Speaker 1: Zone 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. Welcome everybody to it
Speaker 2: could happen here, a podcast about it happening here. The
Speaker 2: slow crumbling of the institutions that make up our society,
Speaker 2: and that includes not just the good stuff that's become
Speaker 2: the bad stuff, like, for example, Google Search, but it
Speaker 2: includes the stuff that's always been bad and has gotten worse,
Speaker 2: like life inside the prison industrial complex, which is partly
Speaker 2: what we will be talking today because our guest is
Speaker 2: the great Corey, doctor, activist, writer, author of a book
Speaker 2: called The Bezel, which is a fiction novel but deals
Speaker 2: with some very non fictional stuff in relation to how
Speaker 2: finance schools have changed life for people behind bars. Corey.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me on. It's a delight to
Speaker 3: be on again.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's always wonderful to have you. I just finished
Speaker 2: the Bezel. It took me. It was one of those
Speaker 2: about a day, you know, in part because I just
Speaker 2: like didn't want to stop reading it, Like I just
Speaker 2: kind of blasted through. I picked it up in the
Speaker 2: morning on a walk and then was done with it
Speaker 2: at about like nine pm. So I found it pretty
Speaker 2: compulsively readable. Amazing.
Speaker 3: That's great to hear. With the first one, I knew
Speaker 3: that I had something going on when I woke up
Speaker 3: at two in the morning and my wife was sitting
Speaker 3: up in bed next to me, and I said, what
Speaker 3: are you doing? And she said, I just had to
Speaker 3: find out how it ended.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and you said the first one. This is
Speaker 2: the second book in a series based on a character
Speaker 2: Martin Hinch, who's a self employed forensic accountant. I do
Speaker 2: want to let people know right at the jump, I
Speaker 2: actually have not read your first hinchbook yet, and they
Speaker 2: don't have to be read an orgy. Yes, yes, that's
Speaker 2: what I was going to point out before we get
Speaker 2: into the stuff about the plot of this book and
Speaker 2: how it relates to some very real things that are ongoing.
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk about a not so stealth advertisement
Speaker 2: within the series for a guy that we're both a
Speaker 2: big fan of, Stephen Bruce. There's an extended digression where
Speaker 2: Martin is sending books to a friend of his in prison.
Speaker 2: And you talk a lot about Steven's Taltosh series, which
Speaker 2: was a huge influence on me as a young person.
Speaker 2: I could definitely see, I think, an influence on this
Speaker 2: series as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, Steve is a wonderful writer, and everything he
Speaker 3: writes is amazing. That particular series, you know, he started
Speaker 3: when I was thirteen years old. I'm now fifty two.
Speaker 3: I just had dinner with him in Minneapolis. Or he
Speaker 3: tells me he's two books away from finishing it. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he had planned the whole thing all those years ago.
Speaker 3: He's a Zelosny protege. Yeah, and also a giant Fritz
Speaker 3: liber fan. And the it's got that wise cracking Robert
Speaker 3: McGee kind of or Travis McGee rather kind of affect
Speaker 3: those books, and also the stuff that I love about
Speaker 3: the best of what you know, disparagingly we could call
Speaker 3: men's adventure fiction, yeah, which is that it at its best.
Speaker 3: And Maria Ferrell just wrote something really good about this
Speaker 3: on crooked timber, and it's best that stuff really geeks
Speaker 3: out about a lot of stuff. That The bad version
Speaker 3: of it is the kind of James Bond version where
Speaker 3: it's like, yeah, you know, this is what the status watches,
Speaker 3: and this is what the status martini is, and this
Speaker 3: is what the status whatever it is, and that you
Speaker 3: call that the gourmet version right, where it's like, you
Speaker 3: know what all the best of everything is and you
Speaker 3: know how to how to signal you know, your ver
Speaker 3: blend goods to other people had to signal that you
Speaker 3: are posh and upper class. But the good version of
Speaker 3: it is the is the gourmand version, which is like,
Speaker 3: if you're going to eat cardboard pizza, this is the
Speaker 3: best cardboard pizza.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And if you're going to you know, like the very
Speaker 3: best gas station toilets are and the you know, the
Speaker 3: one thing that you should always do if you're staying
Speaker 3: in a flophouse is right, And it's just that kind
Speaker 3: of it could be like street smarts, but it's also
Speaker 3: very uh, I want to say self indulgent, but that's
Speaker 3: not the right word. It's no, it's very uh. It's
Speaker 3: it's it's there's a lot of self care in it.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of like deliberate like, oh, this is
Speaker 3: how I'm going to live my life so that it's
Speaker 3: as good as possible, and I enjoy all of the
Speaker 3: finer things as much as I can. This is the
Speaker 3: thing that I do when I'm making a burger so
Speaker 3: that it's a ten percent more delicious every time, you know,
Speaker 3: yeah kind of thing.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's interesting. I came across the first book
Speaker 2: in that series that I read was Dragon, which I
Speaker 2: came across a strip cover from my uncle who worked
Speaker 2: at a bookstore, and that's his like military fiction book
Speaker 2: in the series, which is very much in line with
Speaker 2: the like boys adventure stuff. But as the series goes on,
Speaker 2: it increasingly trends towards like Russian revolutionary literature too. There's
Speaker 2: a little bit more that which I think get an
Speaker 2: influence on me. Well, Steve's a Trotskyist, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: But the thing about communist fantasy writers, there's a few
Speaker 3: of them, There's you know, China Mayville and step and
Speaker 3: a few others well, Shadderley and so on, is that
Speaker 3: the one thing that they can always be relied upon
Speaker 3: to do is get the ratio of vassals to lords, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know that the number of peasants in the field
Speaker 3: is always vastly larger than the number of lords in
Speaker 3: the castle, and they all have a life and an
Speaker 3: interiority and a reason for being there. That's not just
Speaker 3: being scenery or cannon fodder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's it's something he does. Well. I think
Speaker 2: that's enough of a digression. I just always love having
Speaker 2: a chance to talk about Stephen Bruce's work. Let's talk
Speaker 2: about the Bezel because the basic I mean, I try
Speaker 2: I will try not to give away more than is
Speaker 2: in like the good Reads summary, But the basics of
Speaker 2: this story is that you've got this guy, Martin Hinch,
Speaker 2: who's this forensic accountant, and as a result, he's friends
Speaker 2: with some people who have really succeeded in sort of
Speaker 2: the pre dot com bubble tech industry. I guess you'd say,
Speaker 2: and you take us with, you know. He goes with
Speaker 2: one of them to a place called Catalina Island, which
Speaker 2: is a real place that was founded by one of
Speaker 2: like our nation's early plutocrats, who had a bizarre obsession
Speaker 2: with their not being like fast food available on the island. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he had a lot.
Speaker 3: Of bizarre obsessions. This is William Wrigley, the gum chewing
Speaker 3: gum fortune, and his first obsession was chickle trees and
Speaker 3: which you need to make gum. And his particular obsession
Speaker 3: was owning every chickle forest in the world, which he did,
Speaker 3: which meant that if you wanted to make gum, even
Speaker 3: if you were one of his competitors, you had to
Speaker 3: pay him for the chickle. So there was no gum
Speaker 3: that wasn't Wriggly's gum. In some important sense, this made him,
Speaker 3: as you might imagine.
Speaker 2: Very rich.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he bought the Chicago Cubs, is the reason the
Speaker 3: Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field, and they would have
Speaker 3: their spring training on Catalina Island, an island that he bought.
Speaker 3: He loved Westerns, and one of the people who lived
Speaker 3: on Catalina Island was or summered there. Rather was Zane Gray,
Speaker 3: the great Western writer, and there were a bunch of
Speaker 3: Zane Gray movies that were made on the island, including
Speaker 3: one where they brought over thirteen bull bison because they
Speaker 3: were needed for the movie, and because they didn't know
Speaker 3: a lot about animal handling, particularly they did not know
Speaker 3: that male bison do not ever come into contact with
Speaker 3: one another except to have a violent dominance clash, which
Speaker 3: is how the thirteen mail bison all ended up escaping.
Speaker 3: And then Wrigley, in one of his other obsessions, thought
Speaker 3: it was Unchristian for these bachelor bison to be on
Speaker 3: his island, so he brought over thirteen cows and created
Speaker 3: the bison invasive species. Think. He also didn't know that
Speaker 3: bison operate in harems, which was another thing that he
Speaker 3: was just badly wrong. Like it is true that like
Speaker 3: being a billionaire lowers your IQ by thirty points and
Speaker 3: being the son of a billionaire lowers your IQ by
Speaker 3: forty points. Yeah, and and you know, Wriggly had all
Speaker 3: kinds of esthetic ideas in the same way that like,
Speaker 3: you know, when when Ford built Fordlandia in Brazil, a
Speaker 3: planned community that was an identical copy of Dearborn Michigan,
Speaker 3: including the south facing windows, because he wouldn't let his
Speaker 3: architects explain that south of the equator you want north
Speaker 3: facing windows. Yeah, you know, he said, oh, well we're
Speaker 3: you know, like he came up with all kinds of
Speaker 3: weird rules for rubber planters rubber harvesters in the Brazilian jungle,
Speaker 3: and Wrigley came up with his own rules for people
Speaker 3: living on his island.
Speaker 2: And one of them is no fast food.
Speaker 3: And this turns out to be consequential in the story
Speaker 3: because the protagon of the story, who's Martin Hench, Who's
Speaker 3: this you know, two fisted, hard fighting forensic accountant who
Speaker 3: bust finance scams and his pal are on the island
Speaker 3: in the party scene while his friend waits to vest
Speaker 3: from Yahoo, where he's been imprisoned by Dent of having
Speaker 3: sold them a company for millions of dollars, which he
Speaker 3: can only realize if he can sit tight and not
Speaker 3: murder any of his colleagues. While they buy and destroy
Speaker 3: every promising startup in Silicon Valley using the money from
Speaker 3: the Royal family of Saudi Arabia that was funneled to
Speaker 3: them by Masiyoshi Son and Soft Bank, they encounter a
Speaker 3: Ponzi scheme, and the Ponzi scheme is grounded in what
Speaker 3: is an actual practice of people bringing fast food to
Speaker 3: Catalina Island. Like if you go to the K twelve
Speaker 3: school and you have an away game, everyone brings back
Speaker 3: a sack of burgers for their friends because it's forbidden fruit.
Speaker 3: It's exotic, and this turns into a Ponzi scheme to
Speaker 3: sell flash frozen burgers brought to the island by various means.
Speaker 3: And as with every Ponzi scheme, the thing that they're
Speaker 3: actually selling is the right to sell, the right to sell,
Speaker 3: the right to sell burgers. Yeah, no one, No one
Speaker 3: wants the burgers right. They want the down line. And
Speaker 3: this is why Ponzi schemes always implode. And what Marty
Speaker 3: realizes is that this Ponzi scheme is going on, and
Speaker 3: that it has been cooked up by this guy whose
Speaker 3: parties they've been going to, this real estate baron, and
Speaker 3: that he's done it the same way you might carefully
Speaker 3: tend an ant colony for the sole purpose of burning
Speaker 3: them with magnifying glasses. You build this enormous sort of
Speaker 3: Rube Goldberg machine, a self licking ice cream cone, and
Speaker 3: then you destroy it, you smash it. He's waiting for
Speaker 3: this economy to collapse once he's extracted every penny from
Speaker 3: the island, which will add one percent to his net worth,
Speaker 3: and so they do a controlled demolition of it. They
Speaker 3: foil this guy's plan, and this kicks in motion the
Speaker 3: real action in the novel, which is about the private
Speaker 3: prison system.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and I love that. In preparing to read
Speaker 2: this chunk of the book where I learned quite a
Speaker 2: bit about the private prison system, I also learned a
Speaker 2: bunch about Catalina Island and this wealthy madman's insane dream.
Speaker 2: I appreciate that about your books.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean Catalina Island, and we could go on.
Speaker 3: Marilyn Monroe is a fifteen year old child bride on
Speaker 3: Catalina Island. The CIA was founded on Catalina Island. The
Speaker 3: channel between Catalina Island and the mainland is the deepest
Speaker 3: channel known to humanity and now dumped fifty thousand barrels
Speaker 3: of DDT into it in iron that is rusting and
Speaker 3: that we have no way to remediate, and that will
Speaker 3: someday rupture and kill every bird downstream of that channel,
Speaker 3: and also lots of fish. Catalina Island is this very
Speaker 3: fraught place, this very beautiful place, very weird place. It's
Speaker 3: one of my favorite places to go. We just booked
Speaker 3: another trip there, and everything about it is is amazing
Speaker 3: and also terrible, but also beautiful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and appreciate the way that you write that. And
Speaker 2: I appreciate the way that you kind of wrap us
Speaker 2: into by first establishing this character, this friend of Martin's,
Speaker 2: who then winds up in a California Department of Corrections
Speaker 2: facility and taking us over a period of time as
Speaker 2: it goes to the way I think most people think
Speaker 2: prisons still are, right, the kind of the vision of
Speaker 2: like prisons that was formed from movies we watched in
Speaker 2: the early two thousands, in the late nineties, where you know,
Speaker 2: they can be pretty ugly places, but like you have
Speaker 2: family and they can come and visit you. Right, there's
Speaker 2: a big room where everybody gets together with their you know,
Speaker 2: we arrested developments maybe the most before this all changed,
Speaker 2: most recent kind of touchstone on this. And also it's
Speaker 2: a place that has like a library, and not just
Speaker 2: a library, but like there are what comes with the
Speaker 2: library is opportunities for people to like better themselves, to
Speaker 2: learn things, to build skills, to potentially take some more
Speaker 2: agency of their situation. Right, That idea of like the
Speaker 2: jailhouse lawyer who comes informed in all that, and that
Speaker 2: that world has really gone away to a significant extent.
Speaker 2: It's not completely gone everywhere, but certainly a lot of
Speaker 2: those a lot of that has been pruned away. The
Speaker 2: ability of prisoners to have face to face contact with
Speaker 2: their loved ones and the ability of prisoners to like
Speaker 2: use a library is something that is a lot less
Speaker 2: common now than it used to be. And it's because
Speaker 2: a lot of these a lot of these kind of
Speaker 2: attitudes that have characterized finance for so long or increasingly
Speaker 2: become in common within the companies that run these facilities.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, maybe this is a good place
Speaker 3: to explain what a bezel is and how this moment
Speaker 3: relates to what a bezel is. So I really think
Speaker 3: the title bezel is a banger. But I didn't realize
Speaker 3: until I started touring this book that if you say
Speaker 3: it aloud, it sounds like be eazel, which is the
Speaker 3: rectanglar on your phone screen. It's actually be easy z
Speaker 3: l e or a zed zed if you're a Canadian
Speaker 3: like me. And that is a wonderful term coined by
Speaker 3: John Kenneth Galbrath to describe the magic interval after the
Speaker 3: con artist has your money but before you know it's
Speaker 3: a con and in that moment, everybody feels better off.
Speaker 3: And one of the great bezel moments was the moment
Speaker 3: between the crash of the dot com crash of like
Speaker 3: two thousand and two thousand and one and the crash
Speaker 3: of the Great Financial Crisis, the housing crash, and in
Speaker 3: that period, all the money that people put into so
Speaker 3: called investments and into the market and that made them
Speaker 3: feel better off, made them feel like they had a pension,
Speaker 3: made them feel like they had savings, and so on,
Speaker 3: all that money was already gone. So this is one
Speaker 3: of the things about a scam is it feels like
Speaker 3: the moment that you lose the money is the moment
Speaker 3: you realize it's a scam, But you actually lose the
Speaker 3: money the minute you give it to the con artist.
Speaker 3: The con artists might let you keep some of it
Speaker 3: for a little while, but they can take it away
Speaker 3: from you whenever they want. That was a moment of
Speaker 3: kind of giddiness where none of us really wanted the
Speaker 3: dream to end. We knew that once the dream ended,
Speaker 3: we would all be poorer, although in reality we're all poorer.
Speaker 3: Right then, One of the things about that moment is
Speaker 3: it was the moment when another long con came doe,
Speaker 3: and that was the long con of the California three
Speaker 3: strikes rule. So there had been a couple of quite
Speaker 3: ghastly murders of young people, a teenager and a child
Speaker 3: in California that were weaponized by some fairly cruel racists
Speaker 3: to pass a law in California that says that if
Speaker 3: you were convicted of three felonies, you would go to
Speaker 3: prison for the rest of your life with no chance
Speaker 3: of parole. And you know, this is California, which is
Speaker 3: a place that's quite allergic to hire taxes, famously the
Speaker 3: home Proposition thirteen, where you know, we can't raise our
Speaker 3: property taxes unless something like seventy percent of us go
Speaker 3: to the polls and specifically vote for it, which is
Speaker 3: why our cities are so cash strapped. And so in
Speaker 3: this place where you have these anti tax extremist types
Speaker 3: and you have this increasing tax burden associated with locking
Speaker 3: up an ever larger fraction of the population for the
Speaker 3: rest of their lives, you have this unstoppable force and
Speaker 3: this immovable object on a collision course with one another,
Speaker 3: because at a certain point, you're just going to have
Speaker 3: prisons that are so full that you're going to have
Speaker 3: to do something to relieve them. You're going to have
Speaker 3: to build more prisons. You're going to have to reduce
Speaker 3: the cost of operating those prisons. Something's going to give.
Speaker 3: In the end, what ended up giving was a Supreme
Speaker 3: Court case that rule that just being in prison in
Speaker 3: California violated your Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
Speaker 3: That every California prison basically constituted a violation of the
Speaker 3: Eighth Amendment. And California went through the you know, the
Speaker 3: five stages of grieving, which I know they don't replicate
Speaker 3: that it's not real, we don't. That's not really a
Speaker 3: neat description of exactly what happens when we grieve. But
Speaker 3: they certainly went through a period of denial and bargaining,
Speaker 3: including mooting at one point sending prisoners to like Arizona,
Speaker 3: so sending California State prisoners to Arizona and paying Arizona
Speaker 3: to take them off their hands. And as all of
Speaker 3: this stuff was going on, some grifters saw great opportunity,
Speaker 3: and that opportunity was to cut costs in the prisons
Speaker 3: and facilitate moving prisoners further and further away from their
Speaker 3: families by replacing all of the services in the prison
Speaker 3: with a tablet that you would get for free. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So remember you know, the iPad comes out in two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight. Steve Jobs is touting it as the future.
Speaker 5: Of the world.
Speaker 3: Media companies are going crazy. They finally found their daddy
Speaker 3: figure who's going to save them from tech by you know,
Speaker 3: siloing everything in an app that isn't part of the web.
Speaker 3: And all we can hear about is tablets of the future.
Speaker 3: And this sounds quite futuristic, right, We'll put tablet. We'll
Speaker 3: give every prisoner a free tablet. It's like one laptop
Speaker 3: per child, but for prisoners. And those tablets will replace
Speaker 3: the library and in person visits and phone calls and
Speaker 3: music and TV and continuing education and all of it's
Speaker 3: going to cost. And it's going to cost a lot
Speaker 3: more than you would pay outside of the outside of
Speaker 3: the prison for the same services. So, you know, four
Speaker 3: bucks a minute for poster stamp sized video instead of
Speaker 3: free zoom calls, Yeah, music for three bucks instead of one.
Speaker 3: And then, of course these companies are very grifty, and
Speaker 3: so they're constantly restructuring, going bankrupt, being bought, buying one another.
Speaker 3: And every time that happens, the company changes its name
Speaker 3: and says, oh, we're no longer the same company. We
Speaker 3: no longer supply all of those services. We are wiping
Speaker 3: out all of your data, and you're gonna have to
Speaker 3: buy it again. And so, you know, if that's music,
Speaker 3: it means that the song that you pay three dollars for,
Speaker 3: that you bought by working in the prison workshop for
Speaker 3: twenty five cents an hour is gone and you're in
Speaker 3: prison for remember this is California, the rest of your life.
Speaker 3: And so you're going to have to go back and
Speaker 3: earn more money to get.
Speaker 2: That song again.
Speaker 3: But also the five dollars your kid paid to have
Speaker 3: the birthday card that they wrote for you scant because
Speaker 3: you can no longer get parcels or mail. Your family
Speaker 3: have to pay to have their letters scanned, or they
Speaker 3: have to pay to send you email. And so your kid,
Speaker 3: who's growing up with the principal breadwinner, has paid five
Speaker 3: dollars to have their handmade birthday card scanned. That goes
Speaker 3: away too when the prison changes vendors. And it's a
Speaker 3: kind of perfect parable for the indifferent sadism of capital,
Speaker 3: like the degree to which the pursuit of profit drives
Speaker 3: people to be far more cruel than mere ideology.
Speaker 2: You know, yes, yeah, that's so important because like, prisons
Speaker 2: were not nice before, they were not humane before. But
Speaker 2: someone who is simply trying to run a government prison
Speaker 2: facility would not think of the idea of doing like
Speaker 2: a doing like a shell game yank away of people's
Speaker 2: music after letting them buy it and then make them
Speaker 2: buy it again. That's like, that's not something that like
Speaker 2: a bad prison guard comes up with. That's only something
Speaker 2: that somebody from somebody from finance comes up with.
Speaker 3: Well, and and you know, you it helps if the
Speaker 3: way that you're running these prisons is by employing guards
Speaker 3: through a staffing agency, and so you don't even have
Speaker 3: to contend with the rising costs associated with staff turnover
Speaker 3: when prisoners go bug fuck crazy because you took all
Speaker 3: their shit away. Right, those guards are not your employees,
Speaker 3: and it's not your problem. The whole thing is is
Speaker 3: kind of running at several layers of indirection and remove.
Speaker 3: It's what Douglas Rushkoff calls going meta. You know, the
Speaker 3: don't drive a cab found Uber, don't found uber invest
Speaker 3: in Uber, don't invest in Uber, invest in uber derivatives.
Speaker 3: Don't investor in uber derivatives, invest in uber derivative futures. Right,
Speaker 3: like go meta, like get further and further away from
Speaker 3: the useful activities. Yeah, you are insulated from the consequences
Speaker 3: of whatever it.
Speaker 4: Is you do.
Speaker 2: And that's such a it's part of it's like a
Speaker 2: recipe for breaking things right, because the people who are closest,
Speaker 2: not that they're always good at it in the case
Speaker 2: of prison guards, but the people who are closest to
Speaker 2: the useful activity tend to know how to make things
Speaker 2: work right. Whereas the further away you get from that,
Speaker 2: the more likely your ideas are to break things that
Speaker 2: you wouldn't have even thought of. And again, but for
Speaker 2: that kind of person, everything you break is usually an
Speaker 2: opportunity for financializing something else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: The extent to which finance is the true banality of
Speaker 3: evil is hard to overstate. Yeah, you know, we think, well,
Speaker 3: we've heard a lot when you read about the Holocaust
Speaker 3: and World War Two, you hear a lot about the
Speaker 3: cruelty of Nazis, and no one's going to say, well,
Speaker 3: the Nazis weren't cruel and the ideological cruelty of Nazis. So,
Speaker 3: for example, there were moments where, rather than transporting troops
Speaker 3: to decisive battles, they were shipping Jews to concentration camps
Speaker 3: on those same trains and losing battles so they could.
