It Could Happen Here Weekly 161

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

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

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hello, and welcome to Kadokin here. I'm Andrew Siege. I'm
on andre'sm on YouTube, and I'm not on YouTube right now.
I'm on kak here, and I'm joined by the disembodied
voice of the one in.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
Orny Garrison Davis.

Speaker 5 (00:40):
Yes, well one and only that I know of, unless
there's another one going around, which would be creaky.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
That might be. That might be.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
But see, I want to continue our journey through Latin
americanicisms and their histories. Now, compared to all the other
countries I've discussed so far, such as Peru and Chile
and Argentina and Brazil and Cuba, this one had a
bit less information about anarchism in its past, So this

(01:10):
will be a sort of a smaller sangwiche and anarchist
history perhaps fit in of the country that is sandwiched
between Argentina and Brazil. Speaking of course, about Paraguay, known
for its fraud history of warfare, politically volatile landscape, series
of dictatorships, and indigenously intertwined cultural and social fabric, anarchism

(01:32):
took root in this rather unique setting, and downs to
the work of Anhill Capelletti and a few other scattered sources,
I've been able to piece together the history of anarchism
in Paraguay without further ado nos comencemos. For much of
its early history, Paraguay's identity was distinct within South America,

(01:55):
from its time as a Guarani settlement to its formation
as a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century. Spanish Jesuit
missionaries wielded significant influence, and for over a century Paraguay
was a self sustained colony with a rigidly hierarchical system
based on the Spanish castor system. Paraguay's economy primarily revolved
around agriculture and cattlehooded unlike the mining economies and other

(02:18):
Spanish territories. The Guarani people had a significant cultural impact
throughout Paraguay's history, and their language and traditions rained central
even as Paraguay evolved through the centuries. Even today, most
of the population speaks some variety of Guarani alongside Spanish.
Fast forward to the early nineteenth century, as South American

(02:39):
nations began de clearing independence from Spain, Paraguay took a
unique approach. Rather than aligning with the neighboring revolutionary movements, Paraguay,
under the leadership of Jose Gasparrodriguez dev Definancia, declared independence
in eighteen eleven and adopted an isolationist authoritarian path. Francia
ruled as the country's spreme dictator for nearly three decades,

(03:03):
envisioning a self sufficient, cometic society. He strictly controlled foreign influences,
banned European migration, and restricted trade. By the mid nineteenth century,
Paraguay had built up a significancy infrastructure under Francia's successor,
Carlos Antonio Lopez. However, this era of economic development was

(03:23):
short lived, as Paraguay entered the catastrophic War of the
Triple Alliance between eighteen sixty four and eighteen seventy against Brazil.
Argentina and Uruguay over territorial disputes. This conflict proved disastrous
for Paraguay as they suffered staggering losses. Nearly seventy percent
of its population died, its economy was shattered, and its

(03:47):
territory was significantly reduced. And yes, you heard me right,
nearly seventy percent of its population perished, including most of
its male population, in the wars. Aftermath, paragua I was
plunged into political chaos, economic ruin, and a period of
foreign interventions. Due to the economic devastation of the war,
the country became indebted to British creditors. With that leverage,

(04:11):
Britain pushed for the development of a free market economy
and privatization, which brought Paraguay into closer contact with the
global economy and eventually led to a more pronounced class
divide and establishment of an exploitive agricultural exports system. Land
that had once been communitly managed was swiftly privatized, driving
indigenous communities and small farmers off their lands and into

(04:33):
the workforce of larger estates. On those estates, workers would
find themselves in debt bondage tied to the estates as
small debts at workers over to landowners, with spiral into
insurmountable debts that would become nearly impossible to repay. Laborers
called pionees, were typically paid in voltures or script that
could only be redeemed at the estate's store, where prices

(04:55):
were exorbitantly inflated. Any attempt to leave or challenge the
condition was met with violent repercussions from estate managers, creating
a cycle of economic entrapment that was essentially slavery by
another name. Paraguay became a country of ever more wealthy
and powerful landowners with a struggle in rural working class.

(05:15):
As twentieth century approached, the labour struggles and social divisions
then Paraguay and society were clearing. Cron inequality. Explosive working conditions,
and the dislocation of addious communities created footire ground for
radical ideas among rural campusinos and urban workers. European immigrants
flee in political oppression brought with them some rather radical
ideas that began to resonate with paragund workers who were

(05:38):
desperate for a way out of their circumstances. For people
who had survived centuries of oppression, and authoritarian rule. Anarchism
had a unique appeal. By the eighteen eighties, workers in
Paraguay had become organized in mutual aid societies, and one
such society of typographers would organize themselves into a union,
the first in the country's history. By eighteen eighty six.

(06:00):
That same year, so the rise of construction workers, carpenters, tailors,
postal workers.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
And bakers unions.

Speaker 3 (06:06):
Those Bakers Roles conduct countries first ever strike action in
October of eighteen eighty six. The first distinctly anarchist publication
I could find in Paraguay was organized by a group
called those eCos del Chaco, who published a libertarian manifesto

(06:29):
in eighteen ninety two. They call themselves anarchist communists and
declare their intent to abolish private property, the clergy, the state,
and the armed forces.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Quote.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
We seek the complete emancipation of the proletariat as we
fight abolished the unjust exportation of man by man. We
dedicate all of our moral and physical strength to overturn
all attorneys established genuine liberty, equality and fraternity in the
human family. We needs to transform private property into a
common good. We needed to do so because individual property
is a basic cause of all these afflictors. It is

(07:01):
on that basis that the dregs of humanity, government, clerics, lawyers, militaries,
entrepreneurs maintain themselves in power, live as parasites, and they
continued enjoyment to their funder of finances large armies with
the products.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Of our labor end court.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Even prior to that manifesto, anarchists were making moves in
the Graphic, Railway and bakers unions as early as eighteen
eighty nine, fighting for and win in the eight hour
workday by nineteen oh one. Strike actions in this period
were focused on that goal, alongside wage increases and then
improvements to working conditions. The anarchists also tried to establish
a national Trade union center, but unfortunately did not succeed.

(07:37):
In eighteen ninety two, thanks in part to the growing
Spanish and Argentine immigrant populations, there was a wave of
the Berterian union formation throughout Paraguay. The anarchists was quite
successful among the peasantry, as they helped organize armed resistance
societies to aid in their struggles against the landowners. Anarchists
also managed to establish Raphael Barrett Cultural Center in the

(07:57):
early nineties hosting an impressed collection of books by fellow
Paraguayan and foreign writers, and embolding in the formation and
even more trade unions. Raphael Barrett, by the way, is
one of the most significant figures in Paraguay and anarchist history,
according to every account I've read. Born in Toda Vega, Spain,
in eighteen seventy six, but Thatt's early life was typical

(08:18):
of a well to do intellectual. He studied languages, piano,
and eventually engineering. By his late twenties, he was drawn
to Latin America, partly by adventure and partly to make
a difference. Driven by a growing commitment to justice and solidarity,
he arrived in Budas Airis in nineteen oh three, where
he found work as a journalist, soon making ways with
an article that condemned the stock inequality he observed in

(08:40):
Argentina's capital. This critique cost him his job, yet had
deepened his dedication to speak for those who were voiceless.
But as experiences of CEA and European Americrant workers toiling
in the brutal conditions fueled his indignation against unchecked wealth
and poverty's vicious hold on the working class. In nineteen
oh four, but I made a way to Paraguay. He

(09:01):
essentially welcomed as a correspondent for LTMBO and even held
government positions, including as a director of the Department of
Engineers and the Railroad Agency. But his comitments, exposed in
the country's political and social rot soon put him at
odds with Paraguay's new liberal government. He saw that simply
swapping our conservative leaders for liberals did little to improve
conditions for ordinary Paraguayans, as demonstrated by the continuous labor

(09:25):
struggles that arose and response to the industrialization undertaken by the
liberal government. Workers were fighting to abolished child label, improve
their conditions, increase wages, and so on. He couldn't stand
by in silence, so he resigned from government service, now
fully committed to social justice, even as his grown radicalism
began to alienate the political elite. Brett's personal experiences sharpened

(09:46):
his perspective, transformed him from a sympathetic observer to a
dedicated anarchist. His writings in Criminal became essential reading for
workers and peasants alike, urging them to see beyond two
professional reforms and to child the entire structure of pressure,
Barrett condemned the government's abuses and spoke out against exploitive

(10:06):
systems that kept the majority of Paraguayan's martialized. He was
a fiery advocate for social justice, and one write in particular,
Acasto Roa Bastos, called him the discoverer of Paraguayan's social reality,
because Burrett didn't just observe these injustices, he threw himself
into exposing and condemned them with fuvor. His impact was

(10:28):
so significant that even when he was forced to flee
Paraguay in nineteen oh eight under government pressure, his ideas endured.
His health was deteriorating from tibergulosis, where he continued to write,
receiving support from intellectual comrades in Uruguay and Brazil. His
final years were just a continuation if his relentless dedication,
even as his health continued to decline. In nineteen ten,

(10:51):
he went to Paris to seek treatment, but his health
failed and he passed away in December of that year.
But just before Barret's exile and passing in nineteen oh six,
the anarchists would form the first and for some time
only workers Federation in the country by joining together the illustrators,
carpenters and drivers unions. Rafaelberad actually became something of a

(11:11):
thought leader for this group, and this was the Federacion
Opreia Astricanal Paraguay or four, partially inspired by the Federacion
Obrera Reginal Argentina or FURA, where they borrowed many of
their programmatic ideas. If you recall the episodes I did
on Argentina, you know that the reasoning for the name
was ideological. By adding the adjective regional, it made plain

(11:34):
that the country in question, whether Paraguay or Argentina, was
not being considered a state or political unit, but a
region of the world in which workers struggled for their liberation.
Soon after its founding, on the first of May nineteen
oh six, the Fourth held the country's first international Workers
Data demonstration, despite police attempts to shut it down. For
also launched their official publication, El Espertade in the same year,

(11:58):
and the paper carried articles what the anarchist movements in
Europe and Latin America. Printed works by authors such as
Peter Kopotkin and Selmo Ronzo published reports of the Forbes
activities named and shamed and known strike breakers and encouraged
its members to pay their union dues promptly. Subsequent years
would introduce other libertarian newspapers such as Ladra Billion, La
Tribuna and Acil Futuro. After the nineteen oh eight coup

(12:21):
by Emiliano Gonsalves Naverro, they stabilized the economy and restricted
Assuncion's labor movement. Anarchism still found strength among rural and
tanan industry workers, despite increasing hostility from figures like Presidents
Condre and Jarre. Labor strikes continued, which were met by
fierce repression, arrests, and forced deportations. With the outbreak of

(12:43):
the Paraguay and Civil War from nineteen eleven to nineteen twelve,
anarchists and other labor organizations faced a government crackdown. Groups
like the Four became inactive temporarily, at least by nineteen thirteen.
In the wake of the war, a schism was emergent
as some unions move move toward reformist ideologies, influencing part
by the populist Colorado Party. Meanwhile, Four reaffirmed anarchosynicalist routes,

