Fuck the Parents, What About A Children's Bill of Rights?

"What about the children!" This has been the shrill clarion call of hysterical Karens on both sides of the aisle for generations. "What about the children!" A sure fire response to any politically incorrect question that would otherwise require a level of critical thinking that fails to translate into a conveniently empty-handed partisan soundbite. "But hasn't prohibition already been a spectacular failure?" "What about the children!" "But isn't putting the federal government in charge of regulating social media already a form of fascism?" "What about the children!" It never fails to torpedo any inconvenient conversation in a colossal shit-fit of bombastic virtue signaling and the worst part about this bit is that it might actually be a pretty good goddamn question if anyone actually bothered to use it for anything but political sabotage. So, what about those children?

The sick thing is that the same people who use children as a rhetorical broadsword against their political opponents could care less about the rights of young people and you can put today's Republican Party at the top of that sad list with bullet. "What about the children!" has been adopted as the official war cry for the GOP's latest jihad to retake the House, only this time they barely even pretend to acknowledge the existence of their conveniently voiceless scapegoats, skipping right over their children's heads and screeching "What about the parents!" instead.

After a couple of years of high-powered right-wing think tanks and super-pacs fomenting irate suburban soccer moms over looming paper tigers like Critical Race Theory and Transgenderism, House Minority Leader and would-be Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy has rolled out a Republican manifesto called the Commitment to America, the cornerstone of which is a so-called Parent's Bill of Rights, seeking to empower hopped up guardians against the inevitable scourge of their offspring developing minds of their own. 

The document boldly states, "Parents, not the state, have primary authority for raising their children and the organs of the state, including public schools, serve rather than rule the parent." But what about those children that you speak of with all the tender love and care of a lease for a pre-owned Hyundai? Why don't children have the right to not be ruled by the organs of the state or the grandstanding parents that they already jealously serve? How did the Civil Rights Movement skip over an entire class of Americans that we were all once a part of? Forgive me for being frank but fuck the parents, what about a children's bill of rights?

What about a child's right to roam the streets of their own neighborhoods freely, untethered by what essentially amounts to parental leash laws. Kids can't even ride their bikes to the nearest vacant lot without being hassled by strangers with candy in blue and white vans for going dangerously unsupervised for five goddamn minutes. Childhood has become a soul crushingly captive experience that affords young people with zero time unaccosted by meddling adults. 

Zero time to climb trees, skin their knees, break bottles or experiment with the girl across the street. The wonder years have been affectively colonized by a level of round the clock surveillance that makes any right to privacy young people once had a pipe dream at best. This infringes on a supposedly Constitutional right to peacefully assemble, most egregiously with totally arbitrary curfews that have been statistically proven to be totally ineffective at preventing any crime but the freedom of movement. 

What about a child's right to be seen and heard. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a public school as anything queerer than a teacher's pet can tell you that these places are federally funded black holes for free speech. Why the hell should a teacher be granted rights that even a bootlicking GOP pigfucker wouldn't afford to your average cop? Children should have every right to tell any adult who disrespects their dignity to fuck off and get a life, and perhaps no right to free speech is more existential than the right for a child to tell an adult "No!" It is the total non-existence of this right and the autonomy it contains that make children the easiest targets for abuse in this country, both by the state and other predators empowered by their class status as undebatable adults. 

What about a child's right to choose what form of education suits their needs best? Not only is America's compulsory school system a spiritually draining industry of steel reinforced conformity but it affectively amounts to involuntary servitude. Child labor laws in this country achieved nothing more profound than ensuring that children would go from underpaid servants in corporate sweatshops to totally unpaid indentured servants in government sponsored ones devoted to making them more compliant employees once some role-crazy bully with tenure has affectively stripped them of their dignity and individuality for twelve years straight.

The labor rights of young people would have been much better served by helping them to organize their own damn unions that could empower them in either school or the work force and afford them the agency that only coexisting with their elders as equals can build. If schools really want greater student attendance then the responsibility should be on them to provide an experience that young people find beneficial enough to take part in voluntarily and this is going to mean treating them more like people and less like agriculture. Respect is earned, so fucking earn it or fuck off.

And this bleeds right into an equally neglected right, the right for children to be properly informed. This means giving kids access to any information they seek regardless of how the adults who occupy their lives may feel about it. Public libraries are by far the greatest schools that children could ever hope to access because they provide raw and unedited knowledge untethered to the educational bondage of some other asshole's curriculum. 

These spaces should be governed communally by all those who use them in the form of educational mutual aid societies and they should be ungoverned by the conditional aid of the state or the perilous whims of censorious parents who only seek to blindfold children from subjects that they deem inappropriate. This kind of paternalistic censorship only ends up pawning naturally curious kids off on the corporate wolves of the internet who are more than happy to objectify them in ways William Burroughs and Toni Morrison never would even if they could. 

And what about a child's right to bodily autonomy, the right to their own bodies without exception, the right to seek or refuse medical treatment of any kind including access to hormone therapy or reproductive healthcare provided that they are properly informed of all the risks involved, the right to be educated by their physicians rather than infantilized like some ward's show poodle at the local vet, the right to explore their own sexuality and gender identity freely, to figure out exactly who they are and what they want as individuals while they're still in the process of biologically developing. 

What gives any adult the right to fuck with that process? What makes telling children who or  how they can fuck any less dehumanizing than any other form of sexual violence? And I'm the fucking groomer here? Adults need to stay the fuck out of kid's bedrooms and that only becomes enforceable when we afford children the right to make their own mistakes and the access to the means to make them.

This includes self-defense and yes, that includes the right to bear arms. No segment of the population faces a greater risk of physical abuse and no segment of the population is afforded with less means to defend themselves from this abuse. This is not a coincidence. A wide variety of adult authority figures in this country are granted every right to physically assault a child and call it corporal punishment but if any child makes any attempt to defend themselves from this state sanctioned abuse, they become subject to a one way trip down the school-to-prison pipeline where they can only expect more abuse.

No one, let me repeat, no one should be given blanket immunity to commit aggravated assault and when that right becomes conditional to include the abuse of only one segment of a population then this double-standard officially becomes a caste system. Children deserve the right to fight back against their abusers by any means necessary, whether that means having access to a pistol or the ability to emancipate themselves from their guardians so that they can seek the shelter and guidance of someone who makes them feel safe. 

It shouldn't have to come to this but as the Republicans love to harp, freedom isn't free. Right's don't exist in a vacuum unless that vacuum is filled by an individual who can defend them themselves. America, like most countries, is affectively an ageist apartheid state. This matters to me because I barely survived my own childhood as a mentally disabled Queer person at the mercy of adult power structures reinforced by a government that I was afforded zero right to participate in.

But youth rights should matter to everyone because the whole purpose of America's institutional child abuse industrial complex isn't simply to manufacture compliant children susceptible to adult subjugation. It's designed to create a compliant nation of domesticated adults susceptible to government subjugation. So, I'll say it one more goddamn time, and I'm not telling you, I'm asking you, what about the fucking children?

 Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Younger Us by Japandroids

*  Wake Up by Arcade Fire

*  School by Nirvana

*  Zero by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

*  The Prisoner by Iron Maiden

*  Criminal by Fiona Apple

*  Buddy Holly by Weezer

*  Bad Kids by Black Lips

*  1979 by Smashing Pumpkins

*  Best Ever Death Metal Band From Denton by the Mountain Goats

The Fine Art of Blowing Up Pipelines in a Post-Truth Era

 I've always found conspiracy theories to be fascinating, not just individually, but as a concept in and of itself. I spent the darker portion of my teenage years happily lost down dark-web rabbit holes, searching for deeper meaning in the shocking War on Terror that shaped a generation of antiwar misfits like myself. However, I've come to spend more time as an adult asking the far more existential question of what exactly defines a conspiracy theory? The general opinion seems to be that a conspiracy theory essentially amounts to a narrative with a lack of evidence to back it up, but in reality, what makes any particular narrative a conspiracy theory is largely defined by the generally corporate manufactured popular public opinion surrounding its source. 

Basically, the zeitgeist decides, and he who defines the zeitgeist defines what evidence is considered reasonable enough to make any given conspiracy more than just another crackpot theory. Thus, the revolving door of big government and big business that governs our mainstream media also governs our truth. This essentially makes the entire notion of the conspiracy theory a largely arbitrary and inherently elitist concept, especially when you consider the absolute bunk that our all-knowing corporate overlords shovel into our skulls as absolute truth on a regular basis.

What makes the theory of Saddam Hussein's mythical weapons of mass destruction any less unhinged than the theory of bombs being planted in the World Trade Towers? How is putting your total trust in an establishment that essentially acts as a glorified Speak and Spell for the most violent military on the planet any less irresponsible than buying into whatever monster-of-the week Alex Jones has conjured up to sell more dick pills to incels? 

The cult of the conspiracy theory is built largely on a sort of blind faith in the "official story" as told by the same fine folks who brought you the easily debunked mythology behind such gems as the USS Liberty and the Gulf of Tonkin. Not to mention the fact that once maligned conspiracy theories include since proven facts like MK-Ultra and the Tuskegee Experiments. It is in this foggy minefield of crowdsourced truth and manufactured consent that we are forced to comprehend the growing crisis surrounding the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipelines.

Nobody denies that this was a blatant act of deliberate sabotage. On Monday, September 26, a series of underwater explosions blasted gaping holes into both of the Nord Stream Pipelines which were designed to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Danish waters of the Baltic Sea. These pipes were also designed to be virtually indestructible, steel reinforced concrete cables built to withstand the direct impact of the anchor of an aircraft carrier. 

NATO, Russia, Denmark and virtually everyone else at the scene has declared this dastardly deed to be an act of war and this is an act of war that very few military forces on the planet are even capable of pulling off. What we are talking about here is a very powerful and well-choreographed series of controlled demolitions performed miles below sea level with high-tech modified underwater drones. There really are only two militaries on the planet that could pull off this kind of high concept, James Bond-style, skullduggery successfully and they're both currently locked in an increasingly apocalyptic death struggle-by-proxy for the soul of Europe deep in the bloodlands of Ukraine. 

Naturally, the all-knowing Western Zeitgeist blames those wicked Russians for what essentially amounts to the most colossal terrorist attack ever committed on the European continent. On the surface this accusation comes across as totally reasonable. After all, if Vladimir Putin has proven a goddamn thing over the last two decades it's that he is one sneaky, cold-blooded, motherfucker. But once you get past this fact and come across the rest of the facts at hand this narrative very quickly falls apart.

Putin certainly is a soulless snake willing to make millions freeze to achieve his aims, but he was already achieving this sickening goal with those pipelines intact. The Russian state-run petroleum behemoth Gazprom is the sole owner of the Nord Stream 2 and the majority shareholder of the Nord Stream 1, which provides Europe's largest economies with 40% of their natural gas. Putin has already responded to western sanctions by turning off the spigot and telling the EU to sue for peace in Ukraine or shiver. His ability to play God with Europe's thermostat was the greatest opportunity that tinpot Czar had to exert leverage over Europe and even Uncle Sam admits it. 

In a recent press conference, that dead-eyed department store mannequin with a kill list known as Secretary of State Antony Blinken openly gloated about the "tremendous opportunity" those supposedly Russian attacks on their own infrastructure offer to end Europe's dependency on Russia's natural resources and "take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial goals" going on to call these attacks "very significant" and astutely observing that they offer a "tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come." For once, I agree with this creep, though I would add that the most significant opportunity these bombings offer is the opportunity for the US to weaponize Europe's carefully manufactured energy crisis as a means of advancing our own imperial designs in the region.

The only question left here that I can think of to ask is 'Is Vladimir Putin a fucking moron?' I am being completely serious because this is precisely what the US government and their pets in the establishment Speak and Spell are asking us to believe. They readily admit that demolishing the Nord Stream Pipelines is an obvious strategic win for Putin's enemies while simultaneously pushing the hopped-up conspiracy theory that that Mad Russian slaughtered his own cash cow. And naturally, anyone sane enough to suggest that this narrative is tinfoil-hat-crazy is the real fucking conspiracy theorist. 

So, is Putin recklessly stupid enough to blow up his own pipelines just to spite NATO's face? You be the judge, but my bullshit detector is screaming 'Fuck no!' on repeat. Putin is a petty and evil neoliberal gangster just like his opponents, but the man is not an imbecile. The Nord Stream wasn't just a pair of pipelines. it was a weapon of mass destruction, a double-barrel shotgun aimed straight at Europe's throat and with that weapon dismantled he loses all the leverage that made it truly lethal. The so-called logic behind Putin performing such an act of devastating self-sabotage makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever, but this is the latest conspiracy theory to be officially granted the status of the "official story" by the powers at be.

Obvious snow jobs like this are precisely the kind of bush league shenanigans that really killed the truth in this country, the fact that the self-sainted Fourth Estate thinks that we're all fucking morons while they go out of their way to make the "official story" itself the wildest conspiracy theory online. These corporate media hegemons have poured billions of dollars into crippling critical thinking in this country by selling blind faith in their brand as a virtue before discrediting the very premise of truth by abusing this allegiance with a deluge of establishment friendly conspiracy theories sold as Gospel truth.

NAFTA will bring middle-class Americans prosperity! Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11! Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who can stop Donald Trump! The Russian invasion of Ukraine was totally unprovoked! Vladimir Putin is an even bigger moron than you are! The audience isn't fucking buying it anymore and they've been rendered so paranoid from having a supposedly infallible establishment gaslight them into one geopolitical clusterfuck after another that they're willing to believe any asshole with a homespun accent who tells them that China is tainting their tap water to turn their children transgender. Donald Trump didn't poison these people's logic, CNN did.

So, who do we believe now in this post-truth era? I realize that this is going to come across as a bit depressingly jaded even coming from me, but I would honestly suggest no one, at least not exclusively. The contrived notion of objective journalism is a fallacy. Everyone has an ax to grind and the more they try to bury that ax beneath the camouflage of "objectivity" the more deluded by preconceived notions their narrative becomes. Blind faith is the true defining characteristic of the conspiracy theory and combatting that bullshit in this house of mirrors takes discipline and homework.