Speaker 2: Murder more Jews.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, But up the road from Auschwitz was another
Speaker 3: private concentration camp run by ig Farben called Monowitz. YEP
Speaker 3: and ig Farbin were war profiteers. They were they were
Speaker 3: gouging the Wehrmacht on war material that they were manufacturing
Speaker 3: with slave labor, and they bought thousands of slaves from Auschwitz,
Speaker 3: preferring women and children because they were cheaper, and they
Speaker 3: worked them to death. And the lifespan of a slave
Speaker 3: in Monowitz was only three months before they were worked
Speaker 3: to death. It was half of what it was in Auschwitz.
Speaker 3: The conditions were so bad at Monowitz that the SS
Speaker 3: guards who were seconded to it from Auschwitz wrote to
Speaker 3: Berlin to complain about the cruelty of Monowitz. At the
Speaker 3: end of the war, in Nuremberg, twenty four Ig Farben
Speaker 3: executives were tried for this. Their defense was that they
Speaker 3: had a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize returns,
Speaker 3: and nineteen of them were acquitted on that basis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God, and this is you know, before the Chicago
Speaker 2: School guys had really like fully taken over. So this
Speaker 2: this idea that like that was really the only responsibility
Speaker 2: that a business had, even above a moral responsibility, was
Speaker 2: much less established. Like the more you get into how many,
Speaker 2: particularly of the money people got off at Nuremberg, like
Speaker 2: it's maddening stuff. Yeah, indeed, and it is, like I
Speaker 2: think one an accurate way to look at the Holocaust
Speaker 2: from the perspective of those guys is the mining of populations,
Speaker 2: like mining them to death. That's really how a lot
Speaker 2: of this like because a huge chunk of especially the
Speaker 2: early stages of Nazi oppression of like starting with German Jews,
Speaker 2: but going beyond that as they conquered more land, was
Speaker 2: the appropriation of businesses and property, right, like that was
Speaker 2: it was, it was mining human beings. And that attitude
Speaker 2: is persistent. Right, It's not just a thing that happens
Speaker 2: in Nazi Germany. It happens whenever you let people who
Speaker 2: don't have any sort of human concern take control of
Speaker 2: every aspect of life.
Speaker 3: And this is some of the structural stuff that's going
Speaker 3: on in the book. So my editor on this book
Speaker 3: is this great guy, Patrick Nielsen Hayden who's been my
Speaker 3: editor since my first novel. He and I met on
Speaker 3: a BBS in the nineteen eighties, so I've really known
Speaker 3: him most of my life.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: And Patrick, when he gave me the editorial note on
Speaker 3: my first novel, he said something like the way that
Speaker 3: science fiction works is you have a world that is
Speaker 3: like a thought experiment world, and you have a character
Speaker 3: who's a microcosm for that world, and they are like
Speaker 3: a big gear that's the world, and a little gear
Speaker 3: that's the character. And if the microcosm meshes correctly with
Speaker 3: the macrocosm, then as the person spins around and around
Speaker 3: doing their plot stuff, they spin around enough times that
Speaker 3: the world, the big gear that they're meshed with, makes
Speaker 3: a full revolution. So you have this microcosm macrocosm thing.
Speaker 3: And often when a book doesn't work, it's because the
Speaker 3: microcosmic macrocosmic correspondences aren't sharp enough. There's some way in
Speaker 3: which those teeth aren't meshing. One of the things that
Speaker 3: this book tries to do, and that the Martin Hinch
Speaker 3: books generally try to do, because they're all about these
Speaker 3: these finance scams, these high tech finance scams set in
Speaker 3: different eras from the nineteen eighties through the twenty twenties,
Speaker 3: is that they try to create a series of these
Speaker 3: similar correspondences between small scams and big scams. You know,
Speaker 3: they use the small scam as a kind of setup
Speaker 3: or a frame or like a cognitive tool for understanding
Speaker 3: the much bigger scam. And so that small scam, that
Speaker 3: Ponzi scheme, where you have a person who is setting
Speaker 3: out just for shits and giggles to make some money
Speaker 3: by destroying a bunch of other people's lives and viewing
Speaker 3: those people as not as people but as as things,
Speaker 3: as a means to an end, not as an end
Speaker 3: unto themselves, ends up creating this sadistic, brutal, pointless, and
Speaker 3: deliberately unsustainable situation that he knows is going to hurt
Speaker 3: all these other people. And the way that he's able
Speaker 3: to do it is by simply not considering the people
Speaker 3: who are enmeshed in the scheme as fully people entitled
Speaker 3: to their own sort of moral consideration. And in the
Speaker 3: same way that is that's like a microcosm for the
Speaker 3: kinds of decisions that are made when people go on
Speaker 3: to found these prison tech companies and these other companies
Speaker 3: that do these these ghastly things.
Speaker 2: And it's it's also very accurate to how an unfortunate
Speaker 2: number of just like regular people in society and in
Speaker 2: government think about the victims of these schemes. Like when
Speaker 2: you when you try to talk about how unfair and
Speaker 2: how much worse this situation has gotten, it's like, well,
Speaker 2: they're prisoners, they're being punished, you know, as if, as
Speaker 2: if that makes it all okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of a it's kind of a like
Speaker 3: a much more extreme and therefore much more easily spotted
Speaker 3: version of caveat emptor or you know, not your not
Speaker 3: your keys, not your coins. You know, these ideas that
Speaker 3: if if something bad is happening to you, it must
Speaker 3: be because you did something bad.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: That the kind of providential ethics. And I think that
Speaker 3: the work that that does for people is it helps
Speaker 3: them put their own anxiety about their own future to rest,
Speaker 3: because you know, the if you are worried that something
Speaker 3: bad might happen to you, and you can convince yourself
Speaker 3: that the reason that something bad happened to someone else
Speaker 3: is that they had a deficiency right, they committed a sin,
Speaker 3: they were foolish, then you don't have to worry about
Speaker 3: it happening to you. You know, I a couple of
Speaker 3: times in the last decade I have been the victim
Speaker 3: of various kinds of con and I am also someone
Speaker 3: who's written a lot about cons So I've been successfully
Speaker 3: fished once and I had a phone scammer talked me
Speaker 3: out of my credit card number once. And I always
Speaker 3: write about it when it happens, and I write about
Speaker 3: it in part because I want to make sure that
Speaker 3: people understand that, you know, you're not too smart to
Speaker 3: be conned, anyone can be conned and so on, and
Speaker 3: I think that's an inoculant against getting conned. But I
Speaker 3: also do it because the reactions are a kind of
Speaker 3: sociological study.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: If you want to see into the minds of tech
Speaker 3: bros who justify the terrible things that they are doing
Speaker 3: or planning to do, or fantasizing about doing or working
Speaker 3: on to other people, look at their fraud apologetics where
Speaker 3: they say, you know, oh, that was just a business
Speaker 3: and you know you had a caveat emptor or you
Speaker 3: were lazy, or you were foolish, or you know, like
Speaker 3: you did something deficient and that's why it happened, and
Speaker 3: so you deserved it. And that means, on the one hand,
Speaker 3: it's never going to happen to me because I don't
Speaker 3: deserve it. And on the other hand, if I ever
Speaker 3: do it to someone else, that's fine because if they
Speaker 3: fall victim to it, then they must deserve it. The
Speaker 3: old con artist saying that you can't cheat an honest man.
Speaker 2: As a version of this, Yeah, and it's I mean,
Speaker 2: that's like it's such a limited view of it, right,
Speaker 2: because it's true that, like there are some cons that
Speaker 2: you can't trick someone into unless they have a little
Speaker 2: desire for some larceny, right, But like an increasing number
Speaker 2: of cons are just like a company using your bank
Speaker 2: phone number calling you and telling you you've been defrauded,
Speaker 2: and you give them information because you're not used to
Speaker 2: the or or somebody calls using the voice of your
Speaker 2: child and says that they need a ransom payment. Right,
Speaker 2: you're not there's not like dishonesty in your heart because
Speaker 2: you don't want your kid to be kidnapped. You're just
Speaker 2: not ready for what tech has been able to do,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: And while there are some of those cons where they
Speaker 3: you know they're they're playing on your cupidity or your dishonesty. Yeah,
Speaker 3: to make money off of you. Even in those instances,
Speaker 3: it is downstream of a system where it feels like
Speaker 3: you can't survive unless you're cheating, right, like the one
Speaker 3: of the things. And so multi level marketing is actually
Speaker 3: a theme that runs through all of these books. That
Speaker 3: The next is set in the nineteen eighties and it's
Speaker 3: it's about a faith scam. It's an early PC company
Speaker 3: I made up called the Three Wise Men, run by
Speaker 3: a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi
Speaker 3: who use, you know, affiliate marketing through congregations to prey
Speaker 3: on their own faith groups. And one of the things
Speaker 3: about these Ponzi schemes, these pyramid schemes, is that they
Speaker 3: take the only capital that working people have, which is
Speaker 3: social capital, right the relationships they have among one another,
Speaker 3: and they convince them that it is entrepreneurial and therefore
Speaker 3: virtuous to instrumentalize your relationship to the other women in
Speaker 3: your life who help you look after your kids, or
Speaker 3: to your coreligionists who you can turn to if things
Speaker 3: go really bad at work or with your family or whatever.
Speaker 3: And that turning that into a transaction that you can milk,
Speaker 3: you know. Turning those people into a down line who
Speaker 3: have to recruit other people to make you whole so
Speaker 3: that you can feed your own upline is just hustling.
Speaker 3: It's just your shot at the American dream. You know,
Speaker 3: Spike Lee telling you that investing in shit coins as
Speaker 3: building black wealth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I it is like the the fact, and
Speaker 2: I think low key, this is one of the top
Speaker 2: couple of problems that we have in this society because
Speaker 2: it feeds into everything else. It's like it's a I
Speaker 2: think that's probably why it runs through so much of
Speaker 2: your work, because this the scam economy, is behind every
Speaker 2: and it's increasingly becoming everything right, and there's this kind
Speaker 2: of pernicious effect where by people don't the more people
Speaker 2: are victimized by this, both the less they trust other
Speaker 2: people and the more the more they begin to accept that, like, well,
Speaker 2: this is just how you get by in our society, right,
Speaker 2: Why shouldn't we take away prison libraries and replace them
Speaker 2: with more expensive kindle that we can yank away at
Speaker 2: any moment. Everyone's always nickel and diming me. I'm always
Speaker 2: getting more money taken away from me. By these same people.
Speaker 2: And I'm not even in prison, you know.
Speaker 3: Right, why shouldn't there be junk fees in prison if
Speaker 3: there's junk fees everywhere else, If you're if you're you know,
Speaker 3: local water company that's owned by your city is sold
Speaker 3: off to uh, you know, plug a hole in the
Speaker 3: budget because you can't raise taxes. And then they start
Speaker 3: charging you a convenience fee to pay your your water
Speaker 3: bill with a check, and then a different convenience fee
Speaker 3: to pay your water bill with a credit card, and
Speaker 3: a third convenience fee to pay your water bill in
Speaker 3: person with cash. And then you realize that, like there
Speaker 3: that none of these are convenience fees. They're just they're
Speaker 3: just fees.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just more money. Yeah yeah, I mean we're
Speaker 2: in we're in a pretty infuriating situation here, and you
Speaker 2: get to that in the bezel, you really get that
Speaker 2: across well as this guy is trying to deal with
Speaker 2: the and and it kind of brought home to me
Speaker 2: the horror of like having someone you care for in
Speaker 2: this situation and seeing like their avenues for any kind
Speaker 2: of relief edged out chipped away at for the profit
Speaker 2: of some guy who will never notice the money in
Speaker 2: his bank account.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I mean, and you know that, unlike Steve Brucet,
Speaker 3: I well, like Steve brust in some of those volumes,
Speaker 3: I told this story from the perspective of a fairly
Speaker 3: powerful person who's got a lot of agency, only because
Speaker 3: it gives you the opportunity to tell a story that
Speaker 3: at least holds out the possibility of some relief. I'll
Speaker 3: leave it to the reader to find out what actually
Speaker 3: happens at the end. And you know, there have been
Speaker 3: successful prisoner uprisings that have been led by working people
Speaker 3: who are serving long terms, but for the most part
Speaker 3: those uprisings, we never even hear about them. You know,
Speaker 3: there was a prison labor strike before lockdown. I believe
Speaker 3: it was twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen. There's a national
Speaker 3: prison labor strike, and it barely made a dent in
Speaker 3: anyone's consciousness. It was, you know, ultimately one of the
Speaker 3: largest strikes in modern American history. You know, there're thousands
Speaker 3: and thousands of workers were on strike, and we didn't
Speaker 3: even hear about it. Because there's such control over the
Speaker 3: narrative about prisons and prisoners that's run by the carcerl system.
Speaker 3: And so you know, by telling this story about someone
Speaker 3: who goes into prison already a millionaire and who has
Speaker 3: a friend on the outside who's kind of a hustler
Speaker 3: and you know, a pal and who is someone who
Speaker 3: knows how to finagle the system, I can spin out
Speaker 3: a yarn that takes you, like back to Patrick Nielsen
Speaker 3: Hayden and the Big Gear driving the Little Gear takes
Speaker 3: you on a three hundred and sixty degree tour of
Speaker 3: how fucked up the system is rather than just the
Speaker 3: ant's i view or the worm's eye view that most
Speaker 3: people get because they aren't even able to explore all
Speaker 3: the avenues and run into their dead ends because they're
Speaker 3: just stuck where they are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this has been wonderful. I want to again let
Speaker 2: people know your book, The Bezel is in stores now.
Speaker 2: You can purchase it wherever fine books are sold. Do
Speaker 2: you have a preferred URL for buying it?
Speaker 3: The Dashbezel dot org is fine, but wherever people want
Speaker 3: to get it. Yeah, it's a national best seller for
Speaker 3: the third week running.
Speaker 4: It's very good.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 3: Whoever feeds into the USA Today bestseller.
Speaker 2: List you apparently that's wonderful. Yeah, well, Corey, doctor, do
Speaker 2: you have anything else you wanted to get to before
Speaker 2: we roll out today?
Speaker 3: Well, I guess you know, if you want to follow
Speaker 3: the work that I do. Pluralistic dot net is a
Speaker 3: newsletter that I write every day or almost every day,
Speaker 3: and it's open access it so that means it's Creative
Speaker 3: Commons licensed. You can reproduce it. You can reproduce it
Speaker 3: and sell it if you want. And there's no DRM,
Speaker 3: there's no tracking, there's no you know ads, there's no anything.
Speaker 3: It's you know, black type on a white background. You'll
Speaker 3: never get to pop up asking you whether you want
Speaker 3: to subscribe to my mailing list or whatever. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: the email version of it, you can get it as
Speaker 3: an email list. The email version also no tracking. I
Speaker 3: can't tell when you've opened the email or anything. I
Speaker 3: keep no statistics, and I just it's a letter in
Speaker 3: a bottle I write and throw into the ocean every morning.
Speaker 3: And it's great. That's so much fun to write.
Speaker 2: It's a great letter in a bottle. You've been talking
Speaker 2: writing a lot, talking a lot about AI lately and
Speaker 2: kind of the how that all feeds into a lot
Speaker 2: of this stuff you've been covering about or the stuff
Speaker 2: you write about often about you know, bezels and scam economies.
Speaker 2: And I've really enjoyed getting your take on that because
Speaker 2: I think you're one of the one of the people
Speaker 2: who hasn't lost their minds over all this stuff.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I mean, I think we're really like so
Speaker 3: that we hear so much about AI disinformation and the
Speaker 3: people who have like most fallen prey to AID information
Speaker 3: are bosses who've been convinced that AI is good enough
Speaker 3: to fire you and replace you with and you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's not true. It doesn't mean they won't do it, right,
Speaker 3: but it's not true. Yeah, that's that's actually kind of
Speaker 3: the worst of all worlds, right, technological unemployment without without
Speaker 3: actual replacement. It's just it's just another basil. It's a yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a It's that long moment where you think you've
Speaker 3: zeroed out your labor force costs, but you haven't realized
Speaker 3: that you're no longer productive because the chatbot keeps, you know,
Speaker 3: as in the case of Air Canada, just like telling
Speaker 3: people they can get refunds they're not entitled to. And
Speaker 3: then you know, regulators come along and smack you around
Speaker 3: and charge you, you know, find you for your chatbot
Speaker 3: having lied to people about their bereavement, flight discounts and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to to that moment hitting.
Speaker 2: I guess because where we I mean, I do kind
Speaker 2: of think we are sort of nearer to the bursting
Speaker 2: than we are to the peak of the bubble right now,
Speaker 2: But I guess we'll see.
Speaker 3: Well, remember, the market can remain solvent irrational rather longer
Speaker 3: than you can remain solvent.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I've been predicting the collapse of the London housing bubble,
Speaker 3: for example, for a very long time. We're nowhere near it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so that is my humbling lesson. It is definitely a bubble.
Speaker 3: It is going to burst when it's going to burst,
Speaker 3: and is very very very hard to predict.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what will burst with it? Yeah? Well, Corey, thank
Speaker 2: you so much for being on the show. Again. Everybody,
Speaker 2: check out the Bezel Wonderful book, and check out Corey's
Speaker 2: other wonderful books like walk Away. That's the episode. I
Speaker 2: have a good one, Thanks Robert.
Speaker 6: Hello, everyone, welcome to the podcast today. We have a
Speaker 6: very interesting issue. You're very lucky to be joined by Onomo,
Speaker 6: who we've heard from before who is a minister who
Speaker 6: is hindering in the National Unity Government of Burma or Myanmar.
Speaker 6: Both of those words are okay, And we're talking about
Speaker 6: the situation of Rhinga people and the development sort of
Speaker 6: happened in Rakaine State since I guess since the beginning
Speaker 6: of Operation ten twenty seven. So welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, thanks for having me, and it's
Speaker 4: good to be back with you to this show.
Speaker 6: Thank you. Yeah, no, it's wonderful to have you back
Speaker 6: and we're very fortunate. So I wonder if we could
Speaker 6: start by summarizing for listeners the things that have happened
Speaker 6: in the last few months in Rakaine State, because there
Speaker 6: have been some massive changes since maybe listeners will last
Speaker 6: aware of what was happening there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, thank you. Since the coup, the over on
Speaker 4: and off bikes in the Arkan Army and there, and
Speaker 4: the Malasia hunters process in Rakinda State, however, in the
Speaker 4: interests of the of the of the humanitary and neat
Speaker 4: both parties came to enter to a ceasefire peven In between, however,
Speaker 4: the fight against the military junta in and Mark started
Speaker 4: in different part of me and Mark continued to be
Speaker 4: accelerating and most recently the ten twenty seven and followed
Speaker 4: by others operations in in crime estate has has been
Speaker 4: has been quite rapidly spreading across the country and that's
Speaker 4: definitely went through a kinda state where resumed to target
Speaker 4: the the the junta in its polotopical objective to be
Speaker 4: to be reaching uh uh. That's the situations we are
Speaker 4: today that the Arcan Army has been in very goods
Speaker 4: to be dismantling the Hunter's forces in our kind of state,
Speaker 4: and so far since Operation twenty seven ten twenty seven
Speaker 4: staled more than half of the township districts in our
Speaker 4: kind of state has been ceased by the Arkhan Army,
Speaker 4: including some of those were majority of Ringa lifts. And
Speaker 4: it's continued to be under in the very literarating situations.
Speaker 6: Yeah, at the end, they've they've even sunk Hunter ships
Speaker 6: or captured them in some cases. I think it's been
Speaker 6: a bit of a that there was a video that
Speaker 6: was quite like maybe not viruls around word. Certainly I
Speaker 6: saw a lot but of border guard forces right, which
Speaker 6: are like a militia's allied to the Hunter and fleeing
Speaker 6: into Bangladesh.
Speaker 4: This this another the border guard process are from mostly
Speaker 4: from militaries. They are tree militaries. Their uniforms are changed
Speaker 4: into reguard force due to different agreement with that exists
Speaker 4: between two states in allocating. It's true along the border
Speaker 4: side and the border guard forces are one of the
Speaker 4: most primary forces that's deported through Highen and run the
Speaker 4: Rohingia's sources in twenty seven and make them flee. So
Speaker 4: six years later they saying the GPS who committed to
Speaker 4: the crimes against the Rhinga atrocities that include crimes against
Speaker 4: humanity and war crimes had to flee to Bangladesh in
Speaker 4: a quite similar way to refuge. And so it's sort
Speaker 4: of karma or whatever you put it in a way
Speaker 4: and the perceptions and reality of course when it's it's
Speaker 4: kind of confrontations between the two groups Arcan Army and
Speaker 4: the military compless sources. The reality that has been defined
Speaker 4: by most of ours ninianmar and the course that we
Speaker 4: used to believe that the Burmis malitary is a strong
Speaker 4: vote by human resource and equipment and then in reality
Speaker 4: they are very weak and our army has proved by
Speaker 4: dismantling a various battalion in country battalion and even capturing
Speaker 4: alive like second ice commanding officer in the whole of
Speaker 4: the kind of state. And also many senior level officer
Speaker 4: has been has has been killed over this. That so
Speaker 4: the reality perception has been deeper on the NMR malanitary
Speaker 4: when we look it from from external perspective.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think just in case listeners aren't familiar,
Speaker 6: it can be very confusing if you don't read about
Speaker 6: this stuff all the time. It's sort of an alphabet
Speaker 6: soup of organizations, and especially with reference to Rahinga and
Speaker 6: Rekind State, because we have Rahinga armed groups, so armed
Speaker 6: groups which drove mostly for Ngar people that don't necessarily
Speaker 6: represent them all, and then we have the AA. Son,
Speaker 6: can you explain the AA's relationship to Kind State and
Speaker 6: then how they relate to Rehinga people.
Speaker 4: He has been established in two thousand and nine with
Speaker 4: aims to be having confederations and not less than war,
Speaker 4: which is another special regions now with a special autonomy,
Speaker 4: and it has been led by some young people and
Speaker 4: it has been quite a leadership as well within their
Speaker 4: kind political structrum. And he has been growing very apidally
Speaker 4: and the acceptance of the of the people, particularly or
Speaker 4: kind people has been very high. Therefore, the resource allocations
Speaker 4: that he got from human resource to other resources to
Speaker 4: be rapidly coping with that group growth has high end
Speaker 4: that put them in a position to be standing in
Speaker 4: front of Hunta in a very stronger positions and defeat
Speaker 4: them and very rapidly. And of course the Arkhan Army
Speaker 4: which we refer here as AE, is not as inclusive
Speaker 4: as ra kind. Ra kind of state is very diverse
Speaker 4: and it has got a multiple ethnic group. The largest
Speaker 4: ethnic group is Rakin religiously with these people and to
Speaker 4: which the majority of army's leadership derived from there, and
Speaker 4: the second largest majority, which are the Rowinga and Toroinga,
Speaker 4: are still the second largest majority in the rack kind
Speaker 4: of state. Despite a milion being pushed off to Bangladesh
Speaker 4: in twenty seventeen and several hundred thousand spread it across
Speaker 4: the region, and the inclusivity in an Arcan Army is
Speaker 4: still still not there. When we talk about Ringa, that's
Speaker 4: know that there might be some small a small number
Speaker 4: of Rhingias in different battalions of Arkan Army and the
Speaker 4: administrative units that they're building at a very crossroot level. However,
Speaker 4: the the the Rhinga need to be included both by
Speaker 4: functions and in order to have to describe that relationship
Speaker 4: and inclusively between the Rhenia people and the Arkan army.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's that Arakan Is that Rakhan is the
Speaker 6: name of the area before it was called Rakayan state?
