Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
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Speaker 3: Hello everybody, and welcome to it could happen here. It's
Speaker 3: Schreene and today I'm joined by James and Robert to
Speaker 3: welcome our guest. In this episode, we are joined by
Speaker 3: Adam Broomberg. He is an artist, an activist and an educator.
Speaker 3: He was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. His
Speaker 3: parents and his entire extended family are Holocaust survivors and
Speaker 3: he had a very Zionist upbringing. We talked to him
Speaker 3: about how he grew up in apart Height, South Africa,
Speaker 3: how he broke free from Zionism as a teenager, and
Speaker 3: how he's come to be a very vocal Jewish anti Zionist.
Speaker 3: He currently lives and works in Berlin and he's exhibited
Speaker 3: his art all over the world. He's also regularly on
Speaker 3: the ground in Palestine and he uses his work to
Speaker 3: raise awareness about the crimes committed daily by the IDF.
Speaker 3: Members of the German government have accused him and labeled
Speaker 3: him as being anti Semitic because of his criticism of Israel.
Speaker 3: And we're going to get into all of it. I
Speaker 3: want it. So let's just go back into your background
Speaker 3: a little bit. Your family on both sides are Holocaust survivors,
Speaker 3: and your ancestors like fled to South Africa, and that's
Speaker 3: where you grew up with your parents. And I read
Speaker 3: that you went to a zion the school starting from
Speaker 3: age six. Can you tell us about your family background
Speaker 3: and your experience going to issi in a school as
Speaker 3: a Jewish person.
Speaker 4: So you remember the podcast you did about Lithuania and
Speaker 4: that particular character who is the pale who had to
Speaker 4: flee from the pug Rams and all that stuff. So
Speaker 4: basically this is part three.
Speaker 5: What he's talking about here is the Spanish Civil War,
Speaker 5: specifically about an episode we did more than a year ago,
Speaker 5: as many of thirty percent of the fallen volunteers who
Speaker 5: fought in some units in Spain were Jewish. Some of them,
Speaker 5: like al Jakin, who have written about a lot, had
Speaker 5: fled persecution in the pale of Settlement at a very
Speaker 5: young age and arrived in the USA to relative safety.
Speaker 5: But after a few years in the USA, they began
Speaker 5: to see the menace of anti Semitism spreading back towards
Speaker 5: them through Nazi Germany and later through fashed Italy, and
Speaker 5: they decided to take up arms and stop it when
Speaker 5: it threatened to overwhelm democratic Spain.
Speaker 4: Imagine that kid gets on a boat, and that kid
Speaker 4: is my grandfather. My grandfather's name is Joshua, right, and
Speaker 4: he's like a towering six foot three beautiful man. He's
Speaker 4: studying medicine. He he's fleeing his mother. His family is
Speaker 4: not wealthy. The Pilgrims are going on. He's studying medicine,
Speaker 4: you know, very bright guy, but every like of sell
Speaker 4: in his body says you've got to get out of here.
Speaker 4: Also that also he gets this opportunity. He meets a
Speaker 4: woman called Dora Klatschko, my grandmother, who's like four foot two, right,
Speaker 4: but comes from a very wealthy family in Lithuania. And
Speaker 4: it's kind of an arranged set up and I think
Speaker 4: Joshua was paid. Anyway, they get on a boat bound
Speaker 4: for South Africa. Some landed up in Scotland or oddly
Speaker 4: because the boat bound for America there would they would
Speaker 4: they would disemb most of the all of the people
Speaker 4: on board and tell them they were in America and
Speaker 4: then take a whole lot of other people and then
Speaker 4: carry on to America so they could double the fee
Speaker 4: by the way. But anyway, my so, Joshua and Dora
Speaker 4: land up on the boat and they land in the
Speaker 4: port of Durban. It's around nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, okay, and.
Speaker 4: They speak mostly Yiddish. They've never seen a black person
Speaker 4: in their life. They land up, you know, on these
Speaker 4: foreign shores. My grandmother, I think headed towards Johannesburg. And
Speaker 4: this I got from my mother on her deathbed. My
Speaker 4: mom passed away December seventeenth last year, so it's like
Speaker 4: six seven months ago. And you know, she'd like she
Speaker 4: did it magnifics, and she managed to tell those last
Speaker 4: little bits of stories. And one of those was that
Speaker 4: her mother, Dora, had had a child who died at
Speaker 4: nine months old, and she was ann in Johannesburg when
Speaker 4: the child died and Joshua, her husband, was still in Durban.
Speaker 4: So you can imagine the kind of the weirdness of that, right,
Speaker 4: I mean imagine your imagine your your the father of
Speaker 4: your child not not coming to be with you when
Speaker 4: you lose your child. Coupled with the fact that they
Speaker 4: had both lost I think Dora, my grandmother, was one
Speaker 4: of eight or nine children. I think only three survived
Speaker 4: the Holocaust and her parents were killed, and the same
Speaker 4: with Joshua. So they lost all their family and there
Speaker 4: they were at the bottom tip of Africa, right without
Speaker 4: without any kind of orientation.
Speaker 3: Really, yeah, can you talk a little bit about you
Speaker 3: mentioned how you described it as bottom feeders. I listened
Speaker 3: to another podcast you were on and you said that they,
Speaker 3: your family suddenly really enjoyed and appreciated the change and
Speaker 3: status they had in society. Can you talk about that
Speaker 3: a little bit.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, so you know, they got on the boat
Speaker 4: as and their identity we were were there were Jews,
Speaker 4: so they were expelled from Europe as Jews. The minute
Speaker 4: they toes touched the land in Africa, their identity transformed
Speaker 4: from being Jew to being white, right right, Suddenly they
Speaker 4: were they were identified as white people, like the word
Speaker 4: the word Jew almost like just fell off, you know,
Speaker 4: that that yellow star that they had to wear, it
Speaker 4: just fell off. So suddenly they were like, oh my god.
Speaker 4: They were like utterly privileged, powerful and and in control right.
Speaker 4: And with all of the with all of the corruption
Speaker 4: that apartheid provided for the elite, for the white for
Speaker 4: the white supremacist, for the white the white people, that
Speaker 4: the Jews who arrived were able to plug into that privilege.
Speaker 4: And there was about two hundred and fifty three hundred
Speaker 4: thousand Jews who fled and arrived in South Africa, so
Speaker 4: it was quite a big community. And they did ver
Speaker 4: fucking well. Let me tell you, and I can tell
Speaker 4: you why. I can tell you because my father, who
Speaker 4: I just saw about three days ago, what's left of him.
Speaker 4: When he was active and potent, he was the top
Speaker 4: tax lawyer in South Africa, which means that his clients,
Speaker 4: and those clients are people who walk through my house,
Speaker 4: came through my house in the seventies and the eighties
Speaker 4: were probably the most hideous characters in history. You know,
Speaker 4: we're talking soul Kurzner. Sol Curzner started something called Sun's
Speaker 4: City and he exploited the Buntustan, the homeland system that
Speaker 4: apartheid built, and he built this casino hotel resort called
Speaker 4: Sun City.
Speaker 3: At this point in our conversation with Adam, we wanted
Speaker 3: to ask about his personal journey into anti Zionism and
Speaker 3: where it all began.
Speaker 5: So I think an interesting way to approach this end
Speaker 5: would be like, obviously they've found themselves and your parents
Speaker 5: have found themselves in this country which is systematically discriminating
Speaker 5: against people, right, this is apartheid South Africa, and Jewish
Speaker 5: people were at once active in the anti apartment movement,
Speaker 5: and as you're saying, also active in the apartheid government
Speaker 5: and the apartheid regime. And you found yourself, I guess,
Speaker 5: going to this school which was explicitly Zionist. And I'm wondering,
Speaker 5: at what point, and I suppose this involves seeing what's
Speaker 5: happening where you are as well as what's happening in Palestine,
Speaker 5: At what point did you make that connection and be
Speaker 5: like her this this like what what? Because you're you're
Speaker 5: a very explicitly anti Zionist, right, Like it's what was it?
Speaker 5: Something you read? Something you saw? Like what caused you
Speaker 5: to make that leap, and how was that received in
Speaker 5: South Africa.
Speaker 4: So I think it's a mixture of things. I think
Speaker 4: I've got three older siblings, so I'm the last born
Speaker 4: by seven years. I've got a brother Paul, seven years older,
Speaker 4: sister Man who's nine years older who lives in Israel,
Speaker 4: and an old My oldest brother, Jonathan, is ten years
Speaker 4: older than me. Jonathan and Paul, Paul specifically was very
Speaker 4: politically active, so he started an organization unlike Israel, so
Speaker 4: that in South Africa the universities were like the bastions
Speaker 4: of the anti apartype movement right, and he was in
Speaker 4: newsas National Union or South African Students, and he started
Speaker 4: a think called the End Conscription Campaign, which was to
Speaker 4: fight against forced conscription of white men who were compulsory
Speaker 4: called up into the army at the age of eighteen.
Speaker 4: And so given the fact that he was seven years older,
Speaker 4: when I hit about fourteen or fifteen, at fifteen, I
Speaker 4: went on a thing called ol pun, which is kind
Speaker 4: of you've heard of birthright right or pun is something.
Speaker 4: So I went to the Zionist Jewish day School. So
Speaker 4: every day I'd go I'd have to pray, go into
Speaker 4: the synagogue, pretend to pray for about an hour, right,
Speaker 4: And I was looking at my school, like my sister
Speaker 4: is like a gorgeous archivist, and she made this little
Speaker 4: book called Adam's Life. And I was looking at the
Speaker 4: school grades at the age of six, and it was
Speaker 4: like Jewish studies. And we know what those Jewish studies were, right,
Speaker 4: So you walked into the Jewish Studies room and there
Speaker 4: was a little blue tint which was the Jewish National Fund,
Speaker 4: and you would put your spare change in there, and
Speaker 4: that money would go towards making the desert bloom I say,
Speaker 4: in like work marks, right, So that was that money
Speaker 4: would go to plants in like two hundred and forty
Speaker 4: million pine trees in you know which I'm not indigenous
Speaker 4: in Israel. But just to swing back. So at about
Speaker 4: fourteen or fifteen, what happened is in parallel I was
Speaker 4: being told on a daily basis two things I was
Speaker 4: being told. Now you've got to remember this was the
Speaker 4: heights of also the Cold War. So there were these
Speaker 4: proxy wars that were being fought all around South Africa.
Speaker 4: In Angola, in Mozambique. Mozambique you had for Lima were
Speaker 4: backed up by Cuba, Russia. Right, you had you had
Speaker 4: Ruanamo that were backed up by America and South Africa,
Speaker 4: and they were running these kind of gorilla bush wars, right.
Speaker 4: And many of my friends who were called up in
Speaker 4: the military would be flown into Angola or into into Mozambique.
Speaker 4: We dropped there, and you know, they were told, look,
Speaker 4: if something happens you weren't here, Well, you're not there,
Speaker 4: you know, We're not going to come and find you.
Speaker 5: What I'm referring to here are the proxy conflicts throughout
Speaker 5: Africa that saw national liberation movements, often supported by Cuba
Speaker 5: and the USSR, fighting against various last class colonial regimes
Speaker 5: and African anti communist groups. These groups are often supported
Speaker 5: by the US and the guys in anti communism. These
Speaker 5: wars include the Civil War in Angola, the Namibian War
Speaker 5: of Independence, some of those, Ambiquan War of Independence, and
Speaker 5: the zimbabwe War of Independence. You might know the last
Speaker 5: one as a Rhodesian bush war, but Rhodesia doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 5: Living in the United States, it's easy to use the
Speaker 5: phrase cold war as a conflict free standoff mediated by
Speaker 5: nuclear powers chess something without enowledging that in many parts
Speaker 5: of the world, proxy wars in these post colonial states
Speaker 5: and the conflicts of decolonialization throughout the late twentieth century
Speaker 5: made that period anything but cold.
Speaker 4: The point is is that so at the age of fourteen,
Speaker 4: I'm going to these schools and I'm being told every
Speaker 4: day that if apartheid ended, that would mean the end
Speaker 4: of the white people in South Africa, right, because we
Speaker 4: were by far the minority. White people were by far
Speaker 4: the minority, I don't know what it was, ten twelve percent,
Speaker 4: And there was this kind of you could see the
Speaker 4: fear because the walls started getting higher, the security gates
Speaker 4: were built, the razor wire, the electric fences, you know,
Speaker 4: it was it became more increasingly visible in the eighties,
Speaker 4: the fear keeping keeping apart, tight, keeping people apart. So
Speaker 4: I was told all the time, like if aparth he
Speaker 4: had ended, that would mean the end of white people.
Speaker 4: At the same time, I was told, given that my
Speaker 4: community was like second generation Holocaust surviving, you know, the
Speaker 4: notion of Israel as a place of salvation, a place
Speaker 4: of when the ship hits the fag, that's where we
Speaker 4: can go, right, And that we were always told that,
Speaker 4: and we were also told daily this is a land
Speaker 4: without people for a people without land. That became a
Speaker 4: kind of mantra. Honestly, it was like it was said
Speaker 4: to me over and over again. Right, So when and
Speaker 4: what started happening is I think that I became an
Speaker 4: activist at the age of sixteen. There's an amazing she's
Speaker 4: now a dear friend of mine. We've reconnected. She's a
Speaker 4: theater director called yah El Faber, and we started an
Speaker 4: organization called Links the age of sixteen, which was to
Speaker 4: educate white kids about apartheid. And what we started to
Speaker 4: do was to literally kind of break the apartheid wall.
Speaker 4: We'd start doing visits into Suweta, we'd start doing visits
Speaker 4: into Alexandria township, and we started forming friendships. And you know,
Speaker 4: most kids just didn't go out of the suburbs. And
Speaker 4: suddenly we go away on these weekends like led by
Speaker 4: a kind of older activists, and we'd all hang in
Speaker 4: the same you know, we'd all sleep in the same
Speaker 4: dormitories and we start chatting, chatting and smoking cigarettes together
Speaker 4: and so like genuine just basic childhood friendship started for me.
Speaker 4: And when that stuff that profound very successful. Other ring
Speaker 4: that the propaganda of apartheid succeeded in creating, you know,
Speaker 4: the black person as the other, as the enemy, which
Speaker 4: it does it does in Israel right on the other
Speaker 4: side of the apartheid wall is the worst enemy or
Speaker 4: imagination could possibly conjure up right, And it's exactly the
Speaker 4: same process. And suddenly when I kind of pierced that
Speaker 4: wall and that started falling apart, then the kind of
Speaker 4: ideology around Israel and the the notion that Palestinians didn't exist,
Speaker 4: suddenly they started to exist for me somehow. And so
Speaker 4: it was about around the age of sixteen, I'd say.
Speaker 5: And it was It's interesting that it was like through
Speaker 5: your experience of living in an apartheid state that you
Speaker 5: were able to I think appreciate that like that what
Speaker 5: was happening to the Palestinian people was like another form
Speaker 5: of set like colonialism.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think, yeah, like none of this, none
Speaker 4: of this is intellectual. So I think, like everything that
Speaker 4: came to me or has driven to me is lucky
Speaker 4: is through lived experience, it really is. So I think
Speaker 4: it's like through these friendships that I realized and you know,
Speaker 4: like touching, touching skin, and this is one of this
Speaker 4: is the difference between apartheid South African apartheid Israel Palestine
Speaker 4: is that we were segregated by law, you know, I mean,
Speaker 4: mixed marriages were prohibited by law. Sex was prohibited between races.
Speaker 4: But the thing is that we were mixed together because
Speaker 4: the labor force was needed, right, so that like you know,
Speaker 4: the nineteen sixteen Tax Act forced a lot of black
Speaker 4: migrant male workers into the cities to work on the
Speaker 4: gold mines, which meant that there was the presence of
Speaker 4: the other amongst us. And because there was the presence
Speaker 4: of the other the other, there was also the desire
Speaker 4: and it is a sexual desire or essential desire, and
Speaker 4: the smells, and we would touch each other, and we
Speaker 4: would walk through the city and kind of rub up
Speaker 4: against each other. Now, my nieces and nephews having grown
Speaker 4: up under the inter father and because of the apartheid War,
Speaker 4: they've been deprived of that dential experience of the.
Speaker 3: Other in Palestine Israel.
Speaker 4: You mean in Palestine Israel. Yeah, So that you know,
Speaker 4: they've built they've built this twelve foot there's twelve foot,
Speaker 4: seven hundred kilometer long concrete tsunami of a wall that
Speaker 4: divides people, which means that you know, until recently, nobody
Speaker 4: uttered the word Palestinian because they didn't exist, right, And
Speaker 4: so for my nieces and nephews, what was on the
Speaker 4: other side of that wall was, like I said, their
Speaker 4: worst the worst enemy that their imagination could conjure up.
Speaker 4: And children's imaginations are amazing, right, And I did I
Speaker 4: did say this a while back where where you know
Speaker 4: how Fucos spoke about He spoke about the structures that
Speaker 4: were built around the plague, and after the plague ended,
Speaker 4: you were still left with these structures. Right now, let's
Speaker 4: think about the apartheid wall. You've got the seven hundred
Speaker 4: kilometers long, massive like concrete thing. It goes like five
Speaker 4: meters underground. Yeah. Now, unlike for coose hypothesis that war
Speaker 4: has created the plague, that war has created the enemy,
Speaker 4: because what's on the other side of that wall, that's
Speaker 4: only that's only accessible through these little checkpoints that are
Speaker 4: manned by these you know, poor teenage like little foot
Speaker 4: soldiers of the state. That's the that's the only way
Speaker 4: to penetrate that war. So on the other side of
Speaker 4: that wall is whatever you tell the people is there,
Speaker 4: and that's the that's the horror of that situation.
Speaker 3: I actually I'm kind of glad you brought up the
Speaker 3: plague idea because you mentioned that on a different podcast,
Speaker 3: and I thought it was verly like poetic to illustrate
Speaker 3: that a plague can be constructed by the structure versus
Speaker 3: actually be a plague.
Speaker 2: And it's it's also kind of worth noting. You know,
Speaker 2: as you were talking about the restrictions on interracial marriage
Speaker 2: in South Africa, versions of that very much still exist
Speaker 2: to this day in Israel, including heavy restrictions on inner
Speaker 2: marriage between Israeli and Palestinian people. You know that that's
Speaker 2: a bigger topic than I want to just kind of
Speaker 2: casually get into it. Like there's a number of restrictions
Speaker 2: that exist into the present day because like civil marriage
Speaker 2: is not really a thing there as it is.
Speaker 5: In a lot of other countries. Yeah, So I wonder,
Speaker 5: like you said that Estinian people existed in your childhood
Speaker 5: only as this sort of construct, right, this other construct
Speaker 5: and your experience of black people in South Africa has
Speaker 5: showing you that those other constructs were false and misleading
Speaker 5: and served perhaps an agenda. When you decided that, like
Speaker 5: your stance was anti Zionism, and then you said to
Speaker 5: your guessing, to your friend, to your family, to your
Speaker 5: fellow children at the school, like hey, what this is
Speaker 5: fucked up here and this is fucked up there too.
Speaker 5: How was the response?
Speaker 4: Well, it's like, you know, one doesn't come to these
Speaker 4: decisions overnight and like announce it right, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So.
Speaker 4: There's vague memories I have, Like, like I said, I
Speaker 4: was on that all Pun trip, which is like this
Speaker 4: three week or three month trip. I mean they send
Speaker 4: like one hundred and fifteen year old kids. You live
Speaker 4: in a building in Jerusalem, and it's basically like this
Speaker 4: three month propaganda tour. Right. You're given a Bible and
Speaker 4: you're told that that's your guidebook. Literally you like you traverse,
Speaker 4: you traverse this place following the stories of the Bible,
Speaker 4: and that's meant to be like your holy land. But
Speaker 4: I did have one of the one of the it's
Speaker 4: called a Madrich, I think a teacher. He was he
Speaker 4: must have been eighteen or nineteen. He happen to be
Speaker 4: kind of like a vaguely liberal Zionist, and I remember
Speaker 4: clearly him taking me to an anti Kahani protest. So
Speaker 4: there was still like Maya Kahane was was alive, and
Speaker 4: we know that Mayakahani, you know, the Cohanness movement, as
Speaker 4: you know, was a kind of you know, they spawned
Speaker 4: the ben Geviers and these fascists who are in power now,
Speaker 4: but at the time they were deemed a terrorist organization
Speaker 4: by America. And and I remember going to an anti
Speaker 4: Kahani protest, So somehow that planted a little seed in me.
Speaker 4: And I guess, you know, I think that anti Zionism
Speaker 4: came afterwards because I was so focused on the anti
Speaker 4: apartheid struggle because that's where I was and that's what
Speaker 4: I was doing. And my university was either spent like
Speaker 4: running battles with riot police or smoking weed. And I
Speaker 4: literally went to about three classes. Honestly, I was definitely
Speaker 4: the odd one out in my school. I mean, you
Speaker 4: know it being a Zionist Jewish day school. I'm still
Speaker 4: you know, I'm still probably perceived as like an absolute
Speaker 4: fucking avarition. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you did describe your mother in one podcasts as
Speaker 3: diehard zion and so I can only imagine. And you
Speaker 3: you mentioned your nephew and her husband both were in
Speaker 3: the IDF, So I can only imagine. I think It's
Speaker 3: it's good to bring up that despite all of that,
Speaker 3: you were able to like think deeply about it and
Speaker 3: work your way out of that brainwashing. Essentially, before I
Speaker 3: get too carried away, let's take our first break and
Speaker 3: we'll be right back. BRB and we're back. I want
Speaker 3: to talk now about your experience in Germany and how
Speaker 3: you experienced like state level accusations of being an anti
Speaker 3: Semitic person even though you're just a vocal Jewish anti Sionist.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about what led this person I didn't
Speaker 3: even though this person existed Stefan Hensel, who is the
Speaker 3: anti Semitism commissioner of the City of Hamburg. That's the
Speaker 3: position someone has, But what led him to call you
Speaker 3: these really atrocious things in so many newspapers and like
Speaker 3: basically like just libelists and libelist stuff.
Speaker 4: Okay, so so check it out. So my mom dies
Speaker 4: the seventeenth of December. Yeah, I go away to a
Speaker 4: yoga retreat where there's like, there's no like coverage. I'm like,
Speaker 4: I'm offline. I get back to Berlin and there's emails
Speaker 4: from like people are ready trust you know, and serious
Speaker 4: people in my life saying, you know, dude, you've got
Speaker 4: to respond to these allegations that are in like de
Speaker 4: Zeit Billin and zeem Aad's, you know, basically every major
Speaker 4: newspaper in Germany and social media all over the place.
Speaker 4: There's this character, like you said, Stefan Hensel, who is
Speaker 4: the commission of Antisemitism for the state of Bullin. Now
Speaker 4: eight of the states of Germany have commissioners of antisemitism, right,
Speaker 4: none of whom are Jewish, none of whom were elected.
Speaker 4: They kind of semi it's it's super weird they are,
Speaker 4: it's semi legal. I mean, like nobody knows that exists.
Speaker 4: Nobody knows, like nobody elects them. This character Stefan Hensel,
Speaker 4: and I don't want to pay too much attention to
Speaker 4: him because he's just like a nebulous Islamophobic pro Zionist,
Speaker 4: you know, bureaucrat. But anyway, he does a series of
Speaker 4: interviews and to summarize the numerous interviews and his social
Speaker 4: media posts, I am called, quote literally a hateful anti
Speaker 4: Seamite who advocates for terrorism against Jews. Now this is
Speaker 4: two weeks after bearing my Jewish mother, who was a
Speaker 4: second generation Holocaust survivor. Now that is that definition of
Speaker 4: gaslighting right now? As a white man, it's testimony to
Speaker 4: my privilege that I haven't experienced gas lighting on a
Speaker 4: daily basis as most women do. Certainly every Palestinian friend
Speaker 4: I have, they experience that every minute of their lives,
Speaker 4: because their very essence is illegal being Palestinian. You know,
Speaker 4: the blood that runs with their veins is illegal. They
Speaker 4: don't exist because they're Palestinian. Right, But so I stand
Speaker 4: accused of these things, and I'm like, I'm god smacked.
Speaker 4: I'm like, and the reason is is because I've been
Speaker 4: vocal about my support and solidarity for Palestinian rights, and.
Speaker 3: It was particularly about your support for the BDS movement
Speaker 3: right exactly me.
Speaker 4: So BDS boycott divestment sanctions has become a kind of
Speaker 4: it's like one of these terms that emergers in the world.