My personal approach, for whatever that's worth to you, is inspired by the ancient Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. The fable goes that several blind travelers were asked to describe a massive creature that they had never encountered before. Each man felt a different section of the elephant- the tusk, the trunk, the leg, the tail, and thus each man described a radically different creature, and each man was right, and each man was wrong. Only when their descriptions were taken together collectively did they come close to truly comprehending the beast before them.

The moral of the story is that agnosticism is a virtue unto itself and that all narratives should be both considered and taken with a hefty grain of salt. So, I read a little bit of everything that isn't tainted by the revolving door of power and even a few things that are- CounterPunch, Reason, Al-Jazeera, the New Conservative, antiwar.com, the World Socialist Website, and even then, I refuse to assume that I ever have all the answers. Maybe Putin really is stupid enough to blow up his own shotgun. Maybe after decades beneath the pressure of a gaslighting NATO colossus he finally snapped like the rest of us and started believing some mealy-mouthed Rasputin's conspiracy theories. Maybe, but I'm not about to take Aderson Cooper's word for it and you shouldn't take mine either.  

Think for yourselves, dearest motherfuckers. In a post-truth era, it's the best self-defense we have against the beasts that brought us here.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Free to Decide by the Cranberries

*  Atmosphere by Joy Division

*  Atlantis by Donovan

*  Posing for Bondage by Japanese Breakfast

*  Baby's on Fire by Brian Eno

*  Nocturnal Me by Echo & the Bunnymen

*  Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

*  Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics

*  The Bends by Radiohead

*  Are "Friends" Electric? by Tubeway Army

Assimilation or Genocide: Queer Revolution in an Age of Partisan Misdirection

The Republican Party wants to erase trans people. Over the last couple of years, they have made this sickeningly clear, not just with their colossal barrage of brazenly bigoted legislation overwhelmingly targeting children in one of the most tragically suicidal demographics in the country but with their increasingly unhinged and deliberately dehumanizing rhetoric. In fact, according to GOP rock stars like Ron DeSantis and Gregg Abbott, people like me don't even exist. We have been reduced to a conspiratorial ideology known as transgenderism, a perverted cult poisoning the brains of young children and convincing them to mutilate themselves with experimental pharmaceuticals and draconian surgical procedures.

Never mind the mountains of analytical evidence that has led a typically bigoted medical establishment to finally admit that being transgender is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Never mind the decades of exhaustive and conclusive evidence that transgender children denied the right to transition chose to destroy themselves in alarmingly high numbers. Never mind the fact that there are historical records even in the goddamn Bible of third genders existing for as long as anyone has bothered to keep them. Just never mind the fucking facts at all because these people aren't interested in them. They are only interested in securing the endorsement of the Zionist Christian Right and the Christian Right is only interested in using big government to erase my people like Palestinians by any means necessary. 

These means include bills that do far worse things than banning trans kids from sports. They include bills that flagrantly violate the First Amendment by making discussion of their very existence in compulsory public schools a crime. They include bills stripping public libraries of all literature that so much as even acknowledges our history. They include bills that bar minors from access to harmless medications like puberty blockers that have been proven over decades to reduce suicide rates by the double digits. They include prosecuting doctors that even provide this care with felonies. And perhaps most disturbingly of all, they include investigating parents who simply allow their kids to be themselves for child abuse in hopes of ripping their children screaming from their arms before placing them into homes that will force them back into the closet and erase them from public existence. There is a word for this and I'm getting tired of avoiding saying it out loud for fear of getting gaslit by my straight friends. That word is genocide.

I have always contended that being Queer is about far more than just sexuality and gender. We are a nation unto ourselves. Queer people are a unique race defined by our biological and spiritual inability to conform to the rigid confines of Western colonialist puritanical values. We were violently banished from our once affirming Heathen tribes during their forced conversion to State Christianity and left with no other choice but to forge a tribe of our own from the ashes. What we built from those ashes was a diverse and vibrant culture defined by our shared values of radical individuality and resistance to conforming to the White Anglo Saxon gender binary. We stubbornly refused to allow ourselves to be defined by what some progressive eugenicist or child molesting priest contended that our genitalia were supposed to mean.

All Queer people began as gender outlaws of one kind or another. There is no divorcing "transgenderism" from the Queer experience because it is fundamental to our provocatively transgressive way of life. Boys fuck girls because girls wear dresses because human beings require rigid categorization to be properly governed. When the constructed biological basis of the current patriarchal power system becomes fluid, anything becomes possible, and everything is up for grabs. Maybe race and class become fluid too. The order, the caste system, divide and conquer, it all falls apart in glorious anarchy. This is why transgender people are so fucking dangerous, no matter how powerless we are. And this why we must be stopped, and the GOP aren't the only ones conspiring to stop us.

Transgender people, especially those of us who brazenly reject the binary altogether, are the last vanguard of the Queer Nation because we are the most resistant to assimilation and assimilation is the preferred answer to the Queer Question proposed by our supposed allies in the Democratic Party. On the surface this appears to be a far gentler and more equitable approach to diversity, but its conclusion remains identical to that of the openly genocidal Republicans, erasure, and this ain't the first Queer holocaust to prove the synergistic effectiveness of this bipartisan method either.

The AIDS Virus offered the Christian Right with their first viable opportunity to annihilate us with a conspiracy of silence. An entire generation of Queer revolutionaries were wiped out by that suspiciously convenient plague while Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush used the federal government to keep the medical establishment at bay and divorced from any viable attempt to contain it. But the fags refused to just die quietly. Even with a viral timebomb strapped to our chests, the Queer Nation used the tools that we had sharpened on the thick rock-like skulls of pigs at Stonewall to make our suffering too grotesquely visible to ignore. Groups like ACT-UP used an aggressive campaign of highly publicized direct action in order to provoke empathy from the better angels of the straight world. These martyrs came out of the closet to die so another generation could live to torch cop cars.

Sadly, the Democrats had other designs. It was only after it had become viscerally clear that Queer people had survived the plague and the Republican party's attempts to weaponize it for votes that the DNC finally opened its doors to us, and many Queer people were simply to shellshocked to say no to such a warm welcome, but what exactly was it that these fair-weather allies were really offering us? 

They offered us the heterosexual ritual of marriage provided that we mind our manners and shut the fuck up about fixing a crooked insurance system that still leaves most Queer people dying in the cold.  They offered us protection from hate crimes provided that we consent to growing the police state where the greatest hate criminals thrive for a government paycheck as well as that colossal heterosexist animal farm known as the Prison Industrial Complex. They offered us the honor of serving openly in the straight man's army so long as we forfeited our commitment to solidarity with other colonized cultures in the Third World. And of course, they offered us access to their totalitarian medical and education systems where our kids now find themselves soft targets for the Republicans latest jihad against our existence. The message is clear, conform to one half of the duopoly or the other will crush you. 

