By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

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.

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