It Could Happen Here Weekly 101

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hello everybody, and welcome to it could happen here. It's
Schreene and today I'm joined by James and Robert to
welcome our guest. In this episode, we are joined by
Adam Broomberg. He is an artist, an activist and an educator.
He was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. His

(00:50):
parents and his entire extended family are Holocaust survivors and
he had a very Zionist upbringing. We talked to him
about how he grew up in apart Height, South Africa,
how he broke free from Zionism as a teenager, and
how he's come to be a very vocal Jewish anti Zionist.
He currently lives and works in Berlin and he's exhibited

(01:10):
his art all over the world. He's also regularly on
the ground in Palestine and he uses his work to
raise awareness about the crimes committed daily by the IDF.
Members of the German government have accused him and labeled
him as being anti Semitic because of his criticism of Israel.
And we're going to get into all of it. I
want it. So let's just go back into your background

(01:31):
a little bit. Your family on both sides are Holocaust survivors,
and your ancestors like fled to South Africa, and that's
where you grew up with your parents. And I read
that you went to a zion the school starting from
age six. Can you tell us about your family background
and your experience going to issi in a school as
a Jewish person.

Speaker 4 (01:51):
So you remember the podcast you did about Lithuania and
that particular character who is the pale who had to
flee from the pug Rams and all that stuff. So
basically this is part three.

Speaker 5 (02:10):
What he's talking about here is the Spanish Civil War,
specifically about an episode we did more than a year ago,
as many of thirty percent of the fallen volunteers who
fought in some units in Spain were Jewish. Some of them,
like al Jakin, who have written about a lot, had
fled persecution in the pale of Settlement at a very
young age and arrived in the USA to relative safety.
But after a few years in the USA, they began

(02:32):
to see the menace of anti Semitism spreading back towards
them through Nazi Germany and later through fashed Italy, and
they decided to take up arms and stop it when
it threatened to overwhelm democratic Spain.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Imagine that kid gets on a boat, and that kid
is my grandfather. My grandfather's name is Joshua, right, and
he's like a towering six foot three beautiful man. He's
studying medicine. He he's fleeing his mother. His family is

(03:05):
not wealthy. The Pilgrims are going on. He's studying medicine,
you know, very bright guy, but every like of sell
in his body says you've got to get out of here.
Also that also he gets this opportunity. He meets a
woman called Dora Klatschko, my grandmother, who's like four foot two, right,

(03:32):
but comes from a very wealthy family in Lithuania. And
it's kind of an arranged set up and I think
Joshua was paid. Anyway, they get on a boat bound
for South Africa. Some landed up in Scotland or oddly

(03:53):
because the boat bound for America there would they would
they would disemb most of the all of the people
on board and tell them they were in America and
then take a whole lot of other people and then
carry on to America so they could double the fee
by the way. But anyway, my so, Joshua and Dora

(04:16):
land up on the boat and they land in the
port of Durban. It's around nineteen thirty three.

Speaker 5 (04:25):
Oh wow, okay, and.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
They speak mostly Yiddish. They've never seen a black person
in their life. They land up, you know, on these
foreign shores. My grandmother, I think headed towards Johannesburg. And
this I got from my mother on her deathbed. My
mom passed away December seventeenth last year, so it's like

(04:55):
six seven months ago. And you know, she'd like she
did it magnifics, and she managed to tell those last
little bits of stories. And one of those was that
her mother, Dora, had had a child who died at
nine months old, and she was ann in Johannesburg when

(05:19):
the child died and Joshua, her husband, was still in Durban.
So you can imagine the kind of the weirdness of that, right,
I mean imagine your imagine your your the father of
your child not not coming to be with you when
you lose your child. Coupled with the fact that they

(05:42):
had both lost I think Dora, my grandmother, was one
of eight or nine children. I think only three survived
the Holocaust and her parents were killed, and the same
with Joshua. So they lost all their family and there

(06:04):
they were at the bottom tip of Africa, right without
without any kind of orientation.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
Really, yeah, can you talk a little bit about you
mentioned how you described it as bottom feeders. I listened
to another podcast you were on and you said that they,
your family suddenly really enjoyed and appreciated the change and
status they had in society. Can you talk about that

(06:36):
a little bit.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
Well, yeah, so you know, they got on the boat
as and their identity we were were there were Jews,
so they were expelled from Europe as Jews. The minute
they toes touched the land in Africa, their identity transformed

(06:59):
from being Jew to being white, right right, Suddenly they
were they were identified as white people, like the word
the word Jew almost like just fell off, you know,
that that yellow star that they had to wear, it
just fell off. So suddenly they were like, oh my god.

(07:20):
They were like utterly privileged, powerful and and in control right.
And with all of the with all of the corruption
that apartheid provided for the elite, for the white for
the white supremacist, for the white the white people, that

(07:45):
the Jews who arrived were able to plug into that privilege.
And there was about two hundred and fifty three hundred
thousand Jews who fled and arrived in South Africa, so
it was quite a big community. And they did ver
fucking well. Let me tell you, and I can tell

(08:07):
you why. I can tell you because my father, who
I just saw about three days ago, what's left of him.
When he was active and potent, he was the top
tax lawyer in South Africa, which means that his clients,

(08:28):
and those clients are people who walk through my house,
came through my house in the seventies and the eighties
were probably the most hideous characters in history. You know,
we're talking soul Kurzner. Sol Curzner started something called Sun's

(08:52):
City and he exploited the Buntustan, the homeland system that
apartheid built, and he built this casino hotel resort called
Sun City.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
At this point in our conversation with Adam, we wanted
to ask about his personal journey into anti Zionism and
where it all began.

Speaker 5 (09:15):
So I think an interesting way to approach this end
would be like, obviously they've found themselves and your parents
have found themselves in this country which is systematically discriminating
against people, right, this is apartheid South Africa, and Jewish
people were at once active in the anti apartment movement,
and as you're saying, also active in the apartheid government

(09:38):
and the apartheid regime. And you found yourself, I guess,
going to this school which was explicitly Zionist. And I'm wondering,
at what point, and I suppose this involves seeing what's
happening where you are as well as what's happening in Palestine,
At what point did you make that connection and be

(10:01):
like her this this like what what? Because you're you're
a very explicitly anti Zionist, right, Like it's what was it?
Something you read? Something you saw? Like what caused you
to make that leap, and how was that received in
South Africa.

Speaker 4 (10:16):
So I think it's a mixture of things. I think
I've got three older siblings, so I'm the last born
by seven years. I've got a brother Paul, seven years older,
sister Man who's nine years older who lives in Israel,
and an old My oldest brother, Jonathan, is ten years

(10:38):
older than me. Jonathan and Paul, Paul specifically was very
politically active, so he started an organization unlike Israel, so
that in South Africa the universities were like the bastions
of the anti apartype movement right, and he was in

(11:02):
newsas National Union or South African Students, and he started
a think called the End Conscription Campaign, which was to
fight against forced conscription of white men who were compulsory
called up into the army at the age of eighteen.
And so given the fact that he was seven years older,

(11:26):
when I hit about fourteen or fifteen, at fifteen, I
went on a thing called ol pun, which is kind
of you've heard of birthright right or pun is something.
So I went to the Zionist Jewish day School. So
every day I'd go I'd have to pray, go into

(11:46):
the synagogue, pretend to pray for about an hour, right,
And I was looking at my school, like my sister
is like a gorgeous archivist, and she made this little
book called Adam's Life. And I was looking at the
school grades at the age of six, and it was
like Jewish studies. And we know what those Jewish studies were, right,
So you walked into the Jewish Studies room and there

(12:10):
was a little blue tint which was the Jewish National Fund,
and you would put your spare change in there, and
that money would go towards making the desert bloom I say,
in like work marks, right, So that was that money
would go to plants in like two hundred and forty
million pine trees in you know which I'm not indigenous

(12:33):
in Israel. But just to swing back. So at about
fourteen or fifteen, what happened is in parallel I was
being told on a daily basis two things I was
being told. Now you've got to remember this was the
heights of also the Cold War. So there were these
proxy wars that were being fought all around South Africa.

(12:55):
In Angola, in Mozambique. Mozambique you had for Lima were
backed up by Cuba, Russia. Right, you had you had
Ruanamo that were backed up by America and South Africa,
and they were running these kind of gorilla bush wars, right.

(13:17):
And many of my friends who were called up in
the military would be flown into Angola or into into Mozambique.
We dropped there, and you know, they were told, look,
if something happens you weren't here, Well, you're not there,
you know, We're not going to come and find you.

Speaker 5 (13:37):
What I'm referring to here are the proxy conflicts throughout
Africa that saw national liberation movements, often supported by Cuba
and the USSR, fighting against various last class colonial regimes
and African anti communist groups. These groups are often supported
by the US and the guys in anti communism. These
wars include the Civil War in Angola, the Namibian War
of Independence, some of those, Ambiquan War of Independence, and

(13:59):
the zimbabwe War of Independence. You might know the last
one as a Rhodesian bush war, but Rhodesia doesn't exist anymore.
Living in the United States, it's easy to use the
phrase cold war as a conflict free standoff mediated by
nuclear powers chess something without enowledging that in many parts
of the world, proxy wars in these post colonial states
and the conflicts of decolonialization throughout the late twentieth century

(14:22):
made that period anything but cold.

Speaker 4 (14:24):
The point is is that so at the age of fourteen,
I'm going to these schools and I'm being told every
day that if apartheid ended, that would mean the end
of the white people in South Africa, right, because we
were by far the minority. White people were by far

(14:46):
the minority, I don't know what it was, ten twelve percent,
And there was this kind of you could see the
fear because the walls started getting higher, the security gates
were built, the razor wire, the electric fences, you know,
it was it became more increasingly visible in the eighties,
the fear keeping keeping apart, tight, keeping people apart. So

(15:13):
I was told all the time, like if aparth he
had ended, that would mean the end of white people.
At the same time, I was told, given that my
community was like second generation Holocaust surviving, you know, the
notion of Israel as a place of salvation, a place

(15:35):
of when the ship hits the fag, that's where we
can go, right, And that we were always told that,
and we were also told daily this is a land
without people for a people without land. That became a
kind of mantra. Honestly, it was like it was said

(15:56):
to me over and over again. Right, So when and
what started happening is I think that I became an
activist at the age of sixteen. There's an amazing she's
now a dear friend of mine. We've reconnected. She's a

(16:18):
theater director called yah El Faber, and we started an
organization called Links the age of sixteen, which was to
educate white kids about apartheid. And what we started to
do was to literally kind of break the apartheid wall.

(16:38):
We'd start doing visits into Suweta, we'd start doing visits
into Alexandria township, and we started forming friendships. And you know,
most kids just didn't go out of the suburbs. And
suddenly we go away on these weekends like led by

(17:00):
a kind of older activists, and we'd all hang in
the same you know, we'd all sleep in the same
dormitories and we start chatting, chatting and smoking cigarettes together
and so like genuine just basic childhood friendship started for me.
And when that stuff that profound very successful. Other ring

(17:22):
that the propaganda of apartheid succeeded in creating, you know,
the black person as the other, as the enemy, which
it does it does in Israel right on the other
side of the apartheid wall is the worst enemy or
imagination could possibly conjure up right, And it's exactly the

(17:45):
same process. And suddenly when I kind of pierced that
wall and that started falling apart, then the kind of
ideology around Israel and the the notion that Palestinians didn't exist,
suddenly they started to exist for me somehow. And so

(18:09):
it was about around the age of sixteen, I'd say.

Speaker 5 (18:12):
And it was It's interesting that it was like through
your experience of living in an apartheid state that you
were able to I think appreciate that like that what
was happening to the Palestinian people was like another form
of set like colonialism.

Speaker 4 (18:26):
I mean, I think, yeah, like none of this, none
of this is intellectual. So I think, like everything that
came to me or has driven to me is lucky
is through lived experience, it really is. So I think
it's like through these friendships that I realized and you know,
like touching, touching skin, and this is one of this

(18:49):
is the difference between apartheid South African apartheid Israel Palestine
is that we were segregated by law, you know, I mean,
mixed marriages were prohibited by law. Sex was prohibited between races.
But the thing is that we were mixed together because

(19:12):
the labor force was needed, right, so that like you know,
the nineteen sixteen Tax Act forced a lot of black
migrant male workers into the cities to work on the
gold mines, which meant that there was the presence of
the other amongst us. And because there was the presence

(19:33):
of the other the other, there was also the desire
and it is a sexual desire or essential desire, and
the smells, and we would touch each other, and we
would walk through the city and kind of rub up
against each other. Now, my nieces and nephews having grown
up under the inter father and because of the apartheid War,

(19:57):
they've been deprived of that dential experience of the.

Speaker 3 (20:01):
Other in Palestine Israel.

Speaker 4 (20:04):
You mean in Palestine Israel. Yeah, So that you know,
they've built they've built this twelve foot there's twelve foot,
seven hundred kilometer long concrete tsunami of a wall that
divides people, which means that you know, until recently, nobody
uttered the word Palestinian because they didn't exist, right, And

(20:27):
so for my nieces and nephews, what was on the
other side of that wall was, like I said, their
worst the worst enemy that their imagination could conjure up.
And children's imaginations are amazing, right, And I did I
did say this a while back where where you know

(20:52):
how Fucos spoke about He spoke about the structures that
were built around the plague, and after the plague ended,
you were still left with these structures. Right now, let's
think about the apartheid wall. You've got the seven hundred

(21:13):
kilometers long, massive like concrete thing. It goes like five
meters underground. Yeah. Now, unlike for coose hypothesis that war
has created the plague, that war has created the enemy,
because what's on the other side of that wall, that's

(21:36):
only that's only accessible through these little checkpoints that are
manned by these you know, poor teenage like little foot
soldiers of the state. That's the that's the only way
to penetrate that war. So on the other side of

(21:58):
that wall is whatever you tell the people is there,
and that's the that's the horror of that situation.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
I actually I'm kind of glad you brought up the
plague idea because you mentioned that on a different podcast,
and I thought it was verly like poetic to illustrate
that a plague can be constructed by the structure versus
actually be a plague.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
And it's it's also kind of worth noting. You know,
as you were talking about the restrictions on interracial marriage
in South Africa, versions of that very much still exist
to this day in Israel, including heavy restrictions on inner
marriage between Israeli and Palestinian people. You know that that's
a bigger topic than I want to just kind of

(22:44):
casually get into it. Like there's a number of restrictions
that exist into the present day because like civil marriage
is not really a thing there as it is.

Speaker 5 (22:53):
In a lot of other countries. Yeah, So I wonder,
like you said that Estinian people existed in your childhood
only as this sort of construct, right, this other construct
and your experience of black people in South Africa has
showing you that those other constructs were false and misleading
and served perhaps an agenda. When you decided that, like

(23:17):
your stance was anti Zionism, and then you said to
your guessing, to your friend, to your family, to your
fellow children at the school, like hey, what this is
fucked up here and this is fucked up there too.
How was the response?

Speaker 4 (23:33):
Well, it's like, you know, one doesn't come to these
decisions overnight and like announce it right, right.

Speaker 5 (23:42):
Yeah, So.

Speaker 4 (23:45):
There's vague memories I have, Like, like I said, I
was on that all Pun trip, which is like this
three week or three month trip. I mean they send
like one hundred and fifteen year old kids. You live
in a building in Jerusalem, and it's basically like this
three month propaganda tour. Right. You're given a Bible and

(24:06):
you're told that that's your guidebook. Literally you like you traverse,
you traverse this place following the stories of the Bible,
and that's meant to be like your holy land. But
I did have one of the one of the it's
called a Madrich, I think a teacher. He was he
must have been eighteen or nineteen. He happen to be

(24:28):
kind of like a vaguely liberal Zionist, and I remember
clearly him taking me to an anti Kahani protest. So
there was still like Maya Kahane was was alive, and
we know that Mayakahani, you know, the Cohanness movement, as
you know, was a kind of you know, they spawned

(24:51):
the ben Geviers and these fascists who are in power now,
but at the time they were deemed a terrorist organization
by America. And and I remember going to an anti
Kahani protest, So somehow that planted a little seed in me.
And I guess, you know, I think that anti Zionism

(25:17):
came afterwards because I was so focused on the anti
apartheid struggle because that's where I was and that's what
I was doing. And my university was either spent like
running battles with riot police or smoking weed. And I
literally went to about three classes. Honestly, I was definitely

(25:41):
the odd one out in my school. I mean, you
know it being a Zionist Jewish day school. I'm still
you know, I'm still probably perceived as like an absolute
fucking avarition. You know.

Speaker 3 (25:55):
Yeah, you did describe your mother in one podcasts as
diehard zion and so I can only imagine. And you
you mentioned your nephew and her husband both were in
the IDF, So I can only imagine. I think It's
it's good to bring up that despite all of that,
you were able to like think deeply about it and
work your way out of that brainwashing. Essentially, before I

(26:16):
get too carried away, let's take our first break and
we'll be right back. BRB and we're back. I want
to talk now about your experience in Germany and how
you experienced like state level accusations of being an anti
Semitic person even though you're just a vocal Jewish anti Sionist.

(26:36):
Can you talk about what led this person I didn't
even though this person existed Stefan Hensel, who is the
anti Semitism commissioner of the City of Hamburg. That's the
position someone has, But what led him to call you
these really atrocious things in so many newspapers and like
basically like just libelists and libelist stuff.

Speaker 4 (26:59):
Okay, so so check it out. So my mom dies
the seventeenth of December. Yeah, I go away to a
yoga retreat where there's like, there's no like coverage. I'm like,
I'm offline. I get back to Berlin and there's emails
from like people are ready trust you know, and serious

(27:22):
people in my life saying, you know, dude, you've got
to respond to these allegations that are in like de
Zeit Billin and zeem Aad's, you know, basically every major
newspaper in Germany and social media all over the place.
There's this character, like you said, Stefan Hensel, who is

(27:45):
the commission of Antisemitism for the state of Bullin. Now
eight of the states of Germany have commissioners of antisemitism, right,
none of whom are Jewish, none of whom were elected.
They kind of semi it's it's super weird they are,

(28:05):
it's semi legal. I mean, like nobody knows that exists.
Nobody knows, like nobody elects them. This character Stefan Hensel,
and I don't want to pay too much attention to
him because he's just like a nebulous Islamophobic pro Zionist,
you know, bureaucrat. But anyway, he does a series of

(28:29):
interviews and to summarize the numerous interviews and his social
media posts, I am called, quote literally a hateful anti
Seamite who advocates for terrorism against Jews. Now this is
two weeks after bearing my Jewish mother, who was a

(28:53):
second generation Holocaust survivor. Now that is that definition of
gaslighting right now? As a white man, it's testimony to
my privilege that I haven't experienced gas lighting on a
daily basis as most women do. Certainly every Palestinian friend

(29:17):
I have, they experience that every minute of their lives,
because their very essence is illegal being Palestinian. You know,
the blood that runs with their veins is illegal. They
don't exist because they're Palestinian. Right, But so I stand

(29:38):
accused of these things, and I'm like, I'm god smacked.
I'm like, and the reason is is because I've been
vocal about my support and solidarity for Palestinian rights, and.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
It was particularly about your support for the BDS movement
right exactly me.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
So BDS boycott divestment sanctions has become a kind of
it's like one of these terms that emergers in the world.
It's like terrorism or war on drugs or what aren't
the terms can we come up with? You know, it's

(30:21):
like it's one of these catchphrases and it's like BDS, yeah,
and it's like it's just like people don't even associate
it with boycott divestment sanctions. If you break it down,
you know what ended apartheid in South Africa. There was
no there was no sudden moral awakening. Basically the Cold

(30:44):
War ended. Reagan and Thatcher, who were total supporters of
apartheid South Africa, suddenly the Cold War ended. South Africa
wasn't that important an asset, and there was national pressure
and you know, more and more people started to see

(31:05):
what the atrocities that were going on, and sanctions and
divestments started to happen. Right, So Polaroid, the company Polaroid
I did a project about this was one of the
first companies that colluded with the South African government but
also divested when they were exposed, and that led to

(31:29):
a number of banks divesting from South Africa. So sanctions
and investments and essentially the South African government in the
late eighties was financially broke. So they were forced to
the negotiation table because they were broke, not because they

(31:51):
woke up one morning and said, oh my god, we're
oppressing the majority of black people in this country, and
and and and and you know, so, uh, it's just
like they were forced to and so so so b
d S, which is a peaceful, non violent means of

(32:19):
resistance that that that started during the second inter father
has become one of these catchphrases, and I'll tell you
a story, and and this all came to a head
around last year's Documenta, which happens in the city of
Castle in Germany. Now, document is a really interesting art

(32:42):
event in the art world calendar, and last year Documenta
was that was was a very very interesting little theater play.
So what happened during Documentary last year is that there
was a group of Palestinian artists who were invited to

(33:06):
show work and their space was invaded and there was
graffiti was sprayed on the walls. There were two things
were sprayed. One was the number one eight seven and
then the word perolta.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
Can you just explain what those both mean?