(13:08):
forming a federal council that included both workers and intellectuals
aimant rekondelte union activities. Amidst a wave of reorganization post
World War One, a new surgeon demand for Paraguay and
exports revitalized labor activism. In nineteen sixteen, the Corps or
Centro Obero Regionale de Paraguay to call the role of

(13:28):
championing anarchosyndicalism and labor rights. This one gained support from
a wide network, launching influential publications like El Combat and Renovasion.
Other groups like Comedie and the Revolutionary Nationalists Alliance, which
sought a federalist union Other People's Latin America also took
part in the resurgions of anarchist ideas. In nineteen twenty two,

(13:49):
the Paraguay and Anarchists were able to finally establish links
with the International Workers Association.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
By the nineteen.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
Thirties, Syriaco Puarte emerged as a prominent voice cat and
for Workers Rise. Despite you Know Everything, he was a
protege of fellow anarchists and printmaker Felix Kantalisio Aracuyu, a
Paraguay and Mestizo of mixed indigenous and black ancestry. At
one point Arakuyu and his comrades had helped organize a

(14:16):
tram workers strike in Asuncion, which compelled the government to
round them up and dump them in the middle of
the jungle in Mato Grosso, hoping that they would die
and had. Arakuyu and his friends made their way through
over one thousand, three hundred kilometers of mountain jungle, surviving
on roots, fruits, and game, to make their way back
to their hometown of Incarnacion and speaking of Incarnacion both

(14:40):
to our day and Arakuyu took part in the little
known attempt at an anarchist uprising in Paraguay, which was
actually centered in Incarnacion. On the twentieth of February nineteen
thirty one, a group of one hundred and fifty workers
and students organized in a couple of popular assemblies, took
control of the city of Incarnacion with the goal of

(15:00):
establishing a libertarian commune, part of a plan to spark
a wider anarchist cynicalist revolution in Paraguay. This was the
culmination of a series of strikes and widespread lya Latin
by anarchists and students in support of revolution. It wasn't
meant to be centered in the Karnacion, as there was
a planned construction worker at Donald striking and student Zion,
and similar action in Villarica and Concepcion, but key organizers

(15:24):
in those struggles in those cities were deported in the
days leading up to the action, so those planned actions
ended up failing. After sixteen hours when their efforts to
have reinforced by workers in the rest of the nation,
the interactionists of Encarnacion took over two steamboats and made
their way along the river to Brazil, but not before

(15:44):
they attacked the Yuromatic companies and burned the records related
to indentured laborers in two ports. Their solidarity never died,
even after they went through everything they went through, they
didn't lose their sight and what really mattered. Sadly, the
seventeen students and workers who remained in Incarnacion were arrested.

(16:04):
Duarte found himself jailed and interned and Marcurita Ireland. After
Liberal Party president josse P Gugiari outlawded tree unions, other
revolutionaries were dropped off from the jungle to die at
a random point along the Parana River. Seven of the
captured seventeen met this fate and the other ten spent
a few months in prison before being deported to Argentina.

(16:35):
Movement then faced distinct challenges during the Chako War from
nineteen thirty two to nineteen thirty five between Paraguay and Bolivia,
which halted much of the anarchist activism. Many anarchists joined
the war effort reluctantly, including Duarte, who performed duties in
the Rear Guard were working as a type settle for
various presses, including anarchist pressors the Paraguay and Victory. Following
the war, the return to domestic concerns saw a resurgence

(16:58):
of anarchists and labor activities. The government's crackdown of lefterc
ideologies in the late nineteen thirties nineteen forties under President
Morignigo's rule led to severe repression of anarchists and cynicalist groups.
Douart has spent some time as a worker representative at
the National Labor Department or DNT, who was under considerable
fire from the communists were taken hold of the Treading

(17:20):
movement after anarchism waned in popularity. He finally resigned from
his post in nineteen forty one after a Worker's Coordinating
committee of seamen, tram workers, bakers, print workers, and other
trades issued a protest note to President Morinigo, threatening to
withdraw from the Workers Delegate for the infringements of their
rights of assembly, to unionize and to strike. Of course,

(17:43):
their protest note was completely ignored. The president's authoritarian tenure
pushed several anarchists and socialist organizers into exile. Duarte himself
ended up in exile in Argentina by nineteen forty two,
but eventually was able to retain and reclaim his appointment
as a worker representative. Then, not long after, he became
a victim of a police crackdown during the nineteen forty

(18:04):
four general strike, after labor movement was hijacked by the
Republican Workers Organization. After nineteen forty seven, Duerte dropped out
of trade union activity entirely and refocused to publishing articles
and trade union publications abroad and urgent research into Paraguay
and trade union history. He faced repeated arrests and took
part in strikes anyway, advocating for workers' rights across various industries.

(18:27):
He continued his activism against fascism and authoritarianism, operating from
Argentina at times, while still supporting strikes and anarchist literature.
In Paraguay, the nineteen fifty four ascension to power of
General Alfredo Storoister marked a significant period of intensified authoritarianism.
Streuisner's regime violently suppressed opposition, including anarchists, for over three decades,

(18:51):
even in his seventy years. During the nineteen seventy years,
Duarte was harassed by Strausner's secret police. Many other artists
were imprisoned, exiled, or dissip by Stuisner, who imposed tight
control of unions and labor organizers. The nineteen fifty four
to nineteen eighty nine dictatorship of Storisner stifled anarchist activities
severely and forced them underground, where they would have to

(19:12):
preserve anarchist literature and ideas through secret print publications and
solidarity movements. The result of this dictatorship was that anarchism
in Paraguay experienced resurgence much later than other Latin American nations,
with the spark rekindled only in the early two thousands.
This rebooth of anarchist sentiment emerged largely within the punk

(19:32):
counterculture and youth led social movements often interconnected with struggles
for condigious rights, economic justice, and environmental causes. The establishment
of spaces like Laterraza and Anarchist Squad provided platforms for
activists and community engagement, while publications such as Autonomia Zene
and Grito Fanzine disseminated anarchist ideals despite Paraguay's history of

(19:55):
anarchist repression. These newer movements, however, small, signified some small
for a renewed interest in the material ideas within Paraguay,
one that can be seen even more violently in other
parts of Latin America. Paraguay and anarchists have shown us
the drive for freedom and equality is a daily equipment
to defy attorney and resist exploitation. That's by facing decades

(20:17):
of silence and the destroyerst dictatorship. Anarchism did not disappear.
The seeds of resistance late dormant, but they are ready
to bloom again as new generations can take up the struggle.
As we conclude, let's remember the words of Raphael Barre,
who fought tirelesslie for the people. He came to call
his own justice, justice above all things, justice, even if

(20:42):
it costs blood or power to old the people.

Speaker 6 (20:45):
This Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me

(21:07):
James today and I'm joined by Danny. Danny's an engineering
photographer who lived in North East Syria from twenty eighteen
until twenty twenty three and a founding member of the Rise,
which is the Rajarva Information Center if you're not familiar,
and she worked for self administration and civil engineering while
she was there. Welcome to show Danny.

Speaker 7 (21:25):
Hi James, it's really good to be on.

Speaker 6 (21:26):
Yeah, Jas, thanks thanks for coming. I know it's like
a stressful time. So what I thought we would do
is there's been a lot of reporting on Syria that
people have probably seen if they're living in the US
or the UK. Nearly all of it has either excluded
or like footnoted what's happening in North and East Syria
and specifically in the areas that are under a self administration.

(21:49):
So I was hoping today we could give people a
little more introduction to what's happening there. There's been a
lot of like jubilation about what's happening in Syria, and
things have been very far from universally positive. Massive displacement
of civilians, ethnic cleansing of areas that have been captured
by the Turkish Baksterian National Army and genuine like peril
for the self administration project, the like of which we

(22:11):
haven't seen for a long time. So perhaps if listeners
aren't familiar, would you like give them the real basics
of the self administration of the AA ANDES and what
it means and what's going on there.

Speaker 8 (22:22):
Yeah, well that's a big question because it's like it's
a big project.

Speaker 7 (22:27):
It's been going on for quite some time. Yeah, yeah,
it really has.

Speaker 8 (22:30):
It's kind of been lost in discussions and news about
the Serian Civil War because it has been such a complex,
multi polar, multi access, multi ethnic conflict, and it's been
going on for what like thirteen fourteen years now, Yeah,
coming up to fourteen years. The Kurds in the northeast
had been preparing for some time before the outbreak of

(22:53):
civil war back in twenty eleven for something like this.
Obviously they didn't they didn't know this was going to happen,
but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades,
and in particular since around two thousand, they've been working
on this concept of democratic con federalism, which is moving

(23:15):
away from a sort of what they call an old
paradigm of Marxist Leninist thought to this system they've now
quite effectively built up there where democracy is bottom up.
It's structured around small communes and self organizing units, cooperatives.
There's a market economy, but it's not a catalyst economy

(23:36):
where there's sort of radical emancipation of oppressed to people's
particular women who are really centered in the revolutionary process
and organizing there. And I think because they maybe you
can't call them conflict.

Speaker 7 (23:49):
Avoided, that they haven't avoided conflict.

Speaker 8 (23:51):
They very famously defeated ISIS amongst other groups in the northeast,
they fought against Blanders, Refront and various other jihadi groups.
They also didn't enter into serious conflict with either their
FSA as they were, or the regime and the Assad regime,

(24:11):
and so they kind of managed to carve out a
sort of democratic and semi enclave. I mean people who
describe it as a state that they quite vehemently say
it's not a state in the northeast of Syria. Whilst
the worst of the fighting was between the Aussid regime
and the FSA and groups that came out of the

(24:31):
FSA in the west and south of the country.

Speaker 6 (24:35):
Yeah, I think it's very good summary. I think like
it gets missed maybe because of how relatively successful it's
been compared to other democratization projects within Syria. It gets
missed that like when people are talking about what will
happen in Syria now bizarrely and I don't quite like
I don't quite understand how we get here, but people

(24:57):
seem to go to like Libya or I understand how
we get here and through process like orientalism and ignorance,
but we have a functioning democracy. An example of like,
it's not just Kurdish people, right, it's lots of communities
living together in northern East Syria, and because of democratic
confederalism they're able to coexist and still feel that they
have enough sovereignty to be safe.

Speaker 4 (25:20):
Is that fair?

Speaker 7 (25:21):
Yeah? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 8 (25:23):
And I think something that it's hard to convey or
fully understand unless you spend a lot of time there
or you're deeply involved with any of these communities.

Speaker 7 (25:33):
Is quite how hard that was to do.

Speaker 8 (25:35):
Yeah, a lot of different ethnic groups, political groups that
hate each other, you know. Yeah, the Kurds they brought
in lots of different policies, like their right to be
taught in your mother tongue. When they took power twenty
twelve onwards, they were very keen not to just sort
of replace everything with Kurdish, make a Kurdish state, you know,

(25:56):
start being the oppressor and sort of be oppressed. They
made sure that they continue using Arabic as the majority
language because it is the majority language. That the north
and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area,
and this is despite the fact that they've been pretty
horrendously oppressed by the Arab population through the Bath Party
and its oppressive systems for decades. So it has been

(26:19):
a pretty hard ongoing process to negotiate and to put
aside pretty serious conflicts between quite.

