[Editors Note: This article was originally published on March 17, 2024, at Exile in Happy Valley].
I quite frequently use this space to lament the untimely demise of the antiwar movement in this country and to wallow shamelessly in the miseries of what could have been. Those of my readers who have gone on to join the ranks of the loyal followers whom I lovingly describe as my very dearest motherfuckers likely know the sermon by heart at this point. The Gospel of Abbie Hoffman...
The epic tale about a ragtag coalition of Black militants, angry faggots, dope smoking weirdos, and disgruntled GIs who came together in rage, love, and empathy to end Babylon's savage crusade in Indochina with a wild campaign of monkey-wrenching sabotage, campus arson, and fucking in the streets. For just one shining, impossible moment the weird people won, the empire coward in its corner, and everything seemed possible. But then they fired Nixon, put the draft on ice, and brought the troops home, and the movement collapsed. Or has it?
As down and pissed as I get, every once in a while, this nation, long sedated by a toxic casserole of reality television and high-powered prescription narcotics, shows me signs of discontent with their leader's bloodlust abroad. The truth is that this discontent has actually grown more cantankerous than it has been in decades in recent months. But like pretty much everything else good in this country, it has also been tragically bisected by petty partisan bullshit.
On the left we have seen a sonic upsurge in unprecedented outrage over the Democratic Party's longtime support for Israel's increasingly genocidal policies towards occupied Palestine. While I have long cracked wise and mean about the complacent hipster brats of the nouveau left, what with their creepy Bernie Sanders fetish and their politically correct distractions, these kids have made me downright proud lately with the pure fury of their empathy for the long-silenced people of the Gaza Strip. They have literally shut down parades, engaged the pigs in fist-swinging riots, and relentlessly heckled that old white bastard in the White House with chants of "Genocide Joe!" Abbie would be proud too.
Meanwhile, on the right, a rising tide of conservative populists have similarly drawn the line over America's bipartisan spending frenzy in Ukraine. While Volodymyr Zelensky uses Putin's illegal invasion as an excuse to betray his promises for peace in the Donbas and sends ranks of the forcefully conscripted people who voted for him bring it to die in the trenches, three out of every four Republicans who support that scumfuck Donald Trump also support peace in Ukraine. And the GOP is playing along by holding up aid in congress in exchange for a more inhumane police state on the border.
And yet, the same young Democrats who are threatening to ruin Genocide Joe's reelection over the bloodbath in Gaza overwhelmingly support the bloodbath in Ukraine and the MAGA mob furious over being mugged to reignite the Cold War seem to have zero problem dumping their wallets out so Benjamin Netanyahu can drop bunker busters on maternity wards in Rafah. It's total fucking madness and it has me ripping my pink hair out by the roots, screaming at both sides that it's all the exact same goddamn thing.
Palestine and the Donbas are both ethnically diverse but culturally distinct regions that have found themselves gift-wrapped and handed over to nations that they never asked to be a part of in the first place. Palestine had long been a barely governed patch of desert on the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire before the British and the Americans stole it and arbitrarily proclaimed it to be a homeland for European migrants. Similarly, the Donbas had been a region of Russia going back to the 1700s before the Bolsheviks made a unilateral decision to make it a part of their new Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1922 only to have Ukraine take it with them when they unilaterally left the Soviet Union in 1992.
While both Gaza and the Donbas have also had their movements for autonomy largely hijacked by imbeciles and monsters, none of that changes the fact that these are both illegally occupied territories fighting for popular autonomy and the crimes of Hamas and Putin do nothing to sanctify the barbarism that America and its heavily armed proxies have reigned down upon their heads.
In the far less publicized case of the Donbas, I feel compelled to remind my fellow social justice warlords that these people were subjected to a cruel civil war for over seven years before Putin used them as an excuse to sack Kiev.
After the Donbas defied Putin's own orders and voted to declare independence from Ukraine in 2014 in protest of a blatant NATO overthrow of a president who they overwhelmingly voted for, the new Yankee puppet regime in Kiev placed these people under a crippling blockade and sent openly neo-fascist ethnic extremists to terrorize them under a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire, killing over 14,000 people in the process, most of them ethnic Russians.
Volodymyr Zelensky was actually elected on a promise to end this Russophobic apartheid nightmare and give the Donbas some degree of autonomy, but after being bullied and bought off by NATO and his own ethnic nationalist infiltrated military, Zelensky went back on his word and recommitted his country to forcefully retaking the Donbas in revenge for that region's desperate support for Putin's invasion.
As you can see, most people on both the left and the right only seem to know one half of the story but most of them have also been lured into this bipolar ignorance by a corrupt partisan circus that has turned even actual fucking warfare into just another theater for the culture war.
While the Jesus freaks on the right have been bamboozled by their Evangelical megachurches into believing that anything less than total capitulation to Zionist slaughter is antisemitism, the DNC's cable intelligentsia has transformed Vladimir Putin from a corrupt neoliberal opportunist into the ringleader of some kind of international crypto-fascist conspiracy that has grown to include everyone from Donald Trump to Black Lives Matter.
Both sides need to snap out of this zombie fugue state and listen to their consciences because these busted pilot lights are both clearly telling them the same damn thing; it is wrong to rob entire regions of their popular autonomy, whether it be granted by God or Allah, and it is worse to slaughter them in mass just so sick fucking creatures on Capitol Hill can sell more bombs for their masters on Wall Street.
Both parties overwhelmingly support both of these gruesome spectacles, and they are turning what could easily become a viable antiwar movement against itself while they play its peaceniks for dupes. The only viable solution to this con game is to dump these crooks back in their toxic swamp once and for all and join each other back in the streets to demand an end to this madness.
For the love of Abbie Hoffman, wake up dearest motherfuckers and end the massacres in both Europe and the Middle East. Free Gaza and free the Donbass too!
