It Could Happen Here Weekly 107

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A zone media. 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

(00:22):
for you, But you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
This could be a giant disaster. Those were the words
that Elon Musk texted biographer Walter Isaacson on a Friday
evening in September twenty twenty two, claiming that the Ukrainian
military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval
fleet in Sebastopol. In the annexed region of Crimea must
have been providing Starlink Internet to the Ukrainian military for

(00:50):
months as part of their ongoing conflict against Russia's invasion,
and the resourceful Ukrainians began using Stalink as a way
to remotely control the Kamikazi drones. Musk, having spoken to
a Russian ambassador, saw Crimea as a red line that,
when crossed, would escalate the conflict, potentially even provoking a
nuclear retaliation, and so he acted disabling or depending on

(01:12):
who you ask, refusing to enable styling access in the
Crimea region. When the Ukrainian drone serbs approached their targets,
they suddenly stopped communicating with their operators and eventually washed
up ashore, harmless and impotent. While the specific details of
this episode are hazy, the core truth is unambiguously clear.
Elon Musk is a supremely powerful individual and through action

(01:34):
or inaction, has the ability to influence the outcome of
combat operations in the bloodiest war inflicted upon European generations.
It's a level of power typically only reserved for nation
state actors, not tech company CEOs. Throughout history, we've seen
plenty of examples of individuals and companies with outsized country
like power and influence. Musk isn't unique in that regard,

(01:57):
nor is he the sole cautionary tale about why this
shouldn't be allowed to happen. As a private individual operating
within his capacities as CEO, he's unconstrained by democratic accountability,
and as a private businessman, he has his own conflicts
of interest from Tesla's long history of sourcing aluminum from
Russian companies to his contacts with the highest echelons of
Russian leadership, including Vladimir Putin himself. Historically, the only real

(02:21):
accountability mechanism for people like muscusbeed in the media, and
yet in this case, the media is chosen instead to
fate the Elon musk creation myth that he's a trailblazing
real life Tony Stark that will take humanity to the stars,
rather than asking him many hard questions of any kind.
This situation is the product of a media industry dominated

(02:42):
by journalists seeking access to popular public figures, pulling their
punches in the process. The most notable access journalist is
Kara Swisher, who has spent decades covering the tech industry
with a pantomime like aggression, asking the quote unquote hard
questions without ever really pushing the level of discover that
might make a source um willing to pus aarticipate. Swisher famously,

(03:02):
in an interview during the All Things Digital conference in
twenty ten, convinced Meta CEO then called Facebook Mark Zuckerberg
to take off his hoodie after asking him a challenging
question about Facebook's invasion of privacy, only to be distracted
by the design of the inside of what he was wearing,
effectively objecting to her own line of questioning for entertainment purposes.

(03:23):
Eight years later, Swisher would interview Zuckerberg about Cambridge Analytica
and Russian interference in the twenty sixteen elections, lobbing softball
questions like make a case for keeping info wars on
Facebook and responding to Zuckerberg outrights saying he wouldn't ban
Holocaust and Sandy Hook deniers by asking how it made
Zuckerberg feel when people said Facebook killed people Nyanmar. The

(03:44):
Swisher house style is simple, ask a big meeting question,
and then failed to interrogate a single answer in any way,
shape or form a round. A month later, Swisher would
interview Elon Musk, who at that point had aided harassment
campaigns against reporters, called a man saving children a pedo file,
and had his companies faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment
and racism. When asked about his fights with the press

(04:07):
over Twitter must claim that the Wall Street Journal, whose
Wisher used to work for, outright lied about investigation into
Tesla's production figures, to which Swisher asked him if he
realized the dangers of him saying such things about the press,
and proceeded to help Must paper over his claims, saying
that he quote just doesn't like falsehoods. One of the

(04:27):
richest and most powerful men in the world sat before Swisher,
and her interrogation involved asking him simple questions about why
he was doing things, lightly teasing him, and saying that
he looks and I quote rested in calm. To be clear,
this is an ultra powerful billionaire, and this is a
was at the time enterprising journalist who everyone looked to.

(04:50):
In April twenty twenty two, the week that Must announced
the Twitter acquisition, Swusher gave a strange interview to James D.
Walsh of The New Yorker, defending Musk, who had of
course waived you diligence on the acquisition, did not seem
to have a single clear plan about how he might
run the same. She claimed that you couldn't pin Musk down,
that he was quite complex, and that we would be

(05:11):
surprised about what he likes and doesn't like. Musk, who
has invented none of the core products that make him rich,
is a quote visionary that gave Swish a genuine answers
and arguably the most damning thing she could have said,
would call her back. That was her litmus test that
he would return her calls. Her ultimate defense of Musk

(05:33):
was that and I quote inventors were very difficult, problematic people,
and the moderation on Twitter was not working at the
time of acquisition. These are all, of course, demonstrably force
based on the events that followed, the growth of hate speech,
the lack of accountability, the biggest face on the platform,
and the fact that every third post seems to be
some kind of spambot, either selling T shirts or pornography

(05:55):
or cryptocurrency scams. Swisher only turned on Musk when he
emailed her calling her an asshole in November twenty twenty two,
including a screenshot where, according to Swisher, she was actually
defending him, saying that the US government should pay Elon
Musk for starling. Since then, Musk has gone from a
difficult to pin down visionary to carver Swisher calling his
social network a and this is agonizingly horribly written a

(06:19):
thunderdome of toxic asininity. Swisher, it appears, only worried about
what she called Musk's price of cocktail of ignorance and
big ego until he was rude to her. One of
the most famous tech journalists in the world who has
failed to take any real shot at any of the

(06:39):
people she's questioned across decades of doing this has now
been reduced to making epic dunks that sound like a
twenty one year old Harry Potter fan trying to cast
a spell. It's embarrassing. Swisher isn't the sole media figure
guilty of having treated Elon Musk with kid gloves or
treating his bloviating with otherwise on ducrid duity. This is

(07:01):
a problem that affects almost every news outlet and reporter
that covers billionaires. The assumption is always the billionaires will
act with empathy, patience, and grace, three things that Musk, Bezo, Zuckerberg,
and their ilk totally lack. Failing that, one would suppose
they'd act like a normal person, a losing proposition. If
you've ever read Jeff Bezos's texts, these people are not

(07:23):
like us. They do not experience human struggle. They don't
have bills or bosses or fear of anything, let alone authority.
Each and every billionaire is effectively above the law, and
that is the place that you must start to understand them.
It's deeply frustrating, especially when you consider the myriad of
opportunities where the media could have taken must task and

(07:44):
held him accountable. Take high Poop, for example, Musk's concept
for a high speed mass transit system where pressurized capsules
would hurtle between cities through vacuum tubes at speeds as
fast as seven hundred and sixty miles an hour. Hyperloop
Musk promise would allow commuters to travel between San Francisco
and Los Angeles in as little as thirty minutes, and

(08:05):
with the network powered primarily by solar power, with no
real environmental impact. If anything, this could have been a
much bigger deal than Tesla. High speed transit that doesn't
burn fossil fuels could truly have changed the world. So
what do you think happened? Do you think that Must
delivered on this on this product that helped play a

(08:27):
vital role in cementing his image as a real life
Tony Stark. Not only would it be faster and cheaper
than anything currently in existence, but it'd be greener too.
What followed was a gushing or at least gredulous flow
of media coverage, including from The Washington Post and The
New York Times, both papers of record. It wasn't until
the hype gradually died down that people began asking serious

(08:49):
questions about hyperloop's viability. An exhaustive report published by the
Transportation Research Laboratory earlier this year raised a serious questions
about the feasibility of hyperloop, particularly when it comes to
passenger transportation. Riders, it noted, would be exposed to extreme
physical and mental stress, with the noise, vibrations, and rapid
acceleration and deceleration inflicting an unknowable toll on the human body.

(09:14):
Questions about safety still linger, and then there's the thorny
issue of cost, with high bloop requiring an all new infrastructure.
Even the shortest routes would involve a multi billion dollar
upfront investment. These points were for the most part absent
entirely from the earliest coverage of high ploop. The media
also missed the fact that hypeloop wasn't even a new idea.

(09:37):
In the nineteenth century, countless invetors toyed with the notion
of an atmospheric railway where vehicles traveled through a near
vacuum environment on the momentum of pressurized air. A small
demonstrator route was even built by Ismbard Kingdom Brunel, the
legendary British engineer who designed the first transatlantic steamship. While
Highpoloop differed in some meaningful ways, it was still nonetheless

(10:00):
much like many Musk products, a derivative of an earlier idea,
The Boring Company. Musk's hilariously named Tunnel Boring startup earned
similar credulous coverage upon its inception, driven in no small
part due to Musk's decision to raise working capital by
selling branded flamethrowers dubbed the not a flame Thrower to

(10:21):
anyone that paid five hundred dollars. This stunt, aside, the
Boring Company one praise due to its stated mission to
reduce the cost of digging tunnels, which are often an
inevitable and expensive part of road and mass transportation development.
Like hyperloop, The Boring Company fed into the Tony Stark
image of a billionaire that could, through sheer force of will,
change the world and fix once intractable problems. I quote

(10:46):
Meashable when they said, Musk build machines to travel more
efficiently on the Earth and above it, so traveling through
Earth seems within the realm of his capabilities. If anyone
can transform the seemingly absent minded half joke into world
changing technology, it's Elon Musk, said The Guardian, And then
reality here. The Boring Company's first commercial project, a one

(11:07):
point seven mile tunnel in Las Vegas, where I in
fact live, wasn't a traditional road tunnel or part of
an underground metro system. It was, in fact far less impressive,
a single lane loop where human driven tests, there's varied
passengers between points of interest in the Las Vegas Convention Center,
and where traffic jams are a routine frustration for passengers.

(11:28):
Other projects in other cities, most notably Chicago and Los Angeles,
have either been canceled or are on indefinite hiatus. There
is nothing that the Boring Company has done. The tunnel
in Vegas is useless. It's claustrophobic, it's ugly, feels like
being in an airport lounge, except there's no food. It's strange.

(11:50):
It doesn't feel like it solves a problem other than
how can Elon must get more attention? And that really
is what he craves Musk's wafer thin skin, his volatility,
and his propensity to overpromise an under deliver has never
been a secret. While he's been able with some success
to obfiscate a misdirect through a well crafted media persona,

(12:13):
the clues have always been there. Musk's reality distortion field
goes some way to explaining how he has managed to
amass the extent of the power he has and how
he cemented himself into our nation's most vital industries like transportation, communications, infrastructure,
and social media. He has a fairly consistent battle plan.
He makes a big promise, he delivers enough to make

(12:34):
the media believe he's for real, and then he relies
upon the fact that very few parts of the media
will ever follow up with him. There is no challenging
Elon Musk in the media. The thinnest amounts of criticism
are usually meant by a horde of crazed Tesla fans
or at times Elon Musk himself. He's created a paper

(12:56):
thin media image built on the smallest, thinnest s structures
of reality. He has found a way to manipulate the
media using his large amounts of power, money, and his
few friends. Elon Musk is a danger to society. He's
a capricious demagogue desperate for more power and attention, and

(13:17):
he will do whatever he wants, whereever he wants, wherever
he wants, because we are societally unprepared for billionaires. It's
no longer healthy, or safe or honest to see Elon
Musk as a dorky charlatan, carrying sinks into offices or
destroying social networks to settle insular beefs. Elon Musk is
a nation state level actor with a net worth larger

(13:39):
than the GDP of Ukraine. He associates only with equally
spurious reactionaries like Bill Maher, Ronda Santis and David Sachs,
and he's easily influenced by anyone who agrees with his
thinly backed beliefs. Musk isn't polarizing, He's polarization given life,
an empty man made of contrarianism and grievances, and he'll

(13:59):
happily change the world based on his own personal beliefs.
As a result of our market driven government and compliant media,
Musk has caused and will continue to cause human suffering.
An actual death in his pursuit of fame, power and capital.
It's time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur,
an investor, an executive, or an industry blow hard. As

(14:22):
a result of our market driven government and compliant media,
Musk has caused and will continue to cause human suffering
an actual death in his pursuit of fame, power and capital.
It's time to stop treating him as just an entrepreneur,
an investor, an executive, or an industry blow hard and
see him as a man who has used his incredible

(14:44):
wealth and status to twist the world to his petty, ignorant,
and selfish desires. It's important to realize with complete clarity
that Musk makes electric cars that are sold around the
world and sells rockets to NASA. He runs Twitter x
or whatever it's called these days, one of the largest
communication networks in the world, and of course Starlink, the

(15:05):
satellite isp used throughout the world that is specifically marketed
to places that are otherwise inaccessible to traditional broadband. This
is not just the goofy redditor posting epic means and
saying exactly anymore. Elon Musk has chosen to and will
continue to choose to use his influence over these networks
to interfere with global events, and because the media and

(15:26):
the government has been so utterly tepid in their approach
to him, he's accumulated such power and influence that he
is on some level unstoppable. Since his acquisition of Twitter
in twenty twenty two and the subsequent layoffs of six
thousand people, Musk has revealed to the world his deep
seated reactionary beliefs and his noxious, pathetic victim complex. He

(15:49):
has become obsessed with the woke mind virus, a term
that he uses to vaguely refer to everything from progressive
education on college campuses to San Francisco's growing homeless problem.
He's made Twitter's box prob one that he tried to
use to cancel the original acquisition, significantly worse, littering replies
with bots trying to sell your t shirts or make
you join the latest script ocurrency scam, some of which

(16:11):
even include elon Musk's face. He took Twitter's verification system,
a flawed yet workable solution to verifying whether a tweet
came from the person who actually sent it, and turned
it into an eight dollars a month premium account that
verifies nothing other than whether someone is capable of completing
a credit card transaction, and by destroying Twitter's trust and
safety team, Musk has allowed the world's real time communications

(16:33):
channel to become one rife with racism and other hate speech,
leading to Fortune five hundred advertisers worrying that the network
and I quote perpetuates racism, which was raised in a
Semaphore story from earlier in this year, Musk has shown
he is more than willing to do things based on
not what's good for the world, his businesses, or his users,
but on what will confirm his biases and protect his

(16:55):
financial interests. As a result of these moronic and malicious choices,
Twitter's valuation is tanked less than a third of the
forty four billion dollars he paid for it, losing half
of their advertising revenue and changing their name to X,
which some have argued killed further billions of the original
company's brand value. Being a selfish, ignorant, and gormous Charlatan,

(17:17):
Musk has now blamed Jewish nonprofit the Anti Defamation League
for ruining his company, claiming that the ADL had pressured
advertisers into killing X slash Twitter. Musk had previously sued
the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another nonprofit that published
research showing the growth and hate speech on the platform.
Musk is now fine with the ADL because they resumed

(17:38):
advertising a deeply confused and utterly pointless exercise that only
sought to further increase bigotry on his website. For all
his statements around freedom of speech, Musk is the ultimate
capitalist dictator, willing to use his money to intimidate and
censor those who dared to criticize him. He's already done
so on Twitter, banning an account that tracked publicly available

(18:00):
records of private jet flights, censoring over four hundred tweets
critical of Turkish President Erdigan in the week's running up
to an election, suppress accounts critical of Indian Prime Minister
Nearendra Modi, and cut access to links to newsletter platform
Substack when they launched a network competitive to Twitter. Musk
is a propagandist willing to work with any fellow reactionaries

(18:20):
who feel scorned by progressivism, personally helping Republican presidential candidate
Ron DeSantis launch his campaign on Twitter and funneling money
to alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate through Twitter's Creator program
on our nation's roads. Muscus created another problem. In March
twenty twenty three, According to The Washington Post, a seventeen
year old stepped off of a school bus on North

(18:41):
Carolina Highway five point sixty one. As he stepped off
a testa Model y allegedly with Tesla's autonomous autopilot engaged
hit him at forty five miles an hour, throwing him
into the windshield and leaving him lying face down on
the pavement. He thankfully survived, but broke and fractured his
leg in the process. Incident, which the National Highway Traffic

(19:02):
Safety Administration is still investigating, is part of a growing
list of victims of Tesla's open beta test of quote
full self driving, a buggy dangerous software available on hundreds
of thousands of Tesla vehicles allowing users to let the
car drive, which has resulted in the deaths of seventeen
people and led to seven one hundred and thirty six

(19:22):
other injuries and crashes. In theory, activating Tesla's full self
driving lets your Tesla take the wheel, making turns, avoiding
other vehicles, maintaining speed avoiding objects and theoretically helping you
arrive safely at your destination. The problem is that this
has only ever been a beta, meaning that every new
release involves some sort of new bug, such as the

(19:44):
one that Electric Car blog editor Fred Lambert claimed tried
to kill him in September twenty twenty three by trying
to veer at highway speed into the median strip on
the road. One might imagine that such a thing is illegal.
Effectively unleashing beta software onto the world's road without sufficiently
testing it would for any normal person lead to imprisonment

(20:04):
and a lifetime of fines. Musk, thanks to his incredible
wealth and power equivalent to that of a small nation,
has managed to avoid much scrutiny with the occasional government
investigations that never seem to go anywhere, and despite a
well documented culture of racism and sexism, very little seems
to happen to test the at all. This is because

