Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to Kadokin here. I'm Andrew Siege. I'm
Speaker 3: on andre'sm on YouTube, and I'm not on YouTube right now.
Speaker 3: I'm on kak here, and I'm joined by the disembodied
Speaker 3: voice of the one in.
Speaker 4: Orny Garrison Davis.
Speaker 5: Yes, well one and only that I know of, unless
Speaker 5: there's another one going around, which would be creaky.
Speaker 1: That might be. That might be.
Speaker 3: But see, I want to continue our journey through Latin
Speaker 3: americanicisms and their histories. Now, compared to all the other
Speaker 3: countries I've discussed so far, such as Peru and Chile
Speaker 3: and Argentina and Brazil and Cuba, this one had a
Speaker 3: bit less information about anarchism in its past, So this
Speaker 3: will be a sort of a smaller sangwiche and anarchist
Speaker 3: history perhaps fit in of the country that is sandwiched
Speaker 3: between Argentina and Brazil. Speaking of course, about Paraguay, known
Speaker 3: for its fraud history of warfare, politically volatile landscape, series
Speaker 3: of dictatorships, and indigenously intertwined cultural and social fabric, anarchism
Speaker 3: took root in this rather unique setting, and downs to
Speaker 3: the work of Anhill Capelletti and a few other scattered sources,
Speaker 3: I've been able to piece together the history of anarchism
Speaker 3: in Paraguay without further ado nos comencemos. For much of
Speaker 3: its early history, Paraguay's identity was distinct within South America,
Speaker 3: from its time as a Guarani settlement to its formation
Speaker 3: as a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century. Spanish Jesuit
Speaker 3: missionaries wielded significant influence, and for over a century Paraguay
Speaker 3: was a self sustained colony with a rigidly hierarchical system
Speaker 3: based on the Spanish castor system. Paraguay's economy primarily revolved
Speaker 3: around agriculture and cattlehooded unlike the mining economies and other
Speaker 3: Spanish territories. The Guarani people had a significant cultural impact
Speaker 3: throughout Paraguay's history, and their language and traditions rained central
Speaker 3: even as Paraguay evolved through the centuries. Even today, most
Speaker 3: of the population speaks some variety of Guarani alongside Spanish.
Speaker 3: Fast forward to the early nineteenth century, as South American
Speaker 3: nations began de clearing independence from Spain, Paraguay took a
Speaker 3: unique approach. Rather than aligning with the neighboring revolutionary movements, Paraguay,
Speaker 3: under the leadership of Jose Gasparrodriguez dev Definancia, declared independence
Speaker 3: in eighteen eleven and adopted an isolationist authoritarian path. Francia
Speaker 3: ruled as the country's spreme dictator for nearly three decades,
Speaker 3: envisioning a self sufficient, cometic society. He strictly controlled foreign influences,
Speaker 3: banned European migration, and restricted trade. By the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 3: Paraguay had built up a significancy infrastructure under Francia's successor,
Speaker 3: Carlos Antonio Lopez. However, this era of economic development was
Speaker 3: short lived, as Paraguay entered the catastrophic War of the
Speaker 3: Triple Alliance between eighteen sixty four and eighteen seventy against Brazil.
Speaker 3: Argentina and Uruguay over territorial disputes. This conflict proved disastrous
Speaker 3: for Paraguay as they suffered staggering losses. Nearly seventy percent
Speaker 3: of its population died, its economy was shattered, and its
Speaker 3: territory was significantly reduced. And yes, you heard me right,
Speaker 3: nearly seventy percent of its population perished, including most of
Speaker 3: its male population, in the wars. Aftermath, paragua I was
Speaker 3: plunged into political chaos, economic ruin, and a period of
Speaker 3: foreign interventions. Due to the economic devastation of the war,
Speaker 3: the country became indebted to British creditors. With that leverage,
Speaker 3: Britain pushed for the development of a free market economy
Speaker 3: and privatization, which brought Paraguay into closer contact with the
Speaker 3: global economy and eventually led to a more pronounced class
Speaker 3: divide and establishment of an exploitive agricultural exports system. Land
Speaker 3: that had once been communitly managed was swiftly privatized, driving
Speaker 3: indigenous communities and small farmers off their lands and into
Speaker 3: the workforce of larger estates. On those estates, workers would
Speaker 3: find themselves in debt bondage tied to the estates as
Speaker 3: small debts at workers over to landowners, with spiral into
Speaker 3: insurmountable debts that would become nearly impossible to repay. Laborers
Speaker 3: called pionees, were typically paid in voltures or script that
Speaker 3: could only be redeemed at the estate's store, where prices
Speaker 3: were exorbitantly inflated. Any attempt to leave or challenge the
Speaker 3: condition was met with violent repercussions from estate managers, creating
Speaker 3: a cycle of economic entrapment that was essentially slavery by
Speaker 3: another name. Paraguay became a country of ever more wealthy
Speaker 3: and powerful landowners with a struggle in rural working class.
Speaker 3: As twentieth century approached, the labour struggles and social divisions
Speaker 3: then Paraguay and society were clearing. Cron inequality. Explosive working conditions,
Speaker 3: and the dislocation of addious communities created footire ground for
Speaker 3: radical ideas among rural campusinos and urban workers. European immigrants
Speaker 3: flee in political oppression brought with them some rather radical
Speaker 3: ideas that began to resonate with paragund workers who were
Speaker 3: desperate for a way out of their circumstances. For people
Speaker 3: who had survived centuries of oppression, and authoritarian rule. Anarchism
Speaker 3: had a unique appeal. By the eighteen eighties, workers in
Speaker 3: Paraguay had become organized in mutual aid societies, and one
Speaker 3: such society of typographers would organize themselves into a union,
Speaker 3: the first in the country's history. By eighteen eighty six.
Speaker 3: That same year, so the rise of construction workers, carpenters, tailors,
Speaker 3: postal workers.
Speaker 1: And bakers unions.
Speaker 3: Those Bakers Roles conduct countries first ever strike action in
Speaker 3: October of eighteen eighty six. The first distinctly anarchist publication
Speaker 3: I could find in Paraguay was organized by a group
Speaker 3: called those eCos del Chaco, who published a libertarian manifesto
Speaker 3: in eighteen ninety two. They call themselves anarchist communists and
Speaker 3: declare their intent to abolish private property, the clergy, the state,
Speaker 3: and the armed forces.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 3: We seek the complete emancipation of the proletariat as we
Speaker 3: fight abolished the unjust exportation of man by man. We
Speaker 3: dedicate all of our moral and physical strength to overturn
Speaker 3: all attorneys established genuine liberty, equality and fraternity in the
Speaker 3: human family. We needs to transform private property into a
Speaker 3: common good. We needed to do so because individual property
Speaker 3: is a basic cause of all these afflictors. It is
Speaker 3: on that basis that the dregs of humanity, government, clerics, lawyers, militaries,
Speaker 3: entrepreneurs maintain themselves in power, live as parasites, and they
Speaker 3: continued enjoyment to their funder of finances large armies with
Speaker 3: the products.
Speaker 1: Of our labor end court.
Speaker 3: Even prior to that manifesto, anarchists were making moves in
Speaker 3: the Graphic, Railway and bakers unions as early as eighteen
Speaker 3: eighty nine, fighting for and win in the eight hour
Speaker 3: workday by nineteen oh one. Strike actions in this period
Speaker 3: were focused on that goal, alongside wage increases and then
Speaker 3: improvements to working conditions. The anarchists also tried to establish
Speaker 3: a national Trade union center, but unfortunately did not succeed.
Speaker 3: In eighteen ninety two, thanks in part to the growing
Speaker 3: Spanish and Argentine immigrant populations, there was a wave of
Speaker 3: the Berterian union formation throughout Paraguay. The anarchists was quite
Speaker 3: successful among the peasantry, as they helped organize armed resistance
Speaker 3: societies to aid in their struggles against the landowners. Anarchists
Speaker 3: also managed to establish Raphael Barrett Cultural Center in the
Speaker 3: early nineties hosting an impressed collection of books by fellow
Speaker 3: Paraguayan and foreign writers, and embolding in the formation and
Speaker 3: even more trade unions. Raphael Barrett, by the way, is
Speaker 3: one of the most significant figures in Paraguay and anarchist history,
Speaker 3: according to every account I've read. Born in Toda Vega, Spain,
Speaker 3: in eighteen seventy six, but Thatt's early life was typical
Speaker 3: of a well to do intellectual. He studied languages, piano,
Speaker 3: and eventually engineering. By his late twenties, he was drawn
Speaker 3: to Latin America, partly by adventure and partly to make
Speaker 3: a difference. Driven by a growing commitment to justice and solidarity,
Speaker 3: he arrived in Budas Airis in nineteen oh three, where
Speaker 3: he found work as a journalist, soon making ways with
Speaker 3: an article that condemned the stock inequality he observed in
Speaker 3: Argentina's capital. This critique cost him his job, yet had
Speaker 3: deepened his dedication to speak for those who were voiceless.
Speaker 3: But as experiences of CEA and European Americrant workers toiling
Speaker 3: in the brutal conditions fueled his indignation against unchecked wealth
Speaker 3: and poverty's vicious hold on the working class. In nineteen
Speaker 3: oh four, but I made a way to Paraguay. He
Speaker 3: essentially welcomed as a correspondent for LTMBO and even held
Speaker 3: government positions, including as a director of the Department of
Speaker 3: Engineers and the Railroad Agency. But his comitments, exposed in
Speaker 3: the country's political and social rot soon put him at
Speaker 3: odds with Paraguay's new liberal government. He saw that simply
Speaker 3: swapping our conservative leaders for liberals did little to improve
Speaker 3: conditions for ordinary Paraguayans, as demonstrated by the continuous labor
Speaker 3: struggles that arose and response to the industrialization undertaken by the
Speaker 3: liberal government. Workers were fighting to abolished child label, improve
Speaker 3: their conditions, increase wages, and so on. He couldn't stand
Speaker 3: by in silence, so he resigned from government service, now
Speaker 3: fully committed to social justice, even as his grown radicalism
Speaker 3: began to alienate the political elite. Brett's personal experiences sharpened
Speaker 3: his perspective, transformed him from a sympathetic observer to a
Speaker 3: dedicated anarchist. His writings in Criminal became essential reading for
Speaker 3: workers and peasants alike, urging them to see beyond two
Speaker 3: professional reforms and to child the entire structure of pressure,
Speaker 3: Barrett condemned the government's abuses and spoke out against exploitive
Speaker 3: systems that kept the majority of Paraguayan's martialized. He was
Speaker 3: a fiery advocate for social justice, and one write in particular,
Speaker 3: Acasto Roa Bastos, called him the discoverer of Paraguayan's social reality,
Speaker 3: because Burrett didn't just observe these injustices, he threw himself
Speaker 3: into exposing and condemned them with fuvor. His impact was
Speaker 3: so significant that even when he was forced to flee
Speaker 3: Paraguay in nineteen oh eight under government pressure, his ideas endured.
Speaker 3: His health was deteriorating from tibergulosis, where he continued to write,
Speaker 3: receiving support from intellectual comrades in Uruguay and Brazil. His
Speaker 3: final years were just a continuation if his relentless dedication,
Speaker 3: even as his health continued to decline. In nineteen ten,
Speaker 3: he went to Paris to seek treatment, but his health
Speaker 3: failed and he passed away in December of that year.
Speaker 3: But just before Barret's exile and passing in nineteen oh six,
Speaker 3: the anarchists would form the first and for some time
Speaker 3: only workers Federation in the country by joining together the illustrators,
Speaker 3: carpenters and drivers unions. Rafaelberad actually became something of a
Speaker 3: thought leader for this group, and this was the Federacion
Speaker 3: Opreia Astricanal Paraguay or four, partially inspired by the Federacion
Speaker 3: Obrera Reginal Argentina or FURA, where they borrowed many of
Speaker 3: their programmatic ideas. If you recall the episodes I did
Speaker 3: on Argentina, you know that the reasoning for the name
Speaker 3: was ideological. By adding the adjective regional, it made plain
Speaker 3: that the country in question, whether Paraguay or Argentina, was
Speaker 3: not being considered a state or political unit, but a
Speaker 3: region of the world in which workers struggled for their liberation.
Speaker 3: Soon after its founding, on the first of May nineteen
Speaker 3: oh six, the Fourth held the country's first international Workers
Speaker 3: Data demonstration, despite police attempts to shut it down. For
Speaker 3: also launched their official publication, El Espertade in the same year,
Speaker 3: and the paper carried articles what the anarchist movements in
Speaker 3: Europe and Latin America. Printed works by authors such as
Speaker 3: Peter Kopotkin and Selmo Ronzo published reports of the Forbes
Speaker 3: activities named and shamed and known strike breakers and encouraged
Speaker 3: its members to pay their union dues promptly. Subsequent years
Speaker 3: would introduce other libertarian newspapers such as Ladra Billion, La
Speaker 3: Tribuna and Acil Futuro. After the nineteen oh eight coup
Speaker 3: by Emiliano Gonsalves Naverro, they stabilized the economy and restricted
Speaker 3: Assuncion's labor movement. Anarchism still found strength among rural and
Speaker 3: tanan industry workers, despite increasing hostility from figures like Presidents
Speaker 3: Condre and Jarre. Labor strikes continued, which were met by
Speaker 3: fierce repression, arrests, and forced deportations. With the outbreak of
Speaker 3: the Paraguay and Civil War from nineteen eleven to nineteen twelve,
Speaker 3: anarchists and other labor organizations faced a government crackdown. Groups
Speaker 3: like the Four became inactive temporarily, at least by nineteen thirteen.
Speaker 3: In the wake of the war, a schism was emergent
Speaker 3: as some unions move move toward reformist ideologies, influencing part
Speaker 3: by the populist Colorado Party. Meanwhile, Four reaffirmed anarchosynicalist routes,
Speaker 3: forming a federal council that included both workers and intellectuals
Speaker 3: aimant rekondelte union activities. Amidst a wave of reorganization post
Speaker 3: World War One, a new surgeon demand for Paraguay and
Speaker 3: exports revitalized labor activism. In nineteen sixteen, the Corps or
Speaker 3: Centro Obero Regionale de Paraguay to call the role of
Speaker 3: championing anarchosyndicalism and labor rights. This one gained support from
Speaker 3: a wide network, launching influential publications like El Combat and Renovasion.
Speaker 3: Other groups like Comedie and the Revolutionary Nationalists Alliance, which
Speaker 3: sought a federalist union Other People's Latin America also took
Speaker 3: part in the resurgions of anarchist ideas. In nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 3: the Paraguay and Anarchists were able to finally establish links
Speaker 3: with the International Workers Association.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen.
Speaker 3: Thirties, Syriaco Puarte emerged as a prominent voice cat and
Speaker 3: for Workers Rise. Despite you Know Everything, he was a
Speaker 3: protege of fellow anarchists and printmaker Felix Kantalisio Aracuyu, a
Speaker 3: Paraguay and Mestizo of mixed indigenous and black ancestry. At
Speaker 3: one point Arakuyu and his comrades had helped organize a
Speaker 3: tram workers strike in Asuncion, which compelled the government to
Speaker 3: round them up and dump them in the middle of
Speaker 3: the jungle in Mato Grosso, hoping that they would die
Speaker 3: and had. Arakuyu and his friends made their way through
Speaker 3: over one thousand, three hundred kilometers of mountain jungle, surviving
Speaker 3: on roots, fruits, and game, to make their way back
Speaker 3: to their hometown of Incarnacion and speaking of Incarnacion both
Speaker 3: to our day and Arakuyu took part in the little
Speaker 3: known attempt at an anarchist uprising in Paraguay, which was
Speaker 3: actually centered in Incarnacion. On the twentieth of February nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty one, a group of one hundred and fifty workers
Speaker 3: and students organized in a couple of popular assemblies, took
Speaker 3: control of the city of Incarnacion with the goal of
Speaker 3: establishing a libertarian commune, part of a plan to spark
Speaker 3: a wider anarchist cynicalist revolution in Paraguay. This was the
Speaker 3: culmination of a series of strikes and widespread lya Latin
Speaker 3: by anarchists and students in support of revolution. It wasn't
Speaker 3: meant to be centered in the Karnacion, as there was
Speaker 3: a planned construction worker at Donald striking and student Zion,
Speaker 3: and similar action in Villarica and Concepcion, but key organizers
Speaker 3: in those struggles in those cities were deported in the
Speaker 3: days leading up to the action, so those planned actions
Speaker 3: ended up failing. After sixteen hours when their efforts to
Speaker 3: have reinforced by workers in the rest of the nation,
Speaker 3: the interactionists of Encarnacion took over two steamboats and made
Speaker 3: their way along the river to Brazil, but not before
Speaker 3: they attacked the Yuromatic companies and burned the records related
Speaker 3: to indentured laborers in two ports. Their solidarity never died,
Speaker 3: even after they went through everything they went through, they
Speaker 3: didn't lose their sight and what really mattered. Sadly, the
Speaker 3: seventeen students and workers who remained in Incarnacion were arrested.
Speaker 3: Duarte found himself jailed and interned and Marcurita Ireland. After
Speaker 3: Liberal Party president josse P Gugiari outlawded tree unions, other
Speaker 3: revolutionaries were dropped off from the jungle to die at
Speaker 3: a random point along the Parana River. Seven of the
Speaker 3: captured seventeen met this fate and the other ten spent
Speaker 3: a few months in prison before being deported to Argentina.
Speaker 3: Movement then faced distinct challenges during the Chako War from
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty two to nineteen thirty five between Paraguay and Bolivia,
Speaker 3: which halted much of the anarchist activism. Many anarchists joined
Speaker 3: the war effort reluctantly, including Duarte, who performed duties in
Speaker 3: the Rear Guard were working as a type settle for
Speaker 3: various presses, including anarchist pressors the Paraguay and Victory. Following
Speaker 3: the war, the return to domestic concerns saw a resurgence
Speaker 3: of anarchists and labor activities. The government's crackdown of lefterc
Speaker 3: ideologies in the late nineteen thirties nineteen forties under President
Speaker 3: Morignigo's rule led to severe repression of anarchists and cynicalist groups.
Speaker 3: Douart has spent some time as a worker representative at
Speaker 3: the National Labor Department or DNT, who was under considerable
Speaker 3: fire from the communists were taken hold of the Treading
Speaker 3: movement after anarchism waned in popularity. He finally resigned from
Speaker 3: his post in nineteen forty one after a Worker's Coordinating
Speaker 3: committee of seamen, tram workers, bakers, print workers, and other
Speaker 3: trades issued a protest note to President Morinigo, threatening to
Speaker 3: withdraw from the Workers Delegate for the infringements of their
Speaker 3: rights of assembly, to unionize and to strike. Of course,
Speaker 3: their protest note was completely ignored. The president's authoritarian tenure
Speaker 3: pushed several anarchists and socialist organizers into exile. Duarte himself
Speaker 3: ended up in exile in Argentina by nineteen forty two,
Speaker 3: but eventually was able to retain and reclaim his appointment
Speaker 3: as a worker representative. Then, not long after, he became
Speaker 3: a victim of a police crackdown during the nineteen forty
Speaker 3: four general strike, after labor movement was hijacked by the
Speaker 3: Republican Workers Organization. After nineteen forty seven, Duerte dropped out
Speaker 3: of trade union activity entirely and refocused to publishing articles
Speaker 3: and trade union publications abroad and urgent research into Paraguay
Speaker 3: and trade union history. He faced repeated arrests and took
Speaker 3: part in strikes anyway, advocating for workers' rights across various industries.
Speaker 3: He continued his activism against fascism and authoritarianism, operating from
Speaker 3: Argentina at times, while still supporting strikes and anarchist literature.
Speaker 3: In Paraguay, the nineteen fifty four ascension to power of
Speaker 3: General Alfredo Storoister marked a significant period of intensified authoritarianism.
Speaker 3: Streuisner's regime violently suppressed opposition, including anarchists, for over three decades,
Speaker 3: even in his seventy years. During the nineteen seventy years,
Speaker 3: Duarte was harassed by Strausner's secret police. Many other artists
Speaker 3: were imprisoned, exiled, or dissip by Stuisner, who imposed tight
Speaker 3: control of unions and labor organizers. The nineteen fifty four
Speaker 3: to nineteen eighty nine dictatorship of Storisner stifled anarchist activities
Speaker 3: severely and forced them underground, where they would have to
Speaker 3: preserve anarchist literature and ideas through secret print publications and
Speaker 3: solidarity movements. The result of this dictatorship was that anarchism
Speaker 3: in Paraguay experienced resurgence much later than other Latin American nations,
Speaker 3: with the spark rekindled only in the early two thousands.
Speaker 3: This rebooth of anarchist sentiment emerged largely within the punk
Speaker 3: counterculture and youth led social movements often interconnected with struggles
Speaker 3: for condigious rights, economic justice, and environmental causes. The establishment
Speaker 3: of spaces like Laterraza and Anarchist Squad provided platforms for
Speaker 3: activists and community engagement, while publications such as Autonomia Zene
Speaker 3: and Grito Fanzine disseminated anarchist ideals despite Paraguay's history of
Speaker 3: anarchist repression. These newer movements, however, small, signified some small
Speaker 3: for a renewed interest in the material ideas within Paraguay,
Speaker 3: one that can be seen even more violently in other
Speaker 3: parts of Latin America. Paraguay and anarchists have shown us
Speaker 3: the drive for freedom and equality is a daily equipment
Speaker 3: to defy attorney and resist exploitation. That's by facing decades
Speaker 3: of silence and the destroyerst dictatorship. Anarchism did not disappear.
Speaker 3: The seeds of resistance late dormant, but they are ready
Speaker 3: to bloom again as new generations can take up the struggle.
Speaker 3: As we conclude, let's remember the words of Raphael Barre,
Speaker 3: who fought tirelesslie for the people. He came to call
Speaker 3: his own justice, justice above all things, justice, even if
Speaker 3: it costs blood or power to old the people.
