The Only Solution to a Second American Civil War is a Thousand Little Revolutions

 Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

-Paul Goodman

A storm is threatening our very nation today and if we don't get some shelter, America is going to do a hell of a lot worse than fade away, or at least so it appears. Every other news story that comes out of this country lately seems to be haunted by a Let it Bleed harmonica riff. America has never been more divided, and the shit just keeps getting worse. While the oligarchs wage open war against each other with insurrections and FBI raids and the divide between the sad tribes of lost proletariats who base their increasingly shallow identities on these creeps deepens, talk of a Second American Civil War and the decline of Western-style liberal democracy has traveled from the fringe to the mainstream with respected partisan wonks and heavily published academics taking turns wailing like Mick Jagger's rusty harp.

It's not hard to see why. Aside from the fact that brilliant if criminally under looked minds from Oswald Spengler to Ted Kaczynski have been warning us of this fate for decades, all the available numbers seem to be pointing towards an impending cataclysm which you can often catch glimpses of just looking out the fucking window. As Hurricane Trump leaves a tidal wave of white working-class nihilism and resentment in its wake that was present long before the Orange Bastard showed up to exploit it, firearm deaths in the US are on the rise with an increase of nearly 43% in the last decade. With the economic trauma of the Covid Pandemic and the geopolitical trauma of the state's total inability to do anything but exploit it still tearing at the already frayed fabric of civil society, homicides in metropolitan areas have surged by 44% in just the last three years alone and the climate feels ripe for that carnage to spill over into the political arena. In other words, war, children, it's just a shot away. 

Recent studies have shown that one in five Americans believe that politically motivated violence is completely acceptable under certain extenuating circumstances with 7% of 18 million adults in this nation confessing that they themselves are willing to kill for a cause. Nearly half of these Americans expect a civil war in their lifetime and before you go blaming it all on MAGA consider the fact that 41% of Biden voters have stated a desire for their state to secede from the Union along with the lion share of Trump voters. The response from the corporate Washington intelligentsia to this swelling tide of bipartisan disenchantment seems to vacillate between total denial and hair-pulling hysteria. Many on the mainstream left seem to be desperately rifling through their cluttered junk drawers for a jerry-rigged defibrillator to revive faith in our dear old republic and its derelict democratic institutions before it's too late. My own personal radical left-wing informed response to these trends however can essentially be summed up with 'about time' and 'good riddance.' 

This politically incorrect point of view on the coming apocalypse is largely predicated on three equally taboo positions; America is fucking evil, what we call democracy in this country is bullshit, and with the previous two opinions in mind, any sane radical of any stripe should embrace the inevitable collapse of both with open arms as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and finally make things right.

Anyone who's read more than two sentences written by Howard Zinn or Lysander Spooner should be well aware of the painful fact that the American experiment has been a toxic exercise in pure evil from the drop. This is a genocidal slave colony that only declared independence from the British Empire to take its place in a malignant competition to see which camp of psychotic white supremacists could rape and pillage the entire circumference of the planet first. The fact that America won this disgusting race to become the world's sole superpower is nothing to be proud of and neither is the electoral circus erected around it to give it the illusion of a free society.

America's heretical take on democracy essentially amounts to little more than a childish pig fashion show in which the American people are free to choose a dancing puppet to represent the corporate military elites who really run this twisted fucking mess. Just because the Big Steal is big bullshit doesn't mean that everyday Americans are stupid to suspect that the system is rigged. They're only stupid if they believe an old money hustler like Donald Trump isn't in on the grift too. People have lost faith in this system because it's a fraud that they never should have put their faith in it to begin with. This isn't disillusionment, it's enlightenment and if the far left had any balls or ovaries left, they would approach this populist awakening as an opportunity worth exploiting.  

This thing was never going to fucking last. Empire's never do. That's because empires are designed for mindless expansion and the larger a centrally organized territory expands the more impossible it becomes to control. This is why Rome fell. This is why the Soviet Union collapsed. And this is why China will never even become powerful enough to take America's place. They are a Second World bureaucracy that inherited a First World sized territory, and their dystopian police state is America's future if we stubbornly insist on being united states. To put it bluntly, America is simply too goddamn big to be anything but tyrannical and the only other option aside from defacto military rule and a bloody civil war is to destroy America before it can destroy the world.

This only sounds insane because every single institution of power in this country is heavily invested in fooling us all into believing that anything less than full compliance with the status quo they designed to control us and rip us off is a recipe for fucking chaos. Well, take a good look around dearest motherfuckers because we're already there. The collapse of any imperial power structure may be as inevitable as the rising sun, but it only ends in carnage when people insist on clinging to these same systems long after they've clearly failed. Civil wars aren't caused by secession. They're caused by the refusal of one power to let another leave their broken marriage. Any second civil war in this country will be the result of rival camps trying to impose their will on each other the way both sides of the last one did. The best solution to such a grotesque fate is a revolution or to be more precise, a thousand little revolutions. 

Another sorry side effect of the status quo's Delusional Industrial Complex is the belief often shared by even the most well-intentioned revolutionaries that we need one big epic revolution to overthrow one big epic empire. This formula generally only ends in one of two ways; either in a colossal bloodbath that only results in replacing one form of tyranny with another as we've seen in Russia and China or more commonly in a state of revolutionary stasis with a bunch of pissed off kids in Che Guevara t-shirts waiting around for some mythical critical mass that never seems to materialize. There are dusty old politburos across the globe clogged with big mouthed polemics who've grown geriatric and gray waiting for their busted alarm clock to go off. But there is another way, and it is almost criminally simple; just drop out and exist unruled beneath the radar before the grid goes down.

As stated above, all empires collapse and this collapse only results in violence because people stubbornly stick to their designated statist delusions and insist on going down with a sinking ship. True revolution therefore is simply a matter of building an escape raft for your people and preparing for the inevitable. Forget about America. Forget about Washington and Wall Street. Forget about Trump and Biden and Republicrats and Dempublicans and all that fucking bullshit. Build the revolutionary society we all deserve right now where you live. 

Build autonomous local networks capable of sustaining themselves without state or corporate institutions all while depriving the war machine of the tax revenue it subsists on through theft. Build your own food resources with community gardens and family farms. Build your own social resources with mutual aid societies and homeschooling collectives. Protect yourself and your people with volunteer civilian militias. Prepare for the very real possibility of having to defend your community from state intervention but don't provoke it by attempting to overthrowing a busted system when you can simply replace it without even firing a shot and don't make the tragic mistake of trying to force your values on other communities who are just trying to do the same thing in different ways. 

This has been done before by unsung pioneers across the political spectrum. The left-libertarian outlaw Karl Hess made his Washington DC neighborhood directly in the heart of the beast totally self-sufficient by building community gardens and creating a primitive but affective fish breeding facility using nothing but pumps from old washing machines and leftover construction materials that produced hundreds of pounds of meat a year. On the other end of the spectrum, the Black Panther Party created a free breakfast program that began with a single Episcopal church and donations from a handful of local grocery stores in inner city Oakland and ended up feeding thousands of impoverished children with 45 programs across the country. The federal government ultimately had to replicate these services themselves just to shut them down and keep the ghettos compliant.

And this is being done as we speak by pioneers across the globe. The Mexican city of Cheran has opted out of the colonialist War on Drugs by arming peasants against cartels and cops alike and forming a vibrant direct democracy built on local indigenous values. In the failed state of Lebanon, thousands of citizens of every creed have abandoned their corrupt centralized government services to rely solely on the services provided by local Hezbollah militias. And the Amish have been taking care of their own peacefully right in my own backyard with their own tightly woven networks of communal farms and craftsmen without even so much as touching a Glock.

