By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile Happy Valley
Its been nearly a month since the villagers chased off Orange Man Bad with pitchforks and torches and most of my liberal friends in group therapy have sunk into that warm bath of post election honeymoon euphoria. The more human side of my fractured brain envies their bliss. After all, don’t they deserve it? Don’t all of us? But I’m a lifelong anti-imperialist and I’ve seen too many third world sneak attacks not to be this goddamn jaded. While the liberal-progressive world sleeps, I’m left here waiting for the first bombs to drop, and I’ve got plenty of reasons to be vigilant.
Donald Trump may have been a B-movie monster but Joe Biden’s jacket makes him look like a goddamn pacifist. With over half a century of enthusiastically engaging in every illegal war that ever crossed his desk, I would count myself lucky that the twisted old fuck appears to be deep in the throws of full blown dementia if he hadn’t picked a young neoliberal death squad to run his cabinet. Aside from the Obama era Tarantino post-feminists in black aka Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Victoria ‘fuck the EU’ Nuland, Biden’s bloodthirsty grey-care advisors also include lesser known monsters like Director of Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who have had their fingers in every other corpse going back to the Clinton years. These kids are the architects of the Clintonian school of Humanitarian Intervention aka Smart Power, Hillary’s neocolonialist gift to the third world.
Humanitarian Intervention is essentially neoconservatism in an NPR tote bag. It’s warmongering carefully packaged and sold to peace loving liberals as human rights. It usually involves funding some token oppressed minority like, say, the Albanians of Kosovo, highlighting and all too often exaggerating crimes committed against them by the target, and then selling war crimes to the international community as the only cure for more war crimes. It’s the school of imperialist meddling hip in most European nations who’ve outworn their stay as colonialist rapists, even among their own citizens, and it is with this school of thoughtful, PR savvy, skullduggery that Biden’s foreign policy can be predicted to likely be a series of politically correct nightmares like the obliteration of Libya.
Never the less, recently, even pissed off jerks like me have been presented with reasons for hope with Biden’s calls for peace, love, and diplomacy in Yemen and Iran, and there is some legitimate reasons for optimism, but also way too many reasons for skepticism. Every peace song Biden seems to sing is more riddled with hidden meanings, contradictions, and frightening metaphors than Highway 61 Revisited. Call me a bastard (I prefer to self-identify as a bitch), call me whatever the fuck you like, but I’m not buying it and those poor motherfuckers in Yemen and Iran shouldn’t either. Sadly, most of them are too desperate for skepticism. It’s a white privilege that tends to go out of style when you’re forced to eat your own shoes just to keep from starving to death.