Speaker 1: You stand in line. Ahead of you, dozens of other
Speaker 1: ragged figures stretch up to the horizon and the looming
Speaker 1: edifice of the Canadian border station. You're cold, of course,
Speaker 1: but so is everyone. You all shivered together. The sound
Speaker 1: of chattering teeth is louder than the few muffled conversations
Speaker 1: you hear around you. Almost no one is in any
Speaker 1: mood to talk. Everything you own is stuffed into your backpack. Fleetingly,
Speaker 1: you think about your old TV, your gaming consoles, the
Speaker 1: comfy couch you used to relax on while watching Netflix. Netflix.
Speaker 1: You almost tear up thinking about it. You can't remember
Speaker 1: the last time you relaxed, the last beer you sipped,
Speaker 1: the last good meal you enjoyed. A cold wind blows
Speaker 1: across the line, and you feel it most acutely in
Speaker 1: the bit of shrapnel that's been buried in your shoulder
Speaker 1: for the last several months. Every twinge of pain it
Speaker 1: brings you is rather ironically or reminder of how lucky
Speaker 1: you are to have gotten out alive. There's been very
Speaker 1: little news from home since you fled. The little bit
Speaker 1: you've received during snippets of time when you've had both
Speaker 1: power and electricity has been dire. Most of your friends
Speaker 1: have gone dark. You try not to think about what
Speaker 1: that means for them. It's taken three long, hungry, unshowered
Speaker 1: weeks for you to reach the border. Your body is
Speaker 1: at the edge of its endurance. For the last several days,
Speaker 1: you've felt perpetually on the edge of collapse. But now
Speaker 1: with the border in sight, you've been filled with a
Speaker 1: peculiar new energy. You made it. You're going to survive.
Speaker 1: You watches a van rolls up from the Canadian side
Speaker 1: of the hastily thrown up border barricades. A film crew
Speaker 1: steps out, a reporter begins chatting to some of the
Speaker 1: people who've already made it through. You can't hear what
Speaker 1: they say, but you can guess the questions well enough,
Speaker 1: and makes you think back to times years ago when
Speaker 1: you lazily flipped through ch V channels and caught footage
Speaker 1: from some mainstream news station of a journalist talking to
Speaker 1: Syrian refugees. You doubt you watch the story for more
Speaker 1: than a few minutes. Now you wonder about all those
Speaker 1: people where they are now, how many of them are
Speaker 1: still alive. The line moves slowly, but cheerly, and in
Speaker 1: time you're just a couple of people away from the
Speaker 1: border guards. In front of you is a family of five.
Speaker 1: The mother clutches the family Bible, holding on to it
Speaker 1: as if for dear life. The father has a crucifix
Speaker 1: hung around his neck. You think relatively little of this.
Speaker 1: You grew up in America, after all, but the border
Speaker 1: guards seemed to pick them out a suspicious Several of
Speaker 1: them crowd around the family, hands wearily on holstered guns.
Speaker 1: As you watch, their bags are unceremoniously emptied out and searched,
Speaker 1: layers of clothing stripped off of even their bodies. You're
Speaker 1: confused for a bit. The other families passing through hadn't
Speaker 1: been subjected to that kind of treatment. And then you
Speaker 1: think back to a few days ago, hanging out in
Speaker 1: that bus station in Montana, the last time you'd been
Speaker 1: able to charge up your phone and find some WiFi.
Speaker 1: There'd been a terrible shooting in Vancouver. Half a dozen
Speaker 1: Christian dominionists, terrorists from America had smuggled guns up, probably
Speaker 1: from somewhere in Washington. They'd hit up a concert venue,
Speaker 1: killing dozens dozens of people. For a moment, you're ashamed
Speaker 1: that it took you so long to remember that attack,
Speaker 1: you realize that it didn't really stand out to you
Speaker 1: at the time. Your last few months have been filled
Speaker 1: with violence so much more extreme and indiscriminate that the
Speaker 1: news of this tragedy just sort of rolled over you
Speaker 1: like morning fog. It didn't even stick in your head.