Speaker 7 (26:26):
A few different groups that exist there.

Speaker 6 (26:28):
Yeah, it won't be any easier of across the whole
country than it was there, but like, they have a
system that works, and it's kind of frustrating to see
these discussions of what happens next that just ignore the
fact that there's a functioning multi ethnic democracy right there.
If we do just look at women's liberation, you know,
I've reported from lots of places around the world, lots

(26:49):
of places in that part of the world, and the
difference is profound in like everyday life. It's not just
a kind of rhetorical commitment, right, Like, at least my
impression as a man is that, like, this is a
revolution by women, not a revolution and it's about women.
It's not a revolution by men that like seeks to
liberate women, says it's going to liberate women, you know,

(27:10):
with the US in Verde Afghanistan saying it's going to
liberate women, and look what we got, And like the
difference in just the way people are able to look,
like every aspect of everyday life is completely different. But
that's in danger right now. The narrative I guess that
people will be familiar with from Syria is that the
state has been defeated, the A Sad regime has been defeated,
and that therefore the revolution has succeeded. But the A

(27:35):
Sad regime is not the only state in play in Syria, right, So,
can you explain the Turkish antipathy to the project in
northern East Syria and how that's manifesting itself currently.

Speaker 8 (27:47):
Yeah, it's it's pretty hard to discuss any of the
stuff without talking about Turkey and without understanding where they're
coming from. Yeah, I think it's it's something that is
said enough or understood enough that the modern state of
Turkey is an nationalist project. And you know, I don't
say that as a slur. That's like a basic founding

(28:08):
principle of the state. It's a state founded on genocide
and the mass four demographic change across the whole country,
and it's continued that way. There have been reforms, for sure,
but that's still a founding principle. And even now sort
of speaking a non Turkish language in the Turkish Parliament

(28:30):
is a pretty serious violation. And the size of Turkey,
the size of its economy, the size of its military,
the regional power stages they have in the Middle East,
means that they have an enormous gravity.

Speaker 7 (28:42):
They have an enormous amount of power over Syria.

Speaker 8 (28:46):
A lot of the goods and services that Syria relies
on coming through Turkey or rely on on the Turkish industry,
and the Turkish military is a huge supporter of their
groups in the Northwest like Acham and the Syrian National Army,
and of course the Kurdish question within Turkey is the

(29:09):
main reason for their antipathy towards the what's been built
up in North Eastyria as much as the self determination
for oppressed people's minorities is something that's an issue. The
fact that it's Kurdish led, and in particular it's emancipat
for Kurdish people threatens this ethno nationalist aspect of their state,

(29:30):
and they kind of they see it something that needs
to be nicked in the Bud right, and they've sort
of done that with Northern Iraq, that the Kurdish region
of Northern Iraq by essentially vassalizing the KDP, the main
party there, and they know they can't do the same
in North Eastyria, and the military option is their best chance,

(29:53):
their best hope of nipping Kurdish emancipation in Kurdish sub
determination in the Bud and preventing it from sort of
snowboarding across the region.

Speaker 6 (30:02):
Yeah, I think we should probably mention that, Like I guess,
if we talk about like the electoral method or the
electoral path people in Turkish Kurdistan, in Northern Kurdistan, if
you want to call it, in addition to the armed
struggle which has been there since nineteen eighty four, they
have also like tried to vote and repeatedly seen their
votes ignored or changed or their elected officials removed. Like

(30:27):
this is within the last year, I'm not talking about
back in the eighties and nineties, and like Turkey has
been aggressively attacking any attempts at like self determination within
the country and then as you say, like militarily attacking
the Kurdish Freedom movement within northern Eassyria. Do you want
to talk about the Syrian National Army or the Turkish

(30:48):
back Free Syrian Army, whatever you want to call them,
an explain Like, I think part of what we're dealing
with is like that Turkey has a very well established
state media project and they seem to do very well
and like creating vire all social media content. So people
might not be fully familiar with who the SNA are
and specifically like Turkey's role in creating them. Do you

(31:08):
want to explain that a bit to people?

Speaker 8 (31:10):
Yeah, I mean this is this is one of the
reasons why I think it's so hard for people to
report on the Syrian Civil War. It's very hard to
convey like a simple coherent narrative of one side versus
the other, you know, like Ukraine versus Russia, the Russian
world and Ukrainian world, because there are there are so
many different groups in the SNA is that it's an
important one and they are their group. Together with this

(31:33):
concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria, yeah, despite
the fact that they're not actually part of higher than
the liberation movement as it calls itself, that that have
taken over the Syria. Yeah, the Syrian National Army, it's
it's kind of like a loose collection of various some

(31:55):
of them called themselves brigades or groups. It's essentially a
millionary proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent
political framework. They're not revolutionary groups. They're not liberatory or
mantif patrit They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the
same way that maybe HTS would. I mean, the Kurds

(32:16):
in North Eastyria describe them as gangs, which kind of
sounds like a propaganda term, but when you actually look
at what they do, they really are like a sort
of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as
a convenient proxy for force by Turkey because oltimately Turkey
has like a massive military Then maybe it is quite
underfunded and not particularly astafter the air force has suffered

(32:39):
pretty seriously from the fallout of the coup in twenty sixteen,
but the army is massive, it's relatively well funded, and
their drone program is huge. The thing that they struggle
with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups,
particularly the PKK, in the mountains between ark and Turkey,
and they need to they need to control that because

(33:01):
they realize that they've been fighting military as as you say,
since the early nineteen eighties, and they can't have a
Vietnam situation right of a mass movement against their military
occupation and against their military efforts. And Syria, they can't
afford financially or politically to get into a quadmire there,

(33:21):
and so by funding this sort of collection of groups
called the SNA, that's their way of being able to
incurb pretty massive losses without having to report on it,
without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population
of Turkey.

Speaker 6 (33:39):
Right, And I think especially when like some of the
things the SNA have done, which we can maybe get
into in man Bej like, it gives them a deniability
that wouldn't exist if that was regular soldiers doing that
like some stuff which is war crimes, is I guess
a nice way of saying it, like a more sanitized
way of saying it. But horrific stuff, really terrible stuff.
This has been, how think, since at least twenty eighteen.

(34:02):
But Turkey doesn't have to be held accountable for that because,
like you said, it's not Turkish, it's not the Turkish army.
Do you want to explain how the situation in North
Syria has changed since what was it like two weeks ago?
A week ago? I guess that they moved south from
Aleppo and start the HTS, largely with some support from SNA,
moved towards Damascus and then the SNA launched its own

(34:25):
assault on the Self Administration. Can you explain a little
bit of what's happened there in terms of displacement and
in terms of the terrain that's the SNA have captured.

Speaker 8 (34:35):
Yeah, it's been very fast moving now, as you say,
like it's only been two weeks since the battle for
Allpos started if you call it a battle. So the FDA,
so this is like the alliance of military groups that
falls under the remit of the Self Administration in the
northe Eatia. So the YPG and the YPJ are like
the most famous and largest components of this force, but

(34:57):
there are a whole bunch of arab As, Syrian and
Armenian units within the SDF. They held this sort of
salient pushing out into northwest Aria towards Afrin, which was
captured by the SNA and Turkey in twenty eighteen. That
was on one side founded by HTS and on the
other by the SNA. When things really kicked off, the

(35:19):
SNA started a pretty concerned campaign to capture this area
and own as Shedpa, and because of its position and
it's relatively difficult terrain and difficult logitical position to resupply,
they pulled back from that towards Aleppo and man Beach,
which is the only major city that the SDS still

(35:39):
held on the west of the Euphrates, and it's the
area closest to Aleppo.

Speaker 7 (35:46):
They got hit pretty hard.

Speaker 8 (35:48):
If you follow a live upday map or any of
these sort of update maps, it looked like that.

Speaker 7 (35:51):
That's pretty quickly. Actually, it ended up being a sort
of large.

Speaker 8 (35:55):
Gray zone of the gorilla attacks potentially still ongoing. It's
been really muking Hord to tell what's going on there,
but essentially there's a large area of uncontrolled but heavily
contested territory between Aleppo and the Euphrates River now and
which the SDF and the SNA have been fighting over.

Speaker 7 (36:15):
Like one of the curious things for me is that
the Turkish Air.

Speaker 8 (36:18):
Force and literally did not get involved for a while,
but after about a week they did, and they started
hitting man Beach very very heavily. And at that point,
when the center of man Beach started being contested and
for over, the US stepped in. We don't know the
details are, but there seems to have been some kind
of negotiation whereby the suggestion is that if the SDF

(36:39):
fighters poured back across the Euphrates, the SDF would assure.

Speaker 7 (36:43):
Their protection from any further assorts.

Speaker 8 (36:45):
We don't know how true that is, and we know
that today further negotiations on this failed. But it's really
hard to tell right now as we speak what's disinformation
and what's truth, because stuff's only coming out officially in
gyms and traps.

Speaker 6 (37:01):
Yeah, and stuff's coming out unofficially often that it's just
not true, Yeah, every five minutes and getting blasted by
maybe people who just don't understand, or who do understand
but have a certain agenda to push on social media,
especially but on Telegram too, and it can be really
confusing and it's really frustrating.

Speaker 9 (37:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (37:22):
For instance, like just before we came on air, I
saw a couple of videos being posted by pro Turkish
accounts purportedly showing mass troop concentrations lined up against this
border or waiting to invade, and I realized that they
were from twenty and nineteen when Sarah Khane and Tellerbayad
were invaded, and they were just reposting material from then,

(37:44):
you know, as disinformation on these movements and weather and
tack's going to happen, what the negotiations between the US
and Turkey.

Speaker 7 (37:53):
Turned out to be.

Speaker 8 (37:54):
And the truth is like right now, we don't know
exactly what's going on.

Speaker 6 (37:58):
Yeah, and like you put, won't and that's probably a
good thing. One other thing is that like the SDF
tends to have much better operational security discipline than the
SNA does, so you won't see as much of like
media with an SDF spin or people directly streaming. I mean,
one thing the SDNA likes to do is a war

(38:20):
crime and then post it on telegram and so like,
it can be easy to only see that and be like,
oh god, it's terrible, and it is terrible. Those things
are horrific. But like, because you're not seeing when the
SDF is making movements or making advances until a bit later,
until you get something from like an official press channel,
it can give the impression that the SNA is just
romping around, which is not the case.

Speaker 8 (38:41):
Yeah, we saw this a few times when Manboot is
reported to being captured by the SNA and they posted
videos for themselves in the middle of the city, and
then an hour later the SDF posted a video from
the center of the city of twenty or thirty dead
SNA little about the streets and then flying their own.

Speaker 7 (39:00):
So yeah, yeah, it's really it's really hard to tell.

