming the survivors to get genocidal revenge, and Khrushchev stapling Crimea to the battered ass of the bloodlands like a pinata.

Basically, it has been one wild game of imperial grab-ass after another in that region with only the poorest Ukrainians and Novorossiyans being asked to foot the bill, often with their own lives. But the reality that neither side seems willing to own is that the western steppes of Ukraine have always been a wild and stateless region of nomadic warriors and shiftless drifters, and this is precisely what makes that place great when meddling outsiders aren't turning it into a bog full of blood.

Ukrainian culture was defined by distinctly Eurasian stateless federations, including the Rus who would come to define Russian culture as well. The finest among these proud heathen mongrels though were the Zaporizhian Sich, an anarchist Cossack polity that ruled the very land their ancestors on both sides are killing each other over as we speak for nearly three centuries.

Much like modern Ukraine, this feared and respected entity of unapologetic barbarians was by no means racially pure. They were a mixed-up hodgepodge of serfs and outlaws who fled the stuffy Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to build a life without masters in a land too wild to be governed. They pledged their loyalty to no state and ran a uniquely egalitarian society led by popular assemblies with elected representatives that could be recalled at the drop of a sword by popular decree. Even after the Anglophilic Czars broke up the Sich the way they did their own Cossacks and assimilated them into their armies, that land remained haunted by their ungovernable spirit.

This was the same region that proved to be a hotbed for the populist Narodniks who would inspire the Russian Revolution. This was the same region where Europe's original Jewish converts held their last stand as a truly stateless nation in the Pale of Settlement. And this is the same region that briefly served as a homebase for Nestor Makhno's infamous Black Army who took on both the Reds and the Whites during the Russian Civil War and continue to inspire generations of anarchists like me across the globe to dream wild and demand what assholes like Putin and Biden tell us is impossible.

The real reason why Ukrainians and Novorossiyans cannot peacefully coexist is because Ukraine itself cannot peacefully exist within anyone's borders. That Westphalian concept makes no more sense for those steppes than it does for the Middle East or the American Southwest. The only sustainable borders on this planet are those governed by nature, by shores and forests and mountain ranges. By bioregions where nature dictates culture rather than the other way around. And in an environment with no oceans and no forests and where the only mountains to be seen are a hundred miles aways and the deserts and fields stretch on into oblivion, no border can sustain itself and only the wild can live in peace.

When I pray to the gods for Ukraine, I pray for the harmonious chaos of the Cossacks, because theirs was a fire that only burned tyrants and tyrants hold no right to the wild steppes.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Like a Rolling Stone by Drive-By Truckers

* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

* Rite of Cleansure by Burzum

* Celebration by Kool & the Gang

* Chosen To Deserve by Wednesday

* The One I Love by REM

* Southwood Plantation Road by the Mountain Goats

* Equimanthom by Bathory

* Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division

* Smack My Bitch Up by the Prodigy

* International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats

From Oslo to Jenin: A Call for a No-State Solution

 The West Bank is on fire again. In fact, that patch of sand hasn't stopped burning since Benjamin Netanyahu hijacked the Knesset late last year. In a seven month stretch that shameless gangster has taken Israel's seven-decade Nakba and pushed it into increasingly genocidal territory. 190 Palestinians have been killed, 174 of them in the first half of 2023 alone. Israel's American armed gestapo in the IDF have carried out near daily raids in the West Bank while swelling mobs of openly fascist illegal settlers have matched them with their own sweeping pogroms, burning entire villages to the ground.

This latest wave of mutilation is all part of a Faustian bargain that Bibi has made with Israel's rising far right. As long as this coalition of religious whack-jobs and Jewish supremacists agrees to keep that hoza's pink ass out of the slammer he is more than happy to hand them what's left of the West Bank on a spit. This was made obscenely clear with Bibi's promise to expand Israel's illegal settlements by 13,000 homes and his decision to toss his openly genocidal finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the keys to the Nakba with his own customized private army in the Ministry of Defense.

The result has been a whistling pressure cooker of creeping ultraviolence that finally exploded in Jenin this month with a two-day raid that set a new precedent for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank but also raised the bar on their increasingly desperate citizenry's refusal to go down without a fight. For 48 hours the entire weight of Israel's hulking military might rained down on this tiny, impoverished refugee camp. Swarmed by over 2,000 heavily armed troops with hundreds of armored vehicles, Jenin was encircled and completely cut off from the outside world, with bulldozers obliterating all roads leading out of the camp and destroying its capacity to provide its citizens with clean water and electricity. 

Between airstrikes from Reaper drones and Apache gunships, IDF loudspeakers instructed the besieged population to abandon their homes or be obliterated. More than 3,000 civilians out of a population of just over 20,000 heeded their warning under a storm cloud of tear gas. But those who stayed behind had the final word with a brazen message written in fire reading 'fuck around and find out.'