Speaker 1: You notice now, though, that the Canadian soldiers and border
Speaker 1: guards manning this crossing look conspicuously less friendly than you'd expected.
Speaker 1: Friendly is, of course the first word that comes to
Speaker 1: mind when you think about Canadians, but these men and
Speaker 1: women seem anxious, jittery, and perhaps even a little bit angry.
Speaker 1: After a long search, the family ahead of you was
Speaker 1: walked through the border crossing. Border patrol men follow them in,
Speaker 1: and they're led to a separate waiting area from the
Speaker 1: other refugees. The lion moves up. You step forward, that
Speaker 1: much closer to safety. You look up at one of
Speaker 1: the guards. He glares back at you, and once again
Speaker 1: you feel less certain about the future. What stereotypically is
Speaker 1: an American. I've spent a lot of time traveling, and
Speaker 1: I've made friends from all around the world, most notably Israel, Serbia, Germany, France, England,
Speaker 1: and Iraq, So I hope you'll forgive my arrogance and
Speaker 1: starting with my own opinions on stereotypes about Americans before
Speaker 1: we get into a little bit of research. We Americans
Speaker 1: are first and foremost seen as a loud people. Most
Speaker 1: foreigners I know have emphasized that about US. Americans have
Speaker 1: a reputation for being fun to great party goers, were
Speaker 1: seen as passionate and of course fat. That's definitely another stereotype.
Speaker 1: And we are obviously seen as a heavily armed people.
Speaker 1: When I first started traveling and people would find out
Speaker 1: that I came from Texas, many of them would ask
Speaker 1: if I owned guns, which I did and do. I
Speaker 1: can remember one particularly poignant conversation I had with the
Speaker 1: Venezuelan man and a hostel in Belfast, Ireland. It was
Speaker 1: three or four days after the Sandy Hook shooting in
Speaker 1: late two thousand and twelve. Now, Venezuela has and had
Speaker 1: plenty of problems with violence and a nightmarishly high murder rate,
Speaker 1: but I'll always remember the confusion in this guy's voice
Speaker 1: when he said to me, but nobody shoots up a school.
Speaker 1: Nobody does that. So maybe add that to the list
Speaker 1: of stereotypes about Americans. An awful lot of us are
Speaker 1: willing to shoot up schools. I found a fun CBS
Speaker 1: News article how Americans look to the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: and I figured some of those anecdotes would be good
Speaker 1: to pat out my own experience in the matter. I
Speaker 1: want to read to one from an actor in Toronto
Speaker 1: and another from a retired banker in Copenhagen. Quote. The
Speaker 1: first word that comes to mind when I hear the
Speaker 1: word America is arrogance. They are big and loud, and
Speaker 1: they are in charge of everything. And the next capitalism,
Speaker 1: money rules everything. Overweight people, Donald Trump elections shootings. Now.
Speaker 1: One thing that's interesting to me about this article is
Speaker 1: that while positive opinions did outnumber negative ones, people fromation,
Speaker 1: is generally considered culturally closer to the United States were
Speaker 1: more likely to refer to US as arrogant or violent.
Speaker 1: Here's a representative opinion on Americans from a twenty six
Speaker 1: year old in New Delhi. Has a very liberal culture,
Speaker 1: great people in a country that drives innovation. Another interviewee
Speaker 1: from the Philippines said America welcomes all different races. That's
Speaker 1: what she believed about us. It's interesting food for thought.
Speaker 1: At least, why am I talking about all this? What
Speaker 1: does it have to do with the Second American Civil War? Well,
Speaker 1: what are some stereotypes you know about iraqis Afghan people, Syrians?
Speaker 1: We don't wars mean refugees. It is one commonality that
Speaker 1: literally every conflict in modern history shares. If there is
Speaker 1: shooting in American cities, if there are bombings in the
Speaker 1: hills and on the highways, there will be people who flee.