Speaker 6: Is that right?
Speaker 4: Correct? It's even it's before Burma became Burma. Arkhan was
Speaker 4: a king kingdom and it used to have its own
Speaker 4: palace and its diversity, it's high page and it's natural resources.
Speaker 4: And then of course the Burmese colonizations happened to Burma
Speaker 4: and h and later on Kan has been named as
Speaker 4: rakinda state.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So it describes a geographical rather than ethnic identity, right,
Speaker 6: which is distinct from some of the other revolutionary organizations
Speaker 6: like rank or any or what have you.
Speaker 4: I think there are similarities and as well as there
Speaker 4: are differences when when when you put them together, and
Speaker 4: and from a diversity perspective of a kind of statey,
Speaker 4: it's very diverse compared to other ethnic groups. And and
Speaker 4: also it's politically very complex. Uh So, the the the
Speaker 4: the but over their overall similarities as well, like like
Speaker 4: you know, all are fighting to defeat the hunter, to
Speaker 4: to end the dictatorship in Meanmar. But the the the
Speaker 4: the primary thing here is the self interminations and self autonomy,
Speaker 4: like people want to decide to determine what is their
Speaker 4: present and official look like, how they want to treat
Speaker 4: with their past. That's the the the the the aspect.
Speaker 4: But of course the the like to my to the
Speaker 4: best of my knowledge, these ethnic resistance organizations, both political
Speaker 4: and and and and the armed groups have never claimed
Speaker 4: that they want to separate from me and Mar. Yes,
Speaker 4: it's coming together in a different way. The holding together
Speaker 4: would be in a different way.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And even when they speak to Bama people who
Speaker 6: are like the majority ethnicity and the ethnicity from which
Speaker 6: the junta's leadership had rule, and like they tell me,
Speaker 6: they're committed to a federal and like a federal Mianma
Speaker 6: with autonomy for these different regions and groups. And that's
Speaker 6: something that has held that coalition together.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, approximately more than fifty million populations majority are Aburmese Buddhists,
Speaker 4: and they have been having this Buddhist supremacy and like
Speaker 4: Bama's supremacy over ethnic and religious minorities across the country,
Speaker 4: and of course Katchin current and others and went to
Speaker 4: Desromine when their future by by themselves and have the
Speaker 4: equality both their functions and number. And that's where we're
Speaker 4: having these seventy years long civil war. You know, that's
Speaker 4: came to collective revolutions in twenty twenty one, and history
Speaker 4: really speaking, people have been fighting in Enmark for equality,
Speaker 4: justice and to end the cycle of impunity for the
Speaker 4: last seventeen plus years.
Speaker 6: Great, I think that's a great place to take our
Speaker 6: first advertising break. All right, and we're back. I think
Speaker 6: he did an excellent job of explaining the history the
Speaker 6: Goddess here, and people will be very familiar with the
Speaker 6: trustees committed by the Burmese military and its proxies against
Speaker 6: the Rhinga people, I hope. But one thing that's been
Speaker 6: happening recently which are particularly appalling is the forced recruitment
Speaker 6: of Bahinga Peoplehinga people by that same military, right, can
Speaker 6: you explain what's been going on?
Speaker 4: So the the conscriptions law has been reactivated. It has
Speaker 4: been there large by the previous military cats, but it
Speaker 4: has not been active and so since the Hunter has
Speaker 4: been falling apart and collapsing. Not only were the kind
Speaker 4: of state across the country there wherever they fight, they lose,
Speaker 4: and they are battalions by battalion. That's uh, that's running
Speaker 4: away the to Thailand, running away to India, running away
Speaker 4: to Bangladesh and and putting white black. And there are
Speaker 4: several casualties. And apparently the Hunter became the largest military
Speaker 4: equipment supplier to the to the revolutionary force where we
Speaker 4: did not get we did not get international support when
Speaker 4: when young people actress, models and writers points decided to
Speaker 4: to go to the forest to do to fight against
Speaker 4: this cunter and there was little to no international support.
Speaker 4: And we have been struggling to to to equip ourselve
Speaker 4: to to fight this center. And and of course the
Speaker 4: the resilience and the courage that young people had and
Speaker 4: the tactical and strategy capacity that the ethnic Resistance organization
Speaker 4: had in combined became a factor. UH to have an
Speaker 4: strategic sourcing of the military equipment and Hunter like battalion
Speaker 4: by battalion. You don't need to buy the weapons and
Speaker 4: military tang and things like that. You you go and
Speaker 4: fight one battalion and they run away or they die
Speaker 4: and then you take over the That's how the the
Speaker 4: the whole old thing started in in In then when
Speaker 4: they are losing uh, they reactivated the conscriptions law and
Speaker 4: started to in the of making mandustry everyone to be
Speaker 4: serving by force in the military by terms. And of
Speaker 4: course when it's come to a kind of state or
Speaker 4: a kind of state. The six hundred thousand RINGA and
Speaker 4: T one hundred and fifty to sixty thousand of them
Speaker 4: has been in concentration camp, consolidated in one place with
Speaker 4: movement restrictions, no access to education, healthcare and things like that,
Speaker 4: where they have been living more than a decade in
Speaker 4: some of those camp and villages where those people who
Speaker 4: are not in the camp as well has been imposed
Speaker 4: by additional movement restrictions, so you don't need to really
Speaker 4: go and mobilize and people to be forcefully recruiting. And
Speaker 4: at the beginning the junta went to them and to
Speaker 4: give them sort of show them incentive of like you
Speaker 4: will become the citizens and will give that and we'll
Speaker 4: give that, and you need to fight against the Arcan
Speaker 4: army and of course the grassroot the leader community leader
Speaker 4: responded in a way that they need to respond to
Speaker 4: reject the the the requests from from the from the military,
Speaker 4: hometown and mality started to of course, I posted by
Speaker 4: using the force and as I mentioned earlier, they will
Speaker 4: need to like when you have consultilated people that amount
Speaker 4: of young people doing nothing and you just go and
Speaker 4: catch them and put them on a truck, and some
Speaker 4: of them don't know where they are going because their
Speaker 4: whole life has been in this camp. Like when you're
Speaker 4: six years old and you are now eighteen and you're
Speaker 4: it's an industry for you to be serving in the
Speaker 4: military and you don't know what is happening in our
Speaker 4: side of your camp. Because yeah, so that's how really
Speaker 4: the the and then we got these news and of
Speaker 4: course we have been talking different community leaders and the
Speaker 4: community has been approaching to us as a government and
Speaker 4: we make uh. There are several media coverage as well.
Speaker 4: Then the military started to say that these Bengalis are
Speaker 4: not referring to the Hinga, are not the cities. Therefore
Speaker 4: there is no way that we make them served in
Speaker 4: the in the military. So those are fakings that. So
Speaker 4: they use these States propaganda TV channel and the state
Speaker 4: newspaper which is now under control of SUCK to deny that.
Speaker 4: And on seventh October, seventh sorry, seven March, the the
Speaker 4: those who they have conscripted, uh more than five hundred
Speaker 4: has been brought into into the commanding office of the
Speaker 4: Hunter to be training in full uniform. Some of them
Speaker 4: those inside there has got managed to get internet internet
Speaker 4: access and then said to me the video footage, what
Speaker 4: is happening on the inside there, So I posted that
Speaker 4: on my Twitter and and then it's it's spread it
Speaker 4: from there and then we called them like their denial
Speaker 4: initially the lives that they have been putting by denying
Speaker 4: that Roo we're not conscripted, all was wrong. And then
Speaker 4: a few days later they have been sent to the
Speaker 4: front line to fight against a And then there are
Speaker 4: hundreds of those rough hingers who were who died in
Speaker 4: this front line while and the Hunter. The Cake came
Speaker 4: back a few days later talking to their family saying
Speaker 4: that Okaye, hundred plus people has died and we don't
Speaker 4: know who is who and when we bring your dead body,
Speaker 4: you will be able to be identified. And the first
Speaker 4: dead body that they brought and handed over to the
Speaker 4: clumby and the community leader with one million jets, which
Speaker 4: is three hundred and fifty dollars plus one hundred kg
Speaker 4: of rice as an incentive for the life that they
Speaker 4: have given in the fighting. So that's the situations and
Speaker 4: we can of course continue.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's very bleak, isn't it? So this and we've
Speaker 6: seen like just today actually people have been online today
Speaker 6: there was a protest in Rapine State somewhere for a
Speaker 6: hindred people rejecting the raconomy. Can can you explain like
Speaker 6: that that might not be what it seems on the
Speaker 6: face of it, right? Can can you explain what might
Speaker 6: be happening there?
Speaker 4: The situations in ra kind of state has been very
Speaker 4: much complex because there are there are hidden factors being
Speaker 4: created ar officially created by the Hunter. For so long
Speaker 4: from the two thousand and twenty twelve twenty seventeen, between
Speaker 4: these different communities, there has been always interdependency and social
Speaker 4: equation to somewhat level. But HUNDA always used the divide
Speaker 4: and rule methodology to bring the conflict between these community
Speaker 4: and hate each other and then they can carry out
Speaker 4: what they need to do as a powerholder. And of
Speaker 4: course when the Arcan army is getting greater control over
Speaker 4: a kind of state and the hunter is losing the
Speaker 4: the Melochiy hunt and it used all tactics that they have,
Speaker 4: including the the the UH, the intercommunal tensions, and and
Speaker 4: so they there are Ruhinga, few Ringia maybe who has
Speaker 4: businesssess with this hunter, are being used as a proxy
Speaker 4: to push pressure or pressure on the Ruhinga and to organize.
Speaker 4: And so that's why the protest started a few years
Speaker 4: ago in one of the townships in the China state.
Speaker 4: We're eighty to ninety percent are Rringa and claiming that
Speaker 4: we don't want war and we don't want ee. And
Speaker 4: of course this can be happening artificially organically, and it's
Speaker 4: so artificial, and anyone who looks into this video footage,
Speaker 4: I can see that the Ruhingia never had in their life,
Speaker 4: like those who are protesting never know what is means.
Speaker 4: So a freedom of expression means And suddenly in one
Speaker 4: random morning, one hundred hundred of Rwinga, including minors, children
Speaker 4: coming on the street and protesting is not something normal.
Speaker 4: It can happen without the U And of course majority
Speaker 4: of the of the Rhingia are peace loving people and
Speaker 4: they want Burma to be an inclusive federal democracy and
Speaker 4: they want to be part of it and weird. That's
Speaker 4: why I myself as a Ruhinga taking a leading rule
Speaker 4: in the government as the first Rhina holding back ministrial
Speaker 4: positions in the cabinet since nineteen sixty two. And of
Speaker 4: course the Ruhingo equally want the to end the dictatorship
Speaker 4: once and for all because that very junta has been
Speaker 4: committing trustity scrims, including crimes against humanity and to genocides
Speaker 4: to Uringa. This is the very same military who devoted
Speaker 4: a million ringa killed more than twenty four thousands of
Speaker 4: people in burning children's life in twenty seventeen. So in
Speaker 4: which way that's the collectively will come and ascend with
Speaker 4: this hunt were the whole country. So this is not
Speaker 4: this is really not something organic, and this is artificial.
Speaker 4: This is too big and this is so like Hunter
Speaker 4: made to fit into be fitting into their political propaganda.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think one has to when I was
Speaker 6: looking at things in memr be aware that the Hunter
Speaker 6: just doesn't care about lying. It's something they've done for
Speaker 6: a long time. I apparently can't download iHeart podcasts in
Speaker 6: Memo now, like someone tried to download our podcast there
Speaker 6: and so they had to use a VPN. But yeah,
Speaker 6: they manipulate the media environment heavily, like you can read
Speaker 6: Hunter newspapers and some of its comically false. But one
Speaker 6: thing I did want to talk about is like when
Speaker 6: I talk to young PDF fighters, and I've spoken to
Speaker 6: dozens of them now, people who are Koreny, people who
Speaker 6: are Korenne, people who are a people who are kitchin
Speaker 6: they a lot of them say to me that, like
Speaker 6: what happened in twenty seventeen was atrocious and at the
Speaker 6: time they didn't realize because of this manipulated media environment,
Speaker 6: they didn't realize that the way the Rahinda were being
Speaker 6: treated was so appalling, and that now they're very upset
Speaker 6: about what happened. And like for them, I guess the
Speaker 6: litmus test for like a future for Burma is one
Speaker 6: that can include Rahinja people and so like with that
Speaker 6: in mind, I guess we've seen this kind of changing
Speaker 6: of language, right where previously they were referred to as
Speaker 6: Bangladeshi and then now they're referred to as Muslim or
Speaker 6: Hinga people. I guess can you just explain, like what
Speaker 6: is the n UGPDF kind of like how how do
Speaker 6: we ensure independence and safety for a Hingo people in
Speaker 6: Myanmar in a federal, democratic future without a dictatorship.
Speaker 4: We're in a context of identity politics where the identity
Speaker 4: is so much associated with very rights, whether it's political, social,
Speaker 4: and economical right that you deserve and what you need
Speaker 4: to give back as an active of the citizens and
Speaker 4: obligations to the country that you belong. Therefore, the identity
Speaker 4: the Rhinga is a primary thing for Ruhinga to be
Speaker 4: enjoying equal freedom and to be able to contribute equally
Speaker 4: as others in the nation building process. And of course
Speaker 4: before twenty seventeen, even before that, there has been a
Speaker 4: lot of misinformation. Disinformation is propagram that are widespread state
Speaker 4: sponsored against the Rhinga to that could be misleading and
Speaker 4: incitement of violence. And the Troum Bengali is a rum
Speaker 4: that's reefer that you're coming from Bangladesh illegally and you're
Speaker 4: illegally as you settling. That's how the terms came from. False.
Speaker 2: It's a false accusation.
Speaker 4: It's false accusations. And the the the Ruhingia people has
Speaker 4: existed in the kind of states side by side with
Speaker 4: your kind people, even Burma became Burma and they are
Speaker 4: historical facts that there are so many undeniable things that
Speaker 4: you could you could look into and into into various
Speaker 4: historical facts. And so the in between. Of course, the
Speaker 4: Rhingia the trum become illegal and the military denied it,
Speaker 4: rejected it, and then they started to use the tram
Speaker 4: Bengali and the most of the Burmese people fall into
Speaker 4: that trap. And even somewhere either silent in this horrific
Speaker 4: genocideal attack in twenty seventeen or somewhere taking side of
Speaker 4: a military at that time that that is okay to
Speaker 4: kill and it's okay to And of course these are
Speaker 4: being being propelled by all misinformations and disinformation that our
Speaker 4: earlier mentioned and twenty twenty one attempted could happened. And
Speaker 4: that's where a new perspective is being offered to the
Speaker 4: people of Me and Mar, because the same militory that
Speaker 4: has been carrying out atrocities clans against the Rhingia and
Speaker 4: other minorities came to Largerma people doing the same thing.
Speaker 4: So what has been told to us by the Ruhinga
Speaker 4: and the religious and ethnic minority in the end Mar
Speaker 4: for the decade came to be true, and that's how
Speaker 4: the acceptance of the Ruhinga has started to grow. Of course,
Speaker 4: it's not to the level that we would be satisfied
Speaker 4: with yet, it's a process and there is so much
Speaker 4: to unlearn because one provoking factor like attempted to should
Speaker 4: like wouldn't fix a problem, a problem that has been
Speaker 4: there for for decades. And a National Unity government declared
Speaker 4: that we accept the chum Ruhinga, and there has been
Speaker 4: a policy stating very clearly in twenty twenty one June,
Speaker 4: and that policy to be implemented of course when the
Speaker 4: situation is conducive, and there are significant challenges with the
Speaker 4: territorial control and things like that when it's come. But again,
Speaker 4: the momentum that I mentioned we got as a result
Speaker 4: of extreme evolutions need to be maintained in the higher scale.
Speaker 4: That's not only the ruhinga and anything that's wrong, that's
Speaker 4: primarily that's principle and value are strong. I need to
Speaker 4: be able to see it wrong, regardless of whoever it
Speaker 4: is and regardless of race and religion. If we are
Speaker 4: talking about federal, inclusive democracy, we cannot preach to our
Speaker 4: people or international community saying that support us or asking
Speaker 4: for support or be a part of this movement where
Speaker 4: we see a sepri floud fishers and inclusive federal democracy.
Speaker 4: We're actual values that we are not practicing by ourselves.
Speaker 4: So before we preach, we need to we need to
Speaker 4: act upon those principles by ourselves. And overall, I would say,
Speaker 4: the all the loss that we had, including life and livelihood,
Speaker 4: that hundred and hundred of people, thousands of people has
Speaker 4: been killed, jailed, and hundreds of villagers, township has been destroyed,
Speaker 4: the good thing that we got is the the these
Speaker 4: consciousness on the morality.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: And if we're able to accelerate that consciousness at the
Speaker 4: greatest scale, that's where we will be able to maintain
Speaker 4: the values and principle of the inclusive federal democracy. That
Speaker 4: would be the pillar to maintain this as a process.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think. So it's really fascinating to talk to
Speaker 6: young people talking to some manly PDF people not so
Speaker 6: long ago, and they were like, oh, yeah, well, when
Speaker 6: we left, we were told that like the Tang would
Speaker 6: hate us because we're Burmese and they would fight us.
Speaker 6: And then they're like, oh, they're really nice. Like this
Speaker 6: is a guy right next to me and they're like
Speaker 6: because they're joined up together. Now the PDFs and and
Speaker 6: the eros are largely fighting like side by side against
Speaker 6: is there like the PDF forces present in rakind state
Speaker 6: as well.
Speaker 4: No, there is Arkan Army particularly which is an allies
Speaker 4: with the with the we have been there have been
Speaker 4: multiple intract like you know, there are we have Alliance
Speaker 4: Relations Committee that we deal with all the alliance as
Speaker 4: National Unity Government and of course they have been playing
Speaker 4: in an important role in defeating the content. And there
Speaker 4: is no PDF in in the Kinda state.
Speaker 6: Okay, Yeah, so it's a little different there. Other often
Speaker 6: the PDF and the eras are very similar in fight
Speaker 6: side by side.
Speaker 4: Also, our army is not tracked alone in a state.
Speaker 4: They're almost also in in Sharna State and they're yes,
Speaker 4: fighting with not only in the kind Of state. So
Speaker 4: like when we talk about like even though the physically
Speaker 4: PDFs are not there, it doesn't mean that there is
Speaker 4: no military connect to military connections between the ethnic organizations
Speaker 4: that exists across the country.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and like we've seen that a lot since October
Speaker 6: and like since the Three brother Alliance started their campaign
Speaker 6: that moves hunter forces to one place and that allows
Speaker 6: other people like the KARENI to take advantage of the
Speaker 6: way those forces have moved and they've liberated huge parts
Speaker 6: of their territory. So it's all joined, I guess.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The tricky part that they have used in the
Speaker 4: past is like hidden cut, is that they will do
Speaker 4: sea fight in one part of the country and they
Speaker 4: will allocate all of their resources in another part of
Speaker 4: the country, and where they will defeat or they will
Speaker 4: at least like come to bargaining positions, let's not fight anymore,
Speaker 4: and and you stay where you are and don't don't
Speaker 4: try to like you know, and and and it's hunta
Speaker 4: who violate again all all these agreements that usually so
Speaker 4: and and this time it's so coordinated across the country
Speaker 4: that the junta like cannot be able to position themselves
Speaker 4: or estrategize themselves or put then themselves in the tactical
Speaker 4: positions they're all tactic did not work in the modern
Speaker 4: coordinations of the PDF and Ethnic Resistance Organization.
Speaker 6: Yeah, No, They've tried multiple times to have that little
Speaker 6: individuals fires and it hasn't worked. So I wanted to
Speaker 6: ask just just to finish up people I think who
Speaker 6: listen to this will be very familiar with the situation
Speaker 6: in Meama, and they want to help, and they see
Speaker 6: that the international community is doing nothing, and I think
Speaker 6: a lot of people are rightly very upset about that.
Speaker 6: So what what can people do to help and especially
Speaker 6: to advocate for a hanger people.
Speaker 4: Particularly when it's come to the Rhinia people Ringer people
Speaker 4: crisis is so much interconnected with Burmese democratization process. Ruhindia
Speaker 4: will not be able to have a life that dignified, say,
Speaker 4: and in their place of origin unless the Burma is
Speaker 4: solely in the hand of a civilian government. So the
Speaker 4: democratization process that whole verm is attempting to make need
Speaker 4: to be supported by international community. As I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 4: so far we got little to no international support. And
Speaker 4: on the on the Ruhinga crisis as well, there's one
Speaker 4: million people in Bangladesh where their Russians are cuts to
Speaker 4: eight dollars per month per person and which is a
Speaker 4: cup of coffee in the United States, and there is
Speaker 4: a greater danger of hunger restorations and malnitary nutrition and
Speaker 4: UH and so many other social economic problems that would
Speaker 4: have an impact on the regional security stability and things
Speaker 4: like that if the shortfall remains UH funding short call
Speaker 4: remains for for for for for for for the India.
Speaker 4: That's on the Humanustrian and and of course Rhingia need
Speaker 4: to be politically organized in order to be to be
Speaker 4: fitting into the changing political dynamic of Meanmar. Duringia has
Speaker 4: been oppressed, they were not able to study organizations, they
Speaker 4: were not able to be elevating themselves. So all these
Speaker 4: societal leadership aspects need to be supported, including having a
Speaker 4: company like having an organized political platform for for Ringa
Speaker 4: which will be able to represent Shuringa in the larger
Speaker 4: political table UH, ensuring their voices are heart and there
Speaker 4: able to equally take the rights that they deserve and
Speaker 4: more importantly equal equally able to contribute to a decision
Speaker 4: that will have an impact on their life. And the
Speaker 4: United States has determined the crimes against Ruhinga as genocide
Speaker 4: two years before. And of course the genocide discrimination does
Speaker 4: not simply is an announcement. It's come with the moral
Speaker 4: and legal responsibility. So we do want to require the
Speaker 4: United States and it's people to formally extent on the
Speaker 4: moral and legal obligations that it has in ensuring that
Speaker 4: the Rhinga are able to live equally peacefully and more importantly,
Speaker 4: the justice that they deserve on the physical and mental
Speaker 4: damage that happened as part of the genocide. And it
Speaker 4: was picked in twenty seventeen, it's continued to be happening
Speaker 4: today and even today one hundred and fifty people were
Speaker 4: arriving in Archie, Indonesia, where the Indonesian people who were
Speaker 4: showing greater humanity in opening their arms and parts to
Speaker 4: be accepting Ruhinga, are denying the rhinga. So for the Ruhinga,
Speaker 4: there is little to no space to be accommodated, both
Speaker 4: in regional and international and local setting, and it is
Speaker 4: very important that we are able to tackle and navigate
Speaker 4: these issues together with the international community in an innovative, effective,
Speaker 4: efficient and sustainable way for the sake of humanity. And
Speaker 4: there are competing priorities across the world, but the international
Speaker 4: community is we are so aware of that international community
Speaker 4: is capable of doing more than one thing at a time.
Speaker 4: It doesn't have to be either or.