The Democratic Party's solution to Republican terrorism is to use our terror to strengthen the state that the GOP uses to terrorize us and even this booby-trapped gift comes at the price of our autonomy. Ironically, these are also the same twisted mind games the Republican Party plays on Christian conservatives. What was once an insular and largely self-sufficient minority has been successfully assimilated into the state apparatus they once rightfully feared with the promise of protection from Queer scapegoats in exchange for conformity. 

The Democrats torch a bunch of Jesus freaks at Waco and the Republicans offer them protection from fags like me if they agree to fund the same feds who cooked the Branch Davidians alive. The GOP governed CDC twiddles their thumbs while Christopher Street becomes an open-air morgue, and the Democrats offer to hold off the fag bashing hillbillies as long as we give Anthony Fauci a raise for waiting so patiently for us to die. It's all part of the same sick fucking shell game of divide and conquer that inspired the invention of the gender binary in the first place. Every American becomes some other American's demonized other in order to manufacture all of our consent to be ruled. But when that other becomes disposable the stakes grow higher.

Queers, Blacks and Chicanos face the constant threat of extinction because we were never supposed to last as long as we have. Our races, our nations, were designed for the express purpose of resisting our annihilation which made these very identities even more lethal than the bodies they protect because they encourage everyone to join our resistance. This is why both parties are committed to crushing us by any means necessary. The Republican means are far cruder but far less affective. It turns out that even your average straight white American yuppie has a hard time watching Black transgirls slit their wrists to avoid being forcibly displaced. The Democrat's solution is to leave our bodies be and quietly dismantle the identities that empower them. We have nowhere to turn. Or do we?

This Queer turns to Malcolm X. Malcolm saw through the hoax of liberal integration being trafficked by Democrats to quell furious ghettos like Watts into compliance with white power. Malcolm new that the only people who could save Black people from the Faustian holocaust of extermination or assimilation were Black people themselves. Before the government could have him killed, Malcolm called on his people to create their own institutions that could operate with total autonomy from the state. Many fools continue to misunderstand this message to be one of racial separatism as if that were the only alternative to government subjugation, but Malcolm had tossed that bullshit in the rearview mirror with the Nation of Islam. What Malcolm was actually advocating was an old African tradition that honkies have come to call anarchism, a system of a million minorities coexisting without a massive, centralized caste system to divide us against each other.

This is the only way that the Queer nation will survive. The state is a system designed to destroy individuality and the diversity it inspires in the name of order. This only ever leaves any tribe with three options, assimilation, genocide or revolution and the third option doesn't come in a ballot box.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Under Pressure by David Bowie & Queen

*  Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras

*  Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

*  Been a Son by Nirvana

*  The Walker by Christine & the Queens

*  Shoplifters of the World Unite by the Smiths

*  Cop Car by Mitski

*  Easy on Your Own by Alvvays

*  I Think That I Would Die by Hole

The New Cold War is a War on the Poor and the Poor Need to Fight Back

 The shit is getting real again in Ukraine and every neoliberal and his lobbyist seems super stoked about the carnage. After months of pulverizing battlefield gridlock and mounting global war fatigue, the Western warmongers finally have a tangible victory to point at while they're robbing us all blind of our pocket change for Raytheon Boom-Boom Bucks (TM). Their sweeping propaganda campaign promoting an inevitable epic counteroffensive to end all counteroffensives has finally bore fruit with the Ukrainian Military taking back roughly 2,300 square miles of Russian occupied territory in the northeastern Kharkiv region, pushing Putin's boys back to the border and capturing the strategically important logistics hub of Izyum. It was indeed a humiliating defeat Vlad the Failure, but it was one that came at a very steep and telling price that Volodymyr Zelensky's bombastic cheerleaders on cable news haven't bothered to mention during their long-anticipated pep rallies. 

While the reports on Kharkiv have been nothing but flowers, few have mentioned that this counteroffensive actually began days before a shot was even fired in the region with a massive campaign against Russia's southern stronghold of Kherson that resulted in a bloodbath of upwards of 5,000 Ukrainian casualties. A heinous slaughter by any morally sane sentient being's standards but a sickeningly necessary one when you prize giving Putin a blackeye over the sanctity of human life. It was only with flocks of Russian troops redirected from the relatively low priority territory in the north to protect the high priority territory in Novorossiya that the Ukrainians were able to outnumber the Russians in a region that Putin has been slowly abandoning since he declared the beginning of Phase Two of his Special Military Operation (TM). Meanwhile, Russia has continued to make gains in Donetsk as the Ivans slowly march towards the rebel oblast's centrally pivotal city of Slavyansk.

Thousands of Ukrainian peasants, conscripted into Zelensky's army by the barrel of a gun were mercilessly fed into a Russian buzzsaw just to gunk up the gears long enough for a popcorn headline and this is supposed to be a victory for Ukraine? No, this is a victory for NATO and their bloodthirsty vendetta against Putin's Russia and it only comes at the tragic expense of Ukraine. It also comes at the expense of tens of billions in American and Western European tax dollars that have been dumped into remaking Ukraine's already decimated armed forces in Washington's and London's image. 

The war in Ukraine has become a defacto NATO operation from top to bottom, with Ukrainian soldiers trained, armed, fed and led by the same Russophobic death cult that promised those people membership in their little cool-kids club only to leave them hanging like a red flag before a Kremlin bull. Russia sees this. They've gotten the message loud and clear and they're more than prepared to obliterate even more impoverished Ukrainians with their own slave army of impoverished conscripts just to prove that their dicks are still big enough to swing with the Western superpowers and if all else fails, they can always just strap on a nuclear marital aid for the same effect. 

The New Cold War is a class war and oligarchs on both sides are waging it against the poor, not just in Ukraine but across the world. America's sweeping sanctions regime, directed at fomenting Russia's growing poor into conceding to Western regime change, has tanked the entire world's economy and put us all in the grips of catastrophic economic peril. Europe is already in the full throws of an epic recession and staring down the barrel of a very bitter winter. Russia has responded to Western price caps on its natural resources by turning the tap off on the Nordstream pipeline and sending the electricity and heating bills of everyday Europeans skyrocketing into the stratosphere. Working class people from Walloon to Warsaw have found themselves dipping into their own meager savings and even skipping meals just to keep the lights on and all the weathermen with their heads screwed on straight are predicting a similar forecast across the Atlantic.

Naturally, the results of this global class war are set to be far more lethal for the people of the Third World who still depend on Russian and Ukrainian grain for their very survival. Even with Turkish brokered deals to allow shipments of food and fertilizer to leave the bombarded Black Sea ports, nations like Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan are still facing famine thanks to another senseless pissing match between rich white assholes and those rich white assholes on both sides of this proxy abortion are doing just fucking dandy while they burn the rest of the world around them to the fucking ground.

While the Military Industrial Complex is practically printing their own goddamn money at this point, the oil industry is using their latest imperial rampage as an excuse to jack their prices up sky high. BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron are all making record shattering profits while their captive customers teeter on the brink of economic oblivion. Meanwhile, their fellow oligarchs in Moscow are doing just smashingly as well. In spite of a colossal embargo the likes of which the world has never seen, Russian banks have already bounced back to profitability as Gazprom reports a 100% increase in profits over the first half of the year and the Ruble reaches a five-year peak. The only winners in this sick fucking charade of a world war are the rich while the rest of us are expected to just grin and bear the brunt of what essentially amounts to their twin campaigns of class terrorism.