Speaker 1: Many of them will become internally displaced within the country,
Speaker 1: fleeing bombed out neighborhoods and unsafe chunks of the country
Speaker 1: ahead of growing militias and insurgent groups. Now, you probably
Speaker 1: don't know much about Syria in two thousand ten, the
Speaker 1: year before the Arab Spring. That's fine. Until pretty recently,
Speaker 1: I didn't either. That year, Syria was one of the
Speaker 1: fastest growing, lower middle income countries in the world. It
Speaker 1: was host to a huge amount of tourism and agriculture,
Speaker 1: decent industry, healthcare and college were free. It had a dictator,
Speaker 1: Bashar al Assad, but he was widely seen as at
Speaker 1: least a mild reformer. Things seemed to be slowly opening
Speaker 1: up when I was eighteen. In my first year of college,
Speaker 1: I took two semesters of Arabic from a Syrian professor
Speaker 1: named Yasser. Yaser hailed from Aleppo, and he was deeply
Speaker 1: proud of his city. He taught us about how it
Speaker 1: gave birth to the alphabet. He spoke lovingly and at
Speaker 1: length about its beauty, about the wonderful food. He introduced
Speaker 1: me to Arabic coffee and thoroughly convinced me that Syrian
Speaker 1: were better at brewing the drink than anyone else on
Speaker 1: this planet. I've traveled through a decent chunk of the
Speaker 1: Middle East now, and I still believe that the war
Speaker 1: began in two thousand eleven, five years after my classes
Speaker 1: with Yasar. By two thousand fifteen, more than three million
Speaker 1: Syrians had fled the fighting for neighboring countries like Lebanon,
Speaker 1: which is considered by me and only me, to be serious.
Speaker 1: Canada two thousand fifteen was the first year my journalism
Speaker 1: intersected with the Syrians civil war. A few days after
Speaker 1: my trip to report on the war in Ukraine, I
Speaker 1: found myself crossing the Hungarian Serbian border on foot. One
Speaker 1: million Syrian refugees made it over to Europe that year,
Speaker 1: and the bulk of them traveled on foot from Greece
Speaker 1: up through the Balkans and into Western Europe. We spent
Speaker 1: a couple of days on the refugee trail, watching endless,
Speaker 1: unbroken lines of refugees trudged closer and closer to their
Speaker 1: ultimate goal, usually Germany or somewhere in Scandinavia. A huge
Speaker 1: number of these people spoke English. They were just normal people,
Speaker 1: like anyone you'd meet on the street. Many of them
Speaker 1: had smart phones, which they used to show me pictures
Speaker 1: of Bashar al Assad's war crimes. Some of them were
Speaker 1: young men, fresh college graduates, who saw no future in
Speaker 1: their home country and hoped Europe could use their skills
Speaker 1: in medicine, engineering, or whatever. Other young men were fleeing
Speaker 1: the draft issued by the government. I met one man
Speaker 1: who had been a pilot for the Syrian Air Force.
Speaker 1: He'd grown tired of bombing his countrymen. I don't think
Speaker 1: I've ever met a man with older eyes. I wrote
Speaker 1: an article about the things these refugees told me for
Speaker 1: Crack to the Side I worked for at the time.
Speaker 1: Been Shapiro of The Daily Wire wrote an article too.
Speaker 1: His article was titled the Left keeps saying all Syrian
Speaker 1: refugees are Western friendly, they should learn to read. The
Speaker 1: crux of his argument was that Syrian refugees were not
Speaker 1: compatible with Western society since only seventy of them were
Speaker 1: totally negative on isis quote from Ben So what does
Speaker 1: this all mean. It means that the evidenceless picture all
Speaker 1: of all Syrian refugees is Western friendly doesn't hold water.
Speaker 1: But don't look for the media or the international left
Speaker 1: to pay attention to such facts. After all, these are
Speaker 1: the same people who keep stating, without evidence that only
Speaker 1: a tiny minority of Muslims hold extreme views. When fact
Speaker 1: conflicts with pretty fiction, the left chooses its own pretty
Speaker 1: fictions every time, which just means that more Westerners will die.
Speaker 1: And this brings me back to the point I started
Speaker 1: this episode with, what are the rest of the world
Speaker 1: stereotypes about Americans? And how will those stereotypes evolve after
Speaker 1: several years of escalating violence in surgeon attacks and terrorist murder.