Speaker 4: It's like terrorism or war on drugs or what aren't
Speaker 4: the terms can we come up with? You know, it's
Speaker 4: like it's one of these catchphrases and it's like BDS, yeah,
Speaker 4: and it's like it's just like people don't even associate
Speaker 4: it with boycott divestment sanctions. If you break it down,
Speaker 4: you know what ended apartheid in South Africa. There was
Speaker 4: no there was no sudden moral awakening. Basically the Cold
Speaker 4: War ended. Reagan and Thatcher, who were total supporters of
Speaker 4: apartheid South Africa, suddenly the Cold War ended. South Africa
Speaker 4: wasn't that important an asset, and there was national pressure
Speaker 4: and you know, more and more people started to see
Speaker 4: what the atrocities that were going on, and sanctions and
Speaker 4: divestments started to happen. Right, So Polaroid, the company Polaroid
Speaker 4: I did a project about this was one of the
Speaker 4: first companies that colluded with the South African government but
Speaker 4: also divested when they were exposed, and that led to
Speaker 4: a number of banks divesting from South Africa. So sanctions
Speaker 4: and investments and essentially the South African government in the
Speaker 4: late eighties was financially broke. So they were forced to
Speaker 4: the negotiation table because they were broke, not because they
Speaker 4: woke up one morning and said, oh my god, we're
Speaker 4: oppressing the majority of black people in this country, and
Speaker 4: and and and and you know, so, uh, it's just
Speaker 4: like they were forced to and so so so b
Speaker 4: d S, which is a peaceful, non violent means of
Speaker 4: resistance that that that started during the second inter father
Speaker 4: has become one of these catchphrases, and I'll tell you
Speaker 4: a story, and and this all came to a head
Speaker 4: around last year's Documenta, which happens in the city of
Speaker 4: Castle in Germany. Now, document is a really interesting art
Speaker 4: event in the art world calendar, and last year Documenta
Speaker 4: was that was was a very very interesting little theater play.
Speaker 4: So what happened during Documentary last year is that there
Speaker 4: was a group of Palestinian artists who were invited to
Speaker 4: show work and their space was invaded and there was
Speaker 4: graffiti was sprayed on the walls. There were two things
Speaker 4: were sprayed. One was the number one eight seven and
Speaker 4: then the word perolta.
Speaker 3: Can you just explain what those both mean?
Speaker 4: I'm not exactly sure, but one eight seven I can
Speaker 4: tell you, okay. And the reason I could tell you
Speaker 4: is because one eight seven was spray painted outside my
Speaker 4: front door, inside my apartment building. And one eight seven,
Speaker 4: as any gang member in California will tell you, is
Speaker 4: the Californian penal code for murder. And when you spray
Speaker 4: one eight seven, it's a death threat.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: And so and so what the media did in Germany
Speaker 4: is said, oh, no, no, no, hang on, there's a
Speaker 4: hip hop band in Hamburg called one eight seven.
Speaker 5: Okay where that came from?
Speaker 4: Wow?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to mention that Sublime also has
Speaker 2: a few songs with one eighth seven.
Speaker 3: H They were just Sublime fans.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that song about riots. There was a radical branch
Speaker 5: of the Sublime bankler.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'd love to hear this music, but.
Speaker 5: I think you don't want any Sublime.
Speaker 4: No, no, I really do. After this, I'm going to
Speaker 4: actually look and listen to But so on the morning
Speaker 4: when when so back to documenta. So they spray painted
Speaker 4: this stuff and and then there was a furor because
Speaker 4: there was there was an Indonesian collective who did a
Speaker 4: giant mural and one of the pieces that one of
Speaker 4: the characters in this mural depicted an IDF soldier, an
Speaker 4: Israeli Defense Force soldier or an Israeli occupying for a
Speaker 4: soldier as a pig. Right policeman soldier as a pig.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's an old truck. We've all done it right,
Speaker 4: you know, they're the pigs. Police are the pigs. But
Speaker 4: there was an ideaf as a pig and it was
Speaker 4: and so it was deemed anti Semitic, and fair enough,
Speaker 4: it's like it's Germany. It's an Israeli person in a
Speaker 4: uniform depicted as a pig. It's tasteless, you know, it's tacky.
Speaker 4: Immediately they kind of covered the mura, right, but bang
Speaker 4: the troops came in. The israel lobby, the Jewish lobby
Speaker 4: came in. Boom, right, they seized the opportunity and they hit,
Speaker 4: and suddenly the word BDS came in. Right. And so
Speaker 4: the two curators from grong Ruper, who were amongst the
Speaker 4: collective who were curating that year's documentor were visiting professors
Speaker 4: at the Art School in Hamburg, where I had been
Speaker 4: a professor for the previous six years, Okay, and Stefan
Speaker 4: Hensel like a little kind of surgeon. He pinpointed these
Speaker 4: three little nitious, kind of pro Palestinian people that were
Speaker 4: inside a German university, and he wanted to remove them
Speaker 4: with his little tweezers. And so he grouped us together
Speaker 4: and he slammed the word anti Semitism. He accused us
Speaker 4: of being anti Semitic, and so he weaponized this word
Speaker 4: and this word like it's such an interesting word, right,
Speaker 4: anti Semitism. It's so here you've got a guy. Now
Speaker 4: he's never declared, and not that it's of any interest
Speaker 4: to me whether he's Jewish or not. I mean, I
Speaker 4: don't think he has the right to buy into my
Speaker 4: lineage of trauma. He doesn't have that right. But he
Speaker 4: married a Jew. He named his son, I think David
Speaker 4: or something, right, He's there's all these kind of like.
Speaker 3: Gestures to make him seem like he's has the ability
Speaker 3: to say these things.
Speaker 4: Not not a loophole as much as a kind of
Speaker 4: as a kind of dress code. It's like, my son's
Speaker 4: called Yeah, my son's called David. I'm married to a
Speaker 4: Jewish person. I've lived in Israel for six years. I
Speaker 4: ran the Yidisham, the Israelish Germansia organization, you know, Israel
Speaker 4: German organization, which is like, you know, an Islamophobic kind
Speaker 4: of weird or weird ass think tank. I don't know
Speaker 4: what they do, right, But the point is he has
Speaker 4: this guy, and I bet you I would lay money
Speaker 4: on it that his parents or his grandparents were perpetrators
Speaker 4: during the Holocaust. And this is this is the way,
Speaker 4: this is the psychological twist. This is like the beautiful
Speaker 4: little oo that the mind does to get oneself out
Speaker 4: of like feeling shit about yourself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean even attempting to remove those people from
Speaker 3: their posts is like, that's a great example of Germany
Speaker 3: using anti semitism, like weaponizing it at an institutional level.
Speaker 3: Like that's a that's really unfortunate. I want to I
Speaker 3: do want to mention this really quick. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: Germany tried to make BDS a hate crime. And even
Speaker 3: though it was challenged and then it was found to
Speaker 3: be unconstitutional, that like the fact that that tent was made,
Speaker 3: from what I understand, there's still an attitude in Germany
Speaker 3: about BDS being this illegal ish thing.
Speaker 4: Totally exactly. So it's like, you know, my father was
Speaker 4: a lawyer, as I said, so I know, I know
Speaker 4: the difference between law and justice, and I know what
Speaker 4: a test case means. So you bring something to trial
Speaker 4: means it enters into the the language of society, right,
Speaker 4: And when you say, is BDS anti semitic and you
Speaker 4: like test this thing, suddenly there's this presumption and there
Speaker 4: is a presumption that BDS is anti Semitic. And I
Speaker 4: can give you concrete examples of how it's happened, how
Speaker 4: it's played out over the last couple of years.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, what I want James to mention? You looked
Speaker 3: up that word, right, James is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm familiar with her, unfortunately, and I think this
Speaker 5: kind of lines up with the sort of she came
Speaker 5: on the scene in twenty twenty one that I had
Speaker 5: been around doing antiempitism for a long time. She is
Speaker 5: a self self described fascist in Spain. She's part of
Speaker 5: a group or at the time was leading a group
Speaker 5: called Juvental Patriothrica, which is patriotic youth. And like the
Speaker 5: speech that she's most famous for was delivered at a
Speaker 5: commemoration for the Division a Fool, which is a blue division.
Speaker 5: They're the Francoist volunteers who fought for Nazi Germany, which
Speaker 5: you know, if you're commemorating that, you're kind of a
Speaker 5: piece of shit. And then she went on to be
Speaker 5: a further piece of shit. I suppose by like, she's
Speaker 5: very explicit in her anti Semitism, right, she doesn't do
Speaker 5: what a lot of these people do and kind of
Speaker 5: veil it. She talks about Jewish people as the eternal enemy.
Speaker 5: And it's worth pointing out that in Spain Spain has
Speaker 5: had what's largely called anti Semitism without Jews, or sometimes
Speaker 5: called that because Spain conducted ethnic cleansing or conducted a
Speaker 5: literally they'll call it an olympia, like a cleansing and
Speaker 5: a removal of Jewish people, and Spanish Jewish population is
Speaker 5: still very small, and so this sort of virulent anti
Speaker 5: Semitism that were seeing on her behalf, it had impacts
Speaker 5: all around Europe, and she was kind of the most
Speaker 5: prominent and outspoken anti Semitic for a little while there.
Speaker 3: So that was the name they graffitied along with one
Speaker 3: of your seven.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I guess trying to tie this documentar to her
Speaker 5: disgusting anti Semitic, which is entirely distinct things, right, like
Speaker 5: I think, as you were saying, and like that, by
Speaker 5: putting the two in the same phrase, we conflate them
Speaker 5: when when they are entirely distinct things. And she, I
Speaker 5: think all of us would agree, is a terrible person views.
Speaker 4: But if we dig a little deeper, we get to
Speaker 4: the core, which is why did the Nazis and the
Speaker 4: Zionists collaborate in the nineteen thirties, Because they had the
Speaker 4: same desire. They wanted the same outcome. They wanted the
Speaker 4: Jews out of Europe. They wanted them to move to Palestine. Right.
Speaker 4: Zionism was a European project started in the early twentieth
Speaker 4: century in Vienna. They wanted the Jews out of Europe
Speaker 4: and into Palestine. The Zionists did so, they collaborated. And
Speaker 4: I think, really, truly, I think that we do face
Speaker 4: a real threat of real anti Semitism in Germany. And
Speaker 4: I have two children. My daughter is thirteen, her name
Speaker 4: is Lennie. My little boy is ten, his name's Marlow.
Speaker 4: And if you look at the police report of twenty
Speaker 4: twenty two that was released in Berlin, there are multiple
Speaker 4: numerous incidents of visual and quite violent incidents of real
Speaker 4: anti Semitism. Right, And why are we not addressing that?
Speaker 4: Because my kids are in danger? And instead we have
Speaker 4: the Minister of Culture, whose name is Claudia Roff. Stand up.
Speaker 4: A couple of weeks ago on a Friday night at
Speaker 4: the opening of Hakka. There, you know, a huge institution.
Speaker 4: My dear friend Bonaventour, who comes from Cameroon is he's
Speaker 4: been made the head of this institution. And it's a
Speaker 4: Friday night and the whole is full of people, and
Speaker 4: it's glorious. It's a beautiful night. I mean, you have
Speaker 4: diversity like you've never seen. This is like queer diverse blackness,
Speaker 4: indigenous thought. It's queer thought. It's like fucking Peaches is there?
Speaker 4: Everyone's there, you know what I mean. And Claudia Raff
Speaker 4: takes the stage, she takes the microphone, and what does
Speaker 4: she say? She says, and there's silence in the room,
Speaker 4: and she says, BDS is anti submittic. Like what the fuck? Yeah,
Speaker 4: BDS is antisemitic. And I'll tell you I love Boner. Now,
Speaker 4: let me tell you about bonov into A Bonnach came
Speaker 4: from Cameroon thirteen years ago. He has a PhD. His
Speaker 4: PhD is in biotechnology. He worked all day building pacemakers
Speaker 4: while he set up a cultural institution called Savvy Contemporary
Speaker 4: and Savvy represented the biopop community in Berlin and in Germany. Right,
Speaker 4: Bonner is a genius. He deals with post colonialism like
Speaker 4: I mean, he's a maestro. He's amazing what he has done.
Speaker 4: He's changed the landscape of this country. He's brought colonialism
Speaker 4: into the into the discourse of the country, into the culture. Right,
Speaker 4: my fear is is. They've used him as a trojan horse,
Speaker 4: and they've got the German States have got their fist
Speaker 4: up his fucking ass. And that night when he it
Speaker 4: was Bonner's night, it was it was the night of diversity.
Speaker 4: There comes this pernicious minister of Culture and she stands
Speaker 4: up and out of the blue, she says, BDS is
Speaker 4: anti Semitic. Bonner because he's such a graceful, smart man,
Speaker 4: and because he knows that we are fighting intersectional struggles
Speaker 4: that happen at different velocities and happen at different speeds
Speaker 4: and come at different angles. He came up on stage
Speaker 4: and he said, we come in peace. It scares me, No, it's.
Speaker 3: It's I could only imagine what it was like to
Speaker 3: be there a person. I mean, it sounds mortifying, especially
Speaker 3: if you're Palestinian or Arab bird just an anti Zionism
Speaker 3: in general. I brought up a story here that I
Speaker 3: heard Adam talk about on a different show, but future
Speaker 3: me is recording this now because I wanted you to
Speaker 3: have some more context to the story so you can
Speaker 3: really grasp the irony of it all. It's a great
Speaker 3: example of the divide and intensity that happens or that
Speaker 3: can happen with anti Zionists and Zionists within the Jewish
Speaker 3: community itself. Adam said that some of the people who
Speaker 3: he had assumed were friends and allies have disappeared, which
Speaker 3: is one of the prices you pay for criticizing Israel.
Speaker 3: Adam had been spending more time in Hebron, what he
Speaker 3: described as a wasteland. He said in a previous interview
Speaker 3: that you spend ten minutes at Hebron and you get
Speaker 3: the notion of apartheid, occupation and Jewish supremacy. You get
Speaker 3: it and no one has to utter the words. Adam
Speaker 3: has documented violence in places like maximum security jails Afghanistan
Speaker 3: two thousand and three, Iraq two thousand and five, but
Speaker 3: he said that two times he's felt the most existentially
Speaker 3: and physically a threat of death. One of those times
Speaker 3: was last year when he was in Hebron and him
Speaker 3: and his team went to take photos of olive trees.
Speaker 3: Olive trees in that area can be two thousand to
Speaker 3: four thousand years old, and since nineteen sixty seven, Israeli
Speaker 3: settlers have destroyed one million of these trees. I have
Speaker 3: an episode about this and the significance of the Palestine
Speaker 3: olive tree, about how it's not only an immensely important
Speaker 3: crop but also a symbol of Palestinian culture and resistance.
Speaker 3: I talk about this in that episode as well, but
Speaker 3: it bears repeating that destroying olive trees is one of
Speaker 3: the most clear examples that Zionism isn't about wanting to
Speaker 3: return to a sacred land that is destined to you. Instead,
Speaker 3: Zionism is hateful and inexcusable. Adam shares this sentiment, which
Speaker 3: I appreciate, and I really loved learning about his work
Speaker 3: with olive trees. I just don't think Zionists have any
Speaker 3: kind of rebuttal or reasoning to support why the hell
Speaker 3: they keep destroying olive trees decade after decade, Like in
Speaker 3: what universe can you say and believe that you have
Speaker 3: a genuine attachment to that land, a biblical right to
Speaker 3: that land? Like how could you say that you love
Speaker 3: that land as a sacred space but then also go
Speaker 3: and destroy what Adam describes as its quote oldest indigenous citizens,
Speaker 3: aka the olive trees. That's not a person who loves
Speaker 3: that land that it's a person who was driven by hate.
Speaker 3: So Adam is working to preserve and protect these trees.
Speaker 3: Settlers pour gasoline down the center of the tree trunk,
Speaker 3: so by the time you see smoke, the tree is
Speaker 3: already dead. He was there and have Brun with a
Speaker 3: camera taking photos of the trees, and then Jewish settlers
Speaker 3: sent these packs of kids that he said were ages
Speaker 3: five to seventeen, dressed in full religious garb, accompanied by
Speaker 3: these reals military. Adam and his crew kept getting attacked
Speaker 3: by these kids as the military stood by, but he
Speaker 3: explained that you can't lift a finger to defend yourself
Speaker 3: because these kids are miners. Adam talked about this and said,
Speaker 3: if I was Palestinian and I pushed back, I would
Speaker 3: be shot on the spot. The fact that I'm Jewish,
Speaker 3: I would just be removed and the work would simply
Speaker 3: be over. So he got beaten pretty badly several times,
Speaker 3: and apparently there's footage of it somewhere, and his experience
Speaker 3: and have Bron again is one of those two times
Speaker 3: that he's felt the most existentially and physically at the
Speaker 3: threat of death. The second time happened a few days later,
Speaker 3: which is the story. I briefly mentioned to him in
Speaker 3: the recording that we did that I want to talk
Speaker 3: about more here. So a few days after that incident,
Speaker 3: Adam returned to Berlin and it happened to be the
Speaker 3: anniversary of krystel Nacht or the Night of Broken Glass,
Speaker 3: which is widely known as the beginning of the Holocaust.
Speaker 3: It's also called the November Pagrome, and it was a
Speaker 3: pugrum against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party with
Speaker 3: some participation from the Hitler youth and German civilians throughout
Speaker 3: Nazi Germany on the ninth and tenth of November in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty eight. The German authorities looked on as this
Speaker 3: happened without intervening. The name Krystelnacht is literally translated to
Speaker 3: crystal knight, and this name comes from the shards of
Speaker 3: broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of
Speaker 3: Jewish owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. So back
Speaker 3: to Adam's story, a memorial for Krystelnacht is held at
Speaker 3: the site of the two oldest synagogues that had been
Speaker 3: burned down in Germany. Adam arrived there with a crew
Speaker 3: holding signs that said Jews against Fascism. Everywhere. He's surrounded
Speaker 3: by fellow Jewish people, And this big guy comes up
Speaker 3: to Adam, and Adam describes this guy as being much
Speaker 3: bigger and much taller than him. And so this big
Speaker 3: guy looks down at Adam and he says, get rid
Speaker 3: of those signs. Who gave you the right to be here?
Speaker 3: Adam responded, quote the death of ninety percent of my family?
Speaker 3: What troubles you about the sign? Are you anti Semitic?
Speaker 3: Are you fascist? Are you bothered by the word everywhere?
Speaker 3: Have you got this weird synesthesia thing where you see
Speaker 3: the word everywhere and you see Israel? Do you think
Speaker 3: I'm implying that there's a possibility that Israel could have
Speaker 3: fascist traits? In response to this, this big guy starts
Speaker 3: attacking Adam. So Adam ran absolutely terrified. He ran and
Speaker 3: sought protection from the German police. The irony of a
Speaker 3: Jewish person feeling his life threatened by another Jewish person
Speaker 3: and then seeking refuge from the German police. Adam says,
Speaker 3: this was the most surreal moment of his life.
Speaker 4: So so ironic. But let me flip that story on
Speaker 4: its head, right And now, okay, So it's nineteen eight
Speaker 4: and I am on the front page of a newspaper,
Speaker 4: and I get home to my mother and she's furious.
Speaker 4: She's fucking furious because there I am on the front
Speaker 4: page of the newspaper and I'm hold, I'm there, my
Speaker 4: face is there, and I'm holding up a flower, and
Speaker 4: in front of me is a is a South African
Speaker 4: riot policeman. Right, And it was one of the demonstrations
Speaker 4: I was at at the age of eighteen, on the
Speaker 4: campus at Vitsa University, all right, And I got into
Speaker 4: ship from my mother, who said, what the fuck are
Speaker 4: you doing standing in front of the riot police. I
Speaker 4: got into ship from a black student society because we,
Speaker 4: as white students, took orders from a black student society.
Speaker 4: He said, what are you doing holding a flower to
Speaker 4: the fucking pig. It's like, this is this is not
Speaker 4: the nineteen sixties. We're fighting a struggle. So I got
Speaker 4: in ship from both sides. Right now, cut to May
Speaker 4: a few months ago, I mean Iranian Platz. There is
Speaker 4: a commemoration organized for the ongoing Knuckba. All right, we
Speaker 4: know what the Knuckba is, the catastrophe, right, so in
Speaker 4: nineteen we don't have to explain that, but all for
Speaker 4: two the year before that, all commemorations for the Knackbar
Speaker 4: were banned, and in May, the commemorations for the Knackbar
Speaker 4: organized by Palestinian groups were banned. So yidsha Stima, which
Speaker 4: means Jewish voices the organization. They organized a commemoration and
Speaker 4: we gathered together on a beautiful Sunday morning, and you know,
Speaker 4: it was really lovely, and there were kids there, there
Speaker 4: were old people. It was great and we were all
Speaker 4: all gathered together there and we gave the platform to
Speaker 4: some Palestinian voices who were just speaking about freedom from
Speaker 4: the river to the sea, you know, and suddenly the
Speaker 4: riot police came boom, boom, boom, you know, lines of
Speaker 4: them intercepted us. And I was faced again at the
Speaker 4: age of fifty two, not eighteen, so flipped from nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty eight to twenty twenty three. And I'm facing eye
Speaker 4: to eye with a fucking white riot policeman and it
Speaker 4: was the same riot policeman. And you know what I
Speaker 4: said to him. I said to him, where was your
Speaker 4: grandmother during the war? And he didn't answer me, and
Speaker 4: I said, do you know where my grandmother was? And
Speaker 4: he said, I don't care, at which point I turned
Speaker 4: around and two or three, and there's there's footage of
Speaker 4: this from every single angle. Two or three of these
Speaker 4: right policemen jumped on top of me, brutally beat me
Speaker 4: and arrested me, handcuffed me. The handcuffed me so tightly
Speaker 4: that they had to call the fucking fire brigade to
Speaker 4: cut the handcuffs off me. And hang on, it gets worse.
Speaker 4: Then an hour later, I'm on the front page of
Speaker 4: the Berlin Zetel. There I am being marched off by
Speaker 4: German police, riot police, and you know what, the headline says,
Speaker 4: one hundred anti Semitic Palestinian protesters disrupt Jewish memorial. Check
Speaker 4: it out, Check it out, and you know what, I
Speaker 4: think it's still up there. Yeah, Okay, this is where
Speaker 4: we're at. This is where we're at in this country. Like,
Speaker 4: forget fact checking. This is not a Palestinian. I'm a
Speaker 4: fucking Jew. You've arrested, had a fucking third generation Holocaust
Speaker 4: surviving Jew, your mother fucking Nazi. And they tell me
Speaker 4: de Nazification never happened in this country. There's no such
Speaker 4: thing as neo Nazis. They're Nazis man and this Stefan Henzl,
Speaker 4: he wants the Jews out of Germany. That's what's underneath
Speaker 4: all of the shit, right, because if they were worried
Speaker 4: about antisemitism, let's talk about antisemitism, okay, because I've got
Speaker 4: kids and they need to be safe.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean I was reading the other day a news
Speaker 2: article from I think fifty one or fifty two that
Speaker 2: was about one of the god Now I was facing
Speaker 2: at his name, but he was. He was a Wehrmacht
Speaker 2: general who was you know, commanded troops on the Ast Front,
Speaker 2: survived the war and later got into German politics, And
Speaker 2: it was just a it was an article about one
Speaker 2: of his political rallies where protesters were like broken up,
Speaker 2: beaten up by German police officers. And it's kind of
Speaker 2: this this same like, yeah, what were your what was
Speaker 2: your family doing during those twelve years? You know, like
Speaker 2: it's it's really it's a question you can ask, but
Speaker 2: it's rarely really a question, right, right, Yeah, Like there
Speaker 2: was never any That's such an important point, you know,
Speaker 2: particularly when we talk about like why there is you know,
Speaker 2: such what you can call technically support for Israel that's rooted,
Speaker 2: as you noted, often in just getting Jewish people out
Speaker 2: of Germany, like there was never any kind of real denazification.
Speaker 5: No, yeah, no, no, no systemic level.
Speaker 4: This is all about white supremacy, man, because I'll tell
Speaker 4: you what. And this goes deeper. On the fifteenth of July,
Speaker 4: they made a law in Berlin that all public swimming pools.
Speaker 4: They claim that there was a rise in violence in
Speaker 4: public swimming pools in Berlin, Okay, reticularly in Neikol and Kreutzberg, which,
Speaker 4: as we know, are the areas of migrants, particularly Palestinian
Speaker 4: Middle Eastern migrants. Right. And in fact, if you look
Speaker 4: at the statistics from twenty nineteen to two twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: violence has gone down by twenty one or twenty three percent,
Speaker 4: I can't remember correctly, so that's incorrect. But now we
Speaker 4: have a state a position where at the entrance of
Speaker 4: every swimming pool there is a police fan and they
Speaker 4: are ethnically and racially profiling people who come into swimming pools. Right.
