Speaker 1: All media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. There is America hit
Speaker 1: by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest
Speaker 1: buildings were destroyed. Thank God for that. There is America
Speaker 1: full of fear from its north to its south, from
Speaker 1: its west to its east. Thank God for that. What
Speaker 1: America is tasting now with something insignificant to what we
Speaker 1: have tasted for scores of years. Our nation has been
Speaker 1: tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years.
Speaker 1: Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries
Speaker 1: are attacked, and no one hears and no one heeds.
Speaker 1: Those words, written by Osama bin Laden in October seventh,
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, were part of his first statement
Speaker 1: issued after the nine to eleven attacks. You might notice
Speaker 1: a few things about that. One is, of course, the
Speaker 1: glorying over the deaths of several thousand people, and another
Speaker 1: is that when it comes to his analysis of the
Speaker 1: cultural and psychological impact of nine to eleven on the
Speaker 1: United States, he was more or less right. This is
Speaker 1: it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart
Speaker 1: and nothing better embodies the slow, sometimes rapid collapse of
Speaker 1: the United States as our reaction to nine to eleven
Speaker 1: and our continuing responses to it. And so today I've
Speaker 1: got in the studio. We don't actually have a studio.
Speaker 1: I've got Mia, I've got James, and I've got Garrison,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about something you've probably encountered,
Speaker 1: which is that a letter to America written by osamaban Lan,
Speaker 1: which is a different piece from the one I started
Speaker 1: this reading, but written along broadly similar lines, has started
Speaker 1: to go viral on TikTok, and if you've seen the
Speaker 1: reactions to it, it's a mix of a bunch of
Speaker 1: you know, younger people on TikTok reading this letter for
Speaker 1: the first time, where bin Laden explains why he did
Speaker 1: he believed nine to eleven to be justified, and going wow,
Speaker 1: he has a point some of them saying stuff that's
Speaker 1: more unhinged than that even and then you've got this
Speaker 1: chorus of responses from both kind of centrist you know,
Speaker 1: media figures, cultural commentators, pundits, and of course right wing
Speaker 1: shitheads who are all making this out to be the
Speaker 1: left looves Osama bin Laden. We're going to get into
Speaker 1: kind of where the truth lies in this and also
Speaker 1: what is in the letter to America. But yeah, welcome,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the pod everyone, Thanks Robert, horrible to be here.
Speaker 1: How did you how did you all hear about this,
Speaker 1: this new fun trend on the internet.
Speaker 2: I returned from spending my evening volunteering the border in
Speaker 2: Cucumber to find and a death of messages about an
Speaker 2: Issama bin Laden letter or the speech that you just
Speaker 2: read that I've a signed for probably a decade to
Speaker 2: undergraduates without anyone losing their mind. And yeah, extremely confusing
Speaker 2: vibes for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: The first time I heard about it was the first
Speaker 4: post that I saw was it was only about a
Speaker 4: million views. It wasn't even that viral, which I guess
Speaker 4: might be true because TikTok is.
Speaker 3: Nuts, But yeah, I think it.
Speaker 4: I don't know, like I first ran into it on Twitter,
Speaker 4: and I think by the time it hit Twitter, everyone
Speaker 4: was just sort of in about eighteen directions completely losing
Speaker 4: their minds, which is just yeahs it is now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean probably a couple of videos of
Speaker 2: people dying.
Speaker 1: Just that seems to pop up every time something discussed
Speaker 1: on Twitter.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I think that's an accurate description of kind of the
Speaker 1: fallout to and as we're writing the or as we're
Speaker 1: recording this. Most of these original TikTok videos people seem
Speaker 1: to be reading off of the Guardians copy of a
Speaker 1: Letter to America, which was I guess the most easy
Speaker 1: to google prior to I think it was just the
Speaker 1: easiest to google. When this all started rolling, the Guardian
Speaker 1: took that down because they didn't want people reading it
Speaker 1: outside of the context of the article it's in. This
Speaker 1: was a horrible mistake. I have found a number of
Speaker 1: comments being like, this is them. They're trying to stop
Speaker 1: you from reading Ben Lawden's words. We're all going to
Speaker 1: be on a watch list. They can't arrest all of us.
Speaker 1: You can still access the Letter to America.
Speaker 2: It's on the sentiment that you can't arrest one of
Speaker 2: us suggested that many of these people were not alive,
Speaker 2: and the Maybia off to moth of.
Speaker 1: Fucking try. They did try. Just to be very clear,
Speaker 1: you can still read this whole letter to yourself, and
Speaker 1: so can everyone else. It's on wiki source. If you
Speaker 1: just google Binladen Letter to America, it will bring up
Speaker 1: the Wikipedia page that talks about this letter and its context,
Speaker 1: and that will also give you a link at somewhere
Speaker 1: at the bottom to the wiki source. That's just the
Speaker 1: unedited translation of the letter to the American people. So
Speaker 1: it is not like the Guardian's move was bad because
Speaker 1: of they called the streisand principle right that if you
Speaker 1: like try to hide something from people on the internet,
Speaker 1: it just it just makes the problem worse. You never
Speaker 1: do what the Guardian did. It's very dumb, it was
Speaker 1: explain the Guardian.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, sur I was gonna say, yeah, they could
Speaker 2: have blamed trans people.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised he didn't get one of those in there.
Speaker 1: They've been everyone's been trying to pivot very quickly to this.
Speaker 1: So obviously you know, my like James, my opinions on
Speaker 1: this are kind of complex. On one hand, I am
Speaker 1: not an Osama bin Laden fan. He was a bad person.
Speaker 1: He was a terrible person, and he did a lot
Speaker 1: of damage, not just to the United States. That said,
Speaker 1: I've also long been an advocate for like, he's probably
Speaker 1: going to go down as one of the most effective
Speaker 1: and intelligent military rategic minds of the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: The September eleventh attacks worked in large part, right because
Speaker 1: of how We're rereacted, because of the amount of money
Speaker 1: that we spent, the amount of people that we killed,
Speaker 1: the amount of anger that we engendered against the West,
Speaker 1: and the amount of damage that we did to our
Speaker 1: own society. A lot of the fallout that we're seeing
Speaker 1: and all these you know, right wing street gangs and shit,
Speaker 1: a lot of it traces back to fallout from the
Speaker 1: wars that were started by the Bush administration after September eleventh. So,
Speaker 1: and that was that was part of the stated goal, right,
Speaker 1: that was one of the things he was looking to
Speaker 1: provoke a reaction. So I'm both like glad hopefully some
Speaker 1: people are going to come away from this with a
Speaker 1: more nuanced understanding of the guy. And when I say nuanced,
Speaker 1: I don't mean in a moral sense, because it's bad
Speaker 1: to kill thousands of random people, but in the sense
Speaker 1: of like, oh, this was not I think I need
Speaker 1: to play something for you guys, because like as a
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, like I was like nine or ten
Speaker 1: when it happened, so I remember it all very well,
Speaker 1: and I remember the reaction to it, and I remember
Speaker 1: the propaganda we encountered. And there's this thing that you
Speaker 1: will find written about fascists pretty regularly, which is that
Speaker 1: they both need an all powerful enemy, but they also
Speaker 1: need an enemy that's like fundamentally free of virtue, and
Speaker 1: intelligence and skill are virtues. So both in the wake
Speaker 1: of nine to eleven, you got this sort of al
Speaker 1: Qaeda and you know, larger sort of Islamist movements were
Speaker 1: considered this nefarious force as they are now in the
Speaker 1: wake of the attacks by Hamas, right, this nefarious force
Speaker 1: that is capable of infiltrating the US border and seeking
Speaker 1: terrorist sales into the United States to hit anybody. And
Speaker 1: at the same time they're like primitive idiots who are
Speaker 1: bigots against who are you know, they hate women and
Speaker 1: all this stuff, right, Like you can't you can't see
Speaker 1: them as capable or intelligent, because then that would that
Speaker 1: would be to give them a virtue that you reserve
Speaker 1: for yourself anyway. I think a good example of that
Speaker 1: is this parody song by John Valby that I am
Speaker 1: countered in a Napster download when I was a child,
Speaker 1: and this did not it's bin Laden.
Speaker 3: Oh it's the other one.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, yeah, this one's bad. Folks. You're gonna hear
Speaker 1: something offensive. I'm playing it now because number one, I
Speaker 1: think it's something people should remember or no, but also
Speaker 1: because we're about to place these TikTok responses to this
Speaker 1: bin Laden video and read some comments of people who
Speaker 1: are very taken by it. And I want to set
Speaker 1: up what the pre existing image of ben Laden was
Speaker 1: and our culture kind of prior to this reappraisal of him,
Speaker 1: because I think that is important. But this is unhinged
Speaker 1: so and and it's pretty offensive. So just be aware people,
Speaker 1: I'm about to play it now. Can't wait? Oh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have all right? Can you see the giant Confederate?
Speaker 1: So this is from a John Valby album. I think
Speaker 1: it was called Real Woman Do Play in Mud Puddles?
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe not. That may just be a
Speaker 1: random image I did not check. There's like describe there's
Speaker 1: the general lee as a mudding truck with a giant
Speaker 1: Confederate flag behind it, and then with the Confederate flag
Speaker 1: like colors the text real women do play in mud
Speaker 1: puddles and it's as Southern girls serven girl on the
Speaker 1: on the windshield of the truck. So I'm gonna start
Speaker 1: playing this song. I'm not gonna play all of it,
Speaker 1: but this should set up for you kind of what
Speaker 1: the acceptable discourse on bin Laden was right after nine
Speaker 1: to eleven.
Speaker 5: Well, we come from Malabama, but we're in Afghanistan, Navy
Speaker 5: seamer rays hunting for a man.
Speaker 1: They say he has a beard and a diaper on
Speaker 1: his head. I heard we won't be coming home until
Speaker 1: that fucker's dead.
Speaker 3: No, don't do.
Speaker 4: I've come to fuck your fanny with some frax.
Speaker 1: So had you guys heard that before?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: Unfortunately?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, see see.
Speaker 2: The part of America that I midged growing up a
Speaker 2: broad and yeah, never fully understand.
Speaker 1: Now we freezed about thirty seconds into that minute and
Speaker 1: thirty second song, but it was like playing random clips
Speaker 1: of art to go along with the music, and the
Speaker 1: one we paused on was Homer Simpson with an American
Speaker 1: flag behind him, outlined and read with a pistol in
Speaker 1: his hands aimed at a bug eyed Osama Bin Laden
Speaker 1: So great nuanced discourse here, so.
Speaker 4: Many memories like I don't know what it was. People
Speaker 4: loved that, like bug ey'd Bin Luden thing.
Speaker 1: This is like like, yeah, I know what, No, I
Speaker 1: think I know. I'm pretty sure I know why. Which
Speaker 1: is that? So One of the most popular pieces of
Speaker 1: like media popular media in response in the nine to
Speaker 1: eleven attacks was an episode of South Park that came
Speaker 1: out literally like a week or two after the attacks,
Speaker 1: which basically, up until fairly recently, TV was always made
Speaker 1: on a significant delay, so there were no shows on
Speaker 1: air that could pivot to comment on something really quickly.
Speaker 1: The West Wing managed to kind of, but it was
Speaker 1: like a dog shit episode. But the South Park guys
Speaker 1: really pivoted and they put out this episode. It was
Speaker 1: basically like a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Cartman as Bugs
Speaker 1: Bunny and Osama Bin Ladden as Elmer Fudd right, and
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of like scenes of him like
Speaker 1: bug eyes bugging out when like shit would happen, and
Speaker 1: it was It was weird because like the I think
Speaker 1: the most people who watched it, including myself, took it
Speaker 1: in the same manner of that song as like, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck these guys, these like you know, in ways that
Speaker 1: were pretty bigoted. There was also like the episode opened
Speaker 1: with an extended bit of kids in Afghanistan with everything
Speaker 1: around them and all the adults getting murdered by US
Speaker 1: airplanes for no seeming reason, which was like part of
Speaker 1: the anyway whatever. I think one of the was like
Speaker 1: what we're seeing in some of like why young people
Speaker 1: are reacting to this letter by bin Laden so strongly
Speaker 1: is they've never really gotten to appraise the guy objectively.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that that's happening across the board now,
Speaker 1: but I don't think the reactions are nearly as unreasonable
Speaker 1: as they're being painted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he kind of existed an avatar of evil and
Speaker 2: like with zero nuance or complexity, just like, yeah, a
Speaker 2: satanic sort of totem in American culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is why I've.
Speaker 2: Always assigned it just like I think it behooves us
Speaker 2: to understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree entirely. So I went through and I
Speaker 1: looked at some of the tiktoks being made about this,
Speaker 1: And first off, TikTok does seem to have taken some
Speaker 1: action to try to stop this. I don't think it's
Speaker 1: going to work either. But like when I typed in
Speaker 1: letter to America recently, the text I got on TikTok
Speaker 1: was this phrase may be associated with behavior or content
Speaker 1: that violates our guidelines promoting a safe, positive experience as
Speaker 1: TikTok's top priority. Yeah yeah, yah yah yah. You can
Speaker 1: still find shit by like typing in bin Laden, but
Speaker 1: it's not as much shit as findable right now, so
Speaker 1: worth noting. One of the first things I came across
Speaker 1: that was interesting is like, so there's this trend on TikTok.
Speaker 1: If you're not a TikToker, I'm going to play what
Speaker 1: are the people on TikTok. There's a lot of AI
Speaker 1: videos where either the text will be read by AI
Speaker 1: with like images and video clips on screen, or you'll
Speaker 1: some there's some creepy instances of people just generating AI
Speaker 1: faces sometimes of like actual murderers and criminals to talk
Speaker 1: about the shit they did. It's really weird. But one
Speaker 1: of the top videos I found on this from about
Speaker 1: a little less than a day ago, is just the
Speaker 1: entire text of bin Laden's letter to America being read
Speaker 1: by an AI and it it sounds weird. I'm going
Speaker 1: to just let everyone get a listen to this.
Speaker 6: In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful,
Speaker 6: permission to fight against disbelievers is given to those believers
Speaker 6: who are thought against because they have been wronged, and
Speaker 6: surely a law is able to give them. Believe Victoria.
Speaker 1: I think it misses some of the some of the
Speaker 1: stirring contexts the delivery. No, but you get the responses
Speaker 1: of this, and like one of my favorite ones that
Speaker 1: I've gotten the screen is is cheeky chicis Fressa saying
Speaker 1: y'all are gonna hate me? But he kind of ate
Speaker 1: And then the first response is no crumbs, which Garrison
Speaker 1: has our gen Z insult. That means, like, I agree, basically,
Speaker 1: you know, it's oh you're twenty one, now you're out
Speaker 1: of touch.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, the first feeling old moment live.