This is a world war alright and it is a world war against all of us. Every single one of us have become proxies in this twisted game of thrones. Perhaps the only good news is that I'm not the only prole kicking over the TV set and growling 'fuck this shit' between clenched teeth anymore. There is a growing discontent percolating across multiple continents, and it isn't directed at either side of this war's prescribed boogeymen either. It's directed at the very nations those people live in who all conspire against the will of their own people in the name of imperial conquest. Protests against the global class war over Ukraine have been growing in both size and ferocity in places like Austria, Germany and Serbia. Just last month, the Czech Republic saw no fewer than 100,000 working class people marching through the streets of Prague while NATO's Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has been blowing the whistle on a coming wave of civil unrest set to rock the Western World like a hurricane. 

This is precisely what the Antiwar Movement needs to reclaim the lethality that empowered it to shut down the Vietnam War. Back then poor people on both sides of the aisle were incensed over being drafted to fight and die in a rich man's bloodbath. This is why America had no choice but to freeze their military slave trade in carbonite in a sadly successful attempt to disconnect America's working class from the slaughter of our comrades in the darker nations. But with our rapidly disintegrating Atlantic empire's global jihad for full spectrum domination finally reaching the doormat of the Eurasian Century that has long inspired our backwoods crusades, we have all been drafted into what is quickly shaping up to be a downright apocalyptic final showdown between East and West.

Every war is a class war. It's only ever the poor who have to die for rich men's lies. But much like climate change, the wreckage has finally reached proportions too massive to cover up with jingoistic propaganda and bald-faced racism. It isn't Putin's name alone on the pump where working class stiffs get fiscally raped twice a day. It's Exxon, Shell, Biden, NATO, Raytheon. And these motherfuckers would be wise to watch their backs while they're cashing our paychecks because history has a cruel tradition of coming back around again like a boomerang. 

The First World War was an eerily familiar blitz of dying empires firing poor people out of howitzers into castle gates and feeding the unobliterated increasingly incoherent excuses for a rapidly expanding global clusterfuck. Millions died without ever understanding why and the impoverished survivors finally got fed up with killing each other and turned their rifles around to bring the war home where it belonged. The result was a Peckinpahesque shooting spree of popular revolutions destabilizing the capitols on both sides of this twisted international holocaust. Slaves in uniform turned their guns against their masters in the officer corps and beyond and began blowing away the real enemy. The biggest cataclysm to come out of this global mutiny was the Russian Revolution in which the Bolsheviks were powered to an unexpected victory after decades of failure by a lethal working-class antiwar movement to shatter one of the biggest empires on the planet. 

It could happen again. 2023 could be the year of the boomerang and I for one am counting on it, but if we foolishly follow the same path as the Soviets our best-case scenario will be replacing bankers with politburos like the last time, and we'll just end up repeating this same cycle of bloodshed in another century. Frankly, I'm not convinced that we have another century of this bullshit left in us. Poor people across the globe must not only realize that imperialism is a tax on human life that only ever falls on our broken shoulders but that this industry of violence only exists at the behest of the state and that this madness only ends with the states destruction.

There is no end to war without anarchy and there is no time left for half-measures on a dying planet. We can end this Cold War today by ending the rich, but we can only prevent the next one by ending the state. Now let's stop talking and fuck some shit up for peace.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Raw Power by the Stooges

*  Speeding 72 by Momma

*  I Gotcha by Joe Tex

*  The Seether by Veruca Salt

*  (Nothing but) Flowers by Talking Heads

*  Comeback Kid by Sleigh Bells 

*  Candy Sam by Ty Segall

*  Year of the Boomerang by Rage Against the Machine

*  The Inside Game by Royal Trux

How Weaponizing Identity Politics Ended the Vietnam War

 I'll tell you a secret, dearest motherfuckers, if you promise to tell everyone else. The two-party system is nothing but a great big fucking distraction. When it comes down to the big money issues like war and peace, there is virtually zero difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and both of these thieving cliques of corporate sluts use the decidedly divisive masquerade of identity politics to obscure their own malignant identities as mirror vessels of the same apocalyptic war machine.

The Republicans rail furiously against the epic scourge of trangenderism, trying to convince fine folks like you that fine freaks like me are a pack of mincing sexual predators chomping at the bit to chop your son's dicks off. Meanwhile, the Democrats work the other side of the room, selling themselves as the only hope broken trannies like me have of not being burned at the stake for walking into the wrong bathroom. And while we're all busy tearing each other's throats out over race and gender, we all get fucked in the ass by the bipartisan military industrial complex when they quadruple the deficit to sell bunker busters to fascist lunatics in Ukraine.

These yuppie pricks are fucking hustling us over our few differences but somehow, it's people like me and my comrades in the ghetto who get the lion share of the blame for this travesty. It's increasingly hip among principled anti-imperialists on both the left and the right to be openly dismissive if not downright derisive towards identity politics and part of me can't blame them. I get sick and tired of trigger-happy cretins like the Clintons using my people like a rainbow-colored human shield while they carpet bomb the planet in the name of humanitarian interventionism. It's almost enough to make even me want to bash me.

But that doesn't mean that things like trans rights and racial equity don't matter, it just means that they are convenient fodder for both parties to take advantage of because people like me don't have an industrial complex to contend with, but this is precisely why imperialism should matter to marginalized people like me and why marginalized people like me should matter to anti-imperialists. We are the only people in this country fucked enough to be downright Third World. In fact, it wasn't so long ago that being Queer and/or Black was virtually indistinguishable from being an anti-imperialist.

People in this country seem to suffer under the fevered delusion that the Vietnam War just sort of ended. That suddenly after sacrificing some 58,000 American soldiers and annihilating 3 million Indochinese peasants beneath a driving rain of poison gas and shrapnel, Nixon and Kissinger just decided to pack it up and fuck off back to Wahington in 1973. The truth is that the only reason why that war ever fucking ended is because anti-imperialist minorities led a downright revolutionary campaign to fucking end it. We would still be in Danang as we speak, slinging dope and aiming nukes at China, if Blacks, Latinos, Queers and women hadn't radicalized the Peace Movement and turned it into a veritable threat to national security.

Before Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, America's antiwar movement was an ineffectual band of white milquetoast suburbanites strumming banjos and politely begging pitiless psychopaths to knock it off and give peace a chance. The Black Power Movement gave these longhairs fangs and taught them how to use them. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King were some of the boldest voices among the pacifist milieu but it was the more militant splinter sect of his movement that first called out the war in Vietnam for what it truly was, naked racist imperialism, and declared their allegiance with the bombed.

The Black Power Movement was built on abandoning tedious partisan politics in favor of creating autonomous communities of Africans right here in America by expanding their awareness of their place in a larger global struggle against colonialism. This struggle didn't just include other Africans engaged in liberating their continent from European oppressors, it included poor people who stood their ground beneath Western bombs wherever they dropped.