(20:25):
our society, in its government, its media, and its citizen
try is woefully unprepared to deal with billionaires. Musk is
able to operate as a noxious, abusive, and reckless monster
in public, using his companies as vehicles to lend himself,
money and political weapons with little scrutiny or punishment on
their own. One might fob off these concerns as one

(20:46):
time things, but the reality is there's a pattern of
malicious and capricious acts or one after another, again and again,
done in broad daylight for all to see. Musk has
shown he will push what ever envelope he sees fit,
and as Ronan Pharaoh's New York Magazine piece shows, there
are very few people in the government, former and otherwise

(21:09):
anywhere really, not investors, not other members of the Silicon
Valley elite, who are willing or able to get in
the way. Musk is so unbelievably rich, well connected, and
powerful that he can push around just about anybody, even
if they work for the Pentagon. Yet Musk's desperation for
attention and adulation mean that he can be pulled in

(21:30):
any direction that feels like it scorns his critics, And
when his critics are pretty much anyone who isn't a
right wing lunatic, it almost guarantees he will continue to
power around with authoritarian regimes that will influence his remarkably
malleable brain. The actual solution will be to treat Musk
as what he is, a dangerous entity with a higher

(21:53):
GDP than Ukraine and an ego that rivals their invaders
president regardless of what happened in crimea Musk is the
ability to know when attacks are happening and influence their
outcome as a result of his for profit, privately held
satellite internet communications firm that the US government is paying for.
Elon Musk is a nation state global threat and must

(22:17):
be treated as such. He must be treated as if
he will make decisions based only on what he believes
will benefit or amuse him. He's the wish dot Com
version of Bond's earned stavro Blofeld, an offensive, charmless, and
boorish monster that has successfully bought his way into the
elite and found that no matter what he does, their

(22:38):
patience is unlimited and their scruples are few. Musk, like
another high profile narcissist, the former President Donald Trump, routinely
finds himself ensnared in litigation, both in regulators and private individuals,
even though the government never really seems to actually do
anything to him. The SEC is currently investigating Musk for
securities violations concerning his acquisition of Twitter. This would be

(23:01):
his third tryst with the Commission, the first in twenty eighteen,
the second in twenty nineteen. In both cases, very little happen. However,
at the same time, he faces actions from former employees
stiffed on severance pay and from those who allege age
and gender discrimination with factors in their dismissal from Twitter.
For Musk, these lawsuits are unlikely to be anything other

(23:22):
than the minor annoyance rather than any kind of existential
throat or something that otherwise curbs is most egregious of behaviors.
There are people who could help. There are people that
could sway.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
You on Musk.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
You know, people as rich as him, Tim Cook, Mark Benioff,
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the world's
billionaires feel no need to correct Musk's behavior. They don't
need to interfere or even chide him for his disgraceful
acts because doing so would potentially make their actions and
wealth more conspicuous, which is far more important to protect
than free speech or human lives really, anything that normal

(23:58):
people face. They may act as if they have civic
responsibility for the few people we have that could actually
change things. The ones with the war chest to box
out Musk. Blocking X from app stores and excluding him
from their circles are sitting on their hands. One approach
proposed by Stephen Feldstein in The Atlantic is to treat
Musks businesses as they are vital to national security, and

(24:21):
as a result, take them into public control when necessary.
This wouldn't be without precedent. The legislation that allows this,
the Defense Production Act, has been invoked fifty times since
its inception, both in times of war and civil necessity
like the twenty twenty two infant formula shortage. While Stalink
would remain a privately held company, it would be obliged

(24:42):
to prioritize the national need. Full nationalization, Falsteine noted, would
also be a possibility if Musk failed to cooperate. Full
nationalization would be a drastic measure. But at this point,
what other options exist for Elon Musk? What other options
exist for someone that is so reckless, so dangerous, so selfish,
and so capricious. What options exist to deal with someone

(25:06):
who has inserted himself into the most vital aspects of
the American economy, making himself billions of dollars off of governments, subsidies,
and contracts. How the hell do you handle someone who
has insulated himself from media scrutiny despite holding immense nation
state power. Musk is not a goofy weirdow or the

(25:28):
real life Tony Stark. He's a fragile, meanhearted ogre one
hell bent on seeing his whims brought to life at
any cost. The only way to write about this man,
the only fair coverage of Elon Musk, the only clear
perception of this man, is to frame him as a villain,
a bigot, a bully, and a crook. But what do

(25:49):
you do about the man who has everything?

Speaker 4 (26:03):
Hello? Everyone, it's me James, and I am joining you
today for another and long series of the little recordings
where I ask you to give us your money. Once again,
I am asking you to support the mutual aid work
being done at the border. I'm recording this in November,
and this week we have terrible weather forecasts that will

(26:23):
make conditions in her Cumba extremely dangerous for people who
are detained out there by the Department of Homeland Security.
It will mean that it's no exaggeration to say that
people's lives will be at risk and that the important
mutual aid work that's already been done will only become
more important as we get rain, we get snow, and
we get cold temperatures, and people continue to be detained

(26:44):
without shelter, food, water, or adequate clothing. If you would
like to support those efforts, you can find the way
to do so at link tree slash Border Kindness. There's
a dot before the ee, so it's l I NK
tr ee slash Border Kindness. I'll also post a link
on my Twitter if you'd like to find it there.

Speaker 5 (27:06):
Thank you, Hello, everybody, Welcome to It could happen here.
This is Sharene. I'm back to talk about Palestine because
it's important, But when it comes to the history of
the creation of Israel and the subsequent ethnic cleansing and
mass expulsion of the Palestinian people, I feel like there's

(27:27):
a part of history that often gets overlooked. People usually
say Israel was created in nineteen forty eight, but the
intent to create it actually started decades before that. We're
going to be talking about the Balfour Declaration, which resulted
in a significant upheaval in the lives of Palestinians and
was issued over a century ago. On November two, nineteen seventeen.

(27:49):
The declaration turned the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish
state in Palestine into a reality. The pledge is generally
viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nekba,
the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in nineteen forty eight, and
the conflict that ensued with the zion Estate of Israel.
The Balfour Declaration is regarded as one of the most
controversial and contested documents in the modern history of the

(28:13):
Arab world. So what is it the Balfour Declaration It
means or is translated to Balfour's Promise in Arabic. It
was a public pledge by Britain in nineteen seventeen, declaring
its aim to quote establish a national home for the
Jewish people in Palestine. The declaration came in the form
of a letter from Britain's then Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour,

(28:35):
addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British
Jewish community at the time. The declaration was made during
World War One, which was just a reminder from nineteen
fourteen to nineteen eighteen, and this declaration was included in
the terms of the British mandate for Palestine after the
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. So on November two, nineteen seventeen,

(28:57):
the Balfour Declaration became the basis for the movement to
create a Jewish state in Palestine. A week later, the
declaration was published in the Times of London for all
the public to see. The content of the letter is
rather short, so I'm just going to read some of
it right now. It goes, Dear Lord Rothschild, I have

(29:18):
much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His
Majesty's Government, the following Declaration of Sympathy with the Jewish
Zionist Aspirations, which has been submitted to and approved by
the Cabinet. His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment
in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,
and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement

(29:39):
of this object. Keep in mind, at this time the
British had no control over Palestine. It was still under
the Ottoman Empire, but in this letter Britain was essentially
preparing to take it over in the very near future.
I also want to include that at this time Jewish
people only made up six percent of the Palestinian population.
I'm going to play audio from a video posted by

(30:01):
former guests of the show The Amazing Sim Kern, where
they break down the last part of the declaration. Sim
is referencing in this audio Rashid Khalidi's book The one
Hundred Years War on Palestine, A History of Settler Colonialism
and Resistance nineteen seventeen to twenty seventeen.

Speaker 6 (30:18):
It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which
may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non
Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights in political status
enjoyed by Jews in any other country. That last bit
sounds like, all right, well, he's saying we were not
going to tread on the civil and religious rights of Palestinians.

Speaker 7 (30:35):
That's pretty good, right.

Speaker 6 (30:37):
But in The One hundred Years War on Palestine, the
book by Rashid Khalidi that I am encouraging you all
to keep reading along with me this week, Khalidi does
a great job breaking down the rhetoric of this declaration
and why it was actually a declaration of war upon
the Palestinian people. Yes, they were promised civil and religious rights,
but they were not granted political or national rights, and

(30:59):
this meant that for the next fifteen years, as people
in Palestine tried to resist the establishment of a zion
Est state within their country, the takeover of all their
land by Zionist groups, they were unable to find any
audience in the halls of power because Balfour had declared
them to not have these rights and to not really
be people. They weren't even referred to as Arabs or

(31:21):
Palestinians in the Declaration, just non Jewish. Ninety four percent
of the people of this land had just been written
out of existence as far as the Western powers were concerned.
Kalidi describes how between nineteen seventeen and nineteen thirty six,
almost all of the organized Palestinian resistance to Zionism was
peaceful and legalistic. They would form political committees, but the

(31:43):
British said, you're not allowed to have political activity and
shut those down harshly. They would send delegations to the
League of Nations, to other countries to try to get
to support to Britain, but they would not even be
seen in the halls of power. They would not even
get audiences because they were told basically, as Palestinians, you
have no rights allowed to have nationalistic interests.

Speaker 5 (32:03):
As I mentioned, the declaration was included in the terms
of the British Mandate for Palestine. The so called mandate
system set up by the Allied powers was a thinly
veiled form of colonialism and occupation. In retrospective course, it's
not a very thin veil at all. The mandate system
transferred rule from the territories that were previously controlled by

(32:24):
the powers defeated in the war Germany, Austria, Hungary, the
Ottoman Empire in Bulgaria to those who were victorious in
the war. The declared aim of the mandate system was
to allow the winners of the war to administer the
newly emerging states until they could become independent. The case
of Palestine, however, was unique. Unlike the rest of the

(32:45):
post war mandates. The main goal of the British mandate
there was to create the conditions for the establishment of
a Jewish national home, even though Jews, again at the time,
constituted only six percent of the population. Upon the start
of the mandate, the British began to facilitate immigration of
European Jews to Palestine, between nineteen twenty two and nineteen

(33:07):
thirty five, the Jewish population rose to nearly twenty seven
percent of the total population. And even though the Balfour
Declaration included the caveat that quote nothing shall be done
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the
existing non Jewish communities in Palestine, the British Mandate was
set up in a way to equip Jews with the
tools to establish self rule at the expense of the

(33:30):
Palestinian Arabs. Understandably enough, the document is seen as controversial
for several reasons. First, it was, in the words of
the late Palestine American academic Edward Zaid, quote made by
European power about a non European territory in a flat
disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native

(33:50):
majority resident in that territory. In essence, the Balfour Declaration
promised Jews a land where the natives made up more
than ninety percent of the populace. Second, the declaration was
one of three conflicting wartime promises made by the British.
Surprise surprise, when the declaration was released, Britain had already

(34:11):
promised the Arab's independence from the Ottoman Empire in the
nineteen fifteen Hussein McMahon Correspondents. However, the British also promised
the French and a separate treaty known as the nineteen
sixteen psychs Pico Agreement, that the majority of Palestine would
be under international administration, while the rest of the region
would be split between the two colonial powers after the war.

(34:33):
This Hussain McMahon correspondence was a series of letters exchanged
in nineteen fifteen to nineteen sixteen during World War One
between Hussain and Beinnati, who was the Emir of Mecca,
and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt.
In general terms, the correspondence effectively traded British support of
an independent Arab state for the Arab assistance in opposing

(34:54):
the Ottoman Empire. However, the correspondence was later contradicted by
two things, the incompatible terms of the sex Peco Agreement,
which was secretly concluded between Britain and France in May
nineteen sixteen, and Britain's Balfour Declaration in nineteen seventeen. The declaration, however,
meant that Palestine would come under British occupation, that the

(35:15):
Palestinian Arabs who lived there would not gain independence. Third,
the declaration introduced a notion that was reportedly unprecedented in
international law, that of a quote national home. The use
of the vague term national home for the Jewish people
as opposed to state left the meaning open to interpretation.

(35:36):
Earlier drafts of the document used the phrase quote the
reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish state, but that was
later changed. However, in a meeting with Zionist leader Heim
Wizman in nineteen twenty two, Arthur Balfour and then Prime
Minister David Lloyd George reportedly said that the Balfour Declaration
was quote always meant to be an eventual Jewish state. Okay,

(36:00):
let's take our first break here because.

Speaker 4 (36:02):
I have to.

Speaker 5 (36:03):
Okay, bye, and we're back. So we're talking about the
Balfour Declaration. But who exactly is Arthur Balfour. Sim Kern
in that same video that I played earlier, explains that
he can be seen as the person most responsible for
violence in the Middle East for the past century because
when he wrote his declaration in nineteen seventeen, he effectively

(36:24):
wrote Palestinian rights out of existence and surprising no one.
Arthur Balfour was a terrible guy. He was a white supremacist,
a racist, and an anti Semite. The Balfour Declaration is
a statement that can fit into two tweets. As we mentioned,
Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, announced
that the British government would support establishing a national home

(36:48):
for the Jewish people in Palestine, and more than one
hundred years later, those written words continue to define the
dynamic between Israelis and Palestinians. In twenty seventeen, marking one
hundred years the declaration, Little Bitch Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
and Yahoo went to London to commemorate the centennial occasion
with Theresa May. I hope you know by now, though,

(37:10):
that the declaration is really nothing worth celebrating, And though
he may be most known for aiding the Zionist cause
in nineteen seventeen, it's crucial to remember that Arthur Balfour
was a white supremacist. He made that much clear in
his own words. In nineteen o six, the British House
of Commons was engaged in a debate about the Native

(37:31):
blacks in South Africa. Nearly all the members of Parliament
agreed that the disenfranchisement of the blacks was evil, but
not Balfour, who almost alone argued against it. When talking
about the black people in South Africa, he said, we
have to face the facts. Men are not born equal

(37:51):
the white in the black races are not born with
equal capacities. They are born with different capacities which education
cannot and will not change. But Balfour's troubling views were
not limited to Africa. In fact, despite his now iconic
support for Zionism that celebrated by Zionists everywhere, he was
not exactly a friend to the Jews. In the late

(38:12):
nineteenth century, Pagram's targeting Jews in the Pale of Settlement
had led to waves of Jewish flight westward to England
and the United States. Little insert here that the Pale
of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire
with varying borders that existed from seventeen ninety one to
nineteen seventeen, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed,

(38:34):
and beyond which Jewish residency permanent or temporary was mostly forbidden.
So created by imperial decree. The Jewish pale of Settlement
was that part of the Russian Empire within which Russia's
Jewish population was required to live and work for more
than one hundred thirty years between the late eighteenth and
the early twentieth century. Although it was initially intended to

(38:56):
forestall commerce between Jews and the general population of Russia,
the restrictions imposed by the pale fostered the development of
a distinctive religious and ethnic culture in an area covering
roughly three hundred eighty six thousand square miles or one
million square kilometers between the Baltic and Black Seas. The
word pale as used in this sense, comes from the

(39:18):
Latin polus or stake, one that might be used to
indicate a boundary. A pale is thus a district separated
from the surrounding country. It may be defined by physical boundaries,
or it may be distinguished by a different administrative or
legal system. The Jewish pale off Settlement was both a
defined area within the Russian Empire and a legal entity

(39:40):
regulated by laws that did not apply to the Russian
Empire as a whole. So back to the main narrative,
the targeting of Jews in the pale of settlement led
to immigration of many Jews to the West, to England
and the US. This influx of refugees led to an
increase in British anti immigrant racism and outright anti Semitism,
themes not unfamiliar to US today. Support for political action

(40:05):
against immigrants grew as the English public demanded immigration control
to keep certain immigrants, particularly Jews, out of the country.
So this scared and xenophobic public found a sympathetic ear
in Balfour. In nineteen oh five, while serving as Prime Minister,
Balfour presided over the passage of the Aliens Act. This

(40:26):
legislation put the first restrictions on immigration into Great Britain,
and it was primarily aimed at restricting Jewish immigration. According
to historians, Balfour had personally delivered passionate speeches about the
imperative to restrict the waves of Jews fleeing the Russian
Empire from entering Britain. So maybe it's not as astonishing

(40:47):
as you would think that Balfour, whose support of the
Zionist cause has made him a hero among Zionists, would
have implemented anti Jewish laws. But the truth is his
support of Zionism stemmed from the exis exact same source
as his desire to limit Jewish immigration to Britain. Both
of these things can be traced back to his white

(41:07):
supremacist beliefs. Balfour lived in an area of stirring nationalism
highly defined by ethno religious identity. Because of these sentiments.
The early twentieth century was a time when seemingly liberal
Western nations struggled with the challenge of incorporating Jewish citizens.
Balfour wanted to keep the UK as a white Christian

(41:28):
ethno state. What the Zionists provided Balfour with was a
solution to the challenges Jewish citizens posed to his ethno
nationalist vision, a solution that didn't force him to reckon
with them. Instead of insisting that societies except all citizens
as equals, regardless of racial or religious background, the Zionist's

(41:49):
movement offered a different answer, separation. Balfour saw in Zionism
not just a blessing for Jews, but for the West
as well. In nineteen nineteen, he wrote the introduction to
Nahem Sokolo's History of Zionism. In this introduction, Balfour wrote
that the Zionist movement would quote mitigate the age long

(42:09):
miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its
midst of a body which it too long regarded as
alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable
to expel or to absorb. By both giving Jews a
place to go and a place to leave, Zionism seemingly
solved two problems at once in Balfour's mind. In other words,

(42:33):
his support of Zionism was motivated by his desire to
protect Britain from the negative effects or the miseries, as
he said, of having Jews in its population. Rather than
protecting the rights of one of its minorities, Britain could
simply export them, or at least not import anymore. This
is one of the many reasons Zionism itself is anti Semitic.