Speaker 6: This Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me
Speaker 6: James today and I'm joined by Danny. Danny's an engineering
Speaker 6: photographer who lived in North East Syria from twenty eighteen
Speaker 6: until twenty twenty three and a founding member of the Rise,
Speaker 6: which is the Rajarva Information Center if you're not familiar,
Speaker 6: and she worked for self administration and civil engineering while
Speaker 6: she was there. Welcome to show Danny.
Speaker 7: Hi James, it's really good to be on.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Jas, thanks thanks for coming. I know it's like
Speaker 6: a stressful time. So what I thought we would do
Speaker 6: is there's been a lot of reporting on Syria that
Speaker 6: people have probably seen if they're living in the US
Speaker 6: or the UK. Nearly all of it has either excluded
Speaker 6: or like footnoted what's happening in North and East Syria
Speaker 6: and specifically in the areas that are under a self administration.
Speaker 6: So I was hoping today we could give people a
Speaker 6: little more introduction to what's happening there. There's been a
Speaker 6: lot of like jubilation about what's happening in Syria, and
Speaker 6: things have been very far from universally positive. Massive displacement
Speaker 6: of civilians, ethnic cleansing of areas that have been captured
Speaker 6: by the Turkish Baksterian National Army and genuine like peril
Speaker 6: for the self administration project, the like of which we
Speaker 6: haven't seen for a long time. So perhaps if listeners
Speaker 6: aren't familiar, would you like give them the real basics
Speaker 6: of the self administration of the AA ANDES and what
Speaker 6: it means and what's going on there.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well that's a big question because it's like it's
Speaker 8: a big project.
Speaker 7: It's been going on for quite some time. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: it really has.
Speaker 8: It's kind of been lost in discussions and news about
Speaker 8: the Serian Civil War because it has been such a complex,
Speaker 8: multi polar, multi access, multi ethnic conflict, and it's been
Speaker 8: going on for what like thirteen fourteen years now, Yeah,
Speaker 8: coming up to fourteen years. The Kurds in the northeast
Speaker 8: had been preparing for some time before the outbreak of
Speaker 8: civil war back in twenty eleven for something like this.
Speaker 8: Obviously they didn't they didn't know this was going to happen,
Speaker 8: but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades,
Speaker 8: and in particular since around two thousand, they've been working
Speaker 8: on this concept of democratic con federalism, which is moving
Speaker 8: away from a sort of what they call an old
Speaker 8: paradigm of Marxist Leninist thought to this system they've now
Speaker 8: quite effectively built up there where democracy is bottom up.
Speaker 8: It's structured around small communes and self organizing units, cooperatives.
Speaker 8: There's a market economy, but it's not a catalyst economy
Speaker 8: where there's sort of radical emancipation of oppressed to people's
Speaker 8: particular women who are really centered in the revolutionary process
Speaker 8: and organizing there. And I think because they maybe you
Speaker 8: can't call them conflict.
Speaker 7: Avoided, that they haven't avoided conflict.
Speaker 8: They very famously defeated ISIS amongst other groups in the northeast,
Speaker 8: they fought against Blanders, Refront and various other jihadi groups.
Speaker 8: They also didn't enter into serious conflict with either their
Speaker 8: FSA as they were, or the regime and the Assad regime,
Speaker 8: and so they kind of managed to carve out a
Speaker 8: sort of democratic and semi enclave. I mean people who
Speaker 8: describe it as a state that they quite vehemently say
Speaker 8: it's not a state in the northeast of Syria. Whilst
Speaker 8: the worst of the fighting was between the Aussid regime
Speaker 8: and the FSA and groups that came out of the
Speaker 8: FSA in the west and south of the country.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it's very good summary. I think like
Speaker 6: it gets missed maybe because of how relatively successful it's
Speaker 6: been compared to other democratization projects within Syria. It gets
Speaker 6: missed that like when people are talking about what will
Speaker 6: happen in Syria now bizarrely and I don't quite like
Speaker 6: I don't quite understand how we get here, but people
Speaker 6: seem to go to like Libya or I understand how
Speaker 6: we get here and through process like orientalism and ignorance,
Speaker 6: but we have a functioning democracy. An example of like,
Speaker 6: it's not just Kurdish people, right, it's lots of communities
Speaker 6: living together in northern East Syria, and because of democratic
Speaker 6: confederalism they're able to coexist and still feel that they
Speaker 6: have enough sovereignty to be safe.
Speaker 4: Is that fair?
Speaker 7: Yeah? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 8: And I think something that it's hard to convey or
Speaker 8: fully understand unless you spend a lot of time there
Speaker 8: or you're deeply involved with any of these communities.
Speaker 7: Is quite how hard that was to do.
Speaker 8: Yeah, a lot of different ethnic groups, political groups that
Speaker 8: hate each other, you know. Yeah, the Kurds they brought
Speaker 8: in lots of different policies, like their right to be
Speaker 8: taught in your mother tongue. When they took power twenty
Speaker 8: twelve onwards, they were very keen not to just sort
Speaker 8: of replace everything with Kurdish, make a Kurdish state, you know,
Speaker 8: start being the oppressor and sort of be oppressed. They
Speaker 8: made sure that they continue using Arabic as the majority
Speaker 8: language because it is the majority language. That the north
Speaker 8: and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area,
Speaker 8: and this is despite the fact that they've been pretty
Speaker 8: horrendously oppressed by the Arab population through the Bath Party
Speaker 8: and its oppressive systems for decades. So it has been
Speaker 8: a pretty hard ongoing process to negotiate and to put
Speaker 8: aside pretty serious conflicts between quite.
Speaker 7: A few different groups that exist there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it won't be any easier of across the whole
Speaker 6: country than it was there, but like, they have a
Speaker 6: system that works, and it's kind of frustrating to see
Speaker 6: these discussions of what happens next that just ignore the
Speaker 6: fact that there's a functioning multi ethnic democracy right there.
Speaker 6: If we do just look at women's liberation, you know,
Speaker 6: I've reported from lots of places around the world, lots
Speaker 6: of places in that part of the world, and the
Speaker 6: difference is profound in like everyday life. It's not just
Speaker 6: a kind of rhetorical commitment, right, Like, at least my
Speaker 6: impression as a man is that, like, this is a
Speaker 6: revolution by women, not a revolution and it's about women.
Speaker 6: It's not a revolution by men that like seeks to
Speaker 6: liberate women, says it's going to liberate women, you know,
Speaker 6: with the US in Verde Afghanistan saying it's going to
Speaker 6: liberate women, and look what we got, And like the
Speaker 6: difference in just the way people are able to look,
Speaker 6: like every aspect of everyday life is completely different. But
Speaker 6: that's in danger right now. The narrative I guess that
Speaker 6: people will be familiar with from Syria is that the
Speaker 6: state has been defeated, the A Sad regime has been defeated,
Speaker 6: and that therefore the revolution has succeeded. But the A
Speaker 6: Sad regime is not the only state in play in Syria, right, So,
Speaker 6: can you explain the Turkish antipathy to the project in
Speaker 6: northern East Syria and how that's manifesting itself currently.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's it's pretty hard to discuss any of the
Speaker 8: stuff without talking about Turkey and without understanding where they're
Speaker 8: coming from. Yeah, I think it's it's something that is
Speaker 8: said enough or understood enough that the modern state of
Speaker 8: Turkey is an nationalist project. And you know, I don't
Speaker 8: say that as a slur. That's like a basic founding
Speaker 8: principle of the state. It's a state founded on genocide
Speaker 8: and the mass four demographic change across the whole country,
Speaker 8: and it's continued that way. There have been reforms, for sure,
Speaker 8: but that's still a founding principle. And even now sort
Speaker 8: of speaking a non Turkish language in the Turkish Parliament
Speaker 8: is a pretty serious violation. And the size of Turkey,
Speaker 8: the size of its economy, the size of its military,
Speaker 8: the regional power stages they have in the Middle East,
Speaker 8: means that they have an enormous gravity.
Speaker 7: They have an enormous amount of power over Syria.
Speaker 8: A lot of the goods and services that Syria relies
Speaker 8: on coming through Turkey or rely on on the Turkish industry,
Speaker 8: and the Turkish military is a huge supporter of their
Speaker 8: groups in the Northwest like Acham and the Syrian National Army,
Speaker 8: and of course the Kurdish question within Turkey is the
Speaker 8: main reason for their antipathy towards the what's been built
Speaker 8: up in North Eastyria as much as the self determination
Speaker 8: for oppressed people's minorities is something that's an issue. The
Speaker 8: fact that it's Kurdish led, and in particular it's emancipat
Speaker 8: for Kurdish people threatens this ethno nationalist aspect of their state,
Speaker 8: and they kind of they see it something that needs
Speaker 8: to be nicked in the Bud right, and they've sort
Speaker 8: of done that with Northern Iraq, that the Kurdish region
Speaker 8: of Northern Iraq by essentially vassalizing the KDP, the main
Speaker 8: party there, and they know they can't do the same
Speaker 8: in North Eastyria, and the military option is their best chance,
Speaker 8: their best hope of nipping Kurdish emancipation in Kurdish sub
Speaker 8: determination in the Bud and preventing it from sort of
Speaker 8: snowboarding across the region.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think we should probably mention that, Like I guess,
Speaker 6: if we talk about like the electoral method or the
Speaker 6: electoral path people in Turkish Kurdistan, in Northern Kurdistan, if
Speaker 6: you want to call it, in addition to the armed
Speaker 6: struggle which has been there since nineteen eighty four, they
Speaker 6: have also like tried to vote and repeatedly seen their
Speaker 6: votes ignored or changed or their elected officials removed. Like
Speaker 6: this is within the last year, I'm not talking about
Speaker 6: back in the eighties and nineties, and like Turkey has
Speaker 6: been aggressively attacking any attempts at like self determination within
Speaker 6: the country and then as you say, like militarily attacking
Speaker 6: the Kurdish Freedom movement within northern Eassyria. Do you want
Speaker 6: to talk about the Syrian National Army or the Turkish
Speaker 6: back Free Syrian Army, whatever you want to call them,
Speaker 6: an explain Like, I think part of what we're dealing
Speaker 6: with is like that Turkey has a very well established
Speaker 6: state media project and they seem to do very well
Speaker 6: and like creating vire all social media content. So people
Speaker 6: might not be fully familiar with who the SNA are
Speaker 6: and specifically like Turkey's role in creating them. Do you
Speaker 6: want to explain that a bit to people?
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean this is this is one of the
Speaker 8: reasons why I think it's so hard for people to
Speaker 8: report on the Syrian Civil War. It's very hard to
Speaker 8: convey like a simple coherent narrative of one side versus
Speaker 8: the other, you know, like Ukraine versus Russia, the Russian
Speaker 8: world and Ukrainian world, because there are there are so
Speaker 8: many different groups in the SNA is that it's an
Speaker 8: important one and they are their group. Together with this
Speaker 8: concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria, yeah, despite
Speaker 8: the fact that they're not actually part of higher than
Speaker 8: the liberation movement as it calls itself, that that have
Speaker 8: taken over the Syria. Yeah, the Syrian National Army, it's
Speaker 8: it's kind of like a loose collection of various some
Speaker 8: of them called themselves brigades or groups. It's essentially a
Speaker 8: millionary proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent
Speaker 8: political framework. They're not revolutionary groups. They're not liberatory or
Speaker 8: mantif patrit They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the
Speaker 8: same way that maybe HTS would. I mean, the Kurds
Speaker 8: in North Eastyria describe them as gangs, which kind of
Speaker 8: sounds like a propaganda term, but when you actually look
Speaker 8: at what they do, they really are like a sort
Speaker 8: of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as
Speaker 8: a convenient proxy for force by Turkey because oltimately Turkey
Speaker 8: has like a massive military Then maybe it is quite
Speaker 8: underfunded and not particularly astafter the air force has suffered
Speaker 8: pretty seriously from the fallout of the coup in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 8: but the army is massive, it's relatively well funded, and
Speaker 8: their drone program is huge. The thing that they struggle
Speaker 8: with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups,
Speaker 8: particularly the PKK, in the mountains between ark and Turkey,
Speaker 8: and they need to they need to control that because
Speaker 8: they realize that they've been fighting military as as you say,
Speaker 8: since the early nineteen eighties, and they can't have a
Speaker 8: Vietnam situation right of a mass movement against their military
Speaker 8: occupation and against their military efforts. And Syria, they can't
Speaker 8: afford financially or politically to get into a quadmire there,
Speaker 8: and so by funding this sort of collection of groups
Speaker 8: called the SNA, that's their way of being able to
Speaker 8: incurb pretty massive losses without having to report on it,
Speaker 8: without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population
Speaker 8: of Turkey.
Speaker 6: Right, And I think especially when like some of the
Speaker 6: things the SNA have done, which we can maybe get
Speaker 6: into in man Bej like, it gives them a deniability
Speaker 6: that wouldn't exist if that was regular soldiers doing that
Speaker 6: like some stuff which is war crimes, is I guess
Speaker 6: a nice way of saying it, like a more sanitized
Speaker 6: way of saying it. But horrific stuff, really terrible stuff.
Speaker 6: This has been, how think, since at least twenty eighteen.
Speaker 6: But Turkey doesn't have to be held accountable for that because,
Speaker 6: like you said, it's not Turkish, it's not the Turkish army.
Speaker 6: Do you want to explain how the situation in North
Speaker 6: Syria has changed since what was it like two weeks ago?
Speaker 6: A week ago? I guess that they moved south from
Speaker 6: Aleppo and start the HTS, largely with some support from SNA,
Speaker 6: moved towards Damascus and then the SNA launched its own
Speaker 6: assault on the Self Administration. Can you explain a little
Speaker 6: bit of what's happened there in terms of displacement and
Speaker 6: in terms of the terrain that's the SNA have captured.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's been very fast moving now, as you say,
Speaker 8: like it's only been two weeks since the battle for
Speaker 8: Allpos started if you call it a battle. So the FDA,
Speaker 8: so this is like the alliance of military groups that
Speaker 8: falls under the remit of the Self Administration in the
Speaker 8: northe Eatia. So the YPG and the YPJ are like
Speaker 8: the most famous and largest components of this force, but
Speaker 8: there are a whole bunch of arab As, Syrian and
Speaker 8: Armenian units within the SDF. They held this sort of
Speaker 8: salient pushing out into northwest Aria towards Afrin, which was
Speaker 8: captured by the SNA and Turkey in twenty eighteen. That
Speaker 8: was on one side founded by HTS and on the
Speaker 8: other by the SNA. When things really kicked off, the
Speaker 8: SNA started a pretty concerned campaign to capture this area
Speaker 8: and own as Shedpa, and because of its position and
Speaker 8: it's relatively difficult terrain and difficult logitical position to resupply,
Speaker 8: they pulled back from that towards Aleppo and man Beach,
Speaker 8: which is the only major city that the SDS still
Speaker 8: held on the west of the Euphrates, and it's the
Speaker 8: area closest to Aleppo.
Speaker 7: They got hit pretty hard.
Speaker 8: If you follow a live upday map or any of
Speaker 8: these sort of update maps, it looked like that.
Speaker 7: That's pretty quickly. Actually, it ended up being a sort
Speaker 7: of large.
Speaker 8: Gray zone of the gorilla attacks potentially still ongoing. It's
Speaker 8: been really muking Hord to tell what's going on there,
Speaker 8: but essentially there's a large area of uncontrolled but heavily
Speaker 8: contested territory between Aleppo and the Euphrates River now and
Speaker 8: which the SDF and the SNA have been fighting over.
Speaker 7: Like one of the curious things for me is that
Speaker 7: the Turkish Air.
Speaker 8: Force and literally did not get involved for a while,
Speaker 8: but after about a week they did, and they started
Speaker 8: hitting man Beach very very heavily. And at that point,
Speaker 8: when the center of man Beach started being contested and
Speaker 8: for over, the US stepped in. We don't know the
Speaker 8: details are, but there seems to have been some kind
Speaker 8: of negotiation whereby the suggestion is that if the SDF
Speaker 8: fighters poured back across the Euphrates, the SDF would assure.
Speaker 7: Their protection from any further assorts.
Speaker 8: We don't know how true that is, and we know
Speaker 8: that today further negotiations on this failed. But it's really
Speaker 8: hard to tell right now as we speak what's disinformation
Speaker 8: and what's truth, because stuff's only coming out officially in
Speaker 8: gyms and traps.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and stuff's coming out unofficially often that it's just
Speaker 6: not true, Yeah, every five minutes and getting blasted by
Speaker 6: maybe people who just don't understand, or who do understand
Speaker 6: but have a certain agenda to push on social media,
Speaker 6: especially but on Telegram too, and it can be really
Speaker 6: confusing and it's really frustrating.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: For instance, like just before we came on air, I
Speaker 8: saw a couple of videos being posted by pro Turkish
Speaker 8: accounts purportedly showing mass troop concentrations lined up against this
Speaker 8: border or waiting to invade, and I realized that they
Speaker 8: were from twenty and nineteen when Sarah Khane and Tellerbayad
Speaker 8: were invaded, and they were just reposting material from then,
Speaker 8: you know, as disinformation on these movements and weather and
Speaker 8: tack's going to happen, what the negotiations between the US
Speaker 8: and Turkey.
Speaker 7: Turned out to be.
Speaker 8: And the truth is like right now, we don't know
Speaker 8: exactly what's going on.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and like you put, won't and that's probably a
Speaker 6: good thing. One other thing is that like the SDF
Speaker 6: tends to have much better operational security discipline than the
Speaker 6: SNA does, so you won't see as much of like
Speaker 6: media with an SDF spin or people directly streaming. I mean,
Speaker 6: one thing the SDNA likes to do is a war
Speaker 6: crime and then post it on telegram and so like,
Speaker 6: it can be easy to only see that and be like,
Speaker 6: oh god, it's terrible, and it is terrible. Those things
Speaker 6: are horrific. But like, because you're not seeing when the
Speaker 6: SDF is making movements or making advances until a bit later,
Speaker 6: until you get something from like an official press channel,
Speaker 6: it can give the impression that the SNA is just
Speaker 6: romping around, which is not the case.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we saw this a few times when Manboot is
Speaker 8: reported to being captured by the SNA and they posted
Speaker 8: videos for themselves in the middle of the city, and
Speaker 8: then an hour later the SDF posted a video from
Speaker 8: the center of the city of twenty or thirty dead
Speaker 8: SNA little about the streets and then flying their own.
Speaker 7: So yeah, yeah, it's really it's really hard to tell.
Speaker 8: It's also really hard as like, anyone who cares about
Speaker 8: the region has been there, is reported on it, anyone
Speaker 8: interested in the kind of politics that the Kurds are
Speaker 8: built up in the region, and others, I should say,
Speaker 8: it's you know, it's been a multi ethic project if
Speaker 8: you care about that.
Speaker 7: It's really hard not.
Speaker 8: To be glued to social media to see what's going on,
Speaker 8: but it can be quite detrimental to morrow. It can
Speaker 8: be quite an active self harm to be like constantly
Speaker 8: checking on this because it's so mucky and as you say,
Speaker 8: like things can turn around within two hours of info
Speaker 8: or distance for getting out there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think it's it's a super important time
Speaker 6: to be looking at trusted sources and be considering if
Speaker 6: you need to be on telegram that much, something I
Speaker 6: have been considering this weekend. So let's talk about like
Speaker 6: right now, certainly the focus is on Kabani, right, but
Speaker 6: there's also well there's a lot of the self administration
Speaker 6: that could potentially be under threat if Turkey decides to
Speaker 6: go as hard as it can against the self administration
Speaker 6: against the existence of I guess any form of democratic
Speaker 6: project in northern Easteria of attempts to kind of bring
Speaker 6: the whole thing under one government from Damascus. Can you
Speaker 6: explain like what might happen, what people can do, and
Speaker 6: like we should talk about what's at stake as well,
Speaker 6: especially with the prisoner our whole, which maybe we can
Speaker 6: come to after those two things, because I think that's
Speaker 6: a lot to ask you one question, but maybe people
Speaker 6: aren't familiar with our whole we'll leave that one. But
Speaker 6: can you explain at first, like what could potentially happen
Speaker 6: if Turkey decides to go as hard as it wants
Speaker 6: to you here?
Speaker 8: I mean, I think the best way to answer that
Speaker 8: question is to look at what's already happened. So in
Speaker 8: twenty eighteen and nineteen, they already captured three significant cities
Speaker 8: and that were under control of the self administration to
Speaker 8: the first, most famously was Afrin, which was in the
Speaker 8: far northwest of the country, like just north Villeppo, sort
Speaker 8: of jutting out into Turkey.
Speaker 7: That was a majority Kurdish city.
Speaker 8: I don't know exactly, as it was something like eighty
Speaker 8: or ninety percent, which I think is higher than any
Speaker 8: other city in northern Syria. And it was also like
Speaker 8: it's seen the least fighting of pretty much anywhere in
Speaker 8: Syria by that point. So the war had been going
Speaker 8: on for like what seven years, and Afin was pretty
Speaker 8: much untouched.
Speaker 7: So it was in a pretty good state.
Speaker 8: And Turkey and the SNA invaded just as the war
Speaker 8: against ISIS was winding down, and I mean, it's become
Speaker 8: a hell on earth.
Speaker 7: It's been almost completely depopulated I think.
Speaker 8: It's less than ten percent now Kurdish ethnically.
Speaker 7: It has been ruled by a number of different groups.
Speaker 8: We can say the SNA, but you know, different groups
Speaker 8: within the SNA and have fought over it. At the
Speaker 8: HTS at times have had control over certain parts of
Speaker 8: the area, and there's been a lot in fighting. There's
Speaker 8: been horrendous war crimes, committed, great murder, thousands of disappeared people,
Speaker 8: and as you say, they really like to openly put
Speaker 8: videos out of them committing this stuff. I mean, they're
Speaker 8: pretty shameless about it. There are some pretty disturbing videos
Speaker 8: that they're mutilating the bodies of fallen YPJ soldiers, of
Speaker 8: coming some re executions, of wiping out whole towns.