It can be done and for some of us there has never really been any other choice. As a genderqueer person in rural Central Pennsylvania, the only thing separating my community from certain extinction is each other. The government will never understand us, and I honestly hope they never do because I've seen what becomes of those they assimilate. All I want is for the freaks I love to live weird and free from fear and dependence on institutions defined by colonialist violence. By narrowing my goals to this simple and immediate revolutionary dream I can peacefully coexist with Anabaptist Puritans who seem as extraterrestrial to me as I do to them. This is how we prevent another civil war, dearest motherfuckers, by destroying America with nothing more severe than peace, love and empathy.

I tell you, revolution, sister, it's just a kiss away.

Perpetual Solidarity- Nicky/CH  

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

*  Stand by REM

*  Gray Cell Green by Ned's Atomic Dustbin

*  Rock and Roll by the Velvet Underground

*  The Boy with the Arab Strap by Belle & Sebastian

*  Come As You Are by Nirvana

*  Hand in My Pocket by Alannis Morissette

*  Ohm by Yo La Tango Tengo

*  Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins      

How Nancy Pelosi Used "Feminism" to Play the "Isolationist" Right

 Nancy Pelosi has broken a lot of glass ceilings, or at least that's what her cheerleaders in the mainstream media are constantly shouting at me from my tv and I guess they're technically correct. After all, she is the first female Speaker of the House and the first woman to lead a party like a fucking corporation. Over the last twenty years, Nancy Pelosi has been instrumental in making sure that the Democratic Party remains every bit as filthy, corrupt and debased as their macho Republican cousins and she managed to achieve this mountainous feat during the height of the GOP's Satanic baptism by neoconservativism.

Under Nancy's watchful eye, the Democrats have matched a frat pack of openly sexist right-wing He-men pound for pound on killing Muslims, deporting children, evaporating civil liberties, fixing the economy for our shared corporate overlords and getting filthy fucking rich doing it. Nancy Pelosi has been the engine that has driven it all. She is the woman behind the rapists, and she's done it all in the name of human rights and feminism.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, this is the problem I have with the Gloria Steinem School of Second Wave Feminism. The whole idea of success is predicated on women rising to the top of a tower of bones built by centuries of institutionalized heterosexist chauvinism. The result is women like Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Pelosi, who are supposed to inspire women like me by leading an empire just like the ass-grabbing barbarians they replaced or rather just joined on their mountaintop of fractured skulls and filthy money.

Over the years of trudging through the academic muck of gender theory in order to figure out my own vexingly androgynous path to womanhood, I've come to recognize that you don't have to identify as a man to perform masculinity and I've never seen a more revolting performance of reckless jingoistic chauvinism and downright toxic masculinity than Nancy Pelosi's high-octane invasion of Taiwan.

After months of being warned by everyone from the People's Liberation Army to the Pentagon that what she was planning put the entirety of mankind at risk, Nancy Pelosi: Superfeminist arrived in Taipei on a military aircraft dragging half the set of a fucking Rambo movie behind her like a wedding train from hell, a dozen F-35's, a cruiser, a destroyer, a goddamn aircraft carrier and partridge and a pear tree, all for a glorified photo-op of the Madame Speaker with Taiwan's first female president, Tsai Ing-won, pissing standing up like the big boys on Xi Jinping's leg. 

Well, that and a meeting with Mark Lui, the chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation to secure the Military Industrial Complex's iron grip on the kind of computer chips we need to reduce Beijing to radioactive rubble. But that last part was a little hard for the news to choreograph to a Carly Simon song.

China's response was pretty predictable considering that everyone with or without a penis fucking predicted it. The Red Dragon clothed by the WTO went fucking bug-nuts and threw a colossal military hissy fit that continues to terrorize the island of Taiwan as we speak. A simulated blockade with Chinese warships occupying five different zones surrounding Taiwan just twelve miles off their coast in the largest display of military power in the region's history, complete with short range ballistic missiles being fired over the island and naval drills that came a cunt's hair away from ending in direct confrontation.

"I think it was worth it." was Nancy Pelosi's response to nearly causing an Asian Cuban Missile Crisis for girl power and microchips. But there was another response to Nancy's diplomatic provocations that may well prove to be far more lethal than China's and knowing how sly that veteran fraud is, I'm not convinced that it wasn't the real motivation behind this whole sick and sorry episode.

The most grotesque achievement of Nancy's feminist blitz of Taipei was the overwhelmingly unanimous support she received for this seemingly senseless provocation from even the most isolationist minded Republicans, nearly all of whom lined up like toy soldiers behind a woman they routinely accuse of running Satanic child sex rings. That's because the only thing the far-right hates more than mouthy women is the Chinese who they blame for everything from cattle mutilation to hemorrhoids. 

Donald Trump may be about as isolationist as his next check from the Saudis for a kilo of nuclear secrets stashed beneath his waterbed in Mar-a-Lago but his empty fisted rhetoric about putting America first before endless forever wars gave many working-class conservatives the fire they had been waiting for to finally burn the Bush/Cheney signs haunting their front lawns. Believe it or not, it is this very streak of war-weary nationalism that has been the biggest domestic obstacle to Biden's otherwise bipartisan New Cold War with Putin's Russia.

Your average House Republican doesn't give a second thought about shipping AT-ATs to Ukraine as long as the checks from Raytheon don't bounce but Tucker Carlson does. Say what you will about that smug little trust-fund baby, he's a heinously xenophobic white nationalist pig fucker who treats terrified transgender children like bowling pins, but he's also tragically the most consistently antiwar personality on cable news since MSNBC shit-canned Phil Donahue for politely opposing the Iraq War.

Tucker has been an outspoken critic not just of America's proxy war in Ukraine but Donald Trump's own dalliances with bombing shithole countries like Syria and Iran, and his colossal audience essentially is the GOP. This is how we have come to bear witness to the bizarre spectacle of racist lunatics like Lauren Bobbert and Marjorie Taylor Greene somehow being the only people in Congress sane enough to oppose sending a blank check for weapons of mass destruction to a Ukrainian government that routinely ranks somewhere between Putin's Russia and the Gambino Family on the corruption scale. 

But no matter how much of an isolationist Tucker may or may not be, much like Charles Lindbergh, he's also a motherfucking racist at the end of the day and there is no one that Alt-Lite gadflies like him hate more than the Chinese. Tucker will make nice with tankies from the Greyzone over Russia until the chupacabras come home but the moment China comes up he turns into a stark raving neocon lunatic every bit as willing to blow us all to kingdom come as Joe Biden is just to keep Asia from taking the white man's rightful place as the world's foremost economic superpower.

This is a stage 4 case of cultural chauvinism, plain and simple, and by provoking China's gross overreaction to her highly publicized Taiwanese vacay, Nancy Pelosi played these conditional non-interventionists like the shrimp dicked Sinophobic hypocrites they are, manipulating them with their own white pride into backing a war machine that they facetiously pretend to hate until their fragile identity feels threatened. Taiwan was the perfect magic wand for this New Cold War trick because historically speaking Taiwan is essentially just a dark-skinned Ukraine.

Every military colossus from the Queen's Navy to the Empire of the Sun has used that poor fucking island as a launching pad for imperial aggression against the Chinese people the same way many of these same forces have with Ukraine vis a vis Russia. That plucky little island democracy spent the first Cold War as a glorified army base for a fascist opium-slinging dictator named Chiang Kai-shek who held Taiwan hostage under martial law for 38 years while he and his Brown Shirts in the Kuomintang proclaimed themselves to be the only legitimate government of China, a country they collaborated with the genocidal Japanese to destroy during the Second World War before Mao kicked their asses to the fucking curb.