Speaker 8 (39:03):
It's also really hard as like, anyone who cares about
the region has been there, is reported on it, anyone
interested in the kind of politics that the Kurds are
built up in the region, and others, I should say,
it's you know, it's been a multi ethic project if
you care about that.

Speaker 7 (39:19):
It's really hard not.

Speaker 8 (39:20):
To be glued to social media to see what's going on,
but it can be quite detrimental to morrow. It can
be quite an active self harm to be like constantly
checking on this because it's so mucky and as you say,
like things can turn around within two hours of info
or distance for getting out there.

Speaker 6 (39:36):
Yeah, and I think it's it's a super important time
to be looking at trusted sources and be considering if
you need to be on telegram that much, something I
have been considering this weekend. So let's talk about like

(40:01):
right now, certainly the focus is on Kabani, right, but
there's also well there's a lot of the self administration
that could potentially be under threat if Turkey decides to
go as hard as it can against the self administration
against the existence of I guess any form of democratic
project in northern Easteria of attempts to kind of bring

(40:21):
the whole thing under one government from Damascus. Can you
explain like what might happen, what people can do, and
like we should talk about what's at stake as well,
especially with the prisoner our whole, which maybe we can
come to after those two things, because I think that's
a lot to ask you one question, but maybe people
aren't familiar with our whole we'll leave that one. But
can you explain at first, like what could potentially happen

(40:43):
if Turkey decides to go as hard as it wants
to you here?

Speaker 8 (40:47):
I mean, I think the best way to answer that
question is to look at what's already happened. So in
twenty eighteen and nineteen, they already captured three significant cities
and that were under control of the self administration to
the first, most famously was Afrin, which was in the
far northwest of the country, like just north Villeppo, sort
of jutting out into Turkey.

Speaker 7 (41:08):
That was a majority Kurdish city.

Speaker 8 (41:10):
I don't know exactly, as it was something like eighty
or ninety percent, which I think is higher than any
other city in northern Syria. And it was also like
it's seen the least fighting of pretty much anywhere in
Syria by that point. So the war had been going
on for like what seven years, and Afin was pretty
much untouched.

Speaker 7 (41:29):
So it was in a pretty good state.

Speaker 8 (41:33):
And Turkey and the SNA invaded just as the war
against ISIS was winding down, and I mean, it's become
a hell on earth.

Speaker 7 (41:41):
It's been almost completely depopulated I think.

Speaker 8 (41:44):
It's less than ten percent now Kurdish ethnically.

Speaker 7 (41:48):
It has been ruled by a number of different groups.

Speaker 8 (41:50):
We can say the SNA, but you know, different groups
within the SNA and have fought over it. At the
HTS at times have had control over certain parts of
the area, and there's been a lot in fighting. There's
been horrendous war crimes, committed, great murder, thousands of disappeared people,
and as you say, they really like to openly put

(42:12):
videos out of them committing this stuff. I mean, they're
pretty shameless about it. There are some pretty disturbing videos
that they're mutilating the bodies of fallen YPJ soldiers, of
coming some re executions, of wiping out whole towns.

Speaker 7 (42:28):
It's been awful. And the same thing.

Speaker 8 (42:33):
Happened again in twenty nineteen around in October when they
captured as Sarah Khane and Talabiad. And it's worth also
pointing out that these were not Kurdish majority city surprise,
and so I think that Sarah Karney maybe was about
fifty percent and Telebayads, which is kind of close to Kurbani,
I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 7 (42:51):
Wasn't Kurdish majority city.

Speaker 8 (42:52):
B was organized under the self administration and it was
organized quite effectively, and they committed the same horrific times there.
They are an anti Kurdish for so if you can
say that they are racist, they do have.

Speaker 7 (43:08):
A stated goal of committing genocide against the Kurts. That's
not an exaggeration. There's something they openly say.

Speaker 8 (43:13):
But they don't seem to care who they steal from,
or who they rape or who they extort. Wherever they go,
it's death and destruction. And it still is now, and
there's still something like a quarter of a million internally
displaced people from these areas in North Essyria hoping to

(43:34):
go back and now having to see the situation get
even worse and not knowing if.

Speaker 7 (43:37):
They ever will be able to.

Speaker 6 (43:39):
Yeah, and I think like you were talking about, like
we're seeing it right now in man Beach, like the
SNA seems to liesee be in controlled of the city,
albeit with YPG fighters kind of more and I guess
in a gorilla role, so it would seem still fighting there.
But where I believe we're on the second day of
a general strike in man Beach after less than a

(44:01):
week of the SNA holding it because of looting and
executions and other war crimes.

Speaker 8 (44:08):
Yeah, I think this is like actually really good political
education to see what's happening, because what's been built up
in the Northeast has been built up over decades.

Speaker 7 (44:17):
Right. They like to use this anology of the myosolium
and the fruiting bodies of a mushroom.

Speaker 8 (44:25):
They appear to magically emerge from the earth in the
autumn out of nowhere, but actually, you know, they've been
brewing underground for years before, and they used this analogy
because it took decades to put in place these structures.
That's why they were ready as soon as the regime
the Acid region pulled out and collapsed in the face

(44:45):
of ISIS in the early stages of the war, they
were ready to build up these structures. They already had
self organized militias, they had the economy planned out that
they set to work immediately.

Speaker 7 (44:57):
And their SNA don't have any of that. They are
a force of convenience.

Speaker 8 (45:03):
They're mostly sort of young men who were in groups
before that were defeated in Syria like Isis, who are
simply taking the opportunity to enrich themselves.

Speaker 7 (45:14):
And that's also very convenient for Turkey.

Speaker 8 (45:16):
Because they do the dirty work against the population of
North Sypyria. So I think it's worth saying that that
aspect of it, that preparation, that resilience, is something that
also works in favor in the event of the worst
case of full invasion of northern Assyria. I do think
they are significantly better prepared than they were in twenty

(45:38):
eighteen and nineteen. And even if the worst happens, even
if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the
end of this project, right, It's not going to be
the end of this emancipation. There's now an entire generation
of young people in North Eassyria who have grown up
entirely living amongst a liberated and anti hated region and

(46:01):
people that's not something you can militarily defeat. So I
you know, I'm not completely hopeless, and obviously I'll be
like devastated if the worst does happen there, But like,
I don't think it means the end of this incredible
political And it feels wrong to call it a project
because it's not.

Speaker 7 (46:19):
It's really is a revolution in.

Speaker 8 (46:22):
Every possible meaning of the word, and it's deeply embedded.

Speaker 10 (46:27):
Now.

Speaker 6 (46:27):
Yeah, and I think everyone I spoke to there, like
there's a deeply held conviction that they're not going back
some people who have seen like first hand the fascist
violence of ISIS and fascist is the right world. It's
something maybe worse than fascism, but like certainly that like
speaking to women in Rashava about how they're not going

(46:48):
back to the gendered violence of they experience for decades
to include ISIS, but by no means like only from ISIS.
And I guess that kind of brings us on to
I wanted to talk a little bit about the situation
in the parts of Syria that are controlled by HTS
and and in so much as they really are control
controller perhaps around word like they haven't fully established their

(47:11):
state project yet, but they're certainly moving towards that they've
sort of captured the institutions of the state rather than
destroyed them. You'd spoken about, like there's this very I
don't I think. I guess maybe i'll use an examples
or I'm phrasing this question in a very meandering way.
I sort of see ann clip where they're they're like, oh,
we found a guy who's liberally who's like in this
prison and he was stuck here. And then second part

(47:32):
of this was not broadcast on CNN, as this person
turns out to be like an Air Force lieutenant who
was in fact himself someone who tortured and killed civilians,
And like, there's this very liberatory, very excited messaging coming
from media in the West. I guess some of which
is good, right, Like, it's good that the Assabe regime
is good. A sab was fucking terrible and tortured and

(47:54):
killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. But that
doesn't mean that things are all perfect in Damascus. So
do you want to talk a little bit about like
some of the worrying stuff we've see in the last
few days from those areas.

Speaker 8 (48:08):
Yeah, I mean this is something that I worry isn't
being spoken about enough.

Speaker 7 (48:13):
I don't, as a non Syrian, don't want to say.

Speaker 8 (48:15):
To people, you know, you shouldn't be celebrating your own liberation,
because people should absolutely should be, and it's their right
to be. And I'm, like it, extremely happy that this
brutal dictator has gone.

Speaker 7 (48:27):
I mean, it's it's hard to summarize.

Speaker 8 (48:30):
Quite how awful he was, and it's it's deeply refiltrating
that he's probably not going to see justice. Yeah, But
it's also really hard to see stuff which is really
reminiscent of like nineteen seventy nine Tehran, two thousand and
three Baghdad, of a sort of jubilation, whilst at the
same time there are videos of sort of programs being

(48:50):
carried out against minorities, minorities like the Allies who were
in control, and you don't know if the person being
executed in the street were as a torture an intelligence
agent and.

Speaker 7 (49:03):
You don't know who they were.

Speaker 8 (49:04):
But like this is happening, but you're also seeing like
sallapist groups raising their flag, you know, like hardline is
mis raising their flag in places like the Takia and
Tattoos that have significant minority populations. I am very I
mean concerned, is in the right word. Like it's hard
to fill that spirit of liberation when when you see

(49:25):
not only these things happening, but that.

Speaker 7 (49:27):
The people who have captured these state institutions.

Speaker 8 (49:29):
Are admitted former members of al Qaida, and they are
they are Jihad's hard line people that have now got
a very effectively.

Speaker 7 (49:40):
Made themselves about to be moderate.

Speaker 8 (49:43):
But my guart feeling is that we're going to see
something like Manei sem nine Tehran of a lot of
talk of reconciliation, a lot of talk of you know,
the concerns of the Kurds or working with the communists,
but you know, mass executions and.

Speaker 7 (49:58):
Oppression is not around the corner.

Speaker 8 (50:01):
And I guess when the tubulation dies down, my question
is what's going to happen when minorities do you demand
their rights or women don't want to write a job
in you know, inside the building's inst state institutions. And
I'm finding it very hard to believe that these these
men who are professed Islimists are going to allow a

(50:24):
moderate future to exist.

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Yeah, it's I don't know.

Speaker 6 (50:29):
Every day we get different information, right, but like, yeah,
I don't know if concerned it's the right word either,
I don't quite know what the word is.

Speaker 4 (50:36):
But like I'm worried.

Speaker 6 (50:38):
I guess I'm worried that I'm especially worried when like,
rather than what we saw in the self administration was
not like a continuation of institutions right when the Assad
regime left in twenty eleven, in twenty twelve, and areas
that the regime or isis have left since then, like
it wasn't like, Okay, we'll take over these institutions and

(50:58):
minister them differently as we will build democracy from the
bottom up, not we'll just you know, change to people
in charge versus what it seems like we're now seeing
for Damascus is like, hey, can the police from the
cyber regime police stay at work? Which is concerning Talking

(51:24):
of police, the last thing I wanted to address was
that our whole camp. I've spoken about it before on
the show, and people can look back on other episodes,
but if you've not heard about it, can you explain
briefly what our whole is and then the massive risk
that this Turkish backed invasion poses to our whole and
other camps. I guess the whole is not the only camp,
just the biggest one.