Speaker 4: And there is basically a law that says that there
Speaker 4: shall not be more than three men read three men
Speaker 4: of color in a public swimming pool. Okay, And this
Speaker 4: is where we're heading. Felix Klein, who's the federal Commission
Speaker 4: of Anti Semitism Stephan Henzel, who's the Hamburg one these
Speaker 4: people that the mayor of Berlin. On Pentecost night, he tweeted,
Speaker 4: check out check out his tweet. He tweeted something It
Speaker 4: went like this, It said, we wish everybody a happy
Speaker 4: Pentecost and we wish our guests a lovely time our guests.
Speaker 4: This is like, dude, I mean, you know.
Speaker 6: That Christian it's grim It's fucking grim man. And you
Speaker 6: know these people want a white they want a white
Speaker 6: Aryan Christian fucking country. They want the dark people out.
Speaker 3: I mean that's a huge part that people don't realize,
Speaker 3: as that Zionism is mostly white supremacy, mostly very anti
Speaker 3: anti Jewish, because that's its advocates for, just like the
Speaker 3: expulsion of the Jews.
Speaker 4: Again, well, it's a fucking mental illness, is what it is.
Speaker 3: I don't disagree with you.
Speaker 5: I just wanted to reflect, like maybe as we as
Speaker 5: we end up on how far the needle has swung
Speaker 5: when we talk about like anti Semitism, anti Zionism, and
Speaker 5: sort of where they because they do have a lap, yeah,
Speaker 5: but they don't know they are not the same thing.
Speaker 5: And I think about how there's this a letter of
Speaker 5: that is the New York Times published like it was
Speaker 5: in the late nineteen forties forty eight, forty nine. It
Speaker 5: co signed by a lot of prominent Jewish intellectuals, including
Speaker 5: Hannah Rent Albert Einstein, talking about the settler policies in
Speaker 5: Israel at that time by Zionist groups at that time
Speaker 5: as fascist, which is something that would now be considered
Speaker 5: to be like antisemit, Like that's calling Israel fascist was
Speaker 5: what got you chased at him by that guy. It's
Speaker 5: considered to be anti Semitic in Germany, right, And these
Speaker 5: are people who you know, had lost family members, you know,
Speaker 5: they can their nuclear family to the Holocaust, like prominent
Speaker 5: Jewish intellectuals who would now be considered I guess anti
Speaker 5: semitic under this by saying shit, New York Times would
Speaker 5: publish and the Times would have publish that.
Speaker 4: Now. Yeah, you know, a few of us got together
Speaker 4: in Iranian plus in a place where we were arrested
Speaker 4: in May a few like Jewish friends of mine, like
Speaker 4: some from Brooklyn, some from Israel, some from here, and
Speaker 4: you know, five nights ago a young Palesan man was
Speaker 4: arrested by twelve Israeli policemen and they branded a they
Speaker 4: cut with a knife the Star of David into his child. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and there's footage of this, and they literally cut the
Speaker 4: Star of David into his cheek. And we wore red
Speaker 4: Stars of David at the schedule tonight, and it just
Speaker 4: strikes me as ironic. You know, like eighty years ago,
Speaker 4: my ancestors were forced to wear a yellow star as
Speaker 4: a lapel on their armband or stuck to their jackets
Speaker 4: to shame them, to declare them as Jews, as dirty
Speaker 4: Jews in public. And now I feel like I've got
Speaker 4: to wear this red star because of our collective shame,
Speaker 4: because of what's being done in our name by the
Speaker 4: State of Israel and by Zionism. And this is not
Speaker 4: allowed to be done in my name. Really, sorry to
Speaker 4: be so grim. Fuck no, I mean, if.
Speaker 2: There was ever an ending story.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's a.
Speaker 3: Grim story, but I think it's a great place to end.
Speaker 3: There's still so much I want to ask you. I
Speaker 3: would love to know your thoughts about like liberal Zionism,
Speaker 3: but that's gonna have to wait for next time. Thank
Speaker 3: you for giving us time in the middle or the
Speaker 3: early mornings.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much of course.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Adam, where can people find you online and help
Speaker 5: support the advocacy you're doing.
Speaker 4: Mostly I'm a bit of a geriatric, so I'm just
Speaker 4: on Instagram. Adam Broomberg put it in.
Speaker 3: The description for anyone that is curious. Thank you for
Speaker 3: doing your work. Everyone will follow Adam, make sure everyone doesn't.
Speaker 3: Let's let's protect Adam. Let's protect Adam and his family
Speaker 3: out there. But thank you again.
Speaker 4: Thank you guys.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you, thank you. Adam really appreciate me.
Speaker 3: And that's the episode.
Speaker 5: Hi everyone, it's me James, and I'm coming to eat today, sweaty,
Speaker 5: smelly and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the
Speaker 5: desert where I have been spending the weekend trying my
Speaker 5: best to help, along with lots of other dedicated mutual
Speaker 5: aid workers, to mitigate the damage done by an entirely
Speaker 5: preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States southern border. People
Speaker 5: are being held in the open desert in Hakomba, where
Speaker 5: it gets hot in the day gets very cold at night.
Speaker 5: And there are children, there are old people, there are
Speaker 5: young people. All the support they're getting it's from mutual
Speaker 5: aid workers. Then maybe get some water from border patrol,
Speaker 5: from federal government, and not much else. And I'm here
Speaker 5: before your podcast to ask you if you can to help.
Speaker 5: We've all spent all of our time and most of
Speaker 5: our money the last few days week trying to help,
Speaker 5: and we're all pretty broke, and we're all pretty tired.
Speaker 5: But I could really do with your support. And I'm
Speaker 5: going to give the venmos and cash apps and pay
Speaker 5: pal information for two organizations who I dearly love and
Speaker 5: whose work I have seen is extremely effective and is
Speaker 5: the only thing keeping this situation from being a lot worse.
Speaker 5: And please don't think that if you don't have much
Speaker 5: money that you shouldn't give. We can do a lot
Speaker 5: with a little. So if you only have five bucks,
Speaker 5: that is great. And five bucks is are top for
Speaker 5: someone to sleep under or a few hot meals. And
Speaker 5: what we're going to buy is food, blankets, tops, water,
Speaker 5: the things that stop people dying in the desert. Those
Speaker 5: two organizations, Border Kindness and Free Shit Collective, can be
Speaker 5: found online at border Kindness and at free ship PB
Speaker 5: on Twitter for Border Kindness, The venmo is at border
Speaker 5: hyphen Kindness. The cash app is dollar sign border Kindness
Speaker 5: Cash and the zell and PayPal. Information is info at
Speaker 5: Borderkindness dot org. Free Ship Collective are at free ship
Speaker 5: Collective on cash app and PayPal and at free shippbe
Speaker 5: on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys.
Speaker 4: Welcome Jake.
Speaker 7: It happened here a podcast about things falling apart and
Speaker 7: sometimes how to put them back together again. I'm your host,
Speaker 7: Bio Wong. Now, this is not one of those times
Speaker 7: where it's about how to put things back together again.
Speaker 7: This is one of those episodes about why everything is
Speaker 7: absolutely awful. And one of the reasons why everything is
Speaker 7: absolutely awful, and something I've been driven progressively more and
Speaker 7: more insane by in the past sort of half a
Speaker 7: decade is the way people think and talk about class
Speaker 7: in the United States. Why, for example, do people think
Speaker 7: that Trump is working class? Why am I watching people
Speaker 7: argue that being a barista isn't actually being a worker.
Speaker 7: Why are all these millionaires driving forward f one fifties
Speaker 7: while simultaneously claiming that they are also somehow working class.
Speaker 7: Why are billionaires fleeing to Colorado and Wyoming to cause
Speaker 7: play as workers about wearing jeans and T shirts to bars?
Speaker 7: Why is every weight ring dipshit posting the same video
Speaker 7: of a guy in an oil rig committing approximately sixty
Speaker 7: thousand OSHA violations. Why is it that the only part
Speaker 7: of the working class that anyone ever seems to call
Speaker 7: the working class is the white working class. Why is
Speaker 7: it that when people talk about the white working class
Speaker 7: and then try to explain it with data, and this
Speaker 7: is true across the entire ideological spectrum, why do they
Speaker 7: start defining working class by things that are objectively not class,
Speaker 7: like education levels. This reached a breaking point with me
Speaker 7: a few weeks ago and has finally caused me to
Speaker 7: snap and write this now, I've given the game away
Speaker 7: a little by leading with the white working class stuff,
Speaker 7: because a lot of the reason that everything sounds so
Speaker 7: nuts is that when people talk about class in the US,
Speaker 7: most of the time, what they're actually talking about is
Speaker 7: race and gender. And this pisses me off because I
Speaker 7: think more about class that a lot of people with
Speaker 7: my ideology usually do, and I think it can actually
Speaker 7: be a very useful way to understand the world. However,
Speaker 7: comma thinking and talking about class as a kind of
Speaker 7: floating signifier that you can just jam conservative racial and
Speaker 7: gender politic into is a really, really bad way to
Speaker 7: talk about class. On top of just the racism and
Speaker 7: the sexism, this way of looking at class reduces class,
Speaker 7: which is a social relation, into esthetics and grievances. And
Speaker 7: this leads to the question how did this all happen? Now,
Speaker 7: you could take a really expansive look at this here
Speaker 7: and go back to Aristotle or start later with Locke
Speaker 7: or something. But I'm not going to do that because, well, okay,
Speaker 7: partially because this would be seventeen years long if I
Speaker 7: tried to do this, and this episode is already now
Speaker 7: three episodes. The other reason I'm not going to do
Speaker 7: this is that the actual story of how everything got
Speaker 7: like this is the story of how the right adapted
Speaker 7: and distorted the incredibly successful leftist conception of labor that
Speaker 7: built the identity of the working class in the eighteen
Speaker 7: and nineteen hundreds. And in order to do that, we
Speaker 7: need to talk about the labor theory of value. Now,
Speaker 7: when I talk about the labor theory of value, there
Speaker 7: there are two things going on here. You have, on
Speaker 7: the one hand, Marx's law of value, and then you
Speaker 7: have the set of slogans that are passed down the
Speaker 7: mainline of the workers movements and these are not these
Speaker 7: are not the same thing at all. Even though when
Speaker 7: someone just says the labor theory of value, if that's
Speaker 7: a thing that you've heard of, you probably immediately think Marx. So,
Speaker 7: for example, let's get into a sense of sort of
Speaker 7: what this, this kind of like sloganeering looks like. Here's
Speaker 7: the beginning of the Gotha Program, which is the program
Speaker 7: of the German Social Democratic Party in late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 7: It begins, quote, labor is the source of all wealth
Speaker 7: and all culture. Now Marx hates this line. He writes
Speaker 7: a thing called the Critique of the Gotha Program, where
Speaker 7: he goes on a giant rant about how you know,
Speaker 7: nature also produces use values and so on and so forth.
Speaker 7: But you know, Marx just sort of bitterness at this aside,
Speaker 7: labor is the source of all wealth is a very
Speaker 7: very common sentiments. It's the expression of the sort of
Speaker 7: common understanding of production, class, and nature of value. In
Speaker 7: the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the anthropologist David
Speaker 7: Graeber pointed out, Abraham Lincoln, a man who is by
Speaker 7: no means a socialist and is in fact the President
Speaker 7: of the United States, talks like this. Here's Lincoln quote,
Speaker 7: labor is prior to an independent of capital. Capital is
Speaker 7: only the fruit of labor and could never have existed
Speaker 7: if labor had not existed. First, labor is superior of
Speaker 7: capital and deserves much the higher consideration.
Speaker 8: Now, this is.
Speaker 7: Obviously not something you'd ever hear from a president of
Speaker 7: the United States today, and we'll come back to Graver's
Speaker 7: argument about why that is later. But I want to
Speaker 7: get a bit deeper into not just the common conception
Speaker 7: of the labor theory of value, but what the sort
Speaker 7: of capital w capital m worker's movement believed in. And this,
Speaker 7: as it turns out, has a tenuous relation to Marx,
Speaker 7: but is not the same thing, and I think is
Speaker 7: different enough that I'm actually not going to spend another
Speaker 7: like fifteen minutes trying to explain Marx's version of the
Speaker 7: labor theory of value or Marx's law of value, because
Speaker 7: it doesn't ultimately matter that much, which is which is
Speaker 7: a very weird thing to say about the actual sort
Speaker 7: of you know about about about sort of Marx's role
Speaker 7: in labor movement, but it kind of doesn't. So what
Speaker 7: I'm going to do instead is read, well, I should
Speaker 7: I should, Okay, I should also mention like we are
Speaker 7: going to get a bit more into like the things
Speaker 7: that Marx actually wrote and why they mattered to the
Speaker 7: specific movement, like next episode.
Speaker 8: But you know, we'll do, we'll do.
Speaker 7: We'll deal with that tomorrow. And in the meantime, I'm
Speaker 7: going to read a bit from the journal end notes
Speaker 7: from a Unity and Separation supporting workers claims to respectability
Speaker 7: was a vision of their destiny with five tenants. One,
Speaker 7: workers were built a new world with their own hands.
Speaker 8: Two.
Speaker 7: In this new world, workers were the only social group
Speaker 7: that was expanding, whereas all other groups were contracting, including
Speaker 7: the bourgeoisie. Three, Workers were not only becoming the majority
Speaker 7: of the population, they were also becoming a compact mass,
Speaker 7: the collective worker who was being drilled in the factory
Speaker 7: to act in concert with the machines.
Speaker 8: Four.
Speaker 7: They were thus the only group capable of managing the
Speaker 7: new world in accordance with this innermost logic, neither a
Speaker 7: hierarchy of order givers and order takers, nor the irrationality
Speaker 7: of market fluctuations, but rather in every more finely grained
Speaker 7: division of labor.
Speaker 8: Five.
Speaker 7: Workers were proving this vision to be true, since the
Speaker 7: class was realizing what it was in a conquest of power,
Speaker 7: the achievement of which would make it possible to abolish
Speaker 7: class society and thus bring Man's prehistory to a close.
Speaker 7: This is the basis of the formation of the identity
Speaker 7: of the working class. It's how people understand themselves as workers,
Speaker 7: you know, and so in Marxist terms, this is the
Speaker 7: class in itself becoming the class for itself, you know.
Speaker 7: This is this is this is this is the identity
Speaker 7: that produces the workers movement. It's the expression of what
Speaker 7: people believe about themselves. Now, there are ingrained ideological assumptions
Speaker 7: here that go sort of beyond peer arguments about class.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 7: This is an argument about a very specific kind of
Speaker 7: factory worker. And in some sense I think the focus
Speaker 7: on the factory worker as like the sort of emblematic
Speaker 7: like bearer of this And this is true both of
Speaker 7: the theorist of the time and from people like end
Speaker 7: Notes who are looking back on it from like one
Speaker 7: hundred years later. I think this is kind of a
Speaker 7: distraction from what a lot of the actual base of
Speaker 7: the workers movement is, which is to say, like coal
Speaker 7: miners and workers involved with energy logistics. You know, you
Speaker 7: could take for example, like the beating heart of the
Speaker 7: anarchist movement in much of the twenties and thirties are
Speaker 7: these Andalusian coal mine whose militancy and ability to sort
Speaker 7: of control the supply of coal that you know, capital
Speaker 7: the capitalists class relied on for production gave them enormous
Speaker 7: leverage and as the sort of as a historian Timothy
Speaker 7: Mitchell has argued, it was, it was this sort of
Speaker 7: capacity to you know, break the economy through shutting off
Speaker 7: the coal supply, through strikes and sabotage, which workers you know,
Speaker 7: were workers at the time, like think of like the
Speaker 7: strike as a kind of sabotage and it's but it's
Speaker 7: this capability that informs a lot of the sort of
Speaker 7: politics intensive possibility of the twentieth century work as movements
Speaker 7: and you know, given what, but you know, like given
Speaker 7: what what the people who are like you know, working
Speaker 7: in a coal mine or like you know, are are
Speaker 7: like a doc worker or you know, it's like if
Speaker 7: you are working in a factory, right, it makes sense
Speaker 7: that these people believe this right, you know, in terms
Speaker 7: in terms of you know, if if if you're looking
Speaker 7: at some thing like you know, workers are building the
Speaker 7: new world with their hands, right, or like we're you know,
Speaker 7: we're the only social group that's expanding. We're the only
Speaker 7: people who are like capable of like managing the new
Speaker 7: world according to its own logic. This makes a lot
Speaker 7: of sense if you are one of the people who
Speaker 7: live in a world that has effectively disappeared. Now, you know,
Speaker 7: and that and that is a world where you literally
Speaker 7: are watching cities be constructed out of like you know,
Speaker 7: the tiny shells of villages.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 7: The only way you can sort of experience that now
Speaker 7: is if you were one of the people in sort
Speaker 7: of the late the nineties and the two thousands in
Speaker 7: China who you know, like watch shen z En turn
Speaker 7: from a fishing village into one of the largest cities
Speaker 7: in the world. But that's not really a thing anymore.
Speaker 7: But on the other hand, like, this is what these
Speaker 7: people are experiencing, and this is a group of people
Speaker 7: who can literally feel in their hands the sort of
Speaker 7: the power and the value of the labor in what
Speaker 7: they're producing. They can, you know, they can see commodities
Speaker 7: appear in the world, and they can know that it
Speaker 7: was you by their hands that the world was built.
Speaker 7: And this is not you know, this is not purely
Speaker 7: a metaphor, right, These are people who are literally creating
Speaker 7: the world around them. To quote one of the verses
Speaker 7: of Solidarity Forever that modern trade unions hilariously notably do
Speaker 7: not include in the version of In the version of
Speaker 7: the song that they tend to sing at things, the
Speaker 7: trade union version drops a bunch of verses, and one
Speaker 7: of those verses is in our hands is placed to
Speaker 7: power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might
Speaker 7: of armies multiplied a thousandfold, We can bring to birth
Speaker 7: a new world from the ashes of the old.
Speaker 5: For the union makes us strong.
Speaker 7: And this is both the positive vision of the workers
Speaker 7: movement and its own sort of theoretical self conception wrapped
Speaker 7: into one. It is the sort of rosy romantic picture
Speaker 7: of what the worker's movement is. However, Comma, this is
Speaker 7: the incredibly romantic version of this. And before we sort
Speaker 7: of leave the world of pure romance and go into
Speaker 7: these sort of dirty and grimy worlds of reality where
Speaker 7: everything kind of sucks and things are not what they
Speaker 7: normally seem, we are going to take an ad break
Speaker 7: and we're back now.
Speaker 8: There are a lot of.
Speaker 7: Things about this work as movement that if you just
Speaker 7: sort of look at it theoretically, or if you know,
Speaker 7: you're looking at these one of the sort of like
Speaker 7: incredibly sort of rosy self caricatures. I guess if you're
Speaker 7: purely looking at the kind of propaganda that the movement
Speaker 7: produces in order to create itself, you are going to
Speaker 7: get a very distorted picture of sort of what was
Speaker 7: actually going on on the ground. And this also makes
Speaker 7: it very very difficult to understand what happened, because, you know,
Speaker 7: if if you want to understand how this movement was
Speaker 7: defeated and how the like all of the sort of
Speaker 7: branches of the Worker's movements, like all of his different ideologies,
Speaker 7: all of those different manifestations are essentially destroyed, you have
Speaker 7: to get to the point where you are you start
Speaker 7: to realize that the ideological conception of productivity right of
Speaker 7: the producer of you know, like of of what the
Speaker 7: worker is was never as sort of dry and objective
Speaker 7: as theorists wanted us. And you know, you got the
Speaker 7: sense that they wanted like themselves to believe. Case in
Speaker 7: point is the nature of what Marx calls the lump
Speaker 7: and proletariat. So here's from endnotes again, who were these
Speaker 7: lump and proletarians preaching anarchy? Attempts to spell that out
Speaker 7: usually took the form not of structural analysis, but rather
Speaker 7: of long lists of shady characters, lists which collapsed in
Speaker 7: on themselves in a frenzied incoherence. Here is Marx's paradigmatic
Speaker 7: discussion of the lump proletariat from the eighteenth through mayor
Speaker 7: of Louis Bonaparte, on the pretext A founding a benevolent society,
Speaker 7: the lump and proletariat of Paris had been organized into
Speaker 7: secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents. These lumpen
Speaker 7: supposedly consisted of quote, vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jail birds,
Speaker 7: escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mounton bunks, lazaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps,
Speaker 7: brothel keepers, porters, litter, roddy, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.
Speaker 7: In short, the whole indefinite, disintegrating mass thrown hither and
Speaker 7: thither from which the French call labohem. Is there any
Speaker 7: truth in this paranoid fantasy? Do escaped convicts and organ
Speaker 7: grinders share a common counter revolutionary interest with beggars, which
Speaker 7: distinguishes them from the common mass worker, who are currently
Speaker 7: revolutionary by nature. To think so is insane. The lumpen
Speaker 7: proletariat was a specter haunting the worker's movements. If that
Speaker 7: movement constituted itself for the dignity of workers, then the
Speaker 7: lumpen was the figure of the undignified worker, or miraculately,
Speaker 7: the lumpen was one of its figurations. All of the
Speaker 7: movement's efforts to give dignity of the class were supposedly
Speaker 7: undermined by these dissolute figures drunk singing in the streets,
Speaker 7: petty criminals, and prostitutes. References to a lumpen proletariat registered
Speaker 7: what was a simple truth. It was difficult to convince
Speaker 7: workers to organize as workers, since mostly they didn't care
Speaker 7: about socialism. A great many of the poor, especially the
Speaker 7: very poor, did not think or behave themselves as proletarians,
Speaker 7: or find the organizations and modes of actions of the
Speaker 7: movement as applicable or relevant to them. In their fear time,
Speaker 7: they'd rather go to the pub than sing workers' songs.
Speaker 7: In the figure of the lumpen. We discover the dark
Speaker 7: underside of the affirmation of the working class. It was
Speaker 7: a biting class hatred. Workers saw themselves as originating out
Speaker 7: of a stinking morass from Kotsky is the class struggle quote.
Speaker 7: At the time of the beginning of modern industry, the
Speaker 7: term proletariat implied absolute degeneracy, and there are persons who
Speaker 7: believe this is still the case. Moreover, capitalism was trying
Speaker 7: to push them back into the muck. Thus, the crisis
Speaker 7: tendencies of capitalism could only be resolved in one of
Speaker 7: two ways, the victory of the working class or in
Speaker 7: its becoming lumpen'. Now you can see a couple of
Speaker 7: things very clearly here. One is there's been a lot
Speaker 7: of attempts to like resuscitate the lump and proletariat as
Speaker 7: like a functional class, especially see this especially in the seventies.
Speaker 7: And I really, I really would recommend those people go
Speaker 7: back and read what Mark's actually wrote about the lumpen proletariat,
Speaker 7: because it makes no sense. It is just like absolute
Speaker 7: sort of blithering nonsense. And the reason it's this kind
Speaker 7: of like incredibly bizarre, like paranoid, you know, to fantasies
Speaker 7: is that beneath the sort of like foe of scientific
Speaker 7: objectiveness of the workers' movement is this incredibly petty moralism
Speaker 7: and a set of sort of Victorian social values with
Speaker 7: all of the sort of cruelty of their aristocratic masters.
Speaker 7: And I want to sort of point out here like
Speaker 7: this kind of thinking, you know, this kind of like
Speaker 7: we are the movement that is a liberation of the class.
Speaker 7: But in order to do that, we need to prove
Speaker 7: that like we are like actually sort of like real
Speaker 7: dignified human beings, and that there's another group of people
Speaker 7: who are just us, but we hate them because they
Speaker 7: don't behave the way that we think they're supposed to.
Speaker 7: This is a very very common thing that you see
Speaker 7: in basically all social movements, especially in their earliest and
Speaker 7: like shittiest iterations. You see this in the early feminist movement.
Speaker 7: I mean, you see this still in the feminist movement,
Speaker 7: but there are sections of it that do this too.
Speaker 8: There's a really good.
Speaker 7: Piece called some Like It Hot by Sophie Lewis about
Speaker 7: the sort of feminist reaction to Mertory Marilyn Monroe, and
Speaker 7: I'm gonna read a little bit from it. One of
Speaker 7: the things that you get this sense of is that
Speaker 7: people like Glorious Steinem just absolutely hate Marilyn Monroe, and
Speaker 7: the you know, the stuff they write about her is
Speaker 7: stuff that like you just will be like almost incomprehensible
Speaker 7: to imagine any of these people or even just sort
Speaker 7: of like you know, not even like like a modern
Speaker 7: sort of like conservative like writing on purpose about a
Speaker 7: woman and being allowed to sort of get away with it.