Taiwan only sort-of embraced democracy once these gangsters had become so fully entrenched in their nation's deep state as to be virtually irretractable regardless of who their people vote for. Just like Putin, Xi is a revanchist prick but he's not wrong to consider his next-door neighbor a renegade province under these circumstances and he's not paranoid to be pissed off at the US for running naval drills with nuclear death machines off China's coastline in concert with this sketchy state that we promised to remain neutral on with the One China Policy.

Basically, Taiwan is primed for Xi to become what Ukraine was primed for Putin to be, an irresistible beartrap baited with centuries of historical trauma to snare another American adversary into an unwinnable quagmire. The only difference is that this time woke warmongers like Nancy Pelosi have the perfect right-wing aphrodisiac of racism on their side and this putrid ploy has worked before.

After all, FDR used the same strategy to break the original America First Movement when he provoked the Japanese into attacking howlie occupied Hawaii and then drowned an equally war weary nation in an ocean of tax-funded anti-Japanese propaganda that successfully overrode homespun common sense with deep seated fears of the Eastern Other. And this time taxpayers won't even have to pay a dime for their indoctrination because isolationists like Tucker Carlson are more than happy to run the propaganda necessary to frighten peace-loving middle Americans into embracing the insanity of another world war for free. 

The endgame remains the same as the one in Ukraine. This isn't about Putin or Xi. This isn't about autocracy or democracy. This isn't even really about Russia or China. It's about Russia and China. It's about Eurasia, the economic integration of which has always represented the greatest threat to American global hegemony and ghastly opportunists like Nancy Pelosi aren't above using feminism or racism to strangle that threat in its cradle.

As far as I'm concerned, that isn't just an assault on world peace, that's an assault against philosophies like feminism and isolationism that are supposed to be devoted to world peace. Speaking as a proudly isolationist transfeminist, the only thing that offends me more than shallow bigots like Tucker Carlson are manipulative frauds like Nancy Pelosi, who gives human rights a bad name with her big macho ego. Put it back in your pants, chickenhawk. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  You're So Vain by Carly Simon

*  Wardance by Killing Joke

*  Boyish by Japanese Breakfast

*  Boys On the Radio by Hole

*  Raining Blood by Tori Amos

*  And the Same by Fugazi

*  Problem With It by Plains

*  Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys  

      

Joe Biden's New Cold War Targets Black Power

 We recognize that if there is to be any peace on earth, it is going to come as a consequence of our people uniting to defeat US imperialism once and for all... We are going to have to unite with the oppressed peoples of the world. That is the only way that we will ever know peace.

-Omali Yeshitela

The end of the old civilization has come... Let the present generation perish, let the old prevaricators die in the desert! The holy earth will not cover their bones.

-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 

You may have missed it between the subpoenas of the January 6 circus, but on the last Friday morning of July, the FBI redeclared war on the Black Power Movement in St. Louis, Missouri and St. Petersburgh, Florida. In a sweeping series of raids, several homes and offices belonging to the African People's Socialist Party (APSP) and their sister organization, the Uhuru Movement, were blitzed by heavily armed gestapo in a highly publicized show of force. 

Doors were kicked in, windows were smashed, and seven members including the Movement's founder and leader Omali Yeshitela and his wife were dragged away in cuffs like common gangsters while their requests to see a warrant for this treatment went ignored. The Uhuru Solidarity Center, the Uhuru House, even the APSP's tiny radio station, Black Power 96.3, were targeted in this highly choreographed assault on these two relatively marginal organizations.

Their crime? According to the Justice Department Indictment, these two organizations along with a couple others who remain nameless conspired with a Russian national named Aleksandr Ionov as part of a "foreign malign influence campaign" to spread Russian propaganda and sow general discord in the homeland. What little evidence that has been presented in this case is thin at best and relies largely on very broad accusations. 

Ionov, the founder of an organization called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which both the APSP and Uhuru have maintained contact with, and the feds accuse of being a Kremlin front, is the only person actually charged with a crime in this operation and since he lives abroad, it is unlikely that he will ever stand trial to rebut the charges and by extension the APSP and Uhuru will never be granted the legal platform to exonerate themselves.

We've seen these tactics used before by the American Government to give credence to other spurious claims on Russian meddling in American elections. Russian nationals are indicted in absentia for Byzantinesque conspiracies to fuck with Hillary Clinton and our precious bodily fluids only to have the case go nowhere once the media loses interest. But this time the target is a pair of small but loud organizations in what remains of America's Black Power Movement. A movement which seems set to make a greatly needed comeback on inner city streets still stained with George Floyd's Blood.

Both the African People's Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement have been active in antiwar and anti-police state provocations for decades and they have been particularly vocal in their opposition to America's uranium tipped proxy war in Ukraine. Unfortunately for the feds, the raids on the movement's properties appear to have only succeeded in pissing these unapologetic firebreathers off. When confronted with the accusations regarding Comrade Ionov, they denied ever taking anyone's rubles but also briskly responded 'so the fuck what if we did?' 

"Ain't no Russian been responsible for what we face every day in our lives... (The US) is going to say that Russians somehow had to tell us that we are being oppressed... (The US is) telling the world that Black people don't have enough sense to be able to lead our own struggle." Yeshitela railed at the cameras from the courthouse steps like Abraham on uppers before adding, "Don't tell us that we can't have friends that you don't like!" like a hand grenade in a foxhole. To quote Breaking Bad's neo-Nazi arch-villain Jack Welker "Well, I guess that's a response."

Naturally, being the flag-flaming faggot bitch that I am, I took an automatic liking to these militant motherfuckers. Their unblinkingly fearless response to the hammer of the federal government brings to mind Che Guevara's final words to his CIA executioners. "Shoot coward, you're only killing a man." I mean can you imagine those limousine riding sell-outs who hijacked Black Lives Matter Incorporated throwing back a punch like that? The feds can and that's the point. 

The APSP and Uhuru refuse to back down to bullies during an increasingly dangerous time for dissidence in America. While the Biden regime continues to crank up the heat in their new cold war with Russia and China and their barcoded Cassandras in the flailing Fourth Estate tar anyone who so much as questions the logic of this thermonuclear game of imperial chicken, the Democrats are simultaneously using the violent boomer bro-down on January 6 as a sick excuse to keep the Donald's own jihad against the purposely ambiguous specter of domestic extremism alive and lethal. 

While paying lip service to their virtue signaling war on a white supremacist movement that Joe Biden is a Strom Thurmon-sucking, card carrying member of, Biden's Justice Department is essentially just picking up where Bill Barr's Task Force Against Domestic Extremism left off. While Barr's task force singled out Antifa and Merrick Garland's singles out white militia groups, they both leave a backdoor wide open to targeting etcetera and if history has taught us a goddamn thing it's that etcetera is generally newspeak for Black Power.

While Biden's own National Security Council Strategy Document released shortly after his inauguration declared "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists" to be our racially or ethnically motivated empire's main domestic terror threat, it also left a telltale asterisk stating that the feds would also "disrupt and deter those who launch violent attacks in a misguided effort to force change in government policies that they view as unjust."

I don't know about you, dearest motherfuckers, but all of this shit reeks like COINTELPRO to me. For those of you who don't know, the FBI's quite openly white supremacist founding father, J. Edgar Hoover, launched a program called COINTELPRO during the height of the last cold war in 1956 to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" organizations he accused of being directed by malign Russian influence to attempt to force change in government policies that they viewed as unjust like segregation and the Vietnam War. 