12 Palestinians were killed and over one hundred were injured but they held their own against one of the most ferocious armies on earth with little more than glorified zipguns and bottle rockets. Ultimately, they left the hopelessly bogged down IDF with little option but to retreat. This David-and-Goliath spectacle was made all the more stunning by the fact that the militants in these poorly armed brigades were quite literally children, teenage boys with a whole life of oppression ahead of them and nothing to lose but blood and anguish. The oldest casualty was 23 and five of the dead were minors. Israel retreated with its pointed red tail between its legs, promising to come back for more with their hoza-in-chief declaring the operation to be "open ended." Their unshaken teenage targets shouted back, 'Bring it!' with their fists balled and bloodied at their sides and the watching world shuttered.

The only thing more delightfully consistent than Israel's failure to take their victims seriously in the streets of their own neighborhoods is Palestine's ability to kick their fucking ass with its arms tied behind its back. However, Bibi was right about at least one thing. This isn't over and there is no reason to believe that it won't get worse. If the latest attempt to ethnically cleanse Jenin failed with flying colors to break the iron will of a few very pissed-off Arab kids, it sadly succeeded in proving that even the most obnoxiously PC administration in White House history still doesn't give a single solitary fuck about brown lives on the wrong side of the Dead Sea.

After the Biden Administration made all the usual cowardly noises about their Zionist Gollum's inalienable right to defend itself from crumbling ghettos packed with orphans, Israel's Defense Ministry proudly announced its plans to buy another 25 stealth F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin by 2027 with $3 billion of the American taxpayer's hard-robbed money in military aid. In other words, put your wallet away Bibi, the next ten bloodbaths are on us.

My old comrades on the far left will blame this ongoing holocaust on Bejamin Netanyahu and the rise of Israeli fascism that he is presiding over in exchange for a pardon for his corruption spree and they won't be wrong, but they will be missing the point. The most tragic detail about this deadly new stage of the Nakba is that its results became inevitable the day that Yasser Arafat forfeited the duties to defend the West Bank to its fucked-over orphans by signing the Oslo Accords in 1993. It pains me to no end to admit this, but the roots of the bomb in Jenin were formed by a fuse lit with a flaming peace deal called the Two-State Solution and too many good people on the left continue to foolishly warm their hands by the embers of its smoldering ashes.

Once upon a time, Yasser Arafat was our everything. As the fearless keffiyeh clad leader of the PLO, he was like Che Guevara and Mahatma Ghandhi rolled into one mind blowing spliff. After decades of taking the stick to Israel's ass with bold revolutionary actions on nearly every continent on earth, Yasser switched gears and lead an equally daring campaign to make hay with his street cred by breaking bread with his enemies in exchange for a sovereign Palestinian state. In 1993, his labor led to a historic agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin that was supposed to negotiate a settlement to a two-state solution with a Palestinian national entity on the land occupied by Israel since 1967.

The western world rejoiced but Palestine mourned what felt like a cheap consolation prize for being raped by a winner. Edward Said would famously describe the Oslo Accords as "Palestine's Versailles" but it was actually far worse. For all his lofty ambitions and tireless efforts, the only thing that Yasser Arafat had really achieved with that supposedly historic deal was reducing a vibrant revolutionary movement into an easily corruptible state called the Palestinian Authority.

By the end of the nineties, the number of Zionists illegally colonizing the West Bank had nearly doubled and Palestine had lost its patience with Arafat's broken promises of peaceful coexistence with an unrepentantly abusive spouse. Radical young Islamist upstarts in groups like Hamas launched a fiery second Intifada in 2000. Arafat may have grown corrupt and rich in his new position as king of the ghettos, but he still couldn't bring himself to do the Israeli's bidding against a bunch of headstrong kids who merely picked up the sword he had dropped for a headline. Arafat bravely refused to sick the PA's new western funded security forces on Hamas and Israel responded by putting him under virtual house arrest until he died a strange and mysterious death in 2004.

This death was later proven to be murder years later when an autopsy revealed traces of radioactive polonium in Arafat's exhumed corpse. The culprit was pretty clear to anyone with a functioning set of eyeballs. Israel was the only nation in the region with access to that kind of nuclear material and then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had quite openly admitted to toying with the idea of assassinating the peacemaker for years. But this assassination would have been impossible without conspirators in Arafat's inner circle and the events proceeding his death make it hard not to come to the conclusion that those same people took his place in running the Palestinian Authority on Israel's behalf.

A fat little technocrat named Mahmoud Abbas took Yasser Arafat's place in 2005 and after helping Israel to quickly wrap up the Second Intifada he essentially declared war against his own people by turning the Palestinian Authority into one of the most oppressive police states on earth. With a CIA trained security force of 83,000, the West Bank now suffers from the highest ratio of security personnel to civilians out of any territory on earth. These thugs regularly abuse and torture their own people while acting as de facto security guards for the illegal Israeli settlers who rob them blind. 