(42:56):
We can even fast forward to now and see how
Zionists are telling telling anti Zionist Jewish people that they're
no longer Jewish for supporting Palestine. That belief and statement
in itself is extremely anti Semitic. Criticizing Israel on the
Israeli government, however, is not but putting that aside. We
can see that from the very beginning, even in its origin,

(43:18):
Zionists associated and allied themselves with the worst kinds of people,
like people who believed that Jewish people are quote an
alien and hostile body among them. Needless to say, Balfour's
view of Zionism is steeped in the same kind of
white supremacy as Balfour's view of South Africa's blacks, But
his support of the Zionist dream had another problem. Rather

(43:41):
than solving the problem of how to handle a minority
living in a white majority country, the Balfour Declaration just
shifted the same problem into a different geography. The tension
between ethno nationalism and equality is definitely and equally present
today between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and see
where the Israeli state rules over the fate of millions

(44:03):
of Palestinians who either have no right to vote, are
treated as second class citizens, or our refugees denied repatriation.
Today it is Israel that views Palestinians as demographic threats
and sees the quote presence in its midst of a
body which is too long regarded as alien and even hostile,
by which it was equally unable to expel or to

(44:25):
absorb let's take our second break here again because I
have to so see you later and we are back.
So that Balfour's legacy of supremacy persists as much as
British support for Israel does is no accident. We have
arrived at this point today because the white supremacist attitudes

(44:47):
of Balfour informed policy lending imperial right to a project
in pursuit of national self determination for Jews by trampling
on the rights of native non Jews. Remarkably, by Telfour
was unabashedly aware of the hypocrisy in his stance. In
nineteen nineteen, he wrote a letter that said this to
the British Prime Minister. The weak point of our position,

(45:10):
of course, is that in the case of Palestine, we
deliberately and rightly declined to accept the principle of self determination.
We do not propose even to go through the form
of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country,
the seven hundred thousand Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
Those are his words and a letter that he wrote

(45:32):
to the British Prime Minister. So there's no misconstruing that
there those seven hundred thousand Arabs, of course, made up
approximately ninety percent of the population of Palestine. Again bears
repeating that Jewish people, before this declaration was implemented, made
up only six percent of the population, and therein lies

(45:54):
the fundamental problem that continues through this day, more than
one hundred years later. Palestinians are denied the right to
have rights because from the outset their views, their human
rights and by extension, their very humanity, were consistently seen
as inferior to those of others. That was clear in
Balfour's perspective and the British Mandate's policy, and it persists

(46:17):
in one form or another in many, if not most,
of the policies of the Zionist State of Israel through
this day. In modern times, as much as in nineteen seventeen,
the battle between ethno nationalism and equality has risen to
the foreground. We saw this in Donald Trump's rise in
America and in Theresa Mays brexited Britain. Rather than resolving

(46:39):
this tension, Balfour's support for Zionism merely exported it to Palestine,
and resisting the legacy of Balfour's racism is absolutely necessary.
If there is ever to be peace in Palestine and beyond.
A little bit more history here about why this declaration
was issued. The question of why has been subject of

(47:01):
debate for historians for decades, with historians using different sources
to suggest various explanations. Some argue that many in the
British government at the time were Zionists themselves. Others say
the declaration was issued out of an anti Semitic reasoning
that giving Palestine to the Jews would be a solution
to the quote unquote Jewish problem. In mainstream academia, however,

(47:25):
there are a set of reasons over which there is
a general consensus. One, control over Palestine was a strategic
imperial interest to keep Egypt and the Suez Canal within
Britain's sphere of influence. Two, Britain had to side with
Zionists to rally support among the Jews in the United
States and Russia, hoping they could encourage their governments to

(47:46):
stay in the war until victory. Three, there was intense
Zionist lobbying and strong connections between the Zionist community in
Britain and the British government, as well as some of
the officials in the government being Zionists themselves, for Jews
were being persecuted in Europe and the British government was
sympathetic to their suffering. I think that last point is

(48:07):
usually used as a validation to why Israel exists today,
but feeling sorry for a people and giving them someone
else's land is really not a solution in my opinion.
Of course, the Balfour Declaration was also not received well
by Palestinians and Arabs. In nineteen nineteen, then US President

(48:28):
Woodrow Wilson appointed a commission to look into public opinion
on the mandatory system in Syria and Palestine. The investigation
was known as the King Krane Commission. It found that
the majority of Palestinians expressed a strong opposition to Zionism,
leading the conductors of the commission to advise a modification
of the mandate's goal. The late Anni Ebba Adhadi, a

(48:51):
Palestinian political figure, condemned the Balfour Declaration in his memoirs,
saying it was made by an English foreigner who had
no claim to Palestine, to a foreign Jew who had
no right to it. However, it's very important to mention
here that the other vital important source for insight into
Palestine opinion on the declaration at the time. AKA the

(49:12):
press was closed down by the Ottomans at the start
of the war in nineteen fourteen and only began to
reappear in nineteen nineteen, but it was under British military
censorship in November nineteen nineteen when the Alisti La Da Laivi,
the Arab independence newspaper based in Damascus, was reopened. One
article had a response to a public speech given by

(49:34):
Herbert Samuel, a Jewish Cabinet minister in London, on the
second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The article said quote
our country is Arab, Palestine is Arab, and Palestine must
remain Arab. In nineteen twenty, the Third Palestine Congress and
Haifa decried the British government's plans to support the Zionist

(49:54):
project and rejected the declaration as a violation of international
law and the rights of the indigenous population. I'm gonna
pull audio from Sim's video here again. They kind of
summarize in a really good way what happened in the
years leading up to the Nukaba.

Speaker 6 (50:10):
So here is Sim and even still until nineteen thirty six,
Palestinians are trying to peacefully, legalistically resist decolonization, which, unfortunately
history teaches us doesn't work that great usually. However, inspired
by the examples of Iraq and Syria, which had managed
to overthrow their colonizers starting with a general strike, Palestinians

(50:34):
organize a strike in nineteen thirty six. Again, this starts
out as just a peaceful strike, but it is brutally
repressed by the British overlords.

Speaker 7 (50:42):
We're like, no, you're not.

Speaker 6 (50:43):
Allowed to strike. You are our captive wage slavery labor
for us.

Speaker 7 (50:47):
You have to go do your work.

Speaker 6 (50:49):
Khaleedi shows how Britain was also very strategically sowing internal
divisions within the Palestinian leadership, turning people certain to their
side by bribing them to work again one another. And
so the strike fell apart in nineteen thirty six. But
then only then in nineteen thirty seven.

Speaker 7 (51:05):
Did an armed revolt breakout.

Speaker 6 (51:07):
Much is made by Zionists about this Arab revolt and
how this was justification for the Knukba, which would ultimately
kill fifteen thousand Palestinians and displace hundreds of thousands more.
But this was no religious massacre, and that's reflected in
the casualties. Yes, several hundred Jews died during the revolt,
but it took one hundred thousand British troops to suppress
the revolt, and the fighting was mostly between the Arabs

(51:29):
and the British. And it's estimated that between fourteen and
seventeen percent of the adult male Arab population was killed.

Speaker 7 (51:36):
Wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.

Speaker 6 (51:38):
So the population of Palestinians was absolutely devastated by this
revolt by the end of it. What struck me a
lot reading the conclusion of this chapter was, you know,
the Western media, which is so Islamophobic, portrays Palestinians as
like inherently violent and bloodthirsty and anti Semitic, but that
just isn't reflected in this history at all. In fact,
as Khaldi mentioned, several scholars argue that, you know, the
Palestinians really should have organized an armed revolt earlier. It

(52:01):
was too late by the time they did, but they
had spent fifteen years since the Balfour Declaration trying peacefully
and legalistically to earn their rights, and that was ultimately
a dead end. But Palestinians really clearly did not want
to fight a war. It wasn't until they'd exhausted every
single other option to them. They tried legal routes, they
tried organizing, they tried a strike. You know, they had

(52:23):
done everything they could. And this was a population that
had been stripped of huge amounts of its land, that
was destitute, that was impoverished, that was starving, that was
shut out from any economic opportunity in the land they
had lived on for millennia. They were farmers. They didn't
want to wage a war. They wanted to make olive oil.
But because this guy didn't want Jews moving to the UK,

(52:48):
they didn't get to have their country anymore.

Speaker 5 (52:50):
Even prior to the Balfour Declaration in the British Mandate,
Pan Arab newspapers warned against the motives of the Zionist
movement and its potential outcomes displacing Palestinians from their land.
Khalil Sakakini, a jerusalemit writer and teacher, described Palestine in
the immediate aftermath of the war as follows. A nation

(53:12):
which has long been in the depths of sleep, only
wakes if it is rudely shaken by events, only arises
little by little. This was the situation of Palestine, which
for many centuries has been in the deepest sleep until
it was shaken by the Great War, shocked by the
Zionist movement and violated by the illegal policy of the British,

(53:33):
and awoke little by little. And while Britain is generally
and understandably held responsible for the Balfour Declaration, it is
important to note that the statement would not have been
made without prior approval from the other Allied powers. During
World War One, in a war cabinet meeting on September
nineteen seventeen, British ministers decided that the quote views of

(53:55):
President Wilson should be obtained before any declaration was made,
and indeed, according to the Cabinet's minutes on October fourth,
the ministers recalled Arthur Balfour, confirming that Wilson was quote
extremely favorable to the movement. France, surprise, surprise, maybe to
no one, was also involved and announced its support prior

(54:16):
to the issuing of the Balfour Declaration. A May nineteen
seventeen letter from Jules Cambon, a French diplomat, to Nahem Sokolo,
the Polish Zionist, expressed the sympathetic views of the French
government towards a quote Jewish colonization in Palestine. This letter,
again the precursor to the Balfour Declaration, says it would

(54:40):
be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist,
by the protection of the Allied powers in the renaissance
of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the
people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago. The
Balfour Declaration again is widely seen as the precursor to
the nineteen forty eight Palestinian Nekba, when Zionist armed groups

(55:03):
who were trained by the British forcibly expelled more than
seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians from their homeland, and
they massacred fifteen thousand Palestinians. Despite some opposition within the
war cabinet predicting such an outcome was probable, the British
government still chose to issue the declaration, and there is

(55:23):
no doubt that the British mandate created the conditions for
the Jewish minority to gain superiority in Palestine and build
a state for themselves at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.
When the British decided to terminate their mandate in nineteen
forty seven and transfer the question of Palestine to the
United Nations. The Jews already had an army that was

(55:44):
formed out of the armed paramilitary groups trained and created
to fight side by side with the British in World
War II. More importantly, the British allowed the Jews to
establish self governing institutions such as the Jewish Agency, to
prepare themselves for a state when it came to it,
while the Palestinians were forbidden from doing so, paving the

(56:06):
way for the nineteen forty eight ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
We're going to end the episode with one more audio
clip from Sim's video. I just think it really describes
and summarizes why exactly Arthur Balfour is an extremely evil person.

Speaker 6 (56:22):
So here is Sim and the violence that has sprung
from the creation of Israel goes so much further beyond
its borders. I mean, the whole history of the Middle
East and a Western imperial conquest in the Middle East
hinges on Israel being there, all of US imperialism, the
wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, I mean, all of
that would have been impossible without the existence of Israel.
So add Arthur Balfour to your list of the greatest

(56:45):
war criminals of all time.

Speaker 5 (56:47):
It truly feels silly to be talking about anything else
at this time. So I do want to mention here
that at the time of this recording, there are over
eleven thousand Palestinians who have been by the settler colony
of Israel in their genocide that is currently happening. Nearly
five thousand children are gone, have been slaughtered. Every time

(57:11):
I open my phone, I see the worst thing I've
ever seen in my life. And there are images that
we're seeing of. I mean, you've seen them, children under
the rubble, crying for help, parents losing their babies, and
it doesn't make sense for me to describe the images.
But my point is we have never seen a genocide

(57:32):
take place right before our eyes. All the proof is there.
Israeli leaders have been very clear in their intention for genocide.
Just for example, Israeli Cabinet member Avidijkter. I don't care
if I said his name wrong, but he said that
they are rolling out Nekba twenty twenty three. That's one

(57:55):
example of extremely genocidal language as being used by not
just Israel but also American politicians as well. There are
photos side by side of the nineteen forty eight Nekba
to what's happening right now. It's happening again. The mass
expulsion of Palestinians is happening right before our eyes. There

(58:16):
are Palestinians who have experienced the Nekaba in nineteen forty
eight who are experiencing it again, being displaced so many
times in their own country, and right now over a
million Palestinians have been displaced. We are also just being
inundated with the most bizarre propaganda from the IOF. I've

(58:37):
decided to call them the IOF from now on instead
of the IDF because they are not defending anything. They
are the Israeli offensive forces, not defensive. So just a
disclaimer there over my choice of words. But it's strange
they post photos of Arabic text saying it's something else.
Just recently I saw that they posted a calendar that

(58:59):
they found in a house that they say are a
list of Hamas hostages. It's literally just a calendar with
the words of the week written in Arabic. And that
is just one example of many. And I feel like
if I keep talking about this that will never stop.
But my point in bringing us back to modern times

(59:21):
is that this all started with a decision made by
men who had no business making a decision. Arthur Balfour
had no fucking business handing over a piece of land
that had nothing to do with him. It was never
his place. And what galaxy does that make sense to anybody?

(59:41):
Zionism and Jewishness and Judaism are not equivalent, and I
hope at this point in time people are realizing that.
I hope that this episode sheds some light on how
the roots of Zionism itself are rooted in anti Semitism.
It's nobody's place to decide to play god and just

(01:00:04):
pretend people don't exist in a place that you want.
It doesn't work like that. That's not human. So I
think it's important to remember history like this because something
like this does not happen overnight. It did not happen
or start on October seventh. This is something that has
been decades in the making, and it all started with

(01:00:26):
one stupid man making a decision with other stupid men
that have way too much power that resulted in the suffering,
the continued suffering of an entire people, the dehumanization of
an entire people, We're seeing it play out right now.
So I think as you learn about history, as to
learn about things like this that maybe seem like they

(01:00:48):
happen so far away, they really didn't. We are experiencing
the ripples of those decisions. And that's the episode for today.
I hope it was informative, and I hope the genocide
of the Palestinian people comes to an end. So in
the meantime, Free Palestine, No no dot Com.

Speaker 4 (01:01:57):
In the week since the end of October, the confie
landscape in the AMMA has significantly changed. The Hunter and
its alignment issues have taken unprecedented losses, and the PDF,
as well as several ethnic revolutionary organizations, have swept across
the country, seizing bases, weapons, tanks, and even towns and cities.
As the offensive was ongoing, I spoke to Sire montine

(01:02:19):
a leader in the madelid PDF, and Billy Ford of
the United States Institute for Peace. What follows is my
conversation with Billy and some insights on a situation on
the ground with the Madelai PDF. You'll hear more from
Sire Montiney in another episode that we're working on, but
I wanted you to hear his personal on the ground
perspective now as well. First, I let nine nine, the

(01:02:40):
translator from Mandel a PDF, introduce our guest.

Speaker 8 (01:02:44):
Oh yeah, Layes, he is the leader of the Commanding
and Cohesion team, and you can also say that he
the leader of our organization.

Speaker 4 (01:02:57):
To start with, I asked Billy to explain for you
the developments in the conflict in the last few weeks.

Speaker 9 (01:03:02):
I mean, it's really been just the past what is
it since the twenty seventh, so thirteen days kind of
a level change in the conflict trajectory, Whereas I'd say,
I mean, you got coup February first, twenty twenty one,
major military operate resistance operations began September seventh, twenty twenty one,
and frankly since then it's been more or less incremental change.

(01:03:27):
You can, I wouldn't characterize it as a stalemate as
many have, but there's there's essentially been, you know, small
pockets of progress where the resistance is capturing territory, but
all almost exclusively rural areas of the country. And then
things changed radically on October twenty seventh, when whereas Before

(01:03:52):
the twenty seventh, you had a range of armed stakeholders
involved in the conflicts, some under the deposed National Unity government,
as well as what's called the K three C, which
is four of the biggest ethnic armed organizations. But a lot,
a lot of the reason why we hadn't seen the
level change in the military balance of power was because

(01:04:15):
of the absence of some of the biggest and most
powerful armed organizations that had more or less state on
the sidelines.

