Anti-American, that’s the popular slur for any critic of American foreign policy, especially in an election year. If you happen to have enough of a conscience to give a shit about who this country happens to be bombing or starving this week, you’re an anti-American, you hate the troops and you should go back to where you came from. The knee-jerk reaction to this knee-jerk reaction from most peaceniks, left and right, is to designate their opposition to empire as a form of patriotism. And I can respect that, but it’s not really my style. I’ve always been the kind of fat insane faggot who owns her slurs and wears them proudly like gang colors. I call it the Eazy E school of political incorrectness. You can be a patriotic pacifist, or you can be an Anti-American with attitude. My homegirls in the Squad have sheepishly chosen the prior, but I for one am proud to be a flag burning, middle finger waging, Anti-American bitch, and if Trump wants to send me back to the County Cork, I’ll pack my bags if he agrees to kiss my ass on the way out.
The stone cold reality is that my fervent anti-imperialism cannot be divorced from the country I live in. America is not a republic inflicted by empire. America is a glorified corporation defined by empire and it always has been. America has grown from a plucky little European slave colony to the deadliest war machine the world has ever seen. You’ll have to forgive me if I have trouble finding something to love about a rabid ax murderer like Uncle Sam, but for the sake of bitching lets unpack some of the cherished myths even antiwar patriots tend to cling to like exiles to a lifeboat.
Let’s start with an easy one. “People died for your freedom!” Every time I hear some Toby-Keith-love-it-or-leave-it-limp-dick belch that one out, I instinctively start laughing and then feel like a total cunt. People died for our freedom? No they didn’t. When was the last time your “freedom” was personally threatened by some bearded zealot from a shithole country? Did the Vietcong threaten our precious freedom to buy Coke and vote for reality TV rapists? Did the Taliban? The only thing these peasant malcontents threatened was America’s ability to treat the Third World like a broodmare.
Even World War 2, every leftist’s favorite bloodbath, was none of our goddamn business. Hitler’s ass was as good as fucked the second he crossed the Danube. Like most rapid-fire empires, the Third Reich expanded fast and collapsed even faster. America didn’t even step foot in Europe until it had become frighteningly clear that Stalin was gonna take Berlin and all that shallow glory that came with it. As for Japan, America was provided with multiple opportunities to peacefully divvy up the stolen islands of the Pacific, but chose instead to piss on the nation’s Diet with crippling sanctions that all but begged for Pearl Harbor. Contrary to the popular mythology touted across the aisle, the Second World War was every bit as pointless, savage and avoidable as any other American conquest, and this is America’s sainted “Good War.” The troops may have joined up for all the right reasons but they died for Raytheon, Bell and Exxon Mobil. Let’s not dilute ourselves into believing that their deaths weren’t in vain. The sooner America embraces this uncomfortable truth, the sooner they can get over their toxic romance with interventionism.
How about that old jewel about America being the greatest nation on earth? Anybody who’s vile enough to say something that blatantly jingoistic is practically begging to give Stalin’s Nagant a blowjob. Only two kinds of people say shit like that unironically on a regular basis, fascist dictators and Americans. People from around the globe don’t swarm to our shores and borders because we’re some kind of beacon of liberal enlightenment. They come here because we horde a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth and we stole it from them. First World countries can only be First World countries by keeping Third World countries, well, Third World countries. The only reason America can afford to burn its paper money on box stores, McMansions and amber waves of grain is because it sucks the rest of the globe dry with its Dollar tyranny, rapacious trade deals and wars, wars, wars.
And even then, you’re stretching the fabric of reality to call America the freest nation on the planet. We excel when it comes to gun rights and free speech, but Switzerland is actually a semi-direct democracy with few victimless crime prohibitions and a functioning civilian militia. And they achieved all of this without spilling a drop of blood or picking a side in a single World War. Something tells me Thomas Paine would find Geneva a bit more familiar than Georgia. All countries by and large suck, but America sucks more than most unless you’re one of the billionaire child rapists who runs the damn place.
Which brings us to every Libertarians favorite excuse for state-nationalism, the Founding Fathers. According to constitutionalist lure, the men who created this country were hyper-woke minarchist ubermenschen who ate monarchs and shit raw democracy. Certainly such gods among men would be appalled to see their great republic rendered to the status of the next British Empire. While I agree that the sharper minutemen like Jefferson and Adams would likely be appalled by this monster, they’re still the Doctor Frankenstein’s who made this horror show an inevitability. At the end of the day, when you look past all the flowery verbiage about liberty and equality, these moneyed English aristocrats where little more than well spoken apartheid apparatchiks gone rogue.
The main motivator behind the Revolution wasn’t liberty, it was England’s threats to end the slave trade and recognize the sovereignty of the Colonies’ neighboring tribal nations. The Constitution was a document designed to protect the property of the privileged. This doesn’t mean that it’s a bad premise or that it hasn’t evolved into a semi-useful tool for hardcore civil libertarians to use to fuck with the state, but this isn’t the fucking Bible, it’s authors weren’t gods and your average capital L Libertarian is too goddamn smart to be so fucking dogmatic about a glorified national fairy tale. Time to wake up and smell the bodies, children. Time to focus some that skepticism you brag about on the motherfucker in the mirror. This nation hasn’t been destroyed by war. This nation is war.
This isn’t to say that I necessarily hate America or Americans, I just recognize that everything wonderful about this wicked place was brought about by those who resisted its foul government. That’s why I’m not proud to be against America, I’m proud to be an Anti-American. The latest in a long line of anti-statist renegades who’ve made the best of this mess to make the world at large a better place, from Geronimo to Russel Means, from Nat Turner to Malcolm X, from Lysander Spooner to Ross Ulbricht. I am a proud Anti-American and I will always rage to make this country free, even if I have to blow it up to make it happen, metaphorically speaking.
America’s great historian of Anti-Americanism, the late Howard Zinn, once said that you can’t remain neutral on a moving train. Well I can’t pretend to be a patriot in a moving empire. Get back to me after we monkewrench this bitch.