Speaker 7 (51:44):
Yeah, our whole is a really important point to talk about.
Our whole is a very large camp.

Speaker 8 (51:52):
It's hard to sum up what kind of camp it
is because it's so fast and had different sections.

Speaker 7 (51:59):
It's near Alhasse, which is.

Speaker 8 (52:00):
One of the largest cities in north east Syria, and
it mostly it mostly contains families who were members or
were resident in the Islamic State when it collapsed, So
in the beginning of twenty nineteen, ISIS was sort of
squeezed into this little corner in the eastern side of

(52:22):
Syria between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border, and when
the state collapsed, for the caliphate collapse, a lot of
people had nowhere to go, and a lot of them
were foreignly sucomming from abroad.

Speaker 7 (52:33):
I want to say a lot. I mean like tens
of thousands.

Speaker 8 (52:36):
There were something like twenty thousand families left within SUSA
and that was like the last parts of the Califate
to hold out, and they didn't have anywhere to go.
There were already camps set up for IDPs for members
of ISIS and families in North Assyria, but alcohol was
rapidly expanded to take these on. So it's a sort

(52:57):
of semi prison, semi open. The camp that I think
peaked at.

Speaker 7 (53:02):
Seventy five thousand people, which.

Speaker 8 (53:05):
It sounds like a lot on its own, but when
you consider that a large city in northern Eassyria is
about one hundred and fifty thousand people, it.

Speaker 7 (53:12):
Still is significant.

Speaker 8 (53:13):
I don't you probably have work of recent figause I mean,
but I think the current population is about forty thousand.

Speaker 6 (53:19):
Yeah, it shrunk definitely. I'm not sure what it is exactly.

Speaker 7 (53:22):
The big problem that the self administration have had is multitude.

Speaker 8 (53:26):
Really many of the people there are foreigners. Many of
them don't have papers. Many of them come from countries
that either don't want them back or will almost certainly
execute them if they're sent back like a rock, which
is against the policy of the abolition of death penalty.

Speaker 7 (53:42):
Inn Asyria.

Speaker 8 (53:45):
There are some in Alohol, but mostly other camps in
the North and East a Syria. Former ISIS members like
Shamama Begum who come from countries like the UK who
simply won't take them back, and the UK has taken
back some families that simply refuses to take back their
citizens who joined ISIS as you know, card carrying members.
So they've made a pretty massive effort to repatriate as

(54:07):
many families as possible. They've made a big effort to
rehabilitate and deradicalize as many people as possible. They have
shrunk the camp massively, but they're still yeah, forty thousand
or something left there and thinse of a like really
a lot of them are really radical, Like I think
I don't know what an exact number is but something
in the order of ten thousand. Them are still like

(54:29):
professed being members of ices, and they have a lot
of children. And this was something that shocked me when
I was at the end of the caliphate and backwards
and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out, and
I could not have imagined how many children that were.

Speaker 7 (54:46):
And this was like what five years ago now coming
up to six years ago.

Speaker 8 (54:50):
So some of them who were you know, seven, eight,
nine years old are now like heading towards their mid teens.
They've spent their entire lives being radicalized and like what
do you do with them?

Speaker 4 (55:00):
Right?

Speaker 8 (55:00):
And it's no I think there's no coincidence that in
previous Turkish attacks. The Turkey's been attacking the northeast Assyria
for you know, the last five six years now through
the air, through national warfare, and a lot of their
attacks have focused on trying to break these people out.
They have bombed the entrances to prisons multiple times. They
provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are

(55:22):
trying to break them out, and they provide a safe
passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape.
So it's massively in their favor, But of course it's
a Pandora's box because you know, if that does break open,
and if these people aren't youpatriated or aren't you radicalized,
then that's a lot of people who have pretty much
only known their whole lives a extremely radical fascist Islamist ideology.

Speaker 7 (55:46):
And I don't think they're just going to give it up. Yeah, No,
that they're not going to join this moderate future Syria.

Speaker 6 (55:51):
No, And like those people have probably experienced, like probably
have terrible experiences within that camp, and that's not going
to make that that don't tend to be moderating and
sort of pacifying experiences, And I'm sure that they will.
There'll be a lot of hate coming from there when
those people come out. And I don't want to lick
a portion blame too much, but we've had a long

(56:13):
time to deal with this. The world has had a
long time to deal with I mean, I.

Speaker 8 (56:15):
Would happily blame this is entirely on the hands of
the coalition. Northern Assyria is a very poor places. It's
deeply impoverished, and it's been kept in poverished by by
sanctions by Turkey. You know, the oil refinees that the industry,
the economy has been smashed to pieces that they've held

(56:37):
on really well, and that like all credit to them,
they have maintained this camp. They have tried to give
these people alive, but it's it's pretty awful conditions. Yeah,
and this could have been sold if the international community,
if the coalition, the United States had helped with these repatriations,
so put political pressure on European country some particular to

(57:00):
take back their citizens and had just provided the funding,
you know, for they have provided funding. I'm not saying
they haven't pay much, but like it's a drop in
the ocean compared to the Department Defense budget. You know,
we're talking a few tens of millions here and there
as opposed to a concerted effort to deradicalize and repatriate

(57:21):
people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and
the US.

Speaker 6 (57:25):
Yeah, and like you've got Britain doing the opposite of
what's helpful, which is fucking like removing people's passports, right
like the naturalizing them, leaving these people stateless, and like
saying it's not a problem, which is pathetic and.

Speaker 7 (57:38):
I'm very incredibly short sighted.

Speaker 8 (57:40):
Yeah, you know, I don't like using the word terror
or terrorism, because I think it's they've become meaningless terms.
But like ISIS did commit horrendous acts of terror in
Europe and the United States, and these people, a lot
of them, I'm sure would happily do so given the opportunity.
So I don't think that the threat is is like

(58:00):
sufficiently understood in the West.

Speaker 6 (58:02):
Yeah, No, And like it's going to end up biting
them in the ass because they've you know, they've put
this off and put this off, and wouldn't spend the
money to like have justice related to go through a
system and to have a chance to plead their cases
or have a tribune or whatever it is. Instead, these
people have just been essentially abandoned by most of the world.

(58:24):
The self administration has been forced to take care of
the people who did horrific things right there. And Yeah,
at some point, this population will continue to grow if
we don't keep removing people from it, and that's going
to be a problem for the whole world, even if
the whole world wants to pretend it's not happening right now.
And it is just endlessly frustrating to see it not

(58:47):
even be covered, let alone kind of addressed in the West.

Speaker 8 (58:51):
Yeah, I think that's a really important point. When similar
atrustees have been carried out in Europe. We see international tribune,
we see the ICC and the ICJ step in, We
see arrests, we see prosecutions, you know, like Molossovich, like
the newer Bent trials and Isis was was a massive state.

(59:11):
It had something like ten million inhabitants. It committed multiple genocides,
you know, and this is just you know, people in
the regions saying, oh, they're committing just these are like
Western highly studied, highly understood, accepted by Western states as
genocide against like the Uzds.

Speaker 7 (59:28):
They committed horrendous atrocities.

Speaker 8 (59:30):
They are they posed an international threat and a massive
regional threat and at the end of the caliphe as
a territorial realm, as a serious military presence. It just, yeah,
it just disappeared off the radar. And I think this
is like a you know, a really issue really shows
the sort of racist and clonal mindset behind this rules
based international order that the people who were their victims

(59:52):
and who have left to pick up the pieces after
it's got very little support or recognition. And they've been
calling for for tribunals.

Speaker 7 (01:00:00):
For years and it's just fallen on to ears.

Speaker 6 (01:00:02):
Yeah, and sadly ilgy that changing given the incoming administration
in the United States. Like it's it's deeply concerning. I
deeply concerned. Through own word, it's just fucked. I want
to ask, like, people I think want to be in
solidarity with the revolution, They want to help if they can,
they want to support. I did the fundraiser last night.

(01:00:23):
Thank you to everyone who gave their money and came.
That was really nice. But what can people do to
you know, it's one thing to like be in solidarity
or post or whatever, but like, what concrete actions can
they take to help.

Speaker 8 (01:00:36):
This is This is a question that I gets asked
a lot. Yeah, I think and doing anything is helpful. Yeah,
it's also a question that's really hard to answer given
how things are just across the border in Palestine. You know,
I personally find it hard to to engage and ask
for help and ask for solidarity when you know there's

(01:00:56):
a there's a genocide being committed next door. But we
might be about to see the same thing happen in Syria,
and I do think we should be taking it seriously.
And yeah, anything from raising awareness to actually going there
and lending support anything on that spectrum. It's not just like,
it's not just the material contribution that you can make.

(01:01:17):
It's the people that do really feel left doubt, they
feel betrayed, they feel let down by the international community,
by the rest of the world, and any act of
solidarity goes out incredibly well. Like the first year I
was there, I was basically useless because I didn't speak
the language, I didn't know my way around. I was

(01:01:38):
like a burden on society more or less. And for
people just like happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity,
And it's not about being useful, it's about that act.
It's about more than that. That's what I'm trying to say.
And if you can show solidarity in any way you can, like,
this is incredibly incredibly important to time to do it.

Speaker 6 (01:01:57):
Yeah, I think, like I don't know, if I go
back when I moved to the US, which was two
thousand and eight, George W. Bush as president, and like
I have my little free Palestine badge when I got
off the plane in my little kafir and like was
immediately sent to secondary inspection by the customs people because
like that was not really of course, there were Palestinian

(01:02:18):
people and people in solidarity with the people of Palestine
and the US in and they were for a long
time before. But like I would never have imagined that
I would see thousands of people in the streets for
the Palestinian cause, and like that the only thing that
has materially held back the genocide of the Palestinian people
has been the solidarity that they've experienced, And like that
shows the power that people have, though obviously it's been

(01:02:42):
able to do comparatively little in Israel, still seems to
be killing their children every day, but like it shows
that we can build solidarity really quickly and really meaningfully,
and like you don't have to go, but you can go.
You get It's much harder to get to Palestine than
it is to get to northern Essyria last year. And
I think people who are already organizing can bring that

(01:03:05):
into their organizing too. These things don't have to compete
like they can be. There's a lot of solidarity to
go around. But I would say a lot of the
news we see, unfortunately from Turkey, and that will unfortunately
give you information of the extremely biased when it comes
to Naughti Syria. So being conscious of your media consumption
is very important.

Speaker 7 (01:03:25):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 8 (01:03:26):
I think I would just add that to say that
solidarity with any group is a long term project, right,
You're not going to jump in and be able to
make a huge difference immediately. But also at the same time,
like if the worst happens, if Turkey invades Vullon and
as genocide and.

Speaker 7 (01:03:43):
Northern Syria, that isn't the end of it.

Speaker 8 (01:03:46):
It's a massive international movement and there are practices from
it that are being put in place in things that
actually don't even have anything to do with the curves
of the nation. And there are always organizing, there are
matters that they use, there's personality analysis, there's criticism and
self criticism that.