Speaker 7: I yeah, I think that means he like ate everything
Speaker 7: and there's like no crumbs left.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, oh, okay, that's that's good. Very literal.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think I think that's what it means. But again,
Speaker 7: this is this is very.
Speaker 4: Very very particular culture here it's the bleeding edge.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The last comment following that is bizarre. Trump isn't
Speaker 1: a good person either. The gay people have nothing to
Speaker 1: do with me. This does not say book for Trump.
Speaker 1: I think you can't read.
Speaker 4: See you know it's it's and that's the.
Speaker 1: Op responding to no crumbs. So I don't know what's
Speaker 1: missing here.
Speaker 4: It's really it's really hard to tell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think these people may be in a parallel reality.
Speaker 7: I don't think really anyone who's participating in this trend
Speaker 7: is very intelligent or has or has very good media literacy,
Speaker 7: or has really looked into like American imperialism very much.
Speaker 1: No, but we will, we will.
Speaker 4: We will get to that in a Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the next comment is so much truth coming out
Speaker 1: this season. And then I appreciated this from Walker. He
Speaker 1: lost me at the end, he being bin laden with
Speaker 1: the religiously charged homophobia, but that left out he was
Speaker 1: right about everything else, justified and well said, see the
Speaker 1: Voice of reason, the voice. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, but also.
Speaker 1: Also now we'll get through it. There's a few more
Speaker 1: problems with the letter than that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing like you're doing nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: but with a pride flag is yeah, perfect, and I
Speaker 2: have no notes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't.
Speaker 7: You can't remove those things from the rest of the
Speaker 7: letter and the action. Now, they actually do create a
Speaker 7: complete hole. You can't actually pick and choose little parts
Speaker 7: that you want. It's it's like trying to pick and
Speaker 7: choose parts of qan On. You're like, yeah, well, actually
Speaker 7: there are rich people who are pedophiles. You're like, well, yes,
Speaker 7: but you can't, like, you can't. Yeah, that's not giving
Speaker 7: qan On the benefit here.
Speaker 4: This is these are totally different things.
Speaker 1: And the thing that I think people should be doing,
Speaker 1: just so we're clear on like my stands here is
Speaker 1: seeing bin Laden as an incisive and intelligent actor who
Speaker 1: had a significant degree of understanding of this country and
Speaker 1: its culture, and the terrible things that he did were
Speaker 1: as effective as they were because he understood things about
Speaker 1: us that we should understand about us. Right, otherwise you
Speaker 1: are not going to be able to successfully act within
Speaker 1: this culture to improve things and reduce harms. You need
Speaker 1: to understand why what he did worked as well as
Speaker 1: it did, and you need to understand what he knew
Speaker 1: about us, because it's pretty useful stuff to understand. That
Speaker 1: is different from saying that what he is, Like, you
Speaker 1: don't have to view it as the truth, right because
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not like the truth in any moral sense,
Speaker 1: but it's the truth in that Like if you if
Speaker 1: you read some of Hitler's writings on democracy, Hitler accurately
Speaker 1: understood the vulnerabilities of a democratic system and how to
Speaker 1: exploit them. You should understand that you're not saying, wow,
Speaker 1: he was spitting truth. You're just saying, yeah, well some
Speaker 1: people are, Robert. That is a problem. Yeah, some people,
Speaker 1: in fact are.
Speaker 4: Do you know who else is spitting truth?
Speaker 1: Robert our advertisers, Yes, that is right. We are. Are
Speaker 1: we sponsored by the new predition of minkompf at this point? No,
Speaker 1: we are sponsored by Albugdati. He's still alive, folks. Yeh
Speaker 1: mm hmm, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Here here's the ads. Okay, so we're back. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: play another one of these, one of these zoomer Bin
Speaker 1: Laden loving videos for you. Well, no you're not, No,
Speaker 1: I'm not.
Speaker 4: Lots of these videos have also been taken down recently.
Speaker 1: I go, yeah, they which, yeah. I thought this one
Speaker 1: was interesting because it was someone who was like really
Speaker 1: pro bin Laden being like, yeah, you know, he was
Speaker 1: completely right about everything. What a genius. So I love him.
Speaker 1: But all of the comments were people being like, that's
Speaker 1: fucking kind of crazy to say. Bro, Like, yeah, let's
Speaker 1: take a step back.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the thing this reminds me of this, This is
Speaker 4: a phenomenon I've run into with American maoists. We're like, Okay,
Speaker 4: don't read Mao. They'll read MAO saying something that is,
Speaker 4: you know, perfectly reasonable, like you should not talk about
Speaker 4: something unless you've researched it first.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Now, any normal person has heard this when they were
Speaker 4: like two, But these people apparently have never heard this,
Speaker 4: and they run into it through MAO and they're like,
Speaker 4: holy shit, Mao is like the greatest living theorist.
Speaker 1: What's a brilliant thinker? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Man, you guys need bid Launa to tell you the
Speaker 4: US sucks, Like really.
Speaker 1: Yes, people do because they get shit history education because
Speaker 1: their education of nine to eleven was the video I
Speaker 1: started this episode.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like we failed as a country, like just completely.
Speaker 1: No, seriously, Like I like a fucking like horse that
Speaker 1: I will whip till it's dead.
Speaker 3: Is that? Like?
Speaker 2: In twenty sixteen, there was this huge thing about we
Speaker 2: need to teach history properly and media literacy. Right after
Speaker 2: Donald Trump got elected, because a lot of people didn't
Speaker 2: know what the fuck was going on, we just and
Speaker 2: then we just stopped, and everyone was like, nah, fuck it,
Speaker 2: why not, We'll just keep doing STEM STEM STEM and then,
Speaker 2: like like teaching undergraduates often like intro courses for years,
Speaker 2: it's become very clear that we are completely failing in
Speaker 2: the United States to educate people or equipment with any
Speaker 2: understanding of American history, and so they just get propaganda.
Speaker 1: This is a big part of why I focus on
Speaker 1: cryptos so much, because James, that is exactly where crypto
Speaker 1: comes from, is we learned a lot of stemshit, but
Speaker 1: we never learned any humanities or anything. So you get
Speaker 1: people saying stuff like, well, the underlying technology buying crypto
Speaker 1: is so impressive, and it's like, no, it's you can't
Speaker 1: point to a single useful piece of work it's ever done.
Speaker 1: You just find it impressive because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: complex math problems and that's what you that's what you value, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: it's the results of that, Yeah.
Speaker 2: The yard stick of academic achievement or intelligence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it anyway, speaking of people who are less intelligent
Speaker 1: than a yardstick. It's not exactly what you said, James,
Speaker 1: but I also wanted to play here's a right wing
Speaker 1: influencer who's collected a bunch of these videos. I hadn't
Speaker 1: run into this guy before. But oh no, did they
Speaker 1: drop him too? Are they just purching everything?
Speaker 7: So TikTok has been removing all of this, almost all
Speaker 7: of the videos associated with this trend. You can you
Speaker 7: can find the compilations on Twitter are really some of
Speaker 7: the only ways that these videos are still alive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a right wing guy. This was the
Speaker 1: right wing guy making fun of it. But man, that's
Speaker 1: interesting because this was, like I found this five minutes ago.
Speaker 4: So I mean, I think this is the thing that like,
Speaker 4: it's really hard to talk about this without it being
Speaker 4: in like an insane right wing thing. But TikTok is
Speaker 4: really Americans only encounter with the way that Chinese style
Speaker 4: censorship works, which is they take a giant hammer and
Speaker 4: they just like hit things with it. Yeah, as supposed like,
Speaker 4: it's not it's not like targeted. It's like like we
Speaker 4: found everyone who said the word been lauded and band
Speaker 4: it right. Everything associated with the trend like yeah, you know,
Speaker 4: like and this is this is the way that like
Speaker 4: censorship stuff tends to work in China because it's kind
Speaker 4: of easy to do and it covers your ass, and
Speaker 4: so now Americans are like experiencing this.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I'm just enjoying seeing what Roberts have suggested
Speaker 2: for other TikTok he might like, oh, thank goodness for
Speaker 2: the shower's top shelf products.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hashtag has talk. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I
Speaker 1: think it's because of this person, ear earth Mother, Earth
Speaker 1: earth Mother basically who actually I brought her up specifically
Speaker 1: because she was an example of like the way this
Speaker 1: is getting portrayed in kind of like particularly like Twitter
Speaker 1: and more mainstream sort of descriptions of it is like
Speaker 1: all of these gen zers are full throat for Osama.
Speaker 1: They've all gone crazy, and you can certainly find no
Speaker 1: shortage of those videos. I found a bunch of other
Speaker 1: videos that are more critical. It is difficult for me
Speaker 1: to tell what the preponderance of is because there's not
Speaker 1: no one's basing what they're saying on a sentiment analysis.
Speaker 1: They're basing it on what their timelines forwarded them based
Speaker 1: on their passion when they typed letter to America or
Speaker 1: whatever into Twitter or into a TikTok. But like I
Speaker 1: ran into this lady video and like so not plenty
Speaker 1: of these are and I found others like this. Plenty
Speaker 1: of these are like a little more critical but not
Speaker 1: but still, yeah, I'll just play it.
Speaker 8: Hey, guys, just coming on here to remind y'all that
Speaker 8: Osama bin Laden was still bad personally. Crazy that I'm
Speaker 8: even having to get on here and say this, wee hello, obviously,
Speaker 8: but I've been seeing a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 8: say that they read Osamogan Laden's Letter to America. And
Speaker 8: I've read the letter, and I understand that a lot
Speaker 8: of people are getting educated and kind of like deconstructing
Speaker 8: the propaganda that they've grown up in living in America.
Speaker 8: But that does not mean that we should mystify these
Speaker 8: terrible people. But are also criticized the West and questions
Speaker 8: in the West, and like how we operated over here,
Speaker 8: Osam b and LANs doing the same thing. It doesn't
Speaker 8: mean that they are necessarily wrong on what they're saying,
Speaker 8: but it doesn't take away the fact that they're sexist, fascist,
Speaker 8: racist dictators.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like this lady. That's a video.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think she kind of hits on one point
Speaker 7: that I've seen in some of the other like for
Speaker 7: lack of a better term, promo Sama bin Laden, people.
Speaker 4: Have been saying how like.
Speaker 7: Well like people have been talking about how like they're
Speaker 7: like finally like seeing past US propaganda and they're deconstructing
Speaker 7: the lies that media has told them. And this kind
Speaker 7: of gets at something that we see a lot and
Speaker 7: kind of in like cult spaces, is that you rarely
Speaker 7: ever just completely disengage from some form of propaganda.
Speaker 4: You jump to a different form of propaganda, absolutely right.
Speaker 7: It's like reading this letter, you're not getting like disillusioned
Speaker 7: from US propaganda. You're now buying into someone else's propaganda.
Speaker 7: Like the letter to America is a completely other version
Speaker 7: of conspiracy riddled propaganda that was put out for a
Speaker 7: political purpose, and to try to engage with it in
Speaker 7: good faith is not the way to approach that text.
Speaker 7: And I think this is a big part of this
Speaker 7: problem is how people's education has worked the past few years,
Speaker 7: because they should have learned all of the various motivations
Speaker 7: and geopolitical factors that led to the nine to eleven attacks,
Speaker 7: and instead having Islam bin Lan be characterized as this,
Speaker 7: as this like cartoonish evil that hates America for freedom
Speaker 7: and like hates America as a nation for its freedom.
Speaker 7: Like that, Yes, that is propaganda. And if that's all
Speaker 7: you've had your whole life and you're you're now seeing
Speaker 7: this other side, this is probably like this is definitely
Speaker 7: like mind blowing, but like you can look into why
Speaker 7: these things happen without just falling for someone else's extremist propaganda,
Speaker 7: like like yeah, you can. You can get into the
Speaker 7: actual reasons for why this happened, how how US imperialism
Speaker 7: has caused the geopolitical situation coming out of the nineties,
Speaker 7: Like it's it's lots of people have already done this
Speaker 7: reading there's there's just plenty of people on line who have
Speaker 7: not looked into this because they have life, they're doing whatever,
Speaker 7: like right, they've not everyone like us and spends all
Speaker 7: of our time reading like political extremist literature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not all of us have strong opinions on the
Speaker 1: different eras of bin Laden writing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like Tya Swift in that sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think there's a there's another there's a
Speaker 4: thing That's also important here too, which is I think
Speaker 4: you see this a lot in Americans, which is that
Speaker 4: Americans will have this moment where they realize that they've
Speaker 4: been being lied to by the American media. And then
Speaker 4: the thing this convinces them of is that everyone else
Speaker 4: is telling the truth. Yes, and it's like, no, every
Speaker 4: country is doing propaganda. All of their media is doing propaganda.
Speaker 4: Like you can't just sort of ping pong from one
Speaker 4: like countries sort of prop media propaganda to another countries
Speaker 4: because they're all doing it and the stuff that they're
Speaker 4: saying also isn't true. You have to actually, like you
Speaker 4: have to actually try to work out the sort of
Speaker 4: the reality of history. You can't just rely on reading
Speaker 4: like some other like some other propaganda's version of events.
Speaker 2: But this comes down to like a lack of basic
Speaker 2: understanding of how we do history, which I think is
Speaker 2: not anyone's fault. It's because we don't teach you very
Speaker 2: well at all in schools. But like the lack of
Speaker 2: understanding of the difference between primary and secondary sources, right,
Speaker 2: and like people want to get straight to the source,
Speaker 2: so they'll go and read one historical primary source without
Speaker 2: the adequate secondary context and suddenly be like oh shit,
Speaker 2: and yeah, as you say, turned into a maoist or
Speaker 2: apparently Memora of al Kaieda.
Speaker 1: This is why, like you know, journalists do a lot
Speaker 1: of gathering, you know, what they can in the moment
Speaker 1: from a scene, from interviews and stuff. But academics there's
Speaker 1: always going to be if it's like a good academic,
Speaker 1: Like I'm reading a great book right now on trust
Speaker 1: in unstable societies. Society is like racked by war. So
Speaker 1: it's like the concept of it's written by a Gosen
Speaker 1: and it's about like how concepts of public trust fluctuate
Speaker 1: during conflicts. And he's looking at Lebanon, he's looking at Syria,
Speaker 1: he's looking at a rack, he's looking at Palestine. It's
Speaker 1: very interesting. But like he's not just interviewing people. There's
Speaker 1: like a set of basically an algorithm that he runs
Speaker 1: his different interviews and like the overall sentiments expressed in
Speaker 1: them through in order to try and determine like here
Speaker 1: is the aggregate of like what I found as a
Speaker 1: reaction to this question from like the people that I survey.