Just before he was savagely slain by federal government infiltrators, Malcolm X abandoned the reactionary Nation of Islam and called for the creation of an African American led freedom movement defined by playing their part in a larger international struggle against colonialism. A couple years later, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee picked up Brother Malcolm's torch and used it to broaden their revolutionary horizons by officially declaring themselves to be more than just another civil rights organization. 

In 1967, the SNCC boldly redefined themselves as a human rights organization committed first and foremost to supporting "struggles against colonialism, racism and economic exploitation wherever those conditions exist." And then they picked up rifles and joined forces with the Black Panther Party and the shit really got wild. It was during this gunpowder baptism that the antiwar movement became the anti-imperialist movement. 

But the Black Power Movement wasn't alone. They may have represented the brightest spark in this nascent anti-imperialist movement, but it was actually women, especially women of color, who created some of the earliest and gnarliest racket against the empire's bloodbath in Vietnam. Groups like the Women's Strike for Peace and women like Gwen Patton who led the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union didn't just speak out against the war but brazenly declared their allegiance with the people who it was being waged against. 

Patton declared the women who played a pivotal role in the Vietcong "sexy" and many early women's libers saw the spectacle of Vietnamese mothers with their babies on their back and Kalashnikovs in their hands giving cigar chomping sexist thugs like General Curtis LeMay a run for their money as the perfect embodiment of female power, representing lethal strength through empathy, motherhood weaponized in defense of the children who were always the first to die in men's wars. 

And it was women who set the antiwar movement on fire, literally. The most revolutionary act a pacifist can comit is self-immolation and this brazen provocation was first imported to the United States by a badass bitch named Alice Herz in 1965. A Holocaust survivor and founding member of the Women's Strike for Peace, Herz was inspired by the iconic self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monks like Thich Quang Due to literally set herself on fire for peace amidst the factories that built America's arsenal in Downtown Detroit. She left behind only ashes and a searing letter declaring "Decide if this world shall be a good place to live for all human beings or if it should blow itself into oblivion."

Bold Black women like Gwen Patton, Angela Davis and Elaine Brown backed their pacifist sisters up with arms and held the empire's feet to Herz's fire by the barrel of a gun. So did furious transwomen of color like Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major and Sylvia Rivera who took the lessons they learned as part of the Black Power, Chicana and Women's Movement's and applied them to decolonizing Queer spaces like Stonewall by any means necessary. 

These weren't merely the actions of irate Queers against the police state. The Queer Liberation Movement was defined by its commitment to anti-imperialism from day one. It wasn't a mere coincidence that the loudest gang of fist-swinging faggots to come out of the flames of Christopher Street called themselves the Gay Liberation Front. This was an homage to the Algerian National Liberation Front and the South Vietnam Liberation Front, as well as a message to the pigs that a new Queer nation had been born and that it stood defiantly with the people of the Third World.

Huey Newton himself recognized our potential, defending our fight amongst Panthers still hostile towards the Queer experience and declaring that Queer people "might be the most oppressed people" in society and therefore should be considered potentially "the most revolutionary." Huey sharply saw the radical opportunity in weaponizing all oppression against his own people's oppressors and turning this opportunity into what Frantz Fanon called an "immense tyranny destroying wave."

Chicago Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton probably gave us the best example of what this wave might look like when he formed his Rainbow Coalition in 1969, which brought together the Puerto Ricans of the Young Lords, the Native Americans of the American Indian Movement, the Chicanos of the Brown Berets, the Chinese Americans of the Red Guard Party, and even the impoverished Southern whites of the Young Patriots Organization in a diverse coalition of militant identity political organizations united by the imperial enemy they shared with the people of Vietnam.

Even after that racist closet queen, J. Edna Hoover, had Freddy capped, this revolutionary virus spread. Suddenly white college kids were carrying Vietcong flags instead of daisies and organizations like the Weather Underground, the Youth International Party and the White Panthers were declaring their solidarity with the international tyranny destroying mission of Black Power. Soon, ROTC buildings across the country were going up in flames and even GIs were joining the revolution, fragging their commanding officers, refusing orders, sabotaging millions of dollars in equipment and launching uprisings in barracks across the globe.

The powers at be saw the storm clouds of revolution on the horizon. They pulled the plug on their genocidal war in Vietnam to save the empire from collapsing into the flames. It wasn't just the Vietcong who kicked Uncle Sam's ass, it was a revolutionary united front of Third World citizens stretching from Stonewall to Saigon. In 1975, the American Empire was defeated by identity politics.

So, the American Empire did what it does best, it colonized the problem. The Democratic Party enticed Black, brown and Queer people of every color to join their counter-revolutionary operation under two conditions; we forfeit our autonomy in exchange for tokens of bourgeoise assimilation, and we divorce our movements from the anti-imperialism that once defined them. By engaging in this Faustian bargain, we didn't just neuter identity politics, we removed a downright personal commitment to destroying colonialism from the Antiwar Movement in the divorce, sending those poor honky breeders back to the milquetoast purgatory that we had liberated them from.

This is the part of the story where I tell you dearest motherfuckers that it's not too late. Well, it's not. The vision of tragically forgotten martyrs like Fred Hampton and Sylvia Rivera, a wild dream of a diverse coalition of identity outlaws united by our shared awareness that the empire which colonizes the Third World colonizes its fucked cousins back home as well, remains this world's greatest hope for preventing an Ozymandias Century. If a bunch of thugs from the hood can end a war with a ragtag army of drag queens, rice farmers, cholos and dope smoking hicks then I see no reason why we can't end them all with a new global Rainbow Coalition of Black militias, Antifa arsonists, Boogaloo Bois, Shia sectarians, Russian separatists, genderfuck evangelists, Kurdish autonomists and trailer park isolationists.

So, what do you say, dearest motherfuckers? Let's get together and make this fight personal again before it's too late. Let's burn this classist, racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist motherfucker down once and for all and dance in the flames like it's 1975.  

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Down in the Streets by the Stooges

*  Keep the Car Running by Arcade Fire

*  Softer Softest by Hole

*  Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

*  Freddie's Dead by Curtis Mayfield

*  Breed by Nirvana

*  Sweet Jane by the Velvet Underground

*  Hug of Thunder by Broken Social Scene

*  Everyday People by Sly & the Family Stone

*  Heroes by David Bowie

*  Lola by the Raincoats    

You Can't Fight MAGA Fascism Without Smashing Biden's Republic

 Joe Biden is pissed off again and coming out swinging and it isn't those pesky Russkies  or dastardly Chinamen this time either. It's those stupid assholes who voted for the other moron, you know, the orange fella. But this is no laughing matter. Joe is deadly serious. Pounding the pulpit before a crimson lit background, flanked by sharply dressed Marines like a white Louis Farrakhan with Alzheimer's, Joe proselytized to us on primetime television about a grave threat to our democracy, an existential threat to "the very foundations of our republic" and then the President used the F-word. 