Speaker 7 (01:04:04):
There's a lot of that that goes far.

Speaker 8 (01:04:06):
Beyond a single geographic region, and I think engaging with
that can and I've seen with my own I since
I've been back, like there's a lot of groups around
the UK that use techniques for self organization within land
rights movement, within worker struggle, within ant Cutts campaigning, and
these got nothing to do with ra Java, but they

(01:04:29):
have seen that through solidarity with Rajava and Kurdistan that
there are ways that can improve their own practice and
their own actions.

Speaker 4 (01:04:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:04:38):
I think that's really important too, and those are things
maybe we'll cover in the future. And there are plenty
of good resources online. Are there any resources you'd like
to plug or like personal social media's things? Do you
think people could follow to get good information on what's happening?

Speaker 7 (01:04:52):
Definitely the ri C, that's the Rajavia Information Center.

Speaker 8 (01:04:56):
They are probably the best source on the ground in Rajava,
and they are a collective of journalists, a mixture of
locals and internationalists who've been working there for six years now,
so they're a rejer But I see on various social
media platforms you can follow me as at lapinesque la
p I n E, s q u E. I'm also

(01:05:19):
posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm pisiting
updates from friends, people I know there and my take
on the situation based on my experiences being there from
its five years.

Speaker 6 (01:05:31):
Yeah, I think good to follow if you ken. Thank
you very much, Danny. What we're going to do now
is I got some voice notes from some friends who
are at the front with a techosina an assist which
means anarchist struggle in Kurdish. They're a group within the
SDF that is an anarchist group that they're fighting, and
in this case as to doing frontline medical support on

(01:05:53):
behalf of the self administration, on behalf of the revolution.
They sent me some notes this morning it's Monday today
from their positions on the front line. So obviously those
notes will be a little bit they'll be like twenty
four hours old by the time you hear them. But
I still think it's very important to hear from people
who are there what we can not from, like someone
who's supposed to be an expert but hasn't set for

(01:06:14):
in Syria in fifteen years and hasn't really talked to
anyone who's Syrian either. So we'll drop those in after
the advertising break here and with that I will say
thank you very much, Danny, thanks for giving us your time,
and he'll we really appreciate all you're insight today.

Speaker 7 (01:06:27):
Thanks very much.

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
James, talking from the provisional branch.

Speaker 10 (01:06:42):
Just want to situation here because.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
You're probably now the regime has fun.

Speaker 10 (01:06:55):
You've left the country after a big offensive that started
from Italy that took over quite soon quite fast the
city of Alba and continued moving on. We wanted to
explain how is the situation right now on the ground

(01:07:16):
and also be some insight in the situation of North
in Syria and what the media is as not covering.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
Of the different events and situations that are unknowing here.

Speaker 10 (01:07:27):
The main thing to remark that this can be a
bit of a confusion confusion interview for those that are
maybe not familiar with the unknowing situation.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
To give a short context, we can mention.

Speaker 10 (01:07:41):
That there are right now two main conflicts ongoing military conflicts.
One is when we reported they're not so much we
are talking about the war that HDS or the offensive
that HDS launched against the army.

Speaker 1 (01:08:01):
And the other is.

Speaker 10 (01:08:02):
The offensive that the SMA and Turkish proxy forces the
Wilder the name of that Syrian National Army, but that
they are trained, paid and supported by the Turkish estate,
the offensive that they have been launching against Northern Asyria
and the Democratic Administration of North as Ayria is the

(01:08:27):
area also known sometimes as Rigela, that is started as
the court desieration movement leaving the world of Islamic state
and establishing this autonomous administration. So let's go shortly to
the which conflict this offensive of each theater the faith

(01:08:47):
of reaction, but it's Islamige group direct heritage of Anatra
that was the Syrian branch of the GUIDO that has
been learning having somewhat government destructs in the region of
Uglype in the north west of Syria and was under
heavisage from the region forces in Syria Army and the

(01:09:11):
twenty seven of Nananda bay unch is bit offensive that
led to the collapse of the region.

Speaker 1 (01:09:17):
We could reflect deeply about the regions now.

Speaker 10 (01:09:21):
On one side, the Syria Aparty was exhausted that two
years of war here in.

Speaker 11 (01:09:25):
Syria, but especially their main allies and supporters were also
in that situation. We were talking mostly about Russia and Iran.
As we currently know, Russia has been in rage in
a we're in Ukraine for three years.

Speaker 10 (01:09:40):
Almost Iran recently had been also engaged in supporting the
militias in the NFL against Israel after the natural occupation
that Israel started.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
On an Aza year ago.

Speaker 10 (01:10:00):
These two conflicts create a situation that both.

Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
Partners, that Russian and Iran were not able to support
the army as day within the past and this led.

Speaker 10 (01:10:13):
Also to the collapse of the front lands of the
Serra party, allowing the offensive of HDS to overrun very
fast the defenses in the city of Alipo and also
take in control of the city of Hamma. These sparked
also all their groups that also opposed the region for

(01:10:35):
a long time to start also the election, and in
southern Syria and the regions of the Sula and and Cunetia,
there was also an autonomous military operation room that started
coordinated insurgeons and the vision.

Speaker 1 (01:10:54):
These sparked the collapse of the region.

Speaker 10 (01:10:58):
A lot of soldiers were defecting their posessions and finally
the different military groups living the offensive.

Speaker 1 (01:11:06):
To the mass Puts.

Speaker 10 (01:11:07):
This was an offensive that was really not very builded
in the sense of a lot of the similar party
soldiers who were just leaving their positions and running away,
and offensive was able to advance very fast, very easily.

Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
Right now. The offensive led to.

Speaker 12 (01:11:31):
The transition that we are seeing in the masques where
the leader of HDS.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
Had been doing really.

Speaker 10 (01:11:40):
Public speeches and the carrying the tunun for the revolution,
trying to harvest.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
And the revolutionary spirit of like twenty eleven for their.

Speaker 10 (01:11:54):
Own benefit and they imposed or as a transitional government
that is from exclusively by like members connected to aligned
to HDS. Could be good to discuss more about HDS,
but maybe it's not the.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
Focus of our interview right now.

Speaker 10 (01:12:15):
Just mentioned and their authoritarian government in Egypt has been
also really criticized by local population organizing.

Speaker 1 (01:12:25):
Protest against it and right.

Speaker 10 (01:12:28):
Now running this interim government, they are already making proposals
for like a morality police.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
Is amic courts.

Speaker 10 (01:12:39):
So I don't know how much this comparison has been
already shared. That clearly what we saw in a Findistan
with Taliban taking over invested destructors is probably a good
guide to understand what could be happening in Syria. If
HDRS states control of the the state, it seems to

(01:13:00):
be happening. So this is one of the confusion going
that is widely reported.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
The only one maybe is not so much reported.

Speaker 10 (01:13:08):
We see how the Turkish has been for a long
time to give the state has been for a long
time and attacking the vision of that Norway Syria, especially
the Cooldish areas, and this is connected not to their
war against the con deliberation movement that has been in
for more than forty years and the last chapter of

(01:13:31):
Thesus started in coordination with this offensive of HDS where
their prop re forces started to attack many the region
of thirty fact that was an area where a lot
of the refugees from a friend we're living a frine

(01:13:51):
was a region that was a ray occupied by thirty
in twenty eighteen and a lot of the people from
the city was displaced and living in refuge amants in
the origin of Hinda and the civil tech effect, and
these Turkish pretty forces attacked and conquered that vision, forcing

(01:14:12):
all these people that already had to leave their homes
more than five years ago to translating, yeah, so forcing
them to flee once again. A lot of these people
was trapped in a caroline that suffered brutal grades attacks, kidnapping, ransoms.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
Like it has been make a really terrible experience for.

Speaker 10 (01:14:39):
A lot of people that was trying to flee the
offensive of these Turkish patty forces and most of them
are now arriving to do that time to write two
the visions of the self administration when where they are
founding and they can find shelter and for those willing
to help with mentioned that vast is the humanitarian organization,

(01:15:03):
one of the biggest humanitarier organizations working in ant Assyria
has been providing fans and foot and blankets and everything
they can to support all these people that is arriving
on these areas.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
So those willing to.

Speaker 10 (01:15:18):
Support economically and this humanitarian crisis we are experiencing, they
can't easily find.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
The right side. And the Banakana.

Speaker 10 (01:15:28):
Favasa to donay to them to support all these people
that went again know there in their homes.

Speaker 1 (01:15:36):
But the offensives didn't stop.

Speaker 10 (01:15:38):
On an Shaffa and the SNA continued their attacks to
cover the city of Manage already right now and this
was a really heavy classious that it was a really
serious military conflict that has been totally supported by Turkish

(01:15:59):
artillery and air force.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
We are talking about.

Speaker 10 (01:16:02):
Drones sitting different positions and even airplanes that of course
like nature air force have been bombing positions of the
cerin democratic forces, allowing these different even groups that are out.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
Of this coalition of the SMA, these published pactic forces
to control of the city.

Speaker 10 (01:16:25):
At the moment, there is already several days a man
beach this city have been organizing protests and even in
general strike that started yesterday and the occupation because these
groups that occupied the city are looting and even killing
local populations in a really terrible situation. Of this experience

(01:16:49):
in the local people living in Maniche, and they are.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
Willing to continue.

Speaker 10 (01:16:57):
They have been threatening the city of Colony in the
simple of resistance of the regional revolution against the designed state.

Speaker 1 (01:17:04):
And these threads and the city are.

Speaker 10 (01:17:07):
Not just the bombings of the air force and artillery,
but also a lot of military and personal of the
Turkish prepsy forces gathering on the bridge that connects the divisions.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
Of man Beach and Commanding and all across the air
for this river.

Speaker 10 (01:17:28):
So this war is not so reported that it's been
really BOLTI times against the self administration in Northeastyria. We
are trying to report and update about the situation. We
also published two statements to to call out at tension
for comrade what is ongoing here and maybe also.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
Talk a bit about the work that we have been
doing underground.

Speaker 10 (01:18:00):
We need to remark that this offensive of the Mambage
and now districts and Colony have not been the only
duds of the Turkish army and the perhapsy forces on
the wing all around the street that they occupied in
twenty eighteen and two thousand nineteen. The areas around the

(01:18:21):
city of Sylvania and Anisa next to the border with
Turkie also host a lot of Islamist groups that are
part of this Turkish proty coalition and they have been
intensively bonding the areas and their surroundings. And there have
been quiet widespread rumors of the Zamie Hope togethering forces

(01:18:46):
to continue their reports on the self administration of Nordestria
and the ward of the Cylind Democratic Forces. We from
the kasinosas we have been working in the medical capacity,
the providing materials for the medical points in the in
the fundance and being.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
Present in the foundlands together with.

Speaker 10 (01:19:08):
The Syrian Democratic Forces in case that a new invasion,
and it is happening right now.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
The bombings are hitting different areas and it has been
really intense in the last days.