Speaker 4 (33:29):
I'm not exactly sure, but one eight seven I can
tell you, okay. And the reason I could tell you
is because one eight seven was spray painted outside my
front door, inside my apartment building. And one eight seven,
as any gang member in California will tell you, is

(33:51):
the Californian penal code for murder. And when you spray
one eight seven, it's a death threat.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
Oh my god.

Speaker 4 (34:01):
And so and so what the media did in Germany
is said, oh, no, no, no, hang on, there's a
hip hop band in Hamburg called one eight seven.

Speaker 5 (34:17):
Okay where that came from?

Speaker 4 (34:19):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Yeah, I was going to mention that Sublime also has
a few songs with one eighth seven.

Speaker 3 (34:26):
H They were just Sublime fans.

Speaker 5 (34:30):
Yeah, that song about riots. There was a radical branch
of the Sublime bankler.

Speaker 4 (34:38):
I mean, I'd love to hear this music, but.

Speaker 5 (34:44):
I think you don't want any Sublime.

Speaker 4 (34:46):
No, no, I really do. After this, I'm going to
actually look and listen to But so on the morning
when when so back to documenta. So they spray painted
this stuff and and then there was a furor because
there was there was an Indonesian collective who did a

(35:11):
giant mural and one of the pieces that one of
the characters in this mural depicted an IDF soldier, an
Israeli Defense Force soldier or an Israeli occupying for a
soldier as a pig. Right policeman soldier as a pig.
I mean, that's an old truck. We've all done it right,

(35:37):
you know, they're the pigs. Police are the pigs. But
there was an ideaf as a pig and it was
and so it was deemed anti Semitic, and fair enough,
it's like it's Germany. It's an Israeli person in a
uniform depicted as a pig. It's tasteless, you know, it's tacky.

(35:59):
Immediately they kind of covered the mura, right, but bang
the troops came in. The israel lobby, the Jewish lobby
came in. Boom, right, they seized the opportunity and they hit,
and suddenly the word BDS came in. Right. And so

(36:23):
the two curators from grong Ruper, who were amongst the
collective who were curating that year's documentor were visiting professors
at the Art School in Hamburg, where I had been
a professor for the previous six years, Okay, and Stefan

(36:50):
Hensel like a little kind of surgeon. He pinpointed these
three little nitious, kind of pro Palestinian people that were
inside a German university, and he wanted to remove them

(37:11):
with his little tweezers. And so he grouped us together
and he slammed the word anti Semitism. He accused us
of being anti Semitic, and so he weaponized this word
and this word like it's such an interesting word, right,

(37:35):
anti Semitism. It's so here you've got a guy. Now
he's never declared, and not that it's of any interest
to me whether he's Jewish or not. I mean, I
don't think he has the right to buy into my

(37:55):
lineage of trauma. He doesn't have that right. But he
married a Jew. He named his son, I think David
or something, right, He's there's all these kind of like.

Speaker 3 (38:13):
Gestures to make him seem like he's has the ability
to say these things.

Speaker 4 (38:21):
Not not a loophole as much as a kind of
as a kind of dress code. It's like, my son's
called Yeah, my son's called David. I'm married to a
Jewish person. I've lived in Israel for six years. I
ran the Yidisham, the Israelish Germansia organization, you know, Israel

(38:44):
German organization, which is like, you know, an Islamophobic kind
of weird or weird ass think tank. I don't know
what they do, right, But the point is he has
this guy, and I bet you I would lay money
on it that his parents or his grandparents were perpetrators

(39:07):
during the Holocaust. And this is this is the way,
this is the psychological twist. This is like the beautiful
little oo that the mind does to get oneself out
of like feeling shit about yourself.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, I mean even attempting to remove those people from
their posts is like, that's a great example of Germany
using anti semitism, like weaponizing it at an institutional level.
Like that's a that's really unfortunate. I want to I
do want to mention this really quick. In twenty nineteen,

(39:50):
Germany tried to make BDS a hate crime. And even
though it was challenged and then it was found to
be unconstitutional, that like the fact that that tent was made,
from what I understand, there's still an attitude in Germany
about BDS being this illegal ish thing.

Speaker 4 (40:09):
Totally exactly. So it's like, you know, my father was
a lawyer, as I said, so I know, I know
the difference between law and justice, and I know what
a test case means. So you bring something to trial
means it enters into the the language of society, right,

(40:34):
And when you say, is BDS anti semitic and you
like test this thing, suddenly there's this presumption and there
is a presumption that BDS is anti Semitic. And I
can give you concrete examples of how it's happened, how
it's played out over the last couple of years.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
Oh wait, what I want James to mention? You looked
up that word, right, James is.

Speaker 5 (40:59):
Yeah, I'm familiar with her, unfortunately, and I think this
kind of lines up with the sort of she came
on the scene in twenty twenty one that I had
been around doing antiempitism for a long time. She is
a self self described fascist in Spain. She's part of
a group or at the time was leading a group
called Juvental Patriothrica, which is patriotic youth. And like the

(41:22):
speech that she's most famous for was delivered at a
commemoration for the Division a Fool, which is a blue division.
They're the Francoist volunteers who fought for Nazi Germany, which
you know, if you're commemorating that, you're kind of a
piece of shit. And then she went on to be
a further piece of shit. I suppose by like, she's
very explicit in her anti Semitism, right, she doesn't do

(41:43):
what a lot of these people do and kind of
veil it. She talks about Jewish people as the eternal enemy.
And it's worth pointing out that in Spain Spain has
had what's largely called anti Semitism without Jews, or sometimes
called that because Spain conducted ethnic cleansing or conducted a
literally they'll call it an olympia, like a cleansing and
a removal of Jewish people, and Spanish Jewish population is

(42:07):
still very small, and so this sort of virulent anti
Semitism that were seeing on her behalf, it had impacts
all around Europe, and she was kind of the most
prominent and outspoken anti Semitic for a little while there.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
So that was the name they graffitied along with one
of your seven.

Speaker 5 (42:27):
Yeah, I guess trying to tie this documentar to her
disgusting anti Semitic, which is entirely distinct things, right, like
I think, as you were saying, and like that, by
putting the two in the same phrase, we conflate them
when when they are entirely distinct things. And she, I
think all of us would agree, is a terrible person views.

Speaker 4 (42:52):
But if we dig a little deeper, we get to
the core, which is why did the Nazis and the
Zionists collaborate in the nineteen thirties, Because they had the
same desire. They wanted the same outcome. They wanted the

(43:13):
Jews out of Europe. They wanted them to move to Palestine. Right.
Zionism was a European project started in the early twentieth
century in Vienna. They wanted the Jews out of Europe
and into Palestine. The Zionists did so, they collaborated. And

(43:35):
I think, really, truly, I think that we do face
a real threat of real anti Semitism in Germany. And
I have two children. My daughter is thirteen, her name
is Lennie. My little boy is ten, his name's Marlow.

(44:00):
And if you look at the police report of twenty
twenty two that was released in Berlin, there are multiple
numerous incidents of visual and quite violent incidents of real

(44:26):
anti Semitism. Right, And why are we not addressing that?
Because my kids are in danger? And instead we have
the Minister of Culture, whose name is Claudia Roff. Stand up.

(44:49):
A couple of weeks ago on a Friday night at
the opening of Hakka. There, you know, a huge institution.
My dear friend Bonaventour, who comes from Cameroon is he's
been made the head of this institution. And it's a
Friday night and the whole is full of people, and

(45:13):
it's glorious. It's a beautiful night. I mean, you have
diversity like you've never seen. This is like queer diverse blackness,
indigenous thought. It's queer thought. It's like fucking Peaches is there?
Everyone's there, you know what I mean. And Claudia Raff

(45:37):
takes the stage, she takes the microphone, and what does
she say? She says, and there's silence in the room,
and she says, BDS is anti submittic. Like what the fuck? Yeah,
BDS is antisemitic. And I'll tell you I love Boner. Now,

(46:02):
let me tell you about bonov into A Bonnach came
from Cameroon thirteen years ago. He has a PhD. His
PhD is in biotechnology. He worked all day building pacemakers
while he set up a cultural institution called Savvy Contemporary

(46:24):
and Savvy represented the biopop community in Berlin and in Germany. Right,
Bonner is a genius. He deals with post colonialism like
I mean, he's a maestro. He's amazing what he has done.

(46:47):
He's changed the landscape of this country. He's brought colonialism
into the into the discourse of the country, into the culture. Right,
my fear is is. They've used him as a trojan horse,
and they've got the German States have got their fist

(47:09):
up his fucking ass. And that night when he it
was Bonner's night, it was it was the night of diversity.
There comes this pernicious minister of Culture and she stands
up and out of the blue, she says, BDS is

(47:30):
anti Semitic. Bonner because he's such a graceful, smart man,
and because he knows that we are fighting intersectional struggles
that happen at different velocities and happen at different speeds
and come at different angles. He came up on stage

(47:54):
and he said, we come in peace. It scares me, No, it's.

Speaker 3 (47:59):
It's I could only imagine what it was like to
be there a person. I mean, it sounds mortifying, especially
if you're Palestinian or Arab bird just an anti Zionism
in general. I brought up a story here that I
heard Adam talk about on a different show, but future
me is recording this now because I wanted you to
have some more context to the story so you can
really grasp the irony of it all. It's a great

(48:22):
example of the divide and intensity that happens or that
can happen with anti Zionists and Zionists within the Jewish
community itself. Adam said that some of the people who
he had assumed were friends and allies have disappeared, which
is one of the prices you pay for criticizing Israel.
Adam had been spending more time in Hebron, what he

(48:43):
described as a wasteland. He said in a previous interview
that you spend ten minutes at Hebron and you get
the notion of apartheid, occupation and Jewish supremacy. You get
it and no one has to utter the words. Adam
has documented violence in places like maximum security jails Afghanistan
two thousand and three, Iraq two thousand and five, but

(49:05):
he said that two times he's felt the most existentially
and physically a threat of death. One of those times
was last year when he was in Hebron and him
and his team went to take photos of olive trees.
Olive trees in that area can be two thousand to
four thousand years old, and since nineteen sixty seven, Israeli
settlers have destroyed one million of these trees. I have

(49:28):
an episode about this and the significance of the Palestine
olive tree, about how it's not only an immensely important
crop but also a symbol of Palestinian culture and resistance.
I talk about this in that episode as well, but
it bears repeating that destroying olive trees is one of
the most clear examples that Zionism isn't about wanting to
return to a sacred land that is destined to you. Instead,

(49:52):
Zionism is hateful and inexcusable. Adam shares this sentiment, which
I appreciate, and I really loved learning about his work
with olive trees. I just don't think Zionists have any
kind of rebuttal or reasoning to support why the hell
they keep destroying olive trees decade after decade, Like in
what universe can you say and believe that you have

(50:14):
a genuine attachment to that land, a biblical right to
that land? Like how could you say that you love
that land as a sacred space but then also go
and destroy what Adam describes as its quote oldest indigenous citizens,
aka the olive trees. That's not a person who loves
that land that it's a person who was driven by hate.

(50:38):
So Adam is working to preserve and protect these trees.
Settlers pour gasoline down the center of the tree trunk,
so by the time you see smoke, the tree is
already dead. He was there and have Brun with a
camera taking photos of the trees, and then Jewish settlers
sent these packs of kids that he said were ages
five to seventeen, dressed in full religious garb, accompanied by

(50:59):
these reals military. Adam and his crew kept getting attacked
by these kids as the military stood by, but he
explained that you can't lift a finger to defend yourself
because these kids are miners. Adam talked about this and said,
if I was Palestinian and I pushed back, I would
be shot on the spot. The fact that I'm Jewish,
I would just be removed and the work would simply

(51:22):
be over. So he got beaten pretty badly several times,
and apparently there's footage of it somewhere, and his experience
and have Bron again is one of those two times
that he's felt the most existentially and physically at the
threat of death. The second time happened a few days later,
which is the story. I briefly mentioned to him in
the recording that we did that I want to talk

(51:43):
about more here. So a few days after that incident,
Adam returned to Berlin and it happened to be the
anniversary of krystel Nacht or the Night of Broken Glass,
which is widely known as the beginning of the Holocaust.
It's also called the November Pagrome, and it was a
pugrum against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party with

(52:03):
some participation from the Hitler youth and German civilians throughout
Nazi Germany on the ninth and tenth of November in
nineteen thirty eight. The German authorities looked on as this
happened without intervening. The name Krystelnacht is literally translated to
crystal knight, and this name comes from the shards of
broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of

(52:26):
Jewish owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed. So back
to Adam's story, a memorial for Krystelnacht is held at
the site of the two oldest synagogues that had been
burned down in Germany. Adam arrived there with a crew
holding signs that said Jews against Fascism. Everywhere. He's surrounded

(52:48):
by fellow Jewish people, And this big guy comes up
to Adam, and Adam describes this guy as being much
bigger and much taller than him. And so this big
guy looks down at Adam and he says, get rid
of those signs. Who gave you the right to be here?
Adam responded, quote the death of ninety percent of my family?
What troubles you about the sign? Are you anti Semitic?

(53:11):
Are you fascist? Are you bothered by the word everywhere?
Have you got this weird synesthesia thing where you see
the word everywhere and you see Israel? Do you think
I'm implying that there's a possibility that Israel could have
fascist traits? In response to this, this big guy starts
attacking Adam. So Adam ran absolutely terrified. He ran and

(53:35):
sought protection from the German police. The irony of a
Jewish person feeling his life threatened by another Jewish person
and then seeking refuge from the German police. Adam says,
this was the most surreal moment of his life.

Speaker 4 (53:52):
So so ironic. But let me flip that story on
its head, right And now, okay, So it's nineteen eight
and I am on the front page of a newspaper,
and I get home to my mother and she's furious.
She's fucking furious because there I am on the front

(54:12):
page of the newspaper and I'm hold, I'm there, my
face is there, and I'm holding up a flower, and
in front of me is a is a South African
riot policeman. Right, And it was one of the demonstrations
I was at at the age of eighteen, on the
campus at Vitsa University, all right, And I got into

(54:35):
ship from my mother, who said, what the fuck are
you doing standing in front of the riot police. I
got into ship from a black student society because we,
as white students, took orders from a black student society.
He said, what are you doing holding a flower to
the fucking pig. It's like, this is this is not
the nineteen sixties. We're fighting a struggle. So I got

(54:57):
in ship from both sides. Right now, cut to May
a few months ago, I mean Iranian Platz. There is
a commemoration organized for the ongoing Knuckba. All right, we
know what the Knuckba is, the catastrophe, right, so in
nineteen we don't have to explain that, but all for

(55:21):
two the year before that, all commemorations for the Knackbar
were banned, and in May, the commemorations for the Knackbar
organized by Palestinian groups were banned. So yidsha Stima, which
means Jewish voices the organization. They organized a commemoration and

(55:42):
we gathered together on a beautiful Sunday morning, and you know,
it was really lovely, and there were kids there, there
were old people. It was great and we were all
all gathered together there and we gave the platform to
some Palestinian voices who were just speaking about freedom from

(56:02):
the river to the sea, you know, and suddenly the
riot police came boom, boom, boom, you know, lines of
them intercepted us. And I was faced again at the
age of fifty two, not eighteen, so flipped from nineteen
eighty eight to twenty twenty three. And I'm facing eye

(56:25):
to eye with a fucking white riot policeman and it
was the same riot policeman. And you know what I
said to him. I said to him, where was your
grandmother during the war? And he didn't answer me, and
I said, do you know where my grandmother was? And
he said, I don't care, at which point I turned

(56:50):
around and two or three, and there's there's footage of
this from every single angle. Two or three of these
right policemen jumped on top of me, brutally beat me
and arrested me, handcuffed me. The handcuffed me so tightly
that they had to call the fucking fire brigade to

(57:13):
cut the handcuffs off me. And hang on, it gets worse.
Then an hour later, I'm on the front page of
the Berlin Zetel. There I am being marched off by
German police, riot police, and you know what, the headline says,
one hundred anti Semitic Palestinian protesters disrupt Jewish memorial. Check

(57:40):
it out, Check it out, and you know what, I
think it's still up there. Yeah, Okay, this is where
we're at. This is where we're at in this country. Like,
forget fact checking. This is not a Palestinian. I'm a
fucking Jew. You've arrested, had a fucking third generation Holocaust

(58:02):
surviving Jew, your mother fucking Nazi. And they tell me
de Nazification never happened in this country. There's no such
thing as neo Nazis. They're Nazis man and this Stefan Henzl,
he wants the Jews out of Germany. That's what's underneath

(58:22):
all of the shit, right, because if they were worried
about antisemitism, let's talk about antisemitism, okay, because I've got
kids and they need to be safe.

Speaker 5 (58:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
I mean I was reading the other day a news
article from I think fifty one or fifty two that
was about one of the god Now I was facing
at his name, but he was. He was a Wehrmacht
general who was you know, commanded troops on the Ast Front,
survived the war and later got into German politics, And
it was just a it was an article about one
of his political rallies where protesters were like broken up,

(59:00):
beaten up by German police officers. And it's kind of
this this same like, yeah, what were your what was
your family doing during those twelve years? You know, like
it's it's really it's a question you can ask, but
it's rarely really a question, right, right, Yeah, Like there
was never any That's such an important point, you know,

(59:20):
particularly when we talk about like why there is you know,
such what you can call technically support for Israel that's rooted,
as you noted, often in just getting Jewish people out
of Germany, like there was never any kind of real denazification.

Speaker 5 (59:35):
No, yeah, no, no, no systemic level.

Speaker 4 (59:37):
This is all about white supremacy, man, because I'll tell
you what. And this goes deeper. On the fifteenth of July,
they made a law in Berlin that all public swimming pools.
They claim that there was a rise in violence in
public swimming pools in Berlin, Okay, reticularly in Neikol and Kreutzberg, which,

(01:00:03):
as we know, are the areas of migrants, particularly Palestinian
Middle Eastern migrants. Right. And in fact, if you look
at the statistics from twenty nineteen to two twenty twenty two,
violence has gone down by twenty one or twenty three percent,

(01:00:25):
I can't remember correctly, so that's incorrect. But now we
have a state a position where at the entrance of
every swimming pool there is a police fan and they
are ethnically and racially profiling people who come into swimming pools. Right.

(01:00:48):
And there is basically a law that says that there
shall not be more than three men read three men
of color in a public swimming pool. Okay, And this
is where we're heading. Felix Klein, who's the federal Commission
of Anti Semitism Stephan Henzel, who's the Hamburg one these

(01:01:13):
people that the mayor of Berlin. On Pentecost night, he tweeted,
check out check out his tweet. He tweeted something It
went like this, It said, we wish everybody a happy
Pentecost and we wish our guests a lovely time our guests.

(01:01:35):
This is like, dude, I mean, you know.

Speaker 6 (01:01:41):
That Christian it's grim It's fucking grim man. And you
know these people want a white they want a white
Aryan Christian fucking country. They want the dark people out.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
I mean that's a huge part that people don't realize,
as that Zionism is mostly white supremacy, mostly very anti
anti Jewish, because that's its advocates for, just like the
expulsion of the Jews.

