In 2011, I heard the story of Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki

Hi, I’m CriticalResist.

But you can call me Crit.

In 2011, I heard the story of the Al-Awlakis, Anwar and Abdulrahman — a name that’s etched in my heart to this day. I remember hearing how he was assassinated by a drone strike in Yemen, ordered by then President Obama, when Anwar himself was a US citizen. The strike also killed his 16 year old son Abdulrahman.

Abdulrahman was my age. I was just a high schooler back then. That is when I realized that something was deeply wrong with the world, when a 16 year old child was considered an acceptable casualty in the assassination, without trial or due representation, of a citizen of his country. That world leaders were not only signing off on this killing, but also applauded it with morbid glee.

I am not a US citizen. But I remember wondering right there and then, “Will I also one day be considered an enemy of the United States? Will they deem me an acceptable casualty, when it is time for them to invade my country?”

And yet I was a European, and a purported ally of the US!

From that day on, I knew that America has no allies; they only have pawns to serve their interests.

This set me on a path to anti-imperialism which I only fully realized later as I got into Marxism. To truly understand how the United States — and its cohort of vassal states in Europe, Japan, South Korea… — came to be what it is, came to be so depraved in their search of profit… one needs to understand capitalism and imperialism.

Only then does the geopolitical situation make sense and everything falls into place: why I cannot, in good conscience, support a world built on the backs of the global workforce.

And finding the solution that exists at the end of this dark tunnel for us in the imperial core, also called the Global North or the West.

When you know in your heart that you’re right, everything becomes self-evident.

I write about geopolitics, world news, and anti-imperialism with unabashed pragmatism and unashamed rhetoric. As an active editor and administrator of ProleWiki, I also sometimes write about design and how we can use that framework into our organisational work or just in our lives in general, to better help us understand what’s happening around us.

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Why I write under a nickname

Simply put, I write under my online name because most people know me under the name of CriticalResist. I was the founder of the antifastonetoss subreddit, and later joined lemmygrad.ml under this same name where I am currently an admin. In 2020, I joined the nascent ProleWiki project under this name too, where I am currently an active editor and co-administrator.

My real name, meanwhile, has no background or history. It would be more confusing to people who largely know me as Crit to know me under my real name.

Ultimately, I don’t want to attach a particular real-world identity to myself as my writings are international. They are of course biased by my culture and upbringing, but I write for the entire world and don’t want to be pushed into a box of being one person in particular.