Speaker 6: No, it can be both and it should be right
Speaker 6: like obviously people are very concerned with the plight of
Speaker 6: Palestinian people, rightly so at the moment, but yes, we
Speaker 6: should remember that as a Muslim people have been subject
Speaker 6: to genocide for the last needed for seven years, as
Speaker 6: I suppose, and it's ongoing, and they deserve our support
Speaker 6: and solidarity as well. Yeah, I hope, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 6: mean it does seem like I guess a little more
Speaker 6: hopeful than it was even a couple of years ago
Speaker 6: that there will be a democratic mean and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the journey is is almost think and what we
Speaker 4: need is greater international support. Like support doesn't mean just
Speaker 4: you know, releasing the statement, meaningful comprehensive support that we
Speaker 4: are able to defeat this Manta once and for all
Speaker 4: for the sake of people of Me and Mark fifty
Speaker 4: plus million people giving the price at the highest possible
Speaker 4: price in their life that include again the lives and livelihood.
Speaker 4: An international community was not doing more than condemnations for
Speaker 4: releasing a statement of concern over the last three years.
Speaker 4: It's time to act and international community again has to
Speaker 4: answer this question to next generations when there's a questions
Speaker 4: on the morality we're the internetional community. When the genocide
Speaker 4: comes against community and work careme has been happening to
Speaker 4: meally anything send people in the eyes of international community.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, I hope they do. And it's incredible the
Speaker 6: progress that has been made without that support.
Speaker 1: And I think.
Speaker 6: It's just incredible to me that even I remember in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty one talking to people who were just beginning
Speaker 6: their fight, and to see how far they've come is outstanding. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and yeah, people should be very proud of that. But
Speaker 6: it doesn't mean that they don't need more support.
Speaker 4: They do.
Speaker 6: Doesn't mean that they don't need surface to our missiles.
Speaker 2: They do.
Speaker 6: Like, yeah, that it's the thing that we should be doing.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate
Speaker 6: your time and your insight into this. Is there anywhere
Speaker 6: where people can find you online if they were to
Speaker 6: follow on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they can follow me on my tutor and Facebook
Speaker 4: and I it's my tutor is a K two okay,
Speaker 4: and my my Facebook is like my name. If you
Speaker 4: type my moo it will appear. So yeah. Yeah, looking
Speaker 4: forward to seeing you in near future. Yeah, thanks, thank you,
Speaker 4: thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: You're welcome, welcome.
Speaker 4: Let's take it out here.
Speaker 5: The podcast being recorded to a page of pain killers.
Speaker 5: I'm your host, via Wong, I'm fucking dying.
Speaker 6: Yeah it would be yeah, yeah, Phantalem episode even waiting
Speaker 6: for it here it is.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And the other thing that's dying was dying has died
Speaker 5: sort of was a bunch of French colonists in Algeria.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the French Empire as a whole. One could say, yeah,
Speaker 5: thank God, Jesus Christ, why did you let these people
Speaker 5: have an empire? Terrible idea?
Speaker 6: Yeah, not an empire the abroad France, right, like like
Speaker 6: the little parts of France which just happened to be
Speaker 6: in Africa, totally a normal thing, which particular part of
Speaker 6: the French Empire? Are we talking about it? Many many
Speaker 6: such cases of French French Empire taking l's. Not that
Speaker 6: that's unique, to be fair, also a British empire to
Speaker 6: the load of l's.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So today we're talking about Algeria, and I think one
Speaker 5: of the things that I sort of realized about how
Speaker 5: the Algerian Revolution is remembered in the.
Speaker 2: West is okay.
Speaker 5: So there's there's the kind of the Frank Herbert react
Speaker 5: where they saw people who were Muslim in the streets
Speaker 5: and were like, holy shit, it went insane for seventy years. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: to be fair, to be fair, that was also poorly
Speaker 5: partly being driven mad by the Portland Dunes, which, like
Speaker 5: you know, like I get sometimes sometimes you're driven, you're
Speaker 5: driven completely insane by dunes. But you know, so there's
Speaker 5: that's that's there's a sort of reactionary memory of it.
Speaker 5: There's a sort of memory that functions in inside of
Speaker 5: like the American military where you know, Algeria's remember it
Speaker 5: is one of those sort of like examples of failed.
Speaker 2: Kind of insurgency.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then there's there's the memory inside of the
Speaker 5: American left, which is largely confined to Fenn and the
Speaker 5: movie The Battle of Algiers.
Speaker 6: Yep, classic movie to be.
Speaker 5: Fair, Yeah, great movie, like nothing nothing, a good good movie. However, Kama,
Speaker 5: this is a real issue because the Battle of Algiers again,
Speaker 5: great movie ends in nineteen fifty seven. Finan great theorist
Speaker 5: dies in nineteen sixty one. Now notably, Algeria gains independence
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 2: So okay.
Speaker 5: The issue with this is that people kind of broadly
Speaker 5: know the outlines of the First Algerian Revolution, but the
Speaker 5: Second Algerian Revolution, the one where the Algerian working class
Speaker 5: season is the control of the means of production, attempts
Speaker 5: to run them Autonomous League is just has completely faded
Speaker 5: into the mists of history. I talk about it, no
Speaker 5: one has any idea what the fuck I'm talking about.
Speaker 5: And this is kind of startling, because you know, up
Speaker 5: until there's probably like there's like a four year span
Speaker 5: where the Algerian Revolution is the sort of like capital S,
Speaker 5: capital R social revolution, like it's the big one, is
Speaker 5: the one people all over the world taking inspiration from,
Speaker 5: and then it kind of, you know, it flounders out
Speaker 5: for reasons that we're going to talk about, and also
Speaker 5: the culture revolution starts and everyone lashes onto that. But
Speaker 5: it's sort of fascinating to me that this the second
Speaker 5: part of the revolution and the part that everyone was
Speaker 5: really excited about, which is the core of the revolution
Speaker 5: being worker self management, and that being the sort of
Speaker 5: great theoretical innovation of Algeria and socialism that has just
Speaker 5: completely faded for memory. It's just gone, and so today
Speaker 5: we're talking about that revolution. Unfortunately, one of the most
Speaker 5: detailed studies on this I'm can be citing from a
Speaker 5: lot is in Clegg's Worker Self Management in Algeria. Now,
Speaker 5: this is a good book. However, Comma Clegg is uh,
Speaker 5: He's a very specific kind of crimogeny Marxist guy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm familiar with that kind of guy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so like the back third of this book
Speaker 5: is him engaged in a protracted ideological war with phenomen
Speaker 5: over the nature of revolutionary consciousness, which is largely pointless
Speaker 5: and goes nowhere. So many sues, you know, but it
Speaker 5: is a very very detailed and very useful account of
Speaker 5: what actually happened after the First Revolution, like after the
Speaker 5: French are forced to pull out of Algeria, and what
Speaker 5: happens effectively is well, we need to go back a
Speaker 5: little tiny bit, so there are you know, there is
Speaker 5: a staggering slaughter of people who attempt to resist French colonialism.
Speaker 5: Like a lot of the sort of techniques that are
Speaker 5: going to be used in Vietnam, they are going to
Speaker 5: be used all over the world. And kind of insurgencies
Speaker 5: are developed in Algeria in this period. I'm going to
Speaker 5: read a quote from Clagg about what they were doing.
Speaker 5: The use of air power in napalm to clear cover
Speaker 5: made movement inside the country almost impossible. The construction of
Speaker 5: mind and electrified barriers along the border with Tunisian and
Speaker 5: Morocco kept the better trained and armed elements of the
Speaker 5: Liberation Nationale from coming to support the gorillas and moving
Speaker 5: in supplies. One of the most successful moves encountering goerrilla
Speaker 5: activity was the policy of regroupment, initiated by General Chalet.
Speaker 5: This strategy, learned from the British and Malaysia, involved moving
Speaker 5: the rural population out of areas favorable to the gorillas
Speaker 5: and resettling them in camps on their military guard, and
Speaker 5: estimated two million peasants were treated this way, creating vast
Speaker 5: social and economic problems for the future. So, like they
Speaker 5: put two million people in concentration camps.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, according it like Grey group more is a
Speaker 6: a fucking exercise in like and marketing. Like rarely have
Speaker 6: I seen something so nefari named, like we're regrouping them
Speaker 6: parentheses in a fucking concentration camp.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And this is this is a strategy that you know,
Speaker 5: so the British sort of start doing this in Malaysia.
Speaker 5: A lot of it's derived from attempts to counter you know.
Speaker 5: And this isn't really an episode about that ter and revolution,
Speaker 5: but I want to talk about this a little bit.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's design as a way to counter sort
Speaker 5: of MAOIs insurgency campaigns, which is the sort of you know,
Speaker 5: the becomes the new template for like the season that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and it's because it works really well, and you know,
Speaker 5: like the key thing of Maoist like well, I mean
Speaker 5: there's a couple of things obviously, but like one of
Speaker 5: the key elements of it is this is this line
Speaker 5: for Mao is it like the gorilla moves to the
Speaker 5: people like a fish moves through the sea. Right, So
Speaker 5: it's about like it's about building social basis such that
Speaker 5: you know, gorillas can move in and out of communities
Speaker 5: and not get turned in and stuff and use them
Speaker 5: as terrain.
Speaker 6: I've had that particular mao phrase paraphrase to me. I
Speaker 6: think sometimes by people who are where it comes from
Speaker 6: MoU sometimes people who probably have just sort of come
Speaker 6: to it through their own understanding or or heard it
Speaker 6: but not realize the source of it. By people who
Speaker 6: are not certainly not Maoists. All over the world, like
Speaker 6: I've heard it in the Middle East, I've heard it
Speaker 6: in Africa, I've heard it in Asia. It's it's it
Speaker 6: is a very important thing and like it, Yeah, it
Speaker 6: does make Garrida war. If you can remember the population.
Speaker 5: This is something that's propagated through because because of the
Speaker 5: success of Mao's like gorilla insurgency, this is something that's
Speaker 5: propagated through I mean through through obviously, like through through
Speaker 5: communist parties, but I mean like a lot of Islamist
Speaker 5: groups also pick it, like pick up a lot of
Speaker 5: the elements of it, because a lot of those groups
Speaker 5: are trained in uh the Plos camps in the Becker
Speaker 5: Valley in Jordan, and so like a lot of groups
Speaker 5: like all over the world of completely unrelated ideologies all
Speaker 5: sort of picked this stuff up. And the British response
Speaker 5: to this is the British are fighting a communist insurgency
Speaker 5: in Malaysia and they're like, Okay, we're gonna do concentration
Speaker 5: camps for our purposes. So obviously this is a a
Speaker 5: you know, this is an unfathomable atrocity, but it has
Speaker 5: enormous effects even after the war ends, because suddenly, you know, okay,
Speaker 5: like the war ends, the French are gone, but you know,
Speaker 5: two million people have been taken from their homes and
Speaker 5: locked in and locked in camps, and this has enormous
Speaker 5: you know, I mean, this is this is enormous economic
Speaker 5: effects and the second thing that has really sort of
Speaker 5: stunning economic effects are the Sore. There's been a class
Speaker 5: of people in Algeria called the Colognes who are basically
Speaker 5: the colonists. They're not actually all French, a lot of
Speaker 5: them are from other European countries, but they come to
Speaker 5: be this sort of hardcore French ultranationalist, sort of fascist
Speaker 5: turbo racists. I guess they're they're they're not quite the Rhodesians,
Speaker 5: but they're they're only not quite the Rhodesians because they
Speaker 5: didn't stay to fight it out. And when when the
Speaker 5: French lose the war, and when the French pull out,
Speaker 5: these people just flee, like all of them were talking,
Speaker 5: hundreds of thousands of people just are gone. I'm going
Speaker 5: to read another quote from Cleig, because you know, if
Speaker 5: these people had merely left, I think a lot of
Speaker 5: what's going to happen in this revolution goes a lot better.
Speaker 5: But they didn't just leave.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 5: In June, a policy of scorched earth was declared, inaugurating
Speaker 5: an orgy of destruction. With his dream crumbling, the colonist's
Speaker 5: response was to destroy this world, which I think is
Speaker 5: a really sort of elegant.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's you very well written,
Speaker 6: and it's funny. It's this thing that again, like you
Speaker 6: see replicated so often. There was this slogan that they
Speaker 6: used at the start the serience of a war like
Speaker 6: asado we bend in the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it's it's this real you know.
Speaker 5: So, so what what the what the colons end up
Speaker 5: doing is they end up just destroying, Yes, everything they
Speaker 5: can get their hands on. They're destroying houses, They're especially
Speaker 5: destroying any kind of sort of factory of technical equipment,
Speaker 5: anything they can find. They're burning their lighting on fire
Speaker 5: and someone and the other thing about Okay, so Luxuria
Speaker 5: is a colonial economy, right, and the structure of the
Speaker 5: colonial economy is such that you know, if you.
Speaker 2: Are a.
Speaker 5: Anyone who has any kind of technical or manager gerial
Speaker 5: experience are all colonists, right. Everyone else in the country
Speaker 5: is either doing subsistence farming or has been fed as
Speaker 5: like these this sort of like seasonal workers or really
Speaker 5: really badly paid sort of contract workers on the on
Speaker 5: these sort of like cash crap agricultural farms, a lot
Speaker 5: of orange production and.
Speaker 4: Stuff like that.
Speaker 5: And so when the colonists flee the country. Suddenly, like
Speaker 5: the entire technical managerial class, everyone with technical experience, and
Speaker 5: also all of the bosses and the entire bourgeoisie are
Speaker 5: just gone. And this takes everyone by surprise. The Ethelen
Speaker 5: had assumed the Ethelens the the kind of like umbrella
Speaker 5: organization that carried out the revolution. They it kind of
Speaker 5: falls apart very quickly because it's it's not really a
Speaker 5: coherent ideological group. It's just the sort of banner that
Speaker 5: everyone who is fighting kind of attaches themselves to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is quite common, right, like national friends or
Speaker 6: like popular friends very often do this post fore.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they are disintegrate. But but they had all
Speaker 5: expected that the colonists were going to stick around, and
Speaker 5: they don't because they're turbo racists.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: And then the thought of having to live in an
Speaker 5: Algeria world by Algeria, this was like, Nope, I will
Speaker 5: fucking literally light the world on fire and flee to France.
Speaker 5: You know what else is going to light the world
Speaker 5: on fire and cause people to flee to France.
Speaker 6: The products, products and services it's supporting to show.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so how how fucking good they are. It's gonna
Speaker 5: it's going to cause the world to burn and make
Speaker 5: people flee to France.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I have to think about that when they think
Speaker 6: about like how big my pile of gold is, I
Speaker 6: think that that match it's too small. I better just
Speaker 6: bend all down and move to France.
Speaker 5: And we are back now enter enter here. The heroes
Speaker 5: of this episode ode the workers Council, or very specifically,
Speaker 5: so this is this is a French this is a
Speaker 5: French colony. So in France and in Spain and in
Speaker 5: sort of I guess, the Romance languages. There, there was
Speaker 5: a concept called auto gision. I'm pronouncing it really badly
Speaker 5: because I'm reading the French version of it and trying
Speaker 5: to pronounce it half in Spanish, the only one of
Speaker 5: these languages I can even sort of speak. But it
Speaker 5: so it means self management, and it basically it has
Speaker 5: this context of of sort of like workers democratic self management.
Speaker 5: Right if you're if you're doing osteone, you're like the
Speaker 5: workers of a factory have taken over the factory and
Speaker 5: are running it themselves. The most prominent example and at
Speaker 5: this point of self management is Yugoslavia. Now this it's
Speaker 5: very Theoslavian version is very, very weird, but as a
Speaker 5: way basically to tell the Soviets to fuck off. Yugoslavia
Speaker 5: adopts a very different kind of model of socialism than
Speaker 5: everyone else's. So there are models based on the quote
Speaker 5: unquote the withering away of the state. So they're you know,
Speaker 5: you have basically these like reasonably democratic, like workers co
Speaker 5: ops that are the sort of that are sort of
Speaker 5: their productive basis of society. And these these co ops
Speaker 5: sort of compete against each other on the market. But
Speaker 5: other hand, there is a like a very large level
Speaker 5: of workers control that's different from you know, like the US,
Speaker 5: which is just a pure dictatorship of your boss in
Speaker 5: the workplace, tells you what to do, and if you
Speaker 5: don't do what you get fired. Yeah, and so Algeria
Speaker 5: gets there has their own version of self management. But
Speaker 5: unlike Algeria which was sort of effectively imposed by the
Speaker 5: top down for the Comnist party. In Algeria, what happens
Speaker 5: is you have this this enormous mass of workers who
Speaker 5: used to work on these plantations, used to work in factories.
Speaker 5: There's these huge colony lagger cultural estates. And what happens
Speaker 5: is with with the entire ruling class gone and when
Speaker 5: I say the entire ruling class, we're talking from all
Speaker 5: the way up from you know, the highest level government officials,
Speaker 5: through all all of your sort of capitalist bosses, right
Speaker 5: down to sort of the middle management guys are gone.
Speaker 5: All those people just have disappeared. So what happens is
Speaker 5: workers start taking over all of their all of their workplaces,
Speaker 5: and they start forming workers councils. Right now, this is
Speaker 5: this is driven largely by I mean there's there's there's
Speaker 5: there's a few different drivers. There's we'll get to the
Speaker 5: ideological aspect. A lot of it is that these people
Speaker 5: have no money and no one else is going to
Speaker 5: run it. So they're they're the workers who have now
Speaker 5: sees all the stuff are like, Okay, well we're gonna
Speaker 5: we're gonna get the money we need to survive by
Speaker 5: running by running all the stuff ourselves.
Speaker 1: Yea.
Speaker 5: And so this sort of starts ineteen sixty two, and
Speaker 5: it it sweeps across the country very quickly. I mean
Speaker 5: there's a lot of real regions where it never really
Speaker 5: takes hold. But largely what's happening is that permanent workers
Speaker 5: who had been who had been workers at these firms
Speaker 5: seize control of them. This has benefits and downsize. The
Speaker 5: benefit of it is so there's an attempt by the
Speaker 5: sort of the new Algerian sort of bushwise either the
Speaker 5: sort of like small faction of Algerian capitalists to buy
Speaker 5: up all this land. And there's a much of really
Speaker 5: funny stories of these guys buying these estates and showing
Speaker 5: up and the workers conn they just kicking them out. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 5: this is extremely funny. Yeah, there's also issues. So part
Speaker 5: of what's going on is this is this is the
Speaker 5: sort of this is the permanent workers taking over the
Speaker 5: stuff with their people, right, and so a lot of
Speaker 5: times like they'll they'll kick out seasonal workers because yeah,
Speaker 5: so it's not it's not perfect, and there's a lot
Speaker 5: of issues with it, right because this is this is
Speaker 5: all being formed effectively, spontaneously about a bunch of extremely
Speaker 5: desperate people.
Speaker 6: That's what I'm just so obviously like because it's me.
Speaker 6: The point of comparison I'm thinking of is the Spanish
Speaker 6: Civil War, right, Yeah, and worker is self management. But
Speaker 6: there you have a workforce which is which has been
Speaker 6: working towards collectivization for more than a decade in some cases.
Speaker 6: And also like this is the point actually gets missed
Speaker 6: a lot in online discourse about the Spanish Civil War,
Speaker 6: perhaps because people don't know as much as they think
Speaker 6: they do. That like, there were anarchists in all kinds
Speaker 6: of roles, Like when people talk about their rooty column
Speaker 6: or whatever like, there were absolutely anarchists, noncommissioned officers from
Speaker 6: the military who they relied on heavily for advice. And
Speaker 6: the same is true with the collectivized workplaces, right that
Speaker 6: there were anarchists in many roles, you know, in shop
Speaker 6: stewards and things like that, obviously not in like the
Speaker 6: higher management roles. I think, yeah, doing that is kind
Speaker 6: of incompatible with anarchism, but obviously what we're dealing here
Speaker 6: with is anarchosyndicalism. For the most part, the fire was
Speaker 6: more of a purest anarchist group, but there you had
Speaker 6: people who've been working towards this for a long time,
Speaker 6: who have been planning for it, and who did have
Speaker 6: people with a variety of experiences in I think oversight
Speaker 6: might be a better word than the management preps or
Speaker 6: like sort of organization. But they were very successful. But
Speaker 6: that didn't just happen overnight. It often gets presented as
Speaker 6: if it did as if on like the eighteenth of July,
Speaker 6: these people were just sort of going to work and
Speaker 6: by the twentieth they were fully formed the anarchists running
Speaker 6: their own workplaces. But that's absolutely not the case.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and jud jury is the exact opposite of this,
Speaker 5: which is, yeah, there's there's a very low level of
Speaker 5: political consciousness. There's organization is almost non existent, because so
Speaker 5: I mean the kinds of organizations that it existed are
Speaker 5: you know, you have these sort of vanguard cells, but
Speaker 5: those are largely rural. And then you have there are
Speaker 5: some unions, but they're not very they're not very large
Speaker 5: because they've been outlawed. Yeah, break ground, Yeah, like unbelievablexpression.
Speaker 5: Colonial context is extremely important.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, obviously Nia may Or I is blaming Algerian workers
Speaker 6: for not being Catalana.
Speaker 5: No, yeah, like this is this is this is the
Speaker 5: Frenchest fault and and you know, but but any such cases. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but this seizure really takes everyone by surprise because all
Speaker 5: all of the sort of leaders of fl and all
Speaker 5: leaders of the various factions had assumed that either they
Speaker 5: were going to sort of do I don't know, there's
Speaker 5: ideological conflict. But they they they all assume that they're
Speaker 5: going to do some kind of like giant state led
Speaker 5: industrialization project, right, whether it's a socialist one, whether it's
Speaker 5: the more Islamist one, and then suddenly they're they're now all,
Speaker 5: you know, it's like, okay, well your economy is now
Speaker 5: on the Yugoslavian uh self management model because.
Speaker 2: All of these workers have just seized all their workplaces.
Speaker 5: Now that there are there there are a few organizations
Speaker 5: that are are politically very supportive of this. The UGTA,
Speaker 5: which is Algeria's big sort of trade union, are very
Speaker 5: politically socialist and they they are really the only people
Speaker 5: in this entire country who are who are an organized
Speaker 5: political body who actually want to see this thing work,
Speaker 5: and so they do a lot of work helping me,
Speaker 5: helping workers set up their their committees and spreading the revolution.
Speaker 5: Their plan is to use this against any attempt to
Speaker 5: set up basically a dictatorship by uh, you know, it's okay.
Speaker 5: And this is where it gets sort of interesting because
Speaker 5: very explicitly they are trying to stave off sort of
Speaker 5: Soviet style socialisticatorship, right they are, And their plan is
Speaker 5: We're going to use we're going to use the workers
Speaker 5: councils as the as the basis of of an actual
Speaker 5: sort of workers democracy against again against the sort of
Speaker 5: orthodox like Marcus Leninist stuff. And this is another thing
Speaker 5: that's going on too, is the army is a lot
Speaker 5: more orthodox Marcist Leninists than and then either the workers
Speaker 5: committees with the unions and so a lot in a
Speaker 5: lot of parts of the countries in the West, the
Speaker 5: army just sort of rolls through, knocks off the workers
Speaker 5: committees and seizes the land for itself. And that's a fiasco.
Speaker 5: But now now pretty very quickly Ben Bella, who emerges
Speaker 5: as as the sort of as the leader of Algeria
Speaker 5: after a set of political maneuvering that we're not going
Speaker 5: to get into here, is basically forced to and in
Speaker 5: nineteen sixty three set a bunch of decrees saying that, yeah,
Speaker 5: these guys are people who run the economy, et cetera,
Speaker 5: et cetera. But there's there I want to talk. I
Speaker 5: want to actually get into something that is really not
Speaker 5: talked about in ninety nine percent of the accounts of
Speaker 5: this stuff, which is how do these councils actually work?