Speaker 4 (01:02:07):
Again, well, it's a fucking mental illness, is what it is.

Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
I don't disagree with you.

Speaker 5 (01:02:15):
I just wanted to reflect, like maybe as we as
we end up on how far the needle has swung
when we talk about like anti Semitism, anti Zionism, and
sort of where they because they do have a lap, yeah,
but they don't know they are not the same thing.
And I think about how there's this a letter of
that is the New York Times published like it was
in the late nineteen forties forty eight, forty nine. It

(01:02:37):
co signed by a lot of prominent Jewish intellectuals, including
Hannah Rent Albert Einstein, talking about the settler policies in
Israel at that time by Zionist groups at that time
as fascist, which is something that would now be considered
to be like antisemit, Like that's calling Israel fascist was

(01:02:57):
what got you chased at him by that guy. It's
considered to be anti Semitic in Germany, right, And these
are people who you know, had lost family members, you know,
they can their nuclear family to the Holocaust, like prominent
Jewish intellectuals who would now be considered I guess anti
semitic under this by saying shit, New York Times would

(01:03:18):
publish and the Times would have publish that.

Speaker 4 (01:03:20):
Now. Yeah, you know, a few of us got together
in Iranian plus in a place where we were arrested
in May a few like Jewish friends of mine, like
some from Brooklyn, some from Israel, some from here, and
you know, five nights ago a young Palesan man was

(01:03:41):
arrested by twelve Israeli policemen and they branded a they
cut with a knife the Star of David into his child. Yeah,
and there's footage of this, and they literally cut the
Star of David into his cheek. And we wore red

(01:04:03):
Stars of David at the schedule tonight, and it just
strikes me as ironic. You know, like eighty years ago,
my ancestors were forced to wear a yellow star as
a lapel on their armband or stuck to their jackets
to shame them, to declare them as Jews, as dirty

(01:04:27):
Jews in public. And now I feel like I've got
to wear this red star because of our collective shame,
because of what's being done in our name by the
State of Israel and by Zionism. And this is not
allowed to be done in my name. Really, sorry to

(01:04:52):
be so grim. Fuck no, I mean, if.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
There was ever an ending story.

Speaker 5 (01:04:56):
Yeah, yeah, it's a.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
Grim story, but I think it's a great place to end.
There's still so much I want to ask you. I
would love to know your thoughts about like liberal Zionism,
but that's gonna have to wait for next time. Thank
you for giving us time in the middle or the
early mornings.

Speaker 4 (01:05:10):
Thank you so much of course.

Speaker 5 (01:05:12):
Yeah, Adam, where can people find you online and help
support the advocacy you're doing.

Speaker 4 (01:05:18):
Mostly I'm a bit of a geriatric, so I'm just
on Instagram. Adam Broomberg put it in.

Speaker 3 (01:05:25):
The description for anyone that is curious. Thank you for
doing your work. Everyone will follow Adam, make sure everyone doesn't.
Let's let's protect Adam. Let's protect Adam and his family
out there. But thank you again.

Speaker 4 (01:05:40):
Thank you guys.

Speaker 5 (01:05:41):
Yeah, thank you, thank you. Adam really appreciate me.

Speaker 3 (01:05:45):
And that's the episode.

Speaker 5 (01:05:56):
Hi everyone, it's me James, and I'm coming to eat today, sweaty,
smelly and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the
desert where I have been spending the weekend trying my
best to help, along with lots of other dedicated mutual
aid workers, to mitigate the damage done by an entirely
preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States southern border. People

(01:06:20):
are being held in the open desert in Hakomba, where
it gets hot in the day gets very cold at night.
And there are children, there are old people, there are
young people. All the support they're getting it's from mutual
aid workers. Then maybe get some water from border patrol,
from federal government, and not much else. And I'm here
before your podcast to ask you if you can to help.

(01:06:43):
We've all spent all of our time and most of
our money the last few days week trying to help,
and we're all pretty broke, and we're all pretty tired.
But I could really do with your support. And I'm
going to give the venmos and cash apps and pay
pal information for two organizations who I dearly love and
whose work I have seen is extremely effective and is

(01:07:05):
the only thing keeping this situation from being a lot worse.
And please don't think that if you don't have much
money that you shouldn't give. We can do a lot
with a little. So if you only have five bucks,
that is great. And five bucks is are top for
someone to sleep under or a few hot meals. And
what we're going to buy is food, blankets, tops, water,
the things that stop people dying in the desert. Those

(01:07:26):
two organizations, Border Kindness and Free Shit Collective, can be
found online at border Kindness and at free ship PB
on Twitter for Border Kindness, The venmo is at border
hyphen Kindness. The cash app is dollar sign border Kindness
Cash and the zell and PayPal. Information is info at
Borderkindness dot org. Free Ship Collective are at free ship

(01:07:48):
Collective on cash app and PayPal and at free shippbe
on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys.

Speaker 4 (01:07:58):
Welcome Jake.

Speaker 7 (01:07:59):
It happened here a podcast about things falling apart and
sometimes how to put them back together again. I'm your host,
Bio Wong. Now, this is not one of those times
where it's about how to put things back together again.
This is one of those episodes about why everything is
absolutely awful. And one of the reasons why everything is
absolutely awful, and something I've been driven progressively more and

(01:08:19):
more insane by in the past sort of half a
decade is the way people think and talk about class
in the United States. Why, for example, do people think
that Trump is working class? Why am I watching people
argue that being a barista isn't actually being a worker.
Why are all these millionaires driving forward f one fifties
while simultaneously claiming that they are also somehow working class.

(01:08:42):
Why are billionaires fleeing to Colorado and Wyoming to cause
play as workers about wearing jeans and T shirts to bars?
Why is every weight ring dipshit posting the same video
of a guy in an oil rig committing approximately sixty
thousand OSHA violations. Why is it that the only part
of the working class that anyone ever seems to call
the working class is the white working class. Why is

(01:09:04):
it that when people talk about the white working class
and then try to explain it with data, and this
is true across the entire ideological spectrum, why do they
start defining working class by things that are objectively not class,
like education levels. This reached a breaking point with me
a few weeks ago and has finally caused me to
snap and write this now, I've given the game away

(01:09:27):
a little by leading with the white working class stuff,
because a lot of the reason that everything sounds so
nuts is that when people talk about class in the US,
most of the time, what they're actually talking about is
race and gender. And this pisses me off because I
think more about class that a lot of people with
my ideology usually do, and I think it can actually

(01:09:48):
be a very useful way to understand the world. However,
comma thinking and talking about class as a kind of
floating signifier that you can just jam conservative racial and
gender politic into is a really, really bad way to
talk about class. On top of just the racism and
the sexism, this way of looking at class reduces class,

(01:10:09):
which is a social relation, into esthetics and grievances. And
this leads to the question how did this all happen? Now,
you could take a really expansive look at this here
and go back to Aristotle or start later with Locke
or something. But I'm not going to do that because, well, okay,
partially because this would be seventeen years long if I

(01:10:31):
tried to do this, and this episode is already now
three episodes. The other reason I'm not going to do
this is that the actual story of how everything got
like this is the story of how the right adapted
and distorted the incredibly successful leftist conception of labor that
built the identity of the working class in the eighteen
and nineteen hundreds. And in order to do that, we

(01:10:54):
need to talk about the labor theory of value. Now,
when I talk about the labor theory of value, there
there are two things going on here. You have, on
the one hand, Marx's law of value, and then you
have the set of slogans that are passed down the
mainline of the workers movements and these are not these

(01:11:15):
are not the same thing at all. Even though when
someone just says the labor theory of value, if that's
a thing that you've heard of, you probably immediately think Marx. So,
for example, let's get into a sense of sort of
what this, this kind of like sloganeering looks like. Here's
the beginning of the Gotha Program, which is the program
of the German Social Democratic Party in late eighteen hundreds.

(01:11:36):
It begins, quote, labor is the source of all wealth
and all culture. Now Marx hates this line. He writes
a thing called the Critique of the Gotha Program, where
he goes on a giant rant about how you know,
nature also produces use values and so on and so forth.
But you know, Marx just sort of bitterness at this aside,

(01:11:57):
labor is the source of all wealth is a very
very common sentiments. It's the expression of the sort of
common understanding of production, class, and nature of value. In
the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the anthropologist David
Graeber pointed out, Abraham Lincoln, a man who is by
no means a socialist and is in fact the President
of the United States, talks like this. Here's Lincoln quote,

(01:12:20):
labor is prior to an independent of capital. Capital is
only the fruit of labor and could never have existed
if labor had not existed. First, labor is superior of
capital and deserves much the higher consideration.

Speaker 8 (01:12:36):
Now, this is.

Speaker 7 (01:12:37):
Obviously not something you'd ever hear from a president of
the United States today, and we'll come back to Graver's
argument about why that is later. But I want to
get a bit deeper into not just the common conception
of the labor theory of value, but what the sort
of capital w capital m worker's movement believed in. And this,

(01:12:58):
as it turns out, has a tenuous relation to Marx,
but is not the same thing, and I think is
different enough that I'm actually not going to spend another
like fifteen minutes trying to explain Marx's version of the
labor theory of value or Marx's law of value, because
it doesn't ultimately matter that much, which is which is
a very weird thing to say about the actual sort

(01:13:22):
of you know about about about sort of Marx's role
in labor movement, but it kind of doesn't. So what
I'm going to do instead is read, well, I should
I should, Okay, I should also mention like we are
going to get a bit more into like the things
that Marx actually wrote and why they mattered to the
specific movement, like next episode.

Speaker 8 (01:13:42):
But you know, we'll do, we'll do.

Speaker 7 (01:13:44):
We'll deal with that tomorrow. And in the meantime, I'm
going to read a bit from the journal end notes
from a Unity and Separation supporting workers claims to respectability
was a vision of their destiny with five tenants. One,
workers were built a new world with their own hands.

Speaker 8 (01:14:02):
Two.

Speaker 7 (01:14:03):
In this new world, workers were the only social group
that was expanding, whereas all other groups were contracting, including
the bourgeoisie. Three, Workers were not only becoming the majority
of the population, they were also becoming a compact mass,
the collective worker who was being drilled in the factory
to act in concert with the machines.

Speaker 8 (01:14:24):
Four.

Speaker 7 (01:14:24):
They were thus the only group capable of managing the
new world in accordance with this innermost logic, neither a
hierarchy of order givers and order takers, nor the irrationality
of market fluctuations, but rather in every more finely grained
division of labor.

Speaker 8 (01:14:40):
Five.

Speaker 7 (01:14:41):
Workers were proving this vision to be true, since the
class was realizing what it was in a conquest of power,
the achievement of which would make it possible to abolish
class society and thus bring Man's prehistory to a close.
This is the basis of the formation of the identity
of the working class. It's how people understand themselves as workers,

(01:15:03):
you know, and so in Marxist terms, this is the
class in itself becoming the class for itself, you know.
This is this is this is this is the identity
that produces the workers movement. It's the expression of what
people believe about themselves. Now, there are ingrained ideological assumptions
here that go sort of beyond peer arguments about class.

Speaker 8 (01:15:25):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:15:25):
This is an argument about a very specific kind of
factory worker. And in some sense I think the focus
on the factory worker as like the sort of emblematic
like bearer of this And this is true both of
the theorist of the time and from people like end
Notes who are looking back on it from like one
hundred years later. I think this is kind of a
distraction from what a lot of the actual base of

(01:15:47):
the workers movement is, which is to say, like coal
miners and workers involved with energy logistics. You know, you
could take for example, like the beating heart of the
anarchist movement in much of the twenties and thirties are
these Andalusian coal mine whose militancy and ability to sort
of control the supply of coal that you know, capital
the capitalists class relied on for production gave them enormous

(01:16:08):
leverage and as the sort of as a historian Timothy
Mitchell has argued, it was, it was this sort of
capacity to you know, break the economy through shutting off
the coal supply, through strikes and sabotage, which workers you know,
were workers at the time, like think of like the
strike as a kind of sabotage and it's but it's

(01:16:29):
this capability that informs a lot of the sort of
politics intensive possibility of the twentieth century work as movements
and you know, given what, but you know, like given
what what the people who are like you know, working
in a coal mine or like you know, are are
like a doc worker or you know, it's like if

(01:16:50):
you are working in a factory, right, it makes sense
that these people believe this right, you know, in terms
in terms of you know, if if if you're looking
at some thing like you know, workers are building the
new world with their hands, right, or like we're you know,
we're the only social group that's expanding. We're the only

(01:17:10):
people who are like capable of like managing the new
world according to its own logic. This makes a lot
of sense if you are one of the people who
live in a world that has effectively disappeared. Now, you know,
and that and that is a world where you literally
are watching cities be constructed out of like you know,
the tiny shells of villages.

Speaker 8 (01:17:32):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:17:32):
The only way you can sort of experience that now
is if you were one of the people in sort
of the late the nineties and the two thousands in
China who you know, like watch shen z En turn
from a fishing village into one of the largest cities
in the world. But that's not really a thing anymore.
But on the other hand, like, this is what these
people are experiencing, and this is a group of people

(01:17:52):
who can literally feel in their hands the sort of
the power and the value of the labor in what
they're producing. They can, you know, they can see commodities
appear in the world, and they can know that it
was you by their hands that the world was built.
And this is not you know, this is not purely
a metaphor, right, These are people who are literally creating

(01:18:12):
the world around them. To quote one of the verses
of Solidarity Forever that modern trade unions hilariously notably do
not include in the version of In the version of
the song that they tend to sing at things, the
trade union version drops a bunch of verses, and one
of those verses is in our hands is placed to

(01:18:33):
power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might
of armies multiplied a thousandfold, We can bring to birth
a new world from the ashes of the old.

Speaker 5 (01:18:41):
For the union makes us strong.

Speaker 7 (01:18:44):
And this is both the positive vision of the workers
movement and its own sort of theoretical self conception wrapped
into one. It is the sort of rosy romantic picture
of what the worker's movement is. However, Comma, this is
the incredibly romantic version of this. And before we sort

(01:19:04):
of leave the world of pure romance and go into
these sort of dirty and grimy worlds of reality where
everything kind of sucks and things are not what they
normally seem, we are going to take an ad break
and we're back now.

Speaker 8 (01:19:23):
There are a lot of.

Speaker 7 (01:19:24):
Things about this work as movement that if you just
sort of look at it theoretically, or if you know,
you're looking at these one of the sort of like
incredibly sort of rosy self caricatures. I guess if you're
purely looking at the kind of propaganda that the movement
produces in order to create itself, you are going to

(01:19:46):
get a very distorted picture of sort of what was
actually going on on the ground. And this also makes
it very very difficult to understand what happened, because, you know,
if if you want to understand how this movement was
defeated and how the like all of the sort of
branches of the Worker's movements, like all of his different ideologies,

(01:20:09):
all of those different manifestations are essentially destroyed, you have
to get to the point where you are you start
to realize that the ideological conception of productivity right of
the producer of you know, like of of what the
worker is was never as sort of dry and objective
as theorists wanted us. And you know, you got the

(01:20:29):
sense that they wanted like themselves to believe. Case in
point is the nature of what Marx calls the lump
and proletariat. So here's from endnotes again, who were these
lump and proletarians preaching anarchy? Attempts to spell that out
usually took the form not of structural analysis, but rather

(01:20:50):
of long lists of shady characters, lists which collapsed in
on themselves in a frenzied incoherence. Here is Marx's paradigmatic
discussion of the lump proletariat from the eighteenth through mayor
of Louis Bonaparte, on the pretext A founding a benevolent society,
the lump and proletariat of Paris had been organized into

(01:21:10):
secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents. These lumpen
supposedly consisted of quote, vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jail birds,
escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mounton bunks, lazaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps,

(01:21:31):
brothel keepers, porters, litter, roddy, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.
In short, the whole indefinite, disintegrating mass thrown hither and
thither from which the French call labohem. Is there any
truth in this paranoid fantasy? Do escaped convicts and organ

(01:21:51):
grinders share a common counter revolutionary interest with beggars, which
distinguishes them from the common mass worker, who are currently
revolutionary by nature. To think so is insane. The lumpen
proletariat was a specter haunting the worker's movements. If that
movement constituted itself for the dignity of workers, then the

(01:22:13):
lumpen was the figure of the undignified worker, or miraculately,
the lumpen was one of its figurations. All of the
movement's efforts to give dignity of the class were supposedly
undermined by these dissolute figures drunk singing in the streets,
petty criminals, and prostitutes. References to a lumpen proletariat registered
what was a simple truth. It was difficult to convince

(01:22:34):
workers to organize as workers, since mostly they didn't care
about socialism. A great many of the poor, especially the
very poor, did not think or behave themselves as proletarians,
or find the organizations and modes of actions of the
movement as applicable or relevant to them. In their fear time,
they'd rather go to the pub than sing workers' songs.
In the figure of the lumpen. We discover the dark

(01:22:56):
underside of the affirmation of the working class. It was
a biting class hatred. Workers saw themselves as originating out
of a stinking morass from Kotsky is the class struggle quote.
At the time of the beginning of modern industry, the
term proletariat implied absolute degeneracy, and there are persons who
believe this is still the case. Moreover, capitalism was trying

(01:23:18):
to push them back into the muck. Thus, the crisis
tendencies of capitalism could only be resolved in one of
two ways, the victory of the working class or in
its becoming lumpen'. Now you can see a couple of
things very clearly here. One is there's been a lot
of attempts to like resuscitate the lump and proletariat as
like a functional class, especially see this especially in the seventies.

(01:23:39):
And I really, I really would recommend those people go
back and read what Mark's actually wrote about the lumpen proletariat,
because it makes no sense. It is just like absolute
sort of blithering nonsense. And the reason it's this kind
of like incredibly bizarre, like paranoid, you know, to fantasies

(01:24:01):
is that beneath the sort of like foe of scientific
objectiveness of the workers' movement is this incredibly petty moralism
and a set of sort of Victorian social values with
all of the sort of cruelty of their aristocratic masters.
And I want to sort of point out here like
this kind of thinking, you know, this kind of like

(01:24:24):
we are the movement that is a liberation of the class.
But in order to do that, we need to prove
that like we are like actually sort of like real
dignified human beings, and that there's another group of people
who are just us, but we hate them because they
don't behave the way that we think they're supposed to.
This is a very very common thing that you see
in basically all social movements, especially in their earliest and

(01:24:45):
like shittiest iterations. You see this in the early feminist movement.
I mean, you see this still in the feminist movement,
but there are sections of it that do this too.

Speaker 8 (01:24:55):
There's a really good.

Speaker 7 (01:24:55):
Piece called some Like It Hot by Sophie Lewis about
the sort of feminist reaction to Mertory Marilyn Monroe, and
I'm gonna read a little bit from it. One of
the things that you get this sense of is that
people like Glorious Steinem just absolutely hate Marilyn Monroe, and
the you know, the stuff they write about her is
stuff that like you just will be like almost incomprehensible

(01:25:20):
to imagine any of these people or even just sort
of like you know, not even like like a modern
sort of like conservative like writing on purpose about a
woman and being allowed to sort of get away with it.
I mean there right, just horrible things about her. I'm
gonna read a little bit from the piece. Perhaps it
was Monroe's dumping of three husbands, two of them were

(01:25:41):
famous and powerful, that posed quote no adult challenge to
Steinem's mind. Or perhaps Steinem's comments closed nothing so much
as her own inability to see Highem people as subjects. Here,
in case it might pierce a vail, is Monroe apagem
written on Waldorf a story a letter paper in nineteen
fifty five, quote everyone has violence in themselves.

Speaker 8 (01:26:04):
I am violent.