Speaker 7 (01:04:21):
I mean, they were.

Speaker 9 (01:04:22):
Arming and training resistance forces that were engaged in active combat,
but they hadn't themselves in a meaningful way.

Speaker 7 (01:04:31):
But on the twenty seventh that totally changed.

Speaker 9 (01:04:34):
This alliance called the Brotherhood Alliance that involves three of
the biggest armed organizations, initiated coordinated attacks in Northern Shan
State on the border with China, and have since the
twenty seventh.

Speaker 7 (01:04:49):
We're talking to.

Speaker 9 (01:04:50):
You on the tenth here of November, one hundred and
fifty posts have been taken. Seven towns are now under
full z distance control, seven others by my counter under
partial resistance control. And the operation in Northern Shan State
on the border has effectively spurred resistance operations in other

(01:05:14):
parts of the country, and so now you essentially have
operations in all corners of the country. I mean, you've
seen PDFs taking towns in sagain along the Indian border.
You've seen the kN you taking important towns on the
logistics corridor on the Thai border. Kareni groups have moved

(01:05:37):
into Meyse on the Thai border with Kareni State. The
Chin National Front has initiated attacks in Balatwa and Southern
Chin State near the Bangladesh India border.

Speaker 10 (01:05:50):
Yees.

Speaker 9 (01:05:50):
So it's really just the trajectory of conflict has gone
from an incremental trajectory where it's like this is a
slow burn that could last a long time, to a
we need to start thinking about potentially day after. I mean,
nothing is a given, and the minamoral military has been
resilient in the past, but it does feel like this

(01:06:12):
is a historic moment in a lot of ways, and
the military is weakened in a way that we've really
never seen in the history of the country.

Speaker 4 (01:06:22):
I asked Montiney to explain a little about how he
got to a point where his force, who hadn't fought
it all in twenty twenty one, we're able to fight
alongside the Eros and deal a serious defeat to the junta.

Speaker 8 (01:06:34):
So in twenty one March he decided to go for
the unrevolutions. And then he started reading the books about
the military and tactics and then warfare things. And then
he said that he is still learning and reading from
the books about the military tactics till now. And one

(01:06:59):
more thing is we we are having some problems about
the other reverse Defense Force perdief that they don't have
the well forming and then they don't follow the code
of context or something like that. So we organize world

(01:07:20):
that we won't become a blood dirsty organization, but just
to fight for the military pool. And one more thing
is we are following the two CEOC, which is a
code of context and then chain of commands before we

(01:07:42):
form up as these military organizations.

Speaker 4 (01:07:47):
A number of the Eros rightconas you won't have heard before,
and that's because they haven't been part of the conflict before.
So I asked Billy to explain who the Eros in
the north were and how and why are they identityfied now?

Speaker 9 (01:07:58):
Sure, So, the Arakan Army is a Recine ethnic based
armed organization. They're based on the China border, but for
those who know MEMMR geography, Rakine State is actually on
the complete other side of the country. But this like
many were Like many newer armed organizations, they were essentially

(01:08:19):
incubated by some of the longer term armed organizations. In
this case, the Kachin Independence Army helped for the emergence
of the Arakan Army, which has really grown in the
past ten years into one of the strongest armed stakeholders
in the country. Before the coup, under the on Sansuchil

(01:08:42):
National League for Democracy government, they were in intense fighting
with the MR military and on Sansuchi strongly supported the
MEMR military's operations against the AA, and that kind of
built some bad blood, as you might be might imagine,
between the AA in the National League for Democracy and

(01:09:02):
and that bad blood has made it difficult to build
alliance across ethnic lines and with those resistant organizations that
involve n l D folks. But the key point here
is that the AA is operating in two places were
kind State and in Northern Shan State on the and
Kachin State also actually it's the GUY now, but and

(01:09:23):
they're an extremely powerful armed organization, highly disciplined, highly effective.

Speaker 7 (01:09:28):
Well armed.

Speaker 9 (01:09:30):
The The second group is the Ta'ang National Liberation Army.
This is a an ethnic based army in northern Shan
State that also is a relatively a newer armed organization.
They it's it's a pretty complex military environment in Northern

(01:09:51):
Shan State because the t n l A are often
in tension with other shn ethnic groups that are in
Shan State and footing the RCSS or the Shan State
Army South, which is competing for control in other parts
of Shan State. We've also seen some tension between the
t n l A and the s SPP, which is

(01:10:13):
another Northern Shan army that's closely aligned with the Wah
and Chinese. So that's a that's a pretty complex array
of relationships there. But the TNLA is also an increasingly
powerful armed organization, one that administer administers territory and has
also been locked in conflict with the Memory military for

(01:10:35):
some time. The last group is the m n d
a A the MEMR National Democratic Alliance Army UH. This
is a Ko Kong ethnic based armed organization that for
a long time controlled territory along the China border. In

(01:10:56):
two thousand and nine, Men Online, who is now the
commit ender in chief and the head of.

Speaker 7 (01:11:02):
The sac.

Speaker 9 (01:11:06):
He essentially was leading commands in north, in the northeast
and led operations to push the m n d a
A out of that territory and replace it with a
border guard force of.

Speaker 7 (01:11:18):
Another ethnic Ko Kong ethnic army.

Speaker 9 (01:11:23):
And we can get back to that, but that ethnic
army became or is a criminal enterprise that's now operating
massive scam and human trafficking operations with the support of
the m R Military. They're commissioned under the MEMR Military.
But I think a key point here is that there's
it's very personal with the m n d a A

(01:11:45):
and this border guard.

Speaker 7 (01:11:46):
Force and and men online.

Speaker 9 (01:11:49):
And so this is really the m n d a
A is an organization that has been pushing for a
very long time to retake this territory and particularly this
city of Lau Kai. And so that that that three
constitutes the Brotherhood Alliance. There's other stakeholders in this region,
including the United Waw State Army, which is the largest

(01:12:11):
armed organization in Meanmar, or non state armed organization as well,
which is very closely tied with the Chinese. I mean
they use Chinese currency, they speak Chinese they fully administer
their territory and autonomously. And then the other organizations that

(01:12:34):
are relevant here is the National Democratic Alliance Army and
d a A, which is essentially you can think of
it as a closely tied.

Speaker 7 (01:12:40):
With the law and the Chinese.

Speaker 9 (01:12:42):
And then the Kachin Independence Army, which is a Kachin
ethnic based armed organization very much founded as a social
services I mean, it's it's kind of got a different
identity from some of these other groups. It's very much
like a revolutionary organization with political intentions. There's kind of

(01:13:03):
Christian beliefs that are embedded within the organization.

Speaker 7 (01:13:07):
So yeah, all to.

Speaker 9 (01:13:09):
Say, it's a highly complex array of actors with different
intentions and motivations. But in this particular case, they came
together to at least the Brotherhood Alliance came together to
launch this coordinated attack.

Speaker 4 (01:13:22):
The T'ang National Liberation Army the group who received many
of the young people of Mandalay who went on to
form the Mandalaid PDF. Those young people started out as
a strikeforce within Mandleay, but there are only weapons on
Molotov cocktails, and every action they took with the risk
of their whole families if they were caught by march.
A few weeks into the revolution, Montenay and others took

(01:13:44):
to the mountains with the Tang National Liberation Army to
learn to fight. Before the revolution, he said he had
no experience and he didn't even play fighting video games.
I asked him how it felt to be joining a
group he'd been raised to hate and how he got there.

Speaker 10 (01:13:59):
If all, we we formed many peria.

Speaker 8 (01:14:02):
We started as an mst which is a manually special
task Force.

Speaker 10 (01:14:10):
It was the first training for our organizations and H.

Speaker 8 (01:14:16):
At the time we only have a SAM handmade weapons
like Molotov, but we really don't use like handmade guns.
But the after the support of T and L, we
we got the automatic rifles with the help of our
lines and UH. At first, when we act as a

(01:14:40):
MSTF manally special tax force, we restrict the rooms for
not attaching to the schools or hospitals or the civilians,
and then after that we start using the handmade weapons
like just like Molotov.

Speaker 10 (01:14:57):
We didn't use any handguns at the.

Speaker 8 (01:14:59):
Time, but after that we trained UH and we contact
with the tn L. We have a We now have
the automotic rifles and then others, uh, missiles or something
like that.

Speaker 10 (01:15:13):
Now.

Speaker 8 (01:15:14):
So when he decided to contact with the T and
L and the End National what he expected were nothing
else but some few problems that about the racists because
of most of the ethnic groups, they most of them

(01:15:36):
they hate Bumbis people and they even called the Bummy's army.
So he was explaining that we will be having a
racist problem. But when he actually reached to the End region, uh,
he found out that there is no hatred to the
Bombish people, and then there was no problem about the

(01:15:59):
racist problem.

Speaker 10 (01:16:01):
Yeah. He also thought that it's because of the.

Speaker 8 (01:16:03):
Community condication between the bombies people and the plan racist Uh.
Because Palan people they provide tea, leaves and the other
things to eat bambished people and then they make some
tradings and then some they do some business with barbised people.

(01:16:27):
So that there was no problem about that. But the
only other thing was about the weather. Because of the
rough weather in the mountains, it's a very different weather
from the like Manulee region. It's very cool for the
people from the Manley region because Manley's yeah, and in

(01:16:52):
mountains it's very cold in here. So we stay having
problems about the weather problem, but now we are getting
used to it. And he said that he is also
surprised that TNLA, the a National Libation Army is a
wealth am military and then they are also following the

(01:17:15):
code of conduct and then the following the democracy way,
and then most of the leaders from the TNLA of
the liberal ideas and then they also one we work
on to the young leaders from the Revolution Force US.

Speaker 10 (01:17:33):
So see, he was surprised about that.

Speaker 4 (01:17:36):
Billy told me that this same dynamic could occurred all
over the country. And this is probably a good time
to remind listeners that we've covered the formation of the
PDFs and our two previous series about Membar and if
he hasn't had the time to listen to those, I
really hope you do because it'll make this one a
lot more interesting and this one probably won't make much
sense without it.

Speaker 9 (01:17:53):
Yeah, and I think this is really a key dynamic.
And we can come back to the conversation maybe about
day after or the political dimensions of the conflict.

Speaker 11 (01:18:02):
But there's frankly, before the coup, these sorts of coordinations
would be uh like incomprehensible.

Speaker 9 (01:18:13):
I mean, you'd see the Arakan Army, the Kachin Independence Army,
the T'ang National Liberation Army, all of them have deep
connections with mostly Bamar ethnic pds, some of whom work
in coordination with the National Unity Government, some which are

(01:18:34):
slightly more independent. But the this is an inter ethnic
collaboration that's that's very novel and demonstrates a shift and
inter ethnic and intercommunal dynamics in the country that are
is very positive in a lot of ways. So yeah,

(01:18:56):
the t n l A, the has been provided weapons
and training for PDFs in Mandalay, the k i O,
the k i A has been providing weapons and training
and tactical and strategic support to PDFs and sagain, the
Arakan Army has been maybe more than any group, providing
tactical UH support and weapons and training to PDFs in Bogo, Arowadi,

(01:19:21):
Maguay and now more recently in Segaine, so really the
the Burman heartland of the country. So yeah, all of
these ethnic minority based armed organizations are now collaborating, sharing
resources and knowledge with UH, with with Bamar ethnic PDFs.

(01:19:44):
There's a so that I think the main question here
is like what does this mean for intercommunal relations, What
does this mean for the future uh of you know,
of the country is there? Does this indicate there's potential
for greater national solidarity in the absence of the MEMR
militi very fracturing communities and so on. But yeah, it's

(01:20:04):
a radical shift in those relationships.

Speaker 4 (01:20:07):
But he also shared that as we've heard from every
single PDF fighter we've talked to, their time alongside the
eros IS comrades in arms has changed the way they
see ethnicity in the future of their country.

Speaker 9 (01:20:17):
And I think this is also manifesting a lot of
the research that my organization, the US Institute of Piece
has been doing at the among the general public. I mean,
we've done three different studies over the past year to
assess intercreminal relations in the post couperiod and to kind
of see how relations have shifted, because there's a really

(01:20:38):
dominant narrative that MEMR is kind of irreconcilably fractured and
that the communities are loyal to their ethnic identities not
their national identities and.

Speaker 7 (01:20:50):
So on, and.

Speaker 9 (01:20:53):
Frankly, all of our research has has pointed to a
similar trend, which is one of inter ethnic relations are
considerably better.

Speaker 7 (01:21:03):
There's a there's greater solidarity.

Speaker 9 (01:21:07):
There's actually one of the serv the experimental research studies
that we did found that national identity, as in being
from MEMMR was more was more important to respondence than
ethnic identity, which totally cuts against narratives about MEMMAR. And Yeah,

(01:21:28):
I mean, I think there's been considerable gains and inter
ethnic relations, and it's you know, it's hard to determine,
you know, the causal linkages here, whether you know, the
improved inter ethnic relations are spurring greater military collaboration and
collaboration on humanitarian assistants and governance and so on. But
it does feel like there's a major shift and social

(01:21:51):
dynamics in addition to these kind of military shifts that
are taking place. I mean, I think that the research
we've done has found there to be sort of extremist
national perspectives still remain, but that they're they're the likelihood
of them escalating to violence is reduced, in large part

(01:22:13):
because the public's vulnerability to UH incitement or to highly
devisive political speech.

Speaker 7 (01:22:21):
Most of what came.

Speaker 9 (01:22:22):
From Mailmar military run troll farms is is much I mean,
there's much more resilience to those that that form of
political violence, So you know, I think there's still a
lot of work obviously to do to build intercommunal cohesion
and understanding, but that the likelihood, you know, for example,

(01:22:44):
in a post sac world, that you will be you know,
see mass intercommunal violence, it seems much lower than a
lot of people are presuming that it would be that
the that the actual horizontal relationships across communities are not
are not as bad as many presume. Actually, one of

(01:23:05):
the surveys that we did found that Memar's intercommunal relations
are no worse than countries with much lower levels of violence,
which is kind of an indication of the fact that
it's really vertical dynamics like violent political speech, highly exclusionary
governance structures that are driving intercommunal violence, and so that

(01:23:27):
those on that dimension at least that the person to
person intercommunal relation or relationships, I think there's a lot
to be.

Speaker 7 (01:23:36):
A lot of positive narratives there.

Speaker 4 (01:23:39):
Talking of positive narratives, here's some positive narratives about products
and or services. Another aspect of the conflict that has
played out in Operation ten twenty seven, it's the role
of China and the massive crime empires that the junta
has facilitated along the country's borders in recent years. I
asked Billy to explain some of those.

Speaker 9 (01:23:56):
So this has become the major political dynamic between China
and the SAC over the past year.

Speaker 7 (01:24:05):
Frankly, I mean, it's.

Speaker 9 (01:24:08):
Essentially what we've seen is the emergence of these massive
scam operations that use foreign labor that's trafficked into MEMR
into areas controlled primarily by MEMMR military commissioned border guard forces.
So these are commissioned under the MEMR military, which is
a very key point in most cases, and they are

(01:24:30):
running scam operations at a global level that are scamming
people using a scheme called pig butchering, which is long
term relationship building.

Speaker 7 (01:24:40):
And then.

Speaker 9 (01:24:42):
You're yeah, theft at a large scale. This is like,
these are sizable losses from individuals. So last year, for example,
to give you a sense of that scale, China lost
twenty billion dollars to these scam operations.

Speaker 7 (01:24:57):
Twenty billion.

Speaker 10 (01:24:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:24:59):
In the United State it's lost two billion dollars on
scam operations emerging from Meanmar. I mean, the scale of
this is wild. I mean there's more than there's more
than one hundred thousand people being held in scam zones
in Meanmar from forty six different countries. I mean it's
a it's this is a total global operation because I

(01:25:20):
mean this emerged actually before COVID, I mean in sia Hanookville,
Cambodia and other places where there's you know, rule of
laws is dubious. They have have the initiated kind of
casino operations which are illegal in China and really targeting
Chinese public. And during COVID, when China a lot of
Chinese nationals were forced back to mainland China, these criminal

(01:25:44):
enterprises were short on labor and so they shifted their approach.
I mean they shifted to trafficking people into their zones
and then operating out a global scale finding labor from
around the world, you know, using not not low skilled labor.
I mean this is these are high skilled kind of

(01:26:05):
middle class workers seeking employment in the tech industry or
some other scheme that they you know, eventually they're you know,
held at gunpoint and forced to scam their co nationals.

Speaker 7 (01:26:18):
So that's a little bit of background.