Speaker 7: It's been awful. And the same thing.
Speaker 8: Happened again in twenty nineteen around in October when they
Speaker 8: captured as Sarah Khane and Talabiad. And it's worth also
Speaker 8: pointing out that these were not Kurdish majority city surprise,
Speaker 8: and so I think that Sarah Karney maybe was about
Speaker 8: fifty percent and Telebayads, which is kind of close to Kurbani,
Speaker 8: I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 7: Wasn't Kurdish majority city.
Speaker 8: B was organized under the self administration and it was
Speaker 8: organized quite effectively, and they committed the same horrific times there.
Speaker 8: They are an anti Kurdish for so if you can
Speaker 8: say that they are racist, they do have.
Speaker 7: A stated goal of committing genocide against the Kurts. That's
Speaker 7: not an exaggeration. There's something they openly say.
Speaker 8: But they don't seem to care who they steal from,
Speaker 8: or who they rape or who they extort. Wherever they go,
Speaker 8: it's death and destruction. And it still is now, and
Speaker 8: there's still something like a quarter of a million internally
Speaker 8: displaced people from these areas in North Essyria hoping to
Speaker 8: go back and now having to see the situation get
Speaker 8: even worse and not knowing if.
Speaker 7: They ever will be able to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think like you were talking about, like
Speaker 6: we're seeing it right now in man Beach, like the
Speaker 6: SNA seems to liesee be in controlled of the city,
Speaker 6: albeit with YPG fighters kind of more and I guess
Speaker 6: in a gorilla role, so it would seem still fighting there.
Speaker 6: But where I believe we're on the second day of
Speaker 6: a general strike in man Beach after less than a
Speaker 6: week of the SNA holding it because of looting and
Speaker 6: executions and other war crimes.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think this is like actually really good political
Speaker 8: education to see what's happening, because what's been built up
Speaker 8: in the Northeast has been built up over decades.
Speaker 7: Right. They like to use this anology of the myosolium
Speaker 7: and the fruiting bodies of a mushroom.
Speaker 8: They appear to magically emerge from the earth in the
Speaker 8: autumn out of nowhere, but actually, you know, they've been
Speaker 8: brewing underground for years before, and they used this analogy
Speaker 8: because it took decades to put in place these structures.
Speaker 8: That's why they were ready as soon as the regime
Speaker 8: the Acid region pulled out and collapsed in the face
Speaker 8: of ISIS in the early stages of the war, they
Speaker 8: were ready to build up these structures. They already had
Speaker 8: self organized militias, they had the economy planned out that
Speaker 8: they set to work immediately.
Speaker 7: And their SNA don't have any of that. They are
Speaker 7: a force of convenience.
Speaker 8: They're mostly sort of young men who were in groups
Speaker 8: before that were defeated in Syria like Isis, who are
Speaker 8: simply taking the opportunity to enrich themselves.
Speaker 7: And that's also very convenient for Turkey.
Speaker 8: Because they do the dirty work against the population of
Speaker 8: North Sypyria. So I think it's worth saying that that
Speaker 8: aspect of it, that preparation, that resilience, is something that
Speaker 8: also works in favor in the event of the worst
Speaker 8: case of full invasion of northern Assyria. I do think
Speaker 8: they are significantly better prepared than they were in twenty
Speaker 8: eighteen and nineteen. And even if the worst happens, even
Speaker 8: if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the
Speaker 8: end of this project, right, It's not going to be
Speaker 8: the end of this emancipation. There's now an entire generation
Speaker 8: of young people in North Eassyria who have grown up
Speaker 8: entirely living amongst a liberated and anti hated region and
Speaker 8: people that's not something you can militarily defeat. So I
Speaker 8: you know, I'm not completely hopeless, and obviously I'll be
Speaker 8: like devastated if the worst does happen there, But like,
Speaker 8: I don't think it means the end of this incredible
Speaker 8: political And it feels wrong to call it a project
Speaker 8: because it's not.
Speaker 7: It's really is a revolution in.
Speaker 8: Every possible meaning of the word, and it's deeply embedded.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think everyone I spoke to there, like
Speaker 6: there's a deeply held conviction that they're not going back
Speaker 6: some people who have seen like first hand the fascist
Speaker 6: violence of ISIS and fascist is the right world. It's
Speaker 6: something maybe worse than fascism, but like certainly that like
Speaker 6: speaking to women in Rashava about how they're not going
Speaker 6: back to the gendered violence of they experience for decades
Speaker 6: to include ISIS, but by no means like only from ISIS.
Speaker 6: And I guess that kind of brings us on to
Speaker 6: I wanted to talk a little bit about the situation
Speaker 6: in the parts of Syria that are controlled by HTS
Speaker 6: and and in so much as they really are control
Speaker 6: controller perhaps around word like they haven't fully established their
Speaker 6: state project yet, but they're certainly moving towards that they've
Speaker 6: sort of captured the institutions of the state rather than
Speaker 6: destroyed them. You'd spoken about, like there's this very I
Speaker 6: don't I think. I guess maybe i'll use an examples
Speaker 6: or I'm phrasing this question in a very meandering way.
Speaker 6: I sort of see ann clip where they're they're like, oh,
Speaker 6: we found a guy who's liberally who's like in this
Speaker 6: prison and he was stuck here. And then second part
Speaker 6: of this was not broadcast on CNN, as this person
Speaker 6: turns out to be like an Air Force lieutenant who
Speaker 6: was in fact himself someone who tortured and killed civilians,
Speaker 6: And like, there's this very liberatory, very excited messaging coming
Speaker 6: from media in the West. I guess some of which
Speaker 6: is good, right, Like, it's good that the Assabe regime
Speaker 6: is good. A sab was fucking terrible and tortured and
Speaker 6: killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. But that
Speaker 6: doesn't mean that things are all perfect in Damascus. So
Speaker 6: do you want to talk a little bit about like
Speaker 6: some of the worrying stuff we've see in the last
Speaker 6: few days from those areas.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean this is something that I worry isn't
Speaker 8: being spoken about enough.
Speaker 7: I don't, as a non Syrian, don't want to say.
Speaker 8: To people, you know, you shouldn't be celebrating your own liberation,
Speaker 8: because people should absolutely should be, and it's their right
Speaker 8: to be. And I'm, like it, extremely happy that this
Speaker 8: brutal dictator has gone.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's it's hard to summarize.
Speaker 8: Quite how awful he was, and it's it's deeply refiltrating
Speaker 8: that he's probably not going to see justice. Yeah, But
Speaker 8: it's also really hard to see stuff which is really
Speaker 8: reminiscent of like nineteen seventy nine Tehran, two thousand and
Speaker 8: three Baghdad, of a sort of jubilation, whilst at the
Speaker 8: same time there are videos of sort of programs being
Speaker 8: carried out against minorities, minorities like the Allies who were
Speaker 8: in control, and you don't know if the person being
Speaker 8: executed in the street were as a torture an intelligence
Speaker 8: agent and.
Speaker 7: You don't know who they were.
Speaker 8: But like this is happening, but you're also seeing like
Speaker 8: sallapist groups raising their flag, you know, like hardline is
Speaker 8: mis raising their flag in places like the Takia and
Speaker 8: Tattoos that have significant minority populations. I am very I
Speaker 8: mean concerned, is in the right word. Like it's hard
Speaker 8: to fill that spirit of liberation when when you see
Speaker 8: not only these things happening, but that.
Speaker 7: The people who have captured these state institutions.
Speaker 8: Are admitted former members of al Qaida, and they are
Speaker 8: they are Jihad's hard line people that have now got
Speaker 8: a very effectively.
Speaker 7: Made themselves about to be moderate.
Speaker 8: But my guart feeling is that we're going to see
Speaker 8: something like Manei sem nine Tehran of a lot of
Speaker 8: talk of reconciliation, a lot of talk of you know,
Speaker 8: the concerns of the Kurds or working with the communists,
Speaker 8: but you know, mass executions and.
Speaker 7: Oppression is not around the corner.
Speaker 8: And I guess when the tubulation dies down, my question
Speaker 8: is what's going to happen when minorities do you demand
Speaker 8: their rights or women don't want to write a job
Speaker 8: in you know, inside the building's inst state institutions. And
Speaker 8: I'm finding it very hard to believe that these these
Speaker 8: men who are professed Islimists are going to allow a
Speaker 8: moderate future to exist.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's I don't know.
Speaker 6: Every day we get different information, right, but like, yeah,
Speaker 6: I don't know if concerned it's the right word either,
Speaker 6: I don't quite know what the word is.
Speaker 4: But like I'm worried.
Speaker 6: I guess I'm worried that I'm especially worried when like,
Speaker 6: rather than what we saw in the self administration was
Speaker 6: not like a continuation of institutions right when the Assad
Speaker 6: regime left in twenty eleven, in twenty twelve, and areas
Speaker 6: that the regime or isis have left since then, like
Speaker 6: it wasn't like, Okay, we'll take over these institutions and
Speaker 6: minister them differently as we will build democracy from the
Speaker 6: bottom up, not we'll just you know, change to people
Speaker 6: in charge versus what it seems like we're now seeing
Speaker 6: for Damascus is like, hey, can the police from the
Speaker 6: cyber regime police stay at work? Which is concerning Talking
Speaker 6: of police, the last thing I wanted to address was
Speaker 6: that our whole camp. I've spoken about it before on
Speaker 6: the show, and people can look back on other episodes,
Speaker 6: but if you've not heard about it, can you explain
Speaker 6: briefly what our whole is and then the massive risk
Speaker 6: that this Turkish backed invasion poses to our whole and
Speaker 6: other camps. I guess the whole is not the only camp,
Speaker 6: just the biggest one.
Speaker 7: Yeah, our whole is a really important point to talk about.
Speaker 7: Our whole is a very large camp.
Speaker 8: It's hard to sum up what kind of camp it
Speaker 8: is because it's so fast and had different sections.
Speaker 7: It's near Alhasse, which is.
Speaker 8: One of the largest cities in north east Syria, and
Speaker 8: it mostly it mostly contains families who were members or
Speaker 8: were resident in the Islamic State when it collapsed, So
Speaker 8: in the beginning of twenty nineteen, ISIS was sort of
Speaker 8: squeezed into this little corner in the eastern side of
Speaker 8: Syria between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border, and when
Speaker 8: the state collapsed, for the caliphate collapse, a lot of
Speaker 8: people had nowhere to go, and a lot of them
Speaker 8: were foreignly sucomming from abroad.
Speaker 7: I want to say a lot. I mean like tens
Speaker 7: of thousands.
Speaker 8: There were something like twenty thousand families left within SUSA
Speaker 8: and that was like the last parts of the Califate
Speaker 8: to hold out, and they didn't have anywhere to go.
Speaker 8: There were already camps set up for IDPs for members
Speaker 8: of ISIS and families in North Assyria, but alcohol was
Speaker 8: rapidly expanded to take these on. So it's a sort
Speaker 8: of semi prison, semi open. The camp that I think
Speaker 8: peaked at.
Speaker 7: Seventy five thousand people, which.
Speaker 8: It sounds like a lot on its own, but when
Speaker 8: you consider that a large city in northern Eassyria is
Speaker 8: about one hundred and fifty thousand people, it.
Speaker 7: Still is significant.
Speaker 8: I don't you probably have work of recent figause I mean,
Speaker 8: but I think the current population is about forty thousand.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it shrunk definitely. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
Speaker 7: The big problem that the self administration have had is multitude.
Speaker 8: Really many of the people there are foreigners. Many of
Speaker 8: them don't have papers. Many of them come from countries
Speaker 8: that either don't want them back or will almost certainly
Speaker 8: execute them if they're sent back like a rock, which
Speaker 8: is against the policy of the abolition of death penalty.
Speaker 7: Inn Asyria.
Speaker 8: There are some in Alohol, but mostly other camps in
Speaker 8: the North and East a Syria. Former ISIS members like
Speaker 8: Shamama Begum who come from countries like the UK who
Speaker 8: simply won't take them back, and the UK has taken
Speaker 8: back some families that simply refuses to take back their
Speaker 8: citizens who joined ISIS as you know, card carrying members.
Speaker 8: So they've made a pretty massive effort to repatriate as
Speaker 8: many families as possible. They've made a big effort to
Speaker 8: rehabilitate and deradicalize as many people as possible. They have
Speaker 8: shrunk the camp massively, but they're still yeah, forty thousand
Speaker 8: or something left there and thinse of a like really
Speaker 8: a lot of them are really radical, Like I think
Speaker 8: I don't know what an exact number is but something
Speaker 8: in the order of ten thousand. Them are still like
Speaker 8: professed being members of ices, and they have a lot
Speaker 8: of children. And this was something that shocked me when
Speaker 8: I was at the end of the caliphate and backwards
Speaker 8: and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out, and
Speaker 8: I could not have imagined how many children that were.
Speaker 7: And this was like what five years ago now coming
Speaker 7: up to six years ago.
Speaker 8: So some of them who were you know, seven, eight,
Speaker 8: nine years old are now like heading towards their mid teens.
Speaker 8: They've spent their entire lives being radicalized and like what
Speaker 8: do you do with them?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 8: And it's no I think there's no coincidence that in
Speaker 8: previous Turkish attacks. The Turkey's been attacking the northeast Assyria
Speaker 8: for you know, the last five six years now through
Speaker 8: the air, through national warfare, and a lot of their
Speaker 8: attacks have focused on trying to break these people out.
Speaker 8: They have bombed the entrances to prisons multiple times. They
Speaker 8: provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are
Speaker 8: trying to break them out, and they provide a safe
Speaker 8: passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape.
Speaker 8: So it's massively in their favor, But of course it's
Speaker 8: a Pandora's box because you know, if that does break open,
Speaker 8: and if these people aren't youpatriated or aren't you radicalized,
Speaker 8: then that's a lot of people who have pretty much
Speaker 8: only known their whole lives a extremely radical fascist Islamist ideology.
Speaker 7: And I don't think they're just going to give it up. Yeah, No,
Speaker 7: that they're not going to join this moderate future Syria.
Speaker 6: No, And like those people have probably experienced, like probably
Speaker 6: have terrible experiences within that camp, and that's not going
Speaker 6: to make that that don't tend to be moderating and
Speaker 6: sort of pacifying experiences, And I'm sure that they will.
Speaker 6: There'll be a lot of hate coming from there when
Speaker 6: those people come out. And I don't want to lick
Speaker 6: a portion blame too much, but we've had a long
Speaker 6: time to deal with this. The world has had a
Speaker 6: long time to deal with I mean, I.
Speaker 8: Would happily blame this is entirely on the hands of
Speaker 8: the coalition. Northern Assyria is a very poor places. It's
Speaker 8: deeply impoverished, and it's been kept in poverished by by
Speaker 8: sanctions by Turkey. You know, the oil refinees that the industry,
Speaker 8: the economy has been smashed to pieces that they've held
Speaker 8: on really well, and that like all credit to them,
Speaker 8: they have maintained this camp. They have tried to give
Speaker 8: these people alive, but it's it's pretty awful conditions. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and this could have been sold if the international community,
Speaker 8: if the coalition, the United States had helped with these repatriations,
Speaker 8: so put political pressure on European country some particular to
Speaker 8: take back their citizens and had just provided the funding,
Speaker 8: you know, for they have provided funding. I'm not saying
Speaker 8: they haven't pay much, but like it's a drop in
Speaker 8: the ocean compared to the Department Defense budget. You know,
Speaker 8: we're talking a few tens of millions here and there
Speaker 8: as opposed to a concerted effort to deradicalize and repatriate
Speaker 8: people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and
Speaker 8: the US.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and like you've got Britain doing the opposite of
Speaker 6: what's helpful, which is fucking like removing people's passports, right
Speaker 6: like the naturalizing them, leaving these people stateless, and like
Speaker 6: saying it's not a problem, which is pathetic and.
Speaker 7: I'm very incredibly short sighted.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know, I don't like using the word terror
Speaker 8: or terrorism, because I think it's they've become meaningless terms.
Speaker 8: But like ISIS did commit horrendous acts of terror in
Speaker 8: Europe and the United States, and these people, a lot
Speaker 8: of them, I'm sure would happily do so given the opportunity.
Speaker 8: So I don't think that the threat is is like
Speaker 8: sufficiently understood in the West.
Speaker 6: Yeah, No, And like it's going to end up biting
Speaker 6: them in the ass because they've you know, they've put
Speaker 6: this off and put this off, and wouldn't spend the
Speaker 6: money to like have justice related to go through a
Speaker 6: system and to have a chance to plead their cases
Speaker 6: or have a tribune or whatever it is. Instead, these
Speaker 6: people have just been essentially abandoned by most of the world.
Speaker 6: The self administration has been forced to take care of
Speaker 6: the people who did horrific things right there. And Yeah,
Speaker 6: at some point, this population will continue to grow if
Speaker 6: we don't keep removing people from it, and that's going
Speaker 6: to be a problem for the whole world, even if
Speaker 6: the whole world wants to pretend it's not happening right now.
Speaker 6: And it is just endlessly frustrating to see it not
Speaker 6: even be covered, let alone kind of addressed in the West.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think that's a really important point. When similar
Speaker 8: atrustees have been carried out in Europe. We see international tribune,
Speaker 8: we see the ICC and the ICJ step in, We
Speaker 8: see arrests, we see prosecutions, you know, like Molossovich, like
Speaker 8: the newer Bent trials and Isis was was a massive state.
Speaker 8: It had something like ten million inhabitants. It committed multiple genocides,
Speaker 8: you know, and this is just you know, people in
Speaker 8: the regions saying, oh, they're committing just these are like
Speaker 8: Western highly studied, highly understood, accepted by Western states as
Speaker 8: genocide against like the Uzds.
Speaker 7: They committed horrendous atrocities.
Speaker 8: They are they posed an international threat and a massive
Speaker 8: regional threat and at the end of the caliphe as
Speaker 8: a territorial realm, as a serious military presence. It just, yeah,
Speaker 8: it just disappeared off the radar. And I think this
Speaker 8: is like a you know, a really issue really shows
Speaker 8: the sort of racist and clonal mindset behind this rules
Speaker 8: based international order that the people who were their victims
Speaker 8: and who have left to pick up the pieces after
Speaker 8: it's got very little support or recognition. And they've been
Speaker 8: calling for for tribunals.
Speaker 7: For years and it's just fallen on to ears.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and sadly ilgy that changing given the incoming administration
Speaker 6: in the United States. Like it's it's deeply concerning. I
Speaker 6: deeply concerned. Through own word, it's just fucked. I want
Speaker 6: to ask, like, people I think want to be in
Speaker 6: solidarity with the revolution, They want to help if they can,
Speaker 6: they want to support. I did the fundraiser last night.
Speaker 6: Thank you to everyone who gave their money and came.
Speaker 6: That was really nice. But what can people do to
Speaker 6: you know, it's one thing to like be in solidarity
Speaker 6: or post or whatever, but like, what concrete actions can
Speaker 6: they take to help.
Speaker 8: This is This is a question that I gets asked
Speaker 8: a lot. Yeah, I think and doing anything is helpful. Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's also a question that's really hard to answer given
Speaker 8: how things are just across the border in Palestine. You know,
Speaker 8: I personally find it hard to to engage and ask
Speaker 8: for help and ask for solidarity when you know there's
Speaker 8: a there's a genocide being committed next door. But we
Speaker 8: might be about to see the same thing happen in Syria,
Speaker 8: and I do think we should be taking it seriously.
Speaker 8: And yeah, anything from raising awareness to actually going there
Speaker 8: and lending support anything on that spectrum. It's not just like,
Speaker 8: it's not just the material contribution that you can make.
Speaker 8: It's the people that do really feel left doubt, they
Speaker 8: feel betrayed, they feel let down by the international community,
Speaker 8: by the rest of the world, and any act of
Speaker 8: solidarity goes out incredibly well. Like the first year I
Speaker 8: was there, I was basically useless because I didn't speak
Speaker 8: the language, I didn't know my way around. I was
Speaker 8: like a burden on society more or less. And for
Speaker 8: people just like happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity,
Speaker 8: And it's not about being useful, it's about that act.
Speaker 8: It's about more than that. That's what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 8: And if you can show solidarity in any way you can, like,
Speaker 8: this is incredibly incredibly important to time to do it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think, like I don't know, if I go
Speaker 6: back when I moved to the US, which was two
Speaker 6: thousand and eight, George W. Bush as president, and like
Speaker 6: I have my little free Palestine badge when I got
Speaker 6: off the plane in my little kafir and like was
Speaker 6: immediately sent to secondary inspection by the customs people because
Speaker 6: like that was not really of course, there were Palestinian
Speaker 6: people and people in solidarity with the people of Palestine
Speaker 6: and the US in and they were for a long
Speaker 6: time before. But like I would never have imagined that
Speaker 6: I would see thousands of people in the streets for
Speaker 6: the Palestinian cause, and like that the only thing that
Speaker 6: has materially held back the genocide of the Palestinian people
Speaker 6: has been the solidarity that they've experienced, And like that
Speaker 6: shows the power that people have, though obviously it's been
Speaker 6: able to do comparatively little in Israel, still seems to
Speaker 6: be killing their children every day, but like it shows
Speaker 6: that we can build solidarity really quickly and really meaningfully,
Speaker 6: and like you don't have to go, but you can go.
Speaker 6: You get It's much harder to get to Palestine than
Speaker 6: it is to get to northern Essyria last year. And
Speaker 6: I think people who are already organizing can bring that
Speaker 6: into their organizing too. These things don't have to compete
Speaker 6: like they can be. There's a lot of solidarity to
Speaker 6: go around. But I would say a lot of the
Speaker 6: news we see, unfortunately from Turkey, and that will unfortunately
Speaker 6: give you information of the extremely biased when it comes
Speaker 6: to Naughti Syria. So being conscious of your media consumption
Speaker 6: is very important.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 8: I think I would just add that to say that
Speaker 8: solidarity with any group is a long term project, right,
Speaker 8: You're not going to jump in and be able to
Speaker 8: make a huge difference immediately. But also at the same time,
Speaker 8: like if the worst happens, if Turkey invades Vullon and
Speaker 8: as genocide and.