Speaker 7 (01:26:05):
Here is another spoken to photographer Bruno Bernard in nineteen
fifty six. Both the anti communists on the House Committee
on Un American Activities and the movie sensors on the
production board should be buried alive. Perhaps Steinem, who proudly
worked for the CIA in the fifties and sixties, would
not appreciate this kind of courage, the courage of one Norma, who,

(01:26:26):
when notified by the police at Los Angeles roadblock in
nineteen forty nine that a nearby house was being monitored
for ties to communists, shouted the officer's ear off and
went straight to tip off blacklisted screenwriters Norma and Ben Bauersman.
And so, you know, you can sort of see what's
happening here, right, It's a very similar thing where there

(01:26:46):
were these sort of like you know, you have these
very sort of like like respectable mainstream feminists who look
at someone like Marilyn Monroe, who you know, and they
just fucking hate her. They absolutely despise her because she
is sort of she she is the image of what
they sort of think that they're fighting against, right, Like

(01:27:07):
they're they're they're, they're, they're what what liberation looks like
for them is to like not be this kind of woman.
And that's, you know, and this is that's the sort
of unspoken or so sometimes just overly spoken, core of
what a lot of this stuff is. And you know,
and This is how these people like can justify like
working for the fucking CIA, right and you know, somehow

(01:27:28):
claiming to themselves to be like superior feminists, feminist to
Marilyn Monroe, who you know, at like great personal costs
and at great danger, like you know, fought hu wac
and shit. So you know, this kind of like we
are the group who is going to free our own group.
We're also not like because we're not like those other
people who are literally the same as us, but we

(01:27:48):
don't like them because they we don't think they're respectable enough.
This is a very very old sort of trend, but
it has real social consequences and it's you know, it's
it's a really disastrous strategy because it means that all
of these movements have these sort of flanks from which
they can be attacked. One of these flanks for the
workers movements, and one that's become increasingly important now, is

(01:28:11):
the kind of producer's conception of what a worker is.
You know, this is the man sort of creating the
new world with his bare hands. The problem is that,
you know, this is never what most labor actually was.
Here's David Graber again. In fact, there was never a
time when most workers worked in a factory. Even in

(01:28:31):
the days of Karl Marx or Charles Dickens, working class
neighborhoods housed far more maids, boot blacks, dustman cooks, nurses,
cabby's school teachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees and
coal mines, textile mills or iron foundries. Are these former
jobs productive in what sense?

Speaker 8 (01:28:50):
And for whom?

Speaker 7 (01:28:51):
Who produces us who flay? Is because of these ambiguities,
As such, issues are typically brushed aside when people are
arguing about value, but doing so blinds us to the
reality that most working class labor, whether you're carried out
by men or women, actually resembles what we are typically
think of as women's work. Looking after people, seeing to

(01:29:12):
their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss
wants or is thinking, not to mention, caring for, monitoring
and maintaining plants, animals, machines and other objects. Then it
involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things. And you know,
you can see in this sort of issue, right, you

(01:29:32):
can see the axis upon which the workers movement is
going to be split in the eighties and nineties. If
you can convince a set of workers that what they're
doing is you know, masculine productive labor, right, and that
you know what those other people are doing, is this
like feminine care labor that doesn't produce anything. You can
turn the entire ideology of the workers movement on its

(01:29:53):
head and transform it from a liberatory ideology about the
end of the class system to a patriarchal ideology about
the necessity of labor to sort of manhood of masculinity.
And once that ideological shift is made, you can start
writing off entire fields of laborers as being insufficiently quote
unquote productive, or you know, as the right wing shift

(01:30:14):
renders it, you can say productive and mean insufficiently masculine
account as part of the working class TM. This problem,
Graper argues, is a consequence of the sort of maniacal
focus on production that defined the workers movement, because it
obscures the fact that, again, most of actual labor is
care labor. And this is something we've discussed at length

(01:30:37):
on this show in sort of ethnographic if not theoretical terms,
while talking to Starbucks workers, and in these conversations it
becomes almost immediately clear that a huge part of the
job has very little to do with making coffee or
even sort of classical customer management, and like the interpretive
and emotional labor of doing service work, what these workers

(01:30:58):
are actually doing is acting as replacement for the collapsing
American social safety net. Right they are taking care of
and literally saving the lives of people who capitalism has
spat out and.

Speaker 5 (01:31:08):
Left to die.

Speaker 7 (01:31:10):
And this is by by any like any actual you know,
I'm not gonna say objective standard, because don't like there
is an objective standard for what we're like how much
work something is. But you know, in terms of the
amount of labor, in terms of the difficulty of labor,
in terms of like what he is being expected of
expected of these workers, this is incredibly intense difficult labor.

(01:31:33):
But you know, because of the sort of patriarchal like
idea and conception that has sort of consumed what are
our sort of collective conception of what a quote unquote
real job is, the enormous amount of care labor that
perics do every day. And you know, there's there's a
good argument. Graber makes a very similar argument to this

(01:31:54):
that you can look at the entire job. And you
can look at like most economic production as carelabor, right,
because you're producing this coffee in order to care for someone.
You make a bridge in order to like, like in
order so that people can use it.

Speaker 8 (01:32:07):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:32:09):
But you know, there's a good argument that like all
everything in Barista does is care labor. But because you know,
it's not like making cars or being one of the
last fifty thousand coal miners left in the US, it's
not considered real labor. And this, all of this is
just a bomb that is left sitting under the ideological

(01:32:32):
core of the workers' movements. And that bomb probably would
have just gone.

Speaker 8 (01:32:38):
Off on its own.

Speaker 7 (01:32:39):
You know why I say on its own. That bomb
probably would have been set off by something we're going
to talk about or tomorrow, which is the shift in
the labor's force in a lot of countries that sort
of de industrialize towards this kind of labor being the
sort of standard like you knowing being just even more
obviously the standard form of labor. But the ruling class

(01:33:01):
figured out a way to sort of set this bomb
off and ensure that, you know, and ensure that it
would like just detonate the workers movement immediately, and the
thing that they figured out to set this bomb off
is racism. And that is what I'm going to talk
about tomorrow, the story of how the fusion of racism
and sexism that I may well be remembered by historians

(01:33:25):
is the force that burned the entire world, consumed what
was left of the workers' movement, and turned this country
into neoliberal Reagan.

Speaker 5 (01:33:32):
Hell, hi everyone, it's me James, and I'm coming to
you today sweaty, smelly and exhausted from my pickup truck
out in the desert where I have been spending the

(01:33:52):
weekend trying my best to help, along with lots of
other dedicated mutual aid workers, to mitigate the damn done
by an entirely preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States
Southern border. People are being held in the open desert
in Hakomba, where it gets hot in the day gets
very cold at night. And there are children, there are

(01:34:14):
old people, there are young people. All the support they're
getting it's from mutual aid workers, then maybe get some
water from border patrol, from federal government, and not much else.
And I'm here before your podcast to ask you if
you can to help. We've all spent all of our
time and most of our money the last few days
week trying to help, and we're all pretty broke, and

(01:34:36):
we're all pretty tired. But I could really do with
your support. And I'm going to give the venmos and
cash apps and pay pal information for two organizations who
ideally love and whose work I have seen is extremely
effective and is the only thing keeping this situation from
being a lot worse. And please don't think that if
you don't have much money that you shouldn't give. We

(01:34:58):
can work out do a lot with a little. So
if you only have five bucks, that is great. And
five bucks is are top for someone to sleep under
or a few hot meals. And what we're gonna buy
is food, blankets, tops, water, the things that stop people
dying in the desert. Those two organizations, Border Kindness and
Free Shit Collective, can be found online at border Kindness
and at free ship pb on Twitter. For Border Kindness,

(01:35:21):
the venmo is at border hyphen Kindness, the cash app
is dollar sign border Kindness cash and the zell and
PayPal information is info at Borderkindness dot org. Free Shit
Collective are at free shick Collective on cash app and
PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter.

Speaker 9 (01:35:38):
Thank you very much, guys, welcome to take it up
and here a podcast, but why everything absolutely sucks?

Speaker 7 (01:35:48):
I'm your host, Nia Wong. I'm back again. And last
episode we talked about the problems with conceiving of all
of labor as production from a sort of macro feminist
perspective of you know, thinking about how you know, thinking
of all labor as production doesn't actually capture what most
labor is. And you know, we looked at how this

(01:36:11):
allowed patriarchy to become a wedge to private workers movement apart.
But there's another sort of more micro problem with thinking
about productive labor, and that micro problem is that people
are just absolutely unable to think about productivity in anything
other than moral terms. As to you know, why this

(01:36:34):
is the case, I'm not going to go forward an answer.
I've seen every theory from like its Christianity, to like
it's a structural feature of capitalism, to its human nature
or whatever. I'm I don't know, did pick pick your
theory about why everyone is incapable of being normal about productivity?
But this turns out to be a real problem for

(01:36:55):
anyone who is trying to use productive versus unproductive labor
in a purely technical sense. Now, the most famous person
to do this is, as some of you probably know, one,
Karl Marx. And you know I was hard on Mark's
last episode, but this one and the stuff that's going

(01:37:16):
to follow isn't really his fault. Marx here is actually
doing one of the times where he's being very reasonable
and he's being very specific about what productive labor is,
and everyone else is being extremely unreasonable. And you know,
given the incredibly dark places this is going to go,

(01:37:37):
maybe this is one of those things where, like, I
don't know, you need to pick different words that aren't
as emotionally charged as like productive nonproductive labor. But all
in all, like this, the catastrophe that's about two unfold
is not Marx's fault. There was really no way that
he could have known how nuts everyone was going to

(01:37:57):
go over this. So what actually is the distinction between
productive and unproductive labor? From Marx? So, first off, and
this is very important, productive versus unproductive labor is a
technical term. It has no moral content at all. All
it means is that some labor produces capital for the

(01:38:18):
capital owning class and some labor doesn't that. That's literally it.
Here's Marx. The commodities the capitalist buys for his own
private consumption are not consumed productively. They do not become
factors of capital, just as little to the services he
buys for his consumption voluntarily or through compulsion from the state, etc.

(01:38:40):
For the sake of their use value, they do not
become a factor of capital. They are not therefore productive
kinds of labor, and those who perform them are not
productive workers. As you can see, this has literally nothing
to do with the contents of the labor itself or
morality whatsoever. If a dance er work for production company

(01:39:01):
and gives a performance you know, working for the company,
that's productive labor, because the company has turned their capital
into more capital by using the dancer to produce a commodity,
which is, you know, the performance, and then selling it. Right,
If that same dancer puts on the same performance in
the same place for a crowd of you know, just
like their friends or even the same people, but who

(01:39:23):
aren't paying a production company for it, Suddenly the dancer,
who again is doing the same thing in the same
place like even could be on the same day, is
doing non productive labor because no capital is being created
from it, or as you know, here's how Marx puts it.
Labor with the same content can therefore be both productive
and unproductive. Milton, for example, who did Paradise Loss, was

(01:39:45):
an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who
delivers hack work for his publisher is a productive worker.
Later on, Milton sold the product for five dollars and
to that extent became a dealer in a commodity But
the light sig literally II reary proletarian who produces books
e g. Compendium Political Economy at the instruction of his

(01:40:06):
publisher is roughly speaking, a productive worker insofar as his
production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for
the purpose of the latter's valorization. This is a valorization
of capital, which is like having capital make more capital.
A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker.
If she sells her singing for money, she is to

(01:40:28):
that extent a wage laborer or a commodity dealer. But
the same singer when she is engaged by an entrepreneur
who has her sing in order to make money, is
a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. A schoolmaster
who educates others is not a productive worker, but a
schoolmaster who is engaged as a wage laborer and an

(01:40:49):
institution alongside along with others in order to make in
order through his labor to valorize the money of the
entrepreneur of the knowledge mongering institution is a productive worker. Now, okay,
I'm reading a lot of Marx here. I'm focusing on Marx,
you know, because whether or not someone in you know,
the eighteen hundreds is a Marxist or not. And if

(01:41:10):
you picked us like a random worker in the period
when this is being written, the odds are really bad
that they're going to be a Marxist. Marx was enormously influential,
particularly in Europe as sort of social democracy swept through
the Germany's and then communism sort of swept back through Europe.
In the US, and Marx is also and this is
something that Marx himself, like takes great pains to conceal

(01:41:34):
a lot of the time. Marx is a kind of
medium through which the broad cultural consensus on labor was
transformed into like capital T theory, and in this capital
T theory, productive versus unproductive labor is not a moral
claim at all. It's a measure of whether any given
labor produces capital for the bourgeoisie. Now, part of what

(01:41:54):
Marx is trying to do here is to intervene in
existing discourse about productive and unproductive, to turn it into
useful theory instead of people just yelling stuff at each
other and Mars, I feel you, buddy, oh boy, taking
this as a validation of what I'm doing. God, here's
an example I'm just going to put in here of
Marx being very mad about this. The self employed laborer,

(01:42:17):
for example, is his own wage laborer, and his own
means of production confront him in his own mind as capital.
As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage laborer.
Anomalies of this type then offer a favorable field for
outpourings of drivel about productive and unproductive labor. So, you know,

(01:42:38):
even in the eighteen hundreds, people are being incredibly normal
about this. They're saying things that are great and good,
and only only that they're being exceptionally good. Marx isn't
slowly being driven mad by reading it all. But you know,
when when it's being used as a technic category, the

(01:43:02):
sort of productive versus unproductive distinction. You know, it can
tell you a lot of stuff about how a capitalist
economy functions, but when it inevitably becomes a moral category,
things get very bad, very quickly. And so we're going
to go into two times that this has gone very badly,

(01:43:24):
the Nazis and Ronald Reagan. Now, the Nazis and Reagan
aren't quite doing the same thing, although there's a lot
of similarities, which is, you know, to be expected from
a band who went to a Nazi cemetery that included
a bunch of SS dudes and then gave a speech
defending his actions where he said, and I quote they
which is referring to Nazi soldiers, quote they were victims

(01:43:46):
just as surely as the victims and the concentration camps,
which I.

Speaker 8 (01:43:52):
I, I, what the fuck.

Speaker 7 (01:43:55):
What are you supposed to do with that? Like, I
just this guy was a president of Uni States.

Speaker 10 (01:44:00):
I mean, I like, I don't know it makes sense,
but like it never even crossed my mind that it
was like it would even be possible to have a
take that is, people in the Nazi army are actually
just as much victims as the people in the concentration camps. Like, I,
I don't know, baffling stuff by Reagan. I mean, I
guess not baffling considering how closely his administration is tied

(01:44:23):
to a bunch of sort of Nazis who became like
anti communists, while here were always anti comics, but who
became part of sort of like institutional anti communism and
like the post war era.

Speaker 7 (01:44:34):
But god, what a terrible thing. I'm getting my shots
in at Reagan now because this is about to get
so incredibly bleak. So yay, so okay. So the right
is able to sort of, you know, very successful in fact,

(01:44:54):
in transforming this distinction between productive and non productive labor
into a moral category, and then they infuse it with
anti Semitism, and through this sort of I don't know,
the horror of anti Semitism, productive labor is transformed into
you know, productive and unproductive members of society. And this

(01:45:18):
is one of the origins of sort of Nazi race
science and race craft. You know, they have their attempt
to quote unquote purify their race, which relies on a
distinction between sort of productive and non productive members of
society who'se like quote unquote value and productive capacity, you know,
come to be seen as like genetically heritable, which you know,
from the Nazi perspective, they are like, oh, this is stuff,

(01:45:41):
this is heritable. We need to do eugenics and mass
exterminations of, you know, increasing numbers of disabled, queer communists
and especially Jewish and Groma people to ensure that only
the quote unquote like productive members society remain and like
pass down their traits. And this is fucking horrible. But
this is also too simple for an explanation for what

(01:46:03):
actually happens. In order to actually fully grasp the depths
of what's happening here and how this stuff functions, we
need to go deeper into specifically looking at anti Semitism.
And in order to do this, I'm going to turn
to the great sort of the great social theorist moist

(01:46:24):
Pristone Dressed in Peace died a few years ago. Apparently
a great guy. I don't know, but yeah, postone and
his essay Anti Semitism and National Socialism. This is something
I recommend people read it in full. It's a bit
theoretically intense. It's also like one of the most heartbreaking
things I've ever read, but I think it's important to

(01:46:46):
understand what national socialism actually was and what it's sort
of ideological basis was because it oh boy, not only
has it not gone away, it you know, it's it's
it's it's it's doing it's doing, it's doing a lot
of the sort of work that we've we've been sort

(01:47:08):
of discussing. Okay, so what what what is what is
pistone actually talking about? So postone sees Nazi anti Semitism
not just as you know, the sort of socialism of
fools where like Jewish people get substituted for capitalists to
see the worker and okay, like yeah, it's like it
serves as function to some extent. But for postone, like

(01:47:32):
Nazi anti Semitism is its own sort of horrific, incomplete
anti capitalist system. It's this sort of ghastly aryan mirror
of like Marxism, and you know, okay, So so to
to get an understanding of what he means by this,
because this is something that is you know, like it's
it's it's deeply it's kind of theoretically intense, but it's

(01:47:56):
worth it. So in Marxism, this the central mystery of
the commodity is that a commodity is a well i
mean central mystery isn't the right word, but this is
this is one of the one of the opening things
in capital is that you know, this is this is
this thing called the commodity fetish. You have a commodity.
A commodity is simultaneously a concrete physical object that nonetheless

(01:48:20):
contains within it an abstract social relation. It has at
the same time a use value, which is like, you know,
the thing that makes it useful, right, Like take a pencil, right, pencil,
it has.

Speaker 8 (01:48:30):
A use value.

Speaker 7 (01:48:31):
The use value is that you can like use it
to write things, right, and you can use it to
erase things. But the pencil also has an exchange value.
And the exchange value, you know, is the value quote
unquote that you use it to compare it to other commodities. Right,
It's like, how much is this thing? How much is
this thing worth? How much is this compared to like

(01:48:52):
other commodities, And this is a that's simply an enormous
that's that's kind of a simplication of it. But what's
happening here is that the sort of the exchange value
that lets you compare how much a pencil is worth
and how much a bracelet is worth right, that's not
an actual characteristic of the pencil or the bracelet. That
is a serious you know that that's an embedded social relation, right,

(01:49:14):
is an embedded capitalist social relation that allows a commodity
to be compared to all of the commodities by again
like embedding this capitalist social relation into it. The important
part for our purposes is that the commodity has at
the same time a concrete component, which is the physical object,
and an abstract component, which is the sort of capitalist

(01:49:34):
social relation embedded in the pencil that makes it appear
to have value. Here's pistone as indicated above. On the
logical level of the analysis of the commodity, the quote
double character allows the commodity to appear as a purely
material entity rather than as an objectification of mediated social relations.

(01:49:58):
So this is a more complicated way of saying what
I've sort of been trying to get at, which is
that the commodity, you know, because it's a physical object.

Speaker 8 (01:50:07):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:50:09):
The commodity fetish allows the commodity to appear as if
it's just a pure physical object instead of something that
is produced by capitalism and contains within it capitalist social
relations that give value. So we'll back back back to pistone. Relatedly,
it allows concrete labor to appear as a purely material

(01:50:30):
creative process separate from capitalist social relations. On the logical
level of capital, the double character labor process and valorization process.
And by valorization process he means the process that turns
you know, capital into more capital. So the fact that
there's both a labor process and a valorization process allows

(01:50:51):
industrial production to appear as a purely material, creative process
separable from capital. The manifest form of the concrete is
now more organic. Industrial capital can then appear as linear
descendant of quote natural artismal labor as quote organically rooted
in opposition to rootless, quote parasitic finance capital. You can

(01:51:15):
see here where the whole sort of productive versus unproductive
labor distinction has ended up right. It's been transformed into
the sort of organic concrete rooted like productive national worker
and like entrepreneur versus like rootless parasitic finance capital. This
is unbelievably dangerous because now having set the concrete against

(01:51:39):
the abstract, the fascist proceeds to turn the abstract into
a people, which is Jewish people. The result of this
is that in the fascist mind, the sort of concrete
productive worker and the entrepreneur stand against the abstract anti
national finance capital personified in the figure of the Jew.
Here's pistona again of what happened next the extermination of

(01:52:00):
European jeury is the indication that it is far too
simple to deal with Nazism as a mass movement with
anti capitalist overtones, which shed that husk in the nineteen
thirty four Rome push at the latest, once dead served
its purpose in state power have been seized. In the
first place, ideological forms of thought are not simply conscious manipulations.