Speaker 9 (01:26:19):
So this is happening in Ko Kong along the Chinese border,
also in the Waw territories and in the n d
A A territories. The largest areas are actually on the
Thai Burma border with the Kren Border Guard Force and
affiliated criminal organizations. So essentially, over the past year, the

(01:26:43):
Chinese have have noticed not only the financial losses but
the potential for social instability because as youth unemployment has
grown in China, you know, these young people are seeking
new employment opportunities, crossing the border in memr for high
paying tech jobs and then being held at gunpoints. So

(01:27:04):
you have you know, mothers on social media saying I
haven't seen my son in three weeks, and you know
he's being held in a scam operation. So you know
this is this is diletarious at two levels, you know,
the financial scam losses and the trafficking, and it's all
being run by border guard forces that are commissioned by

(01:27:24):
the Malamar military. And yet you see countries around the world,
including China, going to the Malamar military and saying please
shut this down. And of course the Malmur military has
no intention to shut this down because these these scam
operations are financing the border guard forces that are their
key weapon against the resistance. So they need the border

(01:27:47):
guard forces and so they will never shut down the
scam operations, and so what what ensued was essentially earlier
this year. I mean the Chinese came to the Malmour
military and said, we will suppor you at every level.
We will prop you up, provide you weapons, to provide
you assistance if you can demonstrate the capacity to govern,
the capacity to provide stability on our border, the capacity

(01:28:10):
to provide to allow us to pursue our economic interests.
And the SAC has completely failed this test. Scam operations
have exploded China's economic interests. The Chupu Especial Economic Zone
remains in a impact assessment phase. The Lepidon copper mind

(01:28:30):
is non functional, the Mitzo dam is non functional. They're
just not getting out of the SAC what they wanted.
And so there was a meaningful shift recently, it appears,
and I think by all indicators that we can see
the Chinese greenlit Operation ten twenty seven that they at

(01:28:53):
least did not stand in their way.

Speaker 7 (01:28:57):
And you'll see from.

Speaker 9 (01:28:59):
The MND, I mean they really were the leaders of
the operation that in the statements that they issued about
the operation itself and when they articulated their objectives, the
first objective was to shut down scam operations. I mean,
you can see that this is they're speaking to a
Chinese public and the government indicating that we're a responsible,

(01:29:23):
good faith actor that will shut down these enterprises that
are trafficking your citizens and scamming the public.

Speaker 7 (01:29:31):
Out of billions of dollars.

Speaker 9 (01:29:34):
So this has become a really dominant dynamic in the
relationship between the Chinese and the SAC, and it's it
leads to a really weakened position for the SAC if
they're not being propped up in the way that they
have been for so long by the Chinese. So we'll

(01:29:54):
have to see how this kind of unfolds, but it's
not looking good for the military.

Speaker 4 (01:30:02):
When we do see how this unfolds, it'll be people
like the mandol A PDF who we see leading the
charge for a new and democratic MEANDMA. We don't exactly
know what that means, but I asked them, if the
weapons see is in operation ten twenty seven, we'd allow
them to arm more fighters and get there faster.

Speaker 8 (01:30:19):
We are also now recruiting a new recruits, but we
will we will have to recruit until the genter is gone.
And we also need more soldiers to form up the
better army than the gener after we want, even after

(01:30:41):
we want, we are going to need some more human
resources to form up the better army than the Malei Army,
you know. And for the arms and ammunitions, we got
a lot of arm and ammunitions from the Male like
but we it's they use a different type of the ammunitions.

(01:31:06):
And then because we for example, we use like a
K types, we have the different So it is not
very possible to arm the better weapons from the the
Mali army. We only used some of the weapons, like

(01:31:28):
for the artillery or something like that, but that's only
a few we got from them. What we really need
is about the better artillery or s A M or
something like that for the a strights.

Speaker 10 (01:31:44):
So yeah, it's not very usedful for us.

Speaker 8 (01:31:48):
From the anthem ammunition we got from the Male army.
He said that the main points in the arm revolution
is it's about to catch up important points, not to
catcha all the CDs or something like that, like to
catchure the enemy sec quartas or the important places. We

(01:32:14):
are going to need more plants, and then he say
that he's unclear about that.

Speaker 4 (01:32:21):
I asked Billy what he thought we could expect in
the new Mianma. I see points out here. Everything every
Circled analyst has said has been proven wrong by the revolution.
They've exceeded the wildest expectations of experts in London and Washington, DC.
And where they go next is really up to them.

Speaker 9 (01:32:38):
Good question, and frankly, I don't have a lot of
information about that. I mean, you've seen pictures over the
past twelve days of the as the resistance has taken
one hundred.

Speaker 7 (01:32:48):
And fifty posts.

Speaker 9 (01:32:49):
They've definitely captured a lot of heavy munitions and artillery,
but yeah, I'm not sure service to air capabilities. I mean,
I think the the fact that the meanmaur military is
not able to push the resistance out of urban areas.
I mean, this is the first time really that the
resistance moved into urban areas and held them, including into

(01:33:12):
guy and I mean Colon has been they're holding it,
and so I mean that seems to be an indication
to me that the essay c's capability is weakening. I mean, yeah,
their their access to foreign currency and to purchase weapons
is highly constrained now. I mean their primary providers Russia

(01:33:35):
and China, you know, ones fighting their own war and
the other is kind of is a little bit more
skeptical as to whether they deserve their support. I mean
they just last week the US initiated new sanctions on
the Meanoma oil and Gas enterprise that provided half a
billion dollars in revenue for the junta per year. Yeah,

(01:33:57):
that's a major that's a major issue for them accessing
US dollars which they need to buy weapons. I mean,
the Ties can no longer pay the Memoir military and
USD and the Memor military doesn't want bought. So they're
literally negotiating barter agreements where they you know, sell gas

(01:34:18):
for material goods. But now you have the Resistance controlling
you know, part of Cocker Rig on the Asia Highway
into Thailand. I mean, they control the borders, are the
starting to in a way they hadn't before, So even
this sort of bartering or material trade is is less viable.
So yeah, I mean, I think they're just really asset constrained,

(01:34:42):
and it does I mean just the fact that they
haven't been able to retake these critical logistic coups. I
mean the border crossings that the Resistance has have controlled
constitute forty percent of the of the of the overland
trade between China and Memar. It's you know, it's like
four billion dollars in value that's being you know, that

(01:35:04):
tax loss for the SAC it's considerable. It's considerable losses
there as well. And how long they can really hold
out and maintain their air assets is really questionable, particularly
since they've had to massively diversify their air asset purchase,
which really makes it more complex to service points. And

(01:35:26):
so yeah, I mean, I think I'm not sure that
the Resistance has much more capacity in service to air
or air defense, but it does seem like there the
SACS capacity to inflict atrocities in this way has also
been constrained.

Speaker 4 (01:35:40):
Yeah, it sort of flies in the face of every
sort of like analytical idea about the assets that you
need to have in order to be successful in one
of these Like they they've really proved a lot of
people wrong in a really impressive way. I know, you
have to go, I want to ask one more real
quick the uh did these towns did the SAC pull

(01:36:04):
out of the towns or did they like fight house
to house or like how did they very across.

Speaker 9 (01:36:11):
Well, the I mean, the SAC was you know, in
their barracks themselves.

Speaker 7 (01:36:18):
I mean, in these.

Speaker 9 (01:36:18):
Towns it's a national uprising. The public is you know,
opposed to the presence this is an occupying force, and
so yeah, it's just moving in and capturing military posts.
And as one person, resistance fighter indicated, essentially you fire
your gun in the air and they lay down their weapons,
which is more you know, an indication of of where

(01:36:41):
the military stands and the support that these these highly
isolated I mean, this is a fractured light infantry force
that's dispersed a posts all over the country, and you
know they're resupplying from the Northwest Command in Monuoas to
towns within thirty minutes drive by helicopter because they can't

(01:37:03):
they can't move, so there's just not logistics support to
these posts. And so yeah, you've got folks in there
that just the will to fight is pretty small. Morale
is shrinking from a very low base, and so I
think there was the the general pattern is just resistance

(01:37:24):
taking military barracks and posts.

Speaker 7 (01:37:28):
Rather than having to go house to house.

Speaker 9 (01:37:31):
I mean there's villages in towns where there's these groups
called pew Sawtee that are like military aligned militias, but yeah,
that's not really you know, a nationwide fighting force, and
it's in most cases it really is just the resistance
capturing posts and pushing out you know, or military personnel.

(01:37:54):
And I mean there was a they're also using drones
to a high degree of effectiveness.

Speaker 7 (01:37:59):
They recently killed a colonel who.

Speaker 9 (01:38:01):
Is on He was about to be become a brigadier general,
the highest ranking person to have been killed in battle
from the menmoral military through a drone strike in northern
Shun State, I believe for kit Chen, and I think that, yeah,
the resistance drone capabilities have also increased considerably.

Speaker 7 (01:38:23):
And this is also an.

Speaker 9 (01:38:24):
Area where you see nug collaborating a lot with the ROS.
So yeah, it's it's it's just yeah, it's embarracked, you know,
menomour military personnel and they just in many cases just
lay down their arms because it's just moral so low.

(01:38:44):
And the probability of them to be able to fend
off indefinitely is when they have the public against them
and a resistance movement against them. It's just really a
challenging set of conditions for them.

Speaker 4 (01:38:55):
We don't know exactly what the future of MEA. Murray is,
but it took an interesting turn the last few weeks
with the k NDF the Saquareni National Defense Force Fish
Battalion issuing a statement of solidarity with the people of
Rejava and the people of Java in the form of
the YPG and the YPGA, their defense units of men
and women respectively, recording a response a great risk during

(01:39:18):
the ongoing grown campaign expressing their solidarity and support for
the revolutionary people of Myanmar, something will cover in greater
detail on another episode, but it's yet another illustration of
how the revolutionary people of Mianma have continued to defy
everyone's expectations about how and where they will go next,
and how they've managed to dream up a vision from

(01:39:39):
more equal and just future, even as they face the
injustice and inequality of fighting a war the world doesn't
seem to care about. Without a single dollar of international
military aid, little support other than strongly worded letters from
the UN at sporadic intervals have come. To the end
of the episode, I asked Sya Montine if he had
anything else he would like to share with.

Speaker 8 (01:39:59):
Our Okay, he said that if he is able to talk,
he wants them to know that we are not the
white people. We most of them are educated we are
only fighting for the democrats. But in some international news

(01:40:24):
there will be some news that like pdf revolution forces
are killing each other or something like that, but it's
like not fully correct. Maybe some a few will be
doing that, but most of us are not doing that way.

Speaker 10 (01:40:45):
It's just a propagona from the male.

Speaker 8 (01:40:48):
Like you know, we also say that we are no
more expecting for the help from the other countries. We
will be fighting our own and then with our spiritatively
in And he also wanted to say that to the
US government or the King of England or the other

(01:41:13):
countries authorities that we are not wild ones. We are educated,
and then we are just fighting to get the democracy
back to our country. He's a little bit from words,
you know, say that if other governments are not helping

(01:41:35):
us because they can't get any benefits from helping us,
even if they don't want to help us, just don't
look as like we are the wild ones. We will
be trying to get the level of the other countries.

Speaker 10 (01:41:54):
We will always be trying for that.

Speaker 8 (01:41:57):
If you have any chance to speak out in a
seminar or the workshops or any other things or any meetings,
he wants you to tell the news about killings. Each
other of our revolution process is just a propagunnas of SAC.

(01:42:20):
If there is no more SAC, there will be no
issues like the anymore. Most of some issues are just
because of SAC and then they spread in some rumors
about that and then take news. You know, if you
guys can can come and visit us, and then you
can see how we treat people, and then how we

(01:42:44):
respect the civilians, and then how we follow put of
contexts in person.

Speaker 4 (01:42:51):
Do you want to follow the medal APDF? You can
search them on Facebook where they post regular updates. We'll
include the link in the show notes for you. If
you want to hear more from Billy, I'll let him
tell you how.

Speaker 10 (01:43:01):
Sure.

Speaker 9 (01:43:01):
Yeah, I mean, we put out a paper at USIP
dot org yesterday on the relationship between the scam operations
and the.

Speaker 7 (01:43:12):
Conflict dynamics.

Speaker 9 (01:43:13):
I'm putting one out probably next week on the day
after quote unquote dynamics, summarizing some of our research.

Speaker 7 (01:43:22):
I'm on Twitter at b I L L E E.

Speaker 9 (01:43:25):
The number four, the letter D, so you can try
to stay up on some of the conflict dynamics there.

Speaker 7 (01:43:32):
But yeah, the USIP websites where we published most of
our most of our stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:43:37):
In closing, I just want to share how much hope
I found in the conflict in the MR in recent weeks.
At a time when the world seems so full of cruelty,
it's inspiring to see people relatively unified, committed to respecting
life and civilians and succeeding against all the odds. This
doesn't mean they don't need help. They do desperately, and

(01:43:58):
I hope that this people continue to advocate to us
millions in Gaza. They can include civillions and revolutionaries from
me and Mark in their demands going forward.

Speaker 3 (01:44:21):
Welcome, Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Andrew Siege
from YouTube channel Andrewism, joined today.

Speaker 4 (01:44:28):
By James Hi. Sorry, I'm doing my own track hire.

Speaker 10 (01:44:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:44:33):
Yeah, I'm excited to hear about something. I don't know
what yet, So this should be a fun adventure.

Speaker 3 (01:44:39):
Yes, Well, today we are doing a little bit of
time travel. Then we're gonna embark on a journey to
explode movements of about two hundred years ago that I
think is still quite relevant even today, particularly in our
very technological, fast paced world. So when we put a

(01:44:59):
new games in the early nineteenth century in England great,
which you know, is a time of great change, of evil,
disease or that jazz.

Speaker 4 (01:45:10):
Yeah, I think I had thrived as a person with diabetes,
that would have made it approximately, you know, a couple
of weeks.

Speaker 3 (01:45:21):
Yeah. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. It hadn't
quite reached that point yet as far as I know,
but it was transforming the way that people lived and worked.
It was a time of innovation, was also a time
of great uncertainty, and amidst the classroom looms and rise
of organization, a group of workers emerged to became known

(01:45:41):
as the Latites. They were, you know, some early adopters. Ah, Yes,
of resistance, Yes, resistance to the changes of the Industrial Revolution.
And you know, for that cardinal sin they've been missing
too preton ever since. So today we're going to be
explaining exactly who who the Lights were and why their

(01:46:02):
actions resonate with us today in the twenty first century.
We'll talk about their history and their motivations and their
brave stand against the relentless march of capitalist progress. We're
also such on some figures, some of their tactics, and
the last impact they left on history. But most importantly,
we'll be covering why they struggle Somatus today. So here

(01:46:24):
we are. You know, in the nineteenth century indust Revolution
souping through England, British working families were going through some
very tough times as the economy was in turmoil and
unemployment was spreading like wildfire. It really wasn't a good
situation to be in. There was this never ending war
with Napoleon's France, there was Drian resources and causing what

(01:46:45):
Yorkshire historian Frank Peel described as the hard pinch of poverty.
And to make matters worse, food was in short supply
and the prices were shooting up. Not only were jobs
hard to come by, but even putting basic food on
the table was becoming a serious challenge. So it's a
really tough period for these families and they were feeling

(01:47:05):
that squeeze in every way possible. So that Light emerged
as a response to these seismic shifts as a loosely
organized group of textile workers and weavers who healed primarily
but not exclusively, from the nottingham Shire region of England.
At the heart of their struggle was the mechanization of

(01:47:26):
the textile industry. Factories powered by steam engines and intricate
machinery were replacing traditional cottage industries, leading to unemployment and
a decline in working conditions. In the place of a
cottage industry where cloth workers could work as many or
as few hours and days suited them, the factory had

(01:47:47):
a reseren where workers would work long hours at dangerous machinery,
be fed meager meals, and submit to the punitive authority
of the foremant Factory owners were winning. As I alluded
to earlier, the rights were not blindly opposed to this
idea of progress, as they've been misinterpreted, but they were
seeking to protect their livelihoods and the quality of their craftsmanship.

(01:48:10):
Many of the original rights were actually quite savvy when
it came to technology. In fact, some were highly skilled
machine operators that ended up smashing the very machines that
they were accustomed to use in They had no issue
with welcoming innovations that made their lives and their jobs easier,

(01:48:32):
but they had an issue with the way that the
new machinery is being used by the factory owners to
reduce them to mare cogs in the industrial machine. And
they didn't like that factory owners were using the machinery
to kick out the trained and skilled cloth workers in
fear of child laborers and other lower skilled workers would
be easier to exploit. The cloth for these machines produced

(01:48:53):
was of lower quality, but because it was so cheap
to churn out and there was so much of it,
the factory owners were still ted inner profit and so
that you know, that sucks for them, which is why
the rights to resist these changes embraced a distinctive form
of protest. At the time, labor organizing was labor organizing
was illegal, so they chose a suppose even more drastic

(01:49:18):
method of targets in the newly introduced machines for destruction. Yeah,
they were.

Speaker 4 (01:49:24):
Is it E. P. Thompson who called it collective bargaining
by riot?

Speaker 3 (01:49:28):
Yes, yes, I believe so.

Speaker 4 (01:49:30):
Yeah, I think that's an excellent way to understand it.
I'm sure we'll get there, but it's yeah, it's a
means of labor organizing when labor organizing is illegal.

Speaker 3 (01:49:40):
Indeed, indeed, and then if no other options are available
to you, you know, you're pressed against the wall. They
have no other choice.