With prisons being built faster than schools and entire communities being razed to the desert floor, the people of Palestine finally called bullshit on this raw deal by electing Hamas to a majority in parliament over Abbas' fat cats in Fatah in 2006. Israel and the PA responded swiftly in tandem by turning the entire territory into a prison. The Hamas stronghold of Gaza was blocked off from the outside world by air, land, and sea with a crippling Israeli blockade while Abbas earned his keep ruling by decree in the shrinking West Bank. Oh, that deformed gremlin still grumbles loudly over each of Israel's increasingly sensational war crimes, but he conveniently refuses to spare a single member of his own private army to back up the kids they police in the camps when they do their jobs for them by trying to fight back.

I hate to play the anarchist know-it-all card here, but this is what happens when a revolutionary movement makes the mistake of becoming a state, they become the oppressors. The Two-State Solution isn't a failure just because Israel has no right to exist. It's a failure because no state has the right to exist, especially not a European-style nation state in a region with zero indigenous history of that brand of subjugation. Muslims, Jews, and Christians all coexisted peacefully in the Holy Land for generations back when it was a poorly governed Ottoman outpost. It wasn't until the British showed up and started carving up the desert like a Westphalian birthday cake that things began to get crazy, and this insanity won't stop until the people of that region reject thugs like Bibi and Abbas and stop trying to be Europe.

Fuck Europe. Europe is fucked. Be something better. Look to the roadmaps of regional mavericks like Muammar Gaddafi's Isratin Proposal or Abdullah Ocalan's Democratic Confederalism. Recreate the autonomous tribal democracies that ruled those deserts peacefully without a state long before Israel or Palestine even existed. It's up to you, Palestine, but we can all start right now by giving the brave child soldiers of Jenin a little fucking back-up against the forces of Babylon with a Stateless International Third Intifada. Because there is no state solution like a no-state solution.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

* Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Yeah Yeah Yeahs & Perfume Genius

* The Bends by Radiohead

* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies

* Tommy Gun by the Clash

* Ahead by Wire

* Time for Heroes by the Libertines

* Where Eagles Dare by the Misfits

* Anti-Curse by boygenius

* Sonic Reducer by Dead Boys

* My Hero by Foo Fighters

* The Narcissist by Blur

* Heroes by Peter Gabriel 

Poisoned by Prohibition: Sympathy for the Endangered Junkie

 I have a tendency to view most pharmaceuticals, be they therapeutic or recreational, as neither good nor bad, but fentanyl is one lethal concoction that has really sunken its fangs deep into the collective throat of this nation and even a live-and-let-libertine like me has little choice but to shake my weary head sorrowfully at the grim statistics. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than heroin, kills an average of 200 Americans a day, beating out nearly every other drug combined along with cancer and suicide as the greatest single cause of death among Americans under 50. In 2021, the CDC counted 107,375 deaths by overdose in this country with an estimated 67% of these fatalities involving synthetic opioids and most of those casualties likely had little to no idea what the fuck they were even shooting.

To me, that is the greatest crime behind this epidemic and what truly sets it apart from many of the other hyped-up pharmaceutical fads. Unlike most pearl-clutching normies in the straight world, I fully except and even begrudgingly respect the individual right to commit mass suicide by having a good time and I despise all the crowd-exciting tricks that the government and their willing Cassandras in the mass media play to try to horrify the public into embracing totalitarianism as the only elixir worth shooting directly into your prick.

They are playing this twisted fucking game with fentanyl, telling a gasping public that you can overdose just by breathing in the fumes of a junkie's belch on the subway train. The fact that does set fentanyl apart from many other drug hysterias however is that what America is experiencing is indeed by and large a wholesale poisoning, only the population being poisoned has been conveniently obscured by the mass media to mask the fact that most of these individuals are actually just consenting adults being poisoned by the toxic fruit of prohibition itself.

The just-say-no-crowd has only just recently stumbled over their long-anesthetized empathy for the actual addicts caught up in their holy war and the reason behind this sudden sea change is likely that the corpses washing up on their shores are now increasingly white and suburban in nature. Not that this has prevented them from presenting these victims as mere things, like creatures straight out of a George Romero picture, totally devoid of anything in the way of agency. Don't get me wrong, there certainly are plenty of kids keeling over after popping mystery pills from the dark web for the first time, but your average fentanyl casualty is actually an absurdly misunderstood citizen of the western counterculture known as the junkie and the long-term demonization of this population is a big part of what is serving them up to fentanyl like an endangered species.