(01:52:22):
In the second place, this view misunderstands the nature of
Nazi quote anti capitalism, the extent to which it was
intrinsically bound to the anti Semitic worldview. Auschwitz indicates that connection.
It is true that the somewhat too concrete and Plebeian
quote unquote anti capitalism of the essay was dispensed with
by nineteen thirty four, not, however, the anti Semitic thrust

(01:52:46):
the knowledge quote unquote, that the source of evil is abstract.

Speaker 8 (01:52:50):
The Jew.

Speaker 7 (01:52:52):
A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced,
which unfortunately has to take the form of the production
of goods of use values. The concrete is produced as
the necessary carrier of the abstract. The extermination camps were
not a terrible version of the factory. The extermination camps

(01:53:13):
were not a terrible version of such a factory, but
rather it should be seen as its grotesque aryan quote
anti capitalist negation. Auschwist was a factory to quote unquote
destroy value, that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract.
Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the

(01:53:34):
aim of which was to liberate the concrete from the abstract.
The first step was a dehumanize, that is, to rip
away the quote unquote mask of humanity, of qualitative specificity,
and reveal the Jews for quote what they really are
shadows Cipher's numbered abstractions. The second step was to then

(01:53:56):
eradicate that abstractness. He transform it into smoke, trying in
the process to rest away the last remains of the
concrete material use value, clothes, gold hair, soap. Auschwitz, not
the Nazi seizure of power in nineteen thirty three, was
the real German revolution. The attempted to overthrow not merely

(01:54:19):
of a political order, but of the existing social formation.
By this one deed, the world was to be made
safe from the tyranny of the abstract.

Speaker 5 (01:54:28):
In the process, the Nazis.

Speaker 7 (01:54:29):
Quote unquote, liberated themselves from humanity. The Nazis lost the
war against the Soviet Union, America and Britain. They won
their war, their revolution against the European Jews. And this ideology,
this pitting of the abstract against the concrete, is so

(01:54:51):
powerful that it was never defeated. By the time the
Nazis were defeated militarily, they had, you know, by the
combined might of five of the largest empires in human hait,
they had already won, and their ideology never went away.
If you look closely, you can still see it moving.

Speaker 5 (01:55:08):
Throughout the world.

Speaker 7 (01:55:10):
You can see it in the left making exactly the
same mistakes it made before, waging war against the abstract
in the name of an anti capitalism that can never
end with the actual destruction of capitalism in that specific form.
You can see it in a right that openly espouses
these exact same ideas, in the form of pitting their
nationalists and patriots against the globalists, in the way it

(01:55:32):
pits national American or Russian or Hungarian workers against George Soros.

Speaker 8 (01:55:39):
It is the basis of all.

Speaker 7 (01:55:40):
Modern right wing thought. And when we come back from ADS,
we're going to talk about right wing thoughts other basis
Ronald Reagan's rampant racism. We've now seen one way that
the productive and unproductive worker distinction can be turned into
unfathomable right wing violence, and now we're going to take

(01:56:02):
a look at another one, which is the myth of
the welfare queen. So one of the ways that Reagan
eventually took power was bite. I mean literally, he was
doing this for like a decade. He does it for
like twenty fucking years. It's insufferable, is screaming about the
myth of the welfare queen. So the welfare queen for

(01:56:25):
people who like, I don't know, we're too young to
like remember what I mean. I wasn't around for the
original height of it, but like I fucking remember it
from when I was a kid. It's this sort of
like mythical racist caricature of like a black woman who
lives off of scamming the welfare system. And you can
see what's happening here pretty clearly, right, This is not

(01:56:47):
like a particularly subtle political maneuver. The plan is to
pit you know, sort of so called like productive workers
and entrepreneurs versus people on welfare, and through through the
sort of incredible power of racism and specifically misogyn noir,
which is, you know, through the power of America's just
like specific abiden casure to black women, the identity of

(01:57:11):
the worker is transflowed into a racial category. So what
you're actually dealing with is this opposition Reagan is trying
to create between quote unquote like productive white people who
like work for a living or whatever, and you know
black welfare queens quote unquote who are dependent on the
state and don't work. And this is this is this
is sort of Reagan's framing of it. Now, if you

(01:57:33):
go back to this sort of older Marxist conception of class, right,
like unemployed black people are like unambiguously part of the
working class. And this is something that Reagan understood. Now,
part of what was going on here actually was Reagan
attempting to sort of crack down on black welfare activists.
You were doing a lot of you know, really incredible organizing,

(01:57:53):
ranging from sort of like you know, organizing mass protests
to like doing squats to doing like it's fall on
building occupations and Reagan, and more so the people sort
of around Reagan by the end, because you know, like
by like term two, Reagan has like basically checked out,
you know, But the people around Reagan can see which

(01:58:14):
way the wind is blowing, and you know, they are
busy sort of like lining up every fan they can
find to make the wind blow a bit stronger. And
the way that the winds are blowing is that a
bunch of people are about to be spat out of
the capitalist system and too increasingly precarious service jobs or
just no jobs at all. And as the sort of
crisis dynamics emerged and intensified, and people tend to forget this.

(01:58:37):
But Reagan's term started with him nuking the economy, setting
off a recession and jacking employment up to ten percent.
But you know, as this unfolds, Reagan sees a perfect
opportunity to sever what Marks would call the industrial reserve army.
Who are you know, all the people who've been spat
out of the capitalist system and forced to face sort

(01:58:57):
of pecarity and unemployments. He sees an opportunity to like
to split these people from workers who held on to
their jobs. And the way you do this is by
talking about class in a way that's really about race.
This new sort of moral division of like productive non
productive worker is incredibly racialized, which is to say that, like,

(01:59:18):
I mean, it's just it's just really racist. There's no
certain I don't know, there's no I'm I'm not gonna
do the circumlocution on that ship.

Speaker 4 (01:59:27):
It is.

Speaker 7 (01:59:27):
It is really racist, and it's it's specifically designed to
pit white workers against black workers. And it's also this
is something we should point out here, like reality has
no effect on on the sort of like the actual
propaganda value. But like the people who are on welfare
who are working like they're off, they're working a lot,
they're working really shit jobs. They're working more than the

(01:59:49):
people who aren't on welfare in a lot of cases.
What's happening here, right, is is this, this this entire
thing is very specifically designed to pit white workers against
black workers by invoking racial prejudice, and slightly more subtly,
is designed to remove black workers from the category of
labor altogether through you know, the sort of sort of

(02:00:11):
means of America's like deep in abiding hatred of black women.
Now back in sort of reality. And again bearing in
mind reality has no effect on this bullshit. But you know,
back in reality, like the actual biggest welfare cheat of
the modern era is Brett Farr, former quarterback in the
Minnesota Vikings. Please send all complaints at irite, okay on Twitter.

(02:00:34):
Far managed to spend seventy seven million dollars of welfare
money on a bunch of bullshit that includes like trying
to get a multimillion dollar volleyball facility built at his
daughter's school. The actual woman who was like the model
for the first like welfare queen thing like, may have
stolen eight thousand dollars. But you know this, this doesn't

(02:00:59):
matter at all because again, like reality's ability to combat
propaganda is incredibly weak, and you know, and the other
the other thing that's that's important to understand about this,
right is this was never actually about the money, and
this is something that people use to try to combat
this stuff, right, which people will point out and they're
right that, like, yeah, like you know, in order in

(02:01:20):
order to like quote unquote combat welfare fraud, like you
spend more money try to combat the fraud than you
save on the fraud. But that's not the point. That's
not the point at all. The point is again like
turning white workers against black workers to happen to be unemployed.
And it works incredibly well because they tap into two
just really powerful wells of emotion racism, and they happen

(02:01:43):
to do a second one, which is people hating work.
But because this is the right the way they tap
into people hating work was they transform it into the
seething hatred and resentment at the possibility of someone not
having to have the suffering that you have and doing
the thing that you always want to do, which is
not work, and then tying that to, oh, these people

(02:02:06):
don't have to suffer the way that I do because
they're living off of like the product of my labor.
And you know, you can you can see the sort
of ghosts right of like an anti capitalist critique of labor,
which is like, yeah, there are a bunch of people
who like don't work a fucking day in their lives
off the prophecy proceeds of our labors. They wear a

(02:02:27):
bunch of suits and they you know, they they're like
seventeenth generation like descendants of the Walton family or whatever.
But you know, this is this is the sort of
right wing version of it. And so through the sort
of lens of racism and through the sort of transformation
of class and productivity like into into sort of like

(02:02:49):
pure race discourse, they've managed to sort of, you know,
they've managed to completely transform the way people think about class.
And this is this is a big part of the
reason why the way Americans think about classes is so
incredibly messed up. And it's a big part of the

(02:03:09):
reason why, you know, the United States has spent, i mean,
spent the next fifty years doing this unbelievably merciless like
ruthless purge and just like mass infliction of suffering on
the poorest people in the US. It's because of this shit.

(02:03:32):
And this is also the reason that no one, you know,
if you're fucking reading the New York Times, right, you
will never hear anybody talk about black workers. They will
only ever talk about white workers. And this is because
that ideological project, the ideological project that Reagan was attempting
to do, was a big part of It was again
about an attempt to expel black workers from the popular

(02:03:56):
collective imagination of the working class. And it fucking worked.
If you're a white pundit.

Speaker 8 (02:04:01):
You can do this thing.

Speaker 7 (02:04:02):
You can make an entire career off of study and
quote unquote the working class only ever talk to white
people because that's the only part of the working class
that like exists, to these people that they even will
pretend matters. And then you know, never mentioned black workers
even existing at all, much less like engage with black
workers is like the core of the workers movements. And

(02:04:23):
no one outside of like actual leftist circles or even
bad and I no one, no one even thinks this
is fucking weird, right, And you can get away with
this ship because you know, eighty percent of all discourse
about class is really about race or gender, and you know,
eighty percent of all discourse but race as fucking white
people talking to other white people. And that's what we're
going to end for today. We will we will come

(02:04:44):
back to the sort of ruling class reaction to this
another time. But in the meantime, this has been naked
happen here, go out into the world and make something
that's not this one.

Speaker 2 (02:05:06):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. The episode you're about to
hear was recorded late last night at like two in
the morning. Due to the time difference between me and Joe,
who is based in Armenia. As you may have heard,
Azerbijan launched another attack on the independent Armenian majority region

(02:05:26):
of Artsak, which is in territory that Azerbijan claims. Since
we recorded this a couple hours after the Artzok defense
forces have surrendered, there's currently negotiations and something that's being
called a ceasefire. Although there continue to be reports of
shelling and other violent acts by the Azeri military. It's

(02:05:47):
kind of unclear what is going to happen. Tens of
thousands of frightened Armenians have crowded the airport out of Artzok.
Pictures are pretty stunning and sobering, out of fears that
Aside will be instituted against the Armenian populace in that area.
The episode you're about to hear is Joe and I
kind of talking earlier in the invasion, pretty soon after

(02:06:11):
it happened, going over some of the history, what's going
on now, fears for the future. So I thought it
was still valuable stuff, but I wanted to let you
know the situation has advanced since we recorded this, As
is often the case when you're talking about you know,
unfolding events.

Speaker 5 (02:06:28):
So thank you.

Speaker 2 (02:06:34):
Hey everyone, welcome to it could happen here, a podcast
about it happening here, And unfortunately for our guest today
it is again this is not the first time that
it has been happening where this person happens to live.
Joe Kasabian, Joe, Hey, how you doing, buddy?

Speaker 8 (02:06:57):
Hey, Robert, it's I. I would like this say it's
good to be back. But you know this tends to
happen a lot.

Speaker 2 (02:07:04):
We did you know in between the first time you
were or the last time you were on this show
and now you know, we had a surprise meeting in
Dublin that was a lovely time.

Speaker 8 (02:07:14):
That is true. That is true.

Speaker 2 (02:07:16):
Yeah, And now Joe, you uh, you are a podcaster,
a genocide expert and academic studying that and also you know,
the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, which
is a lovely podcast. And you are based out of Yerevan,
which is the capital of Armenia, which is a country

(02:07:40):
that is not yet being invaded but is also in
that in another way is being invaded right now, right
like it's a it's a complicated situation. Basically, the gist
of it is folks, if you're if you're kind of
tuning in, there is a there are a number of

(02:08:01):
different like little republics in the Caucasus region, and one
of the like, over the course of the last like
I don't know, a couple of thousand years, there have
been a lot of Armenian people in this area that
we call the Caucases, right, and you know, you have
your you know, a couple of thousand years of history.

(02:08:25):
You know, around the eleventh century, you get, you know,
some claims start being made to this area in what
is now called Karbak Artsak. And yeah, now you've got
this kind of area that is an Armenian majority region
where the surrounding Azeri people argue that it is their land,

(02:08:47):
their territory, that they should be allowed to take it.
And there have been a series of wars that have
been fighting that have been going on over this area
since the fall of the Soviet Union. And now as
we are talking right now, Joe, you and I, the
Azari military has just launched a new invasion with the
presumed goal, with the stated goal really of retaking this

(02:09:09):
entire region and potentially the goal of engaging the Armenian
military in a wider formal way, right, that's at least
the way the Azaris have discussed it. The Armenian military,
the Armenian government has said like, this is not you know,
Artsak is not Armenia. This is not like our troops

(02:09:29):
and stuff on the ground here. But the Azaris have
basically just said, like, we are disabling Armenian military equipment.

Speaker 8 (02:09:37):
Yeah, it's it's you know, it goes back to December
of last year. I mean, obviously this goes back even
before then. But if you start talking about you know, history,
people's eyes are going to glaze over. Yeah, this the
the war that was fought in twenty twenty obviously Azerbaijan one.
And ever since then, Carlak or Artsak has been cut

(02:09:59):
off on the Republic of Armenia through this area called
the Lashing Corridor. And yeah, according to the treaty it
was supposed to be maintained by Russian peacekeepers, but it
never was, and specifically, since December of twenty twenty two,
Karbak has been completely cut off by the Azarian Russian
military and is effectively being starved out. So it's been

(02:10:22):
you know, quite a long time, and we knew, like
everybody knew the war was going to come again, but
we kind of assumed it was gonna be in like
twenty twenty five, when the Russians are mandated to leave,
but st yesterday, you know, it s already yesterday.

Speaker 2 (02:10:36):
It seems like, I think it like the azeris invaded
right after about twenty three tons something like that of
essentially like bread was brought into like across the Lachin corridor,
right like you literally like this, yeah, exactly, yeah, this
tiny amount of food makes it into this starving populace

(02:10:57):
and then the next day invasion starts.

Speaker 8 (02:11:00):
Since December, they've done as much as they possibly could
to turn Karbak into what is effectively an open air
concentration camp. And the military operation, Now, what it is
it to me is it's a continuation of the twenty
twenty war because they couldn't conquer Seapanicrits in twenty twenty,

(02:11:21):
which is the capital of Karabak, due to external pressures
as well as military capacity, because during twenty twenty, the
Republic of Armenia, despite not legally directly fighting the war,
was of course helping Karabak with volunteers, soldiers, military supplies, everything. Sure,

(02:11:42):
this time, they can't. It's completely cut off, and that
this is not a war of any kind of near
peer powers. The local Karabak defense force, called the Artsak
Defense Army, is a self defense group. They have some
heavy equipment, but the vast majority of it was destroyed
twenty twenty. So this is, you know, effectively like a

(02:12:04):
local gun club trying to fight this army.

Speaker 2 (02:12:07):
This is more or less a militia going up against
I mean, like the Azaris. One of their major suppliers
of arms is Israel, Israel and Turkey. Yeah, yes, Russia, Russia,
Russia as well too. Yeah, and Russia is selling obviously
to our media as well.

Speaker 8 (02:12:22):
They actually aren't that we've we've found out I believe
last year. The government isn't the best at transparency, I
feel like is the best way to word that. And
we have been paying Russia for weapons since twenty twenty.
They have not delivered a single bullet since the war.

Speaker 2 (02:12:40):
Sorry I should have said Armenia is paying Russia for weapons.

Speaker 8 (02:12:44):
Yeah, yeah, we're being fucked by Russia. But yeah, it's
as far as the state of Azari goals are, they're
they're very different. In twenty twenty when the war ended,
they could frame it as a victory because they took
over all these areas that they lost during the first war.
Minds about an area where about one hundred and twenty
thousand people live in Stapanikirt and the general outskirts there.

(02:13:07):
But this time the messaging is much different. It is,
you know, the government must collapse. You know they only
going to like this is going quote unquote until the end,
until they see a white flag from stepanik Hert. So
this is because now if they don't do that, they
can't spin it as a victory, right right, And since December,

(02:13:31):
the Lashing corridor has been shut for everybody. People couldn't leave,
people who live in Karbak, who are in our media
for like school or whatever, couldn't go back. And now suddenly,
yesterday when the war started again, they are saying there's
a humanitarian corridor through the through Lachen. So the goals

(02:13:52):
are very very clear here and we know from their
conduct in twenty twenty government propaganda, just the general attitude
of the Azari government towards Armenians, which is they don't
they can't exist here, like this is a liquidation of
the open air concentration camp that they've created.

Speaker 2 (02:14:11):
So, I mean, Joe, first off, I guess what I
want to ask is, like, what what is it like
in Yerevan right now? Because you know you are you
are not far from from where the fighting is continuing
at the moment, but obviously you are. Armenia is not
technically involved at this point, right Like, that's at least

(02:14:32):
according to the claims of the Armenian government. These aris
alleged that they are striking Armenian military targets right now.
What is it like in Jervan right now?

Speaker 8 (02:14:42):
I think everybody is. I mean, you can see it
on everybody's faces, like they just they want information. They
want to know what's going to happen next. There's a
lot of protests yesterday and into the night because the
Prime Minister came out and said, like, you know, we're
not going to get involved, and he's not exactly very popular,
despite the fact he kind of is our best option

(02:15:02):
at the moment. So there's a lot of you know,
rightful anger towards him, towards Russia, towards the EU, you know,
you name it. Everybody's mad at everybody. So there was
different protests yesterday there was you know, fuck Russia protest,
there was fuck Nikol Pashnian, who's our prime minister protest.

(02:15:23):
There was a combination of the two protests. They all
kind of met in the middle. There is some fighting
with the police. I heard reports that someone quite a
few people tried to break into government buildings. That all
seemed to have cooled off by that because I went
down to the area where there was protesting and I
didn't see any of that, but it seemed to have

(02:15:43):
also started up again after I left. But again, it's
only day one. People's anger is only going to get
worse as the situation in Karabak gets worse. Yeah, you know,
the fall of Karabak when Stapana karat If, and when
that occurs, I have a hard time believing that the
current government here in Armenia will survive. They'll either resign

(02:16:05):
before stouts, you know, an unfortunate third option might happen,
especially with the messaging coming from Russia where they're blaming
Armenia and specifically the Prime Minister for all of this.
Because since September of last year, Armenia has been doing
decent diplomacy in turning towards the West. There's American soldiers

(02:16:29):
in the Republic of Armenia right now for training. We've
sent supplies to Ukraine. We've all but left the CSTO,
which is like Russia's shitty version of NATO. Yeah, so
this is not very functional, right, Like yeah, yeah, I
mean this is a fact. I mean this is a

(02:16:49):
green lit, punitive expedition on Russia's behalf effected.

Speaker 4 (02:16:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:16:55):
And this is you know a couple of things. So
like obviously the way in which which the paper on
paper alliances here kind of like chart out is not
friendly to the sort of like sound bite media of
our day, right because Armenia on paper, Armenia's like big
supporter has been Russia recently, right, as.