Speaker 5: Because spoiler alert. This whole thing is going to fail
Speaker 5: and all these people are going to be crushed. And
Speaker 5: a lot of that has to do with how this
Speaker 5: thing's set up, which is very badly because it is
Speaker 5: a system designed by Marxists, and they're very sympathetic Marksist
Speaker 5: to a broad extent.
Speaker 2: But unfortunately the way that these that this is set.
Speaker 5: Up is that, Okay, so there's an assembly, right, that's like,
Speaker 5: all the workers in the firm are in this assembly.
Speaker 5: The assembly elects this worker's council, which has like ten people,
Speaker 5: and then that council elects the management Committee, which is
Speaker 5: the people who actually do the management. So it has
Speaker 5: a president and there's also a director supposed to represent
Speaker 5: the interest of the state or whatever. And and the
Speaker 5: issue with this is that it's designed specifically to keep
Speaker 5: power out of the hands of workers directly. Right that
Speaker 5: that that giant assembly, it can't actually make policy. The
Speaker 5: only thing they can do is approve plans or disapproved
Speaker 5: plans set down by the management committee.
Speaker 6: Got it, okay? And these people at the management committee
Speaker 6: will presumably like representatives as opposed to delegates.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, yeah, they're the representatives. They also have three
Speaker 5: year terms, and it won. I think they can, but
Speaker 5: it's really hard, okay. And the other thing that that
Speaker 5: that sort of destroys this is that they those they
Speaker 5: there's a lot of sort of like election rigging by
Speaker 5: the state who doesn't want these things to be actual
Speaker 5: sort of democratic and the and this leads into the
Speaker 5: bigger issue, which is state control. And this is this
Speaker 5: is where I think, really this is something that Clegg
Speaker 5: doesn't get into much because Clegg is a Marxist.
Speaker 2: But this is where the.
Speaker 5: Marxism of it all really comes into play. But first,
Speaker 5: do you know who's not a Marxist?
Speaker 6: Oh, yes, almost certainly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, not Marxists. I think we I think we can
Speaker 5: say not Marxists.
Speaker 1: All right, we are back.
Speaker 5: So the biggest issue here, and this is something that
Speaker 5: was kind of true in both Algeria and in the
Speaker 5: others kind of big Marxist self management experiments in Chile,
Speaker 5: which is that these self managing firms don't have control
Speaker 5: over a lot of the things that they need. Right
Speaker 5: So in Algeria, when when when the state essentially tries
Speaker 5: to absorb all of this stuff, when it when it
Speaker 5: gets sort of legitimized under under these decrees, there are
Speaker 5: a lot of issues. One is that these self managing
Speaker 5: organizations don't have control over their own money. So y're, yeah,
Speaker 5: you're paid. You're getting paid by the state, right and
Speaker 5: you so you give the state your money and then
Speaker 5: they they pay you. And this becomes a real issue
Speaker 5: because the state goes, oh well, the people in these
Speaker 5: self managing things are actually like privileged workers, so they
Speaker 5: have permanent pay freezes. And also you can't reinvest your
Speaker 5: profits back into the firm, which is a real issue.
Speaker 6: It's like a horrible combination of like and cap and
Speaker 6: and like stylin its like it without. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 6: I don't want to like derail us too much. But
Speaker 6: this again, like it's it's a stake.
Speaker 5: It's so much worse than the Spanish system. It's so
Speaker 5: much worse, Like every part of it is set up
Speaker 5: to fail.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think this should always get This is
Speaker 6: the sort of discourse I am now going to derailiz.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry. This is the kind of like the online
Speaker 6: like hammer and sickle in bio discourse that we see
Speaker 6: so often, right, and you don't have to pay attention
Speaker 6: to these people, and like you probably shouldn't, but just
Speaker 6: just to like put it out there. I think like
Speaker 6: and archo syndicalism is right there, and it allows for
Speaker 6: the like unions and syndicate which over overlook a whole
Speaker 6: industry to coordinate between workers' committees and ensure that, you know,
Speaker 6: things get done and people get read with dignity, and
Speaker 6: they also make enough money or have access to the
Speaker 6: resources that they need to survive. And when we try
Speaker 6: and like cut the corners off this or kind of
Speaker 6: make a little collage between this and barkist leninism or
Speaker 6: state socialism, like neither thing works, and we to stand
Speaker 6: up with this kind of terrible hodge podge in which
Speaker 6: it doesn't it doesn't function, right, But that that doesn't
Speaker 6: necessarily mean that work is self management itself is invaded
Speaker 6: as a concept it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and and and there's there's a lot of things
Speaker 5: here that you know.
Speaker 4: So the.
Speaker 5: One of the big criticisms of this at the time
Speaker 5: by by social intellectuals is people are going, well, there's
Speaker 5: not coordination, uh, you know, the firms competing against each other,
Speaker 5: there's not broad economic coordination. It's like, well, yeah, that's
Speaker 5: because that's because the state controls other finances. They don't
Speaker 5: they don't have the ability to do coordination.
Speaker 4: With each other.
Speaker 5: And yeah, the big thing, and this is the thing
Speaker 5: that really actually kills this is that so Cleik calls
Speaker 5: it marketing is controlled by the state. But that's not
Speaker 5: quite what's going on. The other thing that's controlled by
Speaker 5: the state is the state has the responsibility or and
Speaker 5: and is the people who are in charge of selling
Speaker 5: the products. And they just fucked us up completely. They
Speaker 5: can't they can't figure out how to get like the
Speaker 5: fruit that's being produced sold right. The problem here isn't
Speaker 5: is an output. Is that the city, the state is
Speaker 5: doing things like I mean sometimes sometimes they they'll have
Speaker 5: all these oranges. So a lot of the the Algeria
Speaker 5: and agricultural economy is set up as a cash crop economy.
Speaker 5: And you're supposed to fight you so okay, and it's
Speaker 5: it's never really worked very well. But the Algerian state
Speaker 5: just completely shits the bed. And there's I mean, this
Speaker 5: is like i mean we're talking like tons of fruit
Speaker 5: is just sitting there rotting a lot of the time.
Speaker 5: What they do is they just dump in onto the
Speaker 5: French market at for like basically zero cost, and so
Speaker 5: and you know, and so you you you get these
Speaker 5: things and you look at the sort of profit lost thing,
Speaker 5: and you know, the sort of like right wing parts
Speaker 5: of the state, and this is oh, I guess you like,
Speaker 5: I guess they are right wing, but the sort of
Speaker 5: anti self management parts of the statia going oh, well,
Speaker 5: look at these these firms. They're hemorrhaging all this money.
Speaker 5: It's like, well, yeah, they're hemorrhaging money because instead of
Speaker 5: actually selling the goods, you guys are throwing all of
Speaker 5: their goods into a dumpster. Like yeah, of course it's
Speaker 5: not working, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And it's just a struggle of like perst colonial economies.
Speaker 6: If you in the French colonial system, like they've decided
Speaker 6: that Algeria is going to be the place that makes
Speaker 6: oranges for the entirety of the French, I'm just sort
Speaker 6: of manufacturing example empire here. Then evidently what once you
Speaker 6: once you secede from that empire, you now have a
Speaker 6: fuck ton more oranges than you need for Algerias. You're
Speaker 6: now going to have to navigate and you might not
Speaker 6: have enough.
Speaker 5: Well, and they can't even figure how to sell to
Speaker 5: other Algerians too. That that that's that's the that's the
Speaker 5: problem with the sort of state control of the market.
Speaker 2: Is they can't.
Speaker 5: They can't do either because they're completely because the bureaucrats
Speaker 5: that are running this are completely incompetent, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, man, I mean one can argue the states incapable
Speaker 6: of adimating resources equally or fairly. But yes, even so,
Speaker 6: they've they've done a bad job even by state standards.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and and and the and the and the subsequent
Speaker 5: issue too is it's because all the finances are controlled
Speaker 5: by the state. Even the firms that are profitable, and
Speaker 5: there are firms that are very profitable, they can't reinvest
Speaker 5: their profit back into you know, improving efficiency or do
Speaker 5: or doing the basic things that workers need, which is
Speaker 5: having money to eat, because that money is that all
Speaker 5: of that sort of capital is just being eaten by
Speaker 5: the state. And so you know, there's not even to
Speaker 5: quote Claig again, as the president of a self managed
Speaker 5: farm said to me in nineteen sixty five, in this situation,
Speaker 5: how can we persuade the worker that he is no
Speaker 5: longer working for a capitalist exploiter? And like, well, yeah,
Speaker 5: he objectively is right, he is, like the state is
Speaker 5: stealing all of his money and then doing some stupid
Speaker 5: bullshit with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I love that they're like they're not quite joining the
Speaker 6: dots there, Like these guys don't seem to be getting it,
Speaker 6: Like maybe maybe they do get it.
Speaker 5: And this is this is one of these things where
Speaker 5: you know, like I I go, Cleig Cleik doesn't really
Speaker 5: draw this line because he just I mean, Cleig just
Speaker 5: refuses to talk about either Hungary or the Spanish Revolution
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, and you really don't like to.
Speaker 5: Well he's not a mouth like that's the thing. He
Speaker 5: is a he is a pro worker self management guy, right,
Speaker 5: but he's a Marxist pro worker self management guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So she's distributing the failure this largely to like, well,
Speaker 5: there wasn't sufficient consciousness. So it's like, well, no, like
Speaker 5: this system, even if everyone wanted it to work, this
Speaker 5: system couldn't have worked because it was set up in
Speaker 5: such a way that it was. And this is something
Speaker 5: you know, this is part of why I want to
Speaker 5: talk to you about. This was that if you look
Speaker 5: at the way that that the Spanish system is set up, right,
Speaker 5: it's it's built off of coordination, like basically like sectoral
Speaker 5: coordination between everyone who's doing a thing, right, It's built
Speaker 5: on resource sharing. If I'm remembering my stuff, right, I
Speaker 5: mean they have basically they have a banking union, and
Speaker 5: people put their profits into the into the banking union,
Speaker 5: and then people can get money from the banking union
Speaker 5: to reinvest in other places.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think that's correct. It's also like, yeah, this this,
Speaker 6: I guess would that be called vertical integration if it's
Speaker 6: the whole sector, even if it's they they.
Speaker 5: Do this thing which takes advantage of both of the
Speaker 5: advantages of self management gives you, which is one like
Speaker 5: and like sort of you know, and it's like socialist
Speaker 5: self management, right, you have the advantage of scale, which
Speaker 5: is that you're now instead of competing ast each other,
Speaker 5: you're now coordinating an entire sector, right, and you're you're
Speaker 5: producing stuff that you're producing stuff for need. And then
Speaker 5: on the other hand, you have the other thing that's
Speaker 5: supposed to be the advantage of self management, which is
Speaker 5: that the workers themselves, who are the people who are
Speaker 5: supposed to understand that production process the best, can make
Speaker 5: decisions over how they're going to do things. But then
Speaker 5: if you look at the Algerian system, because it's because
Speaker 5: it's set up by Marxists, it's specifically designed such that
Speaker 5: basically like you're you're instead of you actually managing yourself,
Speaker 5: you're you're just electing your boss, and then your boss manages, right,
Speaker 5: And that's not actually good. This is and it's weird
Speaker 5: because looking at this, right, this is actually a worst
Speaker 5: system in terms of self management, I think in a
Speaker 5: lot of senses than the Chinese, because the Chinese system
Speaker 5: is not designed for self management. But you can't fire people.
Speaker 5: So because you can't fire people, you have to listen
Speaker 5: to what people think and what people sort of do.
Speaker 5: Is this system, I don't know. It pisces me off
Speaker 5: because this is a revolution that very very easily could
Speaker 5: have worked, but it was you know, there's intentional sabotage
Speaker 5: by the state because most of the sectors of the
Speaker 5: state don't want this to work.
Speaker 2: And then.
Speaker 5: Just structurally from the way it's set up, it's doomed
Speaker 5: to fail from the beginning. And the consequence of this
Speaker 5: is that in nineteen sixty five, Ben Bella gets overthrown
Speaker 5: in a coup by another sort of but basically the army,
Speaker 5: a sort of state socialist faction of the army, and
Speaker 5: they hold on to power by basically turning Algeria into
Speaker 5: an oil economy. Yeah, and dismantling this entire thing. And
Speaker 5: I don't know, it makes me really angry because the
Speaker 5: the the like the actual Algerian ruling class had the
Speaker 5: right idea and then they just got completely fucked by
Speaker 5: everyone who was supposed to be leading them, or you know,
Speaker 5: the people who were supposed to be selling the stuff
Speaker 5: that they made, people who are supposed to be reinvesting,
Speaker 5: all the people who ended up with the financial control
Speaker 5: just completely screwed them. And yeah, I don't know, it's
Speaker 5: it's it's really it's it's it's really depressing in a
Speaker 5: lot of ways. But on the other hand, right, like,
Speaker 5: it doesn't it doesn't. It doesn't have to go like this, Right,
Speaker 5: you don't have to hand control of your workplace over
Speaker 5: to some fucking guy in the Department of Agricultural Waste
Speaker 5: Management or whatever so he can use your origines for
Speaker 5: fertilizer like you can. You can simply not do this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I didn't know the exact situation that
Speaker 6: these were work has found themselves in, and maybe there
Speaker 6: was you know, like a degree of sort of need
Speaker 6: to get reproducing in order to solve hunger issues.
Speaker 2: But yeah, you simply do not have to do that.
Speaker 6: As many examples. I'm thinking of the collectivized farms in
Speaker 6: Spain as well, because perhaps they would have been a
Speaker 6: better example, right, I guess there it was slightly different
Speaker 6: because it was somewhat of a collectivized community that in
Speaker 6: turn collectivized the land as opposed to collectivizing the agricultural labor.
Speaker 6: And then you have this sort of source of labor
Speaker 6: which is not inherently tied to the land that like,
Speaker 6: you know, when when there was a need, like for instance,
Speaker 6: I'm writing a book right now and writing about the
Speaker 6: Druti column, and like they would because they had less
Speaker 6: rifles than they had fighters, they would rotate their fighters
Speaker 6: off the front line during the harvest time and have
Speaker 6: people help with the harvest, and then they didn't like
Speaker 6: need those people the rest of the year. Right, So
Speaker 6: they were able to incorporate like temporary surgeries in labor
Speaker 6: without it being like destructive to their model, because it
Speaker 6: was the idea was like a collective community as opposed
Speaker 6: to a collective as opposed to like just the workplace
Speaker 6: being this island of pseudo collectivisation, like you're saying in Algeria.
Speaker 6: Also shout out to the Iron column who I've been
Speaker 6: writing about recently, who solved their supply side issues by
Speaker 6: leaving the front line and raiding the cops because they
Speaker 6: didn't have enough guns either, so they simply took them
Speaker 6: from the cops. Telling Yeah, incredibly based, Yeah, very bag.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think I think that's kind of the point that
Speaker 5: I want to end this on, which is that you know,
Speaker 5: there's something that that contributes to the collapse of Slavia too,
Speaker 5: is that if you know, the dichotomy they got forced
Speaker 5: on people in the twentieth century was you can either choose.
Speaker 6: Two.
Speaker 5: Okay, so your choices are you get a you get
Speaker 5: a sort of you get a styalinus planned economy completely
Speaker 5: run by the state, or you get a bunch of
Speaker 5: workers cooperatives competing against each other. And those are, like, you're,
Speaker 5: those are your two models of socialism, and those both suck,
Speaker 5: and both are set up to fail from the beginning
Speaker 5: because they're not actually you know, you're you're you're you're
Speaker 5: you're not actually doing the thing, you're not actually having
Speaker 5: the entire the entire class as a class, you know,
Speaker 5: abolishing itself. And then also managing managing production in such
Speaker 5: a way that people are cooperating to produce what people
Speaker 5: need instead of everyone fighting over like either well instead
Speaker 5: of either the state setting a steel quota and having
Speaker 5: that be the entire goal of the economy, or like
Speaker 5: seventeen co ops and the like both producing all producing
Speaker 5: the exact same kind of coffee trying to figure out
Speaker 5: who can produce it more cheaply.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we we can do better, Yes we can, and
Speaker 6: we have, and so we should describe for I guess
Speaker 6: I know. If people want to read about the Spanish Revolution,
Speaker 6: there's a ship ton of books on libcom. I would
Speaker 6: say Pat's book is pretty good. Send a Spanish Revolution.
Speaker 6: Mary Bookchin has a book that the heroic years of
Speaker 6: Spanish anarchism. Able Paz has many books. Yes you can.
Speaker 6: You can spend time on libcom and read a lot
Speaker 6: about collective production in the Spanish Revolution, and for free,
Speaker 6: which is nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's just been taken.
Speaker 5: Happy here, go take over your workplace and then also
Speaker 5: help everyone else take over theirs and coordinate with each other.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that would be very nice. And then then we'll
Speaker 6: do an interview with you on the podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, welcome back to it could have hear a podcast
Speaker 2: about things falling apart, and also about militant resistance, which
Speaker 2: is an aspect of things falling apart. As things fall
Speaker 2: apart any country, you get people who crawl out of
Speaker 2: the woodwork to either accelerate that process or try to
Speaker 2: reverse it in their own lives, and some of those
Speaker 2: people use weapons to do that. Now, we've talked a
Speaker 2: bunch on this show about the various forms that militant
Speaker 2: resistance can take. We've chatted extensively on this network about Rojava.
Speaker 2: We've talked a fair amount James Stout and I. James
Speaker 2: is on the show today, by the way, Hello James,
Speaker 2: Hi Robert. We've talked a lot about me and mar
Speaker 2: and the gin Z Revolution, there three D printing of
Speaker 2: firearms and kind of this war that these people have
Speaker 2: been waging in the Jungles successfully in order to overthrow
Speaker 2: the military dictatorship of their country. But we haven't talked
Speaker 2: a whole lot about naval warfare. And this is because
Speaker 2: for most of history, for most of at least our
Speaker 2: recent history, naval warfare was not really a thing insurgents
Speaker 2: could engage in, right, you know, you could every now
Speaker 2: and then if a ship was docked or something, you
Speaker 2: might be able to get off a bombing, right, like
Speaker 2: what happened to us as coal. And I'm not expressing
Speaker 2: general sympathy for everybody who does a militant insurgent act,
Speaker 2: but I am talking about like the overall kind of
Speaker 2: like tactics and strategy that underline how that stuff works.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that's really changed in the
Speaker 2: last couple of years, since twenty twenty two, you could
Speaker 2: really mark it out, is that irregular non state groups
Speaker 2: can now to an extent never before possible challenge the
Speaker 2: sea power of nations like the United States, which has
Speaker 2: an unquestioned, previously at least unquestioned level of dominance in
Speaker 2: sort of conventional naval power. And we talked about conventional
Speaker 2: naval power in the twenty first century. That means aircraft
Speaker 2: carrier groups. Right, the US has eleven of them, which,
Speaker 2: if I'm not mistaken, is more than the of the world.
Speaker 2: We have a lot of fucking aircraft carriers. And previously
Speaker 2: that was believed to be you know, a guarantee of
Speaker 2: book dominance on sea, and if a carrier group or
Speaker 2: two is in the area, you generally we generally, the
Speaker 2: United States generally could count on having air supremacy. You
Speaker 2: certainly wouldn't expect it to be countered. You know, you
Speaker 2: could expect, like, for example, if we were to have
Speaker 2: a conflict over Taiwan, the Chinese navy could or the
Speaker 2: Chinese army could potentially interdict a carrier group using ground
Speaker 2: based you know, ground to see anti ship missiles or
Speaker 2: something like that. But we're increasingly in an era in
Speaker 2: which these kind of irregular non state groups have access
Speaker 2: to similar technology and have access to kind of even
Speaker 2: more bespoke technology like drone swarms that poses a unique
Speaker 2: threat to the naval dominance of the United States. And
Speaker 2: I wanted to start you know, we've got a two
Speaker 2: part of here. We're going to be talking about the
Speaker 2: Huthis and Yemen. We're going to be talking about the
Speaker 2: Ukrainian navy, which does not really have much in the
Speaker 2: way of boats, but it is still challenging the Russian Navy.
Speaker 2: And we're going to be talking about rebels in Myanmar.
Speaker 2: We're going to start today, we'll be talking about the
Speaker 2: Huthi and to understand Houthi resistance to the United States
Speaker 2: and why a militant group has had such success challenging
Speaker 2: US naval power. You first have to understand how they
Speaker 2: got to the point that they're at right now, where
Speaker 2: they are kind of in a lot of ways a
Speaker 2: near state actor, you know, not a world power actor,
Speaker 2: but near state actor. You know, they're probably more capable
Speaker 2: in some ways than the State of Yemen, which they
Speaker 2: are at war with. Yeah, yeah, And to get how
Speaker 2: they got to that point, you have to understand what
Speaker 2: happened with their fight against the Saudis. So the Houthi
Speaker 2: Movement or ansar Allah, which means Supporters of God, is
Speaker 2: a Zaidi Shia Islamist movement run primarily by members of
Speaker 2: the Huthi tribe. Zaidi Islam is a bit of an
Speaker 2: odd duck. You'll hear it described as, yeah, like a
Speaker 2: Shia segment. It's really probably more accurate to look at
Speaker 2: it as like it's kind of in between Shia and
Speaker 2: Sunni of like the Shia kind of denominations. It's kind
Speaker 2: of closest to being Sunni. I'm not an expert on
Speaker 2: any of this, but it comes out of a guy
Speaker 2: named Zaid iban Ali's rebellion against the Umiyad Caliphate, which
Speaker 2: did not succeed, but we still have the Zaidi. What
Speaker 2: matters for our purposes today is that the Huthi as
Speaker 2: a movement came out of opposition to the Yemen's president
Speaker 2: Abi Abdullah Salah, who was corrupt as hell. He was
Speaker 2: seen as corrupt, and he was in fact corrupt as hell,
Speaker 2: and he was. It was specifically they were they were
Speaker 2: accusing him of basically being bribed by the Saudis. That's
Speaker 2: where like the Houthi started the rebellion in around two
Speaker 2: thousand and three. So they began as a resistance movement
Speaker 2: to this corrupt president Salah. They adopted the slogan God
Speaker 2: is the Greatest, Death to America, death to Israel, and
Speaker 2: a curse upon the Jews, which is still their slogan.
Speaker 2: So they are not what you would call unproblematic. Again,
Speaker 2: but now that they applied out there, they're they're not
Speaker 2: hiding it, you know, dig for this stuff.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And I'm using the triple parentheses
Speaker 6: they say the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's you know, part of why we're talking
Speaker 2: about a regular naval warfare is that who knows what
Speaker 2: the next few years are going to include. It's always
Speaker 2: a long shot, but there's not a zero percent chance
Speaker 2: that people listening to this will wind up engaged in
Speaker 2: some sort of irregular conflict. And that's it's important to
Speaker 2: understand how modern technology has changed the dimensions of how
Speaker 2: that works from like a naval perspective, So that's why
Speaker 2: we're talking about this now. Hoothy armed activities against the
Speaker 2: Saudis really kicked off and hit a major level after
Speaker 2: the Yemeni Civil War, which officially started in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: The new president of Yemen, who was not Salah at
Speaker 2: this point, asked for military support from the international community,
Speaker 2: which in this case meant the Saudis right. So the Saudis.