Speaker 7: I mean there right, just horrible things about her. I'm
Speaker 7: gonna read a little bit from the piece. Perhaps it
Speaker 7: was Monroe's dumping of three husbands, two of them were
Speaker 7: famous and powerful, that posed quote no adult challenge to
Speaker 7: Steinem's mind. Or perhaps Steinem's comments closed nothing so much
Speaker 7: as her own inability to see Highem people as subjects. Here,
Speaker 7: in case it might pierce a vail, is Monroe apagem
Speaker 7: written on Waldorf a story a letter paper in nineteen
Speaker 7: fifty five, quote everyone has violence in themselves.
Speaker 8: I am violent.
Speaker 7: Here is another spoken to photographer Bruno Bernard in nineteen
Speaker 7: fifty six. Both the anti communists on the House Committee
Speaker 7: on Un American Activities and the movie sensors on the
Speaker 7: production board should be buried alive. Perhaps Steinem, who proudly
Speaker 7: worked for the CIA in the fifties and sixties, would
Speaker 7: not appreciate this kind of courage, the courage of one Norma, who,
Speaker 7: when notified by the police at Los Angeles roadblock in
Speaker 7: nineteen forty nine that a nearby house was being monitored
Speaker 7: for ties to communists, shouted the officer's ear off and
Speaker 7: went straight to tip off blacklisted screenwriters Norma and Ben Bauersman.
Speaker 7: And so, you know, you can sort of see what's
Speaker 7: happening here, right, It's a very similar thing where there
Speaker 7: were these sort of like you know, you have these
Speaker 7: very sort of like like respectable mainstream feminists who look
Speaker 7: at someone like Marilyn Monroe, who you know, and they
Speaker 7: just fucking hate her. They absolutely despise her because she
Speaker 7: is sort of she she is the image of what
Speaker 7: they sort of think that they're fighting against, right, Like
Speaker 7: they're they're they're, they're, they're what what liberation looks like
Speaker 7: for them is to like not be this kind of woman.
Speaker 7: And that's, you know, and this is that's the sort
Speaker 7: of unspoken or so sometimes just overly spoken, core of
Speaker 7: what a lot of this stuff is. And you know,
Speaker 7: and This is how these people like can justify like
Speaker 7: working for the fucking CIA, right and you know, somehow
Speaker 7: claiming to themselves to be like superior feminists, feminist to
Speaker 7: Marilyn Monroe, who you know, at like great personal costs
Speaker 7: and at great danger, like you know, fought hu wac
Speaker 7: and shit. So you know, this kind of like we
Speaker 7: are the group who is going to free our own group.
Speaker 7: We're also not like because we're not like those other
Speaker 7: people who are literally the same as us, but we
Speaker 7: don't like them because they we don't think they're respectable enough.
Speaker 7: This is a very very old sort of trend, but
Speaker 7: it has real social consequences and it's you know, it's
Speaker 7: it's a really disastrous strategy because it means that all
Speaker 7: of these movements have these sort of flanks from which
Speaker 7: they can be attacked. One of these flanks for the
Speaker 7: workers movements, and one that's become increasingly important now, is
Speaker 7: the kind of producer's conception of what a worker is.
Speaker 7: You know, this is the man sort of creating the
Speaker 7: new world with his bare hands. The problem is that,
Speaker 7: you know, this is never what most labor actually was.
Speaker 7: Here's David Graber again. In fact, there was never a
Speaker 7: time when most workers worked in a factory. Even in
Speaker 7: the days of Karl Marx or Charles Dickens, working class
Speaker 7: neighborhoods housed far more maids, boot blacks, dustman cooks, nurses,
Speaker 7: cabby's school teachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees and
Speaker 7: coal mines, textile mills or iron foundries. Are these former
Speaker 7: jobs productive in what sense?
Speaker 8: And for whom?
Speaker 7: Who produces us who flay? Is because of these ambiguities,
Speaker 7: As such, issues are typically brushed aside when people are
Speaker 7: arguing about value, but doing so blinds us to the
Speaker 7: reality that most working class labor, whether you're carried out
Speaker 7: by men or women, actually resembles what we are typically
Speaker 7: think of as women's work. Looking after people, seeing to
Speaker 7: their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss
Speaker 7: wants or is thinking, not to mention, caring for, monitoring
Speaker 7: and maintaining plants, animals, machines and other objects. Then it
Speaker 7: involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things. And you know,
Speaker 7: you can see in this sort of issue, right, you
Speaker 7: can see the axis upon which the workers movement is
Speaker 7: going to be split in the eighties and nineties. If
Speaker 7: you can convince a set of workers that what they're
Speaker 7: doing is you know, masculine productive labor, right, and that
Speaker 7: you know what those other people are doing, is this
Speaker 7: like feminine care labor that doesn't produce anything. You can
Speaker 7: turn the entire ideology of the workers movement on its
Speaker 7: head and transform it from a liberatory ideology about the
Speaker 7: end of the class system to a patriarchal ideology about
Speaker 7: the necessity of labor to sort of manhood of masculinity.
Speaker 7: And once that ideological shift is made, you can start
Speaker 7: writing off entire fields of laborers as being insufficiently quote
Speaker 7: unquote productive, or you know, as the right wing shift
Speaker 7: renders it, you can say productive and mean insufficiently masculine
Speaker 7: account as part of the working class TM. This problem,
Speaker 7: Graper argues, is a consequence of the sort of maniacal
Speaker 7: focus on production that defined the workers movement, because it
Speaker 7: obscures the fact that, again, most of actual labor is
Speaker 7: care labor. And this is something we've discussed at length
Speaker 7: on this show in sort of ethnographic if not theoretical terms,
Speaker 7: while talking to Starbucks workers, and in these conversations it
Speaker 7: becomes almost immediately clear that a huge part of the
Speaker 7: job has very little to do with making coffee or
Speaker 7: even sort of classical customer management, and like the interpretive
Speaker 7: and emotional labor of doing service work, what these workers
Speaker 7: are actually doing is acting as replacement for the collapsing
Speaker 7: American social safety net. Right they are taking care of
Speaker 7: and literally saving the lives of people who capitalism has
Speaker 7: spat out and.
Speaker 5: Left to die.
Speaker 7: And this is by by any like any actual you know,
Speaker 7: I'm not gonna say objective standard, because don't like there
Speaker 7: is an objective standard for what we're like how much
Speaker 7: work something is. But you know, in terms of the
Speaker 7: amount of labor, in terms of the difficulty of labor,
Speaker 7: in terms of like what he is being expected of
Speaker 7: expected of these workers, this is incredibly intense difficult labor.
Speaker 7: But you know, because of the sort of patriarchal like
Speaker 7: idea and conception that has sort of consumed what are
Speaker 7: our sort of collective conception of what a quote unquote
Speaker 7: real job is, the enormous amount of care labor that
Speaker 7: perics do every day. And you know, there's there's a
Speaker 7: good argument. Graber makes a very similar argument to this
Speaker 7: that you can look at the entire job. And you
Speaker 7: can look at like most economic production as carelabor, right,
Speaker 7: because you're producing this coffee in order to care for someone.
Speaker 7: You make a bridge in order to like, like in
Speaker 7: order so that people can use it.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 7: But you know, there's a good argument that like all
Speaker 7: everything in Barista does is care labor. But because you know,
Speaker 7: it's not like making cars or being one of the
Speaker 7: last fifty thousand coal miners left in the US, it's
Speaker 7: not considered real labor. And this, all of this is
Speaker 7: just a bomb that is left sitting under the ideological
Speaker 7: core of the workers' movements. And that bomb probably would
Speaker 7: have just gone.
Speaker 8: Off on its own.
Speaker 7: You know why I say on its own. That bomb
Speaker 7: probably would have been set off by something we're going
Speaker 7: to talk about or tomorrow, which is the shift in
Speaker 7: the labor's force in a lot of countries that sort
Speaker 7: of de industrialize towards this kind of labor being the
Speaker 7: sort of standard like you knowing being just even more
Speaker 7: obviously the standard form of labor. But the ruling class
Speaker 7: figured out a way to sort of set this bomb
Speaker 7: off and ensure that, you know, and ensure that it
Speaker 7: would like just detonate the workers movement immediately, and the
Speaker 7: thing that they figured out to set this bomb off
Speaker 7: is racism. And that is what I'm going to talk
Speaker 7: about tomorrow, the story of how the fusion of racism
Speaker 7: and sexism that I may well be remembered by historians
Speaker 7: is the force that burned the entire world, consumed what
Speaker 7: was left of the workers' movement, and turned this country
Speaker 7: into neoliberal Reagan.
Speaker 5: Hell, hi everyone, it's me James, and I'm coming to
Speaker 5: you today sweaty, smelly and exhausted from my pickup truck
Speaker 5: out in the desert where I have been spending the
Speaker 5: weekend trying my best to help, along with lots of
Speaker 5: other dedicated mutual aid workers, to mitigate the damn done
Speaker 5: by an entirely preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States
Speaker 5: Southern border. People are being held in the open desert
Speaker 5: in Hakomba, where it gets hot in the day gets
Speaker 5: very cold at night. And there are children, there are
Speaker 5: old people, there are young people. All the support they're
Speaker 5: getting it's from mutual aid workers, then maybe get some
Speaker 5: water from border patrol, from federal government, and not much else.
Speaker 5: And I'm here before your podcast to ask you if
Speaker 5: you can to help. We've all spent all of our
Speaker 5: time and most of our money the last few days
Speaker 5: week trying to help, and we're all pretty broke, and
Speaker 5: we're all pretty tired. But I could really do with
Speaker 5: your support. And I'm going to give the venmos and
Speaker 5: cash apps and pay pal information for two organizations who
Speaker 5: ideally love and whose work I have seen is extremely
Speaker 5: effective and is the only thing keeping this situation from
Speaker 5: being a lot worse. And please don't think that if
Speaker 5: you don't have much money that you shouldn't give. We
Speaker 5: can work out do a lot with a little. So
Speaker 5: if you only have five bucks, that is great. And
Speaker 5: five bucks is are top for someone to sleep under
Speaker 5: or a few hot meals. And what we're gonna buy
Speaker 5: is food, blankets, tops, water, the things that stop people
Speaker 5: dying in the desert. Those two organizations, Border Kindness and
Speaker 5: Free Shit Collective, can be found online at border Kindness
Speaker 5: and at free ship pb on Twitter. For Border Kindness,
Speaker 5: the venmo is at border hyphen Kindness, the cash app
Speaker 5: is dollar sign border Kindness cash and the zell and
Speaker 5: PayPal information is info at Borderkindness dot org. Free Shit
Speaker 5: Collective are at free shick Collective on cash app and
Speaker 5: PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter.
Speaker 9: Thank you very much, guys, welcome to take it up
Speaker 9: and here a podcast, but why everything absolutely sucks?
Speaker 7: I'm your host, Nia Wong. I'm back again. And last
Speaker 7: episode we talked about the problems with conceiving of all
Speaker 7: of labor as production from a sort of macro feminist
Speaker 7: perspective of you know, thinking about how you know, thinking
Speaker 7: of all labor as production doesn't actually capture what most
Speaker 7: labor is. And you know, we looked at how this
Speaker 7: allowed patriarchy to become a wedge to private workers movement apart.
Speaker 7: But there's another sort of more micro problem with thinking
Speaker 7: about productive labor, and that micro problem is that people
Speaker 7: are just absolutely unable to think about productivity in anything
Speaker 7: other than moral terms. As to you know, why this
Speaker 7: is the case, I'm not going to go forward an answer.
Speaker 7: I've seen every theory from like its Christianity, to like
Speaker 7: it's a structural feature of capitalism, to its human nature
Speaker 7: or whatever. I'm I don't know, did pick pick your
Speaker 7: theory about why everyone is incapable of being normal about productivity?
Speaker 7: But this turns out to be a real problem for
Speaker 7: anyone who is trying to use productive versus unproductive labor
Speaker 7: in a purely technical sense. Now, the most famous person
Speaker 7: to do this is, as some of you probably know, one,
Speaker 7: Karl Marx. And you know I was hard on Mark's
Speaker 7: last episode, but this one and the stuff that's going
Speaker 7: to follow isn't really his fault. Marx here is actually
Speaker 7: doing one of the times where he's being very reasonable
Speaker 7: and he's being very specific about what productive labor is,
Speaker 7: and everyone else is being extremely unreasonable. And you know,
Speaker 7: given the incredibly dark places this is going to go,
Speaker 7: maybe this is one of those things where, like, I
Speaker 7: don't know, you need to pick different words that aren't
Speaker 7: as emotionally charged as like productive nonproductive labor. But all
Speaker 7: in all, like this, the catastrophe that's about two unfold
Speaker 7: is not Marx's fault. There was really no way that
Speaker 7: he could have known how nuts everyone was going to
Speaker 7: go over this. So what actually is the distinction between
Speaker 7: productive and unproductive labor? From Marx? So, first off, and
Speaker 7: this is very important, productive versus unproductive labor is a
Speaker 7: technical term. It has no moral content at all. All
Speaker 7: it means is that some labor produces capital for the
Speaker 7: capital owning class and some labor doesn't that. That's literally it.
Speaker 7: Here's Marx. The commodities the capitalist buys for his own
Speaker 7: private consumption are not consumed productively. They do not become
Speaker 7: factors of capital, just as little to the services he
Speaker 7: buys for his consumption voluntarily or through compulsion from the state, etc.
Speaker 7: For the sake of their use value, they do not
Speaker 7: become a factor of capital. They are not therefore productive
Speaker 7: kinds of labor, and those who perform them are not
Speaker 7: productive workers. As you can see, this has literally nothing
Speaker 7: to do with the contents of the labor itself or
Speaker 7: morality whatsoever. If a dance er work for production company
Speaker 7: and gives a performance you know, working for the company,
Speaker 7: that's productive labor, because the company has turned their capital
Speaker 7: into more capital by using the dancer to produce a commodity,
Speaker 7: which is, you know, the performance, and then selling it. Right,
Speaker 7: If that same dancer puts on the same performance in
Speaker 7: the same place for a crowd of you know, just
Speaker 7: like their friends or even the same people, but who
Speaker 7: aren't paying a production company for it, Suddenly the dancer,
Speaker 7: who again is doing the same thing in the same
Speaker 7: place like even could be on the same day, is
Speaker 7: doing non productive labor because no capital is being created
Speaker 7: from it, or as you know, here's how Marx puts it.
Speaker 7: Labor with the same content can therefore be both productive
Speaker 7: and unproductive. Milton, for example, who did Paradise Loss, was
Speaker 7: an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who
Speaker 7: delivers hack work for his publisher is a productive worker.
Speaker 7: Later on, Milton sold the product for five dollars and
Speaker 7: to that extent became a dealer in a commodity But
Speaker 7: the light sig literally II reary proletarian who produces books
Speaker 7: e g. Compendium Political Economy at the instruction of his
Speaker 7: publisher is roughly speaking, a productive worker insofar as his
Speaker 7: production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for
Speaker 7: the purpose of the latter's valorization. This is a valorization
Speaker 7: of capital, which is like having capital make more capital.
Speaker 7: A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker.
Speaker 7: If she sells her singing for money, she is to
Speaker 7: that extent a wage laborer or a commodity dealer. But
Speaker 7: the same singer when she is engaged by an entrepreneur
Speaker 7: who has her sing in order to make money, is
Speaker 7: a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. A schoolmaster
Speaker 7: who educates others is not a productive worker, but a
Speaker 7: schoolmaster who is engaged as a wage laborer and an
Speaker 7: institution alongside along with others in order to make in
Speaker 7: order through his labor to valorize the money of the
Speaker 7: entrepreneur of the knowledge mongering institution is a productive worker. Now, okay,
Speaker 7: I'm reading a lot of Marx here. I'm focusing on Marx,
Speaker 7: you know, because whether or not someone in you know,
Speaker 7: the eighteen hundreds is a Marxist or not. And if
Speaker 7: you picked us like a random worker in the period
Speaker 7: when this is being written, the odds are really bad
Speaker 7: that they're going to be a Marxist. Marx was enormously influential,
Speaker 7: particularly in Europe as sort of social democracy swept through
Speaker 7: the Germany's and then communism sort of swept back through Europe.
Speaker 7: In the US, and Marx is also and this is
Speaker 7: something that Marx himself, like takes great pains to conceal
Speaker 7: a lot of the time. Marx is a kind of
Speaker 7: medium through which the broad cultural consensus on labor was
Speaker 7: transformed into like capital T theory, and in this capital
Speaker 7: T theory, productive versus unproductive labor is not a moral
Speaker 7: claim at all. It's a measure of whether any given
Speaker 7: labor produces capital for the bourgeoisie. Now, part of what
Speaker 7: Marx is trying to do here is to intervene in
Speaker 7: existing discourse about productive and unproductive, to turn it into
Speaker 7: useful theory instead of people just yelling stuff at each
Speaker 7: other and Mars, I feel you, buddy, oh boy, taking
Speaker 7: this as a validation of what I'm doing. God, here's
Speaker 7: an example I'm just going to put in here of
Speaker 7: Marx being very mad about this. The self employed laborer,
Speaker 7: for example, is his own wage laborer, and his own
Speaker 7: means of production confront him in his own mind as capital.
Speaker 7: As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage laborer.
Speaker 7: Anomalies of this type then offer a favorable field for
Speaker 7: outpourings of drivel about productive and unproductive labor. So, you know,
Speaker 7: even in the eighteen hundreds, people are being incredibly normal
Speaker 7: about this. They're saying things that are great and good,
Speaker 7: and only only that they're being exceptionally good. Marx isn't
Speaker 7: slowly being driven mad by reading it all. But you know,
Speaker 7: when when it's being used as a technic category, the
Speaker 7: sort of productive versus unproductive distinction. You know, it can
Speaker 7: tell you a lot of stuff about how a capitalist
Speaker 7: economy functions, but when it inevitably becomes a moral category,
Speaker 7: things get very bad, very quickly. And so we're going
Speaker 7: to go into two times that this has gone very badly,
Speaker 7: the Nazis and Ronald Reagan. Now, the Nazis and Reagan
Speaker 7: aren't quite doing the same thing, although there's a lot
Speaker 7: of similarities, which is, you know, to be expected from
Speaker 7: a band who went to a Nazi cemetery that included
Speaker 7: a bunch of SS dudes and then gave a speech
Speaker 7: defending his actions where he said, and I quote they
Speaker 7: which is referring to Nazi soldiers, quote they were victims
Speaker 7: just as surely as the victims and the concentration camps,
Speaker 7: which I.
Speaker 8: I, I, what the fuck.
Speaker 7: What are you supposed to do with that? Like, I
Speaker 7: just this guy was a president of Uni States.
Speaker 10: I mean, I like, I don't know it makes sense,
Speaker 10: but like it never even crossed my mind that it
Speaker 10: was like it would even be possible to have a
Speaker 10: take that is, people in the Nazi army are actually
Speaker 10: just as much victims as the people in the concentration camps. Like, I,
Speaker 10: I don't know, baffling stuff by Reagan. I mean, I
Speaker 10: guess not baffling considering how closely his administration is tied
Speaker 10: to a bunch of sort of Nazis who became like
Speaker 10: anti communists, while here were always anti comics, but who
Speaker 10: became part of sort of like institutional anti communism and
Speaker 10: like the post war era.
Speaker 7: But god, what a terrible thing. I'm getting my shots
Speaker 7: in at Reagan now because this is about to get
Speaker 7: so incredibly bleak. So yay, so okay. So the right
Speaker 7: is able to sort of, you know, very successful in fact,
Speaker 7: in transforming this distinction between productive and non productive labor
Speaker 7: into a moral category, and then they infuse it with
Speaker 7: anti Semitism, and through this sort of I don't know,
Speaker 7: the horror of anti Semitism, productive labor is transformed into
Speaker 7: you know, productive and unproductive members of society. And this
Speaker 7: is one of the origins of sort of Nazi race
Speaker 7: science and race craft. You know, they have their attempt
Speaker 7: to quote unquote purify their race, which relies on a
Speaker 7: distinction between sort of productive and non productive members of
Speaker 7: society who'se like quote unquote value and productive capacity, you know,
Speaker 7: come to be seen as like genetically heritable, which you know,
Speaker 7: from the Nazi perspective, they are like, oh, this is stuff,
Speaker 7: this is heritable. We need to do eugenics and mass
Speaker 7: exterminations of, you know, increasing numbers of disabled, queer communists
Speaker 7: and especially Jewish and Groma people to ensure that only
Speaker 7: the quote unquote like productive members society remain and like
Speaker 7: pass down their traits. And this is fucking horrible. But
Speaker 7: this is also too simple for an explanation for what
Speaker 7: actually happens. In order to actually fully grasp the depths
Speaker 7: of what's happening here and how this stuff functions, we
Speaker 7: need to go deeper into specifically looking at anti Semitism.
Speaker 7: And in order to do this, I'm going to turn
Speaker 7: to the great sort of the great social theorist moist
Speaker 7: Pristone Dressed in Peace died a few years ago. Apparently
Speaker 7: a great guy. I don't know, but yeah, postone and
Speaker 7: his essay Anti Semitism and National Socialism. This is something
Speaker 7: I recommend people read it in full. It's a bit
Speaker 7: theoretically intense. It's also like one of the most heartbreaking
Speaker 7: things I've ever read, but I think it's important to
Speaker 7: understand what national socialism actually was and what it's sort
Speaker 7: of ideological basis was because it oh boy, not only
Speaker 7: has it not gone away, it you know, it's it's
Speaker 7: it's it's it's doing it's doing, it's doing a lot
Speaker 7: of the sort of work that we've we've been sort
Speaker 7: of discussing. Okay, so what what what is what is
Speaker 7: pistone actually talking about? So postone sees Nazi anti Semitism
Speaker 7: not just as you know, the sort of socialism of
Speaker 7: fools where like Jewish people get substituted for capitalists to
Speaker 7: see the worker and okay, like yeah, it's like it
Speaker 7: serves as function to some extent. But for postone, like
Speaker 7: Nazi anti Semitism is its own sort of horrific, incomplete
Speaker 7: anti capitalist system. It's this sort of ghastly aryan mirror
Speaker 7: of like Marxism, and you know, okay, So so to
Speaker 7: to get an understanding of what he means by this,
Speaker 7: because this is something that is you know, like it's
Speaker 7: it's it's deeply it's kind of theoretically intense, but it's
Speaker 7: worth it. So in Marxism, this the central mystery of
Speaker 7: the commodity is that a commodity is a well i
Speaker 7: mean central mystery isn't the right word, but this is
Speaker 7: this is one of the one of the opening things
Speaker 7: in capital is that you know, this is this is
Speaker 7: this thing called the commodity fetish. You have a commodity.
Speaker 7: A commodity is simultaneously a concrete physical object that nonetheless
Speaker 7: contains within it an abstract social relation. It has at
Speaker 7: the same time a use value, which is like, you know,
Speaker 7: the thing that makes it useful, right, Like take a pencil, right, pencil,
Speaker 7: it has.
Speaker 8: A use value.
Speaker 7: The use value is that you can like use it
Speaker 7: to write things, right, and you can use it to
Speaker 7: erase things. But the pencil also has an exchange value.
Speaker 7: And the exchange value, you know, is the value quote
Speaker 7: unquote that you use it to compare it to other commodities. Right,
Speaker 7: It's like, how much is this thing? How much is
Speaker 7: this thing worth? How much is this compared to like
Speaker 7: other commodities, And this is a that's simply an enormous
Speaker 7: that's that's kind of a simplication of it. But what's
Speaker 7: happening here is that the sort of the exchange value
Speaker 7: that lets you compare how much a pencil is worth
Speaker 7: and how much a bracelet is worth right, that's not
Speaker 7: an actual characteristic of the pencil or the bracelet. That
Speaker 7: is a serious you know that that's an embedded social relation, right,
Speaker 7: is an embedded capitalist social relation that allows a commodity
Speaker 7: to be compared to all of the commodities by again
Speaker 7: like embedding this capitalist social relation into it. The important
Speaker 7: part for our purposes is that the commodity has at
Speaker 7: the same time a concrete component, which is the physical object,
Speaker 7: and an abstract component, which is the sort of capitalist
Speaker 7: social relation embedded in the pencil that makes it appear
Speaker 7: to have value. Here's pistone as indicated above. On the
Speaker 7: logical level of the analysis of the commodity, the quote
Speaker 7: double character allows the commodity to appear as a purely
Speaker 7: material entity rather than as an objectification of mediated social relations.