No not the fun one that I chuck around like hatchets at the Gathering of the Juggalos. The one that pretty much everyone else chucks around like hatchets at the Gathering of the Juggalos. Fascism, well, semi-fascism at least. According to Joe Biden, the greatest threat to our exceptional empire isn't climate change or nuclear holocaust but the scourge of MAGA Republicans, and only you can stop them with a check to your local Democratic Party and a vote for whatever marginally lesser evil that they've sanctioned this year. 

It's at this moment when you catch your breath and realize that you've been terrorized into another pledge drive for America's other imperialist party. "With just three easy payments of 99.99 you too can save American democracy and advertise that fact to all the other bougie Karens in line at Starbucks with this stylish "I Fought the MAGA Republicans!" tote bag." Goddamnit! You fuckers got me again. I'll take two. But just because Biden's midterm saber rattling is just a rather obvious if garish act of partisan theater doesn't mean that the threat isn't real. Donald Trump is a nefarious gangster with a devoted posse willing to get themselves shot in the face at the Capitol just to do his bidding. Hell, some of them may very well be deserving of that other F-word. But that poses a question that probably doesn't get asked enough in hatchet country. What the fuck is fascism anyway?

Nobody seems to be able to give a straight answer on that one and the few who do all seem to have very different definitions. We all know what fascism looks like, with the marching and the jackboots and the torches and the flags. It's basically racist S&M without the safe words and nobody ever gets off, they just get more pissed off. But aside from the violent theatrics their really doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot holding it all together and that's largely by design. Fascism isn't so much of a philosophy as it is an excuse for rich people to use poor people to kill other poor people. The few things that most of these excuses have in common are demonizing minorities in order to justify the militarization of civilian society and consolidating unchecked corporate power within the federal government. All of this twisted nonsense fits Donald Trump like a fun sized condom. The only problem is that it fits most of his opponents too, including Antifa's latest member, Joe Biden.

Think about it. What are all the sins that make MAGA reek like Mussolini's drawers? The demonization of opponents. The weaponization of the border. The use of law and order to contain irate minorities. The proclamation of absolute power. The glorification of militaristic nationalism. All of this is straight out of the Clinton-Obama-Biden playbook.

It was under Obama that a merciless campaign was waged against whistleblowers and the few journalists left who dared to publish them. By weaponizing the century old Espionage Act and sicking it on more dissidents than every other previous president combined, Mr. Hope-and-Change sent a brutal message to critics of empire across the planet that the price of the truth won't just be your freedom, it will be your sanity. Julian Assange, quite possibly the greatest journalist of his generation, continues to physically and emotionally disintegrate in a cement box at Belmarsh as we speak while awaiting his live burial at Florence Supermax. All part of an international campaign spearheaded seamlessly by the regimes of Obama, Trump and Biden to destroy a man for telling the truth about unchecked power.  

Trump definitely took the weaponization of the border to new lows by going well out of his way to target children, but those crimes too were built on the precedents of his predecessors and his successors alike. The foundation for the current racist military regime that we see at our southern border was first established by Bill Clinton's 1996 Immigration Law and reached its zenith if not quite the height of its cruelty under Biden and Obama. This lethal liberal tag-team still holds the world record for wrangling desperate people like alligators for crossing an invisible line in the fucking desert before shipping them back to the swamps we turned their shithole countries into with our imperial foreign policy. They also built the concentration camps which remain open and designed for the primary purpose of traumatizing migrants into never returning to the land we stole from their ancestors. 

If you want to talk about the white supremacist school of law and order that the MAGA set are so stoked on than ask the motherfuckers who wrote the goddamn book. Joe Biden spent the eighties working closely with his allies in the moderate wing of the Republican Party to turn America's finest thugs in blue into a heavily armed army of colonialist occupation complete with machine guns, battle tanks, three-strikes laws and mandatory minimums and he used openly racist rhetoric to earn the support of white Americans on both sides of the aisle to make it happen. 

In the decades since the landmark 1994 Clinton-Biden Crime Bill, America's prison population has doubled into the largest population of incarcerated people on the planet. It has also decimated inner city communities of color to a level of economic depravity that made them fodder for a pandemic that turned this whole country inside out. The fallout from this perfect storm of carceral apartheid and systemic neglect is our current crime wave which Biden himself seeks to fix with more cops, more prisons and more law and order.

The unchecked power enjoyed by Fuhrer Trump was yet another byproduct of this much-sainted regime which took the already muscular Executive Office of Biden's moderate allies in the Bush junta and pumped it full of steroids by endowing the President with the right to kill on demand with nothing but a rubber stamp court and a fleet of toy planes standing between the Commander-in-chief and a 16-year-old dead Arab boy. Can you honestly blame a breying moron like Donald Trump for assuming that he was elected dictator considering that even self-proclaimed progressives sat on their hands while Barack played Saddam for eight goddamn years and then passed the ball to Orange-Man Bad?

As for the glorification of militaristic nationalism, take a look around honey, because that's what this country was built on. From Manifest Destiny to the New Cold War, America's foreign policy has been one seamless imperial jihad for global domination that has killed more brown people than most openly fascist regimes combined, and we have long fostered a shrill culture of bipartisan white supremacy and cultural hegemony at home to bolster it with the mythology of American exceptionalism. Every day we force our children to pray to a flag like a fucking cargo cult. We throw more parades and holidays glorifying warfare than North Korea. If Trump is Hitler, then both parties are the Kaisers who put the truncheon in his pussy-grabbers.

The difference between Trump and Biden is purely a matter of cosmetics. There is no difference in substance because there is no substance. The platitudes of the so-called mainstream establishment to human rights and racial equity amount to little more than kabuki theater. Behind every pretty mask is another ugly Trump. The MAGA Republicans have simply done what fascists have always done best, they've stripped the nation state bare of its costume and celebrated its vulgar nudity with totally unabashed pride. This is what happens when an empire becomes a failed state. This is what happened to Weimar Germany and Italy and Spain. 

Fascism isn't some kind of satanic aberration built from black magic; it is a desperate attempt by a dying state to revive itself with the overt use of the kind of mass violence that was used covertly to build it. Donald Trump didn't lead his march on Washington to make America great, he led it to make America great again. MAGA isn't about ending wars, it's about winning them like we used to, and this or any other genre of fascism can't possibly threaten the very foundation of Joe Biden's republic when the violent globalist despotism that defines that republic also defines the very foundation of American fascism.

My biggest problem with the Never-Trumpers in both parties has always been their hysterical insistence that Donald Trump is special. Fascism isn't even special. It's the inevitable blowback of late-stage imperialism and if you really want to fight it you should forget about Joe Biden's fucking tote bag of empty rhetoric and save your money for a hammer to smash the state that birthed that rough beast slouching towards Washington to be born.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Like I Used To by Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen

*  Joke Ya Mind by Insane Clown Posse

*   Ahead by Wire

*  All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

*  Buildings by Regina Spektor

*  Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

*  Gray Cell Green by Ned's Atomic Dustbin

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

*  I Put a Spell on You by Marilyn Manson

The NATO Sultanate of Recep Tayyip Erdogan: The Proxy Becomes the Master

 The right of self-determination of the peoples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development.