Speaker 12 (01:49:47):
Yeah, So these uh, these loot rights would gather together
in the dead of the night, usually in secluded areas
like forests or hillsides to plan their actions.

Speaker 3 (01:49:59):
To maintain secrecy, the Rights adopted a strict code of silence,
making it very difficult for authorities to infiltrate their ranks.
That secrecy was crucial to their survival and their ability
to outwit the authorities, and so under this code they'd
go on and break into the factories and smash the machinery,

(01:50:20):
and occasionally leave an etching of the infamous ned Luod
as a mark of their presence. Ned Luod, by the way,
was a symbol, not their actual leader. He was a
legendary weaver who was said to have been whipped for idleness,
so he smashed two knit in frames in a fit
of passion. More likely, Nedlood didn't exist. He was more

(01:50:44):
of like a folkloric character, but the Rights named themselves
after him and would call them King Lood and General Luod.
Funny enough, the authorities actually thought he was the ringleader
of the whole operation, so they tried to hunt him down. Meanwhile,
of course, the Ludites jokingly referring to the Lud's office
and Shewood Forest, and some of the Luodites would actually

(01:51:06):
cross dress as luds wives during their protests.

Speaker 4 (01:51:13):
Yeah, I do, like every time you find an instance
of like cross dressing in history. So it was just
amusing to note that. I guess some people have decided
that like either either like cross dressing or trans people
were invented in like twenty sixteen, not that those two
things are the same, but like, we can find literally
thousands of instances of of course trans people and also crossdressing,

(01:51:36):
like as a form of like deliberate sometimes it's transgression.
Sometimes the thing that just people did. But yeah, you
can see it in depictions of the Luddites, Like people
even took the time to paint it into their paintings
exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:51:53):
Yeah, but yees, so I mean the leader wasn't ned loud,
the leader, well, it really was a lead less movement.
The real instigators were just regular on the ground weavers
and craftsmen, folks like, for example, George Mellow, a weaver
from Huddersfield who played a pivotal role in organizing the

(01:52:14):
right actions in the West Riding of Yorkshire, best known
for the time that he fatally shot a mill owner
in the balls. Yeah, chad move indeed, indeed, But these
actions were not just you know, random acts of vandalism

(01:52:36):
and violence. They were a desperate plea for change. In fact,
they mainly confined their attacks to manufacturers who specifically use
machines in what they called a fraudulent and sitful manner
to get around standard labor practices. The lights wanted machines
that made high quality goods, and they wanted these machines
to be run by workers who had gone through an
apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were really their

(01:53:01):
main concerns. And besides the raids and the smashing, they
also had a couple other tricks up their sleeves. They
organized public demonstrations, They sent out letters to local industrialists
and government officials to lay out their reasons for wrecking
the machinery. They were just smashing flow reason with no messaging.

(01:53:23):
And in different parts of England, you know, you had
different approaches, different stances and different material conditions. So, for example,
in the Midlands of England, the rights had the Company
of Framework Knitters, which was this recognized public body that
could talk to the capitalists through named representatives, and so
they used that legitimacy as a recognized institution to back

(01:53:45):
up their demands. But up in the northwest of England,
textile workers didn't have these established trade institutions, so they
used their letters to push for official recognition as a
united group of trades people. You know, it's like an
early union. The demands and just of course about smash machines.
They also wanted high min on wages and again an

(01:54:05):
end to child labor. They were playing the long game,
and in Yorkshire, you know the tone shifts of it.
They were going from letter writ into making more direct
and violent threats against local authorities who they saw support
in these nasty machines that messed with the job market
the Yorkshire that writes meant business. In fact, they carried

(01:54:30):
around these sledgehammers that they call the Great Enoch, named
after local blacksmith who had manufactured both the hammers and
also many of the machines they intended to destroy. As
they declared Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them, which
I think is just the division that gives me is like,

(01:54:50):
you know, God of War style, you know, swinging around
this sledgehammer smash of the machines.

Speaker 4 (01:54:55):
Yeah, yeah, Like I mean they broke some big things, right,
Like they weren't. Uh, this wasn't like, I know, like
some sort of trivial sabotage like frame breaking is. It's
still a capital crime in the UK, but it's also
a serious feet of strength.

Speaker 3 (01:55:10):
Yes, and I'm going to get into that.

Speaker 4 (01:55:12):
Excellent good. Yeah, I love coming from a country with
normal laws.

Speaker 3 (01:55:18):
There's so many. Don't even get me started on strange
laws around the world. I mean, yeah, you're ensuring that
there are some really strange, strange laws. But yeah, yeah,
I'm sure that could be a whole topic for a
whole episode.

Speaker 4 (01:55:32):
It could be you could suggest that they're not connected
to morality. Perhaps maybe maybe the law and right and
wrong is not the same thing.

Speaker 3 (01:55:40):
M you might be onto something there, Yeah, ponder something
to think about for sure.

Speaker 4 (01:55:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:55:48):
So a lot of these differences and approaches like I mentioned,
really depending on their material conditions. It also depended on
the background of the workers. Some of them were frameworkers,
some of them were weavers, some of them were spinners,
and so they conduferent tactics and styles depending on what
they were experienced with and where you found them. Of course,
they were sending out death threats to some industrialists as well,

(01:56:10):
and in fact Some of these industrialists were so worried
about let light attacks that they had secret chambers built
into their buildings as escape plans in case things went
south during an attack. Yeah, you could imagine them cowering
in their holes. Yeah, just like as were outside.

Speaker 4 (01:56:28):
Imagine being like, yeah, I'm making excellent choices in life.
I employ hundreds of people, and I've built a secret
hole to hiding when They'll never be trying to kill
me because I've made their lives so shit.

Speaker 3 (01:56:39):
Yes, like I am going to create conditions that are
so terrible. These people are going to get so angry
at me, and then I'm just going to make a
place to hide, you know. Yeah, so of actually rectifying
the reasons they're angry.

Speaker 4 (01:56:55):
Yeah, exactly. Like you could simply take the money you
spent on your secret escape hatch and distributed to people
who are literally struggling to put food in their children's mouths.
But I guess that's not the logic of capitalism, is it.

Speaker 3 (01:57:07):
Yeah, that'll be too that'll be too humane.

Speaker 4 (01:57:10):
Yes, yeah, yeah, you can't let them get you know,
realize that you're afraid of them.

Speaker 3 (01:57:15):
Indeed, for all these tactics, the rights were truly fights
not only for their own jobs, but also for us, say,
in the future of their industry and their communities. Like
regular people of today, they were just trying to provide
for their families and defend themselves against the ever expanding
incursions of the capitalists. I don't know, James, how do

(01:57:39):
you think the government and factor and has responded to
these ordinary people and their desperate and fair please for change. Yeah,
surely it was a human response right.

Speaker 4 (01:57:55):
From Yeah, that's what I would expect as a British person.
Throughout history of our government has really shown of humanity
and compassion for people, so i'd expect they did something
similar here. That's what I learned it.

Speaker 3 (01:58:06):
They're so compassionate that they created an empire that the
sun would never set on m hm. And the reason
is so considerate, you know, for people who are afraid
of the dark.

Speaker 4 (01:58:20):
Yeah, yeah, that's the real reason.

Speaker 10 (01:58:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:58:23):
And of course they were doing it to uplift, civilize
and christianize the other peoples of the world, and for
their other reasons.

Speaker 3 (01:58:31):
Such philanthropists, such philanthropists.

Speaker 4 (01:58:35):
Kind people who bought tea and SCons to to the
rest of the world. The British Empire and the British government.

Speaker 10 (01:58:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:58:42):
Never am I going to learn something bad about them?

Speaker 3 (01:58:45):
Yeah, I hate to let you down, but the government
and the factory and I was responded with, you know,
deploying troops to quell the Lights uprisings and firing against
the protesters. In one of the bloodiest incidents, in April
eighteen twelve, some two thousand protesters marbed a mill there Manchester,

(01:59:07):
and the owner ordered his men because in addition to soldiers,
you also have these, you know, private militias that capitalists
would hire. So the owner ordered his men to fire
into the crowd, killing at least three and wound in
eighteen and then soldiers killed at least five more the
next day.

Speaker 4 (01:59:25):
Okay, Yeah, that's that's not quite what we'd hope for,
is it.

Speaker 9 (01:59:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:59:29):
Yeah yeah. Many of the Lights were arrested, many were tortured,
some even faced execution or even worse, exile to Australia.

Speaker 4 (01:59:42):
Yeah. They're ultimate the ultimate crime, the ultimn penalty. Rather, Yeah,
it's sent to the land of kangaroos and where they
put mashed potatoes inside their pies. What Yeah, have you
not seen this? This is it's terrible.

Speaker 3 (01:59:57):
But unfortunately are you talking about like shepherd's pie or.

Speaker 4 (02:00:00):
No, they'll they'll take a meat pie like a normal
meat pie, and then they'll cut a bit and then
put mashed potatoes like into in the top of it.

Speaker 3 (02:00:10):
Just to what is called.

Speaker 4 (02:00:13):
I'd have to look now, like I've seen it on
YouTube meat pie mashed potato Australia. You can get it
like it in like you know, like like it's like
instead of having fish and chips. You can get it
at a van. Like someone will bring it to you.

Speaker 3 (02:00:28):
I think I'm seeing it.

Speaker 4 (02:00:29):
You found it and then they put like gravy as well.

Speaker 3 (02:00:32):
Oh man.

Speaker 4 (02:00:33):
Yeah, it's like I've come from a country that does
terrible things to food. But yeah, it's this one is
really something else. You can see why people where it
was the word.

Speaker 3 (02:00:47):
I have to say though, I do admire that it
seems to be a very balanced you know, you get
in the cobs, the fats and the proteins in it.

Speaker 4 (02:00:54):
You know, it's like, yeah, and it's all in one.

Speaker 3 (02:00:57):
That's that's the gym bro and meats talking of course,
but it seems like a very efficient meal.

Speaker 4 (02:01:03):
Yeah. It's like it's not that the Cornish pasty is
the truly the most efficient working man's power bar because
you can you can hold onto the crust and eat
the pasty and even if you have like dirty hands
from working in a factory, you still get your lunch.

Speaker 3 (02:01:21):
Hmm. Yeah, but we're getting a little bit side.

Speaker 4 (02:01:25):
Yeah, yeah, we have. We've traveled a long way.

Speaker 3 (02:01:28):
From the exiles Australia. I shut out the thought, but
some of them, despite that, kept their fighting spirit to
the bitter end, like for example, John Booth and no
offense to you, James. But you know, a lot of
the names I read, like British history are the most

(02:01:51):
generic sound in names. You just casually find someone in
British named like John Doe.

Speaker 4 (02:02:00):
Yeah, we do. We're choosing from a limited palette. Like
until very recently, we were really pretty pretty like pretty
stodgy on the names, you know, Like.

Speaker 3 (02:02:12):
I mean, I mean, it's it's iconic, but at the
same time it's also hilarious that you like everybody from
like regular people to like some of the movers and cheapers,
the leaders in the military and you know, politicians and stuff,
just all of them.

Speaker 4 (02:02:31):
Yeah yeah, it's like they had yeah yeah, yeah, just
some guy. Occasionally you'll get like a Cornelius or a
Mama duke or just some absolute nons with like a
really posh name. But yeah, otherwise, yeah, it's.

Speaker 3 (02:02:47):
Well apparently like an Enoch, you know.

Speaker 4 (02:02:50):
Yeah, yeah, you got to respect Enoch. Like once you
go outside of England you get some good names. But like, yeah,
we were moving with a pretty pretty pretty playing with
playing with a small deck. I guess when it came
to names for a while there.

Speaker 3 (02:03:03):
For I mean, I can't even talk. My name is Andrews,
so I think.

Speaker 4 (02:03:07):
My name is the most popular name for boys born
in the year I was born. So I can't really
can't really say much.

Speaker 3 (02:03:15):
Oh God, we're going off track again, right yeah. John
Booth Right?

Speaker 10 (02:03:19):
So?

Speaker 3 (02:03:19):
John Booth was this nineteen year old apprentice who joined
one of the light attacks. He was injured, detained, and
died after being tortured to give up the identity of
his fellow thelites. A local priest was in the room
when he was passing, and his dying words became legendary.
So John was like, can you keep a secret? And

(02:03:44):
the priest was like, yes, my child, and then Booth
was like, so can I and then he died.

Speaker 4 (02:03:53):
There you go, what a hero.

Speaker 3 (02:03:55):
Yeah, iconic, iconic.

Speaker 4 (02:03:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:03:58):
So yeah, government officials by eighteen th eighteen, we're trying
to quash the light movement by any means necessary, so
they organize this massive trial in York after the attack
on Cartwright's mill. A Rawford's near Clakheaton.

Speaker 4 (02:04:13):
I've got a right, yeah, clak Heaton. I think that
seems about right. Where are we in the Yeah, yeah,
we're in I'm signing it on the map, okay, in
Ellits Yeah, yeah, Bradford. I've not actually spent much time
in that part of the world, but if I had
to guess, raw folds something like that. We do, like
one of our ano Another great tradition in Britain is

(02:04:35):
having names which don't bear any relation to the way
they're spelled. We just write them like that. Actually can
tell if you're local or not.

Speaker 3 (02:04:42):
Yeah, yeah, I mean we primarily use British spelling conventions.
Internet in English, so I know all about your center
with the R and then the E.

Speaker 4 (02:04:57):
Yeah, defense and yeah. I'm working on a book at
the moment and my American Microsoft word is fighting me
every step of the way on my spelling.

Speaker 3 (02:05:07):
Yeah, I mean, can't they see that the U is
absolutely essential in the word color.

Speaker 4 (02:05:13):
Oh yeah, and without it we wouldn't know what it meant.
And that's what language does.

Speaker 3 (02:05:19):
So yeah. So, after this attack on Cartwright's Miller Ruffles
mayor Clakheaton, the government accused over sixty men, including Mellow
and his associates, of various crimes related to the Lights activities.
It's important to note that not all of these charged
men were actually the Lightes. Some had no connection to

(02:05:40):
the movement, and while these trials were technically legitimateury trials,
many were abandoned due to a lack of evidence laid
in the acquittal of thirty of those sixty men, and
it's evident that these trials were primarily intended as show
trials to discourage other the Lights from continuing the activities.
And then here's where we get to the important bit.

(02:06:03):
Parliament went on to make a machine breaking I eat,
industrial sabotage a capital crime with the Frame Breaking Act
of eighteen twelve.

Speaker 4 (02:06:13):
Yeah, what a normal thing. And they've never repealed it,
is that right?

Speaker 11 (02:06:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (02:06:17):
I believe I don't think so. Ye're still in the books.

Speaker 4 (02:06:21):
Yeah, listen if you're listening. Since it was yeah, I
was gonna say if someone's listening in the UK, just
give it a try and see what happened. Stakes stakes
are quite high, but yeah, you know, you never know,
they might be might be able to get the Machine
Breaking Act struck down.

Speaker 3 (02:06:37):
A frame brankingly. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know,
since it was established in eighteen twelve, if by now
a lot of the British colonies you know, might still
have it in their books as well. Yeah, yeah, have
inherited that common though and stuff. Yeah, and I'm not
like a legal score. I don't know all the deeds

(02:06:57):
on that.

Speaker 4 (02:06:58):
No, I can see Liz trust incorporating it to her
platform to return to our leadership position. It's like a
very insane kind of Tory position, Like there's there's still
this bizarre British like any time we have a protest
movement in the streets in the UK, you can like
log onto like meta on Facebook or whatever and see

(02:07:18):
like a certain type of British person being like sending
the army. Like it's like a like there are people
who have not reconstructed their opinions on labor organizing since
the LA that period.

Speaker 3 (02:07:31):
Yeah, indeed, indeed they are the Conservative Party picture them
like smoking cigars with top hats, except I know they
were not capitalists. A lot of them are just like
regular workers, just like what are you even doing?

Speaker 4 (02:07:47):
Yeah yeah, yeah, like you've like, don't you understand that
your economic interests line up with these people and not
with like the Boris Johnson's of this world, and your
social social interest too of course.

Speaker 3 (02:07:59):
But I mean speaking of of you know, interests aligning,
there was actually a politician who did stand against that legislation,
and that is you know, the well known English poet
Lord Byron. Yeah, he was actually one of the few
prominent defenders that it's especially after witnessing how the defendants

(02:08:19):
were treated during the York trial.

Speaker 4 (02:08:22):
I mean, go ahead, bar Byron has some surprisingly like
good and then he was part of this romantic movement, right,
like the idea that the industrial revolution spoiled the innocence
of the rural working people, which it's it's paternalist at
its core, but like when at least he's not paying
for their blood.

Speaker 3 (02:08:42):
Yeah yeah, yeah, Actually that attitude reminds me of Van
go She was another all of his art was very
obsessed with the peasants because he just saw it like
a better way of life. Yeah, real romanticization of the person.

Speaker 4 (02:09:01):
Yeah, it was. I think it was a thing that's
sort of spread around Europe in their late nineteenth early
twentieth century maybe like in the eighteenth centuries, no, they yeah,
nineteen to twentieth century, like this idea that yeah, like
the innocence of the rural peasants have been broken, and
like it's just so reflected in so much art from
that period.