Speaker 2: It's called a coalition. There's technically some other people involved,
Speaker 2: but it's the Saudis right, and the president of Yemen
Speaker 2: calls in the Saudis when his forces are kicked out
Speaker 2: of the capital of Yemen, Sana, by Hoothy fighters. The
Speaker 2: way when the Hoothy take Sana is when they get
Speaker 2: their first cruise missiles, largely just like a bunch of
Speaker 2: scuds and stuff, so like old Soviet shit, right. Operation
Speaker 2: Decisive Storm is the name that Saudi Arabia gives to
Speaker 2: their intervention in Yemen, and a lot of people will
Speaker 2: say this is basically Saudi Arabia's Vietnam, not an inappropriate
Speaker 2: comparison to make. So the Saudis start bombing the shit
Speaker 2: out of the Houthi and then they send in ground forces,
Speaker 2: because bombing the shit out of people who are motivated
Speaker 2: never really works as well as you want it to, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a lot of people have been bombing a lot
Speaker 6: of people. I mean, you can destroy that of shit,
Speaker 6: you can kill a load of civilians.
Speaker 2: And kill a shitload of civilians.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but many, many such cases if you're looking around
Speaker 6: the world right now. But yeah, one thing that doesn't
Speaker 6: tend to do is really get rid of motivated fighters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you've got an air force, everything looks like Dresden.
Speaker 2: So the Saudis try that for a while. They send
Speaker 2: in ground forces, they carry out naval blockades. None of
Speaker 2: this does much but make Thethi's more determined, and they
Speaker 2: exit this conflict. I mean it's not like you wouldn't
Speaker 2: say completely done, but they exit this conflict with the
Speaker 2: Saudis a lot stronger, right, a lot more organized, with
Speaker 2: a lot better weapons, right, and a lot of this
Speaker 2: you know, so by the way, I should also state that,
Speaker 2: like now, the Houthis are on the side of former
Speaker 2: President Sala It's a complicated conflict, right, but at the
Speaker 2: end of this all they have a shitload of Iranian
Speaker 2: weapons because Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Saudi Arabia
Speaker 2: and they see the Houthis as allies, and so they
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time this during this conflict shipping
Speaker 2: in agtms, which are wire guided missiles that are just
Speaker 2: aces and blasting holes in Saudi Arabia's tanks, which are
Speaker 2: US supplied. If I'm not mistaken as a general, Yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of Saudi Arabia stuff is US and like, yeah,
Speaker 2: basic most of it, right, much of it? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of contractors over there.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And you know, the Houthis they make a lot in
Speaker 2: like waves and kind of people who are following a
Speaker 2: regular conflicts during this period in the late aughts because
Speaker 2: they're so successful in taking out these tanks that had
Speaker 2: previously been pretty hard to fuck up. And it's kind
Speaker 2: of you know, now, agtms in Ukraine are like one
Speaker 2: of the dominant weapons systems that has shaped the battlefield environment.
Speaker 2: But this is kind of when people start to realize, oh, fuck,
Speaker 2: you know Syria as well, these are This is really
Speaker 2: going to change a lot about how armor gets used.
Speaker 2: And this is also where we start to see the
Speaker 2: first Hothi deployments of ballistic missiles, which were used sort
Speaker 2: of they initially used them, not dissimilarly to how the
Speaker 2: Germans used V twos right in World War Two. There
Speaker 2: are terror weapons and they're used in retaliation for Saudi
Speaker 2: Arabia's use of a terror weapon, which is US jets
Speaker 2: and missiles. Right, So Saudi Arabia is terror bombing Yemen,
Speaker 2: and Yemen starts firing missiles back at Saudi Arabia because
Speaker 2: you know that's what you do, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to quote here from an article in
Speaker 2: the National News, quote Huthi militias and Yemen launched and
Speaker 2: this is from twenty twenty two. Huthi militias and Yemen
Speaker 2: launched ballistic missiles at Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on
Speaker 2: Monday and the latest attack on neighboring states. Two missiles
Speaker 2: were destroyed in mid flight during the attempted terrorist attack
Speaker 2: on Abu Dhabi while in Saudi Arabia, one was shot
Speaker 2: down and another missile wounded two civilians in an industrial area.
Speaker 2: So this is that gives you an idea of like
Speaker 2: where they are a couple of years ago. And these
Speaker 2: are not super advanced cruise missiles, as you can see
Speaker 2: by that kind of like casualty rate. Right, they're not
Speaker 2: doing massive amounts of damage, but they caused terror. Right.
Speaker 2: It's scary to know that a missile could come out
Speaker 2: of the sky and kill some of you, and it's
Speaker 2: you know, from their perspective, how else are they going
Speaker 2: to strike back? They don't have an air force in
Speaker 2: the conventional sense, but what we do see here is
Speaker 2: by being able to carry out these attacks back on
Speaker 2: Saudi Arabia who's bombing them, despite not having an air
Speaker 2: force of their own. You already see how new technology
Speaker 2: and cruise missiles aren't new technology, but them being available
Speaker 2: to a non state actor is fairly new. You see
Speaker 2: how that has already changed the game in terms of
Speaker 2: like you can't really say the Saudis don't have this
Speaker 2: air supremacy. You can still say they have air supremacy
Speaker 2: because again, the Huthis don't have much in the way
Speaker 2: of air power at this point, but they can't stop
Speaker 2: missiles from hitting their cities entirely, which is a different
Speaker 2: game than when you know that's not really a possibility.
Speaker 2: The Houthy arsenal today includes a dizzying array of different Iranian, Soviet, Syrian,
Speaker 2: and indigenously produced rockets, including the Burkhan three missiles. These
Speaker 2: are for long range strikes up to twelve hundred kilometers,
Speaker 2: and the botter P one rockets, which have one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty two one hundred and sixty kilometer range. They
Speaker 2: also have old Soviet Frog sevens, which are useful to
Speaker 2: about sixty five kilometers. None of these are accurate in
Speaker 2: cruise missile terms, you know, but they work well enough
Speaker 2: for the Houthy's purposes. The botter P is indigenously produced.
Speaker 2: It's made by the Houthies. It's thought to be based
Speaker 2: on the Syrian Kaibar rocket. It is unguided, and experts
Speaker 2: will say it's closer to being functioning as just like
Speaker 2: dumb artillery than an actual cruise missile. Un inspectors claim
Speaker 2: quote it is produced locally from steel tubing, very likely
Speaker 2: sourced from the oil industry. You hear this a lot
Speaker 2: in a regular conflict in the Middle East. When I
Speaker 2: was in Mosel covering the fighting with Isis, their mortars
Speaker 2: were made off out of tubing that was like part
Speaker 2: of construction projects. I think that traced back to the
Speaker 2: oil industry, at least some of it.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: There are several variants of this rocket, like the botter.
Speaker 4: F and the P one.
Speaker 2: It's not really useful going through all of them. You
Speaker 2: can find some interesting studies on this, but it's not
Speaker 2: necessary to understand their capabilities. Their most accurate missile, as
Speaker 2: far as I can tell, is the OTR twenty one Totshka,
Speaker 2: which has a range of about seventy two one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty kilometers and a four hundred and eighty kilogram payload.
Speaker 2: They only are believed to have a few dozen of these,
Speaker 2: although that's an estimate from an earlier report, and these
Speaker 2: were the ones they would use most regularly on ground
Speaker 2: targets during the Saudi intervention when they needed a precise strike.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to quote from an article and an
Speaker 2: analysis of their missile capability. The Huthis first fired a
Speaker 2: Tatchka missile in September twenty fifteen, targeting the coalitions that's
Speaker 2: the Saudi's software military base in Mareb, Yemen. The strike
Speaker 2: hit a weapons orige depot and killed sixty coalition soldiers.
Speaker 2: The Houthis fired another tachka on December fourteenth, twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: targeting a coalition base south of Taia's City in Taia's Yemen.
Speaker 2: The strike reportedly killed over one hundred and twenty coalition soldiers.
Speaker 2: The most recently recorded tachka fire took place on November nineteenth,
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen, landing in a desert in eastern Marab Province.
Speaker 2: The target was unclear, but was likely the Arab Coalition's
Speaker 2: all weak military camp. So those are significant casualties. These
Speaker 2: are very effective weapons that do a lot of damage.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, international experts, and especially if you read just kind
Speaker 2: of like think tank analysis of what the Hoothies are doing,
Speaker 2: we generally say all of this is only possible because
Speaker 2: of aid from Hisbolah and Iran. Right, That's the only
Speaker 2: reason the Houthis have these weapons. Right now, there is
Speaker 2: an arms embargo on Yemen. This has not stopped anyone
Speaker 2: from getting weapons to Yemen.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It also, to be very fair here, didn't stop anyone
Speaker 2: from didn't stop US from selling arms to the Saudis
Speaker 2: even though they're bringing those arms to Yemen, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, fossible, ridiculous notion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know who you want to get angry
Speaker 2: or at here. I'm not really convinced either side is,
Speaker 2: you know, better than the other. Certainly the Saudis are
Speaker 2: not better, right right? Yeah that matters.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it's just a shit situation for people who
Speaker 6: are trying to get home with me to not get
Speaker 6: blown up.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, really bad situation. I think that is over
Speaker 2: selling it a bit. Obviously, Iranian AID is critical to
Speaker 2: the Hoothies and that that has gotten them a lot
Speaker 2: of their advanced weapons systems, So I don't want to
Speaker 2: undersell it. But at this point they are making a
Speaker 2: significant chunk of these of these cruise missiles, specifically some
Speaker 2: of the less advanced ones indigenously, So because of the
Speaker 2: state things you could, I think it is accurate to
Speaker 2: say that Iran was crucial to them getting to that state.
Speaker 2: But even without Iranian aid's there's a signe probably a
Speaker 2: significant degree of time to which they could continue to
Speaker 2: produce some of these weapons because they are making them themselves.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they make three fifty eight missiles, right, like looid terrain, yeah,
Speaker 6: anti aircraft. Yeah, yes, even if Iran it's not supplying,
Speaker 6: it's probably worth noting that like this isn't like an
Speaker 6: Iranian design or concept at least, and it allows for
Speaker 6: a lot of testing, a lot of like a real
Speaker 6: world kind of verses the NATO US.
Speaker 2: Let's see Iranians, Yeah, to test their weaponry. And again
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to undersell how important they are, just
Speaker 2: you get a lot of like, well, if we can
Speaker 2: just cut off Iranian trade, the hoothies will collapse. I
Speaker 2: think that's accurate anymore. Yeah, you know, I can't say
Speaker 2: that to a point a certainty, but yeah, I think
Speaker 2: that that's kind of wishful thinking on behalf of some people.
Speaker 2: So these are great weapons for a non state militant group. Again,
Speaker 2: this is this stuff. If you think back ten fifteen years,
Speaker 2: the idea of a non state insurgent group having access
Speaker 2: to a cruise missile library like this, you know, not
Speaker 2: to say about like the other weapons they have, the
Speaker 2: drones and stuff they have, it would have been kind
Speaker 2: of unprecedented. That said, these are not good weapons in
Speaker 2: the modern military sense of the word. But I mean
Speaker 2: they are not very accurate for the most part, and
Speaker 2: compared to more advanced missiles like the kind of the
Speaker 2: United States, Russia and China have, they are easy to
Speaker 2: shoot down with the kind of weapons systems aboard say,
Speaker 2: US aircraft carriers. We will discuss that more later. This
Speaker 2: is largely inconsequential to what's been happening in the Red
Speaker 2: Sea because the vast majority of naval traffic that passes
Speaker 2: by Houthi territory does not have access to say FAYLANX,
Speaker 2: FELANX systems. Yeah, you don't have much in the way
Speaker 2: of anti missile systems on a normal containers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, you have fanti bridge antiah rhyming devices. But like, yeah,
Speaker 6: it doesn't matter if your missile is not super accurate,
Speaker 6: if it can't defeat these expensive systems, if you're just
Speaker 6: eating them into a narrow channel anything that goes past
Speaker 6: right right right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the Houthis are aware of that, and this
Speaker 2: is again an intelligent strategy on their part. You know,
Speaker 2: sometimes people get angry when you say that because they
Speaker 2: point out horrible things the Hoothis have done, which I
Speaker 2: don't want to deny, but we're not talking about the
Speaker 2: overall morality of this conflict. We're talking about how these
Speaker 2: tactics work, right.
Speaker 6: Right, Like the Nazis had intelligent and strategies as well.
Speaker 6: They were terrible fucking people, and I'm glad they asked
Speaker 6: them are mostly dead, but like, yeah, yeah, we would
Speaker 6: be unwise to just dismiss everything that they've been know.
Speaker 2: No, And likewise, the fact that the Houthi's right now
Speaker 2: that this interdiction of the Red Sea is based on
Speaker 2: an attempt to stop the genocide in Gaza, which I
Speaker 2: don't think it's going to work, but I would like
Speaker 2: it if somehow it did. That also does not have
Speaker 2: an impact on how this is working strategically, right, You
Speaker 2: are kind of setting all of that aside to just
Speaker 2: talk about how this is functioning, you know. Yeah. So
Speaker 2: in recent years, the Houthis have expanded their stock of
Speaker 2: anti ship missiles. In an article for the International Institute
Speaker 2: for Strategic Studies, a guy named Fabian hens Rights quote
Speaker 2: the parades these are Houthy military parades also featured of
Speaker 2: right of anti ship ballistic missiles ASBMs and guided rockets
Speaker 2: employing Iranian infrared or imaging infrared seeker technology. The four
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty kilometer range CEF appears to be a
Speaker 2: rebranded ASBM version of Iran's FATA three one three missile,
Speaker 2: while the Tongue Kill represents a previously unseen anti ship
Speaker 2: version of the IRGC Iranian Revolutionary GUARDCOREPS developed five hundred
Speaker 2: kilometer range so higher. The two designs constitute the heaviest,
Speaker 2: hoothy anti ship missiles, both with warheads of more than
Speaker 2: three hundred kilograms and are of Iranian origin. Three smaller ASBMs.
Speaker 2: The one hundred and forty kilometer range FLEK, the Mayun
Speaker 2: and the bar al Amar strongly resemble Iranian design philosophy
Speaker 2: and seeker technology, but do not precisely match known Iranian systems.
Speaker 2: They could either be Iranian systems not observed before in
Speaker 2: smuggle to Yemen, or Huthi produced rockets combined using Iranian
Speaker 2: guidance skits, not unlike developments made by another Iran proxy,
Speaker 2: the Lebanese has Belah in its precition guided surface to
Speaker 2: surface missile program. Finally, the Huthis have presented an S
Speaker 2: seventy five SA two surface to air missile, likely from
Speaker 2: pre war ye many army stocks modified for an anti
Speaker 2: ship role using an Iranian guidance kit. So that's that's
Speaker 2: that's a potent and it's probably more some ways more
Speaker 2: advanced than their general cruise missile stockpile arsenal for taking
Speaker 2: out ships. Now, the Houthis are still a non state force.
Speaker 2: When people say online that like the us IS is
Speaker 2: fighting Yemen, not quite accurate, because the Huthis are fighting
Speaker 2: Yemen too, right, like the government if you're if you're
Speaker 2: saying government, you're talking about the people. Well, people in
Speaker 2: Yemen are fighting each other, right, yeah, it's it's that
Speaker 2: is the situation. They are at war with the government
Speaker 2: of Yemen, right, that is still right case.
Speaker 6: We're fighting, we're shooting missiles at Yemen, but yet like
Speaker 6: as a geographical area, right than in the state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the Huthis did not survive years
Speaker 2: of intense bombing by Saudi Arabia and a nation with
Speaker 2: an on paper extremely modern military by making a lot
Speaker 2: of stupid mistakes. So when they decided to attack shipping
Speaker 2: in the Red Sea after Israel launched their genocidal campaign
Speaker 2: against Gaza, they did so with a competent plan, which
Speaker 2: was to make civilian freight travel in the area too
Speaker 2: dangerous to continue. Their stated goal here is to force
Speaker 2: damage on Israel and the Western nations who support it
Speaker 2: by hitting the only thing they care about, commerce, and
Speaker 2: their actions here have done real damage to international trade,
Speaker 2: not exclusively Western international trade. I should note the latest
Speaker 2: several months have seen them capture or sink a couple
Speaker 2: of merchant vessels. They've sunk one. They've hit at least
Speaker 2: sixteen vessels with drones and missiles. I found a Bloomberg
Speaker 2: report with the telling title houthy missiles do far more
Speaker 2: damage to trade than to actual ships, which is an
Speaker 2: interesting way to frame it. Yeah, and they're kind of
Speaker 2: trying to minimize what's going on here. While sixteen strikes
Speaker 2: is a large number for the industry to withstand, there
Speaker 2: have been even more failed attempts. Since the Hoothies began
Speaker 2: their attacks, there have been more than sixty incidents of
Speaker 2: some kind in and around the waterway, including everything from
Speaker 2: near misses to hijackings and harassment by armed militants and
Speaker 2: small boats. If you look at the damage that's occurred
Speaker 2: in most of these incidents, it has not been significant,
Speaker 2: said Marcus Baker, head of the Marine and cargo at Marsh,
Speaker 2: one of the world's top insurance brokers. So far, we
Speaker 2: haven't seen a total loss caused by a missile strike.
Speaker 2: That changed in March when the Houthi successfully sank the
Speaker 2: Ruby Mar despite more than a month of US strikes
Speaker 2: to degrade their capability. The vessel was initially wounded and
Speaker 2: drifted unmanned for almost two weeks before sinking. While it listed,
Speaker 2: A Hoothy representative promised the ship could be salvaged if
Speaker 2: aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza. Ruby Mar wound
Speaker 2: up sinking.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Hoothi strikes have also hit at least one ship bound
Speaker 2: for Iran and another that was going to be delivering
Speaker 2: aid supplies to Yemen. At least three civilian sailors have
Speaker 2: been killed thus far, and a strike on a bulk
Speaker 2: carrier named the True Confidence. Now, how you kind of
Speaker 2: interpret this as a success by the Houthy stated goals,
Speaker 2: which is right, to inflict enough pain on the West
Speaker 2: and on Israel economically that it forces an earlier end
Speaker 2: to what Israel is doing in Gaza, Right, if that's
Speaker 2: their goal, Well, it hasn't happened yet, right, That's one
Speaker 2: thing we can say right, it has not yet. There's
Speaker 2: no evidence that I have seen that it has affected
Speaker 2: the tempo of Israeli operations substantially.
Speaker 6: You know, yeah, it would seem it does not so different,
Speaker 6: and obviously as an incentive for the United States and
Speaker 6: other international actors to like not let this tactics succeed,
Speaker 6: because you do not want a world in which I
Speaker 6: think it's not unreasonably. There's a thing called the right
Speaker 6: to protect an international law, which is probably what the
Speaker 6: heaths are claiming they have of the acting under it,
Speaker 6: and that's not, like, on the face of it, unreasonable,
Speaker 6: But yet I think the US has this very like
Speaker 6: strong incentive to not let it become a thing that
Speaker 6: keeps happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised we sent a carrier group
Speaker 2: into the area. I'm also not surprised that that does
Speaker 2: not seem to be working either. Right, If you are
Speaker 2: judging how the US is acting and how the Houthis
Speaker 2: are acting based on their stated goals, the Houthis have
Speaker 2: not yet accomplished their stated goal with these strikes, and
Speaker 2: the US air strikes do not seem to have stopped
Speaker 2: the Houthis from being a to interdict naval traffic in
Speaker 2: the Red Sea. Right, there's I've heard some argument that
Speaker 2: the tempo is reduced since the US got there, But
Speaker 2: it's also one clear to me is like, well, they
Speaker 2: only have a limited amount of these missiles, right. Has
Speaker 2: the TiO changed because they need to marshal their ammunition effectively,
Speaker 2: or has it changed because there's been damage done to
Speaker 2: their infrastructure. I don't know that we'll ever really get
Speaker 2: a perfect answer on that, right, I know the US
Speaker 2: claims that it has. You know, we claim that our
Speaker 2: strikes have weakened them, but we always claim that, right,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean yeah, we're gonna say, right, yeah, we
Speaker 6: all lived through Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: Right, you're aware of what the US says about shit
Speaker 2: like this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean it would look pretty bad if we
Speaker 6: were like, now, dude, we just heated billions of ammunitions.
Speaker 2: Maxavel for US. It's unclear how much damaged the Hoothies
Speaker 2: have actually done to the global economy. As a consequence
Speaker 2: of all this, traffic has dropped to the Red Sea
Speaker 2: by about thirty five percent, and since the sea carries
Speaker 2: about twenty percent of global trade, that's a major hit.
Speaker 2: But it hasn't stopped trade through the Red Sea either. Again,
Speaker 2: most trade is still you knows, most of the pre
Speaker 2: war level is still occurring. Thirty five percent is a
Speaker 2: substantial drop. That is a hit, and it's hurt a
Speaker 2: lot of people.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: It also has not wholly blocked like there's a longer
Speaker 2: route you can take around Africa to get into the
Speaker 2: Red Sea, but that makes everything more expensive too. The
Speaker 2: country hurt most is actually Egypt, because Egypt depends on
Speaker 2: the Suez Canal for about a quarter of its currency earnings,
Speaker 2: and you go through the Red Sea to get to
Speaker 2: the Suez Canal. For reasons that are obvious if you
Speaker 2: look at a map. Right, people who rightly see what's
Speaker 2: happening in Gaza as a crime against humanity are unlikely
Speaker 2: to care too much about the Egyptian economy, nor should
Speaker 2: they necessarily. But the bigger questions here are can the
Speaker 2: hoo He's actually force an into what Israel's doing? And
Speaker 2: how long can they keep this up? The answer to
Speaker 2: the first question, can the Houthi's force it into his
Speaker 2: reely aggression is not yet. And the answer to the
Speaker 2: second question is how long can they keep this up?
Speaker 2: I don't know, they might be able to eventually bring
Speaker 2: about international pressure through economic damage, but given the state
Speaker 2: of the US presidential election, I don't see that as
Speaker 2: particularly likely a method for changing net and Yahu's behavior.
Speaker 2: The answer to the second question is, you know, you know,
Speaker 2: how long can they keep this up? Probably forever? Right,
Speaker 2: US strikes have been lauded by the US as damaging infrastructure,
Speaker 2: but we don't know that that's true. Our air strikes
Speaker 2: in the region have been launched by the USS. D
Speaker 2: White D. Eisenhower, the head of the carrier strike Group
Speaker 2: in the Red Sea at present. And again, when you
Speaker 2: look at kind of like leftists analyzing this, because they
Speaker 2: don't often know much about the military, you'll get a
Speaker 2: mix of like people being like, ah, the houthis are
Speaker 2: going to kill a carrier because they put out a
Speaker 2: video of like a carrier in their sites and shit,
Speaker 2: and like, I don't think so, guys, doesn't seem likely.