Hoover's targets included everyone from Martin Luther King to John Lennon, but he saved the lion share of his ammo for the Black Power Movement, specifically the Black Panther Party whom he once declared to be "without a question... the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."

This was the original war on terror, and this was in fact where the loaded term counterterrorism originates, and it all began innocently enough with the kind of disruption and deterrence we saw hurled at the APSP and Uhuru last month, but it very quickly devolved into something far more sinister. Activists were framed and did decades behind bars for crimes they didn't commit, rivalries were fostered between competing organizations which ended in bloodshed, and bombastic raids gave way to outright extrajudicial executions like the cold-blooded homicide of Chicago's influential young chairman, Fred Hampton, who was drugged by an FBI informant before being riddled with bullets in bed by the Chicago Police.

This campaign also began with government campaigns to slime radical young activists as agents of Moscow, but this was as bogus as the official motive for the Cold War itself. The Soviet Union was never really a threat to anyone outside of the Warsaw Pact and our government knew it. This is why during the entirety of the Cold War an American bullet never entered the skull of a single Soviet soldier. We didn't give a fuck about communism. Our real targets were indigenous Third World liberation movements like the ones in Vietnam and Nicaragua that resisted America's imperial expansion project.

And what was the Black Power Movement but another uppity Third World liberation movement within our own borders, giving the poor and disenfranchised the crazy notion that our oppression was directly linked to that of the poor brown folks being mowed down with our tax dollars overseas. This is why this shit is personal to me, because without the Black Power Movement there would be no Queer Liberation Movement and I would be a tranny without a posse instead of just a tranny without a pussy.

The most dangerous idea that the Black Power Movement ever fostered however, and the reason they still serve as an inspiration to a genderfuck post-left anarchist like me, is that poor people didn't need the state, all we needed was solidarity and autonomy. This is why the Black Panther project that terrified Old Man Hoover the most was their widely popular Free Breakfast Program in which the party fed tens of thousands of hungry kids in the inner city without relying on a single tax dollar.

I find it similarly telling that over fifty years later these same feds targeted community centers like the Uhuru Solidarity Center in St. Louis and the Uhuru House in St. Petersburgh, decades old institutions best known for providing free stateless services like licensed community kitchens, HIV testing, doula training and housing for former convicts.

Black Power and Black Nationalism have nothing to do with contrived chauvinistic nation states. Quite the contrary, they're all about building stateless nations of self-sufficient communities like the ones once dreamed of by Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. This is what makes organizations like the African People's Socialist Party and the Black Uhuru Movement truly lethal and this is how we can all defend them against Biden's New Cold War, by defending ourselves like they do with Black nations and Chicano nations and Queer nations and Redneck nations and Punk Rock nations and Hip Hop nations, all united with Third World nations from the Donbass to Rojava to strangle the empire that seeks to divide and conquer us all. Only united in universal autonomy can we win.

Consider this rant a big pink Queer fist thrown in solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the African People's Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement. You were right to be afraid of them because you're going to have to take all the stateless nations they inspired down with them. Good luck. You're going to need it more than us because luck is for gangsters without a community and communities are for smashing gangsters without mercy. 

Peace, Love, & Solidarity! - Nicky/CH  

Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post 

*  Wolves by Dead Prez

*  Working for the Knife by Mitski

*  I Against I by Bad Brains

*  Pay Your Way in Pain by St. Vincent

*  Walk Like a Panther by Algiers

*  Power to the People by John Lennon

*  Hood by Perfume Genius

*  Margin Walker by Fugazi

*  Fight the Power by Public Enemy

*  Police State by Dead Prez   

Everyone Has Already Lost the War in Ukraine but Raytheon

 There are very few things on this boiling rock called earth that I hate more than war, but I've also been fascinated with war for as long as I can remember. There is just something about the cataclysmic conjunction of clashing cultures, rugged geography, radical ideology, and existential philosophy that seems to trigger my own cataclysmic conjunction of obsessive-compulsive disorders and ADHD. All of which leads me to follow international conflicts the way more well-adjusted dorks follow sports teams. 

It's an admittedly perverse hobby likely driven by my own history of childhood trauma and the resulting need to gain some sense of control over the horrors of a violently uncontrollable universe, but it also ultimately drove me to become a downright evangelical anti-imperialist and anarchist once I realized the very basic fact that states kill. It is their most defining attribute. A monopoly on the use of grotesque behavior and the insanity of war is how they justify their very existence. All of them, in ways big and small. Not one of them is special. Every team in this blood sport sucks.

But I can honestly say that in my 34 years as a compulsive antiwar nerd, I have never seen a war more horrifically insane than the rapidly expanding mess in Ukraine. There have been plenty of wars that are more violent. There's about a dozen raging in Africa as we speak that make the carnage of Bucha look downright quaint by comparison, but I've never in my lifetime seen a war that is more pointlessly dangerous. 

A savage proxy war between two disintegrating nuclear superpowers that somehow combines the Mad Max-style barbaric warlordism of Afghanistan with the almost casual disregard for mankind of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every fucking second that that Slavic dumpster fire keeps burning brings us another step closer to a nuclear apocalypse and literally everybody has already lost this war months ago, at least in any way that counts. All conceivable reason should lead even an insane person to just fucking end this thing, but this monstrously hideous thing has defied all reason from day one. 

The war in Ukraine didn't start this February, it started in 2014 when a wicked clique of neocons buried like a tick in the Obama Administration and led by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, hijacked the Maidan protests in Kiev with openly fascist thugs and used what was left of it to overthrow the very corrupt but still very democratically elected government of Ukraine in order to replace it with something compliant enough to allow NATO to use the country as a platform to heckle Russia from.

Russia in turn responded by kind-of-sort-of recognizing the autonomy of the most heavily ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine that demanded independence from an overtly Russophobic new government that they never consented to be a part of. With Uncle Sam's credit card now in their arsenal, the new regime in Kiev responded to Russia's meddling by sending neo-Nazi death squads to these breakaway regions and launching a dirty war against their impoverished citizens for nearly 8 years straight, resulting in the senseless slaughter of over 14,000 people. 

Meanwhile, NATO began throwing increasingly provocative dress rehearsals for Barbarossa 2: Electric Boogaloo on Russia's shores and borders with nuclear capable battleships and bombers until things finally exploded late last year into a jarring series of violent twists that has left even seasoned observers like myself with a serious case of whiplash.

In the Summer of 2021, Russia began stacking troops and heavy machinery at the border while demanding a sit-down with the newly elected president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to at least talk about the growing NATO presence in the Donbass and the Black Sea. Both Washington and their loyal flunkies in the Western press responded to this bully tactic by immediately predicting an imminent Russian invasion and began picking a procession of passing dates when the bombs would drop.

 Zelensky and his administration desperately tried to convince the chickenhawks-at-be to end this self-fulfilling countdown to doomsday but also stubbornly refused to even discuss kicking these moneyed lunatics out their country with Moscow. As the pressure mounted, violence finally boiled over in the already embattled Donbass region while Zelensky openly toyed with the idea of restarting Ukraine's still very much operational nuclear weapons program. 

On February 24th, Putin finally flipped his wig and responded with a full-blown shock-and-awe style invasion which he comically declared to be a special military operation. After boldly and brutally attempting to take the capitol of Kiev hostage, the colossal Russian military machine was nearly derailed, not by Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalions but by the irate Russian speaking proletariat who had foolishly voted for Zelensky to contain them, the same Russian speakers who Putin foolishly assumed would greet his own stormtroopers as liberators. 