Speaker 1: It's the same kind of stuff that you do in
Speaker 1: a survey to attempt to add a little bit more
Speaker 1: rigor than just saying, well, I talked to ten people
Speaker 1: and most of them said this, So clearly this is
Speaker 1: a trend, right, which journalists are often guilty of, and
Speaker 1: also just goes ab in part because of that. Twitter
Speaker 1: goes wild with this kind of shit, just like well,
Speaker 1: I looked through and I listened to twenty videos, and
Speaker 1: most of them the kids loved Bin Laden. So the
Speaker 1: kids must love Bin Lodding now, which I don't think
Speaker 1: is entirely fair, but I wanted to. I think it's
Speaker 1: probably a good time for us to go through the
Speaker 1: Letter to America and talk about what is actually in
Speaker 1: this thing, right, because you might as well know what's
Speaker 1: in it. It's a good thing to read. Again, you
Speaker 1: can find it on wiki source.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it starts with him kind of providing just some
Speaker 1: kind of churonic justifications for the concept of fighting against
Speaker 1: an aggressor fighting against like, you know, someone who is
Speaker 1: actively attacking you, which is more essentially how he positions
Speaker 1: like the relationship between the US and the Muslim world.
Speaker 1: And he is a big you know, a big thing
Speaker 1: that comes up over and over in this piece is
Speaker 1: him talking about how the Caliphate is being sort of
Speaker 1: like squashed and stopped from you know, existing in the
Speaker 1: form that it should exist by this kind of constant
Speaker 1: both attacks on not just Arab democracy but on like
Speaker 1: sovereign Arab states as well as like support by the US.
Speaker 1: For he complains about corrupt rulers in the Muslim world,
Speaker 1: and he is talking about not just guys like Saddam,
Speaker 1: but like largely the Saudi royal family is a big
Speaker 1: part of it. He talks a lot about Iran and
Speaker 1: basically the uh So that's kind of like a bit
Speaker 1: where a lot of his like grievances start. He does
Speaker 1: bring up and one of the videos, James that you
Speaker 1: posted earlier was like in Israeli man responding to this
Speaker 1: and basically characterizing in a very inaccurate form saying like, uh,
Speaker 1: there's no facts in this letter. Like he doesn't like
Speaker 1: say anything true. Yeah, he's just angry at Israel in Palestine, right,
Speaker 1: He's just angry at like at that. And he does
Speaker 1: bring up Palestine multiple times. There's lines like the blood
Speaker 1: pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. That's a
Speaker 1: significant part of his case. But he also lists a
Speaker 1: lot of other areas right, he is not. It is
Speaker 1: not just what's happening. It's not just what Israel is
Speaker 1: doing in Palestine that he's talking about. There's lines like,
Speaker 1: you attacked us in Somalia, you supported Therussian atrocities against
Speaker 1: us in Chechnia, the Indian oppression against US in Kashmir,
Speaker 1: and the Jewish aggression against US in Lebanon, and he
Speaker 1: brings all of those up several times. He also he
Speaker 1: does drop some facts in here. One of the more
Speaker 1: salient lines is you have starved the Muslims of Iraq,
Speaker 1: where children die every year. It is a wonder that
Speaker 1: more than one point five million Iraqi children have died
Speaker 1: as a result of your sanctions, and you did not
Speaker 1: show concern yet when three thousand of your people died,
Speaker 1: the entire world rises and has not yet set down.
Speaker 1: And that's not an inaccurate thing to be That's not
Speaker 1: an inaccurate statement or a thing to not be angry about. Now,
Speaker 1: that's not the full context of it, right, because there
Speaker 1: is a bunch of stuff that is in here that
Speaker 1: is like bidden laden culture, warshit that absolutely is not
Speaker 1: reasonable or a reason to bomb people. Like there's a
Speaker 1: point in the letter where he's like, what do we
Speaker 1: want from you? The Americans like, what do we you know?
Speaker 1: Al Kaida, the people who have attacked you. He's speaking
Speaker 1: kind of broadly for the Uma here, what are we
Speaker 1: asking from you? And the first thing we are is
Speaker 1: that we are calling you to Islam, which I don't
Speaker 1: think is likely to happen. The second thing is we
Speaker 1: are calling on you to stop your repression, lies in
Speaker 1: immorality and debauchery that has spread among you. We call
Speaker 1: him for you to be a people of manners, principles, honor,
Speaker 1: and purity, to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling,
Speaker 1: and trading with interest. We call all of you this
Speaker 1: that you might be freed from what you have already
Speaker 1: been caught up in. That you might be freed from
Speaker 1: the deceptive lies that you are a great nation. And
Speaker 1: you may recognize that as a pretty insane reason to
Speaker 1: kill three thousand people. I mean there's gambling, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: I think a big part of the framing of this
Speaker 7: entire thing is like people are taking this as being like, oh,
Speaker 7: look at all these justified reasons. Because the US was
Speaker 7: complicent and active in mass violence in the Middle East.
Speaker 7: But like he's not actually critiquing violence or political violence
Speaker 7: because he is pro political violence. He is like that,
Speaker 7: he look, what he is critiquing is Western degeneracy. Like
Speaker 7: that is that is his actual thing. The first to
Speaker 7: ask is to is to convert over to a fascistic
Speaker 7: version of his religion. Yeah, like that's the primary thing
Speaker 7: that this isn't about, like US imperialism in terms of
Speaker 7: what his end project is.
Speaker 1: And he's also when he's angry about violence, it is
Speaker 1: specifically violence against Muslims, right, because again bin Laden is
Speaker 1: fine with doing violence to and having the state potentially
Speaker 1: do violence to non Muslims in his ideal state. He
Speaker 1: also we read he is very right when he says
Speaker 1: that the United States is complicit in the depths of
Speaker 1: over a million Iraqis because of our sanctions. This is
Speaker 1: in the pre invasion period. One of the worst crimes
Speaker 1: this country has been complicit in within our lifetimes. Absolutely
Speaker 1: a fucking nightmare. He devotes as much time to the
Speaker 1: to that as he does to this next paragraph I'm
Speaker 1: going to which is another one of his grievances. Who
Speaker 1: can forget your President Clinton's imral acts committed in the
Speaker 1: official oval office. After that, you did not even bring
Speaker 1: him to account other than that he made a mistake,
Speaker 1: after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a
Speaker 1: worse kind of event for which your name will go
Speaker 1: down in history and be remembered by nations? He was, like,
Speaker 1: it's fucked up that you killed a million people. The
Speaker 1: worst thing you did was let your president get a blowjob,
Speaker 1: Like that is part of this letter, And that's a
Speaker 1: crazy person thing to think. Yeah, Like that's just him
Speaker 1: being an asshole, because not really a problem, right, there's
Speaker 1: personal problems, right, but on the scale of like American crimes,
Speaker 1: the fact that we didn't forcepend or forced Clinton out
Speaker 1: of office not really on the list. Yeah, does not
Speaker 1: really make the cut. Yeah, there is a long list,
Speaker 1: and that does not make it. Yeah, then of course
Speaker 1: he's got He also spends actually more time on the
Speaker 1: sex trade than he does on what the US did
Speaker 1: to Iraq. You are a nation that practices the trade
Speaker 1: of sex and all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant
Speaker 1: corporations and establishments are established on this under the name
Speaker 1: of art, entertainment, tourism, and freedom, and other deceptive names
Speaker 1: you attribute to it. And because of all this, you
Speaker 1: have been described in history as a nation that spreads
Speaker 1: diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go
Speaker 1: ahead and boast to the nations of man that you
Speaker 1: brought aids as a satanic American invention.
Speaker 7: It's a very basic reactionary screen. It's like, yes, you
Speaker 7: can do the same thing with like sections of Hitler
Speaker 7: speeches talking about like working conditions and factories. Right, you
Speaker 7: could take little sections, put them on TikTok, make it,
Speaker 7: make it be read by an ai voice and be like,
Speaker 7: oh wow, this is a really good critique of capitalism.
Speaker 7: Like you're missing the entire point of what Hitler's actual
Speaker 7: political project is. This is the exact same thing. It
Speaker 7: is exactly this is the this is the thing reactionaries do.
Speaker 7: This is like they will take a few of these
Speaker 7: points talking about imperialism, talking about capitalism, and then wrap
Speaker 7: it in a fascistic package like that. That is their
Speaker 7: entire political goal. It's it's it's the entire way they recruit,
Speaker 7: it's how they spread their propaganda. It's how they get
Speaker 7: people to believe conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we American people especially will be incredibly vulnerable
Speaker 1: to it because they'll look at the critiques, which are
Speaker 1: in some cases reasonable, right, or if somebody's not wrong
Speaker 1: about every critique he has, but the fact that he
Speaker 1: is valuing the murder through starvation of a million or
Speaker 1: more people, which Bill Clinton getting the blow shop some
Speaker 1: it's not something you should miss in your interpretation of
Speaker 1: the validity of his points. Yeah, this is not a
Speaker 1: This is not a guy you need to agree with.
Speaker 4: No, under no circumstances, have to.
Speaker 1: Once again drill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's uh, it's certainly a weird one. The reaction
Speaker 2: to it has been equally weird and equally misleading.
Speaker 1: And yeah, the reaction to the reaction like, yeah.
Speaker 2: It shouldn't be that fucking hard for us to be,
Speaker 2: Like America shouldn't have three sanctions, killed millions of children
Speaker 2: and done then two war crimes out of the world
Speaker 2: Asama bin Lad and bad dude. We can take that
Speaker 2: middle path.
Speaker 1: I do want to get into a little more before
Speaker 1: we finish our talking about this, some of the lines
Speaker 1: that I think are really igniting some of these people
Speaker 1: who are now pro bin laden TikTokers, because it makes
Speaker 1: sense to me that there are bits of this that
Speaker 1: really grab people and I'm going to read a couple
Speaker 1: of them. One of them is this line here. The
Speaker 1: freedom of democracy that you call to is for yourselves
Speaker 1: and for white race only. As for the West of
Speaker 1: the world, you impose on them your monstrous, destructive policies
Speaker 1: and governments, which you call the American friends. You prevent
Speaker 1: them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic Party in Algeria
Speaker 1: wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you
Speaker 1: unleashed your agents in the Algerian Army onto them and
Speaker 1: to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them
Speaker 1: and torture them. A new lesson from the America Book
Speaker 1: of Democracy. And like, yeah, there's some valid stuff in
Speaker 1: that paragraph, right, there's some there's some points he's making
Speaker 1: there that people who have started to get people who
Speaker 1: have just gotten out of like their parents' bubble and
Speaker 1: who are starting to become aware of the world and
Speaker 1: history in the US's place in it. I see why,
Speaker 1: especially if they encounter stuff like that out of context,
Speaker 1: they will find that intriguing, because that's a fairly lucid
Speaker 1: and reasonable sentiment of a horrible thing that this country
Speaker 1: has been involved in.
Speaker 7: It's also nothing that hasn't been said better by it.
Speaker 3: You can find it.
Speaker 1: You can find it being said well ahead of bin
Speaker 1: Laden saying it by people who did not kill thousands.
Speaker 4: I want to sort of, you know, maybe this is
Speaker 4: too late in this episode for anyone to still be
Speaker 4: listening to this, but I want to sort of make
Speaker 4: an appeal to people who are discovering anti colonialism for
Speaker 4: the first time. Yeah, sort of in the wake of
Speaker 4: this and in the wake of Israel community and genocide
Speaker 4: and the thing that's the something very important to understand
Speaker 4: about anti colonialism, which is that anti colonialism is not
Speaker 4: a single coherent set of politics. There are many, many
Speaker 4: different types of anti colonial politics, and those different versions
Speaker 4: of anti colonialism wind up with completely different politics. And
Speaker 4: this is something you know internationally, there was a very
Speaker 4: important distinction between made between left and right wing anti colonialisms.
Speaker 3: In the US.
Speaker 4: I mean, we don't have this right like. This is
Speaker 4: sort of the problem with Americans encountering this for the
Speaker 4: first time, is we don't have left and right wing
Speaker 4: anti colonialism because the US is the world's tremere colonial power.
Speaker 4: But in a lot of parts of the world there
Speaker 4: is right wing anti colonialism, and you know, The core
Speaker 4: difference here is there are people who hate colonialism because
Speaker 4: of their sort of deep and abiding, principled opposition to
Speaker 4: oppression and exploitation, and there are people who hate colonialism
Speaker 4: because their empire lost a war and they want to
Speaker 4: go back to being.
Speaker 3: An empire again.
Speaker 4: And what kinds like which version of this politics people
Speaker 4: take up often has a lot to do with their
Speaker 4: class position, and they're you know, they're they're sort of
Speaker 4: like ethnic, racial, or position in the pre existing society's hierarchy.
Speaker 4: And that's something very important about bin Lauden that you
Speaker 4: can't get from either the American nationalists they hate us
Speaker 4: for our freedom shit, and you also can't get from
Speaker 4: bin Laden's own description of his motivation. And the thing
Speaker 4: that's important here right is that you know, assamo'm bin
Speaker 4: Laden is not some Palestinian k who picked up an
Speaker 4: ak after the Israelis murdered his family. Assamo'm bin Laden
Speaker 4: is one of the heirs to Saudi bin Laden group.
Speaker 4: And this is a second I need this style. We
Speaker 4: need to stop for a little bit and talk about
Speaker 4: the differences between American and Saudi capitalism, because they don't
Speaker 4: they're not structured the same way And one of the
Speaker 4: sort of big differences here is that the Saudi bin
Speaker 4: Laden group isn't like it's not like a company, right,
Speaker 4: it's a conglomerate. And what this means is that you know,
Speaker 4: is that bin Laden's family, like the people who own
Speaker 4: the bin Laden Group, which is outed by his dad,
Speaker 4: they don't own one company, they own five hundred companies.
Speaker 4: The American equivalent to who bin Laden is is like
Speaker 4: it's it's it's imagine if one off Jeff Bezos' kids
Speaker 4: went to like a church, like an Orthodox church of
Speaker 4: Ukraine's seminary school, and then god his dad to like
Speaker 4: go like pay for him to go do war tourism
Speaker 4: in Ukraine and then got a group together to like
Speaker 4: fly a plane into the Kremlin.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and became like a weird like trad cat.