Speaker 2: These are very well defended ships, and they are very
Speaker 2: competently led. Look I have looked into the capital of
Speaker 2: the ship, I've looked into how they have handled the
Speaker 2: considerable tempo of tax against them. I think that these
Speaker 2: guys are operationally competent as the US tends to be. Now,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean they're going to win. The US US
Speaker 2: soldiers tend to be operationally competent most of the time,
Speaker 2: and we also lose a lot, right because operational competence
Speaker 2: doesn't matter if the operations you're being asked to undertake
Speaker 2: have no chance of victory. And that is more or
Speaker 2: less the situation. I think that these sailors are in
Speaker 2: right where they're pretty good at sailing around in an
Speaker 2: aircraft carrier and not getting killed. But that doesn't mean
Speaker 2: they're going to defeat the Houthies in a meaningful way
Speaker 2: right right, And the Hoothies are aware of this. They're
Speaker 2: in a holding pattern. They understand that the primary thing
Speaker 2: that is that all of strategy really hinges around stopping
Speaker 2: and denying terrain to the enemy. And all the Hoothies
Speaker 2: have to do to deny a significant amount of terrain
Speaker 2: to the entire west is keep lobbing missiles, often blindly,
Speaker 2: in this sea and it will make everything more expensive
Speaker 2: for everybody, keep them in the news, and that's a win.
Speaker 2: And it's unlikely, if not basically impossible, that using current methods,
Speaker 2: the US Navy and US you know, airpower in this area,
Speaker 2: based in this carrier group is going to be able
Speaker 2: to do anything but spend a shitload of money.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: US Navy officers in recent weeks have reported attacks by
Speaker 2: both anti ship missiles, regular cruise missiles swarms of unmanned
Speaker 2: aerial drones, which has led to a general conclusion among
Speaker 2: people who analyze this stuff that drone swarms are going
Speaker 2: to be a significant part of naval warfare in the
Speaker 2: immediate future. Right, you can overwhelm you know, the houthis
Speaker 2: you know. As impressive as their drone swarms are, for
Speaker 2: a nonstate actor cannot put together the kind of a
Speaker 2: swarm that a state actor like China, for example, could.
Speaker 2: But people are looking at how close some hits have
Speaker 2: gotten to the carriers and being like, well, shit, if
Speaker 2: you add a lot more of these things, you could
Speaker 2: really cost some fucking problems for these boats.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They have also used unmanned boats and unmanned underwater vessels.
Speaker 2: These are basically unmanned drone boats with explosives in them, right,
Speaker 2: and again, significantly more of these could potentially do some damage.
Speaker 2: This is, by any account, the most direct combat US
Speaker 2: naval forces have seen since World War Two. And one
Speaker 2: thing I fun thing I've learned reading articles about the
Speaker 2: operation is that our jets now get kill markers for
Speaker 2: the bombs they drop.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you can be a drone ace or not a drone,
Speaker 6: a missile downing ace.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, I don't know, may I guess it
Speaker 2: makes sense whatever, it just it doesn't look as impressive.
Speaker 6: I did some googling. I guess you could become an
Speaker 6: ace shooting down barrage balloons in World War One.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the gag shooting back.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, they were very defense strongly defended. Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: a little different of V two rockets, I guess in
Speaker 6: World War Two. I did also find out that the
Speaker 6: navel some of the unmanned underwater vehicles are replacing. More's
Speaker 6: the pity the seals and dolphins that were previously in
Speaker 6: USNAV service.
Speaker 2: I don't mean seals like no, no, no, literal yeah,
Speaker 2: like literal seals heartbreaking, yeah, very In San Diego, I
Speaker 2: often go past them.
Speaker 6: You know what the seals don't want to do or
Speaker 6: they well again added the marine mammals. The other seals
Speaker 6: very much.
Speaker 2: The dolphins might I remember from the documentary SeaQuest that
Speaker 2: they that they enjoy naval service.
Speaker 6: I think all SeaQuest, James, I've not I've not watched
Speaker 6: Sea Quest. I'm afraid. I'm afraid.
Speaker 2: It's It's Star Trek, the next generation Underwater, but the
Speaker 2: role of Picard is played by the sheriff from Jaws.
Speaker 6: It's actually fantastic. Great. Yeah, I'm looking looking forward to
Speaker 6: being exposed to more of this universe. I'm hoping that
Speaker 6: the the Dolphins join force with the Orcas and take
Speaker 6: on the super rich with that using the skills given
Speaker 6: to them by the US military.
Speaker 2: In Challah, James. So, when it comes to the economics
Speaker 2: of this conflict, and a lot of this does come
Speaker 2: down economics, right, what the Houthy are doing is an
Speaker 2: incredibly efficient, good ass deal for them. These drones, specifically,
Speaker 2: a lot of what they've done. They fired missiles, but
Speaker 2: like those are expensive, they don't have a lot of them.
Speaker 2: I think that at this point they would prefer to
Speaker 2: use those on ships that cannot defend against them. They
Speaker 2: have since some manned boats, which the US has fucking
Speaker 2: mrked immediately, and they don't seem to be doing that
Speaker 2: anymore because it's dumb and the Hoothies didn't get where
Speaker 2: they did by repeatedly doing dumb shit. What they seem
Speaker 2: to have settled on is sending out drone swarms. Both
Speaker 2: of these boats, these underwater drones and of aerial drones,
Speaker 2: and these things can cost just a few thousand dollars each.
Speaker 2: Some of the biggest ones are probably more like tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of dollars. But the navy missiles that we
Speaker 2: use to interdict this shit and some of these, they
Speaker 2: also have some dumber cruise missiles that are pretty cheap.
Speaker 2: The missiles we use to interdict this shit are two
Speaker 2: point one million dollars is shot.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: This is all in an adition to the insane cost
Speaker 2: of keeping a carrier battlegroup in the field and fighting.
Speaker 2: It's not at all cheap. I found one political article
Speaker 2: that quotes a DoD official admitting the cost offset is
Speaker 2: not on our side. Now we have some cheaper systems
Speaker 2: that can work really well on particularly drones. They can
Speaker 2: work on missiles too. We've used them and that these
Speaker 2: are air burst shells fired from the conventional guns on destroyers.
Speaker 2: These have worked really well, especially against drones and tests,
Speaker 2: but they're only effective from about ten miles or less away.
Speaker 2: In ballistic missile terms, that's extremely close. You don't want
Speaker 2: to rely on these for as and it's not even
Speaker 2: all that far away in drone terms right As a result,
Speaker 2: the US has expanded research into more efficient anti drone
Speaker 2: and anti missile weapons, including what amounts to laser, laser
Speaker 2: and microwave weapons that could be fired indefinitely for the
Speaker 2: cost of electricity. Given the nature of these weapons, that's
Speaker 2: not insignificant either, but it's a lot less than two
Speaker 2: point one million is shot. As is always the case,
Speaker 2: the kind of fight the Huthies are waging right now
Speaker 2: has an expiration eight right now. Any group that can
Speaker 2: put together a few million dollars to make hundreds and
Speaker 2: hundreds of explosive drones right which a number of groups
Speaker 2: are capable of, could at least exact a substantial toll
Speaker 2: on a US carrier battlegroup, make it, spend a shitload
Speaker 2: of money, potentially even do some damage. And again, even
Speaker 2: if this stuff hits an aircraft carrier, you're like very
Speaker 2: unlikely to see that thing sink. There's a story that's
Speaker 2: worth knowing that, Like when we decommissioned one of our
Speaker 2: aircraft carriers fifteen or twenty years ago. They started. They
Speaker 2: shot at a bunch like they just to see like
Speaker 2: how well it would hold up, and like they such
Speaker 2: a great sink and they couldn't sink the fucker. Like,
Speaker 2: you can do that, you could kill sailors. It would
Speaker 2: be a big deal if they hit a fucking aircraft
Speaker 2: carrier and killed some sailors, even if the carrier doesn't
Speaker 2: go down, that's a huge fucking deal. I don't know
Speaker 2: that they're capable of doing that, but it's unlikely they're
Speaker 2: going to kill one, right.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, they got to send one to the bonomiation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hard, It's hard to do, right. They're made not
Speaker 2: to sink, and they're pretty fucking big. But one can
Speaker 2: imagine kind of a future in which the war the
Speaker 2: Hoothies are waging right now is rendered kind of impossible
Speaker 2: because weapons like that are positioned permanently around say the
Speaker 2: Red Sea, blanketing into defense grid that basically kill any
Speaker 2: thing fired into the sea. That's something that might happen
Speaker 2: in the future if this continues. But that's also just
Speaker 2: the way war works, right. You know, the Hoothies ten
Speaker 2: to fifteen years ago wouldn't have been able to wage
Speaker 2: a war like this against the US Navy. They fought
Speaker 2: the Navy to a stand still. That's the only way
Speaker 2: to analyze this, right, and again, that doesn't mean either
Speaker 2: side is achieving their operational goals. Right, The Houthis have
Speaker 2: not ended the genocide in Gaza, and the US doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to be capable of ending the Houthis. So they
Speaker 2: fought each other to a stand still in this matter.
Speaker 2: And that wouldn't have been possible twenty years ago. So right,
Speaker 2: twenty years from now, what's going on will be different.
Speaker 2: You know, the fact that the US seems to be
Speaker 2: pretty close to developing more efficient anti drone and anti
Speaker 2: missile weapons that are a lot cheaper to use doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that non state actors will not find a way
Speaker 2: around those. But that is the situation we're in right
Speaker 2: now with the Houthis, and that is the end of
Speaker 2: this episode. We're going to get back to you tomorrow
Speaker 2: for part two, where're going to talk about irregular naval
Speaker 2: warfare in Ukraine and Myanmar. James, you got anything else
Speaker 2: to say, No, I didn't think. So you need to
Speaker 2: be a bad day to be a boat. I guess
Speaker 2: bad day to be a boat, bad day to be
Speaker 2: a drone. They're really suffering in this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a great day to be a military contractor,
Speaker 6: which is oh my god, such a good time to
Speaker 6: be a military contractor.
Speaker 2: Whether you're doing it for a run or the United States.
Speaker 2: You are, you are, you are in Clover right.
Speaker 6: Now, which is a massive change from the entirety of
Speaker 6: this century so far.
Speaker 4: So that's nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's nice to see the military contractors finally pick
Speaker 2: up a win.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, one for them.
Speaker 2: That's been It could Happen Here. We'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our special
Speaker 2: two part series Irregular Naval Warfare and You, where James
Speaker 2: and I teach you how you too can challenge the
Speaker 2: US Navy's dominance of the seas or at least the
Speaker 2: coasts for fun and profit. Actually today, last episode we
Speaker 2: talked about people challenging the US Navy's coastal dominance. Today
Speaker 2: we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy.
Speaker 2: So that's going to be fun. And of course the
Speaker 2: Navy of mianmar which is a bit of a different
Speaker 2: class from the US and Russian Navy, but no less interesting.
Speaker 6: Yeah, still fun. I'd love to see a boat lose.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I just like boats going down, you know, I
Speaker 2: just hate a boat. Yeah yeah, us the jocas many
Speaker 2: many such cases. Yeah, I'm going to start with Ukraine,
Speaker 2: and then we're going to throw to James to talk
Speaker 2: about our friends in Myanmar and how they have repurposed
Speaker 2: civilian technology and stolen weapons to counter a navy without
Speaker 2: really having one of their own. But first Ukraine. In
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, when the Russian Army invaded eastern Ukraine and
Speaker 2: took Crimea, Ukraine lost a significant portion of it's already
Speaker 2: not that impressive navy. Most of their boats were just
Speaker 2: taken by Russia, along with a number of sailors who defected.
Speaker 2: A lot of other sailors fled the region, leaving behind
Speaker 2: their homes and cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their
Speaker 2: country in a war that a decade later is still ongoing.
Speaker 2: One of these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and
Speaker 2: had to flee his home, possibly forever, in order to
Speaker 2: continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy,
Speaker 2: Admiral Nazpapa. He leads a navy that is almost without
Speaker 2: manned ships, and on paper, it is utterly incapable of
Speaker 2: challenging Russia's legendary Black Sea Fleet. Since the age of
Speaker 2: the Czars, the Black Sea Fleet has been infamous as
Speaker 2: a pillar of Russian military power. However, also since the
Speaker 2: age of the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to
Speaker 2: get utterly housed by enemies that should have been able
Speaker 2: to beat it.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, not the first time it's taken
Speaker 6: an unexpected loot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it has a legendary history. That doesn't mean good.
Speaker 2: There's bad legends out there, you know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's well known.
Speaker 2: Yeah, today that enemy is Ukraine. Since the expanded Russian
Speaker 2: invasion in twenty twenty two, just two years, Ukraine has
Speaker 2: destroyed or badly damaged more than a third of the
Speaker 2: Black Sea Fleet. Despite having no battleships or destroyers in
Speaker 2: the sea to counter Russian naval power. They have done
Speaker 2: enough damage to reopen Odessa and at least one other
Speaker 2: port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has
Speaker 2: provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline. And
Speaker 2: that's a remarkable achievement. Sinking a third of the Black
Speaker 2: Sea Fleet and basically when you reopen a port. That
Speaker 2: means that you have taken away naval dominance from a
Speaker 2: country that has a navy and you don't. That's pretty good,
Speaker 2: pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, Ukraine had damaged,
Speaker 2: irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to
Speaker 2: seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't
Speaker 2: know the difference. They've They've fucked up a lot of boats.
Speaker 2: They have destroyed a submarine with seed to ground capability
Speaker 2: that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser,
Speaker 2: the capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva.
Speaker 2: They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of
Speaker 2: patrol boats and missile boats, and a number of other
Speaker 2: boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties,
Speaker 2: especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel we're
Speaker 2: looking at a year's multiple years lead time to replace.
Speaker 2: You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during
Speaker 2: the big Dub Dub dose, the US did, but nobody
Speaker 2: really does that anymore, not with the big ones.
Speaker 6: At least just roll through that.
Speaker 7: We were just we were just yeating aircraft carriers into
Speaker 7: the sea, just just flotting them out, Yeah, don't take
Speaker 7: them out a week. Yeah, because it's because Rosy Rivet
Speaker 7: was was really riveting at a high speed.
Speaker 2: She was, she was, she was quite a riveter. So
Speaker 2: at the start of hostilities, Turkey, which controls access to
Speaker 2: the Black Sea forbade any additional military vessels or at
Speaker 2: least military vessels of significant size, from entering the area.
Speaker 2: What this means this has a significant impact on how
Speaker 2: well Ukraine strikes work, because even if Russia can replace
Speaker 2: the losses physically, they can't actually get replacements into the
Speaker 2: Black Sea easily. They can't sail new shit past the Turks.
Speaker 2: The Turks are not allowing that right now. So again,
Speaker 2: this is a situation that has kind of favored the
Speaker 2: way in which Ukraine has adapted to countering Russian naval dominance.
Speaker 2: It is possible that at the present rate of attrition,
Speaker 2: the Black Sea fleet could be rendered inoperable in less
Speaker 2: than two years. Like if they keep going at this
Speaker 2: rates like eighteen months or something before, there's not really
Speaker 2: much of a fleet anymore. Now. If Ukraine had accomplished
Speaker 2: this task with a traditional navy using standard naval tactics,
Speaker 2: This would have been an impressive victory given the disparity
Speaker 2: in resources between the two nations. But they have done
Speaker 2: all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of
Speaker 2: which are produced in country, aerial drones, and new bespoke
Speaker 2: locally produced suicide drone boats. This irregular naval warfare has
Speaker 2: been successful enough that one Rand Corporation engineer and analyst,
Speaker 2: Scott Savatz, described the BLA blaxiafleet as a fleet in
Speaker 2: being quote, it represents a potential threat that needs to
Speaker 2: be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check
Speaker 2: for now. And I'm going to quote from a New
Speaker 2: York Times article on the topic. It brought a little
Speaker 2: more context. Ukraine has effectively turned around ten thousand square
Speaker 2: miles in the western Black Sea off its southern coast
Speaker 2: into what the military calls a gray zone, where neither
Speaker 2: side can sail without the threat of attack. James Heapey,
Speaker 2: Britain's Armed Forces Minister, told a recent security conference in
Speaker 2: Warsaw that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat,
Speaker 2: and contended that the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in
Speaker 2: the Black Sea was every bit as important as the
Speaker 2: successful counter offensives on land and Cersona and Kharkiv last year.
Speaker 2: The classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies
Speaker 2: does not work now, Admiral Nese Papas said. Therefore, we
Speaker 2: have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches
Speaker 2: to planning and implementing work as much as possible. That
Speaker 2: articles about a year old or so.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 2: The Neptune anti ship missile is one of the prides
Speaker 2: of Ukraine's nason arms industry. Missiles are credited with destroying
Speaker 2: the Moskva in April of twenty twenty two. Ukraine also
Speaker 2: has access to several Western anti ship missiles, including these
Speaker 2: storm Shadow and Scalp missiles. I believe the storm Shadow
Speaker 2: comes from your your folks, right James, yeah, convention.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And these seem to be pretty effective missiles. These obviously
Speaker 2: much more advanced. And these are modern naval weapons, right.
Speaker 2: These are much more advanced than, for example, the weapons
Speaker 2: to who these have. These are the kind of things
Speaker 2: that can counter to some extent modern anti missile technology.
Speaker 2: For an example of kind of how that tends to work,
Speaker 2: they used a barrage of I believe it was mostly
Speaker 2: storm shadows to rain death on the crime import of Sebastopol. Recently,
Speaker 2: seven out of eighteen of the missiles fired made it
Speaker 2: through Russian air defenses, and these damaged or destroyed four
Speaker 2: landing ships in a single strike. And these are sizeable
Speaker 2: naval vessels. This is the most recent attack, although as
Speaker 2: after I wrote this, there was another attack on the
Speaker 2: Kirch Bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place
Speaker 2: yet that seems to have shut it down again. But
Speaker 2: that gives you an idea of like what you actually
Speaker 2: have to do. How much of these missiles you have
Speaker 2: to put in the air to get some through. And
Speaker 2: that's not too bad, right, eighteen missiles, seven get through,
Speaker 2: four ships down. That's a really good rate of return.
Speaker 6: Especially when you consider that, like you know, we were
Speaker 6: talking in our first episode about how the US is
Speaker 6: spending significant resources are maintaining its defending its carriers, right,
Speaker 6: Russia does not have the same ability to keep good
Speaker 6: Lord saying munitions no, and so like that's a finite resource, right,
Speaker 6: they're their means of defining that, defending their ships and
Speaker 6: defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource. So
Speaker 6: any time you can even if the ship doesn't get sunk,
Speaker 6: if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles,
Speaker 6: which it doesn't, which the whole country doesn't have very
Speaker 6: many of, that they're still a win.
Speaker 2: Now, this is we're talking about irregular naval warfare. And
Speaker 2: then this is not This is not what most people
Speaker 2: would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to the
Speaker 2: expansion of hostilities in Ukraine. However, we are talking This
Speaker 2: is very different than the case of the Hoothies. Ukraine
Speaker 2: is a state. It doesn't have a massive arms industry,
Speaker 2: but it has one, and it has the support of
Speaker 2: nations with sizable arms industries. Right, so we are not
Speaker 2: talking about this part. We are going to talk about
Speaker 2: the aspects of Ukrainian a regular naval warfare. That are
Speaker 2: some guys that are hobbyists building shit. Yeah, this is
Speaker 2: not that part yet. But I think this information is
Speaker 2: kind of significant and that it shows the tactical use
Speaker 2: of anti ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly
Speaker 2: shape an operational environment even when the country using them
Speaker 2: has minimal conventional naval assets of their own. It is
Speaker 2: largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has
Speaker 2: been able to reopen their black Sea ports. That matters
Speaker 2: to people seeking to understand both this conflict and the
Speaker 2: future of unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you
Speaker 2: could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare,
Speaker 2: but I think we're still leaning on the unconventional side
Speaker 2: at the moment, at least in terms of how doctrine
Speaker 2: is changing as a result of this. So maybe I
Speaker 2: should update how we're defining this. But for our purposes
Speaker 2: as people unlikely to have access to cruise missiles but
Speaker 2: significantly likely to find ourselves waging an unconventional than having
Speaker 2: cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new
Speaker 2: weapons systems Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock
Speaker 2: down the Black Sea fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this
Speaker 2: is where we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones
Speaker 2: are a mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about
Speaker 2: stuff like the Bairaktar, the Turkish drone, which is like
Speaker 2: kind of like the Predator A right, it's like an
Speaker 2: actual military product. But the majority in terms of numbers
Speaker 2: of drones that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or
Speaker 2: at least drones that started out a civilian technology. A
Speaker 2: lot of these are now built to be military, but
Speaker 2: they're still based on these designs that started with people
Speaker 2: hacking and cobbling together civilian drones and outside of naval stuff.
Speaker 2: Prior to the war, there had been a lot of
Speaker 2: veterans and hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the
Speaker 2: Ukrainian military that it needed to adopt drone warfare on
Speaker 2: a large scale, the kind of drone warfare that you
Speaker 2: can do with these these less expensive drones, and they
Speaker 2: received a lot of pushback until the war started and
Speaker 2: these guys just took to the fields, started fucking murking
Speaker 2: Russian armed units and infantry and killing generals and shit.
Speaker 2: And now Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone
Speaker 2: is going to follow. Like Ukrainian like battalions have like
Speaker 2: companies now that are drone assault companies, and like line battalions, and.
Speaker 6: Within infantry you have people used artillery eating transit forwards.
Speaker 2: Yes, all over. They have set a goal for this
Speaker 2: year producing at least a million and ideally more like
Speaker 2: two million drones, and at least from what I read,
Speaker 2: that looks like very plausible and most of these are
Speaker 2: quite small, right, but that doesn't mean obviously ineffective.
Speaker 6: I know they buy a lot of their drones in
Speaker 6: the UK because the UK has consistently kicked itself in
Speaker 6: the nuts when it comes to like Brexit, and so
Speaker 6: the pound is significantly weaker, and so they're able to
Speaker 6: get the drones at a cheaper price and then drive
Speaker 6: them all the way across.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I know people who have done that. I was going
Speaker 6: to go join them, but never worked it out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know there are a number of different
Speaker 2: like these. These these drones earlier in the war had
Speaker 2: an easier time being effected, i even causing casualties in
Speaker 2: the Russians.
Speaker 1: Then later.
Speaker 2: This is something that you know, kind of the hooplaw
Speaker 2: and support which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets.
Speaker 2: Lead some people to discount the degree to which Russian
Speaker 2: forces have adapted and gotten smarter. And one of the
Speaker 2: ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in
Speaker 2: blocking drones and using drones of their own. You know,
Speaker 2: one of the stories the last couple of weeks is
Speaker 2: that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced
Speaker 2: weapons systems like samsites deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended
Speaker 2: their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of,
Speaker 2: and that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less
Speaker 2: efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels. Some
Speaker 2: of this has been kind of funny. I want to
Speaker 2: read a quote from a Business Insider article here. Russia
Speaker 2: is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try
Speaker 2: and trick Ukraine, which keeps destroying its warships. In an
Speaker 2: intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said
Speaker 2: that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the
Speaker 2: side of ks probably to confuse the uncrude aerial vehicle operators.
Speaker 2: They showed there's some images of this. They don't seem
Speaker 2: convincing to me. I don't know if I think this
Speaker 2: is working.
Speaker 1: This is great.
Speaker 2: I love this, like they have a cardboard navy next. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's very bugs bunny. Yes, they're not working as well
Speaker 2: as bugs would like a.
Speaker 6: Hole in the side of the cliff face and crushing
Speaker 6: into it.
Speaker 2: Keeps throwing. It's very funny. I mean obviously they just
Speaker 2: Ukraine just sank like or damn it badly damaged. Four boats.