Speaker 1: Once insurgents start bombing highways, shooting cops and assassinating politicians,
Speaker 1: once separatists start fighting against the government and whole cities
Speaker 1: are beyond the reach of the law, Once the Second
Speaker 1: American Civil War really gets going, the violence will not
Speaker 1: stay contained to our shores. In June of two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: the forces of the Islamic State captured Mosel, the second
Speaker 1: largest city in Iraq. Isis is generally portrayed in Western
Speaker 1: media as having sort of come out of nowhere, but
Speaker 1: that is not the truth. In Iraq, it evolved out
Speaker 1: of long standing hardline, sunny dominionist movements. They framed themselves
Speaker 1: as resistance against both the growing secular aspects of Iraqi
Speaker 1: society and their long standing religious nimessies. The Shia in
Speaker 1: Portland and in Dallas. In Cleveland and northern California, I
Speaker 1: have seen angry, heavily armed men preached their desire for
Speaker 1: a Christian dominated United States. The crosses tattooed on their
Speaker 1: arms and sewn on to their body armor were just
Speaker 1: as prominent as their three percent tattoos and Confederate flags.
Speaker 1: Right now, an American traveling abroad might face uncomfortable questions
Speaker 1: about Donald Trump. Imagine what an American fleeing from Texas
Speaker 1: might face as he tried to enter the EU or
Speaker 1: Canada in the wake of a series of brutal Christian
Speaker 1: nationalist pograms against LGBT Americans. If you remember, Omar Matinees
Speaker 1: ISIS credited mass shooting at a gay night club was
Speaker 1: used as justification by the Trump campaign for why Syrian
Speaker 1: refugees should not be accepted into the United States. A
Speaker 1: few months after my time on the refugee trail, in
Speaker 1: November of two thousand fifteen, a handful of ISIS commandos
Speaker 1: carried out a brutal attack on Paris, killing more than
Speaker 1: a hundred and thirty people, most of whom were concert
Speaker 1: glowers at the Bottaklan Theater. According to ISIS, the attack
Speaker 1: was retaliation for French air strikes and Syria and Iraq. Now,
Speaker 1: as imaginative as I can be, I have a hard
Speaker 1: time seeing France or Canada or any other country carrying
Speaker 1: out air strikes on the United States. We have nukes,
Speaker 1: for one thing, and that's really the only thing that
Speaker 1: matters when it comes to discouraging air strikes. But I
Speaker 1: can imagine other countries providing financial aid to the struggling
Speaker 1: federal government as it battles to maintain control. I can
Speaker 1: imagine them sending in peacekeepers and humanitarian aid to try
Speaker 1: and save gay people and people of color and areas
Speaker 1: threatened by white nationalist or dominionist violence. And I can
Speaker 1: imagine Christian terrorists striking back at them with attacks similar
Speaker 1: to the ones launched by ISIS. And if that happens,
Speaker 1: millions of American refugees might find themselves judged by the
Speaker 1: actions of a few of their most violent countrymen, just
Speaker 1: as the Syrian and Afghan refugees I met in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen were judged by the actions of a handful
Speaker 1: of terrorists, most of whom were not even from Syria
Speaker 1: or Afghanistan. By two thousand fifteen, after four years of
Speaker 1: civil war, nearly five million Syrians had been forced to
Speaker 1: flee their homeland. Syria's pre war population was just twenty
Speaker 1: three million. If our imagined second American Civil War grew
Speaker 1: to anything approaching that kind of intensity and a proportionate
Speaker 1: number of Americans were forced to flee the fighting, we
Speaker 1: could see as many as eighty million of our countrymen
Speaker 1: and women made refugees. Now, most of these people would
Speaker 1: stay within the bounds of the United States, becoming internally
Speaker 1: displaced persons. In Iraq, the acronym I d P was
Speaker 1: used for the folks who had fled from the fighting
Speaker 1: and Mosle and other areas captured by ISIS. Most I
Speaker 1: d p s were herded into vast, tense cities, living
Speaker 1: in canvas and provided for by the UN Humanitarian Crisis
Speaker 1: Relief Organization and eating food provided by the Qatari Red Crescent.