For his part, Zelensky initially seemed open to negotiations after it had become painfully clear that NATO had plaid him like a harp from hell and after a month of humiliating losses, Putin's army retreated from Kiev and headed back to the Donbass region to save face. In any sane world this would have been all she wrote but drunk on the cult of personality bestowed upon him by the Western war paparazzi and armed to the teeth with the latest killing machines US tax dollars could buy, Zelensky rejected diplomacy at a time when he held all the cards and doubled down on America's twisted dream of destroying Vladimir Putin with a tidal wave of Ukrainian corpses.   

At this point the momentum appears to have violently shifted in Putin's favor as his forces have focused on liberating the only section of the map that had actually demanded his help. In fact, they demanded it nearly eight years ago when he was too busy leveling tenements in Syria to bother lifting a finger for the ethnic Russians he's suddenly so damn concerned about. Regardless, after spending a month struggling to hold onto a single neighborhood in the suburbs of Kiev, Putin took over 90% of Luhansk without even trying. 

But with Antony Blinken and Boris Johnson whispering sweet nothings into his ear, Volodymyr Zelensky's objectives only became grander as he refused to even continue negotiations until his regime had completed the impossible task of retaking all of the Donbass and Crimea. With this the war grinded to a bloody halt on the ground but NATO still managed to intensify the conflict they started by sending Ukraine weapons like the HIMARS long range missile system, capable of hitting Russian territory from well past the Donbass. 

Russia responded by announcing their intention to absorb even more territories like Kherson and Zaporizhya in order create a buffer zone of even more Novorossiyan human shields, large enough to make Zelensky's deadly new toys ineffective. But those same countries that promised Ukraine a mythical NATO membership to rile Putin into a sinkhole on his border just keep sending Kiev deadlier and deadlier toys.   

The end result of this suicide circus isn't just thousands of dead bodies but a war without victors. There is no one left alive who can leave this battlefield with their head held high and there is absolutely zero prospect of things getting any better for either side. It didn't have to be this way. There were multiple clearly marked off-ramps to peace on this highway to hell but everyone involved just kept blasting past them with their pedal to the metal. And now we are left with a battlefield governed by broken losers.

Volodymyr Zelensky lost this war when he failed to realize that the only people who screwed him over worse than ones in Moscow were the ones in NATO. He could have easily brokered a peace deal with Russia after they left Kiev with their tails between their legs and left this clusterfuck looking like Churchill with abs. Putin would have gladly taken even a meager concession at that point just to save face after Russia's biggest imperial flop since the Afghan trap, but Zelensky chose to press his luck in the Donbass instead.

By doing so, he didn't just abandon Ukraine's best hope for a favorable outcome in this war, he abandoned the moral high ground to play Putin in someone else's neighborhood. The people of the Donbass have repeatedly made it violently clear that they have absolutely no interest in being part of the post-Maidan Ukrainian experiment. Regardless of Russia's manipulations, what Ukraine did to those people for years is no different than what Putin has done to Ukraine for months. 

Zelensky's predecessors indiscriminately carpet bombed the People's Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk into oblivion for the crime of leaving Ukraine the same way Ukraine left Russia and for the same reasons. Zelensky was elected to end this savagery. Instead, he's decided to pick up where his predecessors left off to fulfill some sick twisted revenge fantasy. Zelensky will never take these territories back. All he can do is punish poor people on both sides of their borders and provoke a nuclear confrontation for his vanity.

Vladimir Putin lost this war the moment that he expanded it beyond the Donbass and stepped into America's trap in Kiev. For decades Putin displayed the kind of cool sociopathic discipline that has long defined Russian brinksmanship. He has played the long game with patience and poise from Damascus to Tbilisi and has repeatedly humiliated an often-bludgeoning American hegemon violently lurching towards its twilight in the process. This isn't to say that Putin is the anti-imperialist wunderkind that some desperate leftists have made him out to be. 

Putin is a heartless fucking bastard, but he's always been a very sly heartless fucking bastard, practicing a kind of counter-imperialism using the gargantuan size of his American foes against them like a Judo master. This all ended the moment he crossed the Dnieper River. At some point, Putin made the fatal mistake that many once-great pugilists before him have made, he decided he was a bad motherfucker who couldn't lose and began fighting like an imbecile. This whole stupid fucking war could have been avoided had Putin simply taken back the Nazi occupied sections of the Donbass to begin with and left NATO to bitch about a region no one who doesn't use the Cyrillic Alphabet even gives a fuck about.

Even America has lost this goddamn war. Our economy has been decimated, not because Putin invaded Ukraine but because America declared war on the Russian people for his actions with a sweeping sanctions regime that has only resulted in strengthening the Ruble and making gasoline more expensive than cocaine. The entire Western World is on the brink of a massive recession and the entire Third World is on the brink of starvation. All because two empires decided to play battleship with Ukraine and the only people who have anything to show for it are the jackals who make the game pieces.

The Military Industrial Complex is raking in the dough, selling Stinger missiles faster than Putin can blow them up at the airport and footing taxpayers with the bill. At some point somebody has to say it. These motherfuckers need to go. A handful of corporations like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have held the world hostage for a century and now they are risking full blown omnicide every fucking day just to make another buck. How are these people any better than the Nazis and how do we justify allowing them to exist? I'm not telling you; I'm asking you. Where do we draw the line?

I have been fascinated with war for as long as I can remember but there is only one war that I'm willing to fight with my own two hands and that is a war against the war machine and the state who keeps it alive with our stolen pocket change to justify their own malignant existence. As far as I'm concerned, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans and 99% of the planet should fight this war with me because our lives all literally depend on it.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Stop Whispering by Radiohead

*  One Step Beyond by Madness

*  The Drowners by Suede

*  Highway to Hell by AC/DC

*  Where Do Ya Draw the Line by Dead Kennedys

*  Mental Math by Julien Baker

*  Kill For Love by Chromatics

*  Bones by Soccer Mommy

Why January 6 Means More to Washington than It Does to America

 

"It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning."

-George Orwell

"Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator."

-JG Ballard

Take it from a penniless middle American pauper when I tell you that, rightly or wrongly, no one gives a flying fuck about January 6 in flyover country. Even in the full throws of their self-stoked hysteria over the five-alarm dumpster fire that is the US House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th, the political class seems to be at least somewhat aware of this yocal malaise over the summer's hottest partisan craze and naturally, they already have the two thirds of the country that they barely even know exists figured the fuck out.

Once again, they're all just a bunch of lazy slack-jawed hicks who can't be coaxed off their tractors to bother with the greatest threat to liberal democracy since Hitler wore lederhosen. Just like those lazy peasants who dare not vote, the rural lumpenproletariat are just genetically predispositioned to be indifferent to what really matters in this world and trust me when I tell you that many of my neighbors are equally mystified and annoyed by these condescending coastal elites who keep trying to sell them tickets to Washington's biggest monster truck rally since Watergate.

As a genderqueer anarchist who has spent the better part of her life being chased by irate farm folk with rusty pitchforks and the other part trying to convince these same people to turn their rage against Washington instead from the comfort of my flaming windmill, I feel that I am somewhat absurdly equipped to explain both of these crowds of assholes in this stand-off to each other, seeing as I'm pretty much equally despised by both of them.