Speaker 8 (02:17:18):
Well as Azerbaijan, like as well, before Russia invaded Ukraine,
they like cemented an alliance. But you know, because Azerbaijan
has been very overt, I guess you could say, and
their support for Ukraine giving them money and you know,
supplies here and they're non military supplies but humanitarian supplies. Yeah,
this gets spun in the brain dead infosphere as it

(02:17:42):
being like another Russian ally that being Armenia is being
invaded or you know, people equate Kara Bak to Crimea
and Ukraine's war goals, and since Azerbaijan is, you know,
a pr ally of Ukraine and supplying the E you
with gas and supplying you with Russian gas as well,

(02:18:03):
it gets spun as like people are cheering for Azerbaijan,
which is is absolutely baffling to me. Like it I
wish I could say I'm confused or surprised, but like
when you treat war like it's a team sport you
want to play on your favorite football jersey or whatever. Yeah,
this is how it goes. When you know, Karabak declared
independence from Azerbaijan during that the Azeri Soviet Socialist Republic

(02:18:29):
when that was legal to do, and the state that
they have created is one of the most free in
the region, whereas Azerbaijan, according to like the Freedom Index
is one point above the Taliban controlled Afghan state at
the moment. Yeah, so like this, this is not a plan.
This is not like a liberation. A dictator cannot be

(02:18:50):
a liberator.

Speaker 2 (02:18:51):
No, And a lot of what is happening and why
a Zerbijan is engaging in aggression right now is due
to what's been happening to like the price of oil
and like what that's done to the Azari economy. Right,
Like this is a like I mean, it's it's it's
a pretty standard page in the the authoritarian playbook, right
of course.

Speaker 8 (02:19:11):
I mean they're a classic fascist dictatorship and so far
as you know, every problem in the state that they have,
of which they have many, because it's effectively a kleptocracy
built around a Petro Petro dictatorship, is caused by Armenians.
They're you know, every single anti Asari piece that gets
published in any media, and you can use the term

(02:19:32):
anti Asari to mean like literally anything is funded by
the like the Armenian lobbying group, which I mean any
Jewish conspiracy theory that we all know and hear about constantly,
and Azurebaijan. You just replace Jewish people with Armenians, and
it's a it's functionally the same thing. So you know,
we're this global superpower with our tendrils and everything, but

(02:19:55):
also we're weak and pitifol and need to be destroyed.
It's it's kind of messaging that we're used to hearing
for like classic fascist propaganda, and you know that as
far as like why they're doing it now is because
they've so ensconced themselves in the European good graces and

(02:20:15):
over the last little bit they know nobody could. Nobody's
going to stop them. The EU literally can't, and the
United States, I mean, they're an outside player when it
comes to European politics, at least internal politics.

Speaker 4 (02:20:28):
And.

Speaker 8 (02:20:29):
They are only loosely connected to Azerbaijehan. They do some
military funding, but it's mostly to do it's like these
weird ghosts of the early global War on Terror where
they're looking for friendly Muslim powers that would act as
counter terror forces. But the Azerbaijan secular this war has
nothing to do with us being Christian or them being Muslim,

(02:20:52):
though it does tend to be free framed that way
by the worst people imaginable.

Speaker 2 (02:20:57):
Yeah, it's it's slots conveniently for a lot of people
into those But like this is I mean again as
I tried, and you know, this is what we're kind
of like throwing this together in media res but like
this is we're talking about, like this is the result
of a very long period of conflict and movement of

(02:21:18):
peoples in a region where they have been for thousands
and thousands of years, right, Like that's like, it's not.

Speaker 8 (02:21:25):
I would say the current conflict is mostly rooted in
about the last thirty thirty five years, I mean the
ancient The ancient history gets thrown around a lot by
like propagandists. But this is a direct result of the
Soviet Union's policies. It has nothing to do with like,
you know, the thirteen hundreds.

Speaker 2 (02:21:45):
Would you take it back though, to like like World
War One? Right where you've got You've got this like
very brief period where like Azerbijan and Armenia and Georgia
all attempt to have this like almost little like Caucasus
you win or e you of their own right, and
then they all get like gobbled up, you know, over
the course of the end of the war, by by

(02:22:07):
by Turkey and then by Russia. Like it's this uh,
like that's kind of where it all results from. Right,
That's at least that's my understanding of it.

Speaker 8 (02:22:15):
Uh, if you want to go back that far, it
has more of a result of early Soviet policy and
specifically Joseph Stalin. Before he took over the Soviet Union,
he was ahead of like the Office of like Minorities effectively, Yeah,
he's a Georgian. Yeah he's it's so is Barria, and

(02:22:38):
he he redrew the borders to include what is today
Karabak within the borders of what effectively would become the
Azaria Soviet Socialist Republic. And during the entire period of
the Soviet Union, which you know, a lot of people
like to frame as this, there's no problems in the
Soviet Union control these areas, which is you know, magical thinking.

(02:23:01):
There were protests by the Armenian populace, right, there was
a lot of protests during the eighties. You have what's
called the Karabak movement wanted either a Karabak to become
its own Soviet Socialist Republic or b to be given
to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and away from these areas,
and failing that, they declared independence, which was within their

(02:23:23):
rights under the Soviet constitution, which did exist, I mean,
it was largely fluid and completely ignored as we see today,
and that's what that triggered a lot of different programs
between a Zaris against the Armenian population within Azerbaijan, and
Armenians did the same thing here as well. But that

(02:23:43):
started the First War, which ended with Armenia winning and
Artsak becoming a de facto independent republic not recognized by
anybody to include Armenia, and it's I mean.

Speaker 2 (02:23:56):
It becomes at that point kind of one of a
series of sort of little fro and wars. During this
kind of like early nineties period where the US was
there was this there was some belief that the US
would act if like these conflicts.

Speaker 8 (02:24:11):
Got out of hand.

Speaker 2 (02:24:13):
That was like often proved wrong, right, Like.

Speaker 8 (02:24:16):
The best comparison is effectively Kosovo. The only difference is
that because of geopolitics, you're getting involved in this war,
whether it be in the nineties, in twenty twenty or today,
is it's not geopolitically advantageous, Like telling Azerbaijan to go

(02:24:37):
fuck themselves by supporting art soccer Armenians doesn't help anybody geopolitically.
If it was Russia invading US, it would be raining
weapons from the West, but geopolitically doesn't benefit anybody to
support us. And you know, like there's this concept of
like ethics and morals from superpowers, whether it be you know,

(02:25:01):
the bastion of democracy in the United States or this
concept of European ethics and morals in the EU, Like
that's all propaganda v aprior where it's not real. If
your country is being helped by any of these countries,
it's because it benefits the countries that are helping you geopolitically.
It's not because of they they support whatever it is

(02:25:22):
that you're doing, you know that, And because the Republic
of Armenia itself is kind of in the situation as well.
But the people of art SoC are certainly in this situation.

Speaker 2 (02:25:34):
And so like right now, I mean honestly, like what
is there to do? But watch right, like is there
is there? Do you have any kind of like hope
for sort of positive productive action at this point or
are we kind of stuck in this? We're going to

(02:25:54):
see what the next chapter of this this conflict looks like,
you know, as it rolls.

Speaker 8 (02:26:00):
Out here, Well, there's two options, really stop it through
military force or let the largest genocide of the twenty
first century go unimpeded. Right because the reason why our
Prime minister said that the Republic of Armenia is not
going to get involved is because it literally cannot. You know,

(02:26:23):
we have Turkey on one border that will almost certainly
be involved if we do. These areas also have guns
pointed at our southern border, which they have said for
years now they want to conquer. The Armenian military is
not a superpower by any stretch of the imagination, and
since we are not connected to Artsock in any feasible way,

(02:26:47):
it would require a massive counter offensive to just relieve
Stapanak Heart from the current siege. Right, there's a reason
why it didn't happen when they were being starved. So
Armenia lacks the ability to stop this. However, there's multiple
countries in the world, mostly France and the United States,
that could end this in five seconds if they truly

(02:27:08):
wanted to.

Speaker 2 (02:27:08):
Yeah, you mentioned at the start that there are US
troops who are in Armenia right now, and I'm my
thoughts are drawn back to in twenty nineteen when Turkey
carried out an expanded invasion of some of the regions
in northeast Syria that composed Rojava, and you know US
peacekeepers pulled out previous to that. Now, the US troops

(02:27:29):
who were in Armenia were training that were not there
as peacekeepers.

Speaker 8 (02:27:32):
But right, they have no mandate to do anything, and
there's only like two hundred of them from some national
Guard unit. It's not like it's a you know, a
brigade combat team, and pressure is whatever you want to
call them are not simply not going to happen. The
European Union is not going to sanction Azerbaijan. They rely
on their oil and Azerbaijan has only become more powerful

(02:27:52):
in this petro diplomacy since Russia invaded Ukraine. The United
States has no functional sanctioning powers over Asgerbajan that could
really affect them. And not to mention, as we've seen
since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sanctions don't stop wars.

Speaker 2 (02:28:09):
Yeah, now, I mean they never had. Like again, this
is something that left is supposed to know right after,
like what happened with Iraq and the nineties, But like
they don't, they don't do anything like.

Speaker 8 (02:28:20):
No, Like if the only thing that stops a genocide
is military force, and there's never been a genocide that
has not ended from military from one actor or another,
I might.

Speaker 2 (02:28:31):
Push even a little bit to say that, like one
thing that in this case I think could potentially at
least reduce the risk of certain kinds of genocide is
like keeping us troops in the area, not even as
like a viable combat force, but as a like all right,
a zebra jen if you if you are going to
like disrupt the territorial integrity of the actual Armenian state,

(02:28:56):
then you know, we've got people who are in country,
and so you'll have to you'll have.

Speaker 8 (02:29:00):
To kill them, you know. That's that's something that probable
have been arguing for a long time now, not necessarily
Americans exactly, but some kind of international peacekeeping mission, because
we all knew that what Russia was doing, like this
war benefits them as the previous instability in the region
benefits them, because it allows them to have their hooks

(02:29:22):
into Armenia. Which is why we're kind of worried of
what happens next here because if Azerbaijan does complete the
conquest of stapanic Herit, which unless someone gets involved, they will,
they need to be like I need to be practical
about these things, and once that happens, Russia won't have

(02:29:43):
the sort of damicles hanging over the Republic of Armenia's
head anymore. So it does make it does make us
wonder like and everybody is very very stupid if they
Thinkbaijan stops with art suck right that in September of
last year when I was on your show, they were
invading the Republic of Armenia. They were not invading Karabaker arts.

(02:30:04):
They were invading the Republic of Armenia. And their stated
goals have not changed. The only thing that would happen
is that this thorn in their side over the last
thirty years would not be there anymore. They would have
no impediments at all within what is considered their own borders.
They could focus everything on the Republic of Armenia. So

(02:30:26):
people who believe that this ends in stapanic Hert like
You'll only have to go back to this time last
year to see that is not the case. The only
thing that's going to happen is maybe they'll take a
little bit of time. The war is coming to Armenia.
This massacre will come across our borders. It's only a
matter of is it one year, two years, three years?

(02:30:47):
That that's the only thing. So without some kind of
immediate intervention, this slaughter will continue until they're defeated. That
you don't negotiate with people who want to murder you.
It's impossible.

Speaker 2 (02:31:03):
No you can't. And it's it's also this is a
very dangerous situation in part because like the reason why
Armenia is acting now, right, and part is because you know,
they have been watching and I think like keying and
like sort of editing their behavior as a result of
how the Russian campaign in Ukraine has gone.

Speaker 8 (02:31:24):
Right. Yeah, they definitely see it as a way to
get away from Russia. I mean, like, yeah, like any
small state in Russia's sphere is doing right now, with
the exception of Georgia, who's kind of doing the opposite.

Speaker 2 (02:31:35):
Yeah, and they there is this, I mean, one of
the things that is really unsettling right now is there
is this there has been kind of a freeze and
a number of conflicts around the world that we have
seen thawing out for the last really the last five
six years. It's been particularly like accelerating this kind of
like thaw in a bunch of these old frozen conflicts.

(02:31:58):
And part of why is that there's this understanding by
a lot of these regional powers that like, well, if
I kicked the fucking door and nobody's coming after.

Speaker 8 (02:32:07):
Me, right, And Azerbaijan understands that to a certain extent,
which is why they acted the way they acted last
year in September. I mean, the CSTO is a joke,
but it does have a mutual defense clause, just like
NATO does. So invasion of our borders should have triggered it,
and that was if people had some kind of not

(02:32:28):
sure if Russia could commit to other things. That's meanted
it for a lot of people. It'smitted it for Armenia specifically.
I mean, we're still technically legal members of that alliance,
but we have no representation in anymore. We don't take
part in trainings, we don't go to meetings. We're functionally
out of it, and we certainly will be after this,
I believe. But I mean as an example of how

(02:32:53):
you can't really negotiate with someone with this kind of
ideology in so far as from this position, like I'm
not saying that like this only ends with international peacekeepers
hoisting a flag over Blak Whuy with this kind of
power discrepancy that the Azaria government has said that they
will negotiate with the government in Stepankert in Karabak once

(02:33:17):
they dissolve and lay down all their weapons. So once
you completely disarm and get rid of all of the
ways you can defend yourself from the obvious slaughter that's
coming your way. Then we'll talk. Is that really a way?
Is that a way of any negotiations could ever happen?
Like being realistic, of course it's not. The government of

(02:33:37):
kara Bak is the only thing. The government of Karabak
and the small local self defense force is the only
negotiating like little crumb that they have because it's it's
stopping them from being murdered. And for people who think
I'm being like I'm overreacting or something, look at how

(02:33:58):
they treated that. Any Armenians villions that fell into their
hands into the twenty twenty war. They cut off their ears,
they cut off their fingers, they cut off their noses.
They fucking beheaded them. It was like watching Isis videos.
But they're wearing multiicam and wearing fast helmets and they
publish them proudly on the internet. They're not ashamed of this.
You can only imagine what happens when a city of

(02:34:18):
one hundred thousand people falls into their hands, and that
is more so than nineteen forties.

Speaker 2 (02:34:24):
Something around like yeah, about one hundred, one hundred and
twenty thousand people who are who are still there.

Speaker 8 (02:34:30):
Our media cannot solve this problem. We do not have
the power to force them to the negotiation table to
guarantee the rights of existence for people where they live.
The countries that do are now friends with the country
that is doing it, So it requires some actual diplomatic spine.

(02:34:52):
And the thing is, you know, the joke is, every
time someone is deeply concerned about something, you take a
drink and then you don't fucking alcoholism, But you can't say,
you know, we call for an immediate cease of the
of the military offensive without an or or like or
what or fucking what? Like what are you doing?

Speaker 4 (02:35:12):
Like?

Speaker 8 (02:35:13):
You can't use strong words to stop a fucking ballistic missile. Yeah,
there needs to be an ore.

Speaker 2 (02:35:20):
We're staring at about a century since we had a
series of conflicts, many of which were based around different
sort of like regional powers scapegoating and then carrying out
acts of tremendous violence against groups of people, including specifically
the Armenians.

Speaker 8 (02:35:39):
Like a tale as old as time. It's being treated
as an anti terror operation and you can go back
to nineteen thirteen during the Genosid, the first genocide, and
it's the same exact excuse the Ottoman Empire.

Speaker 2 (02:35:51):
Used, well, and it's being treated you know, that's how
the Azaris are excusing it. But over here, like when
you're talking about like US politics or about Western policy,
it's it's it's a thing that's happening over there, right,
Like it's a couple of countries that most people don't
know very much about, and like what is what is
our Why are we involved in this? And it's like, well,

(02:36:12):
because this is the thing that we said, like after
one hundred something million people died, the idea that we
all kind of came together with was, well, we should
probably stop folks from doing some of the things that
led to all of those terrible wars.

Speaker 8 (02:36:29):
And we just tell people frame it as, oh, those
people have just been fighting forever.

Speaker 2 (02:36:34):
Yeah, no, we haven't.

Speaker 8 (02:36:37):
It's been within my lifetime. Like I'm thirty five years old.
This war is not older than i am.

Speaker 2 (02:36:44):
Yeah, Like there was not always mass violence between like
the people in this region, right, Like Azeris and Armenians
have not been killing each other over Artsak for thousands
of years, right, Like that's of course there's Armenians and
is Olds.

Speaker 8 (02:37:01):
Yeah, they used to live next to one another. We're
not intractable millennia long enemy. But isn't this isn't one
of those conflicts that I mean, you shouldn't do that
with any conflict because it's a scapegoat to get you
to stop caring and educating yourself about it. But specifically
in the context of this episode, certainly not this conflict.

(02:37:22):
This conflict involves very recent events. Yeah, and it's it's
tied to major geopolitical events happening in the world right
now that whatever country that you're living in and listening to,
your country is involved in.

Speaker 2 (02:37:35):
And it's I mean, like the the the actual as
far as I can see that the actual like realistic
solution here, because this is not a case, right, I
don't think like shipping a bunch of fucking weapons is
a realistic thing to hope for. Like the actual realistic
case for stopping this is putting people in the country

(02:37:57):
that uh provide some sort of like barrier to a
Zeri aggression, right, Like that's like it's taking action we
saying that we did for Kosovo. Yes, yes, that's exactly
what we need without without any kind of negotiations or
debates like that is the only thing that will stop
what is coming. It's not an if like and this

(02:38:19):
is coming and hey online left people, you know, the
Azaris are buy in Israeli arms. Like this is a
situation in which, like we're not talking about we don't
need we don't need guys kicking indoors. We literally need
dudes standing around to create a barrier by the sheer

(02:38:40):
political fact of their existence, right, that's.

Speaker 8 (02:38:43):
All it takes. And not to mention if you're trying
to frame this in like an anti imperialist context or whatever,
Agebajon is literally a fascist fucking dictatorship. Like, yeah, and
our media, we have our problems, car Bock. They have
their problems, you know, but they're functioning representative democracies and

(02:39:03):
with people in land that they've lived on. It's I mean,
there are other people who are indigenous to that land
as well, but it's also theirs. It's if you want
to think of it in that way, which I don't
really like to do because it's it's dirt. But the
real issue here is the people. The people's lives are like,

(02:39:24):
it doesn't fucking matter who controls TOPONICRT at the end
of the day, if people are allowed to live there
and live their lives in dignity, in the way that
they choose to live them. Yeah, but that's not going
to happen if the fascist dictatorship's genocidal armies come storming through, right.
It's it's simply impossible. And that's one of the main
reasons why Karabak Armenians and the Armenian State as well,

(02:39:49):
has continuously said that Karabak can't exist within the frameworks
of the Azari Republic because the Azari Republic is demonstrously
anti Armenian. Like, for instance, if you have an Armenian
surname like I do, you can't even go there. It
doesn't even matter if you've even been to this country
or not. Simply existing is enough to be denied entry,

(02:40:12):
Like it's it's not a place. I mean, if you
want to see how they'll be treated, look how they
treat their own fucking people. Yeah, it's like asking anyone
to be liberated by the fucking forces of North Korea
or Saudi Arabia or something. It's obscene, it's absurd. The
only thing that like, and I'm not saying I support
the government in Armenia as any as anybody who knows me.

(02:40:35):
I don't support any government, but the only constant track
they've had is we support their right for self determination,
as anybody should. And they voted in the eighties to
be on their own, not to be part of Armenia,
not to be part of Andrewijan, but to be the
republic of art SoC because they're the only people who

(02:40:55):
care about their own rights, their own dignity, and their
own right to existence. That's all anybody should ever defend
is people's rights to do that. Yeah, and ever since,
they've made a functioning state with free and fair elections,
ministries that handle these things, ministries of health, ministries of defense,
ministries of education. It's a functioning republic. It's not some

(02:41:19):
statelet that barely functions. And the powers invading it don't
only mean to destroy those the separatist power, they mean
to destroy the people that live there. There's no room
for them to exist in this country.

Speaker 2 (02:41:36):
So, Joe, what do you expect us to see coming
in the next couple of days here? As we you know,
we're about twenty four hours in right now to the
renewed a Zeri attack on art Sock, Like, what is
your kind of expectation for what happens next.

