By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Dearest motherfuckers, we need to have a serious talk about America. I’ve been tapdancing around this subject for years like a genderfuck Shirley Temple but I think we’ve come to the point where we can’t afford to mince words anymore. America is a runaway empire and it needs to be stopped. For a long time I have openly held out hope that the inevitable collapse of such a gargantuan killing machine was upon us and that all peace loving anarchists like me really had to do was prepare for the inevitable and wait. While I continue to maintain that any superpower as bloated and unforgiving as the American empire is certainly doomed to collapse, I have come to fear that our elites are savage and depraved enough to take us all down with them in a colossal mass suicide by cold war. We can’t afford to fuck around anymore folks. We need to have a serious conversation about destroying America once and for all before it destroys us all.

It’s important that we cleanse ourselves of any illusions pertaining to this country of ours. America was born an empire and it will die an empire. There is no once great nation to be saved. This creature began as a hideous mistake at best and a despicable conspiracy at worst. As flagrantly politically incorrect as I clearly enjoy being, those wokesters in the critical race theory market are right about at least one thing, this countries foundation wasn’t built on freedom and liberty. It was built on conquest, rape, slavery, and genocide, and the hustle never stopped. Over the centuries, we’ve evolved from small pocks and cotton to gunboat diplomacy and Manifest Destiny to a new world order and American exceptionalism.

It is all part of the same narrative of power and violence. We dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan as they attempted to surrender. We bombed bridges in Korea and then machine gunned the survivors with babes in arms. We crippled half of Southeast Asia for generations with blankets of Agent Orange. We trained baby killers to rape nuns in Central America and then helped them to get away with their crimes. We carpet bombed miles of fleeing civilians on the Highway of Death in Iraq. We starved the survivors for a decade and then bombed them some more. Any one of these crimes should be sufficient enough to damn us all to hell, but it wasn’t like we all took it sitting down.

America, for all its sins has a proud tradition of both individual and collective resistance to its own tyranny. We have had barracks raiding abolitionists, race traiting injun lovers, starved and shackled Anabaptist war resistors, limp wristed nudist transcendentalists, bomb throwing immigrant anarchists, prison dwelling democratic socialists, peace loving old right isolationists, long haired hippie freaks, draft dodging peaceniks, empire busting Black nationalists, officer fragging GI insubordinates, pink mohawked flag burners, rifle toting American Indian occupiers, anti-nuke Catholic Workers, lowriding Chicano anti-colonialists, state smashing libertarian stoners, Che loving communist metalheads, and even a few gender bending gonzo muckrakers, and it is this renegade tradition of many renegade traditions that makes America-the-place redeemable in the eyes of any deity, but only if we collectively hold America-the-government accountable before it’s too late, and that clock just keeps ticking louder and louder with each preceding presidency.

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