Your average working-class hick in red state America, and I'm not just talking about Republicans, doesn't care about the threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy because American democracy doesn't fucking work for them anymore, if it ever has to begin with. I'm constantly confronted by the fact that once distracted from their impulses to bash me for being a bearded dyke in a dress, your average unwashed auto mechanic or trailer park housewife is actually quite shockingly well aware of how the American political system really operates. Aside from the culture war bullshit, these people really aren't that far off from Chomsky on what really counts.

They all thoroughly grasp the fact that the system is rigged, both major parties are the minor leagues for corporate prostitutes, Iraq was a fucking lie sold to them by these whores for oil, and your average free trade deal is a glorified mugging to tax the poor out of their livelihoods on behalf of a class of stuck-up New England stick-up artists who'd rather use slaves to build their Hybrids. These people may never get my pronouns straight but when it comes to the basics of class warfare they are downright woke.

Most of these people didn't vote for Trump. Most of these people didn't vote for anybody because they didn't see anybody at the podium who represented them and were they wrong? Donald Trump is an undeniably criminal fascist crook but the only thing that separates him from more respectable "grown up" politicians like Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush is that he lacks the institutional prowess to rig an election without breaking any windows. What makes January 6 any more offensive than the games Liz Cheney's newly rehabilitated Sith lord father pulled in Ohio back in 2004?

Even the chair of the January 6 Committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson is at least somewhat aware of the hypocrisy at play here. He was one of only 31 mostly Black House Democrats to object to the certification of the election results in the buckeye state for that year's presidential coup d'état. When confronted with this weapons grade irony, Bennie's response was "I didn't tear up the place because I cast a vote." My response is why the fuck not? The system it represents hasn't just systematically mowed over the democratic rights of average Americans on a near weekly basis for centuries, they have outsourced little Trumps to overthrow democracy in every corner of the planet.

Where was the House Select Committee to investigate Lyndon Johnson's insurrection in Indonesia in 1965 or Dick Nixon's insurrection in Chile in 1973 or Gerald Ford's insurrection in East Timor in 1975 or Jimmy Carter's insurrection in Kwangju in 1980 or Ronald Reagan's insurrection in Grenada in 1984 or Dubya's insurrection in Haiti in 2004 or Obama's insurrection in Honduras in 2009? Where was the breathless media coverage for these fascist plots? All of them hatched from that wretched Capitol with total silence from the same people questioning middle-class America's lack of commitment to democracy. Well, whose democracy? Yours or theirs? Wall Street's or Main Street's or Santiago's? Because they clearly aren't the same goddamn thing. 

The crooks who run that committee have no more respect for the institution of democracy or even that sick joke called representative democracy than Donald Trump does. Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Adam Kinzinger, not to mention House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are all outspoken supporters of the Patriot Act, PRISM, and the around-the-clock domestic surveillance machine that has made this country about as democratic as any nightmare George Orwell or JG Ballard ever penned. So why give a fuck about democracy now? Say what you will about hick country, at least their indifference is consistent. But why do a bunch of barely closeted fascists suddenly give a fuck about the dangers of fascism? 

Because Trump's brand of bush league fascism threatened their brand of legacy fascism, not because it was worse, but because it was embarrassing. This is the real reason why the establishment despises one of their own children, because Donald Trump is nothing but the red-headed stepchild of American fascism. JFK hit up NATO puppets for spare pocket change. Bill Clinton made childish threats to blow up North Korea. His gun moll Hillary leaned on local officials to pervert electoral democracy. But they all had the good common sense to commit these crimes quietly, away from the watchful eye of the international community. They took care to properly maintain the facade carefully erected around our totalitarian government to make us appear respectable enough for the rest of the world to kick up to.

Donald Trump ripped down that facade and exposed America for the fascistic fraud that it's always been. He humiliated his fellow elites on January 6 by bringing the tactics that the grown-up fascists in that Capitol Building usually reserve for the ghettos of Cleveland and the Third World home. He made America look like a shithole country. The carefully choreographed melodrama playing endlessly on CNN is nothing but a PR campaign designed to rehabilitate the tattered vestige of America's mask of sanity. and the yocals in flyover country don't give a flying fuck about this pageantry because they aren't the target demographic.

The US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is little more than a glorified infomercial marketed towards the people still stupid enough to believe that this country was ever a real fucking democracy. The people ignorant enough to think that joining a military alliance with a nest of craven war junkies will keep them safe from a tinpot revanchist like Vladimir Putin. The kind of people foolish enough to believe that a vote cast for a prison-industrial architect like Joe Biden is a vote that will somehow make Black lives finally matter. People so fucking clueless that they honestly believe that they're superior to redneck farmers just because they haven't figured out that this rusty rattrap we call a democracy is already a rigged game.

The biggest problem I have with the local hicks who shrug off January 6 to chase me around with their pitchforks is that they're too busy lunging at Muslims, Queers, illegals and other assorted groups of poor people to realize that we should all be charging the Capitol together to chase every one of those condescending crooks in that two-party junta including Trump out of town once and for all. A House Select Committee won't save this country from its long legacy of fascism any more than Trump's QAnon soccer moms will save it from fucking Chupacabras. Maybe woke poor people should give this insurrection thing a try. After all, it appears to have worked for Sri Lanka and what's good for one shithole country couldn't hurt another. 

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* One Piece at a Time by Johnny Cash

*  Hotel Yorba by the White Stripes

*  The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

*  Peek-a-boo by Siouxsie & the Banshees

*  Rebels by Tom Petty

*  Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

*  Marry Me by the Drive-By Truckers

*  Softer Softest by Hole

*  Mamma Tried by Merle Haggard

*  Waste of Paint by Bright Eyes

Wake up Stupid! Biden Wants War with Iran Too

 Is it just me or does the JCPOA seem to be cursed? Everybody who isn't Trump or Israel seems to agree that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action known colloquially as the Iran Nuclear Deal was working smashingly before it was unilaterally violated by the prior on behalf of the latter. Every other signatory of that deal and the International Atomic Energy Agency who oversaw it are all in total agreement that Iran was in compliance with what amounted to the most obnoxiously intrusive nuclear inspections regime devised by man or beast, all levied against a nation that even Israeli intelligence admits never appears to have even had a nuclear weapons program to begin with. Joe Biden ran for president and won on a promise to revive the deal and the Mullahs have steadfastly offered to comply as soon as the crippling Trump regime sanctions are lifted. And yet, here we are now, over a fucking year after Biden entered the Oval Office and somehow, we seem farther from the JCPOA than ever before. 

Talks have been dragging on for months and leading nowhere. Iran's demands are simple and remain virtually the same since day one, save for a few concessions that they've made to the Biden Administration; knock it off with the fucking sanctions that crazed orange orangutan gagged us with and we'll offer you back our nuclear program on the same silver platter we awarded to Obama back in 2015. But somehow this simple message is two fucking complicated for Biden's people, who let's not forget are essentially just Obama's people in new ties. America won't even meet with Iran directly. We send them coded messages in a bottle through EU intermediaries at drop sites in Doha or Vienna and they fucking put up with it! Yet somehow, the simplest snafu to undue in imperial history continues to be derailed by a never-ending procession of tripwires and landmines.

Iran offers to return to the JCPOA, and Biden demands they make concessions to the maximum pressure ransom note of the same ginger asshole who continues to insist Joe stole the fucking election. Iran offers to return to the JCPOA, and their scientists are assassinated in broad daylight by hired guns who do everything but wave an Israeli flag over their bodies after dropping the gat to announce who sent them. Iran offers to return to the goddamn JCPOA, and America hijacks their oil tankers on the high seas like Blackbeard with battleships. Iran finally caves to the crazy concessions Trump made and Biden demands, and talks are put on hold. Iran finally loses their shit with these honky whack jobs and raises their plutonium enrichment to well beneath the threshold necessary for nuclear weapons to even be an option and suddenly they're the crazy brown rogue state swinging a saber at the wilting Western World.