Speaker 4: That would be kind of cool, it would be funny,
Speaker 4: but like, but that's the thing. Like, he's not like
Speaker 4: London is not a sort of moral authority on like
Speaker 4: Islamic reticizance to American imperialism. He's a rich, failed son
Speaker 4: who had this combination of like regurgitated say you'd cut up,
Speaker 4: and a bunch of his dad's money and like money
Speaker 4: from Pakistani intelligence, and that allowed him to sort of
Speaker 4: you know, that allowed him to do everything that he did.
Speaker 4: Right that that that's the thing that allowed him and
Speaker 4: not you know, like that kid in like that that
Speaker 4: that that kid in Gazo picked up an ak Like
Speaker 4: that's the that allowed him to declare war in the US.
Speaker 4: And I want to read his account of what he
Speaker 4: actually thinks happened to the US. This is this is,
Speaker 4: this is from that same uh this this, this is
Speaker 4: from that same letter. You are the nation that permits usury,
Speaker 4: which has been forbidden by all religions, yet you build
Speaker 4: your economy and investments on usury. As a result of
Speaker 4: this in all its different forms, and guys, is the
Speaker 4: Jews have taken over your economy, through which they have
Speaker 4: then taken control of your media and now control all
Speaker 4: aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving
Speaker 4: their aims at your expense, precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned
Speaker 4: you against. So I want to like, like like think
Speaker 4: for it. Like I wanted people to sort of stop
Speaker 4: and look at what he's actually saying here. His argument
Speaker 4: for why the US is an imperialist power is that
Speaker 4: it is controlled by Jews who control the economy in
Speaker 4: the media and has enslaved the rest of the US
Speaker 4: to do their will. And this is and I cannot
Speaker 4: emphasize this enough word for word, a Nazi yes analysis
Speaker 4: what happened to the US? And this is this is
Speaker 4: what right wing anti colonialism is.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: You look at like the sort of horrors of colonialism,
Speaker 4: go oh, this is bad, and then when someone asks you, okay,
Speaker 4: why is this happening, you unload this like utterly half
Speaker 4: assed pile of anti Semitic conspiracy theories instead of like
Speaker 4: an analysis of capitalism, like he thinks the source of
Speaker 4: like American like imperialism and capitalism is interest bearing loans. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: this is nonsense.
Speaker 1: And that's what he means whenever he talks about usury, which, like,
Speaker 1: by the way, is a heads up. Every Muslim country
Speaker 1: that I am aware of has banks that do what
Speaker 1: it fan does it. Yeah, and they do what is
Speaker 1: effectively usury. It's just okay. So if you know anything
Speaker 1: about like orthodox Judaism, right, you are not supposed to
Speaker 1: do anything on the Sabbath, and so some people do
Speaker 1: keep that You're not even supposed to turn on a light, right,
Speaker 1: like One of the old ways this was expressed is
Speaker 1: like you would light candles the night before the Sabbath
Speaker 1: so that you could have some burning on the Sabbath.
Speaker 1: Today there are ways around it that are like you
Speaker 1: get lights that are scheduled to go on and off
Speaker 1: at certain hours, and it's it's always. It's kind of funny.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of jokes about this you get from
Speaker 1: the Jewish comedians being like, do you think God is
Speaker 1: like tricked by your rule slowering and stuff? But there
Speaker 1: are banks in the Muslim world that are the banking
Speaker 1: equivalent of that. Well, what they're doing isn't technically taking interest,
Speaker 1: but like it works out to be the same thing
Speaker 1: for them. They're just they're just getting around anyway. I
Speaker 1: think that's an important piece.
Speaker 2: Of Catholic Church deciding that uh, fish and chicken on
Speaker 2: meat so you could eat right.
Speaker 1: Right right yeah, where it's like really God, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: do you think you think God is like, oh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I never meant for those things to be meat? Damn
Speaker 1: they got me with that chicken shit. That ain't a
Speaker 1: cow God seeing it? Yeah, I do. Actually, you have
Speaker 1: to credit Chick fil A for being closed on Sunday
Speaker 1: a little, I guess. But I love the idea of
Speaker 1: like God going to like watch a Catholic congregation go
Speaker 1: to breakfast and get their fucking like chicken sandwiches and going, ah,
Speaker 1: you cut you crafty bastards. Got me again, guys. I
Speaker 1: didn't think you need those, guys, They're so gross.
Speaker 7: That is kind of how the Catholic God works far removed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like set up a little sudoku for you.
Speaker 1: He's just thrilled that you're getting.
Speaker 2: That to press a button to get its food.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I want to.
Speaker 4: I want I want to bring it back to bin
Speaker 4: Laden for a second, because I think part of what's
Speaker 4: going on here is something that.
Speaker 3: Isn't I don't know.
Speaker 4: Bin Laden is a product of his specific context, right,
Speaker 4: And his specific context is that he grew up in
Speaker 4: one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, and you know,
Speaker 4: and his you know, And I guess this is the
Speaker 4: thing we should actually I should actually mention I'm being
Speaker 4: slightly unfair to the Taliban when I when I talk
Speaker 4: about them having loans because of the Taliban are from
Speaker 4: a different like school of Islamic jurisprudence. Then al Kaida
Speaker 4: is even though they sort of they kind of work
Speaker 4: together sometimes, but like, you know, but the thing, like
Speaker 4: the sort of hobbyist school that like bin Laden is
Speaker 4: from right, like he's the reason he has a right
Speaker 4: wing anticlonial critique is he's absorbed this sort of like
Speaker 4: social mores and he's absorbed you know, the like the
Speaker 4: the like involved in the slave trade, level of anti
Speaker 4: blackness that you get from the Souds, like from you know,
Speaker 4: like the the he's absorbed their anti Semitism. He's absorbed
Speaker 4: all of these things. And this is what he sort
Speaker 4: of like has constructed as the reason you know, and
Speaker 4: filtered through his sort of cobbling together of like different
Speaker 4: sort of like like of like so how you could
Speaker 4: up and of sort of like different sort of Islamic thinkers,
Speaker 4: Like this is what he's assembled together. And it's this
Speaker 4: thing that it's not a stable, coherent critique of the US.
Speaker 4: It's it's it's it's this like it's all of his
Speaker 4: sort of like weird prejudices and hang ups like grafted
Speaker 4: onto anti colonialism and being able to tell the difference
Speaker 4: between someone who is a genuine anti colonialist and someone
Speaker 4: who is doing this stuff or like who wants their
Speaker 4: empire back, or who is like, you know, like pissed
Speaker 4: off that gay people exist like that. That is something
Speaker 4: that is genuinely very important, and it's something that's made
Speaker 4: enormously harder to do by the way that people like,
Speaker 4: you know, by by the American education system, by the
Speaker 4: way people are raised to think about media. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: this is this is, this is, this is, this is
Speaker 4: this has the bin Loden rant.
Speaker 1: I we can always stand to do more ban Laden rants.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll do another episode on him on Bastards one
Speaker 1: of these days. But yeah, I uh, good stuff. I
Speaker 1: do want to kind of close by reading another bit
Speaker 1: from from obl you know, our our friend of the pod.
Speaker 1: This one's from two thousand and four October twenty ninth,
Speaker 1: and I think it's relevant as we look at the
Speaker 1: different ways the current president of the United States, the
Speaker 1: former and possibly future president of the United States are
Speaker 1: talking about dealing with problems like Islamic extremism. Because I
Speaker 1: think Bin Laden's words here are pretty salient and this
Speaker 1: comes from a common team made. It wound up airing
Speaker 1: on Al Jazeera criticizing George Bush ahead of the two
Speaker 1: thousand and four election. Your security is not in the
Speaker 1: hands of Democratic candidate John Kerry or President George Bush
Speaker 1: or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands.
Speaker 1: We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush in his
Speaker 1: administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half
Speaker 1: of which are ruled by the military and the other
Speaker 1: half by the sons of kings. They have a lot
Speaker 1: of pride, arrogance, greed, and thievery, and again not wrong,
Speaker 1: not wrong about most Muslim majority nations, and not wrong
Speaker 1: about most Western nations.
Speaker 4: And it's a good And also is the Bushes too,
Speaker 4: because yes, the Bushes were friends with the bin Laden family.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes they are you and they are also as
Speaker 1: close as the US has to royalty as is Trump.
Speaker 1: Maybe the kend maybe the Kennedy's. Kennedy's, but another presidential
Speaker 1: candidate man, you know, complete with the insane, inbred guys
Speaker 1: who anyway, anyone else got anything? I'm just baffled. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I'm happy. I'm having a good time, you know.
Speaker 1: Get on TikTok. Let people know that you love terrorism.
Speaker 1: Yeah it got wrong for you. Yeah, alternatively, get on
Speaker 1: Twitter or wherever YouTube and film an angry video in
Speaker 1: your car about how all of gen z I ironically
Speaker 1: and supports the mass killing of civilians. Do either. Those
Speaker 1: seem to be the two primary things people are doing
Speaker 1: right now. So get out and join the herd. Everybody.
Speaker 1: It's fun. What a great place. Ah, welcome back to
Speaker 1: it could happen here, a podcast that is now happening here.
Speaker 1: I could have done something with ear but we'll do
Speaker 1: that next time. Just forget that I said that, and
Speaker 1: welcome Mia to the program. Mia, how are you doing today?
Speaker 4: Not bad?
Speaker 3: Not bad? I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, We're going to be talking about a subject
Speaker 1: that's near and dear to all of our hearts, by
Speaker 1: which I mean the Roman Empire with a guest who
Speaker 1: is near and dear to our hearts, Mike Duncan. Mike,
Speaker 1: how are you doing?
Speaker 3: Hello? Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: It is wonderful to have you.
Speaker 3: Mike.
Speaker 1: You're a podcaster. You are kind of like the history
Speaker 1: podcaster as far as a lot of folks are concerned,
Speaker 1: including me and you. Also, you've had some interesting interactions
Speaker 1: online with people as regards the Roman Empire recently.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, anytime the Roman Empire shows up on the cultural radar.
Speaker 5: I am tagged into it by roughly ten thousand people. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and then I come in and I do my bits,
Speaker 5: or if you know, if something comes through, you know,
Speaker 5: it gets shared at me, you know, not shared with me,
Speaker 5: but shared it at me. And then and then I
Speaker 5: take a look at it, and I get aggravated, and then,
Speaker 5: you know, fire off a few salvos and retreat back
Speaker 5: out of the social media ecosystem, which is kind of
Speaker 5: the strategy these days.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we all have to like fight like an insurgent
Speaker 1: when it comes to that sort of thing, because the
Speaker 1: alternative is to just get constantly stuck in this escalating
Speaker 1: world of beats with strangers on the internet who are
Speaker 1: making money off of the beef.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But yeah, but there are certain things that will get
Speaker 5: me to come out of my little hibernation, which I
Speaker 5: think we're about to talk about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, me, do you want to do you wanna
Speaker 1: take it away?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So one of the things that's been happening recently is
Speaker 4: that so on October twenty fifth, the Republicans finally, after
Speaker 4: an enormous amount of time, finally managed to electic Speaker
Speaker 4: of the House, and they picked this fairly unknown rep
Speaker 4: named Mike Johnson, who's the guy from Louisiana, And they
Speaker 4: picked him effectively because nobody knew who he was. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so they picked this guy and they're like okay,
Speaker 4: and Mike Johnson gets elected and immediately everyone starts trying
Speaker 4: to figure out who this guy is, and they very
Speaker 4: quickly realize this guy is just a absolute incredible Christian
Speaker 4: fundamentalist weirdo. He he doesn't have a bank account.
Speaker 1: Which is like, why, that's classic fundamentalism too, that's some
Speaker 1: of that old school stuff. Yeah, to see.
Speaker 4: It, it's really sort I mean, he's really sort of
Speaker 4: like he's like he's he's really a.
Speaker 3: Blast in the past with the Christian fundamentalist I.
Speaker 4: Mean he he he was a lawyer that represented like
Speaker 4: a bunch of Young Earth creationist museums.
Speaker 3: He's really going into that old school stuff.
Speaker 4: And one of the other things that some people dug
Speaker 4: up is a podcast interview where he is talking about
Speaker 4: how gay people cause the fall of Rome. So, Mike Duncan,
Speaker 4: I want to ask you the question that I think
Speaker 4: all of our listeners are wondering. Can we as queer
Speaker 4: people take responsibility? Can we take any credit for the
Speaker 4: fall of Rome, or are we stealing visigof Valor?
Speaker 3: If we do that, you're stealing valor here.
Speaker 5: But but I do I do agree that several of
Speaker 5: the gays in my life are like, don't take this
Speaker 5: from us. It's one of our proudest accomplishments. We brought
Speaker 5: down the Roman Empire. And I was like, but unfortunately,
Speaker 5: it's just it's not the case. It's not even close
Speaker 5: to the case. It's you know, you could you could
Speaker 5: draw random words out of a hat and produce a
Speaker 5: sentence that was literally nonsensical, and that would be a
Speaker 5: better read of the end of the Roman Empire and
Speaker 5: saying gay people or homosexuality like, because it's all wrapped
Speaker 5: up in this sort of like it was decadence that
Speaker 5: caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They were too like,
Speaker 5: you know, they were just too life sensious, and they
Speaker 5: just throw up some some vocabulary words.
Speaker 3: And it just it just doesn't land at all.
Speaker 5: It doesn't land on the specifics, it doesn't land on
Speaker 5: the general it doesn't land chronologically, it doesn't land in
Speaker 5: any way, shape or form. It's just something they've decided
Speaker 5: is true and repeat to each other and that's the whole.
Speaker 5: That's the long and short of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's some interesting stuff there too, of
Speaker 4: like the stuff people talk about why when they like
Speaker 4: I remember I was reading someone like writing about this
Speaker 4: and they started talking about Nero, and I was like,
Speaker 4: do you know, like in what century the Roman Empire
Speaker 4: like collapse? Like why are you talking about Nero? I
Speaker 4: don't know, it seems like there's this real I don't know,
Speaker 4: it seems like, you know, the the fall of Rome
Speaker 4: is one of these things that's become central to a
Speaker 4: lot of very weird in politics. And I remember, like
Speaker 4: a few years ago, the big thing was like the
Speaker 4: Rome was called the fall of Rome was caused by immigration, Yeah, which.
Speaker 3: And that's also current as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, And so I don't know, what is it
Speaker 4: about like Rome with these people? The fall of Rome,
Speaker 4: these people are like so drawn to in a way
Speaker 4: that causes them not to think about what actually happened
Speaker 4: at all.