When most people think about heroin users, they generally think of some filthy derelict slumped over in an alleyway with the rest of polite society's garbage. The reality however is that this lurid narrative bears very little resemblance to the average dope fiend. Your average heroin user is actually a relatively high-functioning adult with a job, a car, a family and all the responsibilities that come with such mundane trappings of the so-called American Dream. Most of these people have also made a conscious commitment to a lifestyle of narcotic dependency because it is preferable to an existence with chronic pain. Many are former users of prescription opioids who have been cut off and forced to seek salvation from the streets after fascistic federal crackdowns brought on by mass media hysteria. But there is also more than one form of chronic pain and more than one legitimate excuse to embrace addiction as a way of life.

For centuries, artists, philosophers, and seekers have flocked to the poppy fields to sooth their aching spirits while the more well-behaved citizens of western civilization have scratched their heads and shrugged their shoulders at this pervasive trend. Some of the greatest poets of the 19th century drew inspiration from the altered states of consciousness they conjured up under the influence of opioids. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud championed these narcotics and the "Fantasias" they elicited for taking them to spaces where rapture was bottomless and detachment from the modern world around them actually allowed them to comprehend it more clearly. This same form of toxic meditation was later mined by the greatest jazz musicians in American history, pharmaceutical daredevils like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, who boldly celebrated the transcendent relaxation of heroin with bebop and the sonic aesthetics of cool.

Heroin would later come to define the work of many of my own tortured musical heroes on the outskirts of rock n roll. Analog outlaws like Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, Johnny Thunders, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love would all follow the lead of bebop and Baudelaire by using that dirty water to step outside themselves and touch our lives in ways that sobriety may or may not have afforded them otherwise. I'm not trying to sugarcoat addiction here. Many of these same brilliant artists would also ultimately destroy themselves but I think it is foolish for us to simply blame the tool they chose to do that with while totally ignoring the magnitude of the art that came out of that same experience. Alex Trochi, the resident junkie laureate of the Situationist International once referred to his own addiction as an act of "artistic self-destruction" and I believe that this observation cuts to the very heart of the so-called Opioid Epidemic.

All opioids including heroin are essentially painkillers but as I noted above, who is to say that physical pain is the only kind of pain worth killing? Why not psychological pain or even spiritual pain? How about philosophical pain? The collective pain of entire generations forced to endure the deep bottomless ache of an empty, vacuous, and materialistic civilization that seeks to render the human spirit into a veritable commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Heroin is an undeniably toxic substance, but it is also a substance that affords the individual with a level of deep introspection that allows them to divide themselves from the herd. This is what makes the junkie such a vile caste in the eyes of mainstream society. Because the junkie represents a lifestyle which is arguably the most radical rejection of mainstream society available. A kind of chemotherapy for the domesticated spirit. And now that these sullied renegades are becoming a downright endangered sect, mainstream society is suddenly all broken up about it?

Mainstream society brought this poison on with its war on certain drugs and the drug users that they fail to control. No seasoned junkie goes out looking for fentanyl. Fentanyl came looking for them when the US government decided to clamp down on their own opium farms in Central Asia and the Golden Triangle after white people started spiking up and bringing the ghetto to the suburbs. The cartels only turned to fentanyl because prohibition required them to come up with something cheap, lethal, and easy to manufacture and this isn't the first time we've seen this kind of police state blowback either. During this country's disastrous prohibition against alcohol up to 50,000 consenting adults looking for a good time dropped dead after ingesting bathtub gin or rotgut whiskey manufactured on the cheap using industrial alcohol. We have also seen this with vitamin E acetone in THC vapes, synthetic cathinones in MDMA, levamisole in cocaine and now even animal tranquilizers like xylazine in fentanyl.

All of this is the direct product of prohibition, and yet the state's response to this product is more fucking prohibition. That is because the state and its various industrial complexes are the real cartels and they don't just traffic in prisons, borders, and 24/7 surveillance, they traffic in an endless cycle of misery that makes consensual behavior toxic and then sells the violence that caused it as the solution. It is a massive con, and it is a con that requires a virulent form of chemical bigotry to grease the gears that it dismembers us all with.

If people really truly want to stop other people from using certain drugs, then they need to ask themselves why those people choose to use those drugs in the first place. They should also probably ask themselves why exactly it is so goddam important for them to stop other people from doing things they don't like with their own bodies. Is it truly a concern for their wellbeing? If so, then why aren't they equally committed to stopping people from using cars or cellphones or the government? Perhaps these people should look towards their own addiction to controlling other people's choices and ask themselves when was the last time a junkie put an entire generation in prison to achieve their fix? Consider this an intervention.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones

* Loaded by Primal Scream

* Heroin by the Velvet Underground

* The Bird by Charlie Parker

* Hit So Hard by Hole

* Dirty Water by the Standells

* You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

* Blue Train by John Coltrane

* Pennyroyal Tea by Nirvana

* Head On by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* You Can't Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones

* Marquee Moon by Television