This is fucking lunacy and I'm getting sick and tired of people making fucking excuses for Biden's fucking excuses. "Oh, Biden is in a really precarious position because if he rolls back Trump's sanctions he'll be tarred as an appeaser and midterm elections and rable, rable, rable!..." Bullshit. The Republicans are already calling Biden an appeaser for not acting even crazier than Trump did. Biden could drop a fucking A-bomb on Tehran tomorrow and Fox News would call him a pussy while Israel sulks in the corner for not making it a hydrogen one. No more fucking excuses. Everybody without Bibi's circumcised cock in their ass knows that pulling out of the JCPOA was stupid. So why not just return to the damn thing already?

At a certain point the only answer left to this question is because Biden wants a war with Iran every bit as much as the Republicans do and as far as I'm concerned, any doubts to that answer's validity died as the tires of Air Force One hit the tarmac in Tel Aviv during the dog days of mid-July. Before he even left his Delaware bunker for his sojourn to the Holy Land, President Biden afforded a rare one-on-one interview with Israel's state television Channel 12 which aired the day of his arrival. In this interview, while paying lip service to the JCPOA, Biden promised to use military force against Iran if it failed. He reiterated this barely veiled threat in Israel by signing a joint declaration with Prime Minister Yair Lapid, promising to use all of our empire's "national power" to prevent Iran from acquiring weapons we seem to be daring them to acquire, and this madness only metastasized in the House of Saud.   

While the rabid hounds of war in the press yipped on about oil prices and Jamal Khashoggi, the Biden Administration made no secret about the true motives behind their visit with Mohamed bin Salman. Before Biden jammed his tongue deep into that swarthy young sociopath's indubitably well-manicured asshole, he used it to tell the few spin masters who'd listen that the real goal of his prostration was to beef up Trump's Abraham Accords and build a Wahhabi-Zionist alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran.

The Biden Administration has painted the message in bright bold letters, in every conceivable language including Klingon, and Americans in both parties still can't seem to read it. WAKE UP STUPID! WE WANT WAR WITH IRAN! Both parties do and regardless of which feckless twat the few hardworking Americans still dumb enough to vote shove into the White House, unless their name is Omar or Paul, they're going to deliver this coded promise in 2024. The only question now, aside from which Beltway intersection antiwar activists should jam with our broken bodies first, is why? Why Iran and why now?

On paper, Iran seems like the most obvious choice for a Western ally in the Middle East. Compared to the psychotic sheiks in the Gulf who we arm to the fangs, Iran is actually a relatively moderate and stable theocratic republic, founded on the bedrock of a popular revolution. Despite the virtue signaling of the ancient Mullahs, they have a young and socially tolerant population. Women and Jews can vote. Transwomen can medically transition (in near record numbers). They even have a vibrant and avante garde film industry that rivals many European countries on the festival circuit. 

And in spite of our many differences, even the hard asses in Iran's military elite have repeatedly gone out of their way to accommodate the Great Satan in their neighborhood. They have actively aided and abetted the US in many of our quixotic military adventures in the Middle East, from savaging the Baathists in Baghdad to overthrowing the Taliban in Kabul and reigning in the Islamic State. Even Iran's preferred "terrorists" like Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels amount to little more than indigenous ragtag militias set up to protect vulnerable Shia populations from the same people who threw commercial airliners into the World Trade Center. Despite what you've been told by the Zionist smear campaign, Iran is probably the closest thing to a functioning democracy without an apartheid state in the Middle East and sadly, that's actually the real problem here. 

America doesn't want democracy in the Middle East. If we did, we wouldn't have spent the last cold war overthrowing the only ones that ever even existed there. Go ask Mossadegh's gravestone, Iran knows all about this history. America doesn't even want stability in the Middle East. That flaming sandbox is a permanently fucked basket case of failed states and forever wars because we made it that way. America made the sheiks. It was our oil companies that picked out the meanest tribes in the Gulf and built them palaces and skyscrapers in return for unfettered access to the oil that flows beneath them. America made the terrorists. We secretly funded every head-chopping psychopath from the Mujahedeen to the Islamic State to murder any Shiite or communist crazy enough to avoid entanglement in our infidel pissing match with Moscow.

The sick truth is that the Middle East is a fucked-up place because America likes it that way and ever since they overthrew our bloody little tool, the Shah, Iran has been a consistently annoying obstacle to burning that section of the world off the map. America doesn't want an independent neutral government as willing to work with Russia or China as they are with us. America doesn't want a functioning nation of well-adjusted brown people with some assemblance of agency. That kumbaya hippie bullshit just isn't the American way and I'll tell you one more sick truth if you're still willing to hear it. Obama's JCPOA was a part of this colonialist tradition and those suckers in Iran fell for it.

The JCPOA wasn't designed for world peace. It was designed to keep Iran under our thumb by giving Western imperialists full access to their supple young economy and absolute control over their formidable military. There was never a nuclear threat. Even those Shaw-shagging Mossadegh-flippers in the CIA admit this. The Ayatollah Khomeini declared nuclear weapons to be an affront to Allah and even went so far as to issue a fatwa against their manufacture. Yet Obama himself kept up Dubya's threats to make Iran the next Iraq with brutal sanctions until that besieged nation finally submitted to the shackles of his "peace" deal. Trump simply pulled out too early for selfish and reckless reasons but the only reason a geopolitical imbecile like him even could undo that deal so effortlessly is because that was precisely what it was designed to do, unravel at the whims of its masters in Washington whenever they decided it was time to finish what they started and snuff out the Iranian Revolution once and for all. 

Now, with Russia locked into our bloody proxy quagmire in Ukraine and China distracted with our provocations in the South China Sea, Iran is virtually on its own and decimated by Trump's cruel sanctions unleashed at the height of the Pandemic. There is bipartisan unity on "stopping" Iran and it's only a matter of time before the Mullah's lose patience with Israel's constant harassment and give them the Gulf of Tonkin they've been begging for on bended knee. War with Iran appears to be all but inevitable. I just pray to Kali and Mother Mary that there is still an antiwar movement radical enough to oppose it in the streets because peace never matters anywhere else.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Peace Sells by Megadeth

*  Kill For Love by Chromatics

*  Everybody Does by Julien Baker

*  Mariner's Apartment Complex by Lana Del Rey

*  Holiday Song by the Pixies

*  You Learn by Alannis Morrisette

*  Safari by the Breeders

*  Oblivion by Grimes

*  Bones by Soccer Mommy

*  Lithium by Nirvana

*  Daniel by Bat for Lashes 

*  Master of Puppets by Metallica         

  

For the Love of Lysander Spooner, Let the Republic of Texas Secede

 Lysander Spooner was an abolitionist. He was also one of the great American anarchists whose legacy remains so toweringly influential that capitalists and socialists alike routinely bitch each other out on message boards over which tribe of wonks lays claim to his allegiance. But above all else, Lysander Spooner was an abolitionist and a militant one at that. Few white men in nineteenth century America were more committed to annihilating that grotesque institution known as slavery than Mr. Spooner. 

He was a brilliant and fearlessly radical lawyer who would have given William Kunstler a run for his money when it came to turning the courtroom into a revolutionary battlefield. He used the arsenal of his legal expertise like an insurgent, publishing pamphlets for escaped slaves on how to break the system with tactics like jury nullification and offering his services directly to fugitives who couldn't read them free of charge.