Speaker 5: I mean, well, I mean, just to go back a second,
Speaker 5: it's like Rome in general, in their heads, is not
Speaker 5: a sort of temporarily dependent series of events that unfolded
Speaker 5: over a thousand years. It's just this kind of like
Speaker 5: one eternal place that's like a pastiche in their minds,
Speaker 5: so like Nero can exist alongside Attila, can exist alongside
Speaker 5: you know, Scipio Africanus, and all of these people and
Speaker 5: events like just sort of are near each other in time,
Speaker 5: the same way that they believe that, like you know,
Speaker 5: dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the earth like it. It's that
Speaker 5: kind of same thing. And so if they think about
Speaker 5: somebody like Caligula or Nero running this like running these
Speaker 5: courts of decadence, like, it doesn't click to them that
Speaker 5: this is like in the first century, and that the
Speaker 5: Roman Empire doesn't fall for four hundred years, five hundred years,
Speaker 5: and then the East keeps going for another thousand years.
Speaker 1: That's a huge part of it. It is interesting to me.
Speaker 1: You you kind of made the statement there about in
Speaker 1: these guys' heads, Rome being this kind of eternal like
Speaker 1: continuing thing, And that's interesting to me because it that
Speaker 1: that conception of Rome goes back so far, I mean
Speaker 1: very famously, Like when Russia became like an organized political entity,
Speaker 1: there was this widespread attitude that it was the third Rome, right,
Speaker 1: that still plays into a lot of Russian imperial politics
Speaker 1: to this day, So it is. It is kind of
Speaker 1: fascinating how far that idea goes back, Like it says
Speaker 1: something about the success of Roman propaganda, that it still
Speaker 1: has this place in so many people's minds.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I mean it has a place in my mind.
Speaker 5: I don't I don't think of that. Yeah, so do
Speaker 5: I so to many of us. And I don't think
Speaker 5: that the crime here is thinking about the fall of
Speaker 5: the Roman Empire or the trand or as you know,
Speaker 5: we would more properly call it the transition from late
Speaker 5: Antiquity to the eartal Medieval period, which is, you know,
Speaker 5: unfolded and that didn't have a cataclysm, and you shouldn't
Speaker 5: necessarily be thought of as as an inherently negative thing,
Speaker 5: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But organizing your worldview
Speaker 5: around utterly historically illiterate version of the Roman Empire that
Speaker 5: is really just a vehicle for your own special bigotry.
Speaker 5: That's where they're really running a foul of me and
Speaker 5: my temper.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there's there's a lot that's really interesting about
Speaker 1: how they sort of choose to interpret like the causes
Speaker 1: of the fall. I think probably the least the least
Speaker 1: sensible argument they have is this idea that it had
Speaker 1: something to do with like degeneracy. But yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you can find Romans in like the the Middle Republic
Speaker 1: period saying the same thing, that, like, we've become too degenerate,
Speaker 1: too lazy, because of like all of the you know,
Speaker 1: slaves automating, you know, the ruling classes tasks people have.
Speaker 1: You know, Romans are not like the Romans of our
Speaker 1: forefathers and stuff anymore. And like, you know, the empire
Speaker 1: continued or the Republic and then the Empire still had
Speaker 1: centuries in the tank at that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, very very famously, the Romans started complaining about how
Speaker 5: it's not like the good old days round about the
Speaker 5: second century b c. Which is like three hundred years
Speaker 5: before they hit what we all acknowledged to be the
Speaker 5: peak of Roman civilization. And this is like, this is
Speaker 5: when Cato the Elder gets into it. And the thing
Speaker 5: that those guys were griping about at the time, and
Speaker 5: there are there are little, you know, little connections here,
Speaker 5: just doesn't none of it shapes up. Is that what
Speaker 5: Cato the Elder and people like him were complaining about
Speaker 5: way back in the second century was this is when
Speaker 5: the Romans come in contact with the Greeks, and there
Speaker 5: was there was a kind of like a split between
Speaker 5: traditional Latin Romanness and then this like new Eastern Greaceness,
Speaker 5: which like they've got new ideas and like they sounds
Speaker 5: like they have sex with each other all the time.
Speaker 5: You know, they don't care if they're men or women,
Speaker 5: and so that's what they were pushing back against, and
Speaker 5: so that kind of language does that.
Speaker 3: This is where it kind of distills.
Speaker 5: Over the centuries and then over the millennia into this
Speaker 5: idea that the Roman Empire collapsed and was ruined by
Speaker 5: this kind of degeneracy without being able to really define
Speaker 5: what degeneracy means or how it could possibly impact the
Speaker 5: long term health of a of a large empire.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: The fact that very bluntly right when you're saying this
Speaker 5: in one eighty six BC, you can't say that contact
Speaker 5: with Greek ideas brought the Roman Empire down. It just can't,
Speaker 5: because it just didn't get crushed by this, It didn't
Speaker 5: fall apart.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, my if I have to make an argument
Speaker 1: as to like what thing that I can connect to
Speaker 1: modernity killed the modern Empire, I tend to claim that
Speaker 1: it's the concept of a reboot, right, because no sooner
Speaker 1: than did Augustus have Virgil reboot the story of the
Speaker 1: Trojan War, than the inevitable path to the collapse of
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire began. Right that the real sign that
Speaker 1: we're heading towards collapse is all these movie reboots.
Speaker 3: Okay, great, well, the.
Speaker 5: Rule is, whatever your modern preoccupation is, that's what you
Speaker 5: use to explain the fall of the Roman Empire. So
Speaker 5: of course I have my preoccupations, and that's what I
Speaker 5: say caused the fall of the Roman Empire, which is
Speaker 5: that the Roman Empire and never found.
Speaker 3: We're all living in a hologram.
Speaker 5: And we know and we know this because if a
Speaker 5: woman visits me and brings me and brings me groceries
Speaker 5: and she's wearing a Jesus fish necklace, it can pop
Speaker 5: into my brain and I can know that we're.
Speaker 1: Living in We're still We're still in the Roman Empire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the empire never ended, folks, Yeah, yeah, every politician is
Speaker 1: still Cato.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, look, they you could also tell this because
Speaker 4: you know, it's like, in the same way that everything
Speaker 4: tastes like chicken. They haven't invented a new moral panic
Speaker 4: in two thousand years, So pretty clearly we're just we're
Speaker 4: just we're just recycling through exactly the same content over
Speaker 4: and over again.
Speaker 1: It does all of the the kind of similarities you
Speaker 1: can find, or at least seeming similarities you can find
Speaker 1: between stuff that different Roman politicians were complaining about, you know,
Speaker 1: two thousand years ago, and stuff that's in our media today.
Speaker 1: I think does suggest part of why it's almost impossible
Speaker 1: to not keep bringing Rome up, which is that like
Speaker 1: there are and I think that it's a mix of
Speaker 1: like there are some legitimate similarities between our cultures, and
Speaker 1: also our concept of Rome, which is often a historical
Speaker 1: but is based on generations of misconceptions, makes it seem
Speaker 1: even closer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we are a post Roman society and they
Speaker 5: are our forebears, whether we like it or not. Like
Speaker 5: any civilization that exists today that went through the Mediterranean world,
Speaker 5: you know, it had a Roman period, and the Romans
Speaker 5: made a strong imprint on all of us in terms
Speaker 5: of like our laws and how we think about money,
Speaker 5: and how we think about family relationships, like all of
Speaker 5: these things are you know, we're living in a post
Speaker 5: Roman world, and that's why it's important to study the
Speaker 5: Roman Empire as an entity, but do it with some
Speaker 5: degree of rigor rather than just using it as a
Speaker 5: prop in the culture wars. Yeah, that was a great
Speaker 5: That was a great point I just made in so No,
Speaker 5: that was absolutely brought the conversation to a complete stance.
Speaker 5: So as everybody said, just chewed on this nugget wisdom
Speaker 5: that I have fruped at the table.
Speaker 1: I do kind of think it behooves people. Part of
Speaker 1: why it's valuable to do things like listen to the
Speaker 1: Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan is that you're this Rome
Speaker 1: isn't going to stop being brought up by these people
Speaker 1: and increasingly unhinged and inaccurate ways. And it's it's just like,
Speaker 1: it's helpful to have an actual understanding of who the
Speaker 1: Spartans were and what they did and did not do
Speaker 1: for the sake of these arguments. It's helpful to have
Speaker 1: a meaningful understanding of the Roman Empire. And I'm kind
Speaker 1: of wondering, like when you when you come into misconceptions
Speaker 1: about Rome, what are some of like the top ones
Speaker 1: on your list that uh that that your brain just
Speaker 1: forces you to go in and.
Speaker 5: Correct, well, I mean this is a big one that
Speaker 5: because this one I feel like is deeply homophobic and
Speaker 5: principally used to attack the queer community rather than anything else.
Speaker 3: Is.
Speaker 5: And just to give your listeners, like some specifics here,
Speaker 5: it's like, you know, sexuality in the Roman world was
Speaker 5: very different than it was today, and there weren't even
Speaker 5: you know, the kind of binary conceptions of gender sexual
Speaker 5: relations that we have today. A lot of these things
Speaker 5: are very modern inventions. I'm sure a lot of people
Speaker 5: know this, but we can also point very specifically to like,
Speaker 5: you know, Hadrian, who is broadly considered and cited to
Speaker 5: be one of the greatest of the emperors who lived
Speaker 5: at the height of the Golden.
Speaker 3: Age, was gay.
Speaker 5: Like that's like, that's a full stop thing. And so
Speaker 5: it's just like there's no compatibility between these two ideas
Speaker 5: or really anyway, if you ask them to take this
Speaker 5: argument more than twenty five words deep, they're not going
Speaker 5: to have a way to explain how it is that
Speaker 5: somebody engaged in gay sex in the four hundreds could
Speaker 5: have possibly been the reason why the Goths won a
Speaker 5: certain battle, or why Attila the Hunt was able to
Speaker 5: do what he did. All of it is just complete
Speaker 5: and utter ahistorical nonsense, and so I consider it, I
Speaker 5: consider it my duty as some kind of voice of
Speaker 5: authority on Roman history to not let people get away
Speaker 5: with this. The last, the last time I saw this
Speaker 5: pop up was actually uh Ben Carson, which is a
Speaker 5: little bit of a blast from the past at this point,
Speaker 5: but he he he wrote a book at one point
Speaker 5: where he dropped this stuff in there. And and the way
Speaker 5: they always couch it too is like as we all know,
Speaker 5: you know, it was homosexuality that really led to the
Speaker 5: generacy of.
Speaker 3: The lay like I'm so sick of you people.
Speaker 5: But the other, the other big one that really grinds
Speaker 5: my gears that really emerged. This this was not a
Speaker 5: preconception that I had going into doing the history of Rome,
Speaker 5: but something that I came away from after doing it
Speaker 5: and studying, you know, the year by year history of
Speaker 5: the Empire, is that this notion that like sort of
Speaker 5: the Romans were this uh like like a like a
Speaker 5: like a nationality that then went forth and conquered the Mediterranean,
Speaker 5: that Romans were Romans as like an ethnic stock thing,
Speaker 5: and that it was when these other ethnicities started sort
Speaker 5: of pressing at the empire's borders, or as we said
Speaker 5: a little bit earlier, that it was immigration right that
Speaker 5: destroys the Roman Empire. That there was this kind of
Speaker 5: like pure noble Roman thing. This is essentially functioning as
Speaker 5: the white person in the ancient world, Like this is
Speaker 5: how we're connecting these things. The British did this, the
Speaker 5: French did this, Americans now do this today, that like
Speaker 5: the Romans are our stand in as sort of the
Speaker 5: white people, and the white people are civilized and all
Speaker 5: of these other like mongrel races are are uncivilized, and
Speaker 5: they were either civilized by the Romans that they were
Speaker 5: killed by the Romans or enslaved by the Romans. But
Speaker 5: this is all for the good because the Romans themselves
Speaker 5: were were like this this this superior stock of DNA somehow.
Speaker 5: And really, when you go through the empire, the h
Speaker 5: history of the Roman Empire, you find that there is
Speaker 5: that kind of conservative strain inside of like the patrician
Speaker 5: class and inside of the senatorial class that they're like,
Speaker 5: we want this to be a closely held thing, Like
Speaker 5: the original Republic was a closely held oligarchy of Latin
Speaker 5: families who lived on the Palatine Hill, and that's what
Speaker 5: they wanted for themselves. And so when other people tried
Speaker 5: to push into the Republic, they tried to resist it.
Speaker 5: And so that is a running conflict that happens in
Speaker 5: Roman history. But any time that that tendency is overcome
Speaker 5: and a second prevailing force that says like, actually, Romanness
Speaker 5: is just an idea. Romanness is just a set of
Speaker 5: beliefs and practices and sort of daily habits of life
Speaker 5: and ideology that can really be held by anybody at
Speaker 5: any time. And if we let in say non Roman Italians,
Speaker 5: which is the first people who were considered non Roman
Speaker 5: who then came into the Empire, which then we look
Speaker 5: back and we're like, there was a time that Romans
Speaker 5: didn't think that people from what is today like Florin
Speaker 5: or Milan were not Italian or not Roman. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: they were not considered Roman until you know, the very
Speaker 5: late stages of the Republic. I mean, I wrote a
Speaker 5: book about the later stage of the Republic, and the
Speaker 5: Social War is when this gets wrapped up. After hundreds
Speaker 5: of years being treated as second class citizens, there was
Speaker 5: a civil war that nearly destroyed the Republic before Caesar
Speaker 5: even came along. It was resolved by giving citizenship to
Speaker 5: the Italians, making them full members of the polity, and
Speaker 5: then having that just be a boon to Rome's fortunes.
Speaker 5: This happens in Gaul, this happens in Spain, this happens
Speaker 5: in Illyria, this happens in the Far East. That these
Speaker 5: people who the Romans encounter and yes, do conquer, because
Speaker 5: it's a very violent world of conquest and mutual conquest.
Speaker 5: That Romans in Gaul were as much Romans as Romans
Speaker 5: in Rome. And anytime I find Roman leaders resisting that idea,
Speaker 5: I find the empire starting to falter and commit miss steps.
Speaker 5: And anytime they're like, nah, let's just throw it open.
Speaker 5: You know, if you're good, if you're dedicated, if you're loyal,
Speaker 5: you can be a part of this project that we have.