Speaker 8 (02:41:55):
Well, the art sock defense armies doing their best. Yeah,
I mean, obviously they're fighting as hard as they possibly can. However,
without immediate international intervention in some capacity, I mean physical intervention,
a you will stop or this will occur type situation,
it's only a matter of time until it ends. Yeah, yeah,

(02:42:18):
I think that's And to quote the former head of
Doctors without Borders, you cannot stop a genocide with doctors. Yeah,
there's only one way to stop it. And you know,
like I've said a million times before, I believe before
on your show, Yep, the only thing that's allowing this
to go on is the unwillingness of literally anybody to

(02:42:40):
get involved. And there's a couple of quotes about that. Yeah, exactly.
It's it's not a new concept.

Speaker 4 (02:42:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:42:47):
And genide studies.

Speaker 8 (02:42:50):
As someone who studies war, studies genocide and has fought
in war, war is fucking awful. And I don't want
it for anybody. I don't want a Zeri kids to
conscripts to be fucking dying for this, don't want Armenians
to be dying for this. But the only thing that's
going to stop it is someone who is not Armenian,
not his area, and certainly not fucking Russian to say
stop or we will fucking stop it. Yep.

Speaker 5 (02:43:15):
Yeah, I think that's.

Speaker 2 (02:43:18):
I think that's as as good a point to close
on as there is as we're going to find. At least, Joe,
do you have anything else you wanted to kind of
like bring up before we roll out here?

Speaker 8 (02:43:31):
I would. I would. This is normally where I would
say you could support the people involved in this in
this way, but unfortunately, there's they're under siege, they're surrounded,
nothing can get to them. There's I got nothing, man.

Speaker 2 (02:43:45):
Yeah, I mean that that is the reality, right, It's
like there's nowhere to send money, there's nothing to like,
and to be quite frank, I mean, I think people
should be harassing their their representatives over this. But you know,
I'm not overly optimistic. Yeah, the Biden administration has been
making noises, you know, but but I you know, I

(02:44:07):
have not seen evidence that they're going to do more
than that yet.

Speaker 8 (02:44:09):
So I will say, if the United States gets involved
and they really want to turn Armenia to the West,
which they absolutely should, there's no better time like now,
this is the chance.

Speaker 9 (02:44:20):
To do it.

Speaker 8 (02:44:21):
You want to show that like the West is the
way for Armenians and pull them completely away from Russia
because everybody wants to get the fuck away from Russia.
Like there. Yeah, there's thousands of people marching down the
street literally saying fuck Russia yesterday. But you need to
give them a path to do so, and this is
the way to do it.

Speaker 5 (02:44:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:44:42):
Well shit, thanks Joe. Sorry, sorry, we keep having you
on the show and this, uh, this situation. I uh well,
we'll come on and talk about something.

Speaker 8 (02:44:55):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:44:56):
We probably won't.

Speaker 8 (02:44:57):
Neither of our shows ever talk about anything.

Speaker 5 (02:45:00):
About anything lighthearted.

Speaker 2 (02:45:02):
Check out Joe's show Lions Led by Donkeys, The Lions
lad by Donkey's podcast Great Military History Podcast. Joe, thank
you for being on, and please, I don't know, good luck.

Speaker 8 (02:45:17):
Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 5 (02:45:18):
Rob Hi everyone, it's me James. And just before you
hear the episode, i'd want to warn you that you
can hear our telephones going absolutely mental for much of
this episode. That's because as we were recording, people have

(02:45:41):
found out that SDG and E San Diego gast Electric
were restricting access to one of the sites where migrants
were in need of aid, and people were very concerned
about that, so they were reaching out to James and
Jacqueline and Pedro to ask for assistance and to me
to let me know if I could get the word out.
That's why you can hear our phones going crazy, and

(02:46:03):
I think it's good that it's in there in a
sense because perhaps you can get a sense of how
mad the last few weeks have been for everyone. Our
phone's constantly be going off. I'm sure mine a lot
less than James and Jacquelines and Pedros because people are
overwhelmed and they need more help than we're able to give.
So consider that background noise a blessing and I hope

(02:46:24):
you enjoyed the episode. Thanks. Hi everyone, It's me James
today and I hear again to talk about the border today.
I'm joined by some guests. I'm joined by James and
Jacqueline from Border Kindness, who we've heard from before, and
I'm also joined by Pedro Rias from the American Friends
Service Committee. If you guys would like to introduce yourselves

(02:46:46):
and explain the kind of role you play along the border,
that'd be wonderful if we start with Pedro, because folks
haven't heard from him before. That would be great.

Speaker 11 (02:46:54):
Great, Thank you, James, and it's such an honor to
be on the show together with folks from Border Kindness.
James and Jacqueline's great to see you again. My name
is Pedro Rio. I'm director of the American Friends Service
Committee US Mexico Border Program, which is a Quaker based
human rights organization. I've been on staff now for twenty
years working in San Diego on border issues, and it's

(02:47:18):
been a whirldwind of two decades of work being able
to follow this topic. Our work primarily focuses on border issues,
and we have four components, one of which is documenting
civil and human rights abuses that occur when contact goes
awry between primarily federal immigration authorities with members of civil society,

(02:47:44):
including migrants and border community residents. Documentation could be case
evolving abuse of practices, abuse of policies, cases evolving abuse
of authority, and so on and so forth. We also
do a lot of policy analysis and advocacy at the

(02:48:04):
local level, at the state level, and at the federal level,
trying to hold agencies accountable, making them more transparent, ensuring
that there are oversight mechanisms and how they operate, and
that's done in conjunction with several coalitions at the county

(02:48:25):
wide level in San Diego, but also at the national
level with the Southern Border Communities Coalition and other organizations
as well.

Speaker 4 (02:48:34):
And then we.

Speaker 11 (02:48:36):
Obviously work in allyship with a lot of other organizations
that have campaigns of mutual interest, some of which have
been going on for a long time, such as the
Friends of Friendship Park and trying to gain access public
access to Friendship Park, which currently is being impacted by
the construction of two thirty foot border walls. And we

(02:49:01):
also work directly with community members and providing information about
what the rights are, how they can become and our
leaders in their own communities, and how they can be
active in straightening their communities and providing guidance to other
people who might be in the same circumstances. So, in
a nutshell, that's the work that we do.

Speaker 5 (02:49:22):
Yeah, great, it's very important work. And then James and Jacqueline,
you want to explain Folks are familiar I think with
Border Kindness from the previous episode, but like, maybe what
have you been doing in the last I can't remember
two weeks, like since people started being held out in
the open again.

Speaker 12 (02:49:40):
So in our organizations kind of always evolving with like
the evolving needs of the border, and over the last
i want to say, like years in particular, we've really
started to emphasize our services being present in the rural border.
We're based in Mexikali, primarily, our water drops are generally

(02:50:00):
in the Imperio Valley region, and we started to extend
our services to the rural community in San Diego County
with regards to like day labor, providing aid to micro
community that's living in rural communities. So all that to say,
when the border appeared to be having one of its

(02:50:21):
episodes of chaos, what's happened in the last couple of
weeks with folks being detained between the walls down in
sanny Cidral and then folks being you know, just dumped
out into the street at the transit centers if we've
been seeing all over San Diego County. We sort of

(02:50:42):
held off because we knew this was going to happen
in Hakuma. It was kind of one of those sixth
sense kind of things, like when you see the writing
on the wall, and it was like only a matter
of time before people ended up pushed into rural San
Diego County, and unfortunately that has been the case. So
we were actually out in the desert doing a water

(02:51:04):
drop and heard that that in fact had occurred and
there were hundreds.

Speaker 13 (02:51:10):
Of people in Hakkumba. So we've been out there providing
EID ever since.

Speaker 5 (02:51:15):
Yeah, so Preps, we could describe these. So there are
like three things I think people would benefit from knowing about.
One is the detention of people between the walls in
San Cathedral, which I think Pedro has seen a lot of.
I've seen, We've seen each other down there several days.
The detention of folks in the open desert in Hakumba,
and this this dumping of migrants to various transit centers

(02:51:38):
across the county. Those are the three things we've seen,
like in massive numbers this last couple of weeks. So
Preps we could start with explaining her Cumba, and then
Pedro can take on explaining the other two because I
know he's been responding to those. So can you just
tell us, like what you saw, the number of people,
the conditions in which they're being held, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:52:01):
Yeah, usually what we're seeing now, I mean now it's
currently what today?

Speaker 4 (02:52:08):
What is today?

Speaker 1 (02:52:09):
Wednesday? So I know it today is yeah, yeah, I
woke up this morning. I asked jacquely on what day
it was, because it just seems like a broken blur,
you know, the in and day out. But we are
on Wednesday now, that's Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Every day
so far we have noticed a revolving door of roughly

(02:52:35):
two and fifty spread out between one to three camps
every day. There's a camp on the east side in Hokomba,
there's a camp that's on the west side of Hokumba,
and then there's a camp that's just outside Hokomba and
Boulevard that seems to be the biggest camp right now.

(02:52:56):
That camp is the largest one because it's kind of hidden.
You got to drive down from the main highway. You
have to drive, you know, at least fifteen minutes, you know,
down some dirt roads, back roads, you know, past ranches
and stuff like that to get to that open air camp,
where the other ones, especially like we saw in May,

(02:53:19):
were more like wide open, closer to the towns, closer
to visibility, closer to highway access. And so what we've
noticed is that speaking with the locals and seeing for
ourselves that every day the camps that are more visible
are having less people coming in and they're being taken

(02:53:41):
out faster. And so that part I think is, you know,
it could be done for for a multitude of reasons,
but the camp that's hidden and out of you is
the one that seems kind of strategic and seems calculated
on a greater level that as people are being loaded

(02:54:02):
up on vans or buses to be taken out for processing,
almost the same amount of people gets walked in to
that camp from the actual border by border patrol. So
it it's definitely an odd situation that's going on there.
It seems definitely calculated orchestrated and something that you know,

(02:54:22):
we feel that will be going on for quite a while.

Speaker 5 (02:54:26):
Yeah, let's when we talk about that, right, So, like
people are crossing and then being being transported, like you say,
on foot by border patrol to the camp that's your understanding,
right to that camp in in near Boulevard. I'll say,
I don't want to give the exact location.

Speaker 1 (02:54:41):
Correct, Yes, we witnessed that as well. We witnessed on
Monday night that we were there to help distribute food
and warm supplies, and I think a total of five
or six Border Patrol vans had, you know, about one
hundred people are so lined up and loaded up onto

(02:55:03):
those vans. And then right as they were getting ready
to have the last two vans leave, we saw in
the distance, in the opposite direction or Patrol their truck
driving behind a group of roughly eighty eighty five new
migrants coming in on foot. Right around there's a gap

(02:55:26):
in the fence.

Speaker 5 (02:55:27):
Yeah, I saw people walking in. I was the other
day before you guys. So I was early, as I said,
early Monday morning, and I saw the same thing, like
you know, sort of just after dawn. I couldn't make
out who was walking home, just because it was dark.
Can you explain briefly, and then then we'll move to
to Pedro's situation. Can you explain the services that are
provided for them by Border Patrol and then what is

(02:55:50):
provided for them by volunteers.

Speaker 12 (02:55:53):
By Border Patrol. It's essentially nothing. When this occurred in May,
we heard that at most people were receiving an eight
ounce bottle of water daily, not really distributed in an
organized manner. Currently, we're observing that people are when they arrive,
they're at times provided with a sixteen ounce bottle of

(02:56:14):
water and potentially a little toddler sized pack of goldfish crackers.
Border Patrol is not providing any other continued services food, shelter, sanitation,
anything like that. Those things have all been organized at
a community level by a variety of organizations such as

(02:56:36):
ours that's comprised of just regular people. So it's the
government's task of managing a humanitarian crisis.

Speaker 4 (02:56:49):
They have.

Speaker 12 (02:56:51):
Like really outsourced it to the general community of supporters.
So they have taken not just the role of not
having any responsibility towards caring for migrants in like the
most basic manner, but it also seems like they have
come to expect the general community to come in and

(02:57:13):
fill the gaps that they're not meeting. So Border Patrol
is not providing them with anything. It's everyday regular people
that are showing up with blankets, food, water, hygiene items.
It's getting really cold, so people are distributing warm clothing, diapers, formula,
anything that people need is being provided by the community.

Speaker 5 (02:57:34):
Yeah, yeah, a good summary, I think, so, Pedrick, could
you explain how the how the situation is in sany
Edra and then also at the transit centers, and it's
a pretty similar situation.

Speaker 11 (02:57:46):
I think, yeah, sure, I'll start with Sunny zero and
the location where community members and organizations have set up
is known as Whiskey eight.

Speaker 4 (02:57:55):
There are at least.

Speaker 11 (02:57:56):
Three other locations that we know where encampman's has formed.
One is Whisky four, which is close to the last
America shopping mall. It's an outlet mall closer to the
port of entry, and then about a mile west of
Whiskey eight there's Spooners Mesa, and then close to that
there's ninety one X. The Spooners Mesa is primarily where

(02:58:18):
the men's encampment is has been arranged, and this happened
back in May. There was an incident where Border Patrol
decided to move all the single adult men and walk them,
march them essentially about a mile up a hill and
then up another hill to get to Spooners Mesa. After

(02:58:41):
some advocacy last week, we convinced Border Patrol to allow
two of us to go up there to feed about
anywhere between three hundred and eighty and four hundred men,
and it took us over an hour. About an hour,
fifteen minutes to feed all of the men. Fortunately, we
just barely had enough food for all of them. This

(02:59:02):
was in the evening and as we were driving in
and driving out, all we could see was milar blankets
strown about, and that's all that was up there. And
these were the men that were these milar blankets down
in Whiskey eight. How community members and organizations have arranged
the solidarity support stations have been in four set So

(02:59:27):
you have the charging station, you have the medical supplies
and other items station, then you have the food station,
and then the water station. And so we tried to
maintain the medical supplies. The food station is available only
when we have enough food to provide substenance to everyone there.
We don't want to create a situation where we only

(02:59:48):
serve half of the people or a quarter of the people,
and then the other people go hungry. And mind you,
it's important to point out that when people arrive there,
they are hungry, they are thirsty. Some of them have
rapes because they scale the primary border barrier and injure themselves.
Others are wet because they've walked through the canal to

(03:00:08):
get to that location. I've also witnessed on several locations
where a border patrol will tell people who are injured
to walk towards our location because they tell them that
that's where we will provide them with medical care. Now,
I think it's important to mention that under customers and

(03:00:29):
a Border Protection which is a parent agency of the
Border Patrol, under their national standards for how they are
supposed to transform, escort, detain, and search people under their custody,
they are obligated to feed, to provide water, to provide shelter,
to treat medical urgencies. Any time that individuals are under

(03:00:52):
their custody. There is some back and forth. Orbitrol locally
will say that individuals are not under their custody until
they are being transported, even though they will provide them
with a wristband or bracelet in some cases, tell them
to remove their shoelaces, direct them to where they should
be walking y'all at them when they're not forming in

(03:01:13):
lines in order to be picked up. Sometimes throw a
fit and will not pick people up even though they're
supposed to be there to do that because people are
not in lines as quickly as it should be. All
of this to several of our organizations indicate that border
patrol at some to some degree has people under their

(03:01:36):
custody and as such is violating these national standards because
it's not meeting their needs at any level. Besides maybe
the bottle of water might provide and the one or
two granola bars they provide per day, if even that, yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:01:56):
I think it's the national border patrol. Pio also claimed
to me that they were not detaining people and that
people were free to quote return to Mexico, which like,
these people aren't from Mexico and in many cases, and
like I think the first day, maybe I saw you
speaking to one family who come from Mexico, but the
vast jority of people weren't, and they'd also be entering

(03:02:18):
Mexico between ports of entry because they're in the United
States at this time. So yeah, it's just not those
people are like, there's lots of evidence that they're being detained,
even if they say they're not. What then happens to
those people? They We've all seen it, right, These vans
pull up. They generally process people in a certain order,

(03:02:40):
which which is to take unaccompanied miners and women who
are alone with children, and then families and then single adults.
What happens to them once they get on that van?

Speaker 4 (03:02:50):
Do we do?

Speaker 5 (03:02:51):
We have a clear sense of that and where they
end up.

Speaker 11 (03:02:54):
They will be taken to any one of several borbitual
stations for processing. And it's that processing stage where most
of them who are in these locations are there because
they want to present themselves to the authority and begin
an asylum claim, and so it's how they answer the

(03:03:15):
questions while being processed that they get tracked, mostly for asylum.
There are some that will be quickly removed from the
country expeditiously, but most of them will be tracked for asylum.
They will be given a court date when they should
show up, and that court date the court location depends

(03:03:36):
on where their final destination will be. Technically, Mexicans can
only be detained for forty eight hours. Non Mexicans can
only be detained no more than seventy two hours. So
within that detention period, they then are being transported to
one of four locations in San die County, two of
which are in San Diego, the Santi Zeru Transit Center

(03:03:59):
in the Iris Transit Center, one in Oceanside, and the
other in Alcohol. And so we're seeing the majority of
the people being transported to science Ero and to IRIS,
and that's where colleagues with other sister organizations are leading
the charge to try to support them with assisting and
charging phones, providing food, clothing, getting them to the airport,

(03:04:23):
getting them transportation, getting them housing, and as much as
limited as that's possible, trying to connect them with lost
family members. Because families have been separated, there are adult
children eighteen nineteen who also are trying to figure out
where their family members are. And in some cases, as
a conversation I had with them, man from Venezuela, he

(03:04:43):
had no idea what city he was at either, though
he was in San Diego, and so trying to make
that type of arrangement and clarification is always challenging as well.

Speaker 5 (03:04:53):
Yeah, and obviously also expensive. Right, Like these things all
place burdens on like your donation network and both in
sort of the community in general. And perhaps we can
talk about like, because the scale of support that's been
provided by the community is extremely impressive, and given how
many people have already come through this sort of not

(03:05:16):
detention detention system, but perhaps both of you could talk
about like the support you've been able to provide and
how people who are not in San Diego can help
you continue to provide that support.

Speaker 12 (03:05:31):
So the first day that we heard of folks coming
in because obviously it's interesting because border patrol, like Pedro
says like they're claiming that these people are not under
their care, but they're very much acting as if they're
under their detained care. They're telling people that if they

(03:05:52):
call an ambulance to seek medical care, as we observe,
they say, well, that's going to affect your case if
you leave.

Speaker 3 (03:05:57):
And so people are very.

Speaker 12 (03:05:59):
Much under the deliberate impression that they are being detained,
but they're not being cared for in the most basic way.
And so we first responded on Saturday. By Sunday we
were there with five hundred meals that went very very quickly,
providing shelter items for people, so tarps. Hakumba is a

(03:06:23):
very rugged desert terrain. There is no shade in these areas,
so people are making sort of like makeshift shelters, but
there is nothing shielding them from the sun, which is
really unrelenting all day and it gets up to nineties.
So we've been providing tarps, pop ups that sort of

(03:06:44):
thing so people are not becoming sick from overexposure. We're
providing hygiene items, we're providing just basic needs. And that
gets incredibly expensive because if it was a static situation,
such as in May when there was eighteen hundred to
two thousand people, that was a huge undertaking that also

(03:07:05):
took a lot of community collaboration to meet the needs
of so many people. But this time around, as James says,
it's like a revolving door of hundreds and hundreds of people.
So it's taking hundreds and hundreds while at any given
time there may be only and I say only two
to three hundred people, it doesn't mean that to only

(03:07:26):
two to three hundred people needed to be fed that day.
It's that you know, that is who is there at
that time. And when people arrive, as bethro said, like
they haven't eaten in days. We talked to people that
said that they took two days to walk to Hakumba.
So if they arrived to Tijuana without much food in
their belly and then they're having to walk for two days,

(03:07:48):
they're arriving starving and begging for food and not being
provided with absolutely anything. So if it wasn't for all
of the organizations that are showing up and taking sort
of shifts to feed people, there would be nothing for them.
And we have absolutely no idea how long this is

(03:08:09):
going to go on. It could be over today, it
could go on for months year. I mean, we really
don't know what to expect. And organizations are being relied
on to provide, you know, life sustaining care for people,
but we're not being communicated with from border patrol as
to basically anything, what the outlook is, what the numbers are,

(03:08:35):
what the updates of how the situation is going to evolve.
So every day is a surprise and we need to
have resources to be able to meet the needs of
that day. It's incredibly like consuming of every resource including
time and gas is six dollars a gallon.