Lysander Spooner also put his rifle where his mouth was, backing up his bombastic legal activism with direct action. He was a close friend of the great John Brown and actively conspired with the most notorious abolitionist revolutionary in American history to promote violent insurrection in the Antebellum South. Even after Brown was locked up for leading his brazenly quixotic uprising in Harper's Ferry, Spooner participated in an aborted plot to liberate his doomed comrade from the gallows. 

Lysander Spooner was a fucking abolitionist alright. He was a freedom fighter with fangs who wasn't afraid to bite. He was also an equally ferocious opponent of the Civil War. This may sound like a contradiction to some but to Spooner the right to secession, even for an institution he committed his life and safety to violently smashing to bits, was a pivotal manifestation of a government-by-consent that originated from the same wellspring of natural rights which also afforded slaves their right to liberty. Neither of these rights could be broken without declaring war on God herself.

Lysander Spooner also understood that these rights and all rights for that matter could never be granted by violent authoritarian institutions like the Union, who sought only to usurp agrarian chattel slavery to replace it with their own superior industrial slavery of wages. Real rights were those that could only be achieved through the direct democracy of popular self-determination. In no document does Spooner make this fact clearer than he does in his incendiary manifesto "Plan for Abolition of Slavery" in which he calls for nothing short of guerrilla warfare against all slaveholders by a stateless front of Black slaves and landless southern rednecks with nothing but aid and solidarity from northern abolitionists. Needless to say, many northern academics didn't like being cut out of the excitement of playing the white savior to the darker sheep in their flock.

But what Lysander Spooner's more condescending northern white critics couldn't seem to grasp was that he only opposed "liberating slaves" because he knew that slaves would never be truly free until they liberated themselves and that their right to secede from any union was a necessary component of this liberation. It was a radically iconoclastic position for any century, and it was one that spoke very deeply to me as a young genderqueer Marxist raised on similar ideas propagated by modern-day revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. But it was Lysander Spooner's school of hands-on abolition that made this libertarian socialist a secessionist and this is why I am not ashamed to support and encourage the right for the self-proclaimed Republic of Texas to secede from these United States of Hysteria.

At the latest biennial convention of the ruling Republican Party of Texas, those unhinged psychopaths approved an equally unhinged and psychopathic platform. A platform that obnoxiously declares Joe Biden to be an illegitimately elected president and homosexuality to be an abnormal lifestyle choice amongst other hysterics. Most of this fascistic little temper tantrum is nothing new. The platform of the Texas GOP has long been a veritable casserole of juvenile shock tactics designed to turn on their notoriously reactionary base by appalling mommy and daddy back in Washington. 

It's fucking theater, people. The Rocky Horror Picture Show for closeted fag-bashers in ten-gallon-hats. And idle threats of secession have long been a part of the act. But this year, all hopped up on Trumptosterone, Dr. Frank-N-Furter decided to kick it up a notch by actually calling for a statewide referendum to be held on Texas Independence in 2023, thus officially making this year's platform the first time any state's ruling party has formally endorsed a referendum on secession since 1861. As a post-Marxist Spoonerite, I say we call these whack-jobs on their bluff, and not just because I believe secession to be an inalienable civil right. Much like Lysander, I've got other weapons up my sleeve for Texas.

I fully support a 2023 Texit for the same twisted strategic reasons that I fully supported a 2016 Brexit. The United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union was similarly led by a ghastly cabal of openly racist brats and many if not most Brits who voted Yes on that referendum voted as an act of blatant xenophobia. But none of those unpleasant facts changes the equally unpleasant fact that the European Union and the United Kingdom are both equally despotic imperial institutions, and no one can deny in the light 2022 that Brexit quite successfully made both of those foul collaborations significantly weaker through the precedent shattering decentralization of their institutional powers. Afterall, why do think NATO hated the idea so damn much? 

Brexit also had the unintended but very predictable side effect of making long illegally occupied Celtic territories like Scotland, Wales and Ireland stronger. Speaking as an unbowed bastard daughter of James Connolly and the Saint Patrick Battalion whose ancestors only came to this wicked country to flee Royal genocide, this is precisely what I was hoping for back in 2016. Scotland's pro-independence majority in parliament is now calling for their own referendum in 2023 with considerably more popular support than they had for the last one in 2014 and the long-overlooked Welsh independence campaign, Yes Cymru, has seen their membership explode from 2,000 to 17,000 between 2020 and 2021 alone. 

But perhaps most gloriously of all, on the same year as the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, the former Provos in Sinn Fein won a majority in Northern Ireland's parliament on a campaign devoted almost entirely to the reunification of my divided ancestral homeland. Meanwhile, the party's popularity only continues to swell south of the border as well. Nigel Farage may be a snaggle-toothed Islamophobic twat, but I gleefully tip my bonnet to that son of three bastards for achieving in just eight short years what the IRA failed to do for over a century. To quote my fellow Queer Mick, Morrissey, London is dead, London is dead, London is dead, now I'm too much in love, I'm too much in love...

And what is Texas but gringo for Aztlan. In many ways Texas is America's Ulster, a white supremacist colony founded by slave owners, for slave owners. A land ruthlessly mugged from good hardworking Catholic peasants considered subhuman by their Protestant abusers. Texas only declared independence when Mexico abolished slavery, triggering the Mexican American War in which Irish renegades like Juan Riley killed racist cowards like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett like the neutered dogs they were. I'll join Ozzy Osbourne in pissing on the Alamo any day of the fucking week, but Texas didn't remain independent for a reason. Those gringos couldn't hold their own against the people they colonized, so they called in Uncle Sam for backup.

Let's see those bastards fight off the Jungian Reconquista without the taxpayer charity of federal gestapo like ICE and the Border Patrol. Let's see them try to enforce their borderland apartheid state in a country whose economic growth is completely dependent on a Hispanic population that is now virtually equal to that of the colonists and growing at a speed of eleven brown people for every additional Frisco hipster. And as a student of Lysander Spooner, what kind of abolitionist would I be if I didn't offer my ancestor's comrades an Armalite or two? Not that I'll need to in the gun show capitol of the known universe.

But this doesn't have to be a bloodbath. Like I said, secession is a civil right and civil rights are for assholes too. If Texans truly support this right like I do, then it is my solemn hope that they won't just respect the right for Texas to secede from America but the right for Chicano city states to secede from Texas and the right for hillbilly gayborhoods to secede from Chicano city states. This is the panarchist dream, what Karl Hess once poetically described as "a world of neighborhoods in which all social organizations are voluntary."

When secession is truly recognized for the natural right that it is, borders will evaporate, the state will crumble, and nations will become as fluid and decentralized as the indigenous tribes who once roamed the rolling hills of Texas. But even if all else fails, I will still support Texas Independence with all the same fire with which I support the Chicano Movement and for all the same damn reason too, because Lysander Spooner was a fucking abolitionist and so am I.

Si, se puede, dearest motherfuckers. See you on the other side of that shrinking border. I'll be the weird Irish bitch in platform boots with a five o'clock shadow and a daisy in my AR-18.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Bad Catholics by the Menzingers

*  Free to Decide by the Cranberries

*  Fourth of July by X

*  Glamorous Glue by Morrissey

*  Alternative Ulster by Stiff Little Fingers

*  White Minority by Black Flag

*  Breed by Nirvana

*  Rebels of the Sacred Heart by Flogging Molly

*  Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis

*  Look On Down from the Bridge by Mazzy Star