Speaker 5: Then I find the Romans doing very very well. And
Speaker 5: I'm about to start not to just monologue here, but
Speaker 5: I'm about to start working on another book that is
Speaker 5: about the crisis of the third century. And by this time,
Speaker 5: we have emperors who are coming from North Africa. We
Speaker 5: have emperors who are tagged as being Arabian. We have
Speaker 5: the set of emperors who really help Rome emerge from
Speaker 5: this thing that is called the Crisis of the third
Speaker 5: century when the empire very nearly collapsed in the mid
Speaker 5: two hundreds. Is a bunch of guys from Alyria, which
Speaker 5: is today the Balkans. I mean, we're talking about guys
Speaker 5: who are coming from like Serbia and Croatia, or the
Speaker 5: emperors who are continuing the Roman legacy and keeping the
Speaker 5: empire intact. So this notion that like the Rome wasn't
Speaker 5: a multicultural empire, or that the arrival of new peoples
Speaker 5: was somehow bad for them is just disproven over and
Speaker 5: over and over again by the realities of Roman history.
Speaker 5: So that's the other one is this immigration caused the
Speaker 5: fall of the Roman Empire is just flat out incorrect.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, one of the arguments that I've heard sort
Speaker 4: of against that, and I want to ask how true
Speaker 4: this is. But one of the things that I hear
Speaker 4: people sort of responding to this with is this argument
Speaker 4: that like part of what causes like the sack of
Speaker 4: Rome is that the Romans get into one of these
Speaker 4: nphobic streaks and they don't want to sort of try
Speaker 4: to observe the visigoths. Okay, so that that is, that's
Speaker 4: a that's essentially my position.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was just going to bring up a guy who
Speaker 1: a historian, who has to come up anytime you talk
Speaker 1: about the way the right likes to use the image
Speaker 1: of Rome, particularly the collapse of Rome. Victor Davis Hansen. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he is. He is a guy you're going I mean,
Speaker 1: he was. He's my dad's favorite historian. I come from
Speaker 1: a very conservative family. And he wrote a book not
Speaker 1: all that long ago. No, actually it was twenty ten. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that still like five years ago to me. But it's
Speaker 1: not five years ago. It's much further away called Why
Speaker 1: did Rome Fall? And Why does It Matter Now? And
Speaker 1: there's a quote I found from a little article he
Speaker 1: wrote plugging it that I want to bring up here
Speaker 1: so we can chew over in short, what ruined Rome
Speaker 1: in the West. Lots of things, but clearly the pernicious
Speaker 1: effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created
Speaker 1: a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues
Speaker 1: or the creation of actual commensurate wealth, and the resulting debits, inflation,
Speaker 1: debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more
Speaker 1: vulnerable Western Empire far less margin when the barbarians arrived.
Speaker 3: It's all bullshit, I know, it's.
Speaker 5: It's so it's so frustrating because this culture of dependence
Speaker 5: that can I swear on this podcast.
Speaker 1: Oh, absucking lutely for sure.
Speaker 5: This fucking these motherfuckers, this entitle this entitlement thing that
Speaker 5: they have because they don't like welfare because they're pricks,
Speaker 5: you know. And you know Victor Davis Hansen, you know,
Speaker 5: this is a guy who wrote a book called Like Mexifornia,
Speaker 5: which is like, oh my god, yeah, absolutely, this is
Speaker 5: where it comes from the nineties where he's like he's
Speaker 5: like California is going to be destroyed by all these
Speaker 5: Hispanic people. Like it's just loathsome shit that he writes. Anyway,
Speaker 5: this culture of entitlement, right, like oh, it was just
Speaker 5: bread and circuses and like the empire had to give
Speaker 5: all this money to like how many Like okay, great,
Speaker 5: the Roman Rome the city was like a million people, yeah, right,
Speaker 5: And there were a couple of large urban hubs that
Speaker 5: did have like grain doles because you needed to be
Speaker 5: able to feed the people in these cities. And this
Speaker 5: is you know, smart policy by the emperors. It's actually
Speaker 5: not bad on a humanitarian level. And then they also
Speaker 5: through games because this is what people do. Rich people
Speaker 5: throw parties to make themselves love like this is a
Speaker 5: very This happens today, This happens all the time, This
Speaker 5: happened during the medieval period, happens all the time. The
Speaker 5: number of people who are like benefiting from this like
Speaker 5: imperial largess, who have this like entitlement mentality is such
Speaker 5: a fraction, such a fraction of the total number of
Speaker 5: people who live in this empire, where we're talking about
Speaker 5: sixty sixty five million people maybe maybe give or take
Speaker 5: a little bit. Not that many people were on the
Speaker 5: dole in Rome. It was usually just the male head
Speaker 5: of the household got some grain. It was like it
Speaker 5: was it was a little bit of supplemental It's basically
Speaker 5: the equivalent of like supplemental income. It was absolutely not
Speaker 5: just they're rolling out banquets for these people every single day.
Speaker 5: Nor is it the case that that entitlement of Romans
Speaker 5: living in Rome in the two hundred's AD or something
Speaker 5: is like the reason why they couldn't sustain their border defenses. Right,
Speaker 5: This is the same arguments we get when it's like,
Speaker 5: you know, we can't afford social security because the you know,
Speaker 5: the National Endowment for the Sciences paid somebody two hundred
Speaker 5: and fifty thousand dollars to uh to look into the
Speaker 5: you know, be keeping habits.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: Like it's like people just don't have a way to
Speaker 5: compare a million dollars to a billion dollars to a
Speaker 5: trillion dollars because it's just a lot of money in
Speaker 5: our heads.
Speaker 3: So like this none of none of that is true.
Speaker 3: None of that that's true.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's fascinating to me, especially when you hear like, uh,
Speaker 1: this is like really popular amongst the Joe Rogan set,
Speaker 1: this idea that like, oh, you know, when an empire
Speaker 1: is at the end, that's when you get all the
Speaker 1: Britain circuses to distract people. And man, when the empire,
Speaker 1: like the Roman Empire, the entire period during which it
Speaker 1: was expanding like wildfire, was doing nothing but throwing giant
Speaker 1: fucking parties in the caps. All they did, Like that's
Speaker 1: all they did. You couldn't be in politics without going broke.
Speaker 1: Throwing parties like that was the That's why a lot
Speaker 1: of the conquest happened is because you have to throw
Speaker 1: these parties when you were earlier up on the on
Speaker 1: the curses and rum and then you would have to
Speaker 1: like go conquer someplace to pay for it, yep.
Speaker 5: And that was why Actually, when you get right down
Speaker 5: to it, you know, one of my you know, side
Speaker 5: opinions is that if you were a provincial inside of
Speaker 5: these conquests, you know, conquered lands, life was much better
Speaker 5: under the Empire than it was under the Republic because
Speaker 5: there actually was some tightening and normalization of the bureaucratic
Speaker 5: regime under the Empire, like after Augustus comes along, rather
Speaker 5: than what was going on in the Republic, which is
Speaker 5: every single year a province was getting a new governor
Speaker 5: who was there to extract as much money for himself
Speaker 5: as possible because he had taken out tons and tons
Speaker 5: of loans to throw the biggest games that he possibly could,
Speaker 5: to build the biggest act, to build the biggest thing. Now,
Speaker 5: when you get into the later Empire, like are their
Speaker 5: financial difficulties of course, right, you don't get the kind
Speaker 5: of monument building and even aqueduct building and infrastructure projects
Speaker 5: you get in the later Empire, But like there are
Speaker 5: larger economic and structural reasons why they were suffering financial
Speaker 5: difficulties at the end of the empire that have nothing
Speaker 5: to do with these couple of grain doles that were
Speaker 5: going to a few major urban areas. Most of the
Speaker 5: population is rural subsistence peasants, like those people were not
Speaker 5: feeling entitled to.
Speaker 4: Shit, which I think is really funny because if you
Speaker 4: look at like, I am very confident if you actually
Speaker 4: did the math, US spends more money agricultural subsidies every
Speaker 4: year than like than the Romans did, like on the
Speaker 4: entire grain dole.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a way the math is true. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: like we I mean, but in part not just like
Speaker 1: because who knows what the Romans would have done with
Speaker 1: a higher level of technology. Just wasn't possible to do
Speaker 1: that kind of thing outside of the major urban hubs,
Speaker 1: Like you can't.
Speaker 3: Also, you can't you couldn't do it, That's the thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is the same thing where you get into
Speaker 5: like when people like to slip in the whole, like oh,
Speaker 5: there was lead in the in the in the pipes,
Speaker 5: and like there was lead in the pipes, and you know,
Speaker 5: maybe some of the leadership was a bit over led
Speaker 5: exposed like who knows, like maybe maybe, maybe, but like
Speaker 5: the vast majority of the population is not living in
Speaker 5: downtown Rome where this might be a problem, or in
Speaker 5: you know, one of the other you know, regional capitals
Speaker 5: that's just not where any of this is taking place.
Speaker 1: Well, people love to talk about stuff like that. It
Speaker 1: is like, you know, the fact that they're one of
Speaker 1: their major sweeteners included a lot of letters is always
Speaker 1: like interesting to bring up. But the thing that I mean,
Speaker 1: and this was this is also pure speculation, but that
Speaker 1: I always wonder more about, not just with Rome, but
Speaker 1: with like most postmodern societies and even like early modern societies,
Speaker 1: is like, what about like mild head injuries, because we
Speaker 1: know so much more now about how a bunch of
Speaker 1: little head injuries can permanently alter your behavior, and like,
Speaker 1: like that's a big thing when I think about when
Speaker 1: I think about like the World War one generation, is
Speaker 1: you've got millions of men who wind up becoming very
Speaker 1: influential in politics who are under artillery barrages and who
Speaker 1: are there's almost no way they're not walking away with
Speaker 1: some kind of cte based on what we know now
Speaker 1: about what being near artillery does to your brain. You
Speaker 1: know what does that do to Yeah, the ancient world
Speaker 1: was full of trauma and that's and that's a real thing.
Speaker 1: All of these guys were deeply, deeply traumatized. But like
Speaker 1: one of the other points about the whole like bread
Speaker 1: doll thing is this gets back to this is sneaky
Speaker 1: backdoor racism because the argument, the argument is that Rome
Speaker 1: was great when it was the Romans doing it like
Speaker 1: these actual like Latins who were coming from the environs
Speaker 1: of Rome in particular, and that it all started to
Speaker 1: go bad ones non Romans were in charge of things
Speaker 1: because the Romans themselves had had decayed into this like,
Speaker 1: oh well, we just want our bread and circuses and
Speaker 1: we're not going to join the legions. We'll just have
Speaker 1: Germans do our fighting for us, or Goths do our
Speaker 1: fighting for us. Which that is That is simply sneaky
Speaker 1: backdoor racism, because it's a way of saying that it
Speaker 1: was the reason why the Roman Empire was successful was
Speaker 1: because of this small population group and once they go away,
Speaker 1: other groups, these mongrel digs, will never be able to
Speaker 1: live up to or sustain civilization in the way that
Speaker 1: Romans did. The pure Romans did and so that's also
Speaker 1: a big reason why we need to push back on
Speaker 1: these things is because the Roman Empire was not just
Speaker 1: sustained but thrived and expanded by people who were not Romans.
Speaker 1: And the idea that you know, their civilization required this
Speaker 1: like little tiny speck of a DNA spark to keep
Speaker 1: it going is just you know, this is the kind
Speaker 1: of person who finishes writing that book and then immediately
Speaker 1: turns their attention to modern California politics and says, the
Speaker 1: big problem here is Hispanics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is also not true, by the way, I
Speaker 3: need to cut that up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the big problem with California politics is California politicians.
Speaker 3: Right, It's not Latinos.
Speaker 1: You know, it's certainly not Latinos. You know.
Speaker 4: I wanted to kind of circle back around to the
Speaker 4: sort of degeneracy stuff because I think there's an interesting
Speaker 4: through line there too, with with not just sort of
Speaker 4: modern politics, but the politics of the period of the
Speaker 4: original rise of fascism, because you know, you look at
Speaker 4: these arguments and they're like, well, okay, it was like
Speaker 4: cultural decadence, and then they start talking about degeneracy and
Speaker 4: how homosexuality was this like degenerate thing. That brought down
Speaker 4: the empire, and like you go back and you like
Speaker 4: read the Nazis and they are also absolutely obsessed with,
Speaker 4: like you know, with this notion of like degenerate art
Speaker 4: and like cultural degeneracy is this force that's this internal
Speaker 4: force of subverting the empire. And you know, and like
Speaker 4: this is also I think another like reason to be
Speaker 4: reason to be interested in a better way about Rome
Speaker 4: was also the way that like the original Italian fascists art.
Speaker 4: I mean, like the word fascism is like derived you know,
Speaker 4: like from from Roman symbol symbols, right, and like you know,
Speaker 4: this is like Mussolini's entire thing is about turning the
Speaker 4: Vediterranean into the Roman lake. Blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: So the fascist is great. Not to get you know,
Speaker 3: to derail your point, keep.
Speaker 1: Talking, Just gonna cut that line out of the podcast.
Speaker 1: Mike Duncan says, fascist, it's great. The fascist is great.
Speaker 1: It's a great symbol. Go go, Like a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't actually even notice this. Maybe they do at
Speaker 1: this point this is no longer a fun fact.
Speaker 3: But you go. You go to the link.
Speaker 5: No, well, I mean not just Congress, but go to
Speaker 5: Lincoln Memorial look at the Lincoln Memorial. What are his
Speaker 5: hands resting on to a couple of fascists. It just
Speaker 5: is because you know what, a bundle of sticks is
Speaker 5: stronger together and that is a symbol of solidarity, and
Speaker 5: it is a symbol of group action being superior to
Speaker 5: individual attempts to do anything, and that the one, the
Speaker 5: one boo is going to break, but all of them
Speaker 5: together is good. Like none of this is like inherently bad.
Speaker 5: It's just a bunch of fascists claimed it for their own.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, and my memory of this is that I'm pretty
Speaker 4: sure there was a group of people who were like
Speaker 4: calling themselves fascis, like in in early like late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 4: early nineteen hundred Italy, who weren't fascists, who were like,
Speaker 4: it's like basically left wingers. And then and then like, well, sorry, Notazis.
Speaker 5: Well I don't know if you know this, but Nazis
Speaker 5: are actually socialists. They're national socialists. And so a lot
Speaker 5: of people think that their right wing, but actually their
Speaker 5: left wing. And that's what it is. Hitler was. It
Speaker 5: was an Oberlin grad.
Speaker 1: This is where we q my thirty minute digression about
Speaker 1: stress rism.