Speaker 7: So this is a more complicated way of saying what
Speaker 7: I've sort of been trying to get at, which is
Speaker 7: that the commodity, you know, because it's a physical object.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 7: The commodity fetish allows the commodity to appear as if
Speaker 7: it's just a pure physical object instead of something that
Speaker 7: is produced by capitalism and contains within it capitalist social
Speaker 7: relations that give value. So we'll back back back to pistone. Relatedly,
Speaker 7: it allows concrete labor to appear as a purely material
Speaker 7: creative process separate from capitalist social relations. On the logical
Speaker 7: level of capital, the double character labor process and valorization process.
Speaker 7: And by valorization process he means the process that turns
Speaker 7: you know, capital into more capital. So the fact that
Speaker 7: there's both a labor process and a valorization process allows
Speaker 7: industrial production to appear as a purely material, creative process
Speaker 7: separable from capital. The manifest form of the concrete is
Speaker 7: now more organic. Industrial capital can then appear as linear
Speaker 7: descendant of quote natural artismal labor as quote organically rooted
Speaker 7: in opposition to rootless, quote parasitic finance capital. You can
Speaker 7: see here where the whole sort of productive versus unproductive
Speaker 7: labor distinction has ended up right. It's been transformed into
Speaker 7: the sort of organic concrete rooted like productive national worker
Speaker 7: and like entrepreneur versus like rootless parasitic finance capital. This
Speaker 7: is unbelievably dangerous because now having set the concrete against
Speaker 7: the abstract, the fascist proceeds to turn the abstract into
Speaker 7: a people, which is Jewish people. The result of this
Speaker 7: is that in the fascist mind, the sort of concrete
Speaker 7: productive worker and the entrepreneur stand against the abstract anti
Speaker 7: national finance capital personified in the figure of the Jew.
Speaker 7: Here's pistona again of what happened next the extermination of
Speaker 7: European jeury is the indication that it is far too
Speaker 7: simple to deal with Nazism as a mass movement with
Speaker 7: anti capitalist overtones, which shed that husk in the nineteen
Speaker 7: thirty four Rome push at the latest, once dead served
Speaker 7: its purpose in state power have been seized. In the
Speaker 7: first place, ideological forms of thought are not simply conscious manipulations.
Speaker 7: In the second place, this view misunderstands the nature of
Speaker 7: Nazi quote anti capitalism, the extent to which it was
Speaker 7: intrinsically bound to the anti Semitic worldview. Auschwitz indicates that connection.
Speaker 7: It is true that the somewhat too concrete and Plebeian
Speaker 7: quote unquote anti capitalism of the essay was dispensed with
Speaker 7: by nineteen thirty four, not, however, the anti Semitic thrust
Speaker 7: the knowledge quote unquote, that the source of evil is abstract.
Speaker 8: The Jew.
Speaker 7: A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced,
Speaker 7: which unfortunately has to take the form of the production
Speaker 7: of goods of use values. The concrete is produced as
Speaker 7: the necessary carrier of the abstract. The extermination camps were
Speaker 7: not a terrible version of the factory. The extermination camps
Speaker 7: were not a terrible version of such a factory, but
Speaker 7: rather it should be seen as its grotesque aryan quote
Speaker 7: anti capitalist negation. Auschwist was a factory to quote unquote
Speaker 7: destroy value, that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract.
Speaker 7: Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the
Speaker 7: aim of which was to liberate the concrete from the abstract.
Speaker 7: The first step was a dehumanize, that is, to rip
Speaker 7: away the quote unquote mask of humanity, of qualitative specificity,
Speaker 7: and reveal the Jews for quote what they really are
Speaker 7: shadows Cipher's numbered abstractions. The second step was to then
Speaker 7: eradicate that abstractness. He transform it into smoke, trying in
Speaker 7: the process to rest away the last remains of the
Speaker 7: concrete material use value, clothes, gold hair, soap. Auschwitz, not
Speaker 7: the Nazi seizure of power in nineteen thirty three, was
Speaker 7: the real German revolution. The attempted to overthrow not merely
Speaker 7: of a political order, but of the existing social formation.
Speaker 7: By this one deed, the world was to be made
Speaker 7: safe from the tyranny of the abstract.
Speaker 5: In the process, the Nazis.
Speaker 7: Quote unquote, liberated themselves from humanity. The Nazis lost the
Speaker 7: war against the Soviet Union, America and Britain. They won
Speaker 7: their war, their revolution against the European Jews. And this ideology,
Speaker 7: this pitting of the abstract against the concrete, is so
Speaker 7: powerful that it was never defeated. By the time the
Speaker 7: Nazis were defeated militarily, they had, you know, by the
Speaker 7: combined might of five of the largest empires in human hait,
Speaker 7: they had already won, and their ideology never went away.
Speaker 7: If you look closely, you can still see it moving.
Speaker 5: Throughout the world.
Speaker 7: You can see it in the left making exactly the
Speaker 7: same mistakes it made before, waging war against the abstract
Speaker 7: in the name of an anti capitalism that can never
Speaker 7: end with the actual destruction of capitalism in that specific form.
Speaker 7: You can see it in a right that openly espouses
Speaker 7: these exact same ideas, in the form of pitting their
Speaker 7: nationalists and patriots against the globalists, in the way it
Speaker 7: pits national American or Russian or Hungarian workers against George Soros.
Speaker 8: It is the basis of all.
Speaker 7: Modern right wing thought. And when we come back from ADS,
Speaker 7: we're going to talk about right wing thoughts other basis
Speaker 7: Ronald Reagan's rampant racism. We've now seen one way that
Speaker 7: the productive and unproductive worker distinction can be turned into
Speaker 7: unfathomable right wing violence, and now we're going to take
Speaker 7: a look at another one, which is the myth of
Speaker 7: the welfare queen. So one of the ways that Reagan
Speaker 7: eventually took power was bite. I mean literally, he was
Speaker 7: doing this for like a decade. He does it for
Speaker 7: like twenty fucking years. It's insufferable, is screaming about the
Speaker 7: myth of the welfare queen. So the welfare queen for
Speaker 7: people who like, I don't know, we're too young to
Speaker 7: like remember what I mean. I wasn't around for the
Speaker 7: original height of it, but like I fucking remember it
Speaker 7: from when I was a kid. It's this sort of
Speaker 7: like mythical racist caricature of like a black woman who
Speaker 7: lives off of scamming the welfare system. And you can
Speaker 7: see what's happening here pretty clearly, right, This is not
Speaker 7: like a particularly subtle political maneuver. The plan is to
Speaker 7: pit you know, sort of so called like productive workers
Speaker 7: and entrepreneurs versus people on welfare, and through through the
Speaker 7: sort of incredible power of racism and specifically misogyn noir,
Speaker 7: which is, you know, through the power of America's just
Speaker 7: like specific abiden casure to black women, the identity of
Speaker 7: the worker is transflowed into a racial category. So what
Speaker 7: you're actually dealing with is this opposition Reagan is trying
Speaker 7: to create between quote unquote like productive white people who
Speaker 7: like work for a living or whatever, and you know
Speaker 7: black welfare queens quote unquote who are dependent on the
Speaker 7: state and don't work. And this is this is this
Speaker 7: is sort of Reagan's framing of it. Now, if you
Speaker 7: go back to this sort of older Marxist conception of class, right,
Speaker 7: like unemployed black people are like unambiguously part of the
Speaker 7: working class. And this is something that Reagan understood. Now,
Speaker 7: part of what was going on here actually was Reagan
Speaker 7: attempting to sort of crack down on black welfare activists.
Speaker 7: You were doing a lot of you know, really incredible organizing,
Speaker 7: ranging from sort of like you know, organizing mass protests
Speaker 7: to like doing squats to doing like it's fall on
Speaker 7: building occupations and Reagan, and more so the people sort
Speaker 7: of around Reagan by the end, because you know, like
Speaker 7: by like term two, Reagan has like basically checked out,
Speaker 7: you know, But the people around Reagan can see which
Speaker 7: way the wind is blowing, and you know, they are
Speaker 7: busy sort of like lining up every fan they can
Speaker 7: find to make the wind blow a bit stronger. And
Speaker 7: the way that the winds are blowing is that a
Speaker 7: bunch of people are about to be spat out of
Speaker 7: the capitalist system and too increasingly precarious service jobs or
Speaker 7: just no jobs at all. And as the sort of
Speaker 7: crisis dynamics emerged and intensified, and people tend to forget this.
Speaker 7: But Reagan's term started with him nuking the economy, setting
Speaker 7: off a recession and jacking employment up to ten percent.
Speaker 7: But you know, as this unfolds, Reagan sees a perfect
Speaker 7: opportunity to sever what Marks would call the industrial reserve army.
Speaker 7: Who are you know, all the people who've been spat
Speaker 7: out of the capitalist system and forced to face sort
Speaker 7: of pecarity and unemployments. He sees an opportunity to like
Speaker 7: to split these people from workers who held on to
Speaker 7: their jobs. And the way you do this is by
Speaker 7: talking about class in a way that's really about race.
Speaker 7: This new sort of moral division of like productive non
Speaker 7: productive worker is incredibly racialized, which is to say that, like,
Speaker 7: I mean, it's just it's just really racist. There's no
Speaker 7: certain I don't know, there's no I'm I'm not gonna
Speaker 7: do the circumlocution on that ship.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 7: It is really racist, and it's it's specifically designed to
Speaker 7: pit white workers against black workers. And it's also this
Speaker 7: is something we should point out here, like reality has
Speaker 7: no effect on on the sort of like the actual
Speaker 7: propaganda value. But like the people who are on welfare
Speaker 7: who are working like they're off, they're working a lot,
Speaker 7: they're working really shit jobs. They're working more than the
Speaker 7: people who aren't on welfare in a lot of cases.
Speaker 7: What's happening here, right, is is this, this this entire
Speaker 7: thing is very specifically designed to pit white workers against
Speaker 7: black workers by invoking racial prejudice, and slightly more subtly,
Speaker 7: is designed to remove black workers from the category of
Speaker 7: labor altogether through you know, the sort of sort of
Speaker 7: means of America's like deep in abiding hatred of black women.
Speaker 7: Now back in sort of reality. And again bearing in
Speaker 7: mind reality has no effect on this bullshit. But you know,
Speaker 7: back in reality, like the actual biggest welfare cheat of
Speaker 7: the modern era is Brett Farr, former quarterback in the
Speaker 7: Minnesota Vikings. Please send all complaints at irite, okay on Twitter.
Speaker 7: Far managed to spend seventy seven million dollars of welfare
Speaker 7: money on a bunch of bullshit that includes like trying
Speaker 7: to get a multimillion dollar volleyball facility built at his
Speaker 7: daughter's school. The actual woman who was like the model
Speaker 7: for the first like welfare queen thing like, may have
Speaker 7: stolen eight thousand dollars. But you know this, this doesn't
Speaker 7: matter at all because again, like reality's ability to combat
Speaker 7: propaganda is incredibly weak, and you know, and the other
Speaker 7: the other thing that's that's important to understand about this,
Speaker 7: right is this was never actually about the money, and
Speaker 7: this is something that people use to try to combat
Speaker 7: this stuff, right, which people will point out and they're
Speaker 7: right that, like, yeah, like you know, in order in
Speaker 7: order to like quote unquote combat welfare fraud, like you
Speaker 7: spend more money try to combat the fraud than you
Speaker 7: save on the fraud. But that's not the point. That's
Speaker 7: not the point at all. The point is again like
Speaker 7: turning white workers against black workers to happen to be unemployed.
Speaker 7: And it works incredibly well because they tap into two
Speaker 7: just really powerful wells of emotion racism, and they happen
Speaker 7: to do a second one, which is people hating work.
Speaker 7: But because this is the right the way they tap
Speaker 7: into people hating work was they transform it into the
Speaker 7: seething hatred and resentment at the possibility of someone not
Speaker 7: having to have the suffering that you have and doing
Speaker 7: the thing that you always want to do, which is
Speaker 7: not work, and then tying that to, oh, these people
Speaker 7: don't have to suffer the way that I do because
Speaker 7: they're living off of like the product of my labor.
Speaker 7: And you know, you can you can see the sort
Speaker 7: of ghosts right of like an anti capitalist critique of labor,
Speaker 7: which is like, yeah, there are a bunch of people
Speaker 7: who like don't work a fucking day in their lives
Speaker 7: off the prophecy proceeds of our labors. They wear a
Speaker 7: bunch of suits and they you know, they they're like
Speaker 7: seventeenth generation like descendants of the Walton family or whatever.
Speaker 7: But you know, this is this is the sort of
Speaker 7: right wing version of it. And so through the sort
Speaker 7: of lens of racism and through the sort of transformation
Speaker 7: of class and productivity like into into sort of like
Speaker 7: pure race discourse, they've managed to sort of, you know,
Speaker 7: they've managed to completely transform the way people think about class.
Speaker 7: And this is this is a big part of the
Speaker 7: reason why the way Americans think about classes is so
Speaker 7: incredibly messed up. And it's a big part of the
Speaker 7: reason why, you know, the United States has spent, i mean,
Speaker 7: spent the next fifty years doing this unbelievably merciless like
Speaker 7: ruthless purge and just like mass infliction of suffering on
Speaker 7: the poorest people in the US. It's because of this shit.
Speaker 7: And this is also the reason that no one, you know,
Speaker 7: if you're fucking reading the New York Times, right, you
Speaker 7: will never hear anybody talk about black workers. They will
Speaker 7: only ever talk about white workers. And this is because
Speaker 7: that ideological project, the ideological project that Reagan was attempting
Speaker 7: to do, was a big part of It was again
Speaker 7: about an attempt to expel black workers from the popular
Speaker 7: collective imagination of the working class. And it fucking worked.
Speaker 7: If you're a white pundit.
Speaker 8: You can do this thing.
Speaker 7: You can make an entire career off of study and
Speaker 7: quote unquote the working class only ever talk to white
Speaker 7: people because that's the only part of the working class
Speaker 7: that like exists, to these people that they even will
Speaker 7: pretend matters. And then you know, never mentioned black workers
Speaker 7: even existing at all, much less like engage with black
Speaker 7: workers is like the core of the workers movements. And
Speaker 7: no one outside of like actual leftist circles or even
Speaker 7: bad and I no one, no one even thinks this
Speaker 7: is fucking weird, right, And you can get away with
Speaker 7: this ship because you know, eighty percent of all discourse
Speaker 7: about class is really about race or gender, and you know,
Speaker 7: eighty percent of all discourse but race as fucking white
Speaker 7: people talking to other white people. And that's what we're
Speaker 7: going to end for today. We will we will come
Speaker 7: back to the sort of ruling class reaction to this
Speaker 7: another time. But in the meantime, this has been naked
Speaker 7: happen here, go out into the world and make something
Speaker 7: that's not this one.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. The episode you're about to
Speaker 2: hear was recorded late last night at like two in
Speaker 2: the morning. Due to the time difference between me and Joe,
Speaker 2: who is based in Armenia. As you may have heard,
Speaker 2: Azerbijan launched another attack on the independent Armenian majority region
Speaker 2: of Artsak, which is in territory that Azerbijan claims. Since
Speaker 2: we recorded this a couple hours after the Artzok defense
Speaker 2: forces have surrendered, there's currently negotiations and something that's being
Speaker 2: called a ceasefire. Although there continue to be reports of
Speaker 2: shelling and other violent acts by the Azeri military. It's
Speaker 2: kind of unclear what is going to happen. Tens of
Speaker 2: thousands of frightened Armenians have crowded the airport out of Artzok.
Speaker 2: Pictures are pretty stunning and sobering, out of fears that
Speaker 2: Aside will be instituted against the Armenian populace in that area.
Speaker 2: The episode you're about to hear is Joe and I
Speaker 2: kind of talking earlier in the invasion, pretty soon after
Speaker 2: it happened, going over some of the history, what's going
Speaker 2: on now, fears for the future. So I thought it
Speaker 2: was still valuable stuff, but I wanted to let you
Speaker 2: know the situation has advanced since we recorded this, As
Speaker 2: is often the case when you're talking about you know,
Speaker 2: unfolding events.
Speaker 5: So thank you.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to it could happen here, a podcast
Speaker 2: about it happening here, And unfortunately for our guest today
Speaker 2: it is again this is not the first time that
Speaker 2: it has been happening where this person happens to live.
Speaker 2: Joe Kasabian, Joe, Hey, how you doing, buddy?
Speaker 8: Hey, Robert, it's I. I would like this say it's
Speaker 8: good to be back. But you know this tends to
Speaker 8: happen a lot.
Speaker 2: We did you know in between the first time you
Speaker 2: were or the last time you were on this show
Speaker 2: and now you know, we had a surprise meeting in
Speaker 2: Dublin that was a lovely time.
Speaker 8: That is true. That is true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And now Joe, you uh, you are a podcaster,
Speaker 2: a genocide expert and academic studying that and also you know,
Speaker 2: the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, which
Speaker 2: is a lovely podcast. And you are based out of Yerevan,
Speaker 2: which is the capital of Armenia, which is a country
Speaker 2: that is not yet being invaded but is also in
Speaker 2: that in another way is being invaded right now, right
Speaker 2: like it's a it's a complicated situation. Basically, the gist
Speaker 2: of it is folks, if you're if you're kind of
Speaker 2: tuning in, there is a there are a number of
Speaker 2: different like little republics in the Caucasus region, and one
Speaker 2: of the like, over the course of the last like
Speaker 2: I don't know, a couple of thousand years, there have
Speaker 2: been a lot of Armenian people in this area that
Speaker 2: we call the Caucases, right, and you know, you have
Speaker 2: your you know, a couple of thousand years of history.
Speaker 2: You know, around the eleventh century, you get, you know,
Speaker 2: some claims start being made to this area in what
Speaker 2: is now called Karbak Artsak. And yeah, now you've got
Speaker 2: this kind of area that is an Armenian majority region
Speaker 2: where the surrounding Azeri people argue that it is their land,
Speaker 2: their territory, that they should be allowed to take it.
Speaker 2: And there have been a series of wars that have
Speaker 2: been fighting that have been going on over this area
Speaker 2: since the fall of the Soviet Union. And now as
Speaker 2: we are talking right now, Joe, you and I, the
Speaker 2: Azari military has just launched a new invasion with the
Speaker 2: presumed goal, with the stated goal really of retaking this
Speaker 2: entire region and potentially the goal of engaging the Armenian
Speaker 2: military in a wider formal way, right, that's at least
Speaker 2: the way the Azaris have discussed it. The Armenian military,
Speaker 2: the Armenian government has said like, this is not you know,
Speaker 2: Artsak is not Armenia. This is not like our troops
Speaker 2: and stuff on the ground here. But the Azaris have
Speaker 2: basically just said, like, we are disabling Armenian military equipment.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's it's you know, it goes back to December
Speaker 8: of last year. I mean, obviously this goes back even
Speaker 8: before then. But if you start talking about you know, history,
Speaker 8: people's eyes are going to glaze over. Yeah, this the
Speaker 8: the war that was fought in twenty twenty obviously Azerbaijan one.
Speaker 8: And ever since then, Carlak or Artsak has been cut
Speaker 8: off on the Republic of Armenia through this area called
Speaker 8: the Lashing Corridor. And yeah, according to the treaty it
Speaker 8: was supposed to be maintained by Russian peacekeepers, but it
Speaker 8: never was, and specifically, since December of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 8: Karbak has been completely cut off by the Azarian Russian
Speaker 8: military and is effectively being starved out. So it's been
Speaker 8: you know, quite a long time, and we knew, like
Speaker 8: everybody knew the war was going to come again, but
Speaker 8: we kind of assumed it was gonna be in like
Speaker 8: twenty twenty five, when the Russians are mandated to leave,
Speaker 8: but st yesterday, you know, it s already yesterday.
Speaker 2: It seems like, I think it like the azeris invaded
Speaker 2: right after about twenty three tons something like that of
Speaker 2: essentially like bread was brought into like across the Lachin corridor,
Speaker 2: right like you literally like this, yeah, exactly, yeah, this
Speaker 2: tiny amount of food makes it into this starving populace
Speaker 2: and then the next day invasion starts.
Speaker 8: Since December, they've done as much as they possibly could
Speaker 8: to turn Karbak into what is effectively an open air
Speaker 8: concentration camp. And the military operation, Now, what it is
Speaker 8: it to me is it's a continuation of the twenty
Speaker 8: twenty war because they couldn't conquer Seapanicrits in twenty twenty,
Speaker 8: which is the capital of Karabak, due to external pressures
Speaker 8: as well as military capacity, because during twenty twenty, the
Speaker 8: Republic of Armenia, despite not legally directly fighting the war,
Speaker 8: was of course helping Karabak with volunteers, soldiers, military supplies, everything. Sure,
Speaker 8: this time, they can't. It's completely cut off, and that
Speaker 8: this is not a war of any kind of near
Speaker 8: peer powers. The local Karabak defense force, called the Artsak
Speaker 8: Defense Army, is a self defense group. They have some
Speaker 8: heavy equipment, but the vast majority of it was destroyed
Speaker 8: twenty twenty. So this is, you know, effectively like a
Speaker 8: local gun club trying to fight this army.
Speaker 2: This is more or less a militia going up against
Speaker 2: I mean, like the Azaris. One of their major suppliers
Speaker 2: of arms is Israel, Israel and Turkey. Yeah, yes, Russia, Russia,
Speaker 2: Russia as well too. Yeah, and Russia is selling obviously
Speaker 2: to our media as well.
Speaker 8: They actually aren't that we've we've found out I believe
Speaker 8: last year. The government isn't the best at transparency, I
Speaker 8: feel like is the best way to word that. And
Speaker 8: we have been paying Russia for weapons since twenty twenty.
Speaker 8: They have not delivered a single bullet since the war.
Speaker 2: Sorry I should have said Armenia is paying Russia for weapons.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, we're being fucked by Russia. But yeah, it's
Speaker 8: as far as the state of Azari goals are, they're
Speaker 8: they're very different. In twenty twenty when the war ended,
Speaker 8: they could frame it as a victory because they took
Speaker 8: over all these areas that they lost during the first war.
Speaker 8: Minds about an area where about one hundred and twenty
Speaker 8: thousand people live in Stapanikirt and the general outskirts there.
Speaker 8: But this time the messaging is much different. It is,
Speaker 8: you know, the government must collapse. You know they only
Speaker 8: going to like this is going quote unquote until the end,
Speaker 8: until they see a white flag from stepanik Hert. So
Speaker 8: this is because now if they don't do that, they
Speaker 8: can't spin it as a victory, right right, And since December,
Speaker 8: the Lashing corridor has been shut for everybody. People couldn't leave,
Speaker 8: people who live in Karbak, who are in our media
Speaker 8: for like school or whatever, couldn't go back. And now suddenly,
Speaker 8: yesterday when the war started again, they are saying there's
Speaker 8: a humanitarian corridor through the through Lachen. So the goals
Speaker 8: are very very clear here and we know from their
Speaker 8: conduct in twenty twenty government propaganda, just the general attitude
Speaker 8: of the Azari government towards Armenians, which is they don't
Speaker 8: they can't exist here, like this is a liquidation of
Speaker 8: the open air concentration camp that they've created.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, Joe, first off, I guess what I
Speaker 2: want to ask is, like, what what is it like
Speaker 2: in Yerevan right now? Because you know you are you
Speaker 2: are not far from from where the fighting is continuing
Speaker 2: at the moment, but obviously you are. Armenia is not
Speaker 2: technically involved at this point, right Like, that's at least
Speaker 2: according to the claims of the Armenian government. These aris
Speaker 2: alleged that they are striking Armenian military targets right now.
Speaker 2: What is it like in Jervan right now?
Speaker 8: I think everybody is. I mean, you can see it
Speaker 8: on everybody's faces, like they just they want information. They
Speaker 8: want to know what's going to happen next. There's a
Speaker 8: lot of protests yesterday and into the night because the
Speaker 8: Prime Minister came out and said, like, you know, we're
Speaker 8: not going to get involved, and he's not exactly very popular,
Speaker 8: despite the fact he kind of is our best option
Speaker 8: at the moment. So there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 8: rightful anger towards him, towards Russia, towards the EU, you know,
Speaker 8: you name it. Everybody's mad at everybody. So there was
Speaker 8: different protests yesterday there was you know, fuck Russia protest,
Speaker 8: there was fuck Nikol Pashnian, who's our prime minister protest.