Speaker 5 (03:08:51):
Yeah, now you need to drive your truck right because
like you can't get to some of the locations, Like
I know, I have a big get truck and loves
of my friends about to catch a rye with me
because I cause can't make it.

Speaker 12 (03:09:03):
It exactly like, we have people that have gas efficient,
low priuses and stuff and they're going to bottom out
out there. So we have our huge lifted jeep that
you know, doesn't get as much gas mileage as something,
but it's also going to be able to get the
supplies out there. So every aspect of it is incredibly
consuming of resources and we don't know what to expect.

(03:09:28):
It's not it's hard to budget. You don't know what
I expect. So the community has obviously come together in support,
but then it's like, well, how do we manage this
when we don't we can't forecast what's going on, so
it's tough. It's definitely tough. We need sustained support.

Speaker 1 (03:09:50):
If I may add on that, as Jacquelin said, the
people are showing up hungry, heavening for days. You know,
we get reports that you know, people are showing up
just begging for food, and the federal government more specifically DHS,
more specifically CBP Border Patrol know this. They're trying to

(03:10:12):
stop people out at whatever the endgame is, and maybe
it's just another arm of you know, prevention through the terrence.
It's cruel, it's on purpose. People you know, are are
the ponds and whatever, you know, game is being played
and it's cruel, and that's you know, we're doing what

(03:10:33):
we can to try to offset that as much as possible,
but cruelty is definitely they're all across the border.

Speaker 5 (03:10:40):
Just to kind of upbuild on what James said, like,
I think it's very easy for this construct of migrants
to like always be like this sort of demonized other
Fox News and KUSI and all these outlets do that
very well. But I think it's really important to like
the people who were being cruel to. Like I saw
a lady breastfeeding in the desert on Sunday night. I've

(03:11:01):
seen grandparents, I've seen people who are eight months pregnant
little children like these aren't like people who have done
anything wrong, and they just for whatever reason they come here,
it doesn't really matter. They don't deserve to be treated
like that. And like James said, it's something of an
induced Like I've been to natural disasters all over the

(03:11:24):
world and reported on those and seen those, and I've
been to refugee camps all over the world, but like
it's some big of a unique to the US problem
that our federal government can click its fingers and induce
a humanitarian crisis and then like hold its hands up
in the air and say we can't help you. Like that,
Like aside from dictatorial regimes in places I've reported in

(03:11:47):
like the people don't governments don't do that very often,
and like James said, it's these people who paid the price,
it's not us for the most part. Pedro, could you
maybe explain a little bit of how American French Service
Committee has been able to respond and the resources you've used,
and how you can help make this a little bit
less painful for the people who are being held in

(03:12:10):
between defenses.

Speaker 11 (03:12:11):
Sure, learning from the experience that we had back in March,
April and May, we heard a few weeks ago that
there were people lined up in an area that we
could not see from the US side but could be
seen from the Mexican side, just west of the Sandy
Sedra port of entry, with people wearing and using milar blankets.

(03:12:32):
And so the milar blankets were an indication to us
that people were there for probably longer than four hours,
and so we kept monitoring that, asking colleagues in Tijuana
to inform us if they had seen any other groups
like that, and off and on over the past month
there were reports of that, and it wasn't until about
two weeks ago that someone said that they were there

(03:12:52):
for a long period of time. So last last week
we set up what we called an observation post at
Whiskey eight so that we could determine for ourselves how
long people were there, what sort of needs they might have,
and how to respond whether to set up the solidarity
support stations again, and quickly we determined that that's what

(03:13:16):
we needed to do, so we call our colleagues from
other organizations whenever set up up with that for instance,
has been extremely helpful and leading the charge in different places.
The Appreciate Collective So Mutual Group also has been extremely
important in having their people out there, and Friends of
Friendship Park also has been important. So all these organizations

(03:13:39):
that responded quickly and started to build from the experience
that we had back in late spring setting up these
stations to charge phones. Phones our lifeline for people. And
back in may Or Patrol threatened us and they said,
if you want to keep feeding people, you can't be
charging their phones. And so we said, well, we're going

(03:14:01):
to have to keep charging phones because people need them.
And unfortunately Borbtoal backed off then and now it's part
of what we do right. We charge phones and it's
how people are able to communicate with their loved ones,
especially if they've been separated. Feeding people, it's just as
much as we're able to, even if it's just a sandwich,
even if it's a warm meal that we're able to

(03:14:25):
get through the bars or the secondary border barrier, that
could mean the difference between someone staying healthy or someone
becoming seriously ill. Bandaging up small cuts could relieve someone
from getting an infection, identifying when medical emergencies pop up,

(03:14:47):
so an eight month pregnant person who is suddenly having
labor pains and having a needing to call nine to
one one, for instance, or insisting with porbatrol that the
one month old child cannot remain overnight in between border walls,
and just insisting and insisting and insisting, insisting that the

(03:15:09):
two porter parties that they have there need to be serviced,
for instance. And so all of this advocacy is happening
at the same time that our colleagues and allies are
also feeding people, and the constant communication with different elected
officials pushing on them to take charge and to respond

(03:15:29):
has been one of the different aspects of our response
to what is a humanitarian disaster that has been slowly evolving,
I would say over years and years, because human migration
isn't centered around humanitarian needs and human rights. It's been
centered around enforcement, around militarization, around cruel deterrence, as James

(03:15:55):
was talking about, which creates conditions where people are led
to suffer. And that's what we're seeing right now, people
suffering because of how this has been manufactured, how immigration
has been dealt with, regardless of who's in the White House,
over and over and over, and so now we're challenged

(03:16:16):
to respond to these humanitarian needs in ways that are
stretching our limits, but we're able to do it and
hopefully lifting up the dignity of people that are placing
under these terreble inhumane conditions.

Speaker 5 (03:16:31):
Yeah, I think it's very important to give people a
little bit of dignity as much as we can. One
thing that you mentioned that we haven't spoken about we
should is elected officials and local federal state governments. How
much support, if any, have either of these sites received
from people in elected office.

Speaker 11 (03:16:51):
You know, we have had support from Senator Seph Bala's office.
That's been to me oppressive to see how much interest
there is, how much advocacy there is from staff from
that office. We have not necessarily had much support from

(03:17:11):
congressional or federal senators. We have not seen them really
on the ground. There is a responsibility I believe that
the County of San Diego has to meet some of
these challenging circumstances at the transit centers, they're bocking, I feel,

(03:17:32):
and to the detriment of people who need these services
and need the support. I believe the San Diego Police
Department has been suggesting where people should be dropped off
and not listening to folks on the ground about how
the IRIS station should be central and not dividing the
drop offs between Irish and Sandy Seso for instance. So

(03:17:54):
there's a lot of a lot of necessity for local
government to be coordinating with state and federal governments and
and that's lacking again to the detriment of people who
are cut in the middle.

Speaker 5 (03:18:09):
How about James and Jack And have you seen any
sort of government support?

Speaker 8 (03:18:14):
No, not at all.

Speaker 1 (03:18:18):
I've you know, heard through channels of you know, sources
that work for the county and they claim that they're
handcuffed or that it's Border Patrols responsibility. And then Border
Patrol is saying it's the county's responsibility, and it just
it seems like appointing fingers. No one's trying to take

(03:18:41):
you know, responsibility for it. And maybe that's because it's
going to be something that's going to go on for
a while. It's not something that either wants to you know,
take on the responsibility of. And you know, you've seen
county supervisors speak out against it, push them the blame.
People are here, this is San Diego County, this is

(03:19:03):
the United States. Someone needs to take care of, you know,
the people here. That's that's the role of government. That's
why people pay taxes for you know, for services, and
services need to be provided for. You know, we pay
taxes so other people can get services as well, citizens
non citizens like that. To me, it seems so easy.

Speaker 5 (03:19:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean.

Speaker 1 (03:19:27):
That's that's everything that you've been told, but everything that
you're not seeing, you know, in practice. So I mean,
this whole thing is to us on the ground, it
seems so simple of how it should be done. But
like you know, anytime, and we've spoke on it. I
think on the last episode as well, like money's big issues.
You're going to spend all this money, they need to

(03:19:48):
make sure that their money is going in the right
pockets that they wanted to.

Speaker 5 (03:19:51):
Yeah, Like I was sitting out in her cumba with
the colleague and we got overflown by a uh sixty
black Hawk, a Border Patrol helicopter, and it just hobbling
around checking us out, and like it's just so I
don't know, it's just so depressing to see this helicopter
which costs millions of dollars, which are thousands of dollars

(03:20:12):
just to take off next to the border wall, which
got twelve million dollars a mile. And like on the
same day that the San Diego City Council found an
amicus brief in this case of the Supreme Court to
allow it to further criminalize and house people. We have
all these resources and we're just throwing them, as Pedera said,
enforcement and criminalization of the most marginalized people in our communities,

(03:20:34):
rather than giving a thirsty personal bottle of water or
like a little baby blanket. And yeah, it's really hard.

Speaker 12 (03:20:42):
It's one of those agents over time of the day
could literally feed everybody there. Yes, we're all like you know,
calculating calories per dollar of like the mule and trying
to get like every single dollar to stretch because we
don't know how long this is going to go on,
because we know that public perception and interest is something

(03:21:07):
that is not sustained. And the purpose too, because for instance,
Border Patrol is claiming and they were on what outlet
was it CBA.

Speaker 1 (03:21:18):
CBS eight local San Diego said, I need to report
that the Kumba camps are cleared. There's no one's there.
I just you know, I had to step away from
this this recording for a few to get an update
that there are people still showing up. There's getting trying
to get cleared out as quick as possible as people
show up because it's in the public eye. But also

(03:21:39):
now the power company is threatening legal action and criminal
action against any aid orgs or people they show up.

Speaker 5 (03:21:49):
Oh great, cool, that'll be fun. Yeah, I mean yeah,
the reporting on this has been poor, even more poor
than it was in May. I'll say, like out in Hokumba,
it's hard to get to. James and I both spent
a decent junk of yesterday morning trying to direct people
how to not get lost out there. But like I
think more persinently when there is not an election or

(03:22:11):
like a narrative that migration fits in. It gets, certainly
by national outlets forgotten with the end of Title forty
two in May. I think everyone had their like sort
of doomsday op eds in the weeks beforehand, and then
that that didn't actually happen in the way that it
had been sort of like quote unquote experts who don't

(03:22:33):
come to the border very often had predicted it would,
and so folks turned up, especially at Whiskey eight, and
did the sort of crisis story. But we haven't seen
that this time.

Speaker 12 (03:22:44):
And you know, now it's appearing really different because, like
you see sort of the management by border patrol of
the situation in order to sort of shield the public
from like the true level of the crisis. So in

(03:23:05):
claiming that Umba has been cleared, I suppose that's technically
correct if they're referring to the you know, they're relying
on reality in order to so people, the average everyday
person that's not immersed in this is going to read
that and they're like, oh good, it's been cleared. Because like,
my family back home knows a lot of like really
conservative folks Outland par Valley, and like even the most

(03:23:26):
conservative people I knew back in May were like, oh
my gosh, how could they have babies out there in
the desert.

Speaker 13 (03:23:32):
That's so horrible.

Speaker 12 (03:23:33):
And people had, you know, a lot of really strong
emotions to seeing families huddled in the desert for a week. Now,
it seems like there's a really deliberate management of like
the pr with respect to this situation.

Speaker 5 (03:23:50):
So yeah, like.

Speaker 12 (03:23:50):
Relying on the technicality of Hakumba being cleared because the
main camp in town has been cleared, but ten fifteen
minutes away, there's still hundreds of people, and we're the
ones that are out on social media screaming into the
void into each other. Hey, this is still happening, people
are you know, there's an amputee out here whose leg
is bleeding. There is someone out here who hasn't had

(03:24:12):
his heart medication for a week. Like those kind of
situations are occurring still, while the report and the public
perception is like, ohhkum has been cleared, it's all good.
So unless somebody is like already involved, they're generally not
hearing about it.

Speaker 13 (03:24:25):
And I think that's on purpose too.

Speaker 5 (03:24:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's Yeah, that's a very
that's a very niche technicality. It might not be within
the boundaries of the town of a Cumba, but like
people are still being corraled in the desert with no services, right,
and that that's what we should care about, not which
district they're in or what have you. So I think
people have probably heard why now that things are bad

(03:24:50):
and we don't know how bad they will be, and
then maybe they'll get worse, maybe they'll get better, and
hopefully they'll want to support. So how can people do that? Like,
what what resource? Like what I guess the concrete actions
can they take? Where can they give you money? How
can they send you supplies if they want to volunteer
in there in the county, how can they do that?
And what kind of volunteers are most needed?

Speaker 1 (03:25:11):
Yeah, for Border Kindness, monetary donations are the biggest help
that allows us to meet current needs, daily needs. We're
on venmo at Border dash Kindness Cash app at Border
Kindness Cash, they'll info at Borderkindness dot Org.

Speaker 12 (03:25:31):
Volunteering volunteering is pretty sensitive, We're not We understand that
our team is already incredibly taxed, so we do need
support in terms of like food preparation and getting supplies
out there, transporting supplies, but it is a very sensitive situation,

(03:25:55):
so we do want to I don't know if vet
or we want to be able to talk to the
people that want to volunteer, so certain expectations that they
may have or some certain needs that we may have
are all communicated really clearly. So the organization very amazingly

(03:26:19):
agreed to help us with that task of screening volunteers.
So people, if they are wanting to do so and
come out to Hakumba, to email volunteer at Ala dot org.

Speaker 5 (03:26:36):
Perfect, Yeah, that's pretty good.

Speaker 12 (03:26:38):
Yeah, I'll send you that info and they can just
say like what are they interested in doing, where they're
located and that sort of thing, and then we'll be
in touch. Primarily, I mean more than anything, Like twenty
dollars is a tarp to cover a family and keep
somebody shielded from the wind.

Speaker 13 (03:26:59):
We can feed a lot of people with one hundred dollars.

Speaker 12 (03:27:02):
So financial support is the most direct way, even though
it's not necessarily always feasible for people, it is the most.

Speaker 13 (03:27:12):
Efficient way for us to be able to buy items
in bulk.

Speaker 5 (03:27:15):
Yeah, I think even five bucks, right, Like maybe that's
two people and it really makes a day to have
a whole meal.

Speaker 8 (03:27:20):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 13 (03:27:21):
Yeah, anything helps.

Speaker 5 (03:27:23):
So yeah, people can definitely do this. How about for
American French service cammit be better? How can people donate
volunteer help?

Speaker 11 (03:27:30):
Yeah, I mean I would. I would also stress what
Jacqueline said in terms of vetting people and volunteers. It's
you know, it's not it's not easy work, and we
want to make sure that when people are volunteering that
there's a certain level of emotional strength that people are
able to have. It's very tough work. And at the

(03:27:51):
same time make sure that what we're doing does not
negatively impact those that we are presuming to want to help, right,
and so that's important. I think going through those channels.
If you you know the folks that are leading the
work at the transit centers, check in with them first.

(03:28:14):
But then there are other things that could be done.
The other day, someone showed up with twenty boxes of pizza,
you know, a very useful, easy way to support connecting
with people and finding out what the needs are. That's
another way. If if you would rather purchase the tarps yourselves,
for instance, do that and then we can pick them

(03:28:35):
up we can find out how to meet and pick
up those items. If you want to donate. There are
multiple organizations doing this work. I believe someone was working
on a list to produce for us. Going on the
website AFC dot org and being sure that you find
our locations San Diego, so that our program then receives

(03:28:58):
that donation directly. If the program goes to the overall
a f C, we won't see it.

Speaker 8 (03:29:02):
So just be very.

Speaker 11 (03:29:04):
Mindful of when you're donating to a f CFC dot org.
First locate the Sending a program office and then find
the donate page on there so that we can be
assured that you are sending it to our program, or
you can definitely contact me and I could also assist
you with that.

Speaker 5 (03:29:24):
Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's important that
both if you sort of centered with regard to volunteering,
that like there are organizations that exist to serve volunteers
through facilitating like a service experience to them, and that
that's not what is happening here, Like this is about
serving people who are very vulnerable, So like there has
to be some kind of vetting process and people have
to understand that, like that's part of keeping those people

(03:29:46):
safe and that that's why that's happening. So yeah, thank
thank you very much for this. We'll keep covering it obviously,
and I really hope people can find some resources to
donate because it's been very taxing financially and all these
groups and in our community generally. Is there anything else

(03:30:07):
you guys would like to share before we finish up?

Speaker 11 (03:30:10):
The only thing I would add is that you know,
pressing the authorities. That's the other way. If you are
able to connect with the county, you know, your county
supervisor in San Diego, press on them that they have
a responsibility and an obligation to respond to this in
a way that supports people who need to support And

(03:30:32):
that's where I would push towards.

Speaker 5 (03:30:34):
Yeah, I'll add to that that having spoken to people
in the county and then in state office, like if
you call, that makes more difference, and if you email,
so if you have the time to make a phone call,
that could help a lot. Anything else from you, James Jaqueline,
That's what.

Speaker 1 (03:30:50):
I can think of. I mean, everything changes daily, so
if we were the record them so every single day,
I'm sure I could come with something new.

Speaker 5 (03:30:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (03:30:55):
Yeah, for people to stay clued in with pannels of
communications such as this podcast that are actually with people
on the ground and share that with their community is
really important. Like we're already getting like some social media
kind of comments. I mean, it happens every time about
how we're aiding and abetting people breaking the law. But

(03:31:16):
it's the government breaking the law. They're breaking international asylum law.
And it's really important for people who aren't as versed
in all of this to stay aware of that that
everybody who is presenting for asylum has a legal right
to do so.

Speaker 13 (03:31:32):
Not that it matters.

Speaker 12 (03:31:32):
I mean they have, like it's a humanitarian right, yes,
but for people who are very concerned with legality, or
at least they lean heavily on legality, presenting for asylum
is illegally protected right, and that's something that is actually being.

Speaker 13 (03:31:56):
Cut short by the government in violation of that.

Speaker 5 (03:32:00):
Yeah, I think you're right. It doesn't really matter. Like
I really don't give a shit about.

Speaker 13 (03:32:03):
Like, yeah, come back people that really about.

Speaker 1 (03:32:07):
It, you know.

Speaker 5 (03:32:08):
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, it's good to it's good to remind
them that they are wrong, both morally and legally exactly. Yeah,
So what would your social media SPA. If people wanted
to keep up to date with what's happening.

Speaker 13 (03:32:19):
Border Kindness on Instagram tends to have the most up
to date common I mean shares of like what we're doing,
and that will have updates in our stories and our
posts of how to help what's going on.

Speaker 5 (03:32:35):
How about you, Petri.

Speaker 11 (03:32:37):
We're we're terrible with our social media, but you can
definitely find some of our work there a f C
San Diego. Just look for a f C San Diego
minus Pederal Pedro mostly on on Twitter, some ig and
I'll be updating some items later today.

Speaker 8 (03:33:00):
Fact.

Speaker 5 (03:33:00):
Yeah, one more question, because people contacted me in May
to ask if they could donate air miles to facilitate
travel for folks after they've been paroled into the US.
Is that something that AFSC can do?

Speaker 11 (03:33:14):
There is another organization that I'm not sure that's what
you just mentioned a now, the Miles for Migrants.

Speaker 5 (03:33:20):
Yeah, Miles for Migrants, Yeah.

Speaker 11 (03:33:21):
Absolutely, absolutely a wonderful organization and that we've used through
some of our other assists organizations and getting people to
their final destinations. I would say that might be the
best way right now.

Speaker 5 (03:33:33):
Okay, Yeah, so that's the thing people can do if
they happen to have a surplus of those. And great,
thank you so much for your time. I know you're
all extremely busy. I appreciate it. And yeah, hopefully people
listening will find a way to support if they can.
Thanks guys, great, thank you.

Speaker 2 (03:33:52):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 7 (03:33:58):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (03:34:00):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 5 (03:34:14):
Thanks for listening.

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