By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“I am going to make it through this year if it kills me!” I find myself singing that desperate chorus from the Mountain Goats’ classic “This Year” repeatedly pretty much every year around this time but I’ve never needed to believe those lyrics more badly than I do now in the final days of 2023. I could say that 2023 fucking sucked. That’s the way that I’ve started a lot of these annual lists of the few people who seemingly miraculously actually didn’t. But somehow that just doesn’t seem to cut it this year.

The most accurate way that I can put it is that 2023 peeled me alive. Just when I thought that nothing could possibly be more nauseating than the pointless proxy quagmire in Ukraine, Bibi Netanyahu and his coterie of Ashkenazi ethno-terrorists declared total war on the starving children of Gaza and proceeded to pulverize preschoolers into mush with American ordinances. As if that weren’t heinous enough, this horror show seemed to coincide like a conspiracy with a series of personal therapeutic breakthroughs that have brought my own long suppressed childhood trauma up like spiritual vitriol.

Long depressing story short; I spent the holidays watching my inner child dragged bloody and screaming from the rubble in Palestine over and over again before being tarred and feathered as an antisemite for being a little fucked by the experience.

So, yeah, 2023 fucking sucked. 2023 can eat a flaming train of dicks. Fuck that year and whatever twisted god who came up with it. But, as always, 2023 did still provide us with a few people who didn’t suck, a few people who were actually downright heroic, providing a much-needed silver lining to an otherwise toxic storm cloud of a year, and I’m here to swallow a gallon of my own vitriol and praise them because many of these people actually helped me to survive this awful fucking year and maybe, just maybe, their example will go on to help me prosper in the next one. So, let’s now thank that twisted god for a few people who actually didn’t suck in 2023. She could learn a thing or two from these people.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti– I’m probably going to get my fair share of shit for this one but quite frankly, I’m too goddamn pissed-off to give a fuck. Once in every generation or so, a revolutionary movement manages to capture the imagination of the pissed-off lumpenproles of this world by simply catching the empire we despise with its pants down. Past generations have had the Black Panthers, the Tupamaros and Anonymous. This one has the Houthi rebels and regardless of your own personal politics or creed it is hard not to admire a rag-tag army willing to take on Babylon with such rugged charisma and smirking zeal. While most of the world has stood by helpless while the United States has used Israel to obliterate Gaza like a fucking lawnmower, the Houthis, a half-starved renegade militia from one of the poorest corners of the earth have nearly single-handedly held this imperial conspiracy to erase the Palestinian people accountable with a series of increasingly daring pirate stunts against the western world’s global shipping empire in the Red Sea.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti is not the leader of this rogue band of Shia renegades but this senior political official for the artists formerly known as Ansar Allah has become the unofficial spokesman for the movement since it overthrew Yemen’s American-backed dictatorship in 2014 and his literary defiance rings out like church bells in a damned world, boldly declaring after America announced the creation of a 10-nation naval task force to end the Houthis guerrilla blockade against the blockaders that “America’s announcement of the establishment of the coalition of shame will not prevent us from continuing our military operations until the crimes of genocide in Gaza are stopped.” All of this from a nation that has barely survived its own Yankee proxy genocide which has taken no fewer than 377,000 Yeminis. The world needs the Houthis and Allah knows that the Great Satan deserves them.

Manuel Esteban Paez Teran– At least 33 transgender and gender-diverse Americans were murdered in the last 12 months alone but at least one of us went down swinging this year. Manuel, known as Tortuga or Little Turtle to their comrades was a fellow gender outlaw and Queer anarchist who was brought down in a hail of police gunfire as part of the embattled Stop Cop City Forest Defense that has been formed by volunteers from across the country to protect the South River Forest of Dekalb County, Georgia from being colonized by a massive police state training center. The cops claim that Tortuga fired first with a handgun they had legally armed themselves with and while the available evidence points to something far more sinister, with Tortuga’s body being riddled with 57 bullet wounds, including in the palms of their hands, I find this to be irrelevant. Even if Tortuga did pull the trigger, they did so in defense of another slice of the commons being annihilated by eminent domain. Either way, they died a martyr for the cause of a stateless society and a hero to trans people like me who refuse to become just another statistic without a fight.

READ MORE