Speaker 8: There was a combination of the two protests. They all
Speaker 8: kind of met in the middle. There is some fighting
Speaker 8: with the police. I heard reports that someone quite a
Speaker 8: few people tried to break into government buildings. That all
Speaker 8: seemed to have cooled off by that because I went
Speaker 8: down to the area where there was protesting and I
Speaker 8: didn't see any of that, but it seemed to have
Speaker 8: also started up again after I left. But again, it's
Speaker 8: only day one. People's anger is only going to get
Speaker 8: worse as the situation in Karabak gets worse. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 8: the fall of Karabak when Stapana karat If, and when
Speaker 8: that occurs, I have a hard time believing that the
Speaker 8: current government here in Armenia will survive. They'll either resign
Speaker 8: before stouts, you know, an unfortunate third option might happen,
Speaker 8: especially with the messaging coming from Russia where they're blaming
Speaker 8: Armenia and specifically the Prime Minister for all of this.
Speaker 8: Because since September of last year, Armenia has been doing
Speaker 8: decent diplomacy in turning towards the West. There's American soldiers
Speaker 8: in the Republic of Armenia right now for training. We've
Speaker 8: sent supplies to Ukraine. We've all but left the CSTO,
Speaker 8: which is like Russia's shitty version of NATO. Yeah, so
Speaker 8: this is not very functional, right, Like yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 8: mean this is a fact. I mean this is a
Speaker 8: green lit, punitive expedition on Russia's behalf effected.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And this is you know a couple of things. So
Speaker 2: like obviously the way in which which the paper on
Speaker 2: paper alliances here kind of like chart out is not
Speaker 2: friendly to the sort of like sound bite media of
Speaker 2: our day, right because Armenia on paper, Armenia's like big
Speaker 2: supporter has been Russia recently, right, as.
Speaker 8: Well as Azerbaijan, like as well, before Russia invaded Ukraine,
Speaker 8: they like cemented an alliance. But you know, because Azerbaijan
Speaker 8: has been very overt, I guess you could say, and
Speaker 8: their support for Ukraine giving them money and you know,
Speaker 8: supplies here and they're non military supplies but humanitarian supplies. Yeah,
Speaker 8: this gets spun in the brain dead infosphere as it
Speaker 8: being like another Russian ally that being Armenia is being
Speaker 8: invaded or you know, people equate Kara Bak to Crimea
Speaker 8: and Ukraine's war goals, and since Azerbaijan is, you know,
Speaker 8: a pr ally of Ukraine and supplying the E you
Speaker 8: with gas and supplying you with Russian gas as well,
Speaker 8: it gets spun as like people are cheering for Azerbaijan,
Speaker 8: which is is absolutely baffling to me. Like it I
Speaker 8: wish I could say I'm confused or surprised, but like
Speaker 8: when you treat war like it's a team sport you
Speaker 8: want to play on your favorite football jersey or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 8: this is how it goes. When you know, Karabak declared
Speaker 8: independence from Azerbaijan during that the Azeri Soviet Socialist Republic
Speaker 8: when that was legal to do, and the state that
Speaker 8: they have created is one of the most free in
Speaker 8: the region, whereas Azerbaijan, according to like the Freedom Index
Speaker 8: is one point above the Taliban controlled Afghan state at
Speaker 8: the moment. Yeah, so like this, this is not a plan.
Speaker 8: This is not like a liberation. A dictator cannot be
Speaker 8: a liberator.
Speaker 2: No, And a lot of what is happening and why
Speaker 2: a Zerbijan is engaging in aggression right now is due
Speaker 2: to what's been happening to like the price of oil
Speaker 2: and like what that's done to the Azari economy. Right,
Speaker 2: Like this is a like I mean, it's it's it's
Speaker 2: a pretty standard page in the the authoritarian playbook, right
Speaker 2: of course.
Speaker 8: I mean they're a classic fascist dictatorship and so far
Speaker 8: as you know, every problem in the state that they have,
Speaker 8: of which they have many, because it's effectively a kleptocracy
Speaker 8: built around a Petro Petro dictatorship, is caused by Armenians.
Speaker 8: They're you know, every single anti Asari piece that gets
Speaker 8: published in any media, and you can use the term
Speaker 8: anti Asari to mean like literally anything is funded by
Speaker 8: the like the Armenian lobbying group, which I mean any
Speaker 8: Jewish conspiracy theory that we all know and hear about constantly,
Speaker 8: and Azurebaijan. You just replace Jewish people with Armenians, and
Speaker 8: it's a it's functionally the same thing. So you know,
Speaker 8: we're this global superpower with our tendrils and everything, but
Speaker 8: also we're weak and pitifol and need to be destroyed.
Speaker 8: It's it's kind of messaging that we're used to hearing
Speaker 8: for like classic fascist propaganda, and you know that as
Speaker 8: far as like why they're doing it now is because
Speaker 8: they've so ensconced themselves in the European good graces and
Speaker 8: over the last little bit they know nobody could. Nobody's
Speaker 8: going to stop them. The EU literally can't, and the
Speaker 8: United States, I mean, they're an outside player when it
Speaker 8: comes to European politics, at least internal politics.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 8: They are only loosely connected to Azerbaijehan. They do some
Speaker 8: military funding, but it's mostly to do it's like these
Speaker 8: weird ghosts of the early global War on Terror where
Speaker 8: they're looking for friendly Muslim powers that would act as
Speaker 8: counter terror forces. But the Azerbaijan secular this war has
Speaker 8: nothing to do with us being Christian or them being Muslim,
Speaker 8: though it does tend to be free framed that way
Speaker 8: by the worst people imaginable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's slots conveniently for a lot of people
Speaker 2: into those But like this is I mean again as
Speaker 2: I tried, and you know, this is what we're kind
Speaker 2: of like throwing this together in media res but like
Speaker 2: this is we're talking about, like this is the result
Speaker 2: of a very long period of conflict and movement of
Speaker 2: peoples in a region where they have been for thousands
Speaker 2: and thousands of years, right, Like that's like, it's not.
Speaker 8: I would say the current conflict is mostly rooted in
Speaker 8: about the last thirty thirty five years, I mean the
Speaker 8: ancient The ancient history gets thrown around a lot by
Speaker 8: like propagandists. But this is a direct result of the
Speaker 8: Soviet Union's policies. It has nothing to do with like,
Speaker 8: you know, the thirteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: Would you take it back though, to like like World
Speaker 2: War One? Right where you've got You've got this like
Speaker 2: very brief period where like Azerbijan and Armenia and Georgia
Speaker 2: all attempt to have this like almost little like Caucasus
Speaker 2: you win or e you of their own right, and
Speaker 2: then they all get like gobbled up, you know, over
Speaker 2: the course of the end of the war, by by
Speaker 2: by Turkey and then by Russia. Like it's this uh,
Speaker 2: like that's kind of where it all results from. Right,
Speaker 2: That's at least that's my understanding of it.
Speaker 8: Uh, if you want to go back that far, it
Speaker 8: has more of a result of early Soviet policy and
Speaker 8: specifically Joseph Stalin. Before he took over the Soviet Union,
Speaker 8: he was ahead of like the Office of like Minorities effectively, Yeah,
Speaker 8: he's a Georgian. Yeah he's it's so is Barria, and
Speaker 8: he he redrew the borders to include what is today
Speaker 8: Karabak within the borders of what effectively would become the
Speaker 8: Azaria Soviet Socialist Republic. And during the entire period of
Speaker 8: the Soviet Union, which you know, a lot of people
Speaker 8: like to frame as this, there's no problems in the
Speaker 8: Soviet Union control these areas, which is you know, magical thinking.
Speaker 8: There were protests by the Armenian populace, right, there was
Speaker 8: a lot of protests during the eighties. You have what's
Speaker 8: called the Karabak movement wanted either a Karabak to become
Speaker 8: its own Soviet Socialist Republic or b to be given
Speaker 8: to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and away from these areas,
Speaker 8: and failing that, they declared independence, which was within their
Speaker 8: rights under the Soviet constitution, which did exist, I mean,
Speaker 8: it was largely fluid and completely ignored as we see today,
Speaker 8: and that's what that triggered a lot of different programs
Speaker 8: between a Zaris against the Armenian population within Azerbaijan, and
Speaker 8: Armenians did the same thing here as well. But that
Speaker 8: started the First War, which ended with Armenia winning and
Speaker 8: Artsak becoming a de facto independent republic not recognized by
Speaker 8: anybody to include Armenia, and it's I mean.
Speaker 2: It becomes at that point kind of one of a
Speaker 2: series of sort of little fro and wars. During this
Speaker 2: kind of like early nineties period where the US was
Speaker 2: there was this there was some belief that the US
Speaker 2: would act if like these conflicts.
Speaker 8: Got out of hand.
Speaker 2: That was like often proved wrong, right, Like.
Speaker 8: The best comparison is effectively Kosovo. The only difference is
Speaker 8: that because of geopolitics, you're getting involved in this war,
Speaker 8: whether it be in the nineties, in twenty twenty or today,
Speaker 8: is it's not geopolitically advantageous, Like telling Azerbaijan to go
Speaker 8: fuck themselves by supporting art soccer Armenians doesn't help anybody geopolitically.
Speaker 8: If it was Russia invading US, it would be raining
Speaker 8: weapons from the West, but geopolitically doesn't benefit anybody to
Speaker 8: support us. And you know, like there's this concept of
Speaker 8: like ethics and morals from superpowers, whether it be you know,
Speaker 8: the bastion of democracy in the United States or this
Speaker 8: concept of European ethics and morals in the EU, Like
Speaker 8: that's all propaganda v aprior where it's not real. If
Speaker 8: your country is being helped by any of these countries,
Speaker 8: it's because it benefits the countries that are helping you geopolitically.
Speaker 8: It's not because of they they support whatever it is
Speaker 8: that you're doing, you know that, And because the Republic
Speaker 8: of Armenia itself is kind of in the situation as well.
Speaker 8: But the people of art SoC are certainly in this situation.
Speaker 2: And so like right now, I mean honestly, like what
Speaker 2: is there to do? But watch right, like is there
Speaker 2: is there? Do you have any kind of like hope
Speaker 2: for sort of positive productive action at this point or
Speaker 2: are we kind of stuck in this? We're going to
Speaker 2: see what the next chapter of this this conflict looks like,
Speaker 2: you know, as it rolls.
Speaker 8: Out here, Well, there's two options, really stop it through
Speaker 8: military force or let the largest genocide of the twenty
Speaker 8: first century go unimpeded. Right because the reason why our
Speaker 8: Prime minister said that the Republic of Armenia is not
Speaker 8: going to get involved is because it literally cannot. You know,
Speaker 8: we have Turkey on one border that will almost certainly
Speaker 8: be involved if we do. These areas also have guns
Speaker 8: pointed at our southern border, which they have said for
Speaker 8: years now they want to conquer. The Armenian military is
Speaker 8: not a superpower by any stretch of the imagination, and
Speaker 8: since we are not connected to Artsock in any feasible way,
Speaker 8: it would require a massive counter offensive to just relieve
Speaker 8: Stapanak Heart from the current siege. Right, there's a reason
Speaker 8: why it didn't happen when they were being starved. So
Speaker 8: Armenia lacks the ability to stop this. However, there's multiple
Speaker 8: countries in the world, mostly France and the United States,
Speaker 8: that could end this in five seconds if they truly
Speaker 8: wanted to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned at the start that there are US
Speaker 2: troops who are in Armenia right now, and I'm my
Speaker 2: thoughts are drawn back to in twenty nineteen when Turkey
Speaker 2: carried out an expanded invasion of some of the regions
Speaker 2: in northeast Syria that composed Rojava, and you know US
Speaker 2: peacekeepers pulled out previous to that. Now, the US troops
Speaker 2: who were in Armenia were training that were not there
Speaker 2: as peacekeepers.
Speaker 8: But right, they have no mandate to do anything, and
Speaker 8: there's only like two hundred of them from some national
Speaker 8: Guard unit. It's not like it's a you know, a
Speaker 8: brigade combat team, and pressure is whatever you want to
Speaker 8: call them are not simply not going to happen. The
Speaker 8: European Union is not going to sanction Azerbaijan. They rely
Speaker 8: on their oil and Azerbaijan has only become more powerful
Speaker 8: in this petro diplomacy since Russia invaded Ukraine. The United
Speaker 8: States has no functional sanctioning powers over Asgerbajan that could
Speaker 8: really affect them. And not to mention, as we've seen
Speaker 8: since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sanctions don't stop wars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now, I mean they never had. Like again, this
Speaker 2: is something that left is supposed to know right after,
Speaker 2: like what happened with Iraq and the nineties, But like
Speaker 2: they don't, they don't do anything like.
Speaker 8: No, Like if the only thing that stops a genocide
Speaker 8: is military force, and there's never been a genocide that
Speaker 8: has not ended from military from one actor or another,
Speaker 8: I might.
Speaker 2: Push even a little bit to say that, like one
Speaker 2: thing that in this case I think could potentially at
Speaker 2: least reduce the risk of certain kinds of genocide is
Speaker 2: like keeping us troops in the area, not even as
Speaker 2: like a viable combat force, but as a like all right,
Speaker 2: a zebra jen if you if you are going to
Speaker 2: like disrupt the territorial integrity of the actual Armenian state,
Speaker 2: then you know, we've got people who are in country,
Speaker 2: and so you'll have to you'll have.
Speaker 8: To kill them, you know. That's that's something that probable
Speaker 8: have been arguing for a long time now, not necessarily
Speaker 8: Americans exactly, but some kind of international peacekeeping mission, because
Speaker 8: we all knew that what Russia was doing, like this
Speaker 8: war benefits them as the previous instability in the region
Speaker 8: benefits them, because it allows them to have their hooks
Speaker 8: into Armenia. Which is why we're kind of worried of
Speaker 8: what happens next here because if Azerbaijan does complete the
Speaker 8: conquest of stapanic Herit, which unless someone gets involved, they will,
Speaker 8: they need to be like I need to be practical
Speaker 8: about these things, and once that happens, Russia won't have
Speaker 8: the sort of damicles hanging over the Republic of Armenia's
Speaker 8: head anymore. So it does make it does make us
Speaker 8: wonder like and everybody is very very stupid if they
Speaker 8: Thinkbaijan stops with art suck right that in September of
Speaker 8: last year when I was on your show, they were
Speaker 8: invading the Republic of Armenia. They were not invading Karabaker arts.
Speaker 8: They were invading the Republic of Armenia. And their stated
Speaker 8: goals have not changed. The only thing that would happen
Speaker 8: is that this thorn in their side over the last
Speaker 8: thirty years would not be there anymore. They would have
Speaker 8: no impediments at all within what is considered their own borders.
Speaker 8: They could focus everything on the Republic of Armenia. So
Speaker 8: people who believe that this ends in stapanic Hert like
Speaker 8: You'll only have to go back to this time last
Speaker 8: year to see that is not the case. The only
Speaker 8: thing that's going to happen is maybe they'll take a
Speaker 8: little bit of time. The war is coming to Armenia.
Speaker 8: This massacre will come across our borders. It's only a
Speaker 8: matter of is it one year, two years, three years?
Speaker 8: That that's the only thing. So without some kind of
Speaker 8: immediate intervention, this slaughter will continue until they're defeated. That
Speaker 8: you don't negotiate with people who want to murder you.
Speaker 8: It's impossible.
Speaker 2: No you can't. And it's it's also this is a
Speaker 2: very dangerous situation in part because like the reason why
Speaker 2: Armenia is acting now, right, and part is because you know,
Speaker 2: they have been watching and I think like keying and
Speaker 2: like sort of editing their behavior as a result of
Speaker 2: how the Russian campaign in Ukraine has gone.
Speaker 8: Right. Yeah, they definitely see it as a way to
Speaker 8: get away from Russia. I mean, like, yeah, like any
Speaker 8: small state in Russia's sphere is doing right now, with
Speaker 8: the exception of Georgia, who's kind of doing the opposite.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they there is this, I mean, one of
Speaker 2: the things that is really unsettling right now is there
Speaker 2: is this there has been kind of a freeze and
Speaker 2: a number of conflicts around the world that we have
Speaker 2: seen thawing out for the last really the last five
Speaker 2: six years. It's been particularly like accelerating this kind of
Speaker 2: like thaw in a bunch of these old frozen conflicts.
Speaker 2: And part of why is that there's this understanding by
Speaker 2: a lot of these regional powers that like, well, if
Speaker 2: I kicked the fucking door and nobody's coming after.
Speaker 8: Me, right, And Azerbaijan understands that to a certain extent,
Speaker 8: which is why they acted the way they acted last
Speaker 8: year in September. I mean, the CSTO is a joke,
Speaker 8: but it does have a mutual defense clause, just like
Speaker 8: NATO does. So invasion of our borders should have triggered it,
Speaker 8: and that was if people had some kind of not
Speaker 8: sure if Russia could commit to other things. That's meanted
Speaker 8: it for a lot of people. It'smitted it for Armenia specifically.
Speaker 8: I mean, we're still technically legal members of that alliance,
Speaker 8: but we have no representation in anymore. We don't take
Speaker 8: part in trainings, we don't go to meetings. We're functionally
Speaker 8: out of it, and we certainly will be after this,
Speaker 8: I believe. But I mean as an example of how
Speaker 8: you can't really negotiate with someone with this kind of
Speaker 8: ideology in so far as from this position, like I'm
Speaker 8: not saying that like this only ends with international peacekeepers
Speaker 8: hoisting a flag over Blak Whuy with this kind of
Speaker 8: power discrepancy that the Azaria government has said that they
Speaker 8: will negotiate with the government in Stepankert in Karabak once
Speaker 8: they dissolve and lay down all their weapons. So once
Speaker 8: you completely disarm and get rid of all of the
Speaker 8: ways you can defend yourself from the obvious slaughter that's
Speaker 8: coming your way. Then we'll talk. Is that really a way?
Speaker 8: Is that a way of any negotiations could ever happen?
Speaker 8: Like being realistic, of course it's not. The government of
Speaker 8: kara Bak is the only thing. The government of Karabak
Speaker 8: and the small local self defense force is the only
Speaker 8: negotiating like little crumb that they have because it's it's
Speaker 8: stopping them from being murdered. And for people who think
Speaker 8: I'm being like I'm overreacting or something, look at how
Speaker 8: they treated that. Any Armenians villions that fell into their
Speaker 8: hands into the twenty twenty war. They cut off their ears,
Speaker 8: they cut off their fingers, they cut off their noses.
Speaker 8: They fucking beheaded them. It was like watching Isis videos.
Speaker 8: But they're wearing multiicam and wearing fast helmets and they
Speaker 8: publish them proudly on the internet. They're not ashamed of this.
Speaker 8: You can only imagine what happens when a city of
Speaker 8: one hundred thousand people falls into their hands, and that
Speaker 8: is more so than nineteen forties.
Speaker 2: Something around like yeah, about one hundred, one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty thousand people who are who are still there.
Speaker 8: Our media cannot solve this problem. We do not have
Speaker 8: the power to force them to the negotiation table to
Speaker 8: guarantee the rights of existence for people where they live.
Speaker 8: The countries that do are now friends with the country
Speaker 8: that is doing it, So it requires some actual diplomatic spine.
Speaker 8: And the thing is, you know, the joke is, every
Speaker 8: time someone is deeply concerned about something, you take a
Speaker 8: drink and then you don't fucking alcoholism, But you can't say,
Speaker 8: you know, we call for an immediate cease of the
Speaker 8: of the military offensive without an or or like or
Speaker 8: what or fucking what? Like what are you doing?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 8: You can't use strong words to stop a fucking ballistic missile. Yeah,
Speaker 8: there needs to be an ore.
Speaker 2: We're staring at about a century since we had a
Speaker 2: series of conflicts, many of which were based around different
Speaker 2: sort of like regional powers scapegoating and then carrying out
Speaker 2: acts of tremendous violence against groups of people, including specifically
Speaker 2: the Armenians.
Speaker 8: Like a tale as old as time. It's being treated
Speaker 8: as an anti terror operation and you can go back
Speaker 8: to nineteen thirteen during the Genosid, the first genocide, and
Speaker 8: it's the same exact excuse the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 2: Used, well, and it's being treated you know, that's how
Speaker 2: the Azaris are excusing it. But over here, like when
Speaker 2: you're talking about like US politics or about Western policy,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's a thing that's happening over there, right,
Speaker 2: Like it's a couple of countries that most people don't
Speaker 2: know very much about, and like what is what is
Speaker 2: our Why are we involved in this? And it's like, well,
Speaker 2: because this is the thing that we said, like after
Speaker 2: one hundred something million people died, the idea that we
Speaker 2: all kind of came together with was, well, we should
Speaker 2: probably stop folks from doing some of the things that
Speaker 2: led to all of those terrible wars.
Speaker 8: And we just tell people frame it as, oh, those
Speaker 8: people have just been fighting forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, we haven't.
Speaker 8: It's been within my lifetime. Like I'm thirty five years old.
Speaker 8: This war is not older than i am.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like there was not always mass violence between like
Speaker 2: the people in this region, right, Like Azeris and Armenians
Speaker 2: have not been killing each other over Artsak for thousands
Speaker 2: of years, right, Like that's of course there's Armenians and
Speaker 2: is Olds.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they used to live next to one another. We're
Speaker 8: not intractable millennia long enemy. But isn't this isn't one
Speaker 8: of those conflicts that I mean, you shouldn't do that
Speaker 8: with any conflict because it's a scapegoat to get you
Speaker 8: to stop caring and educating yourself about it. But specifically
Speaker 8: in the context of this episode, certainly not this conflict.
Speaker 8: This conflict involves very recent events. Yeah, and it's it's
Speaker 8: tied to major geopolitical events happening in the world right
Speaker 8: now that whatever country that you're living in and listening to,
Speaker 8: your country is involved in.
Speaker 2: And it's I mean, like the the the actual as
Speaker 2: far as I can see that the actual like realistic
Speaker 2: solution here, because this is not a case, right, I
Speaker 2: don't think like shipping a bunch of fucking weapons is
Speaker 2: a realistic thing to hope for. Like the actual realistic
Speaker 2: case for stopping this is putting people in the country
Speaker 2: that uh provide some sort of like barrier to a
Speaker 2: Zeri aggression, right, Like that's like it's taking action we
Speaker 2: saying that we did for Kosovo. Yes, yes, that's exactly
Speaker 2: what we need without without any kind of negotiations or
Speaker 2: debates like that is the only thing that will stop
Speaker 2: what is coming. It's not an if like and this
Speaker 2: is coming and hey online left people, you know, the
Speaker 2: Azaris are buy in Israeli arms. Like this is a
Speaker 2: situation in which, like we're not talking about we don't
Speaker 2: need we don't need guys kicking indoors. We literally need
Speaker 2: dudes standing around to create a barrier by the sheer
Speaker 2: political fact of their existence, right, that's.
Speaker 8: All it takes. And not to mention if you're trying
Speaker 8: to frame this in like an anti imperialist context or whatever,
Speaker 8: Agebajon is literally a fascist fucking dictatorship. Like, yeah, and
Speaker 8: our media, we have our problems, car Bock. They have
Speaker 8: their problems, you know, but they're functioning representative democracies and
Speaker 8: with people in land that they've lived on. It's I mean,
Speaker 8: there are other people who are indigenous to that land
Speaker 8: as well, but it's also theirs. It's if you want
Speaker 8: to think of it in that way, which I don't
Speaker 8: really like to do because it's it's dirt. But the
Speaker 8: real issue here is the people. The people's lives are like,
Speaker 8: it doesn't fucking matter who controls TOPONICRT at the end
Speaker 8: of the day, if people are allowed to live there
Speaker 8: and live their lives in dignity, in the way that
Speaker 8: they choose to live them. Yeah, but that's not going
Speaker 8: to happen if the fascist dictatorship's genocidal armies come storming through, right.
Speaker 8: It's it's simply impossible. And that's one of the main
Speaker 8: reasons why Karabak Armenians and the Armenian State as well,
Speaker 8: has continuously said that Karabak can't exist within the frameworks
Speaker 8: of the Azari Republic because the Azari Republic is demonstrously
Speaker 8: anti Armenian. Like, for instance, if you have an Armenian
Speaker 8: surname like I do, you can't even go there. It
Speaker 8: doesn't even matter if you've even been to this country
Speaker 8: or not. Simply existing is enough to be denied entry,
Speaker 8: Like it's it's not a place. I mean, if you
Speaker 8: want to see how they'll be treated, look how they
Speaker 8: treat their own fucking people. Yeah, it's like asking anyone
Speaker 8: to be liberated by the fucking forces of North Korea
Speaker 8: or Saudi Arabia or something. It's obscene, it's absurd. The
Speaker 8: only thing that like, and I'm not saying I support
Speaker 8: the government in Armenia as any as anybody who knows me.