Speaker 7: Northern Syria, that isn't the end of it.
Speaker 8: It's a massive international movement and there are practices from
Speaker 8: it that are being put in place in things that
Speaker 8: actually don't even have anything to do with the curves
Speaker 8: of the nation. And there are always organizing, there are
Speaker 8: matters that they use, there's personality analysis, there's criticism and
Speaker 8: self criticism that.
Speaker 7: There's a lot of that that goes far.
Speaker 8: Beyond a single geographic region, and I think engaging with
Speaker 8: that can and I've seen with my own I since
Speaker 8: I've been back, like there's a lot of groups around
Speaker 8: the UK that use techniques for self organization within land
Speaker 8: rights movement, within worker struggle, within ant Cutts campaigning, and
Speaker 8: these got nothing to do with ra Java, but they
Speaker 8: have seen that through solidarity with Rajava and Kurdistan that
Speaker 8: there are ways that can improve their own practice and
Speaker 8: their own actions.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think that's really important too, and those are things
Speaker 6: maybe we'll cover in the future. And there are plenty
Speaker 6: of good resources online. Are there any resources you'd like
Speaker 6: to plug or like personal social media's things? Do you
Speaker 6: think people could follow to get good information on what's happening?
Speaker 7: Definitely the ri C, that's the Rajavia Information Center.
Speaker 8: They are probably the best source on the ground in Rajava,
Speaker 8: and they are a collective of journalists, a mixture of
Speaker 8: locals and internationalists who've been working there for six years now,
Speaker 8: so they're a rejer But I see on various social
Speaker 8: media platforms you can follow me as at lapinesque la
Speaker 8: p I n E, s q u E. I'm also
Speaker 8: posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm pisiting
Speaker 8: updates from friends, people I know there and my take
Speaker 8: on the situation based on my experiences being there from
Speaker 8: its five years.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think good to follow if you ken. Thank
Speaker 6: you very much, Danny. What we're going to do now
Speaker 6: is I got some voice notes from some friends who
Speaker 6: are at the front with a techosina an assist which
Speaker 6: means anarchist struggle in Kurdish. They're a group within the
Speaker 6: SDF that is an anarchist group that they're fighting, and
Speaker 6: in this case as to doing frontline medical support on
Speaker 6: behalf of the self administration, on behalf of the revolution.
Speaker 6: They sent me some notes this morning it's Monday today
Speaker 6: from their positions on the front line. So obviously those
Speaker 6: notes will be a little bit they'll be like twenty
Speaker 6: four hours old by the time you hear them. But
Speaker 6: I still think it's very important to hear from people
Speaker 6: who are there what we can not from, like someone
Speaker 6: who's supposed to be an expert but hasn't set for
Speaker 6: in Syria in fifteen years and hasn't really talked to
Speaker 6: anyone who's Syrian either. So we'll drop those in after
Speaker 6: the advertising break here and with that I will say
Speaker 6: thank you very much, Danny, thanks for giving us your time,
Speaker 6: and he'll we really appreciate all you're insight today.
Speaker 7: Thanks very much.
Speaker 1: James, talking from the provisional branch.
Speaker 10: Just want to situation here because.
Speaker 1: You're probably now the regime has fun.
Speaker 10: You've left the country after a big offensive that started
Speaker 10: from Italy that took over quite soon quite fast the
Speaker 10: city of Alba and continued moving on. We wanted to
Speaker 10: explain how is the situation right now on the ground
Speaker 10: and also be some insight in the situation of North
Speaker 10: in Syria and what the media is as not covering.
Speaker 1: Of the different events and situations that are unknowing here.
Speaker 10: The main thing to remark that this can be a
Speaker 10: bit of a confusion confusion interview for those that are
Speaker 10: maybe not familiar with the unknowing situation.
Speaker 1: To give a short context, we can mention.
Speaker 10: That there are right now two main conflicts ongoing military conflicts.
Speaker 10: One is when we reported they're not so much we
Speaker 10: are talking about the war that HDS or the offensive
Speaker 10: that HDS launched against the army.
Speaker 1: And the other is.
Speaker 10: The offensive that the SMA and Turkish proxy forces the
Speaker 10: Wilder the name of that Syrian National Army, but that
Speaker 10: they are trained, paid and supported by the Turkish estate,
Speaker 10: the offensive that they have been launching against Northern Asyria
Speaker 10: and the Democratic Administration of North as Ayria is the
Speaker 10: area also known sometimes as Rigela, that is started as
Speaker 10: the court desieration movement leaving the world of Islamic state
Speaker 10: and establishing this autonomous administration. So let's go shortly to
Speaker 10: the which conflict this offensive of each theater the faith
Speaker 10: of reaction, but it's Islamige group direct heritage of Anatra
Speaker 10: that was the Syrian branch of the GUIDO that has
Speaker 10: been learning having somewhat government destructs in the region of
Speaker 10: Uglype in the north west of Syria and was under
Speaker 10: heavisage from the region forces in Syria Army and the
Speaker 10: twenty seven of Nananda bay unch is bit offensive that
Speaker 10: led to the collapse of the region.
Speaker 1: We could reflect deeply about the regions now.
Speaker 10: On one side, the Syria Aparty was exhausted that two
Speaker 10: years of war here in.
Speaker 11: Syria, but especially their main allies and supporters were also
Speaker 11: in that situation. We were talking mostly about Russia and Iran.
Speaker 11: As we currently know, Russia has been in rage in
Speaker 11: a we're in Ukraine for three years.
Speaker 10: Almost Iran recently had been also engaged in supporting the
Speaker 10: militias in the NFL against Israel after the natural occupation
Speaker 10: that Israel started.
Speaker 1: On an Aza year ago.
Speaker 10: These two conflicts create a situation that both.
Speaker 1: Partners, that Russian and Iran were not able to support
Speaker 1: the army as day within the past and this led.
Speaker 10: Also to the collapse of the front lands of the
Speaker 10: Serra party, allowing the offensive of HDS to overrun very
Speaker 10: fast the defenses in the city of Alipo and also
Speaker 10: take in control of the city of Hamma. These sparked
Speaker 10: also all their groups that also opposed the region for
Speaker 10: a long time to start also the election, and in
Speaker 10: southern Syria and the regions of the Sula and and Cunetia,
Speaker 10: there was also an autonomous military operation room that started
Speaker 10: coordinated insurgeons and the vision.
Speaker 1: These sparked the collapse of the region.
Speaker 10: A lot of soldiers were defecting their posessions and finally
Speaker 10: the different military groups living the offensive.
Speaker 1: To the mass Puts.
Speaker 10: This was an offensive that was really not very builded
Speaker 10: in the sense of a lot of the similar party
Speaker 10: soldiers who were just leaving their positions and running away,
Speaker 10: and offensive was able to advance very fast, very easily.
Speaker 1: Right now. The offensive led to.
Speaker 12: The transition that we are seeing in the masques where
Speaker 12: the leader of HDS.
Speaker 1: Had been doing really.
Speaker 10: Public speeches and the carrying the tunun for the revolution,
Speaker 10: trying to harvest.
Speaker 1: And the revolutionary spirit of like twenty eleven for their.
Speaker 10: Own benefit and they imposed or as a transitional government
Speaker 10: that is from exclusively by like members connected to aligned
Speaker 10: to HDS. Could be good to discuss more about HDS,
Speaker 10: but maybe it's not the.
Speaker 1: Focus of our interview right now.
Speaker 10: Just mentioned and their authoritarian government in Egypt has been
Speaker 10: also really criticized by local population organizing.
Speaker 1: Protest against it and right.
Speaker 10: Now running this interim government, they are already making proposals
Speaker 10: for like a morality police.
Speaker 1: Is amic courts.
Speaker 10: So I don't know how much this comparison has been
Speaker 10: already shared. That clearly what we saw in a Findistan
Speaker 10: with Taliban taking over invested destructors is probably a good
Speaker 10: guide to understand what could be happening in Syria. If
Speaker 10: HDRS states control of the the state, it seems to
Speaker 10: be happening. So this is one of the confusion going
Speaker 10: that is widely reported.
Speaker 1: The only one maybe is not so much reported.
Speaker 10: We see how the Turkish has been for a long
Speaker 10: time to give the state has been for a long
Speaker 10: time and attacking the vision of that Norway Syria, especially
Speaker 10: the Cooldish areas, and this is connected not to their
Speaker 10: war against the con deliberation movement that has been in
Speaker 10: for more than forty years and the last chapter of
Speaker 10: Thesus started in coordination with this offensive of HDS where
Speaker 10: their prop re forces started to attack many the region
Speaker 10: of thirty fact that was an area where a lot
Speaker 10: of the refugees from a friend we're living a frine
Speaker 10: was a region that was a ray occupied by thirty
Speaker 10: in twenty eighteen and a lot of the people from
Speaker 10: the city was displaced and living in refuge amants in
Speaker 10: the origin of Hinda and the civil tech effect, and
Speaker 10: these Turkish pretty forces attacked and conquered that vision, forcing
Speaker 10: all these people that already had to leave their homes
Speaker 10: more than five years ago to translating, yeah, so forcing
Speaker 10: them to flee once again. A lot of these people
Speaker 10: was trapped in a caroline that suffered brutal grades attacks, kidnapping, ransoms.
Speaker 1: Like it has been make a really terrible experience for.
Speaker 10: A lot of people that was trying to flee the
Speaker 10: offensive of these Turkish patty forces and most of them
Speaker 10: are now arriving to do that time to write two
Speaker 10: the visions of the self administration when where they are
Speaker 10: founding and they can find shelter and for those willing
Speaker 10: to help with mentioned that vast is the humanitarian organization,
Speaker 10: one of the biggest humanitarier organizations working in ant Assyria
Speaker 10: has been providing fans and foot and blankets and everything
Speaker 10: they can to support all these people that is arriving
Speaker 10: on these areas.
Speaker 1: So those willing to.
Speaker 10: Support economically and this humanitarian crisis we are experiencing, they
Speaker 10: can't easily find.
Speaker 1: The right side. And the Banakana.
Speaker 10: Favasa to donay to them to support all these people
Speaker 10: that went again know there in their homes.
Speaker 1: But the offensives didn't stop.
Speaker 10: On an Shaffa and the SNA continued their attacks to
Speaker 10: cover the city of Manage already right now and this
Speaker 10: was a really heavy classious that it was a really
Speaker 10: serious military conflict that has been totally supported by Turkish
Speaker 10: artillery and air force.
Speaker 1: We are talking about.
Speaker 10: Drones sitting different positions and even airplanes that of course
Speaker 10: like nature air force have been bombing positions of the
Speaker 10: cerin democratic forces, allowing these different even groups that are out.
Speaker 1: Of this coalition of the SMA, these published pactic forces
Speaker 1: to control of the city.
Speaker 10: At the moment, there is already several days a man
Speaker 10: beach this city have been organizing protests and even in
Speaker 10: general strike that started yesterday and the occupation because these
Speaker 10: groups that occupied the city are looting and even killing
Speaker 10: local populations in a really terrible situation. Of this experience
Speaker 10: in the local people living in Maniche, and they are.
Speaker 1: Willing to continue.
Speaker 10: They have been threatening the city of Colony in the
Speaker 10: simple of resistance of the regional revolution against the designed state.
Speaker 1: And these threads and the city are.
Speaker 10: Not just the bombings of the air force and artillery,
Speaker 10: but also a lot of military and personal of the
Speaker 10: Turkish prepsy forces gathering on the bridge that connects the divisions.
Speaker 1: Of man Beach and Commanding and all across the air
Speaker 1: for this river.
Speaker 10: So this war is not so reported that it's been
Speaker 10: really BOLTI times against the self administration in Northeastyria. We
Speaker 10: are trying to report and update about the situation. We
Speaker 10: also published two statements to to call out at tension
Speaker 10: for comrade what is ongoing here and maybe also.
Speaker 1: Talk a bit about the work that we have been
Speaker 1: doing underground.
Speaker 10: We need to remark that this offensive of the Mambage
Speaker 10: and now districts and Colony have not been the only
Speaker 10: duds of the Turkish army and the perhapsy forces on
Speaker 10: the wing all around the street that they occupied in
Speaker 10: twenty eighteen and two thousand nineteen. The areas around the
Speaker 10: city of Sylvania and Anisa next to the border with
Speaker 10: Turkie also host a lot of Islamist groups that are
Speaker 10: part of this Turkish proty coalition and they have been
Speaker 10: intensively bonding the areas and their surroundings. And there have
Speaker 10: been quiet widespread rumors of the Zamie Hope togethering forces
Speaker 10: to continue their reports on the self administration of Nordestria
Speaker 10: and the ward of the Cylind Democratic Forces. We from
Speaker 10: the kasinosas we have been working in the medical capacity,
Speaker 10: the providing materials for the medical points in the in
Speaker 10: the fundance and being.
Speaker 1: Present in the foundlands together with.
Speaker 10: The Syrian Democratic Forces in case that a new invasion,
Speaker 10: and it is happening right now.
Speaker 1: The bombings are hitting different areas and it has been
Speaker 1: really intense in the last days.
Speaker 10: The Syrian Democratic Forces are in maximum alard and especially
Speaker 10: there is an important call in solidarity with the city
Speaker 10: of Covany, a symbol of resistance.
Speaker 1: That is small ones again under threat.
Speaker 10: We have been seen as demonstrations are around the world
Speaker 10: in Solarity with the motions here and this has been
Speaker 10: also bringing out as motivation to continue the resistance underground.
Speaker 10: Right now, uh, these situations of the instability and political
Speaker 10: tradition is still in ways that are difficult to predict.
Speaker 1: We can see how the self administration has been tending political.
Speaker 10: Realizations to the matters to memor Shade with this new
Speaker 10: provisional government.
Speaker 1: With the attempt to reach autonomy.
Speaker 10: For the region that connects with the ideas of democratic controlism,
Speaker 10: the ideas of democratic comprolism. Don't expect to run a
Speaker 10: state institutions because we don't want to live in a
Speaker 10: society that is ruled by a state, and are calling
Speaker 10: for time of autonomy in a local governments where then
Speaker 10: the different communities can live together, colleges together, administering their
Speaker 10: social forms.
Speaker 1: Together and also their defense.
Speaker 10: We'll see how the civil democratic forces is at a
Speaker 10: military coalition of different local teleforces that it's made on
Speaker 10: the principles of self defense. Maybe to give a bit
Speaker 10: of contexts of what we have been doing here for
Speaker 10: several years that our organization has been operating another Syria.
Speaker 1: As anarchists. We can here in solidarity international society with
Speaker 1: this revolution.
Speaker 10: Because their political values and their political project is really
Speaker 10: close to our ideas. We see big similarities with the
Speaker 10: ideas of libertarian socialism and social ecology and thinkers and
Speaker 10: moral bootin have been a big inspiration found others and
Speaker 10: the leader of the cour Desirational movement that has been
Speaker 10: proposing this political friend called democratic controlism, where especially with
Speaker 10: the principles of one liberation, social ecology and studios and
Speaker 10: offracy has been political campus of the revolution here. Building
Speaker 10: autonomy in the different regions has been also a very
Speaker 10: important element to develop the project, and especially during the
Speaker 10: war and in one state, as soon as the different
Speaker 10: territories were liberated, there was a big emphasis on creating
Speaker 10: local councils civilian and military councils.
Speaker 1: Both that around their own affairs.
Speaker 10: This is very interesting from anarchists perspective not to see
Speaker 10: how one of the main political points is these promotings
Speaker 10: of defense and creating a military force that is not
Speaker 10: based on a centralized monopoly of balance, but on allowing
Speaker 10: every community to take care of their own defense and
Speaker 10: their own offairs. This is a really inspiring element that
Speaker 10: for us has been also a really extraordinary learning process
Speaker 10: being part of a revolution, leaving day to.
Speaker 1: Day the developments that are happening here and.
Speaker 10: Seeing what doesn't mean to make a revolution, because it's
Speaker 10: something that sometimes we anarchists look back often in at
Speaker 10: the epic times of like Spain one thirty six or
Speaker 10: Ukraine in the twenties to see examples of an anarchist revolution,
Speaker 10: and this is something that today is happening here. Courdistant
Speaker 10: has been for a long time living resistance against the
Speaker 10: logic of national states, especially in Turkey, but we saw
Speaker 10: how it has been funding in Syria where that this
Speaker 10: movement found the space to put in practice these ideas
Speaker 10: and to develop the revolutionary society that has been theorized
Speaker 10: for a long time. So even if we cannot save
Speaker 10: vergialwas an anarchist, that we can say how the principles
Speaker 10: inspired the project and that it's been developed here and implemented.
Speaker 10: This is a really an important school and it brings
Speaker 10: a lot of lections of the big challenges of reorganizing
Speaker 10: a society with principles of euer Italian socialism. It is
Speaker 10: especially complicated here because of external reasms like the situation
Speaker 10: of the Marble, the constant threat of the Tutis army,
Speaker 10: and this is something that for sure we can point out.
Speaker 1: As like, well, it's very difficult to make a revolution
Speaker 1: with these factors, but this is also acting that making
Speaker 1: a revolution will always be difficult, and we always have
Speaker 1: really big.
Speaker 10: Factors that make the situation very difficult. If making a
Speaker 10: revolution would be easy.
Speaker 1: We would already have done it.
Speaker 10: So of course it's something that brings a lot of difficulties,
Speaker 10: a lot contradictions, to a lot of challenges and use
Speaker 10: here day to day living what it means to build
Speaker 10: the revolutionary society, a lot, a lot of equations from
Speaker 10: the reflections that we also able to translate and to
Speaker 10: reflect together with the artist movements from around the world, to.
Speaker 12: Learn from his experience and to be able to analyze
Speaker 12: together and reflect and discuss together of what it means
Speaker 12: to build anarchism in the twenty first century, what it
Speaker 12: means to build libertarian socialism nowadays, in the current society
Speaker 12: with all the different.
Speaker 10: Elements that we see, and of course in the military
Speaker 10: comes the digion going. It can seem maybe sometimes far
Speaker 10: away of a community in western countries, but I think
Speaker 10: it's important to remember that revolution and war had been
Speaker 10: always to size of the same time.
Speaker 1: In these moments of instability of war where the logic
Speaker 1: and the established school of national states is more weak,
Speaker 1: because we can actually.
Speaker 10: See in nine other times, in other moments or even
Speaker 10: in other places nowadays, what is happening, for example, in
Speaker 10: the now, what is happening in the different areas where.
Speaker 1: The logic of a national state is in questioned.
Speaker 10: Creates in the stability to create a situation where the
Speaker 10: different actors will push.
Speaker 1: To take control. And we know that often those actors
Speaker 1: will be led by a nationalism.
Speaker 10: Forces mentality with an authoritarian logic to just impose their
Speaker 10: ideas and their aims by force.
Speaker 1: And it's very important that we think and we reflect and.
Speaker 10: Reorganize force that is able to react to that situation
Speaker 10: because a traitarian.
Speaker 1: And hierarchic structors are required false to react.
Speaker 12: We as anarchist, we need time to organize Arizona pally
Speaker 12: because our structures.
Speaker 1: Function based usurn thrust also knowing each other. And even
Speaker 1: if I really believe that they are much more solid
Speaker 1: and much more reliable in a long term, in a
Speaker 1: short term we can face big, big challenge.
Speaker 12: So it's important to see fascism is as with advancing
Speaker 12: all around the world, and we can see how.
Speaker 1: The intentions are like growing.
Speaker 10: So maybe this isn't as a call might to learn
Speaker 10: from the lessons here, to learn from how the Kurdish
Speaker 10: movement have been working and preparing for decades and what
Speaker 10: happened in Syria made possible for the revolutionary movement to
Speaker 10: put the cards on the table, to organize together with
Speaker 10: the people and to defense and their people and their
Speaker 10: communities building this revelifering process. But nowadays that so many
Speaker 10: people have been like taking inspiration from, So yeah, probably
Speaker 10: this is a bit confusing and maybe.
Speaker 1: Not so current. Sorry, we have been quiet some hours.
Speaker 10: We've had several weeks that have been extremely challenging with really.
Speaker 1: Few hours of sleep.
Speaker 10: But I hope this is more or less clear, and
Speaker 10: this is doing is something that it's not so understandable.
Speaker 1: And always welcome new and.
Speaker 10: New questions and helping to answer, answer and share more perspective.
Speaker 10: We have been answer writing some statements in their answer
Speaker 10: trying to answer all those people interested in learning more
Speaker 10: about the situation here and in.
Speaker 1: A ways special for different.
Speaker 5: Welcome to what could Happen Here? A show about things
Speaker 5: falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode is going
Speaker 5: to be a special audio companion piece to an article
Speaker 5: published last night on substack at shatter Zone. That's Robert's
Speaker 5: usual substack, though. Last night I publish an article detailing
Speaker 5: the online history and transvestigation discourse regarding a school shooting
Speaker 5: in Madison, Wisconsin. The article has pictures and hyperlinks which
Speaker 5: might help explain some of the stuff I'm talking about,
Speaker 5: but I'll do my best to relay it here to
Speaker 5: you on the podcast feed. Another Monday in America and
Speaker 5: another school shooting. On the morning of December sixteenth, a
Speaker 5: female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin
Speaker 5: shot and killed a teacher and fellow student, and injured
Speaker 5: six others before killing herself. Initially, police falsely reported the
Speaker 5: shooter was seventeen years old, but late Monday night they
Speaker 5: correctly identified the deceased shooter as fifteen year old Natalie
Speaker 5: ruppnow who went by Samantha or sam. In the aftermath
Speaker 5: of this horrific event, right wing influencers and content creators
Speaker 5: wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people,
Speaker 5: labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged
Speaker 5: transgender terrorists. But what really happened here, had nothing to
Speaker 5: do with trans people, and is sadly ordinary for the
Speaker 5: United States. In August of twenty twenty four, the father
Speaker 5: of the future school shooter took his to a gun
Speaker 5: range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing
Speaker 5: the logo of a band KMFDM. In another photo of
Speaker 5: the shooter, we can see the front of the shirt.