Speaker 10 (01:19:22):
The Syrian Democratic Forces are in maximum alard and especially
there is an important call in solidarity with the city
of Covany, a symbol of resistance.

Speaker 1 (01:19:33):
That is small ones again under threat.

Speaker 10 (01:19:37):
We have been seen as demonstrations are around the world
in Solarity with the motions here and this has been
also bringing out as motivation to continue the resistance underground.
Right now, uh, these situations of the instability and political

(01:19:58):
tradition is still in ways that are difficult to predict.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
We can see how the self administration has been tending political.

Speaker 10 (01:20:07):
Realizations to the matters to memor Shade with this new
provisional government.

Speaker 1 (01:20:14):
With the attempt to reach autonomy.

Speaker 10 (01:20:17):
For the region that connects with the ideas of democratic controlism,
the ideas of democratic comprolism. Don't expect to run a
state institutions because we don't want to live in a
society that is ruled by a state, and are calling

(01:20:37):
for time of autonomy in a local governments where then
the different communities can live together, colleges together, administering their
social forms.

Speaker 1 (01:20:51):
Together and also their defense.

Speaker 10 (01:20:54):
We'll see how the civil democratic forces is at a
military coalition of different local teleforces that it's made on
the principles of self defense. Maybe to give a bit
of contexts of what we have been doing here for
several years that our organization has been operating another Syria.

Speaker 1 (01:21:16):
As anarchists. We can here in solidarity international society with
this revolution.

Speaker 10 (01:21:22):
Because their political values and their political project is really
close to our ideas. We see big similarities with the
ideas of libertarian socialism and social ecology and thinkers and
moral bootin have been a big inspiration found others and

(01:21:42):
the leader of the cour Desirational movement that has been
proposing this political friend called democratic controlism, where especially with
the principles of one liberation, social ecology and studios and
offracy has been political campus of the revolution here. Building

(01:22:06):
autonomy in the different regions has been also a very
important element to develop the project, and especially during the
war and in one state, as soon as the different
territories were liberated, there was a big emphasis on creating
local councils civilian and military councils.

Speaker 1 (01:22:29):
Both that around their own affairs.

Speaker 10 (01:22:34):
This is very interesting from anarchists perspective not to see
how one of the main political points is these promotings
of defense and creating a military force that is not
based on a centralized monopoly of balance, but on allowing
every community to take care of their own defense and

(01:22:55):
their own offairs. This is a really inspiring element that
for us has been also a really extraordinary learning process
being part of a revolution, leaving day to.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
Day the developments that are happening here and.

Speaker 10 (01:23:13):
Seeing what doesn't mean to make a revolution, because it's
something that sometimes we anarchists look back often in at
the epic times of like Spain one thirty six or
Ukraine in the twenties to see examples of an anarchist revolution,
and this is something that today is happening here. Courdistant

(01:23:34):
has been for a long time living resistance against the
logic of national states, especially in Turkey, but we saw
how it has been funding in Syria where that this
movement found the space to put in practice these ideas
and to develop the revolutionary society that has been theorized

(01:23:55):
for a long time. So even if we cannot save
vergialwas an anarchist, that we can say how the principles
inspired the project and that it's been developed here and implemented.
This is a really an important school and it brings
a lot of lections of the big challenges of reorganizing

(01:24:17):
a society with principles of euer Italian socialism. It is
especially complicated here because of external reasms like the situation
of the Marble, the constant threat of the Tutis army,
and this is something that for sure we can point out.

Speaker 1 (01:24:35):
As like, well, it's very difficult to make a revolution
with these factors, but this is also acting that making
a revolution will always be difficult, and we always have
really big.

Speaker 10 (01:24:48):
Factors that make the situation very difficult. If making a
revolution would be easy.

Speaker 1 (01:24:54):
We would already have done it.

Speaker 10 (01:24:56):
So of course it's something that brings a lot of difficulties,
a lot contradictions, to a lot of challenges and use
here day to day living what it means to build
the revolutionary society, a lot, a lot of equations from
the reflections that we also able to translate and to
reflect together with the artist movements from around the world, to.

Speaker 12 (01:25:18):
Learn from his experience and to be able to analyze
together and reflect and discuss together of what it means
to build anarchism in the twenty first century, what it
means to build libertarian socialism nowadays, in the current society
with all the different.

Speaker 10 (01:25:38):
Elements that we see, and of course in the military
comes the digion going. It can seem maybe sometimes far
away of a community in western countries, but I think
it's important to remember that revolution and war had been
always to size of the same time.

Speaker 1 (01:26:00):
In these moments of instability of war where the logic
and the established school of national states is more weak,
because we can actually.

Speaker 10 (01:26:12):
See in nine other times, in other moments or even
in other places nowadays, what is happening, for example, in
the now, what is happening in the different areas where.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
The logic of a national state is in questioned.

Speaker 10 (01:26:25):
Creates in the stability to create a situation where the
different actors will push.

Speaker 1 (01:26:30):
To take control. And we know that often those actors
will be led by a nationalism.

Speaker 10 (01:26:37):
Forces mentality with an authoritarian logic to just impose their
ideas and their aims by force.

Speaker 1 (01:26:46):
And it's very important that we think and we reflect and.

Speaker 10 (01:26:50):
Reorganize force that is able to react to that situation
because a traitarian.

Speaker 1 (01:26:57):
And hierarchic structors are required false to react.

Speaker 12 (01:27:03):
We as anarchist, we need time to organize Arizona pally
because our structures.

Speaker 1 (01:27:09):
Function based usurn thrust also knowing each other. And even
if I really believe that they are much more solid
and much more reliable in a long term, in a
short term we can face big, big challenge.

Speaker 12 (01:27:26):
So it's important to see fascism is as with advancing
all around the world, and we can see how.

Speaker 1 (01:27:33):
The intentions are like growing.

Speaker 10 (01:27:36):
So maybe this isn't as a call might to learn
from the lessons here, to learn from how the Kurdish
movement have been working and preparing for decades and what
happened in Syria made possible for the revolutionary movement to
put the cards on the table, to organize together with

(01:27:58):
the people and to defense and their people and their
communities building this revelifering process. But nowadays that so many
people have been like taking inspiration from, So yeah, probably
this is a bit confusing and maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:28:16):
Not so current. Sorry, we have been quiet some hours.

Speaker 10 (01:28:21):
We've had several weeks that have been extremely challenging with really.

Speaker 1 (01:28:26):
Few hours of sleep.

Speaker 10 (01:28:28):
But I hope this is more or less clear, and
this is doing is something that it's not so understandable.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
And always welcome new and.

Speaker 10 (01:28:39):
New questions and helping to answer, answer and share more perspective.
We have been answer writing some statements in their answer
trying to answer all those people interested in learning more
about the situation here and in.

Speaker 1 (01:28:59):
A ways special for different.

Speaker 5 (01:29:20):
Welcome to what could Happen Here? A show about things
falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode is going
to be a special audio companion piece to an article
published last night on substack at shatter Zone. That's Robert's
usual substack, though. Last night I publish an article detailing

(01:29:41):
the online history and transvestigation discourse regarding a school shooting
in Madison, Wisconsin. The article has pictures and hyperlinks which
might help explain some of the stuff I'm talking about,
but I'll do my best to relay it here to
you on the podcast feed. Another Monday in America and

(01:30:03):
another school shooting. On the morning of December sixteenth, a
female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin
shot and killed a teacher and fellow student, and injured
six others before killing herself. Initially, police falsely reported the
shooter was seventeen years old, but late Monday night they

(01:30:23):
correctly identified the deceased shooter as fifteen year old Natalie
ruppnow who went by Samantha or sam. In the aftermath
of this horrific event, right wing influencers and content creators
wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people,
labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged
transgender terrorists. But what really happened here, had nothing to

(01:30:48):
do with trans people, and is sadly ordinary for the
United States. In August of twenty twenty four, the father
of the future school shooter took his to a gun
range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing
the logo of a band KMFDM. In another photo of

(01:31:09):
the shooter, we can see the front of the shirt.
The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris,
who is a fan of the band. The bulk of
this new shooter's online footprint suggests a general obsession with
school shooters and the TCC or True Crime Community, a
nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This

(01:31:34):
sort of content dominates Samantha's tumbler, which last posted in
May of twenty twenty four. An alleged online friend of
the shooter said that she quote posted about school shooters
all the time quote end quote had school shooter leanings unquote.
Samantha is hardly alone in this. There have been over

(01:31:55):
one hundred copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since nineteen
ninety nine. A Twitter account believes to have belonged to
the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and
glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her
own shooting. The account was created in December of twenty
twenty four, and the profile picture featured a young man

(01:32:15):
in camo pants and a tactical backpack. The male profile
picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that
the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers cannot
agree on whether she was female to male or male
to female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare
the photo of the shooter with her Twitter profile picture.

(01:32:39):
This is a ridiculous diagram with about seven images overlaid
at different opacities, trying to layer the faces and body
shapes of these two people on top of each other.
This post is only proof that most of what gets
passed off as quote unquote ocant online today's just completely
incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with his diagram

(01:33:02):
is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat,
a school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was
only fifteen years old when he carried out his shooting.
Hours after the shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, while right wing
accounts were still arguing about what sort of transgender the
shooter had been. A neo Nazi Twitter account named Nitro

(01:33:26):
claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and
repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her
our quote unquote biological woman. An early complicating factor in
establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that
her alleged Twitter account posted a link to a Google
doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the

(01:33:50):
visibility setting public, so you couldn't access.

Speaker 4 (01:33:53):
The Google doc.

Speaker 5 (01:33:54):
You had to put in an email for approval, and
the person who was supposed to approve your email was
now dead, so there was no way to actually look
at this person's manifesto. The shooter's alleged Discord friend, Nitro,
claims to find what he believes to be a snippet
of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a
Discord group chat. Nitro is based out of the UK,

(01:34:17):
and so if this is legitimate, and that is a
big if, this message would have been sent about an
hour and a half before the shooting, per the Discord timestamp.
I'm going to read a bit of this alleged writing
from the shooter quote. Women are the only hope for
this wretched world. But even women have been brainwashed by

(01:34:38):
moids for too long. They've internalized the patriarchy and turned
on each other, always begging for male approval and validation.
It's disgusting. I realize the truth. Men are irredeemable. Radfem
Hitler was is fucking vindicated. Now they can't be reformed
or redeemed. They are a fucking scourge upon the earth.