Speaker 8: I don't support any government, but the only constant track
Speaker 8: they've had is we support their right for self determination,
Speaker 8: as anybody should. And they voted in the eighties to
Speaker 8: be on their own, not to be part of Armenia,
Speaker 8: not to be part of Andrewijan, but to be the
Speaker 8: republic of art SoC because they're the only people who
Speaker 8: care about their own rights, their own dignity, and their
Speaker 8: own right to existence. That's all anybody should ever defend
Speaker 8: is people's rights to do that. Yeah, and ever since,
Speaker 8: they've made a functioning state with free and fair elections,
Speaker 8: ministries that handle these things, ministries of health, ministries of defense,
Speaker 8: ministries of education. It's a functioning republic. It's not some
Speaker 8: statelet that barely functions. And the powers invading it don't
Speaker 8: only mean to destroy those the separatist power, they mean
Speaker 8: to destroy the people that live there. There's no room
Speaker 8: for them to exist in this country.
Speaker 2: So, Joe, what do you expect us to see coming
Speaker 2: in the next couple of days here? As we you know,
Speaker 2: we're about twenty four hours in right now to the
Speaker 2: renewed a Zeri attack on art Sock, Like, what is
Speaker 2: your kind of expectation for what happens next.
Speaker 8: Well, the art sock defense armies doing their best. Yeah,
Speaker 8: I mean, obviously they're fighting as hard as they possibly can. However,
Speaker 8: without immediate international intervention in some capacity, I mean physical intervention,
Speaker 8: a you will stop or this will occur type situation,
Speaker 8: it's only a matter of time until it ends. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: I think that's And to quote the former head of
Speaker 8: Doctors without Borders, you cannot stop a genocide with doctors. Yeah,
Speaker 8: there's only one way to stop it. And you know,
Speaker 8: like I've said a million times before, I believe before
Speaker 8: on your show, Yep, the only thing that's allowing this
Speaker 8: to go on is the unwillingness of literally anybody to
Speaker 8: get involved. And there's a couple of quotes about that. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 8: It's it's not a new concept.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And genide studies.
Speaker 8: As someone who studies war, studies genocide and has fought
Speaker 8: in war, war is fucking awful. And I don't want
Speaker 8: it for anybody. I don't want a Zeri kids to
Speaker 8: conscripts to be fucking dying for this, don't want Armenians
Speaker 8: to be dying for this. But the only thing that's
Speaker 8: going to stop it is someone who is not Armenian,
Speaker 8: not his area, and certainly not fucking Russian to say
Speaker 8: stop or we will fucking stop it. Yep.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's.
Speaker 2: I think that's as as good a point to close
Speaker 2: on as there is as we're going to find. At least, Joe,
Speaker 2: do you have anything else you wanted to kind of
Speaker 2: like bring up before we roll out here?
Speaker 8: I would. I would. This is normally where I would
Speaker 8: say you could support the people involved in this in
Speaker 8: this way, but unfortunately, there's they're under siege, they're surrounded,
Speaker 8: nothing can get to them. There's I got nothing, man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that that is the reality, right, It's
Speaker 2: like there's nowhere to send money, there's nothing to like,
Speaker 2: and to be quite frank, I mean, I think people
Speaker 2: should be harassing their their representatives over this. But you know,
Speaker 2: I'm not overly optimistic. Yeah, the Biden administration has been
Speaker 2: making noises, you know, but but I you know, I
Speaker 2: have not seen evidence that they're going to do more
Speaker 2: than that yet.
Speaker 8: So I will say, if the United States gets involved
Speaker 8: and they really want to turn Armenia to the West,
Speaker 8: which they absolutely should, there's no better time like now,
Speaker 8: this is the chance.
Speaker 9: To do it.
Speaker 8: You want to show that like the West is the
Speaker 8: way for Armenians and pull them completely away from Russia
Speaker 8: because everybody wants to get the fuck away from Russia.
Speaker 8: Like there. Yeah, there's thousands of people marching down the
Speaker 8: street literally saying fuck Russia yesterday. But you need to
Speaker 8: give them a path to do so, and this is
Speaker 8: the way to do it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well shit, thanks Joe. Sorry, sorry, we keep having you
Speaker 2: on the show and this, uh, this situation. I uh well,
Speaker 2: we'll come on and talk about something.
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 2: We probably won't.
Speaker 8: Neither of our shows ever talk about anything.
Speaker 5: About anything lighthearted.
Speaker 2: Check out Joe's show Lions Led by Donkeys, The Lions
Speaker 2: lad by Donkey's podcast Great Military History Podcast. Joe, thank
Speaker 2: you for being on, and please, I don't know, good luck.
Speaker 8: Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 5: Rob Hi everyone, it's me James. And just before you
Speaker 5: hear the episode, i'd want to warn you that you
Speaker 5: can hear our telephones going absolutely mental for much of
Speaker 5: this episode. That's because as we were recording, people have
Speaker 5: found out that SDG and E San Diego gast Electric
Speaker 5: were restricting access to one of the sites where migrants
Speaker 5: were in need of aid, and people were very concerned
Speaker 5: about that, so they were reaching out to James and
Speaker 5: Jacqueline and Pedro to ask for assistance and to me
Speaker 5: to let me know if I could get the word out.
Speaker 5: That's why you can hear our phones going crazy, and
Speaker 5: I think it's good that it's in there in a
Speaker 5: sense because perhaps you can get a sense of how
Speaker 5: mad the last few weeks have been for everyone. Our
Speaker 5: phone's constantly be going off. I'm sure mine a lot
Speaker 5: less than James and Jacquelines and Pedros because people are
Speaker 5: overwhelmed and they need more help than we're able to give.
Speaker 5: So consider that background noise a blessing and I hope
Speaker 5: you enjoyed the episode. Thanks. Hi everyone, It's me James
Speaker 5: today and I hear again to talk about the border today.
Speaker 5: I'm joined by some guests. I'm joined by James and
Speaker 5: Jacqueline from Border Kindness, who we've heard from before, and
Speaker 5: I'm also joined by Pedro Rias from the American Friends
Speaker 5: Service Committee. If you guys would like to introduce yourselves
Speaker 5: and explain the kind of role you play along the border,
Speaker 5: that'd be wonderful if we start with Pedro, because folks
Speaker 5: haven't heard from him before. That would be great.
Speaker 11: Great, Thank you, James, and it's such an honor to
Speaker 11: be on the show together with folks from Border Kindness.
Speaker 11: James and Jacqueline's great to see you again. My name
Speaker 11: is Pedro Rio. I'm director of the American Friends Service
Speaker 11: Committee US Mexico Border Program, which is a Quaker based
Speaker 11: human rights organization. I've been on staff now for twenty
Speaker 11: years working in San Diego on border issues, and it's
Speaker 11: been a whirldwind of two decades of work being able
Speaker 11: to follow this topic. Our work primarily focuses on border issues,
Speaker 11: and we have four components, one of which is documenting
Speaker 11: civil and human rights abuses that occur when contact goes
Speaker 11: awry between primarily federal immigration authorities with members of civil society,
Speaker 11: including migrants and border community residents. Documentation could be case
Speaker 11: evolving abuse of practices, abuse of policies, cases evolving abuse
Speaker 11: of authority, and so on and so forth. We also
Speaker 11: do a lot of policy analysis and advocacy at the
Speaker 11: local level, at the state level, and at the federal level,
Speaker 11: trying to hold agencies accountable, making them more transparent, ensuring
Speaker 11: that there are oversight mechanisms and how they operate, and
Speaker 11: that's done in conjunction with several coalitions at the county
Speaker 11: wide level in San Diego, but also at the national
Speaker 11: level with the Southern Border Communities Coalition and other organizations
Speaker 11: as well.
Speaker 4: And then we.
Speaker 11: Obviously work in allyship with a lot of other organizations
Speaker 11: that have campaigns of mutual interest, some of which have
Speaker 11: been going on for a long time, such as the
Speaker 11: Friends of Friendship Park and trying to gain access public
Speaker 11: access to Friendship Park, which currently is being impacted by
Speaker 11: the construction of two thirty foot border walls. And we
Speaker 11: also work directly with community members and providing information about
Speaker 11: what the rights are, how they can become and our
Speaker 11: leaders in their own communities, and how they can be
Speaker 11: active in straightening their communities and providing guidance to other
Speaker 11: people who might be in the same circumstances. So, in
Speaker 11: a nutshell, that's the work that we do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, great, it's very important work. And then James and Jacqueline,
Speaker 5: you want to explain Folks are familiar I think with
Speaker 5: Border Kindness from the previous episode, but like, maybe what
Speaker 5: have you been doing in the last I can't remember
Speaker 5: two weeks, like since people started being held out in
Speaker 5: the open again.
Speaker 12: So in our organizations kind of always evolving with like
Speaker 12: the evolving needs of the border, and over the last
Speaker 12: i want to say, like years in particular, we've really
Speaker 12: started to emphasize our services being present in the rural border.
Speaker 12: We're based in Mexikali, primarily, our water drops are generally
Speaker 12: in the Imperio Valley region, and we started to extend
Speaker 12: our services to the rural community in San Diego County
Speaker 12: with regards to like day labor, providing aid to micro
Speaker 12: community that's living in rural communities. So all that to say,
Speaker 12: when the border appeared to be having one of its
Speaker 12: episodes of chaos, what's happened in the last couple of
Speaker 12: weeks with folks being detained between the walls down in
Speaker 12: sanny Cidral and then folks being you know, just dumped
Speaker 12: out into the street at the transit centers if we've
Speaker 12: been seeing all over San Diego County. We sort of
Speaker 12: held off because we knew this was going to happen
Speaker 12: in Hakuma. It was kind of one of those sixth
Speaker 12: sense kind of things, like when you see the writing
Speaker 12: on the wall, and it was like only a matter
Speaker 12: of time before people ended up pushed into rural San
Speaker 12: Diego County, and unfortunately that has been the case. So
Speaker 12: we were actually out in the desert doing a water
Speaker 12: drop and heard that that in fact had occurred and
Speaker 12: there were hundreds.
Speaker 13: Of people in Hakkumba. So we've been out there providing
Speaker 13: EID ever since.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so Preps, we could describe these. So there are
Speaker 5: like three things I think people would benefit from knowing about.
Speaker 5: One is the detention of people between the walls in
Speaker 5: San Cathedral, which I think Pedro has seen a lot of.
Speaker 5: I've seen, We've seen each other down there several days.
Speaker 5: The detention of folks in the open desert in Hakumba,
Speaker 5: and this this dumping of migrants to various transit centers
Speaker 5: across the county. Those are the three things we've seen,
Speaker 5: like in massive numbers this last couple of weeks. So
Speaker 5: Preps we could start with explaining her Cumba, and then
Speaker 5: Pedro can take on explaining the other two because I
Speaker 5: know he's been responding to those. So can you just
Speaker 5: tell us, like what you saw, the number of people,
Speaker 5: the conditions in which they're being held, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, usually what we're seeing now, I mean now it's
Speaker 1: currently what today?
Speaker 4: What is today?
Speaker 1: Wednesday? So I know it today is yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: woke up this morning. I asked jacquely on what day
Speaker 1: it was, because it just seems like a broken blur,
Speaker 1: you know, the in and day out. But we are
Speaker 1: on Wednesday now, that's Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Every day
Speaker 1: so far we have noticed a revolving door of roughly
Speaker 1: two and fifty spread out between one to three camps
Speaker 1: every day. There's a camp on the east side in Hokomba,
Speaker 1: there's a camp that's on the west side of Hokumba,
Speaker 1: and then there's a camp that's just outside Hokomba and
Speaker 1: Boulevard that seems to be the biggest camp right now.
Speaker 1: That camp is the largest one because it's kind of hidden.
Speaker 1: You got to drive down from the main highway. You
Speaker 1: have to drive, you know, at least fifteen minutes, you know,
Speaker 1: down some dirt roads, back roads, you know, past ranches
Speaker 1: and stuff like that to get to that open air camp,
Speaker 1: where the other ones, especially like we saw in May,
Speaker 1: were more like wide open, closer to the towns, closer
Speaker 1: to visibility, closer to highway access. And so what we've
Speaker 1: noticed is that speaking with the locals and seeing for
Speaker 1: ourselves that every day the camps that are more visible
Speaker 1: are having less people coming in and they're being taken
Speaker 1: out faster. And so that part I think is, you know,
Speaker 1: it could be done for for a multitude of reasons,
Speaker 1: but the camp that's hidden and out of you is
Speaker 1: the one that seems kind of strategic and seems calculated
Speaker 1: on a greater level that as people are being loaded
Speaker 1: up on vans or buses to be taken out for processing,
Speaker 1: almost the same amount of people gets walked in to
Speaker 1: that camp from the actual border by border patrol. So
Speaker 1: it it's definitely an odd situation that's going on there.
Speaker 1: It seems definitely calculated orchestrated and something that you know,
Speaker 1: we feel that will be going on for quite a while.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let's when we talk about that, right, So, like
Speaker 5: people are crossing and then being being transported, like you say,
Speaker 5: on foot by border patrol to the camp that's your understanding,
Speaker 5: right to that camp in in near Boulevard. I'll say,
Speaker 5: I don't want to give the exact location.
Speaker 1: Correct, Yes, we witnessed that as well. We witnessed on
Speaker 1: Monday night that we were there to help distribute food
Speaker 1: and warm supplies, and I think a total of five
Speaker 1: or six Border Patrol vans had, you know, about one
Speaker 1: hundred people are so lined up and loaded up onto
Speaker 1: those vans. And then right as they were getting ready
Speaker 1: to have the last two vans leave, we saw in
Speaker 1: the distance, in the opposite direction or Patrol their truck
Speaker 1: driving behind a group of roughly eighty eighty five new
Speaker 1: migrants coming in on foot. Right around there's a gap
Speaker 1: in the fence.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I saw people walking in. I was the other
Speaker 5: day before you guys. So I was early, as I said,
Speaker 5: early Monday morning, and I saw the same thing, like
Speaker 5: you know, sort of just after dawn. I couldn't make
Speaker 5: out who was walking home, just because it was dark.
Speaker 5: Can you explain briefly, and then then we'll move to
Speaker 5: to Pedro's situation. Can you explain the services that are
Speaker 5: provided for them by Border Patrol and then what is
Speaker 5: provided for them by volunteers.
Speaker 12: By Border Patrol. It's essentially nothing. When this occurred in May,
Speaker 12: we heard that at most people were receiving an eight
Speaker 12: ounce bottle of water daily, not really distributed in an
Speaker 12: organized manner. Currently, we're observing that people are when they arrive,
Speaker 12: they're at times provided with a sixteen ounce bottle of
Speaker 12: water and potentially a little toddler sized pack of goldfish crackers.
Speaker 12: Border Patrol is not providing any other continued services food, shelter, sanitation,
Speaker 12: anything like that. Those things have all been organized at
Speaker 12: a community level by a variety of organizations such as
Speaker 12: ours that's comprised of just regular people. So it's the
Speaker 12: government's task of managing a humanitarian crisis.
Speaker 4: They have.
Speaker 12: Like really outsourced it to the general community of supporters.
Speaker 12: So they have taken not just the role of not
Speaker 12: having any responsibility towards caring for migrants in like the
Speaker 12: most basic manner, but it also seems like they have
Speaker 12: come to expect the general community to come in and
Speaker 12: fill the gaps that they're not meeting. So Border Patrol
Speaker 12: is not providing them with anything. It's everyday regular people
Speaker 12: that are showing up with blankets, food, water, hygiene items.
Speaker 12: It's getting really cold, so people are distributing warm clothing, diapers, formula,
Speaker 12: anything that people need is being provided by the community.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, a good summary, I think, so, Pedrick, could
Speaker 5: you explain how the how the situation is in sany
Speaker 5: Edra and then also at the transit centers, and it's
Speaker 5: a pretty similar situation.
Speaker 11: I think, yeah, sure, I'll start with Sunny zero and
Speaker 11: the location where community members and organizations have set up
Speaker 11: is known as Whiskey eight.
Speaker 4: There are at least.
Speaker 11: Three other locations that we know where encampman's has formed.
Speaker 11: One is Whisky four, which is close to the last
Speaker 11: America shopping mall. It's an outlet mall closer to the
Speaker 11: port of entry, and then about a mile west of
Speaker 11: Whiskey eight there's Spooners Mesa, and then close to that
Speaker 11: there's ninety one X. The Spooners Mesa is primarily where
Speaker 11: the men's encampment is has been arranged, and this happened
Speaker 11: back in May. There was an incident where Border Patrol
Speaker 11: decided to move all the single adult men and walk them,
Speaker 11: march them essentially about a mile up a hill and
Speaker 11: then up another hill to get to Spooners Mesa. After
Speaker 11: some advocacy last week, we convinced Border Patrol to allow
Speaker 11: two of us to go up there to feed about
Speaker 11: anywhere between three hundred and eighty and four hundred men,
Speaker 11: and it took us over an hour. About an hour,
Speaker 11: fifteen minutes to feed all of the men. Fortunately, we
Speaker 11: just barely had enough food for all of them. This
Speaker 11: was in the evening and as we were driving in
Speaker 11: and driving out, all we could see was milar blankets
Speaker 11: strown about, and that's all that was up there. And
Speaker 11: these were the men that were these milar blankets down
Speaker 11: in Whiskey eight. How community members and organizations have arranged
Speaker 11: the solidarity support stations have been in four set So
Speaker 11: you have the charging station, you have the medical supplies
Speaker 11: and other items station, then you have the food station,
Speaker 11: and then the water station. And so we tried to
Speaker 11: maintain the medical supplies. The food station is available only
Speaker 11: when we have enough food to provide substenance to everyone there.
Speaker 11: We don't want to create a situation where we only
Speaker 11: serve half of the people or a quarter of the people,
Speaker 11: and then the other people go hungry. And mind you,
Speaker 11: it's important to point out that when people arrive there,
Speaker 11: they are hungry, they are thirsty. Some of them have
Speaker 11: rapes because they scale the primary border barrier and injure themselves.
Speaker 11: Others are wet because they've walked through the canal to
Speaker 11: get to that location. I've also witnessed on several locations
Speaker 11: where a border patrol will tell people who are injured
Speaker 11: to walk towards our location because they tell them that
Speaker 11: that's where we will provide them with medical care. Now,
Speaker 11: I think it's important to mention that under customers and
Speaker 11: a Border Protection which is a parent agency of the
Speaker 11: Border Patrol, under their national standards for how they are
Speaker 11: supposed to transform, escort, detain, and search people under their custody,
Speaker 11: they are obligated to feed, to provide water, to provide shelter,
Speaker 11: to treat medical urgencies. Any time that individuals are under
Speaker 11: their custody. There is some back and forth. Orbitrol locally
Speaker 11: will say that individuals are not under their custody until
Speaker 11: they are being transported, even though they will provide them
Speaker 11: with a wristband or bracelet in some cases, tell them
Speaker 11: to remove their shoelaces, direct them to where they should
Speaker 11: be walking y'all at them when they're not forming in
Speaker 11: lines in order to be picked up. Sometimes throw a
Speaker 11: fit and will not pick people up even though they're
Speaker 11: supposed to be there to do that because people are
Speaker 11: not in lines as quickly as it should be. All
Speaker 11: of this to several of our organizations indicate that border
Speaker 11: patrol at some to some degree has people under their
Speaker 11: custody and as such is violating these national standards because
Speaker 11: it's not meeting their needs at any level. Besides maybe
Speaker 11: the bottle of water might provide and the one or
Speaker 11: two granola bars they provide per day, if even that, yeah.
Speaker 5: I think it's the national border patrol. Pio also claimed
Speaker 5: to me that they were not detaining people and that
Speaker 5: people were free to quote return to Mexico, which like,
Speaker 5: these people aren't from Mexico and in many cases, and
Speaker 5: like I think the first day, maybe I saw you
Speaker 5: speaking to one family who come from Mexico, but the
Speaker 5: vast jority of people weren't, and they'd also be entering
Speaker 5: Mexico between ports of entry because they're in the United
Speaker 5: States at this time. So yeah, it's just not those
Speaker 5: people are like, there's lots of evidence that they're being detained,
Speaker 5: even if they say they're not. What then happens to
Speaker 5: those people? They We've all seen it, right, These vans
Speaker 5: pull up. They generally process people in a certain order,
Speaker 5: which which is to take unaccompanied miners and women who
Speaker 5: are alone with children, and then families and then single adults.
Speaker 5: What happens to them once they get on that van?
Speaker 4: Do we do?
Speaker 5: We have a clear sense of that and where they
Speaker 5: end up.
Speaker 11: They will be taken to any one of several borbitual
Speaker 11: stations for processing. And it's that processing stage where most
Speaker 11: of them who are in these locations are there because
Speaker 11: they want to present themselves to the authority and begin
Speaker 11: an asylum claim, and so it's how they answer the
Speaker 11: questions while being processed that they get tracked, mostly for asylum.
Speaker 11: There are some that will be quickly removed from the
Speaker 11: country expeditiously, but most of them will be tracked for asylum.
Speaker 11: They will be given a court date when they should
Speaker 11: show up, and that court date the court location depends
Speaker 11: on where their final destination will be. Technically, Mexicans can
Speaker 11: only be detained for forty eight hours. Non Mexicans can
Speaker 11: only be detained no more than seventy two hours. So
Speaker 11: within that detention period, they then are being transported to
Speaker 11: one of four locations in San die County, two of
Speaker 11: which are in San Diego, the Santi Zeru Transit Center
Speaker 11: in the Iris Transit Center, one in Oceanside, and the
Speaker 11: other in Alcohol. And so we're seeing the majority of
Speaker 11: the people being transported to science Ero and to IRIS,
Speaker 11: and that's where colleagues with other sister organizations are leading
Speaker 11: the charge to try to support them with assisting and
Speaker 11: charging phones, providing food, clothing, getting them to the airport,
Speaker 11: getting them transportation, getting them housing, and as much as
Speaker 11: limited as that's possible, trying to connect them with lost
Speaker 11: family members. Because families have been separated, there are adult
Speaker 11: children eighteen nineteen who also are trying to figure out
Speaker 11: where their family members are. And in some cases, as
Speaker 11: a conversation I had with them, man from Venezuela, he
Speaker 11: had no idea what city he was at either, though
Speaker 11: he was in San Diego, and so trying to make
Speaker 11: that type of arrangement and clarification is always challenging as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and obviously also expensive. Right, Like these things all
Speaker 5: place burdens on like your donation network and both in
Speaker 5: sort of the community in general. And perhaps we can
Speaker 5: talk about like, because the scale of support that's been
Speaker 5: provided by the community is extremely impressive, and given how
Speaker 5: many people have already come through this sort of not
Speaker 5: detention detention system, but perhaps both of you could talk
Speaker 5: about like the support you've been able to provide and
Speaker 5: how people who are not in San Diego can help
Speaker 5: you continue to provide that support.
Speaker 12: So the first day that we heard of folks coming
Speaker 12: in because obviously it's interesting because border patrol, like Pedro
Speaker 12: says like they're claiming that these people are not under
Speaker 12: their care, but they're very much acting as if they're
Speaker 12: under their detained care. They're telling people that if they
Speaker 12: call an ambulance to seek medical care, as we observe,
Speaker 12: they say, well, that's going to affect your case if
Speaker 12: you leave.
Speaker 3: And so people are very.
Speaker 12: Much under the deliberate impression that they are being detained,
Speaker 12: but they're not being cared for in the most basic way.
Speaker 12: And so we first responded on Saturday. By Sunday we
Speaker 12: were there with five hundred meals that went very very quickly,
Speaker 12: providing shelter items for people, so tarps. Hakumba is a
Speaker 12: very rugged desert terrain. There is no shade in these areas,
Speaker 12: so people are making sort of like makeshift shelters, but
Speaker 12: there is nothing shielding them from the sun, which is
Speaker 12: really unrelenting all day and it gets up to nineties.
Speaker 12: So we've been providing tarps, pop ups that sort of
Speaker 12: thing so people are not becoming sick from overexposure. We're
Speaker 12: providing hygiene items, we're providing just basic needs. And that
Speaker 12: gets incredibly expensive because if it was a static situation,
Speaker 12: such as in May when there was eighteen hundred to
Speaker 12: two thousand people, that was a huge undertaking that also
Speaker 12: took a lot of community collaboration to meet the needs
Speaker 12: of so many people. But this time around, as James says,
Speaker 12: it's like a revolving door of hundreds and hundreds of people.
Speaker 12: So it's taking hundreds and hundreds while at any given
Speaker 12: time there may be only and I say only two
Speaker 12: to three hundred people, it doesn't mean that to only
Speaker 12: two to three hundred people needed to be fed that day.
Speaker 12: It's that you know, that is who is there at
Speaker 12: that time. And when people arrive, as bethro said, like
Speaker 12: they haven't eaten in days. We talked to people that
Speaker 12: said that they took two days to walk to Hakumba.