Speaker 5: The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris,
Speaker 5: who is a fan of the band. The bulk of
Speaker 5: this new shooter's online footprint suggests a general obsession with
Speaker 5: school shooters and the TCC or True Crime Community, a
Speaker 5: nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This
Speaker 5: sort of content dominates Samantha's tumbler, which last posted in
Speaker 5: May of twenty twenty four. An alleged online friend of
Speaker 5: the shooter said that she quote posted about school shooters
Speaker 5: all the time quote end quote had school shooter leanings unquote.
Speaker 5: Samantha is hardly alone in this. There have been over
Speaker 5: one hundred copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety nine. A Twitter account believes to have belonged to
Speaker 5: the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and
Speaker 5: glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her
Speaker 5: own shooting. The account was created in December of twenty
Speaker 5: twenty four, and the profile picture featured a young man
Speaker 5: in camo pants and a tactical backpack. The male profile
Speaker 5: picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that
Speaker 5: the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers cannot
Speaker 5: agree on whether she was female to male or male
Speaker 5: to female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare
Speaker 5: the photo of the shooter with her Twitter profile picture.
Speaker 5: This is a ridiculous diagram with about seven images overlaid
Speaker 5: at different opacities, trying to layer the faces and body
Speaker 5: shapes of these two people on top of each other.
Speaker 5: This post is only proof that most of what gets
Speaker 5: passed off as quote unquote ocant online today's just completely
Speaker 5: incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with his diagram
Speaker 5: is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat,
Speaker 5: a school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was
Speaker 5: only fifteen years old when he carried out his shooting.
Speaker 5: Hours after the shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, while right wing
Speaker 5: accounts were still arguing about what sort of transgender the
Speaker 5: shooter had been. A neo Nazi Twitter account named Nitro
Speaker 5: claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and
Speaker 5: repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her
Speaker 5: our quote unquote biological woman. An early complicating factor in
Speaker 5: establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that
Speaker 5: her alleged Twitter account posted a link to a Google
Speaker 5: doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the
Speaker 5: visibility setting public, so you couldn't access.
Speaker 4: The Google doc.
Speaker 5: You had to put in an email for approval, and
Speaker 5: the person who was supposed to approve your email was
Speaker 5: now dead, so there was no way to actually look
Speaker 5: at this person's manifesto. The shooter's alleged Discord friend, Nitro,
Speaker 5: claims to find what he believes to be a snippet
Speaker 5: of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a
Speaker 5: Discord group chat. Nitro is based out of the UK,
Speaker 5: and so if this is legitimate, and that is a
Speaker 5: big if, this message would have been sent about an
Speaker 5: hour and a half before the shooting, per the Discord timestamp.
Speaker 5: I'm going to read a bit of this alleged writing
Speaker 5: from the shooter quote. Women are the only hope for
Speaker 5: this wretched world. But even women have been brainwashed by
Speaker 5: moids for too long. They've internalized the patriarchy and turned
Speaker 5: on each other, always begging for male approval and validation.
Speaker 5: It's disgusting. I realize the truth. Men are irredeemable. Radfem
Speaker 5: Hitler was is fucking vindicated. Now they can't be reformed
Speaker 5: or redeemed. They are a fucking scourge upon the earth.
Speaker 5: The only solution is to total exterminate them and every
Speaker 5: foid who worships these fucking parasites. Every single male must
Speaker 5: be wiped out, from babies to the elderly. Only then
Speaker 5: can women be free to create a new world. All
Speaker 5: be the pioneer. I'll be the first one to take
Speaker 5: the first step. I don't care if their fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, teachers, police,
Speaker 5: and especially n words or politicians. I've been craving to
Speaker 5: kill them all. This is my mission. Only when their
Speaker 5: parasitic sludge has been expunged from the earth is when
Speaker 5: then the world will be clean and women can start over.
Speaker 5: It's the only way. In approximately ten minutes, I should
Speaker 5: be dead. It's strange, but it feels good. Hopefully to
Speaker 5: most people, this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary
Speaker 5: quote unquote feminist screed about initiating a wave of male
Speaker 5: targeted violence to cleanse the earth with pepperings of and foids,
Speaker 5: which is Internet in cell slang for male and female respectively.
Speaker 5: Also included are racial slurs and something called quote unquote
Speaker 5: radfem Hitler. That last part is a reference to a
Speaker 5: Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle hollow
Speaker 5: earth Turf, whose content is a mix of trad influenced
Speaker 5: right wing feminism with anti trans flourishes, advocating for a
Speaker 5: mass purge of mooids. This includes trans women. This account
Speaker 5: is derided by those both on the right and left,
Speaker 5: but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem and
Speaker 5: anti trans women with trad or often occult interests. The
Speaker 5: discord nazi Nitro claimed that the shooter was quote unquote
Speaker 5: a fan of radfem Hitler and talked about the account
Speaker 5: frequently on Discord. Though Nitro previously believed her interest in
Speaker 5: the account was merely ironic, now obviously an anonymous Twitter
Speaker 5: nazi is certainly not the most reliable source, but Nitro
Speaker 5: was the first person to correctly identify and post photos
Speaker 5: of the shooter. Though they could be utilizing this newfound
Speaker 5: clout to troll a widely disliked Twitter user, but the
Speaker 5: fact that he's been right about all other details inclines
Speaker 5: me to not discount his claims just altogether, but instead
Speaker 5: just hold them with a billion pounds of salt. Allegations
Speaker 5: that the shooter was a neo Nazi Radfem certainly sent
Speaker 5: Radfem Hitler into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to
Speaker 5: have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been
Speaker 5: quote unquote e dating, with the apparent intention of disproving
Speaker 5: any ties the shooter had to the Twitter Radfem orbit.
Speaker 5: Through this alleged online boyfriend, the right wing turf Ecosystem
Speaker 5: claimed to have acquired a copy of the quote unquote
Speaker 5: full manifesto. This purported manifesto lacks the anti male, anti
Speaker 5: moid ramblings of the discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its
Speaker 5: use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times
Speaker 5: evocative of Pecca Eric Auvinen's manifesto, a Finnish school shooter
Speaker 5: from two US and seven who killed eight people. Auvinen
Speaker 5: considered himself a quote unquote natural selector who had evolved
Speaker 5: beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha's purported manifesto,
Speaker 5: he is mentioned by name as a quote unquote true inspiration.
Speaker 5: Over the course of eight hours, a radfem Twitter account
Speaker 5: released six pages of what they claimed to be Samantha's writing.
Speaker 5: It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being
Speaker 5: quote unquote scum. The writing describes a difficult family life,
Speaker 5: suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists.
Speaker 5: Though it briefly references the accelerationist terror gram saints, the
Speaker 5: whole of this piece of writing is much more reminiscent
Speaker 5: of old school columnbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu.
Speaker 5: The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters and
Speaker 5: includes a paragraph on Vladyskov Rosleyakhov, another Columbine copycat, but
Speaker 5: from Crimea, who also cause played as one of the
Speaker 5: Columbine shooters during his own mass shooting. Though the discord
Speaker 5: Nazi and the reactionary rad femmes question the authenticity of
Speaker 5: the others alleged manifesto, what both sides of the in
Speaker 5: cell war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender.
Speaker 5: We're going to go on a quick ad break and
Speaker 5: come back to discuss transvestigation and the trans terror panic.
Speaker 4: Okay, we are back.
Speaker 5: It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated
Speaker 5: is to do a school shooting. Transvestigating is the practice
Speaker 5: of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It's
Speaker 5: often leveled against celebrities, athletes, and politicians, but in recent
Speaker 5: years there's been a new common subject of transvestigation, mass shooters,
Speaker 5: in particular school shooters. Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout
Speaker 5: previously reported on this trend back in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant
Speaker 5: School shooting, which police say was committed by a transman,
Speaker 5: we theorized that the online right was testing out a
Speaker 5: new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with
Speaker 5: mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and
Speaker 5: plane disinformation that fear has come to pass. The modicum
Speaker 5: of believability provided by the Nashville shooting, as it's the
Speaker 5: only legitimate transrelated incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass
Speaker 5: shooting databases, was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for
Speaker 5: the next two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted
Speaker 5: to link nearly every viral mass slash school shooting to
Speaker 5: trans people to create a false trend. The strategy operates
Speaker 5: as follows. During the first few chaotic hours after a shooting,
Speaker 5: a small group of right wing content creators weaponized the
Speaker 5: lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged
Speaker 5: shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the
Speaker 5: use of out of context social media posts, doctrine photographs,
Speaker 5: photos of other people, or simply pictures of long or
Speaker 5: dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose
Speaker 5: evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter
Speaker 5: is really transgender. For more context on this, you can
Speaker 5: listen to an episode of It Could Happen here. I
Speaker 5: wrote earlier this year covering the rise of fake trans terrorists.
Speaker 5: The goal is to get as many of their followers
Speaker 5: to see and spread these claims as fast as possible.
Speaker 5: Even if it's widely debunked the next day, many who
Speaker 5: heard the false claim won't be aware of the verified correction.
Speaker 5: All these anti trans influencers in need is a brief
Speaker 5: window of time to plant the idea into people's minds,
Speaker 5: and then that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is
Speaker 5: repeated every few months whenever there's a new mass shooting,
Speaker 5: then it's pretty easy to create the false perception of
Speaker 5: a growing trend.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 5: In reality, trans people per capita are actually way less
Speaker 5: likely to commit a shooting compared to CIS people, and
Speaker 5: are much more likely to be the victim of gun violence.
Speaker 5: But this past Monday, conservative and anti trans influencers tried
Speaker 5: once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda.
Speaker 5: Monday afternoon, Ian Miles Chung posted trans terrorism must end.
Speaker 5: Hours later, Laura Lumer wrote, quote the trans movement is
Speaker 5: really turning out to be a terrorist movement unquote. Just
Speaker 5: minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer
Speaker 5: Matt Wallace posted that an unknown quote unquote witness said
Speaker 5: that the shooter quote looked to be transgender unquote. Wallace,
Speaker 5: who has over two point two million followers on Twitter,
Speaker 5: provided no source or citation and has since deleted this post,
Speaker 5: but others in the online mega orbit parroted this language
Speaker 5: before any identifying information was released, with the user just
Speaker 5: Jeff from Cali writing a transperson targeted and opened fire
Speaker 5: on students at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin twelve hit.
Speaker 5: The right wing content creator Ryan Mada baselessly claimed that
Speaker 5: the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter
Speaker 5: quote another mentally unstable psychopath who has prescribed puberty blocker
Speaker 5: and hormones unquote. Mata hosts a show on the right
Speaker 5: wing YouTube alternative Rumble and has over one hundred and
Speaker 5: twenty three thousand followers on Twitter. His tweet claiming the
Speaker 5: shooter was on HRT racked up one point six million
Speaker 5: quote unquote views and seventeen thousand likes in just twelve hours.
Speaker 5: Larger accounts like Tya write Check's libs of TikTok fueled
Speaker 5: undue speculation about the gender identity of the shooter, seeding
Speaker 5: confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for
Speaker 5: political gain, quoting the police chief saying, quote, I don't
Speaker 5: know if the shooter is male or female unquote. A
Speaker 5: small group of conservative influencers have just so successfully created
Speaker 5: in alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter
Speaker 5: is transgender that they don't even have to outright say
Speaker 5: it anymore. Accounts like libs of TikTok and Malaysian blog
Speaker 5: ugger Ian Miles Chung can merely gesture to this reality
Speaker 5: tunnel they've intentionally created, and now thousands of people will
Speaker 5: affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth, backed up
Speaker 5: by historical precedent of fabricated memory. Matt Wallace posted a
Speaker 5: photo of the shooter and the male profile picture, saying
Speaker 5: what do you notice about the shooter again? Ian miles
Speaker 5: Chung posted quote, police are unable to identify if the
Speaker 5: school shooter in Madison, Wisconsin is male or female, but
Speaker 5: they do know who did it and identified them as
Speaker 5: a student. Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Unquote?
Speaker 5: This speculation fueled conspiracy theories, which spread claiming that police
Speaker 5: were intentionally withholding information about the shooter's gender identity in
Speaker 5: service of some hidden agenda, and actually they were just
Speaker 5: waiting to like let the family know that their daughter
Speaker 5: was dead and making sure they had the correct identification.
Speaker 5: Very basic stuff. Police all do this, but no, it's
Speaker 5: all part of some secret agenda and some hidden narrative.
Speaker 5: As early as one pm EST on Monday, which is
Speaker 5: just like an hour after the shooting would have taken place,
Speaker 5: the neo Nazi Twitter account Nitro correctly identified the shooter
Speaker 5: as his online friend Sam Samantha. As this name spread online,
Speaker 5: the multi gendered nature of the name added to the
Speaker 5: speculation that the shooter was trans. Scarlett Johnson, an activist
Speaker 5: with the ultra conservative parents' rights group Moms for Liberty
Speaker 5: Shared self admitted unconfirmed reports that the shooter was quote
Speaker 5: unquote a transgender teen who went by Sam or Samantha.
Speaker 5: As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online
Speaker 5: courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified.
Speaker 5: An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter's given name matches
Speaker 5: the ancient Sam Hide meme, in which extremely online people
Speaker 5: try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a
Speaker 5: new mass shooting was the American comedian Sam Hyde. In
Speaker 5: recent years, the meme has turned into the Samantha Hide meme,
Speaker 5: used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One
Speaker 5: hide post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey raked
Speaker 5: up over six hundred thousand views, four point five thousand likes,
Speaker 5: and one and a half thousand retweets. Massi posted quote,
Speaker 5: when you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually
Speaker 5: mutilate them, you're not curing them. You're creating potential school
Speaker 5: shooters unquote. Now it should go without saying, but the
Speaker 5: use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence.
Speaker 5: We're going to go on one last break and return
Speaker 5: to conclude our discussion of transvestigating school shooters. Okay, we
Speaker 5: are back. Time to talk about the potential double flipper.
Speaker 5: So as this transvestigation continued, the quote unquote, we can
Speaker 5: always tell. Crowd ended up transvestigating in both directions, seemingly
Speaker 5: unsure of what a signed gender at birth the shooter
Speaker 5: must have had. Some believe the shooter was transferm while
Speaker 5: others concluded they were trans mask with one reply to
Speaker 5: an end wokeness tweet reading quote those do not look
Speaker 5: like female hands, and another transvestigation post saying the shooter
Speaker 5: is a trans kid, a female pretending to be a male.
Speaker 5: Exactly why we keep our Second Amendment rights to protect
Speaker 5: our children from this mental health crisis. Zoom in close
Speaker 5: on her shirt and hand gesture unquote. A now deleted
Speaker 5: post from a URF account also attempted to pass off
Speaker 5: the shooter as a transgirl, saying, quote, the Wsconsin school
Speaker 5: shooter was a seventeen year old transidentified male. It just
Speaker 5: keeps happening now quote unquote. Trans identified male was usually
Speaker 5: a transphobadogu whistle to refer to a trans woman as
Speaker 5: a male who identifies as a trans woman, but sometimes
Speaker 5: transfoms get confused by words and use the phrase to
Speaker 5: refer to trans people who quote unquote identify as men,
Speaker 5: like this other transvestigation post saying quote shooter was a
Speaker 5: seventeen year old trans but identified male now. One of
Speaker 5: the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans
Speaker 5: guy came from an anti Semitic doctor in Denmark with
Speaker 5: one point four million followers. She falsely claimed with no evidence,
Speaker 5: that the shooter was taking testosterone, writing quote the Wisconsin
Speaker 5: school shooter has been identified as a seventeen year old
Speaker 5: trans identified male another mentally ill girl on testosterone unquote.
Speaker 5: As of Tuesday morning, this post has over three million views,
Speaker 5: twenty two two thousand likes, and eight point three thousand retweets.
Speaker 5: In a following post, this doctor blamed quote unquote the
Speaker 5: Jews for inventing transgenderism as a note extremism. Researchers have
Speaker 5: argued that transphobia is structurally similar to anti semitism. Now.
Speaker 5: A common piece of anti trans memetic propaganda deployed in
Speaker 5: the wake of mass shootings is the transshooter collage. This
Speaker 5: format spread after the Nashville school shooting in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: and this week Matt Wallace provided us with a brand
Speaker 5: new version. This post is an ugly mishmash of one, two, three, four, five, six,
Speaker 5: seven people's faces with a variety of backgrounds, a purposeless
Speaker 5: red circle in the middle of the image, and text
Speaker 5: that reads quote, almost every child killed in a mass
Speaker 5: shooting in the last few years was killed by a
Speaker 5: transgender shooter. Now, out of all those pictures in this clash,
Speaker 5: only one person in this clash has actually reported to
Speaker 5: be transgender. The Nashville shooter in the upper left. The
Speaker 5: rest of the people pictured are not trans and have
Speaker 5: never claimed to be trans. The person with long hair
Speaker 5: in the lower half the image is cult Gray, who
Speaker 5: is falsely labeled as trans by far right influencers like
Speaker 5: end Wokeness and Mike Cernovich. Cult Gray's discord posts reveal
Speaker 5: he actually held transphobic beliefs. A more classic version of
Speaker 5: the trans shooter collage format is just five pictures with
Speaker 5: texts next to each of them, reading the X shooter
Speaker 5: identified as trans, the X shooter identified as trans right,
Speaker 5: just a big list of five of these names is
Speaker 5: saying that they all identified as trans. The version I'm
Speaker 5: using here is courtesy of Limbs of TikTok admin Chaya Reichek,
Speaker 5: who posted this earlier this year. But just as before,
Speaker 5: the majority of the subjects in this meme aren't actually
Speaker 5: trans and it's just full of disinformation. The Colorado Springs
Speaker 5: shooter who targeted a queer club is not actually non
Speaker 5: binary and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to
Speaker 5: get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as
Speaker 5: the Denver shooter is not trans, has never claimed to
Speaker 5: be trans. He just has dyed hair. This individual pictured
Speaker 5: did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is
Speaker 5: not pictured. Now, Lastly, though the person pictured as the
Speaker 5: Euvaldi shooter is trans, this is not the actual Euvaldi shooter.
Speaker 5: It's a random trans girl who was one of two
Speaker 5: trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the
Speaker 5: shooter as transgender. The other two people in this image
Speaker 5: is the Nashville shooter who does appear to be trans,
Speaker 5: and the perpetrator of the Aberdeen workplace shooting. But back
Speaker 5: to Madison, Wisconsin. So after all of that transvestigating, what
Speaker 5: do we have just another columnbiner with neo Nazi ties.
Speaker 5: The right has gotten so good at deploying the trans
Speaker 5: shooter as a smoke bomb it obscures the reality of
Speaker 5: the ov availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization,
Speaker 5: and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth.
Speaker 5: Instead of focusing on all that on the victims of
Speaker 5: this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to
Speaker 5: spend a whole day debunking the late shooters pronouns. And
Speaker 5: that's the point, that's what they want us talking about.
Speaker 5: Those who delete their quote unquote trans terrorist posts after
Speaker 5: being conclusively proven wrong, will try the exact same shtick
Speaker 5: in a few months after the next mass shooting goes viral.
Speaker 5: Others won't even care that much. They'll just leave up
Speaker 5: their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel
Speaker 5: they helped to create. I'm going to close with a
Speaker 5: quote from Sartra. Never believe that fascists are completely unaware
Speaker 5: of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their
Speaker 5: remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves,
Speaker 5: for it is their ada visari who was obliged to
Speaker 5: use words responsibly since he believes in words. This post
Speaker 5: has been deleted. Welcome to It could Happen Here, a
Speaker 5: podcast about the worst coups in all of history. I'm
Speaker 5: your host, Via Wong, and we are returning to one
Speaker 5: of the worst coups I have ever seen, because a
Speaker 5: whole bunch more stuff has happened in our most recent,
Speaker 5: unbelievably dogshit coup in South Korea, the six hour coup
Speaker 5: at which President Yun declared martial law and tried to
Speaker 5: shut down the National Assembly, and then the National Assembly
Speaker 5: got together and voted to end the martial law, and
Speaker 5: then it stopped extremely.
Speaker 13: Bizarre in baffling series of events. And you know, when
Speaker 13: we last left our intrepid heroes, the people of South Korea,
Speaker 13: they had just successfully overturned a coup. No one quite
Speaker 13: knew what was gonna happen in the aftermath. We knew
Speaker 13: an impeacha vote was coming, a vote to impeach President Yun.
Speaker 13: The reason we're coming back to this, though, is that
Speaker 13: the aftermath of all of this has been absolutely baffling,
Speaker 13: and I think this has all been lost in the
Speaker 13: news cycle because about a trillion things are happening right now,
Speaker 13: but the situation in South Korea has been unbelievably weird,
Speaker 13: and so we're now going to take a look at
Speaker 13: the actual impeachments of President Yun and the unbelievably bizarre
Speaker 13: path that led to it, because oh my god, the
Speaker 13: more I talk to people, the more I realize that
Speaker 13: people don't know how unbelievably unhinged everything has been since
Speaker 13: since the military coup, because everyone has moved on. So
Speaker 13: we're going back. So immediately after the coup, there is
Speaker 13: this whole wave of military guys going like we didn't
Speaker 13: know we were taking part in the coup, We're totally innocent, like, oh,
Speaker 13: they just let us out of the trucks and suddenly
Speaker 13: we were at the National Assembly.
Speaker 4: We were like, oh, what are we doing?