Speaker 2: So I don't think this is I haven't seen evidence
Speaker 2: that this is working well. Their actual like jamming efforts
Speaker 2: have been much more successful, right, Yeah, they always will
Speaker 2: be on civilian One of the thing that's really interesting
Speaker 2: compared to Meanma is that Ukraine tends to rely on
Speaker 2: modified off the shelf civilian drones, right your dji is
Speaker 2: that kind of thing in Mianma because of where a
Speaker 2: lott of the PDFs are. Because but they increasingly do
Speaker 2: control the borders, but they haven't always. They have been
Speaker 2: making their own drones. The group called Federal Wings you
Speaker 2: can find them on telegram who who make their own drones,
Speaker 2: and I think those seem to be less the Jammas
Speaker 2: that the sac that the Tamado has are Chinese made
Speaker 2: Jamma rifles. You see them all the time in captured
Speaker 2: weapon cashes, but they don't seem to be having as
Speaker 2: much impact on these homemade drones, which is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's you know, I've mentioned a couple of times
Speaker 2: we're doing this in part because the odds that people
Speaker 2: listening might be involved in an irregular conflict are not zero.
Speaker 2: You know what I think about when I say that
Speaker 2: is not that there's high odds for any individual person
Speaker 2: fighting themselves in that situation, but there is, given the
Speaker 2: number of people who listened to this podcast, probably someone
Speaker 2: who is not currently involved in a conflict that will
Speaker 2: find themselves that way in the future. And I base
Speaker 2: that in part on the fact that all of our
Speaker 2: friends in Myanmar who are currently fighting a war were
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago delivery drivers and you know,
Speaker 2: playing pubg online and not really thinking they would wind
Speaker 2: up as insurgents.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I've spoken to a number of people who are
Speaker 6: currently fighting done in Mianma who have listened to our
Speaker 6: Mianma podcast and realized the capacity of three D printing
Speaker 6: to be very useful and so like, even in that sense,
Speaker 6: it's already happening. But yeah, don't know one in Memma.
Speaker 6: Like many of them said that their entire combat experience
Speaker 6: is playing pubg. Yeah, now they're murking ships.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff. And
Speaker 2: this brings me back to Ukraine's irregular drone warfare units,
Speaker 2: which again a lot of these guys started out as
Speaker 2: civilian enthusiasts who expanded responded to the outbreak or at
Speaker 2: least expansion of hostilities by expanding their hobby into a
Speaker 2: real world military effort that had a real world effect.
Speaker 2: Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing
Speaker 2: Ukraine to do severe damage to that massive Russian armored
Speaker 2: column heading towards the city and providing intel that led
Speaker 2: to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it
Speaker 2: is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same
Speaker 2: group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand
Speaker 2: their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I
Speaker 2: found in CNN by some Bashtian Shukla, Alex Marcott and
Speaker 2: Daria Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the
Speaker 2: title of this article. Yeah, I'll try to thriller in
Speaker 2: the show notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea
Speaker 2: drones part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea.
Speaker 2: Haven't really seen the word fight backies that way, but
Speaker 2: there you go. So I'm going to read a quote
Speaker 2: from that article. A government linked Ukrainian fundraising organization called
Speaker 2: United twenty four has sourced money from companies and individuals
Speaker 2: all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to
Speaker 2: a variety of developers and initiatives, from defense to soccer matches.
Speaker 2: The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict
Speaker 2: guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who seen and
Speaker 2: met with declined to give their full names or even
Speaker 2: their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky wooden jetty,
Speaker 2: a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants to go
Speaker 2: by shark in front of him is a long, black,
Speaker 2: hard show briefcase. He unveils a bespoke multi screened mission control,
Speaker 2: essentially an elaborate gaming center combined, complete with levers, joysticks,
Speaker 2: a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches that
Speaker 2: shouldn't accidentally be knocked. With labels like Blast. The developer
Speaker 2: of the drone, who act to remain anonymous sid their
Speaker 2: work on sea drones only began once the war started.
Speaker 2: It was very important because we did not have many
Speaker 2: forces to resist the maritime state Russia, and we needed
Speaker 2: to develop something of our own because we didn't have
Speaker 2: the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design I mean,
Speaker 2: this guy's not really a hobbyist anymore, but that's how
Speaker 2: he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the military
Speaker 2: recognized the value of what he was doing. And the
Speaker 2: current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little over
Speaker 2: two thousand pounds with an explosive six hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: one pound payload, a five hundred mile range and a
Speaker 2: max speed of fifty miles per hour. That is a
Speaker 2: significant weapons system. Multiple sea drones have been used to
Speaker 2: strike Russian assets in the Black Sea, and drones were
Speaker 2: involved in a successful attack that severely damaged the Kirch
Speaker 2: Bridge last July, rendering it impassable since until September. So
Speaker 2: these have had a real battlefield effect and they probably
Speaker 2: will continue to do so. The developer of these drones
Speaker 2: told CNN these drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They
Speaker 2: are designed, drawn and tested here. It's our own production
Speaker 2: of holes, electronics and software. More than fifty percent of
Speaker 2: the production of equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's
Speaker 2: really significant because you know, I think we're all aware
Speaker 2: of the difficulty Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from
Speaker 2: the West as a result of fucking around in Congress,
Speaker 2: and so it is a necessity for them to be
Speaker 2: able to develop weapon systems like this that can interdict
Speaker 2: and counteract more advanced and expensive weapon systems and can
Speaker 2: be produced indigenously. You know, I don't think we have
Speaker 2: seen a mass suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what
Speaker 2: happens when we do, like with more significant numbers than
Speaker 2: we've seen deployed. I kind of wonder the degree to
Speaker 2: which the Russians have gotten good at spotting this stuff.
Speaker 2: I've come across at least a couple of stories of
Speaker 2: these boats likely destroyed on approach. So they certainly don't
Speaker 2: always work even a majority of the time. But given
Speaker 2: the cost of these things they don't have to get
Speaker 2: through the majority of the time, very much worth it.
Speaker 2: Right now, In you Know that interview with the New
Speaker 2: York Times, Admiral Najpapa caution that a Ukraine is still
Speaker 2: outgunned in the Black Sea. Even though the Russians no
Speaker 2: longer have supremacy, they still have air superiority. They are
Speaker 2: still able to launch from the sea long range missiles
Speaker 2: at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets, So this is not
Speaker 2: again a situation that should be portrayed as them having
Speaker 2: their own way. Their ability to kind of interdict the
Speaker 2: sea has been the primary effects of it have been
Speaker 2: number one, the reopening of trade in the Black Sea
Speaker 2: and earlier in the war, by locking down the ability
Speaker 2: of these landing ships to put more troops on ground,
Speaker 2: and by doing damage to the Kurch Bridge, they were
Speaker 2: able to slow Russian reinforcements in Russian materiel from entering
Speaker 2: the war zone in order to this aided in some
Speaker 2: of the advances, particularly in areas like Carson. At this moment,
Speaker 2: the situation has changed because again, the Russians aren't just
Speaker 2: kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over again,
Speaker 2: or at least not always, and we don't tend to
Speaker 2: talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things,
Speaker 2: but that is an important part of the story. And
Speaker 2: one of the things the Russians have done is kind
Speaker 2: of igledge that the Black Sea Fleet may not be
Speaker 2: a fleet in being forever and certainly cannot be relied
Speaker 2: upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle.
Speaker 2: And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time
Speaker 2: building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern
Speaker 2: Russia to Mariopol and occupied southern Ukraine. This has allowed
Speaker 2: them to get high volume shipments into the area and
Speaker 2: supply troops to the area along Ukraine's southern front without
Speaker 2: relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: So the fact that Ukraine has been able to take
Speaker 2: out for landing ships recently is good. That's a win
Speaker 2: for Ukraine. It reduces Russian capability, but it is not
Speaker 2: half the same effect that it would have had, for example,
Speaker 2: two years earlier. Right, Yeah, because Russia has also evolved,
Speaker 2: and among other things, railroads are a lot easier or
Speaker 2: a lot harder to destroy to take out. Right, It's
Speaker 2: easy to damage a railroad, but they're easy to fix.
Speaker 2: It doesn't take a lot to get some guys over
Speaker 2: to fix a damage sunk of railroad. Fixing a bridge
Speaker 2: that's been blown up or a sunk boat is a
Speaker 2: lot harder.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, and there are people within Russia
Speaker 6: even who are sabotaging railroads, but as you say, it's
Speaker 6: like it's very high stakes for them, and it's relatively
Speaker 6: low cost for the Russian state to fix that stuff,
Speaker 6: so like it's not as effective.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But I think this gives you an idea of
Speaker 2: kind of like what we're looking at when we look
Speaker 2: at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side
Speaker 2: that does not have access to a functional navy, not
Speaker 2: able to interdict or destroy fleets, but able to stop
Speaker 2: them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop
Speaker 2: them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them
Speaker 2: terrain that they can act in without being countered, and
Speaker 2: you have also denied them from stopping you from acting
Speaker 2: in that same terrain, even if you don't have total
Speaker 2: safety in that area. That opens up the operational possibilities substantially.
Speaker 2: And this is something that I kind of don't think
Speaker 2: is going to get put back in the bag. Even
Speaker 2: if some of these Star Wars ass weapons systems do
Speaker 2: come out in the near future. You know, maybe that'll
Speaker 2: have an impact in the immediate term on people like
Speaker 2: the houthies, but I don't think that it really will
Speaker 2: on you know, for example, what Ukraine's doing right Yes, yeah.
Speaker 6: Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms, body armor, grenades,
Speaker 6: and ships. There's no way it's going to implement some
Speaker 6: kind of massive Star Wars system over its navy, not
Speaker 6: right now, not in the middle of a conflict that's
Speaker 6: it's struggling to supply yep.
Speaker 2: You know what, here's an ad break.
Speaker 6: All right, we're back and we are traveling around the world.
Speaker 6: Spend your little globe in your head and look for Meanma,
Speaker 6: which is of course in Asia. Now I'm talking about
Speaker 6: two different I guess anti ship sabotage or attack or
Speaker 6: two different ways ships have been sunk in the Amba.
Speaker 6: I'll start with the first one, which is undoubtedly the flashiest,
Speaker 6: just because it's fun. So a ship in the port
Speaker 6: of Yangon about about a month ago, so we're recording
Speaker 6: on a twenty. It's about the first of March. It
Speaker 6: was in the river, in the river in Yangon, right,
Speaker 6: and it was carrying allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now, if
Speaker 6: you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese Freedom movement,
Speaker 6: they will one of their demands for a long time
Speaker 6: has been to stop supplying the Hunter with jet fuel,
Speaker 6: which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians,
Speaker 6: PDF formations, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed
Speaker 6: at some point in the last couple of years. And
Speaker 6: they haven't been exactly right. They haven't been able to
Speaker 6: stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the Hunter.
Speaker 6: So they've taken it into their own hands. And what
Speaker 6: they did on the first of March was that they
Speaker 6: snuck onto a boat. So two, this is the story
Speaker 6: from the Burmese National Unity Governments Ministry Defense. Anyway, combat
Speaker 6: divers snuck onto this boat planted a kilogram of TNT
Speaker 6: or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of TNT. Robert
Speaker 6: and I've both spoken to people who make explosives in mema,
Speaker 6: so we do. We definitely know the PDF has access
Speaker 6: to a range of explosives. They set it on a
Speaker 6: five hour fuse and it blew up in the middle
Speaker 6: of the night, and there's definitely footage of the ship
Speaker 6: on fire having blown up. Now, this is pretty remarkable
Speaker 6: for never real Like this is like why the United
Speaker 6: States has units like the Navy Seals, right, like the
Speaker 6: higher speed guys, because it is not easy to scuba
Speaker 6: dive across a harbor, climb onto a ship, send an
Speaker 6: explosive charge without being detected, and then leave that ship
Speaker 6: and have the charge go off and sink the ship
Speaker 6: without you being compromised, without the charge itself being like compromised,
Speaker 6: and the ship being saved. Right, this is some like
Speaker 6: this is some classic like this is why they are
Speaker 6: special unit within the US Minute Now, the PDF very
Speaker 6: obviously did not have combat divers. Two years ago, I
Speaker 6: was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon. The rivers
Speaker 6: in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very low,
Speaker 6: So the people who you find diving in that area
Speaker 6: are not so much like hobby scuba divers or free divers,
Speaker 6: but there's salvage divers and there's a whole little industry
Speaker 6: of people. And these people are diving in equipment that
Speaker 6: I would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an
Speaker 6: air hose in between your teeth and diving down and
Speaker 6: trying to find there's a large deposit of coal in
Speaker 6: one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship
Speaker 6: that's sunk. There was a course copper, which everyone all
Speaker 6: around the world, including the Vigcong in Santia, are stealing copper.
Speaker 6: There's iron, right, So these people are diving down and
Speaker 6: trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever minimal
Speaker 6: amount they can. Right, It's an extremely dangerous an extremely
Speaker 6: low income. It's one of the sort of really high risk,
Speaker 6: low reward jobs that you get in economies where people
Speaker 6: are really struggling to make ends meet, right, So those
Speaker 6: are the only divers I can find evidence of in Yangon.
Speaker 6: I don't think it was them who did this, because
Speaker 6: you have to have a boat above you with a
Speaker 6: pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth, right,
Speaker 6: So it seems like somebody in within the They said
Speaker 6: it was a Yangon PDF, that's what they attribute it to,
Speaker 6: So that would be one of these. It would likely
Speaker 6: be an underground group within the PDF, right, some people
Speaker 6: living in the city who were able to sneak onto
Speaker 6: this boat, set a charge and blow it up, And
Speaker 6: they would also had to have intelligence at the boat
Speaker 6: where it was, what it was carrying, et cetera. It's
Speaker 6: a pretty pretty daring mission that this is the first
Speaker 6: one like this we've seen, and we haven't seen anything since.
Speaker 6: But it's of course possible that this is a story
Speaker 6: that we're being told. In fact, they had like someone
Speaker 6: undercover on the ship, right, or like they had some
Speaker 6: other means of getting this charge onto the ship. But
Speaker 6: one way or another they managed to blow up this
Speaker 6: ship carrying fuel, which is a significant debt trim. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: and that's how they get most of their shit, it's
Speaker 6: not over land, especially with more the.
Speaker 2: Terrain there is just absolutely like even with modern technology
Speaker 2: difficult to get significant amounts of shit through.
Speaker 6: They're resupplying some of their outposts that are ten miles
Speaker 6: from a town with helicopters right now, like A the
Speaker 6: terrain is burly, and B they don't have The PDF
Speaker 6: has denied them access that. Any time they send out
Speaker 6: a convoy, it gets attacked, so setting out. Plus, you
Speaker 6: know that their land border crossings are increasingly falling into
Speaker 6: the hands of the PDFs and the ROS, So getting
Speaker 6: stuff through the ocean is one of the ways that
Speaker 6: they can still get stuff. And if this keeps happening,
Speaker 6: then they will make that more expensive for them. And
Speaker 6: they're not exactly a wealthy like hunter, even though I
Speaker 6: guess Lung just made himself an air force one recently.
Speaker 6: I was just looking at it today.
Speaker 2: He's good.
Speaker 6: He's got himself too luxury. Yeah, they called it dictator class,
Speaker 6: like he's upgraded from president class.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yes, he has in many ways. So, yeah,
Speaker 6: that's one way that the PDF has been blowing up
Speaker 6: ships in the Yangon Robert, do you know who else
Speaker 6: has been blowing up ships in the yang In Yangon.
Speaker 2: Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa
Speaker 2: the mid eighteen hundreds, so I would guess them that's right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Lots of repressed, repressed
Speaker 6: feelings and growing up a.
Speaker 2: Lot of cabin boys with deep trauma. Anyway, here's the ass.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, we're Becka. We hope you enjoyed that.
Speaker 6: That pivot one of our best ones yet. And we're
Speaker 6: talking about the Arakan Army now. So the Arakan Army
Speaker 6: are not to be confused with the Arakan Rahine of
Speaker 6: Salvation Army. Different group. Arakan is a name of what
Speaker 6: is now a kind state before it was colonized by
Speaker 6: the Burmese. That was I think Arakan was a king
Speaker 6: before it was colonized by the Burmese, so that that's
Speaker 6: where that refers to. It's a geographical appellation rather than
Speaker 6: like necessarily an ethnic one. The Rakin would be the
Speaker 6: ethnic group. So what the AA have done is sunk
Speaker 6: I think at least four Hunter ships now, and most
Speaker 6: of these ships are kind of they're like the they
Speaker 6: look like big Higgins boats. They're like landing craft or
Speaker 6: like car ferries, like flat bottom with a bow that
Speaker 6: goes down.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: I rode around a lot in the Marshall Islands in
Speaker 6: little landing craft like that because they can get them in.
Speaker 6: They don't have like docks, so they can just ride
Speaker 6: that right up to the beach and then drop the
Speaker 6: front and off you go. And they use them a lot.
Speaker 6: The Hunter doesn't have like per se marines that they
Speaker 6: don't have maritime infantry, but they they use them to
Speaker 6: transport their regular army around, right, and they use them
Speaker 6: to transport them up river. They also use them a
Speaker 6: lot in Rakhine State to shell AA positions and any
Speaker 6: townships that they've decided they want to wipe off the
Speaker 6: map and kill all the people in.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: So these these boats have been a real like thorn
Speaker 6: in the side of the Aracan Army. After Operation ten
Speaker 6: twenty seven, when they joined with two other groups to
Speaker 6: form the Three Brotherhood Alliance, A launch attacks on the
Speaker 6: Hunter all over Vima. And so what they've been doing,
Speaker 6: it appears, is using underwater mines to sink these ships,
Speaker 6: which is interesting, right, Like, I guess the mines are
Speaker 6: like a very old technology, right, it's probably one hundred
Speaker 6: years plus underwater mines have existed. It seems the way
Speaker 6: that like, the reason they're able to get away with
Speaker 6: using what is their relatively dated technology is because the
Speaker 6: hunter doesn't expect to encounter anything, right, and so has
Speaker 6: not equiped its ships as such, Like they do have
Speaker 6: stuff like submarines, but that's not what's getting sunk. What's
Speaker 6: getting sun of these big kind of landing craft riverboats,
Speaker 6: And it seems that they're using mines and then once
Speaker 6: they disabled the ship, they're then attacking it with small boats,
Speaker 6: small arms like indirect fire mortars and stuff. I saw
Speaker 6: one post that suggested they'd use which is pretty cool
Speaker 6: if they did. The Burmese military has these like tank destroyers.
Speaker 6: It's a tank, it's what it is, and they've captured
Speaker 6: the AA has captured a number of these, and I've
Speaker 6: seen suggestions that they're using some of these on like
Speaker 6: they just set up an ambush along the banks of
Speaker 6: the river, right and as a ship comes in they
Speaker 6: can they can maybe disable it with a mine and
Speaker 6: then attack it with those. But there are videos online
Speaker 6: you can find them of the AA sinking these ships
Speaker 6: and then they've done some amazing drone photography of like
Speaker 6: they obviously they then like staged their units on the ships,
Speaker 6: like all saluting the drone and they had the Arakan
Speaker 6: Army flags and they're actually really cool photos of them
Speaker 6: taking these. But again, like I think this might be
Speaker 6: the first sinking of a Bermese naval ship since since
Speaker 6: independence from Britain, Like I can't think that they were.
Speaker 6: They really haven't played much of a role at all
Speaker 6: in its comics with the Eros aside as from like
Speaker 6: basically kind of just shelling places when they want to
Speaker 6: do that. But there's never really been any significant opposition
Speaker 6: to them, and that's changed now they have to obviously,
Speaker 6: just like everywhere else, watch out for drones. R drones
Speaker 6: have been used to a massive extent in Myanmar, and
Speaker 6: like the AA doesn't have as many like associated PDFs,
Speaker 6: I haven't seen them doing as much of the drone
Speaker 6: stuff as the PDFs. The pdf tend to be like
Speaker 6: the more urban folks, right, the younger folks and the
Speaker 6: gen Z folks that we've spoken about before, and a
Speaker 6: lot of them have been very savvy with their use
Speaker 6: of drones. Like I said, you can look up Federal
Speaker 6: wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones
Speaker 6: and all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks.
Speaker 6: So they like, but that what it wasn't even drone
Speaker 6: to you, it's pretty simple. It was just mine. So
Speaker 6: things they do love mines and meat of mines all
Speaker 6: over that country. But in this case, these I guess
Speaker 6: massive what mines in the rivers. Given that the Hunter
Speaker 6: is the only only entity sending big boats up and down,
Speaker 6: you could set them at a certain depth where these
Speaker 6: small boats wouldn't hit them, and eventually one of the
Speaker 6: Hunter boats is going to hit them, I guess. And
Speaker 6: so it's pretty basic technology, but it's still a massive
Speaker 6: step forward in terms of like a place where the
Speaker 6: state had complete impunity, it now doesn't.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people.
Speaker 6: They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate
Speaker 6: soldiers and their families from a position. The soldiers they
Speaker 6: were trying to like, rather than surrendering, they were trying
Speaker 6: to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else. The
Speaker 6: AA asked them to surrender, and they didn't. They tried
Speaker 6: to evacuate them. So then they mined the ships and
Speaker 6: took those out. I think the hunters. Like tried to
Speaker 6: spin this as like the AA is attacking civilians, but
Speaker 6: I think a Burmese Navy ship with a Burmese Navy flag,
Speaker 6: when those ships have just been shelling you, seems like
Speaker 6: a legitimate target to me. And I think it's very hard.
Speaker 6: It's you know, it's a hunter, but children on one
Speaker 6: of their naval ships rather than the AA who attacked
Speaker 6: the ship because it had children. You can hear in
Speaker 6: one of the things. You can hear the AA are
Speaker 6: like attacking the ship in small boats and they're shouting
Speaker 6: like there are children on board, and you can hear
Speaker 6: them acknowledging it. And there are videos of the AA
Speaker 6: rescuing people who jumped overboard, rescuing them from the river,
Speaker 6: and then like, I guess they've just held us. POW's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously, not many of us have
Speaker 6: access to underwater mines, but you know, maybe in a
Speaker 6: fictional future we might.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, there you go, folks. This has been irregular
Speaker 2: naval warfare. And you a podcast about a regular naval
Speaker 2: warfare and you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, send us to your videos of yourself. Yeah, ir
Speaker 6: regular naval.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, go out there. Look how about this, Every
Speaker 2: listener go out and sink one naval vessel, you know,
Speaker 2: no matter who's just any boat. Any go sink a boat,
Speaker 2: any boat, take super yot, knock it out. You see
Speaker 2: a dinghy, take that fucker out. People kayaking, fuck them up,
Speaker 2: you know. Ban on a boat, absolutely, a banana boat
Speaker 2: for sure. One of those weird duck boat car things
Speaker 2: that they have in some city. Oh yeah, actually, you
Speaker 2: know what, you don't need to do anything with that.
Speaker 2: That'll kill everybody on board on Those things are traps.
Speaker 2: Just pray for those.
Speaker 6: Yeah, any any other boat. Yeah, you see a doughnut,
Speaker 6: you know behind a speedboat?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, murk it anyway, everybody go away. Hey, we'll
Speaker 2: be back Monday with more episodes every week from now
Speaker 2: until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 5: It Could Happen here as a production of Pool Zone.
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Speaker 4: Thanks for listening,