Speaker 5: Oh god, but I think to you, I think to
Speaker 5: the point that you were trying to make or that
Speaker 5: you were making there though, is that they were you know,
Speaker 5: the Nazis did. And then we hear this repeated today
Speaker 5: that like that degeneracy is like a thing that is
Speaker 5: a force, like a physical force that can maybe even
Speaker 5: be measured, and if you don't have enough of it,
Speaker 5: or if you have too much of it, then your
Speaker 5: society is going to start to break apart or decay.
Speaker 5: Like it's just an idea, that's it. It's just sort
Speaker 5: of a way of thinking about something or a way
Speaker 5: of describing something. It's not actually a really real thing
Speaker 5: that is out there in the world. Like if you
Speaker 5: have a society that suddenly can't grow grain and you
Speaker 5: have a famine, like that's a real thing that will
Speaker 5: actually affect your society and bring it down. You have
Speaker 5: this other thing that is just like moral degeneracy. This
Speaker 5: is just like you listing things you don't like and
Speaker 5: saying that this is the reason why things are falling apart,
Speaker 5: because degeneracy can be anything to anybody. But really, you know,
Speaker 5: like people smoking cigarettes at four o'clock in the morning
Speaker 5: because they've been up all night, you know, doing drugs,
Speaker 5: like that's what kids do, what people have that people
Speaker 5: are always going to do this, This is always on
Speaker 5: the backgrounds and margins of any society. So like and
Speaker 5: rich people like they've always partied, they always will party.
Speaker 5: Like those kinds of things. You can't really then say like, oh,
Speaker 5: well we've accumulated too much degeneracy. Now our society is
Speaker 5: going to start to break apart, and this, you know,
Speaker 5: the things that we see today in terms of our
Speaker 5: own sort of faltering democratic republic. This is not because
Speaker 5: of degeneracy. This isn't because the kids are doing too
Speaker 5: many drugs, or like we legalize gay marriage, Like that's
Speaker 5: not That's not why any of this is happening. It's
Speaker 5: happening for other reasons. It's happening because of greed. It's
Speaker 5: happening because of sociopathic indifference to other people's lives. Those
Speaker 5: are the things that actually matter, not whether you stayed
Speaker 5: up all night drinking and partying.
Speaker 1: No, No, it's yeah, it's it's it's the kind like
Speaker 1: I tend to think, like talking about the Lata fundia
Speaker 1: is a lot more relevant to talking about like what
Speaker 1: happened to the elites under Rome and what's happened in
Speaker 1: our own society than bringing up like the parties and.
Speaker 3: Shit like yeah, it's this exactly.
Speaker 1: The centralization of wealth and power in a tinier and
Speaker 1: tinier number of men was responsible for a number of
Speaker 1: the problems that Rome encountered, as it aged.
Speaker 5: And they don't want to have that conversation out, so
Speaker 5: they want us to have this other conversation which flatters
Speaker 5: their bigotry.
Speaker 4: Well, and this I think comes back to the thing
Speaker 4: you were, you know, the joke you're making about like
Speaker 4: all of these these are all the same people who
Speaker 4: are like, oh, well, the Nazis were socialists.
Speaker 1: It's like yeah, you know.
Speaker 4: Like the point of like these arguments is so they
Speaker 4: you don't go back into the historical record and realize
Speaker 4: how much all the things are saying are wrong and
Speaker 4: how much they're making precisely the same arguments that you know,
Speaker 4: the Nazis were making, or that all of these sort
Speaker 4: of like you know, all all of the sort of
Speaker 4: past people who broadly is acknowledged did a bunch of
Speaker 4: terrible stuff, had the same opinions that they do.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, yeah, well I don't know. I think that's
Speaker 1: what I've got to talk about today. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is like we could go on to the way in
Speaker 1: which like Sparta gets remembered and stuff and the cultural
Speaker 1: like right wing, but I think that's kind of moving
Speaker 1: sort of far afield. Although there's similarities, right, there's always
Speaker 1: this idea that like at this certain point when everybody
Speaker 1: looked the same, like that's when this historic empire was
Speaker 1: at their best. And when you know, degeneracy got entered
Speaker 1: into it, when immigrants got into into it, that's when
Speaker 1: it sort of fell apart. I guess some of that's
Speaker 1: mixed in with sort of like Frank Miller as opposed
Speaker 1: to any sort of real history. But that's always the case, right,
Speaker 1: I think a lot.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean in Frank Miller's working in a tradition that
Speaker 5: is very standard. You know, the you know, the kind
Speaker 5: of racist orioleentizing, orientalizing of you know, of anybody from
Speaker 5: the east, like that was all current, like you know,
Speaker 5: the Romans had those ideas. I mean that we get
Speaker 5: the word barb like the word like one of the
Speaker 5: points that I'm going to make probably in my book
Speaker 5: is that like so the word barbarian just means non Greek,
Speaker 5: like that's it, because the Greeks had a you know,
Speaker 5: a very sort of self centered.
Speaker 3: View of the world, as we all do. But that
Speaker 3: meant that the Romans are barbarians, you know, and that
Speaker 3: word is coined, and we're thinking about who the Romans are,
Speaker 3: like they were the civilized ones and then and then
Speaker 3: there are all these barbarians who are bad.
Speaker 5: But like from the Greek perspective, the Romans were as
Speaker 5: barbaric as you know, the Scythians were, and you know,
Speaker 5: probably and certainly less civilized than the Persians were when
Speaker 5: the Romans. When the Romans first appeared on the scene
Speaker 5: in Greece, they were like, who are they? These are
Speaker 5: just a bunch of guys who are obsessed with war
Speaker 5: and they have no culture, they have no ideas of
Speaker 5: their own. They just march around in squares and kill
Speaker 5: people like That's that was their interpretation of what the
Speaker 5: Romans were originally, which is not a you know, terrible
Speaker 5: interpretation of e really Roman history. But yeah, this just
Speaker 5: this sort of dividing between civilized peoples and barbaric peoples
Speaker 5: is something that then has been around for thousands of
Speaker 5: years and we're still doing it today. Like everything that
Speaker 5: we're seeing, you know, and I look at Israel and Palestine,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of this mapping of civilized versus uncivilized
Speaker 5: people onto this conflict that I see is rooted in
Speaker 5: a lot in these sort of Western traditions that informed
Speaker 5: nineteenth century racist ideas about how things you know, about
Speaker 5: how societies organize themselves, all of which needs to be
Speaker 5: deconstructed and thrown away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always love it when people
Speaker 1: try to bring up like these sort of racial theories
Speaker 1: within the context of the Roman Empire, who had absolutely
Speaker 1: nothing that would be considered like a modern understanding of
Speaker 1: whiteness or race like was was completely absent.
Speaker 3: No, they they all had they all had group identity.
Speaker 1: No, they wets but yeah, different era, Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 3: It was there's us and then there's everybody else.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know, the Romans differentiated a little bit
Speaker 5: between like there were Egyptians, and you know, they they
Speaker 5: were kind of you know, they were they were curious
Speaker 5: about how how the Jews worked, because the Jews were
Speaker 5: very old civilization, and so the Romans kind of took
Speaker 5: special note of that, and they really admired the Greeks,
Speaker 5: and so there are these like sort of like groupings
Speaker 5: that they all understood, but it's all just sort of
Speaker 5: that very self centered. You know, if you go through
Speaker 5: anthropological history of any group of people, their word for
Speaker 5: themselves is just the word for person.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: We find this a lot, and the Romans were that
Speaker 5: way too, but not not in this way, not not
Speaker 5: sitting down and making like hierarchies of you know, who can, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, who can do what, and who should be
Speaker 5: on top and who should be on bottom, because you know,
Speaker 5: if you're a traditional ancient Chowvinus, you're like, well, my
Speaker 5: people should be on top, and that, you know, is
Speaker 5: self explanatory, and then we will we will fight for
Speaker 5: that that it's not because of yeah, these these racial hierarchies.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I think that's about all I had to
Speaker 1: get into, Mia. You have anything else you wanted to
Speaker 1: sort of touch on today?
Speaker 4: I I think I think I think we've about we
Speaker 4: think we've about covered it.
Speaker 1: Well, we got it.
Speaker 5: We have we've established that it's wrong to think that
Speaker 5: gays made the Roman Empire fall.
Speaker 1: No, No, although you can, yeah, there's a million more
Speaker 1: things to say about that, but but yeah, I think
Speaker 1: we've we've hit on the basics. Mike. You are a podcaster.
Speaker 1: Your Revolution podcast is one of the best things on
Speaker 1: the internet. You are also an author. Think of a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of books, The Storm Before the Storm, which
Speaker 1: is about a lot of the stuff we've been talking
Speaker 1: about today, Hero of Two Worlds, the History of Rome. Yeah, Mike,
Speaker 1: you have anything else you want to plug?
Speaker 5: Well, I am just about, as I said earlier, about
Speaker 5: to start work on a third book, which will be
Speaker 5: the Crisis of the Third Century. So if anybody out
Speaker 5: there who's listening to this has been like I wonder
Speaker 5: if Mike's ever going to write a book about the
Speaker 5: Crisis of the third Century, I will, and I am excellent.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for being on the show, Mike, and
Speaker 1: yeah listeners until next time. If somebody brings up the
Speaker 1: Roman Empire in an attempt to attack various special interests
Speaker 1: in our modern political system by a Gladias, you know
Speaker 1: that still works the same way it did in the past,
Speaker 1: Just start swinging a Gladias. Remember it's God but blade
Speaker 1: on both sides, so you got to be careful when
Speaker 1: you swing a Gladias. Satire satire that's not actionable satire.
Speaker 9: Hello, everybody, Welcome to it could happen here. My name
Speaker 9: is Scharene, and today, as usual, I have a very
Speaker 9: serious topic to talk about. Today, I wanted to talk
Speaker 9: about corn. Yes, corn, the food. I think corn gets
Speaker 9: a really bad wrap these days, a starchy carb. Oh no, hi,
Speaker 9: fructose corn syrup, get away from me. But like, actually
Speaker 9: that shit is not good for you, so do eat
Speaker 9: it in moderation, if at all. But corn itself shouldn't
Speaker 9: be made into a death syrup in the first place.
Speaker 9: Corn isn't supposed to be eaten this way. It's meant
Speaker 9: to be eaten just as it is, or rather how
Speaker 9: it has come to be because of human intervention, which
Speaker 9: is delicious. I am obsessed with corn. My entire family
Speaker 9: is obsessed with corn. Corn boiled sweet corn in particular,
Speaker 9: is one of the most popular street foods in the
Speaker 9: Middle East and Syria. Street vendors have handfuls dozens of
Speaker 9: corn cobs boiling in these giant cauldrons at the side
Speaker 9: of the road, and the smell is intoxicating. Every time
Speaker 9: my family and I were in Syria, my uncle would
Speaker 9: stop by a vendor and grab bags full of corn
Speaker 9: for us, like it was right after getting picked up
Speaker 9: from the airport, our first stop always. Then we'd usually
Speaker 9: put the corn in the biggest pot my grandmother had
Speaker 9: and boil them fresh. And again the smell, you guys,
Speaker 9: it would fill up the entire apartment and it smelled
Speaker 9: so good. The corn would be steaming hot, and we'd
Speaker 9: move the couch in the living room in order to
Speaker 9: make room for the table that we can all eat
Speaker 9: on and gather around, and we would devour the corn.
Speaker 9: We would go to town, and in my thoughts about
Speaker 9: corn that I have quite often, I started wondering about
Speaker 9: how exactly did corn become a street food, because it's
Speaker 9: a street food in many cultures. Elote is one that
Speaker 9: comes to mind that is the most popular, I believe,
Speaker 9: But I wanted to know why and how how did
Speaker 9: it become so popular as street food. That's what I
Speaker 9: wanted to find out, and I did kind of. I
Speaker 9: ended up learning a lot about the history of corn
Speaker 9: and how exactly it ended up being in practically everything
Speaker 9: we eat, and that was fascinating to me, so maybe
Speaker 9: you'll find it fascinating too. Today corn is one of
Speaker 9: the world's most important crops. That is not news. Obviously,
Speaker 9: we eat corn, and it can also be turned into
Speaker 9: flour and syrup. It's fed to livestock, it's transformed to ethanol,
Speaker 9: and it can even be used to make plastic. More
Speaker 9: than one billion tons of corn are produced around the
Speaker 9: globe every year, and corn yields more than six percent
Speaker 9: of all food calories for humans, which is a big
Speaker 9: percent even though six is a small number. Let's talk
Speaker 9: about the history of corn. Corn as we know it
Speaker 9: today would not exist if it weren't for the humans
Speaker 9: that cultivated and developed it. It is a human invention,
Speaker 9: a plant that does not exist naturally in the wild.
Speaker 9: It can only survive if planted and protected by humans.
Speaker 9: Relatable scientists believe that people living in central Mexico developed
Speaker 9: corn about ten thousand years ago. Apparently, civilization got off
Speaker 9: to a slow start in Mexico, flagging about five thousand
Speaker 9: years behind civilization in what historians call the quote fertile
Speaker 9: Crescent of the Middle East. Hughitlas, a University of Wisconsin,
Speaker 9: the professor of botany, thinks this delay can be blamed
Speaker 9: on the differences in plants. He said, the New World
Speaker 9: civilization developed slowly because the basic food crop first cultivated
Speaker 9: in Mexico was corn. He said the process of deriving
Speaker 9: corn from wild plants was maybe fifty times more complex
Speaker 9: than the development of wheat and other crops in the
Speaker 9: Middle East. Las said agriculture in the Old World started
Speaker 9: ten thousand years ago with the sowing of wild plant seeds.
Speaker 9: With time, farmers selected grains with seed pods that didn't
Speaker 9: shatter as easily and that could be easily gathered and stored,
Speaker 9: And humans got plenty of lessons from animals too. He said.
Speaker 9: The early Old World farmers probably learned from golden hamsters
Speaker 9: and other little seed gathering mammals that lived in the area,
Speaker 9: and they learned this way to hoard seeds over the winter.