-Abdullah Ocalan

Russia is really out of control lately, throwing its weight around the neighborhood like a suburban bully with a battle tank instead of a John Deere, crushing any blue-haired busybody who dares to eyeball Putin's azaleas the wrong way, invading sovereign backyards and redrawing the property lines, all to restore the good name of some long dead empire that's never coming back. The only people worse are those goddamn Chinese commies, building their multicontinental New Silk Road and ethnically cleansing any tribe of inconvenient Muslims who stand in the way of construction.

I mean, who does things like this? Who do these Eurasian barbarians think they are, the United States? Just thank White Jesus that we have the Sacred Knights Templar of Western Neoliberal Civilization to put such autocratic beasts back in their place among the squaller we carefully erected for them with our cannons and opium. America may be an insane fucking murder machine but if there is one thing we won't put up with its obnoxious upstarts jacking our playbook to set up new empires of their own. NATO is all about preventing this kind of rude dark-skinned revanchism, except when they're not. 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's relatively open dirty little secret. Under his increasingly autocratic rule, Turkey has committed every single crime that Russia and China have been accused of by less than reliable sources and they've done it all with American weapons and the official NATO stamp of approval. As we speak, Turkey is engaged both directly and by proxy in the invasion of no fewer than four sovereign nations depending on the given week as well as the subsequent implementation of what could very quickly escalate into two separate concurrent genocides.

Erdogan has been openly proclaiming his intentions to launch a full-blown ground invasion of Kurdish held territory in both Syria and Iraq since earlier this spring and considering that his forces already hold large swaths of this territory after the last three invasions they've thrown over the last six years, we have every reason to take him at his word. We also have every reason to believe that the next illegal incursion could be part of a final solution to Turkey's long lingering Kurdish question.  

As punishment for defeating his friends in ISIS and jumpstarting the greatest experiment in modern-day anarchism since Catalonia, Sultan Erdogan has proclaimed his intentions to dig a thirty kilometer deep "buffer zone" into what is currently the autonomous region of Rojava and what is still internationally recognized as Syria where he will use the millions of Arab Syrian refugees he hosts to ethnically cleanse the region of its millions of ethnic Kurds. Erdogan's multinational jihad against the Kurdish people has already displaced hundreds of thousands, not just from Rojava but the Kurdish region of Iraq as well where just this summer he bombed the tourist village of Perex, killing 9 civilians including two children, one of them a year-old infant.

This isn't exactly an isolated intervention either. It is part of a rapidly expanding international plan for Erdogan's Turkey to reestablish the Ottoman Empire and slaughter every man, woman and child who stands in his way. This includes the revival of the Armenian Genocide with help from Erdogan's Stalinist sock puppet in Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. Together these two Turkic supremacists made the Ottoman great again in 2020 by invading the Armenian autonomous region of Artsakh and emptying it of nearly half of its ancient Christian population. 

90,000 of the 150,000 citizens who have occupied those sacred hills centuries before NATO was just a glimmer in Satan's eye have been forced to flee for their lives from the same armies who buried their ancestors by the millions. This international rampage has also included Erdogan's drone war in Libya and his increasingly aggressive Blue Homeland Doctrine which has him jockeying with fellow NATO allies like Greece for control of the Mediterranean.

Of course, the United States and NATO are just incredibly concerned about all of this, offering up threats and protests and even a few sanctions but they show their true colors where the rubber meets the road. In spite of Erdogan's very chic anti-western posturing, his military machine is still largely dependent on Atlantic financing. The United States shills out millions in taxpayer dollars to Turkey every year, nearly every penny of which goes to putting more bullets in Kurdish and Armenian skulls. Joe Biden himself has called for the US to sell the F-16's he hasn't already promised to the Azov Battalion to Turkey. This is not how you treat an openly genocidal pariah unless of course that pariah is secretly doing your bidding. 

All in all, Erdogan's neo-Ottoman Reich appears to be a net win for American primacy. We were already finished with the Kurds for another generation and both of Ankara's appalling interventions in Rojava and Artsakh serve to weaken Iran and Russia's influence in the region. Turkey has long served a role similar to Saudi Arabia as a conduit of the kind of chaos America can't afford to be caught stirring up red handed. It was Turkey who helped us provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis by stashing nuclear tipped Jupiter missiles on their soil. It was Turkey who sabotage a neutral Greek democracy by invading and occupying half of Cyprus. And it was Turkey who spearheaded America's plot to overthrow Putin's little bro-bro Bashar al-Assad in Syria by arming a jihadist revolt that would quickly mutate into the Islamic State. So, what if Turkey has its own imperial ambitions. After all, that's how the American Empire got started, isn't it? While this is true, that's also how the English Empire ended.

Once upon a time, the United Kingdom swung the biggest stick on the world stage, fighting fifty wars at a time and lording over an empire that stretched across the globe from Belfast to Bangladesh. But taking over the world is fucking hard. If you don't pace yourself, you could easily end up like that hotdogging amateur Adolf Hitler. The sharper empires find proxies to pick up the slack. The United States began as one of those proxies, just a little backwater slave colony to keep the French and Spanish in line in the killing fields of the New World. Sure, occasionally they went too far with the Indian killing and slavery was becoming a bit of a dated industry once Africa was finally fully under Europe's control, but how much of a threat could a gaggle of grubby proxies like George Wahington and Thomas Jefferson pose to the greatest empire on earth?

Every single empire thinks it can't happen to them until it does. America is on the brink of collapse and Sultan Erdogan has become a master at playing both sides of the field. As we speak, he has his forked tongue jammed deep into Putin's ear, increasing Turkey's trade with Russia even while he sends Bayraktar drones to kill their troops in Ukraine. Erdogan has masterfully managed to establish himself as an indispensable middleman between the oligarchs of Moscow and Kiev. He's already brokered deals to allow Ukrainian grain to leave Russian encircled ports and if he can pull off brokering a peace deal to end a war that America is feverishly invested in making last forever than Erdogan could make his economically unstable upstart of an empire an irreplaceable partner in a Eurasian Century that promises to show America to the door and Turkey isn't alone.

Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are all American funded proxy states who show an increasing taste for geostrategic independence in an age of American decline. Solo, none of these ambitious little shits poses much of a threat to the Atlantic Colossus but together, with alternative streams of income being offered by a multipolar Eurasian conglomeration that just won't die, each one of these cherished and protected allies of American imperium could easily become another dagger in Ceasar's back.   

Buck up Uncle Sam and keep in mind as the streetlights fade over the gutter where your blood flows like wine that what goes around comes around. Your Judas proxies will someday join your shattered bones on that same dust heap where you left the Crown, that is if the melting ice caps don't drown them first. This is the way of empire, and the hustle doesn't stop until the poor people of this world join Rojava and Artsakh in thinking small and smashing the state into democracy sized pieces.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes by Soccer Mommy

*  Fake Empire by the National

*  Territorial Pissing by Nirvana

*  Livin' Thing by Electric Light Orchestra

*  Evil by Interpol

*  See No Evil by Television

*  Mountain Song by Jane's Addiction

*  Just by Radiohead

*  Bulldog Front by Fugazi

*  Frankenstein by New York Dolls 

*  Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome by the Mountain Goats