Speaker 3 (02:09:19):
That is, that's literally just like the evolution of nostalgia. Yeah,
fully think about it.

Speaker 9 (02:09:27):
You know.

Speaker 3 (02:09:27):
It's like it's kind of like our people today are like, oh,
the nineties was so much better. Oh, the two thousands
were so much better. Oh the eighties or the seventies.
It's just that but with peasants. Yeah yeah, like disco whatever. Yeah, yeah,
you're right, Like, yeah, it is. It's like doing like
doing a ironic wearing a fanny pack, but with a peasant.

(02:09:50):
Not even just in fashion. It's also like the angel
like material reasons people feel nostalgic. Nostalgic as well. Yeah,
like when think about you know, safety, when you think
about the ways that our cities have changed, think about
you know, all of the material realities that have changed
in these decades, and it makes sense. But just like

(02:10:10):
I wished for the simpler life of the present, our
people now wish, you know, go back to these simpler
times of.

Speaker 4 (02:10:19):
You have the minus strike when.

Speaker 3 (02:10:21):
The media posts gym through and colonial independent inspience.

Speaker 4 (02:10:27):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's uh I think also we
forget the hardships. But yeah, like it's a way, and
change accelerates so much quicker now because we've raally fucked
the whole planet, and climate change accelerating and obviously to
technological change accelerating, so our nostalgia cycles are much shorter.
But yeah, this is just like when I had an
estate and I could direct the peasants to trim my

(02:10:50):
trees in a certain shape, life was better for them
kind of, but like in a meaningful sense, right, Like
the lives of working class people were not improved. Right
we see, like the like GDP, which is a useless
metric that, like the amount of of like value of
goods the country produces an industrial revolution goes up and

(02:11:10):
up and up, but the quality of life and even
life expectancy does not, right, Like people are dying earlier
and certainly like and chiefly life expectancy is dropping because
children are dying, right, either from the industrial conditions or
conditions in cities, and so like, in a meaningful sense,
those people's life was not improved. The life of the

(02:11:31):
bourgeoisis was improved.

Speaker 3 (02:11:33):
And like.

Speaker 4 (02:11:35):
We see that later in Britain with things like the
Britain's forced to incorporate the bourgeoisi into into its politics, right,
so that doesn't have a bigger revolution, that's what it
does in the Great Reform Act. But like the working
class people, it continues to suppress. Like after this, you know,
we look, we see it with the chartists and like

(02:11:56):
the violent suppression of chartism. But yeah, this nostalgia isn't
it helps them, but I guess it's not really invested
in their agency. It's more of a paternalist like it's
I guess not dissimilar to the way Britain treated its
colonies in many ways.

Speaker 3 (02:12:13):
Yeah, And I think another aspect of it as well is,
you know, when we look at this sort of nostalgia,
whether it's talking about this romantic nostalgia for the simple
life of the peasant, always talking about the nostalgia of
for example, an example from Trinidad, the oil boom period
in the seventies and eighties, right, Yeah, we gain independence

(02:12:37):
nineteen sixty two, and in the seventies and eighties we
got this oil boom, and you know, a lot people
who live in lavish But whether you talk either of
those cases, when you look at the reality of the
situation on the ground, it's like, oh, you actually go
back to that time, it wasn't also on Shannon Russ,
you know, like it actually was not good to be

(02:12:57):
a peasant. Actually, I mean there are certain things that
you know a lot better than now in terms of
perhaps the vibrants of culture or the ability to lean
on a community for support and that sort of thing.
But or take for example, this oil boom situation talking
about with Trinidad. Yeah, like there was this massive influx

(02:13:21):
of wealth and stuff, but there's also you know, a
whole bunch of corruption. And also we had the whole
nineteen seventy Black Power revolution that was born out of
the frustration of the people at the time. There's an
all sunshine and rainbows, you.

Speaker 4 (02:13:36):
Know, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's just always this sense like
you see it in like nostalgia as well, right, Like
the nostalgia for East Germany that German people will talk
about like you also had the starz e Like, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (02:13:50):
Yeah, I mean I get it when I look at
some of the maps of like like they're talking about
with Germany, some of the data related maps sociological data
of things like religiosity or things. Yeah, current with some
other examples, but there's some like stark differences between the
two sides of the country. Yes, yeah, yeah, very much so,

(02:14:12):
so I completely understand people would feel like, oh, we
feel so separate and distinct from you know, West Germany
and all that stuff.

Speaker 4 (02:14:21):
But yeah, and when you've become like they went from
being like a I guess, like a nation within the
USSR to like the often the less economically advantage parts
of a nation which is near liberal and capitalist, and
like neoliberal capitalism is not kind to the less economically
ad advantage people. It wasn't a great situation before either,

(02:14:43):
to be clear, but like I can see how suddenly
being incorporated into like not everyone's going through this, but
you are are, and the state's not going to do
fuck all to help you. It's like I can see
how that might promote some nostalgia.

Speaker 3 (02:14:56):
Definitely, definitely, And I mean speaking of states doing nothing.
At this time, Byron is making his speech before the lords,
and in that speech last with sarcasm, of course, he
was highlighting the benefits of automation, which he believe led

(02:15:19):
to the production of inferior goods and unemployment. He concluded
that the proposed law, the Frame Breaking Act of eighteen twelve,
was only missing two crucial elements to be effective twelve
butchers for a jury and a Jeffries for a judge,
which was a reference to George Jeffries, an infamous hanging

(02:15:42):
judge known for his very harsh judgments.

Speaker 4 (02:15:45):
Yeah, it's also mad that, like, but also not uncommon
in this period that you are seeing like the leftmost
political opinion being advanced within Parliament being advanced in the
hereditary chamber, like the House of Law, Like.

Speaker 3 (02:16:02):
Yeah, exactly, as soon the the what's the word, the aristocratic, Yeah,
the aristocratic realm is still you know, having to deal
with this.

Speaker 4 (02:16:17):
Yeah, it's very much tied to like a paternalism and
a sort of feudal attitude. But it's just it's just
fascinating to see, like, and it does happen especially and
I think also there's this a deep, deep disdain for
new money. That is a powerfully British vibe that that
comes especially from the House of Lords, right, like like this,

(02:16:39):
like they don't identify with the bourgeoisie at all and
fucking hate them because they're they're they're turning up at
the country club or whatever.

Speaker 3 (02:16:49):
Yeah, and it's so it's so funny about a lot
of old money. And I'm gonna say this, and I'm gonna,
you know, give her contrack. What's so funny about the
old money folks is that a lot of a lot
of cases they don't even have of like as much
money as the new money people. Yes, yeah, about money
for them at this point, it's really just about linear
and culture and whatever.

Speaker 10 (02:17:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:17:10):
Like Britain's class thing is like it's almost like a
caste system, Like your cast is your class is inherited
regardless of your actual financial means. Like they're like lord
living in a castle that he can't afford to heat is.
It's like a it's like a it's a trope for
a reason in Britain, I guess.

Speaker 3 (02:17:28):
Indeed indeed.

Speaker 10 (02:17:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:17:32):
But the passing of that Act, and in the years
had followed, the Light Movement came to an end, but
the actions left a lasting mark on the labor movement.
There's tactics of collective action even though Clandestine laid the
groundwork for future labor unions, demonstrating the power of organized resistance,

(02:17:54):
defenders of their way of life. Reminders the technology, while
transforming to it, can also disrupt lives and communities. The
lights experiences, the lights experiences echo even today, you know,
in an era with the fear of technological unemployment, with
discussions and the impact of automation and AI.

Speaker 4 (02:18:18):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:18:21):
Before he had said his infamous last words, John Booth
also said that the new machinery might be man's chief
lesson instead of his curse, if society were differently constituted.
In other ways, technology can either help common food or
harm them, depending on not just what the technology is,

(02:18:44):
but also what society the technology develops with it.

Speaker 4 (02:18:49):
Yeah, that's very true.

Speaker 3 (02:18:52):
So I'll leave you all with that for now, and
next time will be shifting our focus to the present
day and examining how Bloodism's principles have been applied by
movements of the twentieth and twenty first century.

Speaker 2 (02:19:09):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (02:19:10):
Nice, that's all for me. You can find me on YouTube.
Dot com slash Andrewism and support on Patreon dot com
slash Saint Drew this husband, it could happen here. Welcome

(02:19:38):
back to it could happen here. I'm Andrew Sage and
you can find my stuff on my YouTube channel, Andrewism.
I'm joined once again.

Speaker 4 (02:19:46):
By James getting no less aw quid as we go
behind Andrew, I'm excited to learn about what we're going
to learn about today.

Speaker 3 (02:19:56):
Yes, we're picking up where we left off by tackling
the bloodites of today. In our previous episode, we unravel
the story of the Floodites who stood against the encroaching
forces of the industrial revolution and more specifically, the abuses
of workers by profit seeking capitalists. They were challenging the
world view of lazier fair capitalism with this increase in

(02:20:16):
amalgamation of power, resources, and wealth, rationalized by its emphasis
on progress. Today, it seems this history as we have
of repeating itself as we face a similar struggle against
technological changes that come about to the detriment of workers.
As some tech has been used by tech companies in
various industries to drive down wages and worsen conditions for

(02:20:37):
common workers. Say, for example, technological unemployment. Theladites who once
resisted the encroachment her machines would find their concerns reflected
in our modern world. As a technological advancements often come
with the cost of those whose jobs can be automated away.
For instance, in the manufacturing industry, robots and automated assembly

(02:20:59):
lines of streamline in production lead into increased efficiency and
lower costs for companies, but these efficiencies often meant the
displacement of human workers, and such as in manufacturing, the
ripple effects extend to various sectors like customer service, transportation,
and data analysis, and so there's this fear of job

(02:21:20):
displacement looms large. However, technological unemployment, which is the belief
that as technology advances, human jobs are at risk potentially
into widespread unemployment, has been described by some economists as
a fallacy. Back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution,

(02:21:41):
when the advance of mechanization began transforming various industries, and
with workers fear and automation would render them job less
and devalue their labor, the people took a stand, but
as time passed, new industries and job opportunities emerged to
replace some of the old ones. Ultimately absorbing that workforce.

(02:22:02):
Fast forward to the twentieth century and the rise of
computers and automation technology reignited concerns about technological unemployment, but again,
new jobs were created in new industries. Today, the debate
continues as artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation advance at an
unprecedented pace, and it remains to be seen what the
long term consequences of those technologies may be. My position

(02:22:26):
has really always been that we should be working less anyway,
but instead people are obsessed with creating new jobs, even
when they're unnecessary. See you know, of course, David Graber's
bullshit jobs. But you know, even if the idea of
mass unemployment due to tech is not true, if we
end up replacing the jobs that are eraised with new jobs,

(02:22:46):
whatever the case may be, tech is nevertheless quite capable
of destroying livelihoods, creating unintended consequences, and further concentrating power
in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Tech advance
when it makes a job more fulfilling and enjoyable. They
are also those who make it more tea us and grinding,

(02:23:07):
I mean, yes, tech and free us from some tasks.
You know, accountants have digital spreadsheets to make their lives
much easier. For example, writing is way easier now that
the personal computers is more common. But while technological progress
can produce prosperity, there's really no guarantee that the prosperity
will reach the workers. In most cases on the capitalism,

(02:23:30):
it very clearly doesn't. In fact, many of the benefits
of the industrial revolution were really not felt by the
workers until decades later, after many of them had been
you know, crushed or poisoned or killed or you know,
died in a factory fire or whatever they shut down
when protesting, you know, like that, they didn't see the

(02:23:51):
benefits until much later on. You know, it's not like
you know, these things introduced and boom, everybody benefits. I
mean even now, not everybody in the world is benefiting
from you know, the computer age. There are still many people,
like for example, in the Congo, who are endurance slavery

(02:24:14):
and slave like conditions in order to you know, procure
the materials necessary for the computer age totally, and yet
they're not seeing those benefits and arranged we're scene when
they'll see the benefits that many of us enjoy in
various parts of the world, and particularly that there was
enjoy in the global North. In our relentless pursuit of

(02:24:36):
progress and technological advancement as defined by capitalism, we also
end up losing our nature, our community, and in many
cases are craftsmanship. I mean, I remember John Booth, the
one who had said can you keep a secret? Or
so can I? Yes? Other words, you know that the
new machinery, right, Beman's chief blessing in Surface Curse. It's

(02:24:59):
a side he were differently constituted. That's where I have
to bring in the one and only the ls I've
spoken about him before, of course, the Austrian philosopher, the
theologia and the sort of everything Guy ivan Ilich.

Speaker 4 (02:25:14):
Oh yeah, fun times, fun times.

Speaker 3 (02:25:16):
Yeah. He was a thinker ahead of his time. You know,
it's really strange in some of his positions, I think,
but a lot of his concepts resonate today in various movements.
In fact, one of the foundational concepts in the modern
movement of the growth is the concept of conviviality, which

(02:25:37):
was redefined and introduced in the context of our tools
in Elisio's book Tools of Conviviality. Eligious vision as explored
by the book is one in which technology sales humanity,
not supplant it. We had convivial tools empowered individuals and communities,

(02:25:59):
fostering creativity and autonomy while preventing the concentration of power
in the hands of the few. According to Ilig, conviviality
is individual freedom realized in personal interdependence. It's basically the
ability of individuals to interact and to interact creatively and
autonomously with others and the environment to satisfy their individual

(02:26:21):
and collective needs. Convivial tools, or those which are robust
and durable, preserve or enhance ecosystems, level unequal power relationships,
and give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity
to enrich the environment with the fruits of their vision.
And a convivial society is one in which tools, which
according to Lag includes physical hardware, productive institutions, and productive systems,

(02:26:45):
so tools will be factories, hospitals, schools, farms. All of
those things are being included in his definition of tools,
and a convivial society is one of which those tools
operate on the humans scale and save the people instead
of rulers. The idea of configual tools really challenges us

(02:27:06):
to a few technology as a means to enhance our
lives rather than displace our livelihoods. It's a call to
harness innovation for the bettend of society instead of the
perpetuation of radical monopolies, which I spoke about in a
previous it could happen here episode. I think a Lodites
like John Booth would have certainly appreciated that message.

Speaker 4 (02:27:29):
Yeah, and to the rights of.

Speaker 3 (02:27:31):
Today certainly do because yeah, I'm not the first nor
the only person to see lessons to be learned from
the La Lite movement. The concept of a Neolodite movement
has been embraced by a variety of folks who may
or may not understand what the original Ledite movement was about. Like,
you know, you have these primitivists who embrace the Neoloodite

(02:27:53):
cause because I think it means hate and technology, and
you have the anarchists and the trade unionists and the environmentalists.
We're looking more at the label, organized and roots of
the original Latite movement, and of course even see echoes
of Ogloodite action in the vandalism against self driving cars.

Speaker 4 (02:28:12):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:28:14):
The Neolodite movement is composed of activists, workers, scholars, and
social critics who stand against the predominant worldview that unbridled
technology represents progress, point ins key, then critiques, and in
some cases actual action against technologies and tech companies that
desecrate our planet and our society. Philosopher Lewis Mumford, who

(02:28:36):
had written the Myth of the Machine Pentagonic Power, reminds
us that technology and compasses more than just physical objects.
It also includes the techniques of operation and the social
organizations that make up particular technology work. Technology reflects our worldview.
The forms of technology we embrace, whether they be machines, techniques,

(02:28:57):
or social structures, are seeply roots in our perception of life, death,
human potential, and the relationships between humans and nature. Our
choice of technology, in many ways, mirrors our outlook on
the world. That outlook in the modern world is shaped
by a rather mechanistic approach to life, characterized by rational thinking, efficiency, utilitarianism,

(02:29:20):
scientific detachment, and a belief in humanities, ownership and supremacy
over nature. That's how the end of getting texts like
the Military Industrial Complex and they were and sprawl. Honestly,
in a sense, the old lites kind of had it easy.

Speaker 8 (02:29:38):
Not.

Speaker 3 (02:29:38):
I mean, obviously their conditions were horrible. When I say
they had it easy, I mean it's in the sense
that their machines could be destroyed by their sledgehammers.

Speaker 4 (02:29:47):
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:29:48):
Our technology is a lot more ephemoral. You know, it's
in the cloud. It's as nebulous as microplastics in the soil,
the water, and the breast milk. I mean, it's everywhere,
and it's integrated into everything. It's like, where do you
even begin?

Speaker 6 (02:30:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (02:30:03):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (02:30:05):
In the book When Technology Wounds by Psychologists Chellish Clendening
by psychologists Chellis Clendening, she studied technology survivors, people who
had suffered injury or illness in recent years after being
exposed to various toxic technologies in their homes and workplaces,
whether nuclear radiation, pesticides, asbestos, both control devices, or drugs,

(02:30:30):
and covered how they had begun to question not only
the processes that maimed them, but the world that indifferently
forced those processes on them under the guise of progress.
Glendening saw these victims as the basis of a new
Bloodite movement struggling against what has been called the Second
Industrial What has been called the Second Industrial Revolution alongside

(02:30:53):
thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Ivan Ilich. Those survivors have
gone on to create groups such as as Those Victims
of America as part of ME, Victims of Their Friends,
Citizens Against Pesticide Misuse, DALK and Shield Information Network, des Action,
and National National Association of Atomic Veterans, National Committee for
Victims of Human Research, National Toxics Campaign, and the VDT Coalition.