Speaker 1: They brought what they could carry and nothing more. We
Speaker 1: don't In the event of a second American civil war,
Speaker 1: the government would do its best to take care of
Speaker 1: millions of displaced citizens. But in the midst of a
Speaker 1: war and a failing economy, I do not think these
Speaker 1: camps would be overwhelmingly pleasant places. My mind is drawn
Speaker 1: to the treatment of the homeless and modern America, we
Speaker 1: as a culture sort of suck assid taking care of
Speaker 1: our needy in good times. A government prosecuting a brutal
Speaker 1: internesting war probably wouldn't win any awards for cleanest, best
Speaker 1: fed refugee camps. Stories of these miserable places would spread
Speaker 1: as millions of other Americans watched anxiously and considered whether
Speaker 1: or not they ought to flee themselves. Increasing numbers of
Speaker 1: US would seek shelter in Canada or northern Mexico. The
Speaker 1: rich would flee first, of course, probably to Europe. They
Speaker 1: would have the resources to pay their way into visas
Speaker 1: and replant their lives and cities like Berlin. The first
Speaker 1: wave of vulnerable refugees, Activists, people of color, gay and
Speaker 1: trans individuals would also probably have a relatively simple time
Speaker 1: earning refugee visas and places like Europe. But as the
Speaker 1: number of fleeing Americans increased from thousands to tens and
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands, and eventually to millions, the world's patients
Speaker 1: with US would wear out. Stories of terrorist attacks by
Speaker 1: American extremists would color world opinion of US. Canada is
Speaker 1: the world's seventh most peaceful society, Iceland is the world's
Speaker 1: most peaceful society. Most European nations are fairly high on
Speaker 1: that list. The United States, however, is currently number ninety four.
Speaker 1: We will not rise higher during a second American Civil war.
Speaker 1: One of the people interviewed in that CBS article about
Speaker 1: world stereotypes of Americans was a thirty nine year old
Speaker 1: from Toronto. He said, what identifies an America in loudness?
Speaker 1: All of the Trump stuff in the US has been depressing.
Speaker 1: You would like to think people are smarter than that,
Speaker 1: but definitely surprising and depressing to see how much support
Speaker 1: he has and how much support his ideas have. Imagine
Speaker 1: how this guy's opinion of us would harden after stories
Speaker 1: of gay people being gunned down or burned alive by
Speaker 1: Christian nationalists, after terrorists bombings from eco fascist cadres, after
Speaker 1: right wing militias and leftist guerrillas shoot up home neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: How long will it take that guy and millions of
Speaker 1: Canadians like him to go from Americans are loud and
Speaker 1: kind of annoying too. We need to shut down all
Speaker 1: American immigration until we figure out what's going on now.
Speaker 1: That might have been a good note to end this
Speaker 1: episode on, but the unofficial motto of this show is
Speaker 1: it can always get darker, and it's about to because
Speaker 1: human beings will not be the only people displaced by
Speaker 1: the Second American Civil War. There are currently roughly one
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty million cats and dogs living in the
Speaker 1: United States. Their numbers are actually close to eve and
Speaker 1: cats out numbered dogs by around five million or so.
Speaker 1: Both species are capable of surviving on their own, or
Speaker 1: at least certain members of both species are, but they
Speaker 1: seem to vastly prefer life with human beings to life without.
Speaker 1: If you're listening to this, the odds are pretty good
Speaker 1: that you have a pet, a cat or a dog,
Speaker 1: or both, or possibly several of both, and you certainly
Speaker 1: love them as much as they love you. Right now,
Speaker 1: it may be impossible for you to imagine abandoning them.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you would try to take them with you as
Speaker 1: the mortars started falling on your neighborhood, as the death
Speaker 1: squads broke through to your street, as the government helicopters
Speaker 1: began reigning hell fire down around you, But most of
Speaker 1: you would leave them. I know that, because I know
Speaker 1: the citizens of Abdifka, Ukraine, loved their cats and dogs
Speaker 1: as well as you do. But when the Russian backed
Speaker 1: separatists started pounding the town with a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: five millimeter howitzer shells and grad rockets, the ones who
Speaker 1: could leave, the young and the moneyed left, and many
Speaker 1: of them left their beloved pets behind. There was simply
Speaker 1: no other option. War does not stop for your sentiments,
Speaker 1: and so has the town of ev Dievka, emptied of
Speaker 1: human beings, it filled with abandoned animals. Cats and dogs
Speaker 1: hid at first in the abandoned homes of their masters,
Speaker 1: but once it got too cold, they began to congregate
Speaker 1: around the heating pipes that ran from building to building,
Speaker 1: providing the central heating necessary in Ukraine's unbelievably harsh winters.