Speaker 12: So if they arrived to Tijuana without much food in
Speaker 12: their belly and then they're having to walk for two days,
Speaker 12: they're arriving starving and begging for food and not being
Speaker 12: provided with absolutely anything. So if it wasn't for all
Speaker 12: of the organizations that are showing up and taking sort
Speaker 12: of shifts to feed people, there would be nothing for them.
Speaker 12: And we have absolutely no idea how long this is
Speaker 12: going to go on. It could be over today, it
Speaker 12: could go on for months year. I mean, we really
Speaker 12: don't know what to expect. And organizations are being relied
Speaker 12: on to provide, you know, life sustaining care for people,
Speaker 12: but we're not being communicated with from border patrol as
Speaker 12: to basically anything, what the outlook is, what the numbers are,
Speaker 12: what the updates of how the situation is going to evolve.
Speaker 12: So every day is a surprise and we need to
Speaker 12: have resources to be able to meet the needs of
Speaker 12: that day. It's incredibly like consuming of every resource including
Speaker 12: time and gas is six dollars a gallon.
Speaker 5: Yeah, now you need to drive your truck right because
Speaker 5: like you can't get to some of the locations, Like
Speaker 5: I know, I have a big get truck and loves
Speaker 5: of my friends about to catch a rye with me
Speaker 5: because I cause can't make it.
Speaker 12: It exactly like, we have people that have gas efficient,
Speaker 12: low priuses and stuff and they're going to bottom out
Speaker 12: out there. So we have our huge lifted jeep that
Speaker 12: you know, doesn't get as much gas mileage as something,
Speaker 12: but it's also going to be able to get the
Speaker 12: supplies out there. So every aspect of it is incredibly
Speaker 12: consuming of resources and we don't know what to expect.
Speaker 12: It's not it's hard to budget. You don't know what
Speaker 12: I expect. So the community has obviously come together in support,
Speaker 12: but then it's like, well, how do we manage this
Speaker 12: when we don't we can't forecast what's going on, so
Speaker 12: it's tough. It's definitely tough. We need sustained support.
Speaker 1: If I may add on that, as Jacquelin said, the
Speaker 1: people are showing up hungry, heavening for days. You know,
Speaker 1: we get reports that you know, people are showing up
Speaker 1: just begging for food, and the federal government more specifically DHS,
Speaker 1: more specifically CBP Border Patrol know this. They're trying to
Speaker 1: stop people out at whatever the endgame is, and maybe
Speaker 1: it's just another arm of you know, prevention through the terrence.
Speaker 1: It's cruel, it's on purpose. People you know, are are
Speaker 1: the ponds and whatever, you know, game is being played
Speaker 1: and it's cruel, and that's you know, we're doing what
Speaker 1: we can to try to offset that as much as possible,
Speaker 1: but cruelty is definitely they're all across the border.
Speaker 5: Just to kind of upbuild on what James said, like,
Speaker 5: I think it's very easy for this construct of migrants
Speaker 5: to like always be like this sort of demonized other
Speaker 5: Fox News and KUSI and all these outlets do that
Speaker 5: very well. But I think it's really important to like
Speaker 5: the people who were being cruel to. Like I saw
Speaker 5: a lady breastfeeding in the desert on Sunday night. I've
Speaker 5: seen grandparents, I've seen people who are eight months pregnant
Speaker 5: little children like these aren't like people who have done
Speaker 5: anything wrong, and they just for whatever reason they come here,
Speaker 5: it doesn't really matter. They don't deserve to be treated
Speaker 5: like that. And like James said, it's something of an
Speaker 5: induced Like I've been to natural disasters all over the
Speaker 5: world and reported on those and seen those, and I've
Speaker 5: been to refugee camps all over the world, but like
Speaker 5: it's some big of a unique to the US problem
Speaker 5: that our federal government can click its fingers and induce
Speaker 5: a humanitarian crisis and then like hold its hands up
Speaker 5: in the air and say we can't help you. Like that,
Speaker 5: Like aside from dictatorial regimes in places I've reported in
Speaker 5: like the people don't governments don't do that very often,
Speaker 5: and like James said, it's these people who paid the price,
Speaker 5: it's not us for the most part. Pedro, could you
Speaker 5: maybe explain a little bit of how American French Service
Speaker 5: Committee has been able to respond and the resources you've used,
Speaker 5: and how you can help make this a little bit
Speaker 5: less painful for the people who are being held in
Speaker 5: between defenses.
Speaker 11: Sure, learning from the experience that we had back in March,
Speaker 11: April and May, we heard a few weeks ago that
Speaker 11: there were people lined up in an area that we
Speaker 11: could not see from the US side but could be
Speaker 11: seen from the Mexican side, just west of the Sandy
Speaker 11: Sedra port of entry, with people wearing and using milar blankets.
Speaker 11: And so the milar blankets were an indication to us
Speaker 11: that people were there for probably longer than four hours,
Speaker 11: and so we kept monitoring that, asking colleagues in Tijuana
Speaker 11: to inform us if they had seen any other groups
Speaker 11: like that, and off and on over the past month
Speaker 11: there were reports of that, and it wasn't until about
Speaker 11: two weeks ago that someone said that they were there
Speaker 11: for a long period of time. So last last week
Speaker 11: we set up what we called an observation post at
Speaker 11: Whiskey eight so that we could determine for ourselves how
Speaker 11: long people were there, what sort of needs they might have,
Speaker 11: and how to respond whether to set up the solidarity
Speaker 11: support stations again, and quickly we determined that that's what
Speaker 11: we needed to do, so we call our colleagues from
Speaker 11: other organizations whenever set up up with that for instance,
Speaker 11: has been extremely helpful and leading the charge in different places.
Speaker 11: The Appreciate Collective So Mutual Group also has been extremely
Speaker 11: important in having their people out there, and Friends of
Speaker 11: Friendship Park also has been important. So all these organizations
Speaker 11: that responded quickly and started to build from the experience
Speaker 11: that we had back in late spring setting up these
Speaker 11: stations to charge phones. Phones our lifeline for people. And
Speaker 11: back in may Or Patrol threatened us and they said,
Speaker 11: if you want to keep feeding people, you can't be
Speaker 11: charging their phones. And so we said, well, we're going
Speaker 11: to have to keep charging phones because people need them.
Speaker 11: And unfortunately Borbtoal backed off then and now it's part
Speaker 11: of what we do right. We charge phones and it's
Speaker 11: how people are able to communicate with their loved ones,
Speaker 11: especially if they've been separated. Feeding people, it's just as
Speaker 11: much as we're able to, even if it's just a sandwich,
Speaker 11: even if it's a warm meal that we're able to
Speaker 11: get through the bars or the secondary border barrier, that
Speaker 11: could mean the difference between someone staying healthy or someone
Speaker 11: becoming seriously ill. Bandaging up small cuts could relieve someone
Speaker 11: from getting an infection, identifying when medical emergencies pop up,
Speaker 11: so an eight month pregnant person who is suddenly having
Speaker 11: labor pains and having a needing to call nine to
Speaker 11: one one, for instance, or insisting with porbatrol that the
Speaker 11: one month old child cannot remain overnight in between border walls,
Speaker 11: and just insisting and insisting and insisting, insisting that the
Speaker 11: two porter parties that they have there need to be serviced,
Speaker 11: for instance. And so all of this advocacy is happening
Speaker 11: at the same time that our colleagues and allies are
Speaker 11: also feeding people, and the constant communication with different elected
Speaker 11: officials pushing on them to take charge and to respond
Speaker 11: has been one of the different aspects of our response
Speaker 11: to what is a humanitarian disaster that has been slowly evolving,
Speaker 11: I would say over years and years, because human migration
Speaker 11: isn't centered around humanitarian needs and human rights. It's been
Speaker 11: centered around enforcement, around militarization, around cruel deterrence, as James
Speaker 11: was talking about, which creates conditions where people are led
Speaker 11: to suffer. And that's what we're seeing right now, people
Speaker 11: suffering because of how this has been manufactured, how immigration
Speaker 11: has been dealt with, regardless of who's in the White House,
Speaker 11: over and over and over, and so now we're challenged
Speaker 11: to respond to these humanitarian needs in ways that are
Speaker 11: stretching our limits, but we're able to do it and
Speaker 11: hopefully lifting up the dignity of people that are placing
Speaker 11: under these terreble inhumane conditions.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it's very important to give people a
Speaker 5: little bit of dignity as much as we can. One
Speaker 5: thing that you mentioned that we haven't spoken about we
Speaker 5: should is elected officials and local federal state governments. How
Speaker 5: much support, if any, have either of these sites received
Speaker 5: from people in elected office.
Speaker 11: You know, we have had support from Senator Seph Bala's office.
Speaker 11: That's been to me oppressive to see how much interest
Speaker 11: there is, how much advocacy there is from staff from
Speaker 11: that office. We have not necessarily had much support from
Speaker 11: congressional or federal senators. We have not seen them really
Speaker 11: on the ground. There is a responsibility I believe that
Speaker 11: the County of San Diego has to meet some of
Speaker 11: these challenging circumstances at the transit centers, they're bocking, I feel,
Speaker 11: and to the detriment of people who need these services
Speaker 11: and need the support. I believe the San Diego Police
Speaker 11: Department has been suggesting where people should be dropped off
Speaker 11: and not listening to folks on the ground about how
Speaker 11: the IRIS station should be central and not dividing the
Speaker 11: drop offs between Irish and Sandy Seso for instance. So
Speaker 11: there's a lot of a lot of necessity for local
Speaker 11: government to be coordinating with state and federal governments and
Speaker 11: and that's lacking again to the detriment of people who
Speaker 11: are cut in the middle.
Speaker 5: How about James and Jack And have you seen any
Speaker 5: sort of government support?
Speaker 8: No, not at all.
Speaker 1: I've you know, heard through channels of you know, sources
Speaker 1: that work for the county and they claim that they're
Speaker 1: handcuffed or that it's Border Patrols responsibility. And then Border
Speaker 1: Patrol is saying it's the county's responsibility, and it just
Speaker 1: it seems like appointing fingers. No one's trying to take
Speaker 1: you know, responsibility for it. And maybe that's because it's
Speaker 1: going to be something that's going to go on for
Speaker 1: a while. It's not something that either wants to you know,
Speaker 1: take on the responsibility of. And you know, you've seen
Speaker 1: county supervisors speak out against it, push them the blame.
Speaker 1: People are here, this is San Diego County, this is
Speaker 1: the United States. Someone needs to take care of, you know,
Speaker 1: the people here. That's that's the role of government. That's
Speaker 1: why people pay taxes for you know, for services, and
Speaker 1: services need to be provided for. You know, we pay
Speaker 1: taxes so other people can get services as well, citizens
Speaker 1: non citizens like that. To me, it seems so easy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1: That's that's everything that you've been told, but everything that
Speaker 1: you're not seeing, you know, in practice. So I mean,
Speaker 1: this whole thing is to us on the ground, it
Speaker 1: seems so simple of how it should be done. But
Speaker 1: like you know, anytime, and we've spoke on it. I
Speaker 1: think on the last episode as well, like money's big issues.
Speaker 1: You're going to spend all this money, they need to
Speaker 1: make sure that their money is going in the right
Speaker 1: pockets that they wanted to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like I was sitting out in her cumba with
Speaker 5: the colleague and we got overflown by a uh sixty
Speaker 5: black Hawk, a Border Patrol helicopter, and it just hobbling
Speaker 5: around checking us out, and like it's just so I
Speaker 5: don't know, it's just so depressing to see this helicopter
Speaker 5: which costs millions of dollars, which are thousands of dollars
Speaker 5: just to take off next to the border wall, which
Speaker 5: got twelve million dollars a mile. And like on the
Speaker 5: same day that the San Diego City Council found an
Speaker 5: amicus brief in this case of the Supreme Court to
Speaker 5: allow it to further criminalize and house people. We have
Speaker 5: all these resources and we're just throwing them, as Pedera said,
Speaker 5: enforcement and criminalization of the most marginalized people in our communities,
Speaker 5: rather than giving a thirsty personal bottle of water or
Speaker 5: like a little baby blanket. And yeah, it's really hard.
Speaker 12: It's one of those agents over time of the day
Speaker 12: could literally feed everybody there. Yes, we're all like you know,
Speaker 12: calculating calories per dollar of like the mule and trying
Speaker 12: to get like every single dollar to stretch because we
Speaker 12: don't know how long this is going to go on,
Speaker 12: because we know that public perception and interest is something
Speaker 12: that is not sustained. And the purpose too, because for instance,
Speaker 12: Border Patrol is claiming and they were on what outlet
Speaker 12: was it CBA.
Speaker 1: CBS eight local San Diego said, I need to report
Speaker 1: that the Kumba camps are cleared. There's no one's there.
Speaker 1: I just you know, I had to step away from
Speaker 1: this this recording for a few to get an update
Speaker 1: that there are people still showing up. There's getting trying
Speaker 1: to get cleared out as quick as possible as people
Speaker 1: show up because it's in the public eye. But also
Speaker 1: now the power company is threatening legal action and criminal
Speaker 1: action against any aid orgs or people they show up.
Speaker 5: Oh great, cool, that'll be fun. Yeah, I mean yeah,
Speaker 5: the reporting on this has been poor, even more poor
Speaker 5: than it was in May. I'll say, like out in Hokumba,
Speaker 5: it's hard to get to. James and I both spent
Speaker 5: a decent junk of yesterday morning trying to direct people
Speaker 5: how to not get lost out there. But like I
Speaker 5: think more persinently when there is not an election or
Speaker 5: like a narrative that migration fits in. It gets, certainly
Speaker 5: by national outlets forgotten with the end of Title forty
Speaker 5: two in May. I think everyone had their like sort
Speaker 5: of doomsday op eds in the weeks beforehand, and then
Speaker 5: that that didn't actually happen in the way that it
Speaker 5: had been sort of like quote unquote experts who don't
Speaker 5: come to the border very often had predicted it would,
Speaker 5: and so folks turned up, especially at Whiskey eight, and
Speaker 5: did the sort of crisis story. But we haven't seen
Speaker 5: that this time.
Speaker 12: And you know, now it's appearing really different because, like
Speaker 12: you see sort of the management by border patrol of
Speaker 12: the situation in order to sort of shield the public
Speaker 12: from like the true level of the crisis. So in
Speaker 12: claiming that Umba has been cleared, I suppose that's technically
Speaker 12: correct if they're referring to the you know, they're relying
Speaker 12: on reality in order to so people, the average everyday
Speaker 12: person that's not immersed in this is going to read
Speaker 12: that and they're like, oh good, it's been cleared. Because like,
Speaker 12: my family back home knows a lot of like really
Speaker 12: conservative folks Outland par Valley, and like even the most
Speaker 12: conservative people I knew back in May were like, oh
Speaker 12: my gosh, how could they have babies out there in
Speaker 12: the desert.
Speaker 13: That's so horrible.
Speaker 12: And people had, you know, a lot of really strong
Speaker 12: emotions to seeing families huddled in the desert for a week. Now,
Speaker 12: it seems like there's a really deliberate management of like
Speaker 12: the pr with respect to this situation.
Speaker 5: So yeah, like.
Speaker 12: Relying on the technicality of Hakumba being cleared because the
Speaker 12: main camp in town has been cleared, but ten fifteen
Speaker 12: minutes away, there's still hundreds of people, and we're the
Speaker 12: ones that are out on social media screaming into the
Speaker 12: void into each other. Hey, this is still happening, people
Speaker 12: are you know, there's an amputee out here whose leg
Speaker 12: is bleeding. There is someone out here who hasn't had
Speaker 12: his heart medication for a week. Like those kind of
Speaker 12: situations are occurring still, while the report and the public
Speaker 12: perception is like, ohhkum has been cleared, it's all good.
Speaker 12: So unless somebody is like already involved, they're generally not
Speaker 12: hearing about it.
Speaker 13: And I think that's on purpose too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's Yeah, that's a very
Speaker 5: that's a very niche technicality. It might not be within
Speaker 5: the boundaries of the town of a Cumba, but like
Speaker 5: people are still being corraled in the desert with no services, right,
Speaker 5: and that that's what we should care about, not which
Speaker 5: district they're in or what have you. So I think
Speaker 5: people have probably heard why now that things are bad
Speaker 5: and we don't know how bad they will be, and
Speaker 5: then maybe they'll get worse, maybe they'll get better, and
Speaker 5: hopefully they'll want to support. So how can people do that? Like,
Speaker 5: what what resource? Like what I guess the concrete actions
Speaker 5: can they take? Where can they give you money? How
Speaker 5: can they send you supplies if they want to volunteer
Speaker 5: in there in the county, how can they do that?
Speaker 5: And what kind of volunteers are most needed?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for Border Kindness, monetary donations are the biggest help
Speaker 1: that allows us to meet current needs, daily needs. We're
Speaker 1: on venmo at Border dash Kindness Cash app at Border
Speaker 1: Kindness Cash, they'll info at Borderkindness dot Org.
Speaker 12: Volunteering volunteering is pretty sensitive, We're not We understand that
Speaker 12: our team is already incredibly taxed, so we do need
Speaker 12: support in terms of like food preparation and getting supplies
Speaker 12: out there, transporting supplies, but it is a very sensitive situation,
Speaker 12: so we do want to I don't know if vet
Speaker 12: or we want to be able to talk to the
Speaker 12: people that want to volunteer, so certain expectations that they
Speaker 12: may have or some certain needs that we may have
Speaker 12: are all communicated really clearly. So the organization very amazingly
Speaker 12: agreed to help us with that task of screening volunteers.
Speaker 12: So people, if they are wanting to do so and
Speaker 12: come out to Hakumba, to email volunteer at Ala dot org.
Speaker 5: Perfect, Yeah, that's pretty good.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I'll send you that info and they can just
Speaker 12: say like what are they interested in doing, where they're
Speaker 12: located and that sort of thing, and then we'll be
Speaker 12: in touch. Primarily, I mean more than anything, Like twenty
Speaker 12: dollars is a tarp to cover a family and keep
Speaker 12: somebody shielded from the wind.
Speaker 13: We can feed a lot of people with one hundred dollars.
Speaker 12: So financial support is the most direct way, even though
Speaker 12: it's not necessarily always feasible for people, it is the most.
Speaker 13: Efficient way for us to be able to buy items
Speaker 13: in bulk.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think even five bucks, right, Like maybe that's
Speaker 5: two people and it really makes a day to have
Speaker 5: a whole meal.
Speaker 8: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 13: Yeah, anything helps.
Speaker 5: So yeah, people can definitely do this. How about for
Speaker 5: American French service cammit be better? How can people donate
Speaker 5: volunteer help?
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean I would. I would also stress what
Speaker 11: Jacqueline said in terms of vetting people and volunteers. It's
Speaker 11: you know, it's not it's not easy work, and we
Speaker 11: want to make sure that when people are volunteering that
Speaker 11: there's a certain level of emotional strength that people are
Speaker 11: able to have. It's very tough work. And at the
Speaker 11: same time make sure that what we're doing does not
Speaker 11: negatively impact those that we are presuming to want to help, right,
Speaker 11: and so that's important. I think going through those channels.
Speaker 11: If you you know the folks that are leading the
Speaker 11: work at the transit centers, check in with them first.
Speaker 11: But then there are other things that could be done.
Speaker 11: The other day, someone showed up with twenty boxes of pizza,
Speaker 11: you know, a very useful, easy way to support connecting
Speaker 11: with people and finding out what the needs are. That's
Speaker 11: another way. If if you would rather purchase the tarps yourselves,
Speaker 11: for instance, do that and then we can pick them
Speaker 11: up we can find out how to meet and pick
Speaker 11: up those items. If you want to donate. There are
Speaker 11: multiple organizations doing this work. I believe someone was working
Speaker 11: on a list to produce for us. Going on the
Speaker 11: website AFC dot org and being sure that you find
Speaker 11: our locations San Diego, so that our program then receives
Speaker 11: that donation directly. If the program goes to the overall
Speaker 11: a f C, we won't see it.
Speaker 8: So just be very.
Speaker 11: Mindful of when you're donating to a f CFC dot org.
Speaker 11: First locate the Sending a program office and then find
Speaker 11: the donate page on there so that we can be
Speaker 11: assured that you are sending it to our program, or
Speaker 11: you can definitely contact me and I could also assist
Speaker 11: you with that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's important that
Speaker 5: both if you sort of centered with regard to volunteering,
Speaker 5: that like there are organizations that exist to serve volunteers
Speaker 5: through facilitating like a service experience to them, and that
Speaker 5: that's not what is happening here, Like this is about
Speaker 5: serving people who are very vulnerable, So like there has
Speaker 5: to be some kind of vetting process and people have
Speaker 5: to understand that, like that's part of keeping those people
Speaker 5: safe and that that's why that's happening. So yeah, thank
Speaker 5: thank you very much for this. We'll keep covering it obviously,
Speaker 5: and I really hope people can find some resources to
Speaker 5: donate because it's been very taxing financially and all these
Speaker 5: groups and in our community generally. Is there anything else
Speaker 5: you guys would like to share before we finish up?
Speaker 11: The only thing I would add is that you know,
Speaker 11: pressing the authorities. That's the other way. If you are
Speaker 11: able to connect with the county, you know, your county
Speaker 11: supervisor in San Diego, press on them that they have
Speaker 11: a responsibility and an obligation to respond to this in
Speaker 11: a way that supports people who need to support And
Speaker 11: that's where I would push towards.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'll add to that that having spoken to people
Speaker 5: in the county and then in state office, like if
Speaker 5: you call, that makes more difference, and if you email,
Speaker 5: so if you have the time to make a phone call,
Speaker 5: that could help a lot. Anything else from you, James Jaqueline,
Speaker 5: That's what.
Speaker 1: I can think of. I mean, everything changes daily, so
Speaker 1: if we were the record them so every single day,
Speaker 1: I'm sure I could come with something new.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, for people to stay clued in with pannels of
Speaker 12: communications such as this podcast that are actually with people
Speaker 12: on the ground and share that with their community is
Speaker 12: really important. Like we're already getting like some social media
Speaker 12: kind of comments. I mean, it happens every time about
Speaker 12: how we're aiding and abetting people breaking the law. But
Speaker 12: it's the government breaking the law. They're breaking international asylum law.
Speaker 12: And it's really important for people who aren't as versed
Speaker 12: in all of this to stay aware of that that
Speaker 12: everybody who is presenting for asylum has a legal right
Speaker 12: to do so.
Speaker 13: Not that it matters.
Speaker 12: I mean they have, like it's a humanitarian right, yes,
Speaker 12: but for people who are very concerned with legality, or
Speaker 12: at least they lean heavily on legality, presenting for asylum
Speaker 12: is illegally protected right, and that's something that is actually being.
Speaker 13: Cut short by the government in violation of that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think you're right. It doesn't really matter. Like
Speaker 5: I really don't give a shit about.
Speaker 13: Like, yeah, come back people that really about.
Speaker 1: It, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, it's good to it's good to remind
Speaker 5: them that they are wrong, both morally and legally exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 5: So what would your social media SPA. If people wanted
Speaker 5: to keep up to date with what's happening.
Speaker 13: Border Kindness on Instagram tends to have the most up
Speaker 13: to date common I mean shares of like what we're doing,
Speaker 13: and that will have updates in our stories and our
Speaker 13: posts of how to help what's going on.
Speaker 5: How about you, Petri.
Speaker 11: We're we're terrible with our social media, but you can
Speaker 11: definitely find some of our work there a f C
Speaker 11: San Diego. Just look for a f C San Diego
Speaker 11: minus Pederal Pedro mostly on on Twitter, some ig and
Speaker 11: I'll be updating some items later today.
Speaker 8: Fact.
Speaker 5: Yeah, one more question, because people contacted me in May
Speaker 5: to ask if they could donate air miles to facilitate
Speaker 5: travel for folks after they've been paroled into the US.
Speaker 5: Is that something that AFSC can do?
Speaker 11: There is another organization that I'm not sure that's what
Speaker 11: you just mentioned a now, the Miles for Migrants.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Miles for Migrants, Yeah.
Speaker 11: Absolutely, absolutely a wonderful organization and that we've used through
Speaker 11: some of our other assists organizations and getting people to
Speaker 11: their final destinations. I would say that might be the
Speaker 11: best way right now.
Speaker 5: Okay, Yeah, so that's the thing people can do if
Speaker 5: they happen to have a surplus of those. And great,
Speaker 5: thank you so much for your time. I know you're
Speaker 5: all extremely busy. I appreciate it. And yeah, hopefully people
Speaker 5: listening will find a way to support if they can.
Speaker 5: Thanks guys, great, thank you.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 7: It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 5: Thanks for listening.