Speaker 13: And there's also been this whole thing of all these
Speaker 13: special forces guys going like oh yeah, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 13: we totally could have taken the National Assembly in twenty
Speaker 13: minutes if we wanted to. We just we just like
Speaker 13: didn't want to take a National Assembly, Like we didn't
Speaker 13: we didn't really want to do it, man.
Speaker 4: Like our heart wasn't in this coup.
Speaker 13: And like, really, I have seen the videos of that shit, man,
Speaker 13: Like I didn't see you like going in there and
Speaker 13: kicking ass and taking names. I saw you getting your
Speaker 13: ass kicked by a guy just like blowing your ass
Speaker 13: up with a fire extinguisher and like not being able
Speaker 13: to break a bunch of very well constructive barricades set
Speaker 13: up by like fucking Senate aids. So that's been extremely funny.
Speaker 13: So you like vanished for the entire time this coup
Speaker 13: was going on, and like nobody knew where he was
Speaker 13: and no one had seen him and things were kind
Speaker 13: of fiasco e.
Speaker 4: He was just gone.
Speaker 13: So he finally like reappeared, right and as he sort
Speaker 13: of reappears, he tries to like do this explanation of
Speaker 13: why he did the coup. It goes about as badly
Speaker 13: as you would expect from someone who just failed the
Speaker 13: worst coup that we've ever seen. Here's from MPR quote.
Speaker 13: In his speech on Thursday June, a former chief prosecutor
Speaker 13: attempted to justify his actions and downplay its significance. He
Speaker 13: argued that the opposition's quote legislative dictatorship unquote paralyzed state
Speaker 13: affairs and disturb social order. Now this, this is going
Speaker 13: back to the thing you know he did at the time. Right,
Speaker 13: he has this thing where he keeps calling the Parliament,
Speaker 13: which is controlled by the Democratic Party, which is like
Speaker 13: the liberal opposition party. He kept calling the parliaments like
Speaker 13: opposition anti state forces, and like, my brother in Christ,
Speaker 13: what the fuck is a legislative dictatorship? I mean, like,
Speaker 13: you know, you could be really strictly anarchist about it
Speaker 13: and be like, well, yeah, all legislative dictatorships, but my dude,
Speaker 13: you are not living under a dictatorship because the parliament
Speaker 13: that your country elected hates you and refuses to pass
Speaker 13: your dogship budget because no one likes you. That is
Speaker 13: simply not what the word dictatorship means. It reminds me
Speaker 13: of this thing where like, you know, if if you
Speaker 13: go back and you read like people in the eighteen
Speaker 13: hundreds talking about or like eight like seventeen hundreds too,
Speaker 13: you'll read them talking about monarchies, right, and they'll be like, Ah,
Speaker 13: if the king can like overrule the will of the nobles,
Speaker 13: we would be living in a peer dictatorship. It's like,
Speaker 13: what the fuck are you talking about? Like Surri, you
Speaker 13: live under a monarchy, like you are already in a dictatorship.
Speaker 13: You are also like part of the authoritary and aprahas
Speaker 13: of the dictatorship, and this is just like the inverse
Speaker 13: of that where it's like, ah, the legislature won't let
Speaker 13: me do whatever the fuck I want, so this is
Speaker 13: now a dictatorship. And so like you know, that's simply
Speaker 13: not what the word dictatorship means. And you can't get
Speaker 13: away with that shit as much in a country where
Speaker 13: people like in living memory have lived through an actual
Speaker 13: military dictatorship and understand what that's like. The parliament refusing
Speaker 13: to pass your terrible budget, that's not an excuse to
Speaker 13: institute martial law and try to shut down the legislature.
Speaker 13: So this was not received well as you would expect
Speaker 13: from whatever unhinged speech that was. He did apologize for
Speaker 13: imposing martial law, which is a very funny place to
Speaker 13: end up, is like you try to do a coup
Speaker 13: and then you have to go on TV and apologize
Speaker 13: for trying to do the coup and also try to
Speaker 13: argue you didn't just try to do a coup. So
Speaker 13: this is received very poorly, as we sort of predicted, immediately,
Speaker 13: the opposition Democratic Party immediately tries to impeach you. And
Speaker 13: from the way the headlines kind of work in the West,
Speaker 13: and from the way this is being talked about, and
Speaker 13: even from the way this episode sort of opened, you'd
Speaker 13: think that this impeachment vote was how we got impeached.
Speaker 13: But no, no, the first impeachment vote is not how
Speaker 13: Un gets impeached. Everything is way weirder than that. Now
Speaker 13: Yun's party, the People's Power Party, which is henceforth going
Speaker 13: to be called the PPP because I am not going
Speaker 13: to say the words People Power Party over and over again.
Speaker 4: Good lord.
Speaker 13: The PPP get a lot of credit from people outside
Speaker 13: of South Korea for like, you know, some of their
Speaker 13: members legitimately did show up to Parliament to vote against
Speaker 13: the martial law declaration, and at the time in the
Speaker 13: last episode, I said, that's bullshit. You don't get credit
Speaker 13: for voting against martial law. And also like most of
Speaker 13: them weren't there, and I kind of got shipped for this,
Speaker 13: And I have been absolutely one hundred percent vindicated because
Speaker 13: the piece are vote, the first one rolls around, The
Speaker 13: first one happens very quickly after the first coup, right, well,
Speaker 13: the first QUP hopefully the only coup, hopefully is not
Speaker 13: a second cue, but it happens very quickly, and Okay,
Speaker 13: so the vote rolls around, and the entire PPP, the
Speaker 13: entire party except maybe like two people just walk out
Speaker 13: of the chambers, and because they walk out of the chambers,
Speaker 13: the vote fails because they don't they don't have quorum.
Speaker 13: If you don't have quorum, is like there's like a
Speaker 13: minimum number of members that has to be in attendance
Speaker 13: for whatever you're doing to be legal to stop like
Speaker 13: two people from showing up in the middle of the
Speaker 13: night and being like, aha, i am the Parliament. We've
Speaker 13: just passed this like order that makes me dictator or whatever.
Speaker 13: And again the entire PPP just walks out and they leave,
Speaker 13: and the vote fails because the PPP managed to whip
Speaker 13: basically its entire membership into trying to keep Uni in power.
Speaker 13: And here begins the what the fuck is going on
Speaker 13: part of this episode because A all reports we have
Speaker 13: suggest that Yun was planning to have the leadership, but
Speaker 13: the PPP arrested, and B he just literally tried to
Speaker 13: do a coup and they're still backing him. And see
Speaker 13: we stumble into a very very thorty question that I
Speaker 13: saw from people in Korea, like the moment after all
Speaker 13: this stuff happens, but didn't really hit the western press
Speaker 13: until later, if at all, didn't really hit like the
Speaker 13: mainstream consciousness. And this question will become a parent in
Speaker 13: a second. So here's from the Guardian. Senior PPP politicians
Speaker 13: have claimed you can continue as president while delegating his
Speaker 13: powers to the Prime Minister. An arrangement Park. That's Park
Speaker 13: Schoon Day, who's a very powerful Democratic Party politician. An
Speaker 13: arrangement Park described as quote a blatant constitutional violation.
Speaker 4: With no legal basis. Now this is true.
Speaker 13: What Park is saying is right, right, and the fact
Speaker 13: that the Guardian is saying like that their way of
Speaker 13: framing this is Oh, the opposition party person says that
Speaker 13: this is a blatant violation of constitutional law with no
Speaker 13: legal basis. That's not just a thing that he says, like,
Speaker 13: this is true, Like there is no legal mechanism for well,
Speaker 13: we don't want to impeach our presidents. But also he
Speaker 13: just tried to do a coup, so is said, we're
Speaker 13: going to take his powers away and give it to
Speaker 13: the Prime minister so he can still serve without us
Speaker 13: impeaching him. Like, that's not a thing. You can't do this,
Speaker 13: there's no mechanism for this. The Democratic Party people are
Speaker 13: just completely correct here. But because for some reason the
Speaker 13: Guardian feels it, I mean, it's the Guardian right, like,
Speaker 13: but they feel it necessary to sort of both sides again,
Speaker 13: a fucking coup.
Speaker 4: This is where we are. Here's more from the Guardian quote.
Speaker 13: The leader of the PPP, Hondung Hun, said at the
Speaker 13: weekend that Yun would not be involved in foreign and
Speaker 13: other state affairs, with control of the administration shifting to
Speaker 13: the Prime Minister. Hon Duk su Han said Yun's televised
Speaker 13: apology was effectively a promise to leave office.
Speaker 4: Now, no, it wasn't.
Speaker 8: It was not a promise to leave office.
Speaker 13: What the fuck are you talking about? Like, everyone could
Speaker 13: just go listen to his apology. He didn't say that.
Speaker 13: He did not say he was gonna leave office, right
Speaker 13: and no, hell he says it's effectively a promise to
Speaker 13: leave office.
Speaker 4: But it simply isn't.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 13: Everyone could just see this and again, like you know, okay, So,
Speaker 13: like the thing that the thing that the PvP is
Speaker 13: trying to do, right, the BVP is trying to have
Speaker 13: their prime minister like gain control of of the administration. Now,
Speaker 13: there is a mechanism to do this under the constitution.
Speaker 13: It's called impeachment. I think it happens where you get impeached,
Speaker 13: is that.
Speaker 4: You get kicked out of office.
Speaker 13: As we're gonna get to this later, but you get
Speaker 13: kicked out of office and the prime minister gets put
Speaker 13: into power and this happens until this pre court decides
Speaker 13: whether whether whether your impeachment should go through it or not. Right, So,
Speaker 13: like there's a mechanism for this, but the PvP doesn't
Speaker 13: want to like impeach union, but they also don't want
Speaker 13: him seemingly running the country because he appears to be
Speaker 13: like absolutely unhinged and just again declared martial law and
Speaker 13: tried to knock off the legislature.
Speaker 4: So you have this, you have this whole sort of
Speaker 4: steaming mess.
Speaker 13: Of a situation where the PvP is trying to like
Speaker 13: have it both ways of like not having union power
Speaker 13: but also not impeaching him. But this also begs one
Speaker 13: very important question, whula fuck was running the country between
Speaker 13: the first.
Speaker 4: Appiachment vote and the second one. No one knows, No
Speaker 4: one knows who was running this fucking country.
Speaker 13: This is a country with fifty one million people, and
Speaker 13: nobody knew who was fucking running the country. And this
Speaker 13: this barely made the news. I'm going insane, How how, why?
Speaker 13: Why is this a thing that just like completely disappeared
Speaker 13: beneath the fucking like chatter of the news waves. This
Speaker 13: just vanished entirely. And speaking of vanishing entirely, we were
Speaker 13: gonna vanish entirely to do these ads.
Speaker 4: And we are back.
Speaker 13: So, as you would imagine from a situation where again
Speaker 13: you have a country, you're fifty one million people, where
Speaker 13: no one knows who is running the country, things have
Speaker 13: been extremely chaotic. So you know, we covered in the
Speaker 13: last episode that like a bunch of ministers were resigning,
Speaker 13: right because you know, they had just taken part in
Speaker 13: a coup and they were like, well, shit, the ex
Speaker 13: defense minister, who's one of the people who's been sort
Speaker 13: of implicated as being like saying that he's to a
Speaker 13: large step behind the coup, like is true. But I mean,
Speaker 13: this is a cooperative effort between un the Defense minister
Speaker 13: and a bunch of the people in the army, and
Speaker 13: the defense minister who resigned in disgrace like got thrown
Speaker 13: in jail. So that's fucking wild, Like you just got
Speaker 13: like arrested by the police. A bunch of testimony also
Speaker 13: has come out from the National Assembly investigation, which I'm
Speaker 13: not covering much of the testimony from the National Assembly
Speaker 13: investigation because it's really unclear exactly how reputable all this
Speaker 13: stuff is because a lot of people are just saying shit, right,
Speaker 13: and some of it may be real. Some of it
Speaker 13: maybe some of that people have you know, obtained their sources,
Speaker 13: but some of it's probably not. But like to get
Speaker 13: a sense of like the kind of stuff that is
Speaker 13: coming out in this investigation, one of the big claims
Speaker 13: was from I think it's from like a TV host
Speaker 13: who claimed he got texted it by a guy in
Speaker 13: the army, but apparently he was saying that the plan
Speaker 13: by union in the army, the plan was to have
Speaker 13: the head of the PPP called and then drop a
Speaker 13: North Korean uniform nearby to like do a false flag
Speaker 13: and implicate North Korean special forces. Now this is unbelievably unhinged, right,
Speaker 13: what the fuck? And it probably isn't true, but you know,
Speaker 13: the source isn't great, But like who knows, right, Like,
Speaker 13: we don't actually know if they're playing to do this
Speaker 13: and fucked it up, or if they weren't playing to
Speaker 13: do this, or if this person is this person just lying,
Speaker 13: this person did get this text, but the person was misinformed.
Speaker 13: We don't know if this is just like misinformation that's
Speaker 13: being spread around. This is a good demonstration of what
Speaker 13: the sort of chaos of this moment has been. And
Speaker 13: you know, and there's been a lot of other stuff
Speaker 13: that I think in any other time and place probably
Speaker 13: would have been like front page news. So one of
Speaker 13: the things that happens in this whole process is that
Speaker 13: the South Korean police tried to raid the house of
Speaker 13: the president, and you know, like as as part of
Speaker 13: their investigation, there's a whole thing where Union's been ordered
Speaker 13: by like the investigatorial services to not leave the country
Speaker 13: because he's just actively under investigation for this military coup
Speaker 13: being illegal by just like the regular ass police. And
Speaker 13: so South Korean police like try to raid his house
Speaker 13: and they can't do it because the South Korean equivalent
Speaker 13: of the Secret Service stops them from doing the raid.
Speaker 13: And this in and of itself is something that like
Speaker 13: again would be a giant news headline at any other
Speaker 13: point in time, and it's just been completely lost, and
Speaker 13: it's like it's not sort of clear right now how
Speaker 13: this is all sort of going to play out, and
Speaker 13: whether the police are going to be able to do this,
Speaker 13: and you know, what's actually gonna happen to you un
Speaker 13: after he presumably leaves office. I mean, I guess the
Speaker 13: Streme Court could save him, but like, you know, there's
Speaker 13: a real chance that he and we're going to get
Speaker 13: into this morning a second, there's a real chance that
Speaker 13: he just like fucking goes to prison, right and unlike
Speaker 13: the last president who was going to move from office,
Speaker 13: like I can't imagine him getting pardoned by the next
Speaker 13: administration because that was merely an unhinged corruption scandal involving
Speaker 13: the president of South Korea being under the influence of
Speaker 13: a shaman and doing.
Speaker 4: A bunch of corruption that did a bunch of horrible shit.
Speaker 13: But this is, you know, this is like he tried
Speaker 13: to do a coup, right, So it's sort of unclear
Speaker 13: if he's going to get saved from that. It does
Speaker 13: seem very likely that he's going to face a bunch
Speaker 13: of charges for this because everyone is unbelievably pissed off.
Speaker 13: Here's from DW. On Monday, former head of Special Warfare
Speaker 13: Command Kwak Jung Gwyn and former head of the Capitol
Speaker 13: Defense Command Legion Wu were arrested on charges of deploying
Speaker 13: military personnel to the parliament. Former chief of the Defense
Speaker 13: Counterintelligence Command Yo En Hung has been accused of orchestrating
Speaker 13: the implementation of martial law, and Army Chief Park Ensiu
Speaker 13: has been s suspended from his role. Yun's former Defense
Speaker 13: Minister Kim Yung hyun, who stepped down immediately following the
Speaker 13: boarded martial law declaration, and former Interior Minister Lee Song
Speaker 13: Men also face investigations. So what we're seeing here effectively, right,
Speaker 13: is the house cleaning of the ranks of the Korean
Speaker 13: military who've been involved with this whole thing, right, and
Speaker 13: they're going through a lot of different people. Part of
Speaker 13: this is also clearing out some of like the clicks
Speaker 13: in the military who've been sort of backing Yun and
Speaker 13: who people have suspected have been a bunch of people
Speaker 13: behind a lot.
Speaker 4: Of this stuff. And this is a good and necessary process.
Speaker 13: The entire time this has been going on, everyone has
Speaker 13: been terrified of the possibility of a second coup and
Speaker 13: the only way to avoid that in the short term
Speaker 13: is to remove the senior leadership of the military and
Speaker 13: get them away from their troops. They don't have the
Speaker 13: ability to sort of plan anything, and sometimes this can
Speaker 13: make people just go for it, right Like that, that's
Speaker 13: what happens in Bolivia. It looks like where the oblivion
Speaker 13: qu was a product of, you know, people trying to
Speaker 13: do house cleaning and get rid of military guys before
Speaker 13: they did a coup, and so that this makes them
Speaker 13: go off half cocked, and like, you know, that's a
Speaker 13: bad situation for I mean, it's bad situation for everyone
Speaker 13: that says that there's a coup happening, but it's a
Speaker 13: bad situation, especially for the military, because they don't have
Speaker 13: their coup preparations in place, so it's easier to knock
Speaker 13: them off. But what's interesting about this too is that
Speaker 13: to a large extent, we're seeing other parts of the
Speaker 13: Korean state like really go after the military, right, And
Speaker 13: this I don't know, I mean, like I'm hoping this
Speaker 13: kind of like has a precedent inside of the sort
Speaker 13: of Korean like liberal democratic societal norms that like, you
Speaker 13: can't let this just unhinged military do all of this stuff.
Speaker 13: That the precedent of this sort of like military house cleaning,
Speaker 13: I think is a good one, Right, this is.
Speaker 4: Going to be a rare, a rare.
Speaker 13: Mia agrees with the people who founded the US moment
Speaker 13: because oh my god, those people suck shit like a
Speaker 13: bunch of slave owning, gedicidal bassards. But you know, one
Speaker 13: of the things that they were right about is the
Speaker 13: political danger to any democratic system of having a standing army, right,
Speaker 13: and especially when you have set a standing army that's
Speaker 13: like permanently on a semi war footing. The way the
Speaker 13: South Korea is is there's always a real political risk
Speaker 13: that they attempt to seize power and you have to
Speaker 13: fucking stop them from doing that. And ideally you just
Speaker 13: fucking acts as much of it as you possibly can, right,
Speaker 13: And I mean I think you should act. You acts
Speaker 13: the entire political system to make sure this doesn't happen.
Speaker 13: But you know, this is a this is hopefully a
Speaker 13: good first step. I also want to mention that the
Speaker 13: specific charge of insurrection is being thrown at a lot
Speaker 13: of these people and also at Un himself, and like
Speaker 13: he absolutely did it, right, Like, there's not much of
Speaker 13: a dispute that he did in fact do an insurrection
Speaker 13: under under sort of Korean law, and this technically like
Speaker 13: carries the death penalty, but I.
Speaker 4: Don't think they're gonna kill him.
Speaker 13: But you know, this is the sort of severity of
Speaker 13: this stuff under the Korean legal system. And Okay, so,
Speaker 13: like all of this fucking chaos happening, right, And eventually
Speaker 13: there's a second impeachment vote, and this time the public
Speaker 13: pressure is enough that the PPP stays in the chamber
Speaker 13: to vote no, and only about a dozen Like per MPR,
Speaker 13: only about a dozen PPP lawmakers actually vote to impeach
Speaker 13: the guy who just tried to have their fucking parliament disbanded,
Speaker 13: you know. And this is like one of the really
Speaker 13: depressing things about this, right, even after everything, right, and
Speaker 13: this is something that we can trace back to sort
Speaker 13: of the roots of the conservatism of the PPP even
Speaker 13: after all of this shit, right, Like, these people still
Speaker 13: backed him. And that's a really really grim and depressing thing.
Speaker 13: And part of the reaction to this has been from
Speaker 13: the South Korean trade Union Movement, which has been calling
Speaker 13: for just to straight up the disbanding of the PPP
Speaker 13: as a political party, right, And that's something that I
Speaker 13: think is extremely reasonable. Again, if your party's president tries
Speaker 13: to do a military coup, I think I think you
Speaker 13: shouldn't be allowed to have a party anymore.
Speaker 4: This is the liberal opinions, right, Okay.
Speaker 13: So like eventually this vote does go through, and the
Speaker 13: stage that we're at right now is that, Okay, so
Speaker 13: once you get impeached by the National Assembly, you're suspended
Speaker 13: from all your duties and the Prime Minister takes power.
Speaker 13: So it's happening right now is he doesn't have any
Speaker 13: power formally, but we're still in this sort of holding period.
Speaker 13: We're waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in and
Speaker 13: either like approve the impeachment or not. And that's kind
Speaker 13: of where things stand now after an unbelievably unhinged week
Speaker 13: at a half of just everything being extremely unboud two weeks,
Speaker 13: I guess everything being just unbelievably extremely weird. And yeah,
Speaker 13: but I think I think there is a mild hopeful note,
Speaker 13: which is that like, if if you fight back against
Speaker 13: these people, they can be defeated. It sucks, but you
Speaker 13: can eventually get them to crumble. And all I can
Speaker 13: really say for this is I hope the South Korean
Speaker 13: people prevail over the shitty military dictators, and I hope
Speaker 13: that we too are able to sort of prevail in
Speaker 13: the US against our sort of equivalents of these forces.
Speaker 13: Welcome to It could happen here a podcast that I
Speaker 13: introduced the same way almost every time.
Speaker 10: I don't know.
Speaker 13: You listen to the show, right, you're listening at like
Speaker 13: some point in the future, you probably know the things
Speaker 13: fall like apart putting back together again intro.
Speaker 4: I don't have to do it.
Speaker 13: We are doing something that we have done before, and
Speaker 13: I guess we'll continue to you, which is talking to
Speaker 13: other anarchist media projects about their work and how things
Speaker 13: are going, and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the general why, how what of it all?