Speaker 1: The junction boxes, where several of these pipes met, were
Speaker 1: particularly popular, and the remaining denizens of Abdivka, mostly older people,
Speaker 1: started setting out food and building small shelters for the
Speaker 1: abandoned animals. It was not lost on me when I
Speaker 1: visited in two thousand fifteen that while human beings murdered
Speaker 1: each other a mile away, cats and dogs had learned
Speaker 1: to get along and share the same home and food.
Speaker 1: One optimistic thing I can tell you is that for
Speaker 1: all the violence and of bloodshed a second American Civil
Speaker 1: War would bring, I suspect there would be numerous figures
Speaker 1: on every side, leaders of right and left wing militias alike,
Speaker 1: who would take time out from the fighting to care
Speaker 1: for abandoned animals. In two thousand thirteen, I read a
Speaker 1: fantastic article on the conflict journalism website war is Boring
Speaker 1: about a Syrian rebel commander named Jamal. I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from that now. He commands rebel forces in the
Speaker 1: ruins of an ancient mountaintop village in northern Syria. He
Speaker 1: daily dodges bombs and rockets from regime warplanes and silent,
Speaker 1: invisible bullets from enemy sharpshooters. He leads his men in
Speaker 1: battle unarmed, equipped only with a walkie talkie for issuing orders.
Speaker 1: He also rescues abandoned cats, hundreds of them hiding out
Speaker 1: in the ruins of Adaha, one of the most important
Speaker 1: battlegrounds of the three year old Syrian Civil War. Jamal
Speaker 1: was a farmer in his mid fifties when the war started.
Speaker 1: He was just a normal man with a love of
Speaker 1: animals who found himself thrust into vicious fighting. And when
Speaker 1: he wasn't fighting, he fed and cared for countless kittie
Speaker 1: cats left behind by their owners. Quote. The felines are everywhere,
Speaker 1: sleeping into rebel bunkers, to mew at officers conferring over radios,
Speaker 1: rolling in the sun baked dirt between mounds of rubble,
Speaker 1: lounging under tree sheared of their branches by gunfire and artillery.
Speaker 1: An accurate count is impossible, but during our day long
Speaker 1: visit in early October, we saw scores of them in
Speaker 1: just one small section of the village. Jamal loves cats.
Speaker 1: Who doesn't, he says. Indeed, his family, his wife, two sons,
Speaker 1: and two daughters have two cats of their own at
Speaker 1: their home in southern Isleb. When his forces occupied the
Speaker 1: mountain village, they found almost no people but countless hungry kitties.
Speaker 1: The rebels in Araja survive on cantuna, sardines and processed meat,
Speaker 1: and now so do the cats. As I write this episode,
Speaker 1: Russian and Syrian war planes are currently pounding id Lib
Speaker 1: Jamal's home with indiscriminate bombs from above. Jamal is almost
Speaker 1: certainly dead now, along with most of the courageous men
Speaker 1: and women who dared to defy Bashar al Assad. But
Speaker 1: we will see his like again if a second civil
Speaker 1: war comes to this land and forces hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of men and women to fight a war they never
Speaker 1: thought would come. All friends, you can can you get
Speaker 1: me home? Can you tell the two with so much
Speaker 1: friends a fence? Perhaps the birds? That is pretty intensive
Speaker 1: because it wants I'm Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted
Speaker 1: from reading all of that. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at I right, Okay, you can find this show
Speaker 1: on Twitter at happen here Pod, and you can find
Speaker 1: the show online at it could happen here pod dot com.
Speaker 1: Our music, as always, is from four Fists