Speaker 9: What's kind of fucked up about that, though, is that
Speaker 9: Itlas said these humans may have even dug out some
Speaker 9: of the hamsters seeds stashes and taken those seeds from
Speaker 9: the hamsters route. But in comparison, the New World farmers
Speaker 9: did not have it so easy. There were no plants
Speaker 9: well suited to agriculture and no seed hoarding mammals to
Speaker 9: learn from. The only potential grain the New World people
Speaker 9: had to work with was an unpromising mutant plant derived
Speaker 9: from the plant called Teosinte. It took five, six, maybe
Speaker 9: seven thousand years for this plant to evolve into an
Speaker 9: integrated food producing plant. Taocinte is a wild grass and
Speaker 9: it looked very different from our corn today. The kernels
Speaker 9: were small and they were not placed together like the
Speaker 9: kernels we see on a modern ear of corn. Honestly,
Speaker 9: I found it kind of unsettling and disturbing if you
Speaker 9: wanted to look that up to each their own. And surprisingly,
Speaker 9: the original tiocente plant can still be found today, but
Speaker 9: only in one three acre area of the Hellisco region
Speaker 9: of Mexico. It said the plant is absolutely useless. Teocente
Speaker 9: seeds have a steel hard outer covering, and these seeds
Speaker 9: were virtually inedible except when they were green. Also, the
Speaker 9: Teocente plant only had six or twelve kernels on each
Speaker 9: tiny ear. It was said that the first step in
Speaker 9: the development of corn as we know it today involved
Speaker 9: a quote catastrophic sexual transmutation his words that converted the
Speaker 9: tip of some male tassels into the uniquely monstrous many
Speaker 9: ranked ears. Also his words that are now the edible
Speaker 9: female ears of corn. I did not know I've been
Speaker 9: eating female corn this whole time. But this is what
Speaker 9: researching a podcast can do. After this complex transformation, farmers
Speaker 9: then had to select mutant tiocente plants that were more
Speaker 9: edible and easier to cultivate. These changes were much more
Speaker 9: complex than the changes that made old world plants useful.
Speaker 9: Modern agriculture continues to tinker with corn and ti ucentae.
Speaker 9: It Liss said that plant breeders today are crossing the
Speaker 9: two plants together to derive perennial or enduring, long lasting
Speaker 9: corn that would not have to be planted each year
Speaker 9: and that would be resistant to viruses. Steve Price is
Speaker 9: a biotechnology researcher for the Standard Oil Company of Ohio,
Speaker 9: and he said that with genetic engineering techniques, it might
Speaker 9: take five years rather than five thousand years for contemporary
Speaker 9: humans to make a better corn plant. This time, from Mexico,
Speaker 9: corn spread north into the southwestern United States and then
Speaker 9: south down the coast to Peru. In Mexico, squash cultivation
Speaker 9: began ten thousand years ago, but corn had to wait
Speaker 9: for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its
Speaker 9: wild ancestor, teocente. Wild corn like plants derived from theo
Speaker 9: cente appear to have been cultivated at least nine one
Speaker 9: thousand years ago. The first directly dated corn cob dates
Speaker 9: to only around five thousand and five hundred years ago.
Speaker 9: As corn reached North America, it cultivated sunflowers, and this
Speaker 9: is also when potato started growing in the Andes region
Speaker 9: of South America about one thousand years ago. As indigenous
Speaker 9: people migrated north to the eastern woodlands of present day
Speaker 9: North America, they brought corn with them. So when Europeans
Speaker 9: like Columbus, friend of the Show, made contact with people
Speaker 9: living in North and South America, corn was a major
Speaker 9: part of the diet of most native people. When Columbus
Speaker 9: quote unquote discovered or just like bumped into America, he
Speaker 9: also discovered corn for his people, because up to this time,
Speaker 9: people living in Europe did not know anything about corn.
Speaker 9: In fourteen ninety three, Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with
Speaker 9: apparently a pocket full of corn seeds, among other things.
Speaker 9: He learned a lot during his travels to the New World,
Speaker 9: killed and his people and stolar land, et cetera. But
Speaker 9: being exposed to this new grain he was unfamiliar with,
Speaker 9: seemed promising agriculturally for Europe. It was unfamiliar it was delicious.
Speaker 9: It was us Columbus romanticized at the time quote affixed
Speaker 9: by nature in a wondrous manner, and inform in size
Speaker 9: like garden peas. And it could, to corn's credit, if
Speaker 9: Europeans learned to farm it properly help feed a lot
Speaker 9: of people. The only problem was that Columbus had left
Speaker 9: behind a fairly important bit of information about said corn.
Speaker 9: He didn't take back the knowledge of how to process it.
Speaker 9: Betty Fusell is the author of Quote the Story of Corn,
Speaker 9: which chronicles corn's several thousand year history. She says it
Speaker 9: might sound innocuous, but the history of corn probably changed
Speaker 9: the course of humanity. According to her, the old world
Speaker 9: is a wheat culture. You know what else is a
Speaker 9: wheak culture. Ads, and we're back, okay. So, over the
Speaker 9: next few hundred years, most of Europe grew to misunderstand
Speaker 9: corn rather than embrace it. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, corn
Speaker 9: endured a different fate. It thrived and eventually found its
Speaker 9: way into the very center of the American diet. Until
Speaker 9: the eighteen hundreds, corn was eaten mostly by the poor.
Speaker 9: It was a cheap and prolific crop consumed by farmers
Speaker 9: and fed to prisoners, and used also as a commodity.
Speaker 9: As Michael Pollan wrote in his two thousand and six
Speaker 9: book The Omnivores Dilemma, corn was both the currency traders
Speaker 9: used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food
Speaker 9: upon which slaves subsisted on during their passage to America.
Speaker 9: But then came the Industrial Revolution and with it three
Speaker 9: essential technologies that helped corn thrive from being just the
Speaker 9: grain for poor people to being the grain for all people,
Speaker 9: consumed by everyone. The first invention was an iron plow,
Speaker 9: which allowed farmers to sow deep into the soil on
Speaker 9: much larger scales. The Midwest was planted with corn on
Speaker 9: a commercial basis precisely because of the iron plow, which,
Speaker 9: although it seems pretty simple, was a revolutionary tool. Two
Speaker 9: other advancements had an equally large effect, even though they
Speaker 9: touched corn production more tangentially. Fuselle said that one of
Speaker 9: the most important boons for corn might have been that
Speaker 9: the commercial farms in the Midwest grew up at the
Speaker 9: same time as the canneries and railroads. Until then, corn
Speaker 9: was mainly distributed locally, but trains helped move the grain
Speaker 9: far beyond just county limits, and along with the advent
Speaker 9: of canning, it meant that corn could keep for much longer.
Speaker 9: This allowed farmers to grow corn and other crops with
Speaker 9: hundreds of thousands of mauths in mind. In the coming decades,
Speaker 9: the amount of land dedicated to corn grew incredibly quickly,
Speaker 9: but it wouldn't be for another fifty years until corn
Speaker 9: actually made its way to the center of the American diet.
Speaker 9: Corn is what fu Cell calls a genetic monster because
Speaker 9: it's highly adaptable and easily manipulated, and there is perhaps
Speaker 9: no better example of its mutant like qualities than what
Speaker 9: happened shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. In
Speaker 9: the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, scientists discovered a way
Speaker 9: to boost corn production to a level that was previously unthinkable.
Speaker 9: They bred hybrid strains that had larger ears and could
Speaker 9: be grown closer together, which allowed farmers to produce a
Speaker 9: lot more corn without needing more land. This discovery, along
Speaker 9: with the introduction of new industrial fertilizers and more efficient
Speaker 9: farm tools like tractors, led to a huge increase of
Speaker 9: corn output. Paul Roberts wrote in his two thousand and
Speaker 9: nine book The End of Food that in the following
Speaker 9: decades the number of bushels of corn per acre doubled,
Speaker 9: and then it continued to rise each year. Corn yields
Speaker 9: have risen ever since then, with only brief interruptions due
Speaker 9: to sporadic droughts, but these interruptions are easily countered with
Speaker 9: further engineered corn. Advancements in farming, technology and science paved
Speaker 9: the way for corn's ascent into the American food system.
Speaker 9: But the main reason that corn has made its way
Speaker 9: into just about everything we eat and every food that
Speaker 9: Americans eat today is that, above all, it is inexpensive.
Speaker 9: Corn has and always will be cheap because it grows
Speaker 9: everywhere in the world. The most incredible thing about the
Speaker 9: corn grown in America today is how little of it
Speaker 9: we actually eat. This does not include people like me
Speaker 9: and my family who are obsessed with corn and eat
Speaker 9: it regularly, and also Sophie, who I know shares this
Speaker 9: corn obsession. But less than ten percent of the corn
Speaker 9: used in the United States is directly ingested by humans.
Speaker 9: The bulk is either turned into ethanol for use as
Speaker 9: fuel or fed to the hundreds of millions of animals
Speaker 9: that we subject to the factory system. Corn is fed
Speaker 9: to cows, chickens, pigs, and even fish. I had no idea.
Speaker 9: Apparently fish are given these little pellets that are largely
Speaker 9: made of corn, so it's everywhere. The relative cheapness of
Speaker 9: corn and general usefulness of it as a form of energy,
Speaker 9: both for living animals and living more generally, have proved
Speaker 9: important enough that the government subsidizes its production to the
Speaker 9: tune of some four point five billion dollars each year.
Speaker 9: The result is perpetuation of ambitious growing goals, farmers realizing
Speaker 9: the more efficient they are, the more money they will get,
Speaker 9: grow more and more corn. The more corn there is,
Speaker 9: the lower its price, and the greater the incentive is
Speaker 9: to use it in as many ways as possible. I
Speaker 9: want to talk now about the different varieties of corn,
Speaker 9: But first, do you know what else has variety? All
Speaker 9: the ways you can spend your money like these. Let's
Speaker 9: talk about the different varieties of corn. There are many types,
Speaker 9: but the most commonly eaten forms can be divided into
Speaker 9: three general categories. The first is sweet corn. Sweet corn
Speaker 9: is what Americans usually eat when they eat corn on
Speaker 9: the cob, or when they throw corn on the grill
Speaker 9: at a barbecue that you didn't want to go to.
Speaker 9: And this sweet corn accounts for only about one percent
Speaker 9: of the corn grown in America. Then there is flint corn.
Speaker 9: Flint corn has a soft center and harder outer shell,
Speaker 9: which most people know as popcorn. It became popular in
Speaker 9: the nineteen sixties after a Jiffy pop which cooked the
Speaker 9: kernels in aluminum foil on the stovetop, was introduced, and
Speaker 9: its popularity rose further in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties,
Speaker 9: shortly after the introduction of the microwave. Today, much like
Speaker 9: sweet corn, flint corn accounts for a steady but comparatively
Speaker 9: insignificant portion of the US corn crop. And then there's
Speaker 9: dent corn aka field corn, the most important kind of
Speaker 9: corn when it comes to production of it, not when
Speaker 9: it comes to me eating it, because I cannot do that.
Speaker 9: But dent corn accounts for the vast majority of corn
Speaker 9: grown in America today, as well as the vast majority
Speaker 9: of the corn Americans eat, just not on purpose. It's
Speaker 9: in most of the beverages we drink Surprise Surprise because
Speaker 9: of high frycto's corn syrup, and this is derived from
Speaker 9: flint corn and is the most commonly used commercial sweetener
Speaker 9: aka death syrup. It's in most animals people eat because
Speaker 9: it's fed to most animals that are raised for slaughter.
Speaker 9: It's even in our cheese because many cows are fed
Speaker 9: corn instead of being able to graze on grain. All
Speaker 9: of this makes corn virtually inseparable from the American diet.
Speaker 9: Reddy Fouseel says that people have this kind of nostalgic
Speaker 9: understanding of corn. They think of corn on the cob
Speaker 9: and popcorn. But the truth is that field corn is
Speaker 9: what we are really talking about when we talk about
Speaker 9: the dominance of corn in the United States. It's in
Speaker 9: almost every product in the supermarket today. That's no exaggeration.
Speaker 9: But obviously corn cannot be contained. American style processed food,
Speaker 9: which almost always relies on corn, has unpopularized in countries
Speaker 9: all around the world. Let's go back to Mexico, the
Speaker 9: birthplace of corn as we know it. How exactly did
Speaker 9: corn become such a popular street food. Mexican food is
Speaker 9: quite often literally built upon the tortilla, which is a
Speaker 9: lot of the times made of corn. The tortilla is
Speaker 9: a vehicle by which the country's most popular foods are
Speaker 9: eaten in chiladas, caesadillas, taos, tomalies. I can list food forever.
Speaker 9: Although wheat flour has grown in popularity here in the
Speaker 9: United States, which is actually the technical home of the burrito, Apparently,
Speaker 9: in Mexico, it's all about the corn. Mexico City is
Speaker 9: frequently praised as one of the most significant cities on
Speaker 9: Earth in terms of street food. Street food is referred
Speaker 9: to as antohitos in Spanish, which means little cravings, which
Speaker 9: I find very cute. Street dishes count corn as a
Speaker 9: near universal ingredient and sometimes, of course, it doesn't have
Speaker 9: to be processed to achieve its highest potential. Elote is
Speaker 9: perhaps the most recognized example, which is, for those not
Speaker 9: in the know, a full ear of corn that is
Speaker 9: grilled and slathered with a variety of toppings like butter,
Speaker 9: chili powder or taheen mayonnaise and cotiha cheese, among many
Speaker 9: other things. The final product, elote is served on a stick,
Speaker 9: providing an easy means for mobile consumption. Another common corn
Speaker 9: street food is asquitas, a Mexican sweet corn salad, although
Speaker 9: its true origin is not known. According to Nawadl stories,
Speaker 9: asquitas are credited by being created by a god, a
Speaker 9: deity with a name I cannot say or pronounce what
Speaker 9: It is long and looks cool, but I won't try
Speaker 9: to say it. But this god is also credited with
Speaker 9: creating Mexican corn, jelly corn. It's from the gods. Literally.
Speaker 9: As for me, there isn't some magical history of corn
Speaker 9: in the Middle East. I looked, I searched, I tried
Speaker 9: to find something, and I couldn't find one. No magical
Speaker 9: mystical history of my beloved corn. Like most things I
Speaker 9: have questions about, I asked my mom, and my mom
Speaker 9: said that when it's in season, street vendors sell corn.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 9: The same goes for other street foods that are popular
Speaker 9: in the Middle East, which you might find interesting, which
Speaker 9: is cactus fruit or the prickly pair. But no corn
Speaker 9: is magical. But it's only magical to me. And just
Speaker 9: because it's magical to me doesn't mean it is actually magical.
Speaker 9: And through researching for this episode, I have learned that.
Speaker 9: So what I'm saying is this episode has shattered my
Speaker 9: naive childhood dreams about a magical land of corn. But
Speaker 9: the job's a job, and someone has to do it.
Speaker 9: So that's it. Goodbye.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 9: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 9: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 9: cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
Speaker 9: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 9: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 9: monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.