Speaker 13: And today we're talking with the Collective Anarchist Writers, and
Speaker 13: very specifically we're talking to Shirley Branson who is a writer,
Speaker 13: translator and teacher currently living in so called New York,
Speaker 13: Parla Joy Bergman who lives across the border in Canada
Speaker 13: and is a mom, writer, artist and loves crows.
Speaker 4: Very important.
Speaker 13: We'll be coming that back to that in a second.
Speaker 13: And Vicky Ostiwil, who is a worker, writer and agitator
Speaker 13: based in Philadelphia. And all three of you, welcome to
Speaker 13: the show.
Speaker 9: Hi, thanks for having us, Thanks so much for having us,
Speaker 9: for having us, love our project. Also, just wanted to
Speaker 9: give a shout out to our fourth member, Danny Berlison,
Speaker 9: who's not here today because she's working paid work, who
Speaker 9: just rounds us out so beautifully and wanted to say
Speaker 9: her name.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this, and partly I'm
Speaker 13: excited to talk about it because the acronym for this
Speaker 13: is caw and there's a whole crow theme going on
Speaker 13: and we love a crow here in Portland. It is
Speaker 13: maybe our big thing.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm in Vancouver. Well I was in Vancouver just
Speaker 9: up from there, but Pacific Northwest, and so it's pro highway.
Speaker 9: You know, thousands and thousands of crows.
Speaker 14: Oh yeah, I got it. I think the crow is
Speaker 14: like what ultimately sealed the project for us, honestly, Yeah, hell.
Speaker 4: Yeah it was.
Speaker 15: It really came together around around the Corvid theme, I think.
Speaker 16: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Yeah, in the combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence,
Speaker 15: and never ending spite, I think are all sort of
Speaker 15: motivating factors for.
Speaker 1: All of us.
Speaker 9: So yeah, and that there are collective and have meetings
Speaker 9: often throughout.
Speaker 14: The day, a collective called a murder which is also
Speaker 14: pretty badass.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland. We have the
Speaker 4: Mega Murder.
Speaker 13: So every every like morning, all the crows sort of
Speaker 13: fly off into their different like little murders and they
Speaker 13: go you know, they go out and hang out in
Speaker 13: the city, and then at a round sunset every day,
Speaker 13: all of the crows fly back into the city. They
Speaker 13: have their like giant mega murdering meeting. There's thousands and
Speaker 13: thousands of them. You know, you look up and you
Speaker 13: just see them like the herds like that, the murders
Speaker 13: of crows flying past. And if you there's different spots
Speaker 13: in Portland where you can just go see all of
Speaker 13: the all all all the crows hanging out and you know,
Speaker 13: doing doing doing whatever the things crows do. When literally
Speaker 13: an entire cities where the crows gathered together every night.
Speaker 16: Oh no, it's a spokes council.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 13: It's all a spokes also because all of them are there,
Speaker 13: I feel like that's an assembly.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 9: Vancouver, it's called it's called the Crow Highway. Yeah, hell yeah,
Speaker 9: because it's so massive and goes forever and ever and
Speaker 9: ever to their roost. Brief story on crows and resistance.
Speaker 9: A really incredible story in Vancouver when a park was
Speaker 9: a colonial person created a park in the downtown which
Speaker 9: was like the placed a lot of Indigenous people in
Speaker 9: their homes and designed this park that was filled with
Speaker 9: crows as well. They also brought in animals from Europe
Speaker 9: as well to make it pretty, and the crows made
Speaker 9: it really hard for these animals. And so the City
Speaker 9: of Vancouver for fifty years from nineteen hundred to nineteen
Speaker 9: fifty gave free range to the Vancouver gun people to
Speaker 9: go into the park and shoot crows every day, Oh
Speaker 9: my god. And when I see like the amount of
Speaker 9: crows that are still alive, it's just some metaphor for
Speaker 9: indigenous resilience, you know, like it's just so powerful. So
Speaker 9: it's another reason why I'm like interested in terms of
Speaker 9: where I was like living.
Speaker 14: As I've been gathering images for our project that I've
Speaker 14: been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking people
Speaker 14: because I think that's good. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 14: the follow up to what you were saying, Carla, is
Speaker 14: the crow's revenge.
Speaker 10: Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 13: One of the things that you know, you kind of
Speaker 13: have to do here in Portland is you have to
Speaker 13: kind of like negotiate with the crows. You have to
Speaker 13: like you leave them like peace offerings and you sort
Speaker 13: of you know, when your friends come, you let you
Speaker 13: introduce them to the crows or the crows know that
Speaker 13: you're okay.
Speaker 9: It's very sweet, shiny things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we love a crow based society.
Speaker 13: And speaking of a crow based society, yeah, do you
Speaker 13: want to, I guess, give a brief sort of overview
Speaker 13: of what cause is before we get sort.
Speaker 4: Of more into it.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that.
Speaker 1: As VICKI by the way.
Speaker 15: Yeah, So CAU is sort of like I mean, it's
Speaker 15: an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is a
Speaker 15: collective of anarchist writers. It's also a corved appreciation working group,
Speaker 15: and there's a lot of different acronyms for it. And
Speaker 15: what we are doing is we are bringing all for
Speaker 15: at first, just all four of our efforts together. So
Speaker 15: a lot of us work on separate podcasts, We have
Speaker 15: pedagological tasks, We have many activist projects at center around culture.
Speaker 15: You know, I have a newsletter, Surely has a Patreon,
Speaker 15: Kyla has a newsletter, Danny has has also has like
Speaker 15: an email list. There's just all these different projects, and
Speaker 15: we realize that, like for all of our talk about
Speaker 15: mutual aid and working collectively, when it comes to writing
Speaker 15: and creativity, the market has been so fractured and so
Speaker 15: alienated and sort of so turned into like everyone has
Speaker 15: an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another, you know,
Speaker 15: even though they don't want to be like they want
Speaker 15: to be. But that's sort of ultimately what's happening is
Speaker 15: that there's limited sort of customers and there's also this
Speaker 15: other trend going on right now of this really exciting
Speaker 15: kind of worker owned journals. A lot of them local journalisms.
Speaker 15: There's some in New York and Chicago, and there's one
Speaker 15: in Ashville and all over the country as well as
Speaker 15: like on special topics, so like Aftermath, which like does
Speaker 15: I think the other video games, and there's four or
Speaker 15: four media, it does tech. There's just like all these
Speaker 15: different sort of sites doing this sort of thing, and
Speaker 15: I think in some ways all of us are sort
Speaker 15: of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort of
Speaker 15: stolen and destroyed by capital, you know, in a big way.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 15: So there's sort of two goals that we have, and
Speaker 15: I think Carla Carla speaks really eloquently to some of this,
Speaker 15: but one of which is to make writing radical culture
Speaker 15: work beautiful, joyful, fun and also critical like movement work.
Speaker 15: To make it sustainable for us and for anyone else
Speaker 15: who wants to share in this project, who we can
Speaker 15: sort of expand towards, but also to make it easier
Speaker 15: for people who are reading to have access to these
Speaker 15: things like in one place, instead of having to you know,
Speaker 15: decide who they care for and who they like in
Speaker 15: order to sort of you know, do that mac of
Speaker 15: like who can I afford to subscribe to, like I personally,
Speaker 15: I don't know if it's true for everyone else, but
Speaker 15: personally I usually have about two or three people I
Speaker 15: can afford to subscribe to a month, and I switch
Speaker 15: it out, just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know,
Speaker 15: or something like that that was very technical and financially focused.
Speaker 15: But what we're really excited to do mostly is support
Speaker 15: each other's work, because I think we all really love
Speaker 15: and admire each other's work and have for a long time,
Speaker 15: and this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of
Speaker 15: my writing just being for me, it's for Shuley and
Speaker 15: Carla and Danny No, And that just makes it feel
Speaker 15: more inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I mean connected to the financial aspect, but I
Speaker 14: think when we are initially discussing this, the experience of
Speaker 14: being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. Yeah,
Speaker 14: and if you're trying to get paid for that, you
Speaker 14: have to sell it to people, right, And so it's
Speaker 14: very hard to get paid at all for writing, and
Speaker 14: it's very hard to place your writing in venues that
Speaker 14: publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle
Speaker 14: because people do not really want to publish things that
Speaker 14: come to anarchist conclusions, Like they want you to do
Speaker 14: all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you
Speaker 14: to think about like what an action is like, so like,
Speaker 14: you know, you could write for some of the lefty
Speaker 14: so called lefty socialist whatever rags, but they don't.
Speaker 16: Yeah, they won't feature anarchists.
Speaker 14: They basically even just act as if anarchism doesn't exist,
Speaker 14: never exists, you know, never existed. They erase the whole
Speaker 14: history of it. The only serious kind of political force
Speaker 14: is some kind of democratic socialism. So to us, we
Speaker 14: wanted to create a place where we can do the
Speaker 14: writing we want to do without having to make compromises
Speaker 14: and what we want to.
Speaker 16: Say just to get published.
Speaker 14: Because that, yeah, just that game of like of shopping
Speaker 14: your stuff around is it's demeaning. It's totally time consuming.
Speaker 14: It distracts you from actually doing the work. So we
Speaker 14: were like less banned together instead of each of us
Speaker 14: going off wasting our time trying to write.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and I think one of the other issues with
Speaker 13: this too also, like the pay is just so bad,
Speaker 13: Like even though almost especially the leftist groups like page
Speaker 13: is so rancid, and all of the combinations of those
Speaker 13: things make it really really hard to just sort of
Speaker 13: be an independent writer. And also, okay, jumping back a
Speaker 13: second to the racing anicism exists. This is why the
Speaker 13: one that makes me always lose my mind is Like
Speaker 13: I'm specifically going to name Jocobin here because I don't
Speaker 13: like them, but like, one of the things that jacumum
Speaker 13: will do is though covering a strike that is organized
Speaker 13: by the IWW it is an IWW union, that they
Speaker 13: will have pictures of the strike where there are a
Speaker 13: bunch of people holding IWW banners, and they will never
Speaker 13: mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike.
Speaker 13: So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy
Speaker 13: of silence I guess about our politics and the stuff that.
Speaker 4: We do in the world.
Speaker 16: It's so glaring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit.
Speaker 14: And then the podcasts associated with the dig like they
Speaker 14: will specifically will be talking about history where anarchists have
Speaker 14: been very involved.
Speaker 16: And they just will not mention them.
Speaker 14: I'm like, and they sometimes there's really good history and
Speaker 14: analysis on that podcast, but like, this is an omission
Speaker 14: that they clearly are choosing.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and I think, you know, self organization is effectively
Speaker 13: the only way out of this, because why is you
Speaker 13: just sort of I don't know how I have to
Speaker 13: deal with all the sort of media gatekeepers like sitting
Speaker 13: there in front of you with a stick going no
Speaker 13: anarchism of balk Yeah, and.
Speaker 15: Even the projects that have sustained, that have survived, which
Speaker 15: are all really awesome, you know, like and exciting, like
Speaker 15: very few of them have offered real sustainability, like on
Speaker 15: a professional level, and like I've been publishing like quote
Speaker 15: unquote professionally for fifteen years, and like I'm the like
Speaker 15: newest writer on the scene, like from our crew basically,
Speaker 15: like we're incredibly experienced, and all of us have books out,
Speaker 15: all of us have edited volumes, all of us have
Speaker 15: like podcasts, and like are people who I like, really respect,
Speaker 15: whose names I think are big and important in the
Speaker 15: world of theory and activism and like in the Anglophone
Speaker 15: world especially, and none of us can sustain ourselves as
Speaker 15: writers as such because of the way that just you know,
Speaker 15: both politically but also just like the way the market
Speaker 15: has come down and it just feels like something we
Speaker 15: could apply our politics to solving as a workplace issue
Speaker 15: rather than just sort of as like a you know,
Speaker 15: are you committed enough to sacrifice all your time issue?
Speaker 15: And so hopefully like that will also function to make
Speaker 15: more work available to produce and to platform and to
Speaker 15: yeah to to sort of work as an example simultaneously.
Speaker 13: Unfortunately, speak of speaking of sustaining work as a platform. Unfortunately,
Speaker 13: the way we are sustained here is with these ads.
Speaker 4: So hold on and we are back, and this, I
Speaker 4: guess brings us to the kind of work that's happening here.
Speaker 4: And I was very.
Speaker 13: Excited because one of the things y'all have done is
Speaker 13: an interview with Rouls of Becky, who is the author
Speaker 13: of like one of my favorite quotes of all time.
Speaker 13: I think I've said on this show like multiple times
Speaker 13: that I weirdly ran into in a sort of completely
Speaker 13: unrelated book called Rhythms of the Patchacouti, which is about
Speaker 13: the sort of the water and gas wars in Bolivia.
Speaker 13: I talked about this book on the show like all
Speaker 13: the time. This quote goes roughly like struggle illuminates the
Speaker 13: divisions of a society like lightning illuminates the sky.
Speaker 4: And I love it.
Speaker 13: It's like it's like it's the best explanation of what
Speaker 13: happened during twenty twenty that I've ever seen, And this
Speaker 13: is sort of what's happening like right now too, is
Speaker 13: like you have these sort of flashpoint moments where where
Speaker 13: you know, suddenly, like all of how society works very
Speaker 13: briefly becomes visible and you have this sort of moment
Speaker 13: when you're eludinated by it to act. And so I'm
Speaker 13: really excited that you are talking to him, And yeah,
Speaker 13: because you talked to Pet a bit more about what's
Speaker 13: been going on and what's to come.
Speaker 9: I'm sure thanks. That was a highlight definitely this shear
Speaker 9: was talking to Raoul obviously, you know a podcastco. We
Speaker 9: talked for quite a bit longer than what was on
Speaker 9: the show, and I think like reading his newest book
Speaker 9: that was translated and then doing that show with him,
Speaker 9: it was completely connected to me, like reaching out to
Speaker 9: Schuley about doing Call, because there is a way that
Speaker 9: that he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries
Speaker 9: that those Bapotistas are working on, like this idea of
Speaker 9: really truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality
Speaker 9: or autonomy that we don't actually enact in our day
Speaker 9: to day lives. And so I really started to reflect
Speaker 9: on my own life that way. And not so much
Speaker 9: Vicky at this point yet, but like Huli and Danny,
Speaker 9: both of them, like we just were blurbing each other's
Speaker 9: books and like supporting each other to connecting to publishers
Speaker 9: or trying to connect each other to publishers, and just
Speaker 9: like trying to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath
Speaker 9: even when we're all really committed to not being competitive,
Speaker 9: but there's like it is, like there's a you know.
Speaker 9: So all is to say that for me, like collaboration
Speaker 9: is at the heart of what we're doing here in
Speaker 9: a deep, deep way. And for me, collaboration just means
Speaker 9: that when something is created that wouldn't be created otherwise
Speaker 9: without this collaboration. So I'm just really excited to see
Speaker 9: what sparks and comes up individually, but also like with
Speaker 9: each other and even like through collaborations like this show
Speaker 9: with Raoul and like how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah,
Speaker 9: so like for myself, I'm going to definitely focus on
Speaker 9: collaboration in a deep way. I don't think I'll write
Speaker 9: very much solo stuff for the for call, I think
Speaker 9: it will always be in conversation with others and just
Speaker 9: trying to double down on on doing it together instead
Speaker 9: of individual pursuits.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And that's something I think is useful for everyone
Speaker 13: listening to this, is that, like it's a lot easier
Speaker 13: to develop better ideas, and you know, it makes your
Speaker 13: writing more clear. It makes the way that you, you know,
Speaker 13: just the way you act in the world a lot
Speaker 13: more clear when you're working with other people, and it's
Speaker 13: you know, it's it's it's the process by which the
Speaker 13: best stuff gets created.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I mean, I think that's really like true. And
Speaker 15: I think like I have for a long time now
Speaker 15: sort of accepted that writing is never going to support
Speaker 15: or sustain me. And all I needed was a push
Speaker 15: from a few other people to be like, wait, what
Speaker 15: if we like actually tried to do it collectively, to
Speaker 15: be like, oh, yeah, like I could actually try that,
Speaker 15: Like I don't have to just accept that, Like I'll
Speaker 15: always have like a full time job plus whatever writing,
Speaker 15: like in whatever hours I can steal, you know, and
Speaker 15: like you know, with great difficulty put out some writing
Speaker 15: sometimes and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting
Speaker 15: out enough to like sustain myself, like that whole process.
Speaker 15: I think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle,
Speaker 15: you know, of having gigs and work and lots of
Speaker 15: other important things to do and and you know, sort
Speaker 15: of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like,
Speaker 15: what's so inspiring about? You know, because Carlin and as
Speaker 15: Carlo was just mentioning, they sort of brought I'm the
Speaker 15: last one on the on the crew, and I was
Speaker 15: sort of the closer, you know or whatever. But I think, like,
Speaker 15: I don't know what that means genuinely, but but I
Speaker 15: was brought in. And I think just having them propose
Speaker 15: it already just as a project that we've been thinking
Speaker 15: of has like changed the way I've been thinking about
Speaker 15: what is possible with the writing I'm already doing. And
Speaker 15: so I think, like, just to underline that point and
Speaker 15: go on and on, collaborations really really like important and
Speaker 15: supporting one another.
Speaker 1: So is so powerful.
Speaker 14: Yeah, When carl and I initially had like the seed
Speaker 14: come versation of this, like Carlo said something about collectivizing
Speaker 14: as writers, like we talk about it with all these
Speaker 14: other other workplaces and industries and whatever, and it was
Speaker 14: like like when when she said that, I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 14: like that makes so much sense. Like we're off here
Speaker 14: doing our own thing, and as Vicky said, you do
Speaker 14: it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable.
Speaker 16: You steal your time to.
Speaker 14: Do it, right, Even the supposed jobs that are there
Speaker 14: to enable you to write actually make you do all
Speaker 14: this other work. So like the time for writing is
Speaker 14: always like endlessly deferred. And you know, we have that
Speaker 14: image also like of the patron or something, or like
Speaker 14: Virginia Woolf says, you need money enough to have a
Speaker 14: room of one's own. But if we put ourselves together
Speaker 14: in this way, then we are trying to, yeah, I
Speaker 14: don't know, create more time for ourselves to write. And then,
Speaker 14: like going back to something Vicky said earlier about like
Speaker 14: reinventing the newspaper, there was a time in anarchism where
Speaker 14: I think we talked about this amongst ourselves, like where
Speaker 14: like every block had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper. Right,
Speaker 14: It wasn't like, yeah, you had one newspaper telling all
Speaker 14: the anarchists, but to think it was like it was
Speaker 14: hyper local in a way, and there was so many voices,
Speaker 14: and so I think that's another thing that we want
Speaker 14: to do is like help for that proliferation, because in
Speaker 14: the sort of spirit of collaboration, like the reason to
Speaker 14: write as an anarchist for me is to have conversations
Speaker 14: to produce the possibility for people to like receive it
Speaker 14: and then contact me into and I get into conversations
Speaker 14: with people and learn things from them.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I think it's an angle there too, where like I
Speaker 13: think we're kind of okay. So I was a tiny
Speaker 13: baby when all this was happening, so I'm gonna have
Speaker 13: to rely on y'all for this. But like, you know,
Speaker 13: one of the things I get from sort of reading
Speaker 13: the record about like the older anarchist movie. I mean
Speaker 13: when I say older, I mean like like anti anti
Speaker 13: globalization era stuff was like there seems like there was
Speaker 13: a lot more of a kind of like anarchist media sphere.
Speaker 9: Are you talking about like the late nineties, Yeah, and like.
Speaker 4: Like to the two thousands to some extent like a
Speaker 4: Battle Seattle.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I mean that was like the you know,
Speaker 9: the birth of anarchy again, right, Yeah, I was definitely
Speaker 9: around I'm in my late fifties, but the same struggle
Speaker 9: was there like that, yeah, that we're swimming in liberalism
Speaker 9: and like that socialist worker like capturing of the movement
Speaker 9: was just as powerful then, and it was you saw
Speaker 9: it at all the rallies and stuff, and you know,
Speaker 9: immediately anarchism was marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and
Speaker 9: not practical for the revolution, and this is why it
Speaker 9: splintered off and all these kind of sectarian movements in
Speaker 9: the That's my take anyway, I think.
Speaker 4: That no, it makes sense, it makes sense.
Speaker 9: I mean I've hashed this out with so many older anarchists.
Speaker 9: I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies, Like we
Speaker 9: talked about this a lot phenomena with Scott Crow, and
Speaker 9: you could just see the direct line of where it
Speaker 9: went into sectarianism from this sort of rebirth. Sorry I
Speaker 9: went off on a different thing instead of like journals
Speaker 9: and media.
Speaker 13: But yeah, no, no, well this is good too, because
Speaker 13: like I think that's the other thing I've been realizing
Speaker 13: is like people don't I mean in my generation too,
Speaker 13: but like people younger than me don't really know the.
Speaker 4: History of this stuff.
Speaker 13: Like all the time I have conversations with people where
Speaker 13: I started talking about like the Wahaka Uprising, and they
Speaker 13: have no idea what I'm talking about, and I'm like,
Speaker 13: oh no, we need to like we need to like
Speaker 13: resuscitate the history of like the two thousands, because stuff
Speaker 13: happened there.
Speaker 15: So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I
Speaker 15: was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at
Speaker 15: the moment. And some of that was actually because a
Speaker 15: lot of what was going on in the alter globalization
Speaker 15: movement in that period was happening through culture. I think
Speaker 15: most famously, like touring punk bands would also bring zine
Speaker 15: libraries with them, so they would have someone destroying zines
Speaker 15: and playing the show. And like, I mean I got
Speaker 15: radicalized through punk. I know a lot of people who
Speaker 15: did that. Was you know when I finally did, it
Speaker 15: was after that movement had largely crusted. But I think
Speaker 15: there was a lot of focus on culture and also
Speaker 15: a critique of clture was also pretty central to how
Speaker 15: people were thinking and moving. And I think the explosion
Speaker 15: of social media and like posting and like the sort
Speaker 15: of quote unquote democratization and leveling of communication capabilities, which
Speaker 15: in some ways was more real in the early twenty
Speaker 15: tens than it is certainly than it is now. It
Speaker 15: wasn't totally like a made up narrative, but there was
Speaker 15: also it was also over relied on. I think people
Speaker 15: sort of reached for a kind of like, well, we
Speaker 15: anyone who can use these tools to communicate, like that's valuable.