(02:31:18):
All of these, of course are based in the US,
and there are also actives groups like earth First that
could have been classified under the Neololte cause and Earthful
strategy was to stop environmental intrusions by any means available,
legal and otherwise. So they will be slashing engines, slashing tires,
disabling engines, blocking roads. Most famously, they would drilled spikes

(02:31:41):
into trees and wilderness forests to prevent them from being
logged by chainsaws.

Speaker 4 (02:31:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:31:49):
But you know, while all these movements and organizations are
happening in the Western world, it really wasn't just the
Western world where this has happening. A positive undercurrent of
the right spirit has surged where indigenous peoples have led
the charges against the incursions of industrialism. Quncies of mainly
resisting the machines and projects for industrialization, but also pushing
back against its cultural impact. Peasants and farmers staunchly rejecting

(02:32:12):
participation in the various development initiatives imposed upon them by
compliant governments, often under the influence of entities like the
World Bank or the US State Department. For example, during
the early nineteen eighties, some farmers in Mali took a
stand against the construction of dams and dykes for a
rice growing program that they wanted no part of. Other

(02:32:35):
communities elsewhere have rallied to hold dam projects that threatened
to submerge the ancestral lands, and some of them successful,
as seen of the villagers who protested the Narmada Dam
in India and the early nineteen nineties, and others have
faced more daunting challenges, like the people of eastern Java
who protested against the Neper Irrigation Dam and faced deadly

(02:32:56):
consequences at the hands of Indonesian security forces in nineteen
ninety three. Yeah interous tribes have also organized to combat
deforestation and road building projects that encroached upon their territories.
The Chipco tree Huggan movement in India during the nineteen
seventies and eighties famously succeeded in stopping government clear cutting efforts,

(02:33:17):
and similar projects have echoed across the globe, from Malaysia
to Australia, Brazil to Costa Rica, Solomon Islands, Indonesia and beyond.
Traditional fishermen in many regions, such as the Indians of continent, Malaysia, Indonesia,
and multiple ports along the Pacific coast of South America,
including Ecuador and Columbia, have also taken action against industrial

(02:33:38):
fishing fleets encroaching on their waters and jeopardizing their livelihoods.
In some cases, these protests may have involved the destruction
of machinery, but sabotage, you know, is not unheard of,
like in the case of a high tech chemical plant
in Thailand in nineteen eighty six. The driving force behind
these actions really mirrors to ethos you know, as they

(02:33:58):
share this full un desire to preserve the ways of
life and livelihood in the face of industrial capitalisms, relentless
pull towards a wage and market system. And then, of course,
outside these movers and shakers, these onderground activists, there are
also you know, the philosophical litites like the aforementioned illage.

(02:34:18):
The neololite spectrum is more diverse and intriguing than one
might imagine. While it may not have crystallized into a
more formal movement with clear representatives, as is expected of
movements these days, it unites a wide array of individuals
to share common awakening from the allure of unchecked technology

(02:34:38):
and resist various aspects of the industrial monoculture. Perhaps of
the connections between these separate groups strengthen we'd see a
greater recognition of the interconnected challenges in this grand tapestry
of all evolving world. But the thing is to address
the challenges posed by these technologies. It's not enough to
merely regulate orti vidual items like pesticides or nuclear weapons.

(02:35:03):
What's required is a profound shift in our thinking about
humanity and in our relationship to life itself. We need
to craft a new worldview that paves the way for
a different way of interacting with our world, our technologies,
and our felt human beings. We need to reconsider our
place in the ground scheme of things and to imagine
a world where harmony and balance take precedence of predomination

(02:35:28):
and control. In notes toward a Neulrite Manifesto written in
nineteen ninety, also by Chelli's Clendoning. The author outlines three
core principles and four prescriptions that could drive the Neulrite movement.
In terms of principles, firstly, and I suppose most essentially
to addressing the misconception, Neulorites are not anti technology. Actually

(02:35:52):
says technology is intrinsic to human creativity and culture. But
what they oppose are the kinds of technologies that are
at root destructive of human lives and communities. The next
principle two is that all technologies are political. Quote a
social critic Gerrymander rights in four argumented Elimination of Television,

(02:36:14):
a book I read some years ago, by the way
that a premedians revisit. But continuing the quote, technologies are
not neutral tools that can be used for good or
evil dependent on who uses them. They are entities that
have been consciously structured to reflect and serve specific, powerful
interests in specific historical situations. The technology is created by
mass technological society. Are those that serve the perpetuation of

(02:36:37):
mass technological society. They tend to be structured for short
term efficiency ease of production, distribution, marketing and profit potential,
or for warmaking. As a result, they tend to create
rigid social systems and institutions that people do not understand
and cannot change or control. The last principle three is

(02:36:57):
that the poisonal view of technology is dangers limited. Glendoning
argues that the often hood message, but I couldn't live
without my word processor, because of course she's writing this,
you know, years and years ago.

Speaker 4 (02:37:12):
Yeah, yeah, I have my word my automatic typewriter.

Speaker 3 (02:37:16):
Yeah. But this oftenhood message that I couldn't live up
my word processor, and I guess you could substitute that
for smartphone or computer. That message denies the wider consequences
of widespread use of computers, for example, the toxic contamination
of workers electronic plants, or the certifying of corporate power
through exclusive access to new information and databases. As Manda

(02:37:39):
points out, producers and disseminators of technologies tend to introduce
their creations and upbeat utopian terms. You know, pesticides will
increase yields to feed a hungry planet, nuclear energy will
be too deep, too cheap to meter, et cetera. And
of course you know you have to throw in that
that potshot at nuclear energy. It's very very twentieth century

(02:38:04):
coded text. Yeah, however, quote learning to critique technology demands
fully examining its sociological context, economic gratifications, and political meanings.
It involves asking not just what is gained, for what
is lost and by whom. It involves looking at the
instruct introduction of technologies from the perspective not only a
few in use, but of the impact in other living beings,

(02:38:26):
natural systems, and the environment. And then there's the neolodide program,
which loses me a bit at some points, even where
I may agree with some of their principles, and you know,
you might say that's a sign of my propagandized mind
in our technological society. But I'll leave you to be
the judge of that. Here's what Glendening explicitly proposes one

(02:38:51):
as I moved toward dealing with the consequences of modern
technologies and preventing further destruction of life, the New Lotte
movement should favor the dismantling of nuclear technology, chemical technologies,
genetic engineering technologies, television, electuro wagnetic technologies, and computer technologies, which,
according to them, you know, according to her course, disease

(02:39:13):
and death, create dangerous me to gens in case of television,
functions as a centralized mind, controlling force, poisons the environment,
all these different things. And I mean I gets some
of the justifications for some of these technologies, right, yeah,
of course, disease, death, you know, pollution, social issues, right yeah,

(02:39:35):
But I at same time, I don't believe in through
and out entire sciences and technologies. Who will see like that,
you know, it feels like it feels like a very
myopic view being presented on some of these texts.

Speaker 4 (02:39:46):
Yeah, I mean, I guess this was before really the
decentralization of some of the means of dissemination of information
that happened kind of later on with things like some
parts of the Internet. I don't want to say by
any means of the Internet decentralized, but at least the
promise of that which we occasionally see deliver as well. Right,
Like if you saw today that I was just watching

(02:40:09):
a video of the Yeppe Gay in Syria that the
people in Rojaba like talking about the importance of women
in the revolution in Myanmar, and like just occasionally the
internet or technology gives us the thing they were supposed
to give us this ability to connect without barriers. Absolutely,

(02:40:30):
but yeah, like you said that that's the computer or
the cell phone and that was recorded on or whatever
happened because somebody, somebody in the congo and in horrific
conditions and the DC had to dig out some rare
earth chemical and then got paid next to nothing and
their ancestral homeland was ruined by some rabid company that

(02:40:50):
makes billions of dollars and pays people like shit.

Speaker 3 (02:40:53):
Yeah. Yeah, So, I mean, I absolutely agree that the
supply side of a lot of these technologies to change drastically,
and also the you know, just the supply chain as
a whole, you know, from the raw materials to the
finished product and how it gets to us. I mean,
that might mean no more of certain technologies, or it

(02:41:14):
might mean a different approach, but it really remains to
be seen. We really haven't tried other approaches because you know,
we live under this capitalist hegemony. The next step in
the program to the New Write movement should favor a
search for new technological forms and the creation of technologies
by the people directly involved in their use, not by scientists,

(02:41:36):
engineers and entrepreneurs who gain financially from mass production and
distribution of the inventions, and who know little about the
context in which their technologies are used. I don't necessarily
believe in, you know, splitting it down the middle like that,
as if you know, scientists and engineers are not going
to be the people that are directly involved in their use.
And in some cases that's true. But another case is,

(02:41:58):
you know, you know, people who are using the pros
sometimes the people who invented it, yeah, iterated on it
and whatnot.

Speaker 4 (02:42:04):
Like when I think about before there were three D
printing weapons in the revolution in the amber, they were
three D printing presteses because land minds are so common there, right,
and so like for those people where the engineer is
a person whose brother or sister or non binary sibling
or what have you needs a leg and so they
have iterated or designed a leg, and like that person

(02:42:27):
is very much both like benefiting from the end use
and doing the engineering exactly.

Speaker 3 (02:42:33):
I get this is kind of like, you know, a
screed against the Ivory tower types. But yes, I don't
think that reflects on you know, all of the or
even most of the scientists and engineers. A lot of
engineers on the ground a lot of you know, barefoot scientists,
as the expression is.

Speaker 4 (02:42:53):
Yeah, yeah, Nick, when we talk about things like permaculture
or the things we talked about before, like, some of
that is a science too, right. We have a thesis
and we test it and we prove it, and then
we keep iterating on it like it's a hypothesis, I
should say, Like, and that's certainly a science which is
rooted in a place and people and respect for the environment.

Speaker 3 (02:43:13):
Yeah, I mean, the manifesto goes a little bit further
on this particular point. You know, she's advocating for the
creation of technologies that are of a scale and structure
that makes them understandable to the people who use them
and are affected by them. She's advocating for the creation
of technology is built with a high degree of flexibility,
so that you do want to impose a rigid and
irrasible imprint on their users. And she's advocating for the

(02:43:36):
creation technologies are foster independence from technological addiction and promise
political freedom, economic justice, and ecological balance. They are I can't.

Speaker 4 (02:43:47):
Disagree, you know, Yeah, I know, I'm down with that.

Speaker 3 (02:43:51):
I'm absolutely down with advocating for that. Yeah, the third
point in the program, She says, we feel creation of
technologies in which politics, morality, ecology, and technics are merged
for the benefits of life on Earth. For example, community
based energy sources utilizing solar, wind and waters technologies, organic

(02:44:14):
biological technologies and agriculture, engineering, architecture, art, medicine, transportation and defense,
conflict resolution technologies which emphasize cooperation, understanding, and continuity of relationship.
And decentralized social technologies which encourage participation, responsibility, and empowerment.
Now you know, I'm the solar punk guy. I'm the

(02:44:37):
you know, the anarchists on YouTube. Whatever he got me
on these. You know, I agree with all of these obviously,
But what I find interest in is that this list
seems to ignore how, you know, the technology is being
advocated here are linked to the previous technologies that would
just be in decride. You know, like in one section

(02:45:01):
she's talking about, you know, a fan of these chemical technologies,
but chemistry is an inevitable component of the biological technology
such you're advocating for. Are you saying that you don't
like computer technologies, But when you're talking about like solar
wind and water energy, which to be fair can be
low tech too. Yeah, there is usually some involvement of

(02:45:24):
a computer in those energy systems. So I think it's
you know, sight inconsistency there. But I don't know, what
do you think?

Speaker 4 (02:45:37):
Yeah, I think yeah, like we can't sort of yeah, yeah,
some times we can't say that to like you say,
to a degree, all of these systems will require a technology,
and like I suppose we start to get into like
what is the technology right before we get too far,
and then I think that's probably a question worth asking.

(02:45:58):
But yeah, I think it's easy to throw to maybe
out of bar water, I suppose.

Speaker 3 (02:46:03):
Yeah. I mean, like, like Momford said, technology is more
than just physical objects, it's also techniques of operation organizations
that reflects a worldview.

Speaker 4 (02:46:17):
Yeah, yeah, so I suppose, as you said before, right,
Like it's what I think about often, it's like what
we need to change is the way we see the world,
and then the other stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:46:29):
Well we can change in a midbe will fall into place.

Speaker 4 (02:46:32):
Yeah, I think again, I'm gonna get back. So I
was just in Rojabo for the last few weeks. But
one of the things that I heard from everyone there,
right from like and not just from like people in
the women's movement, but also from like random guy in
the market who I'm having tea with, is like that

(02:46:52):
this idea that we can't can't decolonize the country until
we declonize our family, and the notion that like women
were the first colonized group of people, which and so
like if we can't do gender equality, what you know,
what are we doing what we can't where where we
find this revolution to liberate our country when we can't
liberate our spouse, daughter or what have you. So definitely, yeah,

(02:47:16):
it's just it's a very powerful I know it's not
like as fun as taking a sledgehammer to a cotton mill,
but like if we if we replicate that kind of
extractive extractive capitalism is what makes the supply side of
these things so bad, and it's what also leads us

(02:47:36):
to think about using them in a way that can
extract the most value from the worker. So I would
absolutely say that you know, the break the frame in
your mind.

Speaker 3 (02:47:48):
I don't know, that's a good point. And it's funny,
as you mentioned, you know, as going to be as
fun as you know, smashing a cotton a cotton mill
or whatever. It made me think that you know, perhaps
in a revolutionary society. In guess society, you may see
therapeutic rage rooms where people can smash out some of

(02:48:11):
their last frustrations against the capitalist system. Yeah, consequences they
have left for them to fix.

Speaker 4 (02:48:19):
Yeah, yeah, to get that out before you you take
that out on other.

Speaker 3 (02:48:23):
Go and rewild or something. You know, you have to
get that energy outfit.

Speaker 4 (02:48:26):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, remove the toxicity.

Speaker 10 (02:48:28):
I like that.

Speaker 4 (02:48:30):
Place where you can take that anger out.

Speaker 3 (02:48:34):
Right. So finally, the fourth and final element of the program,
she says that we favor the development of a life
enhancing worldview in Western technological societies. We open in still
a perception of life, death, and human potential, and technological
societies they will integrate the human need for creative expression,
spiritual experience in community with the capacity for rational thought

(02:48:57):
and functionality. We perceive the human role not as them
of other species and planetary biology, but as integrated to
the natural world with appreciation for the sacredness of all life.
We foresee a sustainable future of humanity if and when
Western technological societies restructure their mechanistic projections and foster the
creation of machines, techniques, and social organizations to respect both

(02:49:17):
human dignity and the nature's wholeness, and progressing towards such
a transition. We are aware that we have nothing to
lose except a way of living that leads the destruction
of all life. We have a world to gain. Quote
word that was.

Speaker 4 (02:49:36):
That was a nice, nice, a nice, very rhetorical flare
at the end.

Speaker 9 (02:49:41):
Yeah, that's.

Speaker 3 (02:49:45):
I mean, in my opinion, coming to a close here,
the neololites hits and a miss. They hit a lot
more than they miss. There's things I have some slight
quibbles with, and I really, of course I have to
give them credit for doing a lot more to investigate
and confront technology than the vast majority of people. I mean,

(02:50:08):
they're asking the right questions, questions that you don't see
being asked at all. You know, you see you get
these announcements for new technologies, new innovations, new techniques, new whatever.
It's always just like you know, marketing and advertising, and
then it's just implemented. There's no say of people, there's
no raising questions about what are the consequences of this?

(02:50:30):
Be ten years on the line, twenty years on the line,
fifty years on the line, hundred years on the line,
you know. Yeah, yeah, and the lessons of letters are
very clear. Technology should serve humanity, not the other way around.

Speaker 4 (02:50:43):
Yeah. I think that's that's a key take home, Like, Yeah,
it's there to make our lives better. We don't have
to not to allow us lands more exploited.

Speaker 3 (02:50:53):
Yeah, landscape is vast and it's constantly evolving. But the
principles of the lights and the vision of contiviual tools,
I think they can offer us some guide once and
I hope you'll be able to take that away from
this two parts. Yeah, and that's all I have for today.

Speaker 10 (02:51:12):
Great.

Speaker 3 (02:51:12):
Thanks, follow me on YouTube, Andraism support and Petreon, slash
sent Drew, Thanks James for being parts of this and
I thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:51:21):
That was good. I enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 (02:51:23):
This has been It could happen here.

Speaker 12 (02:51:25):
Peace.

Speaker 10 (02:51:29):
Hey.

Speaker 1 (02:51:29):
We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 5 (02:51:34):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia 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
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