Speaker 15: So critiquing sort of media in general, or critiquing sort
Speaker 15: of capitalist media is sort of beside the point because
Speaker 15: we can go around it. We can sort of go
Speaker 15: we can you know, go on Twitter and subvert it,
Speaker 15: and we can like do all these you know, go
Speaker 15: sideways around it. So I was, you know, a participant
Speaker 15: in to Occupy Wall Street twenty eleven, which people also
Speaker 15: don't know anything about because that's just being older. But
Speaker 15: Occupy Wall Street was started by a magazine called Adbusters,
Speaker 15: which came out of the WTO movement and sort of
Speaker 15: managed to stick around. And by two thousand eleven, when
Speaker 15: they did that, we thought it was like a joke.
Speaker 15: It was like, oh, these culture jammers who like make
Speaker 15: fun of advertisements, like they started the movement. Like that's ridiculous, right,
Speaker 15: Like that's silly, and like this is not to defend Adbusters,
Speaker 15: I think.
Speaker 4: Whatever, Yeah, there's some issues with them. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: they also did think.
Speaker 15: I don't know, yeah, But also I think that reaction
Speaker 15: of like culture jamming is sort of stupid or like,
Speaker 15: you know, like talking about who wants to talk about culture?
Speaker 15: At this point, I think that that made sense in
Speaker 15: the context in which we were moving and organizing. But
Speaker 15: like now, once again, it is clear that by abandoning
Speaker 15: the cultural sphere in many ways, we have in fact
Speaker 15: lost a tremendous amount of ground. So I think it's
Speaker 15: actually really important to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory,
Speaker 15: that aren't just news, but that are like really talking
Speaker 15: about art and beauty and like excitement and joy and
Speaker 15: fiction and all these things that we find really important
Speaker 15: because you know, I think a lot of people sort
Speaker 15: of think, well, it's a crisis moment, you know, the
Speaker 15: world's ending, why would you do that? But like the
Speaker 15: world has been ending since fourteen ninety two, Like the
Speaker 15: world worth defending has been ending since then, and it
Speaker 15: hasn't ended yet. And one of the ways it hasn't
Speaker 15: ended is by indigenous and black and other marginalized cultures
Speaker 15: and stories and narratives and works of art has been
Speaker 15: an important mode of history and resistance just as much
Speaker 15: as organizing and struggle, And yeah, I think we can
Speaker 15: move some struggle into that terrain right now. And I
Speaker 15: think there's a lot of craving for it now because
Speaker 15: I think also for a while things felt really oversaturated.
Speaker 15: But the last five years, the Internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No,
Speaker 15: everything feels like streaming is a mess. Like everything's a mess.
Speaker 15: There's no access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates
Speaker 15: what they're doing. They know it's exploiting the artists. They know,
Speaker 15: you know, Spotify is giving people pennies, and that you know,
Speaker 15: Hbo and all those you know, all the all the
Speaker 15: streaming services you know, support Amazon, and they're they're just miserable, right,
Speaker 15: And I think there's there's a real opening and a
Speaker 15: real desire for something else at this moment, at the
Speaker 15: same time that things are indeed quite on fire, literally ecocidally,
Speaker 15: but also also sort of politically, yeah.
Speaker 13: Speaking, everything being on fire, we need to take an
Speaker 13: ad break and then we will come back. And I
Speaker 13: think the deliberate political intervention here we are back from
Speaker 13: capital healthscape to mildly less capital healthscape.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 4: Actually you're gonna.
Speaker 14: Say, yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing,
Speaker 14: because when you know, when after October seventh, when people
Speaker 14: are getting together to try to figure out how in
Speaker 14: the United States to do some kind of work and
Speaker 14: action and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian
Speaker 14: Liberation movement, like people were just sort of like, what
Speaker 14: the hell can we even do? And one of the
Speaker 14: things that I would say to people is like just
Speaker 14: putting up stickers and writing about Gaza on the walls,
Speaker 14: like in graffiti has a huge impact in it. It's
Speaker 14: overlooked often, I think, as like something that's effective, but
Speaker 14: we can see that there has been a giant cultural
Speaker 14: shift after October seventh in terms of people's awareness of
Speaker 14: the Israeli Gino side against the Palestinians and then support
Speaker 14: for the Palestinians. I think that it has to do really,
Speaker 14: you know, post October seventh, with the fact that this
Speaker 14: was like kind of plastered everywhere, and so it's easy
Speaker 14: to kind of think that that isn't action. But to me,
Speaker 14: in a way, doing something like that is more effective
Speaker 14: than the kind of marching in circles that we can
Speaker 14: do that we call protest, and you know, like going
Speaker 14: back to punk, I think also punk has gets a
Speaker 14: bad rap sometimes because you know, in that line of
Speaker 14: like the kind of bookschin lifestyleism. But I don't think
Speaker 14: we should downplay like punk created its own culture of
Speaker 14: people doing everything themselves to make it happen. It's where
Speaker 14: I got radicalized too. And they were like it was anarchists, right,
Speaker 14: It was like explicitly anarchist, and you were living in
Speaker 14: an anarchist way and like creating things in an anarchist.
Speaker 16: Way, and it was this whole other world.
Speaker 14: So like, if we put our anarchist energy into culture,
Speaker 14: it's part of making a world that we want to
Speaker 14: live in, you know, over and against this world, this
Speaker 14: hell world that we're also trying to destroy at the
Speaker 14: same time. So I think we shouldn't kind of just
Speaker 14: like dismiss this as as less important than the other
Speaker 14: kinds of actions that we can take.
Speaker 13: You're here, yeah, And that brings me to something I
Speaker 13: wanted to sort of ask about, like more deliberately, which
Speaker 13: is like, what's the kind of specific political intervention that
Speaker 13: you're trying to make into this moment with this project
Speaker 13: and both stor I guess a bit more generally too
Speaker 13: big question.
Speaker 9: I mean, my work has always been about intervening around
Speaker 9: any kind of dominant narratives that things are just now bad,
Speaker 9: or that people don't know what anything, or pedagogically they're lacking.
Speaker 9: Like I've always tried to intervene around this idea that
Speaker 9: we've always been otherwise, and we always are, and there's
Speaker 9: always cracks everywhere and eruptions of batical ways of being,
Speaker 9: knowing and doing, and so it's like a deepening of that.
Speaker 9: And I think probably on a systemic thinking systemically is
Speaker 9: really about disrupting individualism or liberalism or empire, whatever you
Speaker 9: want of colonialism to really like live it in the everyday.
Speaker 9: So that's partly that. And then on just a super
Speaker 9: practical level, like you know, all of us don't have wealth,
Speaker 9: don't have generational wealth, are working all the time to
Speaker 9: try to meet and meet and some of us are
Speaker 9: have housing insecurity and other real basic needs are insecure
Speaker 9: and health stuff and so like actually showing up for
Speaker 9: each of us is at the core of it. For me,
Speaker 9: like I it feels so good in my body to
Speaker 9: know that I'm not just showing up to think about
Speaker 9: what to do for cow. For me, it's like in
Speaker 9: the act of collectivism for each other, and so I'm
Speaker 9: just open to what sparks and emerges with our work.
Speaker 9: I don't have an agenda except for to disrupt and
Speaker 9: intervene belief systems that are ideologically driven by empire. And
Speaker 9: I also came of age in the early eighties in
Speaker 9: the punk scene and had a venue space and to me,
Speaker 9: punk is and I would say hip hop is well
Speaker 9: underground hip hop stuff is like always The way to
Speaker 9: disrupt being captured by empire or from liberalism is to
Speaker 9: keep that punk ethos of doing it together and keeping
Speaker 9: it low to the ground.
Speaker 15: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I just like to build on that, Carl,
Speaker 15: because I think that was really beautiful. Second, everything that
Speaker 15: you said is it like many of us have a perspective.
Speaker 15: You know that huge structural change is going to need
Speaker 15: to come, and that often that will come through these
Speaker 15: big social movements, that these explosions of energy that you know,
Speaker 15: these lightning strikes, right, But you can't force those, you
Speaker 15: can't make those happen. Yeah, and in the meantime you can.
Speaker 15: I think I've spent a lot of my in the
Speaker 15: meantimes in trying to sort of organ stuff that sort
Speaker 15: of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just
Speaker 15: feels often feels like wheel spinning, you know, like I'm building,
Speaker 15: I'm trying to build mass movement organizing like you know,
Speaker 15: like whatever that means. And in the twenty tens, like
Speaker 15: one of the things that happens from like twenty eleven,
Speaker 15: are you by two thousand nine, but definitely twenty eleven
Speaker 15: to twenty twenty was that wherever you were, it was
Speaker 15: never more than probably eighteen months before there was like
Speaker 15: something else going off in the streets. And so although
Speaker 15: those could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult,
Speaker 15: you still had a lot of periods where you know,
Speaker 15: you could just sort of be waiting and it would
Speaker 15: just sort of happened.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 15: That was certainly what I was doing in that decade
Speaker 15: in a way that I don't think I appreciated until
Speaker 15: it was over, because the last four years has been
Speaker 15: very different. The rhythm has been very different since the
Speaker 15: pandemic started. And I can't just say Panini on this podcast, Okay,
Speaker 15: everyone does it right, yeah, Sin since the dynamics started,
Speaker 15: you know, those rhythms have been disrupted, and I think
Speaker 15: the Biden counter revolution against Way twenty, which has also
Speaker 15: really disrupted those things in that space. It has felt
Speaker 15: very clear to me personally. And I'm older, you know whatever.
Speaker 15: I'm like, you know, a movement elder at this point,
Speaker 15: just because our movements are so you focused now, because
Speaker 15: I'm actually old. Like the decade before twenty eleven, from
Speaker 15: like two thousand and one, you know, from from nine
Speaker 15: to eleven until it sort of occupies sort of how
Speaker 15: I periodize it a bit. There wasn't a ton of
Speaker 15: street movement. You had the Iraq War stuff that was really,
Speaker 15: really big, and there were important exceptions to that in
Speaker 15: the US. I'm doing a potted history here. Obviously there's
Speaker 15: exceptions to this, but you definitely had all this time,
Speaker 15: and the stuff that was sustained and remembered were largely
Speaker 15: like sort of cultural projects, and so like I think
Speaker 15: like now as we're moving into this era here in
Speaker 15: North America on Turtle Island of extreme repressive danger, right, like,
Speaker 15: we shouldn't like joke about it or downplay it. Like
Speaker 15: we were facing a lot of extreme repression and fascists
Speaker 15: back in the streets in a big way. It doesn't
Speaker 15: feel like big political organizing of the kind that happened
Speaker 15: during the first Trump administration where people did a lot
Speaker 15: of marching in circles, but there were targets for the pressure,
Speaker 15: you know, like they don't feel as relevant now, but
Speaker 15: now I'm really off, way off. But no, but no,
Speaker 15: I think so, I think like I think like we're
Speaker 15: in this moment where the fascists both are quite empowered
Speaker 15: and very unfocused. They're confused, they don't really have us
Speaker 15: in their sights, like they think Liz Cheney is just
Speaker 15: as much a revolutionary as Assadashikur or whatever, right, and
Speaker 15: like that leaves us some space to move and to
Speaker 15: build things that can maintain the spirit of resistance, that
Speaker 15: can reproduce a culture of resistance that can also organize.
Speaker 15: And another thing that has really been important for me
Speaker 15: recently with Kaw is that I've been doing an organizing
Speaker 15: project that I won't talk about the details of, but
Speaker 15: that the skills have largely come from punk music that
Speaker 15: I did in the twenties twenty is being in a
Speaker 15: touring punk band, and those skills have made this organizing
Speaker 15: really easy. And that's been a huge thing for me
Speaker 15: because I'm working with other people who are younger who
Speaker 15: don't have that experientially.
Speaker 2: Oh, how do you do this.
Speaker 15: I'm like, oh no, no, it's so easy. You just
Speaker 15: like do this. You know, here's these skills I learned
Speaker 15: just from doing music, And like, I don't think that's
Speaker 15: just like accidental, as Shuley was saying, like the DIY
Speaker 15: nature of some of that work, the culture work. You know,
Speaker 15: maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The bands I was in
Speaker 15: certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever, but they gave
Speaker 15: me all of these powerful skills and ideas and concepts
Speaker 15: for doing really important work. And I think that that's
Speaker 15: also a reason to pursue DIY culture in a way
Speaker 15: that's genuinely sustainable and world building.
Speaker 14: I think like if I can build off this too,
Speaker 14: and I'm going to try to do some tying together
Speaker 14: of things. But like one of the ways that I
Speaker 14: think about my contribution is to think about like let's
Speaker 14: not like don't look there, let's look over here. And
Speaker 14: that can mean of multiple things, which is often when
Speaker 14: people think politically, they're looking at these big moments or
Speaker 14: big actions or like top down solutions, which means that
Speaker 14: we take our attention away from these other places where
Speaker 14: we're doing all this stuff like carloisting, like we're already
Speaker 14: doing a lot of important kind of like life making work.
Speaker 14: And then also there's moments in in our movements where
Speaker 14: we have to be like you all look over here
Speaker 14: while we do stuff over right, Like you don't want
Speaker 14: to be seen all the time, so we have to
Speaker 14: be able to direct our attention to the things that
Speaker 14: we do and then also keep some of that stuff
Speaker 14: under wraps, and that means it's hard sometimes to see
Speaker 14: and because it's so decentralized, and anarchism really functions through decentralization,
Speaker 14: like we're not always aware of how much power we
Speaker 14: actually have and what's going on at.
Speaker 16: Any one moment.
Speaker 14: And going back to the kind of moments, even tracing
Speaker 14: back to the Battle of Seattle, and I think it's
Speaker 14: like ever more present today in all of the kinds
Speaker 14: of organizing for street actions that are being done, that
Speaker 14: a lot of the groundwork for any of these moments
Speaker 14: is done by anarchists, and then it's not either claimed
Speaker 14: by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists, Like we make
Speaker 14: everything sort of run, and anarchism makes everything run, and
Speaker 14: then it just gets ignored because it's not about taking credit,
Speaker 14: it's not about kind of imposing itself. And so I
Speaker 14: think like that kind of in between of seeing what
Speaker 14: we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then keeping under
Speaker 14: wrap so that we can keep chugging along, and then
Speaker 14: just also being aware of when our work is being
Speaker 14: stolen and then repurposed for something that goes against what
Speaker 14: we want.
Speaker 16: I think these are all ways for us to prepare for.
Speaker 14: Those moments of like explosion or eruption where anarchy really
Speaker 14: manifests and then we can kind of taste freedom for
Speaker 14: a moment, love it.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I think though the way I've always thought about it
Speaker 13: was just kind of like, is this like flame tending
Speaker 13: process where in these sort of low cycles, your job
Speaker 13: is to keep the flame alive and eventually you know
Speaker 13: that you're going to see it, Like you know you're
Speaker 13: going to see the explosion again, right, You're going to
Speaker 13: see the flame. But like that, that doesn't happen unless
Speaker 13: the flame is still there and unless people have been
Speaker 13: tending it and people have been trying to make it grow.
Speaker 13: And you can't necessarily just like add fuel to it
Speaker 13: and be like, ah, it's gonna.
Speaker 4: Grow now, right it?
Speaker 13: You know, you don't you don't really have control of
Speaker 13: how it sort of moves and grows, it expands, but
Speaker 13: you have control over your ability to like make sure
Speaker 13: that it keeps.
Speaker 9: Going absolutely all about Bambers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think also, like I think about the
Speaker 4: punk metaphor a lot.
Speaker 13: Like one of the ways that I've been thinking a
Speaker 13: lot about like what we're doing here and it could
Speaker 13: happen here is we kind of took the like we
Speaker 13: took the ridge against the machine gambit, which is to say,
Speaker 13: we were like we're like, Okay, we're going to go
Speaker 13: to try to go somewhat mainstream in order to I
Speaker 13: mean bridge but obviously like well, way bigger than we did,
Speaker 13: but like we're going to go try to some We're
Speaker 13: going to go like somewhat mainstream so we can like
Speaker 13: spread this thing to a larger group of people. That's
Speaker 13: also very very dangerous in the sense that like it's
Speaker 13: very easy to sort of just lose yourself in the
Speaker 13: kind of mire of like the field you've walked into.
Speaker 4: But on the other hand, the.
Speaker 13: Upside about it is that we're not the only people
Speaker 13: doing this, right, and there's all of you out there
Speaker 13: who are who are doing this, Like everyone on this
Speaker 13: call is doing this, like is doing the like like
Speaker 13: the DIY work that is going to be the core
Speaker 13: of what this whole thing becomes. And the more the
Speaker 13: more of these media projects we get and the more
Speaker 13: that people are able to sustain themselves doing this, the
Speaker 13: more that we're sort of able to break, like I
Speaker 13: don't know, just like the model maniacal substack control of
Speaker 13: like taking your money and giving it the transphobes kind
Speaker 13: of thing.
Speaker 4: The better shape we're going to be in the years
Speaker 4: to come exactly.
Speaker 15: And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad
Speaker 15: at doing is accepting that we do require money and
Speaker 15: asking for it. So I'm going to do that for
Speaker 15: the squad.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 15: We are currently fundraising because it's actually really hard to
Speaker 15: make something sustainable for four people. Yeah, man, because we
Speaker 15: have a fundraiser going on. If you like what we're
Speaker 15: talking about here, you can donate to our Indiegogo literally
Speaker 15: anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're going
Speaker 15: to have a pay what you want subscription model, so
Speaker 15: everything will be subscribed. But we really want to have
Speaker 15: three months worth of living wage for all of us
Speaker 15: to do two days a week on it, right, So
Speaker 15: we're not even you know, we're not talking full salaries.
Speaker 15: That's forty five thousand dollars because four people for three months,
Speaker 15: it's not even a tremendous amount of money because we're
Speaker 15: including solidarity funds in that and like paying any writers
Speaker 15: who contribute, like lots of other stuff. So yeah, if
Speaker 15: you have a few bucks and you know, maybe you're
Speaker 15: thinking about, you know, getting off of one of those
Speaker 15: substacks or something, and you want to throw our way,
Speaker 15: we would be absolutely honored. I'm very excited to accept
Speaker 15: anything in this launch. And if you don't have that money,
Speaker 15: which is i know true for a lot of us,
Speaker 15: which is why we feel bad asking for the money
Speaker 15: because there are so many people who need it right now.
Speaker 15: You can subscribe online. You can find us on social
Speaker 15: media and keep in touch until we do launch, and
Speaker 15: then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also
Speaker 15: a really great way to support us. But if you
Speaker 15: have a few bucks you want to throw, if you
Speaker 15: want to give someone a present of a year's membership,
Speaker 15: you can get that for one hundred dollars for the holidays,
Speaker 15: you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with our work,
Speaker 15: we'd really really appreciate it.
Speaker 13: And yeah, thanks Vicky, yeah, and I don't know, I'm
Speaker 13: excited for this. There's already been a bunch of great
Speaker 13: stuff that's up on the site. We will have links
Speaker 13: to everything in the description. Yeah, thank you, thank you
Speaker 13: three for coming on the show. And I'm really excited
Speaker 13: about this.
Speaker 9: Well, thanks for having us.
Speaker 16: Yeah, thanks for the chance to share it.
Speaker 14: And like I always say, like if anyone is interested
Speaker 14: and wants to get in touch, I'm happy to hear
Speaker 14: from you.
Speaker 9: And yeah, yeah, same, and reach out to us too.
Speaker 9: A few ideas on what cost stands for. We love
Speaker 9: hearing from people. My favorite is kN the anarchist right,
Speaker 9: that's what it stands for. I don't know who came
Speaker 9: up with that. I think that might have been Schuerlier, Victy,
Speaker 9: but it's a good one.
Speaker 16: TVD, TBD.
Speaker 9: So yeah, send in what you think. And we also
Speaker 9: are going to have an advice column that's going to
Speaker 9: be launched soon. Yeah, so send us questions or individually
Speaker 9: or whatever, but you know, disrupt individualism, reach out to us.
Speaker 15: Yeah, thanks so much. And yeah, as a long time listener,
Speaker 15: first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here.
Speaker 1: So thank you Mia so much.
Speaker 4: That's not true, hold time all right, sorry, I.
Speaker 15: Just go on so many podcasts.
Speaker 9: Sorry.
Speaker 15: Yeah, well anyway, it's really exciting to be here and
Speaker 15: talking to everyone, and we have to meet y'all in
Speaker 15: the future. And kay, we'll have a well, we will
Speaker 15: have a discord community. We'll be having like writing class.
Speaker 15: We're gonna have a lot of like really exciting stuff.
Speaker 15: So even if you can't throw in money right now,
Speaker 15: please sign up to our website, cosh anythings dot com.
Speaker 15: Stay in touch and find out all the really cool
Speaker 15: stuff we're doing.
Speaker 14: And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we're
Speaker 14: already doing is now going to have a home and call.
Speaker 14: So like my essays and podcasts, Vicki's reviews and essays,
Speaker 14: and Carla's many projects which include podcasts and writing and
Speaker 14: these interviews, Danny's writing and classes.
Speaker 16: Yeah, this is all moving there.
Speaker 9: Plus new things doing it together.
Speaker 13: Yeah, in that spirit, you two, dear listener, can can
Speaker 13: do things together and go disrupt this world. So go
Speaker 13: do that now instead of listening to whatever else it
Speaker 13: tappling on the show. This is ending is not going well,
Speaker 13: but go go to srub fas get it.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday. With more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 9: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 9: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 13: You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here
Speaker 13: listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.