(01:35:00):
The only solution is to total exterminate them and every
foid who worships these fucking parasites. Every single male must
be wiped out, from babies to the elderly. Only then
can women be free to create a new world. All
be the pioneer. I'll be the first one to take
the first step. I don't care if their fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, teachers, police,

(01:35:22):
and especially n words or politicians. I've been craving to
kill them all. This is my mission. Only when their
parasitic sludge has been expunged from the earth is when
then the world will be clean and women can start over.
It's the only way. In approximately ten minutes, I should
be dead. It's strange, but it feels good. Hopefully to

(01:35:46):
most people, this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary
quote unquote feminist screed about initiating a wave of male
targeted violence to cleanse the earth with pepperings of and foids,
which is Internet in cell slang for male and female respectively.
Also included are racial slurs and something called quote unquote

(01:36:09):
radfem Hitler. That last part is a reference to a
Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle hollow
earth Turf, whose content is a mix of trad influenced
right wing feminism with anti trans flourishes, advocating for a
mass purge of mooids. This includes trans women. This account

(01:36:31):
is derided by those both on the right and left,
but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem and
anti trans women with trad or often occult interests. The
discord nazi Nitro claimed that the shooter was quote unquote
a fan of radfem Hitler and talked about the account

(01:36:52):
frequently on Discord. Though Nitro previously believed her interest in
the account was merely ironic, now obviously an anonymous Twitter
nazi is certainly not the most reliable source, but Nitro
was the first person to correctly identify and post photos
of the shooter. Though they could be utilizing this newfound
clout to troll a widely disliked Twitter user, but the

(01:37:16):
fact that he's been right about all other details inclines
me to not discount his claims just altogether, but instead
just hold them with a billion pounds of salt. Allegations
that the shooter was a neo Nazi Radfem certainly sent
Radfem Hitler into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile,

(01:37:38):
some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to
have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been
quote unquote e dating, with the apparent intention of disproving
any ties the shooter had to the Twitter Radfem orbit.
Through this alleged online boyfriend, the right wing turf Ecosystem
claimed to have acquired a copy of the quote unquote

(01:38:01):
full manifesto. This purported manifesto lacks the anti male, anti
moid ramblings of the discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its
use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times
evocative of Pecca Eric Auvinen's manifesto, a Finnish school shooter

(01:38:21):
from two US and seven who killed eight people. Auvinen
considered himself a quote unquote natural selector who had evolved
beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha's purported manifesto,
he is mentioned by name as a quote unquote true inspiration.
Over the course of eight hours, a radfem Twitter account

(01:38:44):
released six pages of what they claimed to be Samantha's writing.
It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being
quote unquote scum. The writing describes a difficult family life,
suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists.
Though it briefly references the accelerationist terror gram saints, the

(01:39:07):
whole of this piece of writing is much more reminiscent
of old school columnbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu.
The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters and
includes a paragraph on Vladyskov Rosleyakhov, another Columbine copycat, but
from Crimea, who also cause played as one of the

(01:39:29):
Columbine shooters during his own mass shooting. Though the discord
Nazi and the reactionary rad femmes question the authenticity of
the others alleged manifesto, what both sides of the in
cell war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender.
We're going to go on a quick ad break and
come back to discuss transvestigation and the trans terror panic.

Speaker 4 (01:40:02):
Okay, we are back.

Speaker 5 (01:40:04):
It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated
is to do a school shooting. Transvestigating is the practice
of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It's
often leveled against celebrities, athletes, and politicians, but in recent
years there's been a new common subject of transvestigation, mass shooters,

(01:40:28):
in particular school shooters. Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout
previously reported on this trend back in twenty twenty three,
right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant
School shooting, which police say was committed by a transman,
we theorized that the online right was testing out a
new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with

(01:40:52):
mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and
plane disinformation that fear has come to pass. The modicum
of believability provided by the Nashville shooting, as it's the
only legitimate transrelated incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass
shooting databases, was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for

(01:41:15):
the next two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted
to link nearly every viral mass slash school shooting to
trans people to create a false trend. The strategy operates
as follows. During the first few chaotic hours after a shooting,
a small group of right wing content creators weaponized the

(01:41:36):
lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged
shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the
use of out of context social media posts, doctrine photographs,
photos of other people, or simply pictures of long or
dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose
evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter

(01:41:57):
is really transgender. For more context on this, you can
listen to an episode of It Could Happen here. I
wrote earlier this year covering the rise of fake trans terrorists.
The goal is to get as many of their followers
to see and spread these claims as fast as possible.
Even if it's widely debunked the next day, many who

(01:42:19):
heard the false claim won't be aware of the verified correction.
All these anti trans influencers in need is a brief
window of time to plant the idea into people's minds,
and then that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is
repeated every few months whenever there's a new mass shooting,

(01:42:39):
then it's pretty easy to create the false perception of
a growing trend.

Speaker 1 (01:42:44):
Now.

Speaker 5 (01:42:44):
In reality, trans people per capita are actually way less
likely to commit a shooting compared to CIS people, and
are much more likely to be the victim of gun violence.
But this past Monday, conservative and anti trans influencers tried
once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda.
Monday afternoon, Ian Miles Chung posted trans terrorism must end.

(01:43:10):
Hours later, Laura Lumer wrote, quote the trans movement is
really turning out to be a terrorist movement unquote. Just
minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer
Matt Wallace posted that an unknown quote unquote witness said
that the shooter quote looked to be transgender unquote. Wallace,

(01:43:31):
who has over two point two million followers on Twitter,
provided no source or citation and has since deleted this post,
but others in the online mega orbit parroted this language
before any identifying information was released, with the user just
Jeff from Cali writing a transperson targeted and opened fire

(01:43:52):
on students at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin twelve hit.
The right wing content creator Ryan Mada baselessly claimed that
the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter
quote another mentally unstable psychopath who has prescribed puberty blocker
and hormones unquote. Mata hosts a show on the right
wing YouTube alternative Rumble and has over one hundred and

(01:44:16):
twenty three thousand followers on Twitter. His tweet claiming the
shooter was on HRT racked up one point six million
quote unquote views and seventeen thousand likes in just twelve hours.
Larger accounts like Tya write Check's libs of TikTok fueled
undue speculation about the gender identity of the shooter, seeding
confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for

(01:44:37):
political gain, quoting the police chief saying, quote, I don't
know if the shooter is male or female unquote. A
small group of conservative influencers have just so successfully created
in alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter
is transgender that they don't even have to outright say
it anymore. Accounts like libs of TikTok and Malaysian blog

(01:45:00):
ugger Ian Miles Chung can merely gesture to this reality
tunnel they've intentionally created, and now thousands of people will
affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth, backed up
by historical precedent of fabricated memory. Matt Wallace posted a
photo of the shooter and the male profile picture, saying

(01:45:20):
what do you notice about the shooter again? Ian miles
Chung posted quote, police are unable to identify if the
school shooter in Madison, Wisconsin is male or female, but
they do know who did it and identified them as
a student. Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Unquote?
This speculation fueled conspiracy theories, which spread claiming that police

(01:45:43):
were intentionally withholding information about the shooter's gender identity in
service of some hidden agenda, and actually they were just
waiting to like let the family know that their daughter
was dead and making sure they had the correct identification.
Very basic stuff. Police all do this, but no, it's
all part of some secret agenda and some hidden narrative.

(01:46:06):
As early as one pm EST on Monday, which is
just like an hour after the shooting would have taken place,
the neo Nazi Twitter account Nitro correctly identified the shooter
as his online friend Sam Samantha. As this name spread online,
the multi gendered nature of the name added to the
speculation that the shooter was trans. Scarlett Johnson, an activist

(01:46:30):
with the ultra conservative parents' rights group Moms for Liberty
Shared self admitted unconfirmed reports that the shooter was quote
unquote a transgender teen who went by Sam or Samantha.
As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online
courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified.

(01:46:52):
An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter's given name matches
the ancient Sam Hide meme, in which extremely online people
try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a
new mass shooting was the American comedian Sam Hyde. In
recent years, the meme has turned into the Samantha Hide meme,

(01:47:13):
used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One
hide post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey raked
up over six hundred thousand views, four point five thousand likes,
and one and a half thousand retweets. Massi posted quote,
when you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually

(01:47:34):
mutilate them, you're not curing them. You're creating potential school
shooters unquote. Now it should go without saying, but the
use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence.
We're going to go on one last break and return
to conclude our discussion of transvestigating school shooters. Okay, we

(01:48:04):
are back. Time to talk about the potential double flipper.
So as this transvestigation continued, the quote unquote, we can
always tell. Crowd ended up transvestigating in both directions, seemingly
unsure of what a signed gender at birth the shooter
must have had. Some believe the shooter was transferm while

(01:48:26):
others concluded they were trans mask with one reply to
an end wokeness tweet reading quote those do not look
like female hands, and another transvestigation post saying the shooter
is a trans kid, a female pretending to be a male.
Exactly why we keep our Second Amendment rights to protect

(01:48:46):
our children from this mental health crisis. Zoom in close
on her shirt and hand gesture unquote. A now deleted
post from a URF account also attempted to pass off
the shooter as a transgirl, saying, quote, the Wsconsin school
shooter was a seventeen year old transidentified male. It just
keeps happening now quote unquote. Trans identified male was usually

(01:49:09):
a transphobadogu whistle to refer to a trans woman as
a male who identifies as a trans woman, but sometimes
transfoms get confused by words and use the phrase to
refer to trans people who quote unquote identify as men,
like this other transvestigation post saying quote shooter was a
seventeen year old trans but identified male now. One of

(01:49:32):
the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans
guy came from an anti Semitic doctor in Denmark with
one point four million followers. She falsely claimed with no evidence,
that the shooter was taking testosterone, writing quote the Wisconsin
school shooter has been identified as a seventeen year old
trans identified male another mentally ill girl on testosterone unquote.

(01:49:55):
As of Tuesday morning, this post has over three million views,
twenty two two thousand likes, and eight point three thousand retweets.
In a following post, this doctor blamed quote unquote the
Jews for inventing transgenderism as a note extremism. Researchers have
argued that transphobia is structurally similar to anti semitism. Now.

(01:50:18):
A common piece of anti trans memetic propaganda deployed in
the wake of mass shootings is the transshooter collage. This
format spread after the Nashville school shooting in twenty twenty three,
and this week Matt Wallace provided us with a brand
new version. This post is an ugly mishmash of one, two, three, four, five, six,

(01:50:39):
seven people's faces with a variety of backgrounds, a purposeless
red circle in the middle of the image, and text
that reads quote, almost every child killed in a mass
shooting in the last few years was killed by a
transgender shooter. Now, out of all those pictures in this clash,
only one person in this clash has actually reported to

(01:50:59):
be transgender. The Nashville shooter in the upper left. The
rest of the people pictured are not trans and have
never claimed to be trans. The person with long hair
in the lower half the image is cult Gray, who
is falsely labeled as trans by far right influencers like
end Wokeness and Mike Cernovich. Cult Gray's discord posts reveal

(01:51:19):
he actually held transphobic beliefs. A more classic version of
the trans shooter collage format is just five pictures with
texts next to each of them, reading the X shooter
identified as trans, the X shooter identified as trans right,
just a big list of five of these names is
saying that they all identified as trans. The version I'm

(01:51:41):
using here is courtesy of Limbs of TikTok admin Chaya Reichek,
who posted this earlier this year. But just as before,
the majority of the subjects in this meme aren't actually
trans and it's just full of disinformation. The Colorado Springs
shooter who targeted a queer club is not actually non
binary and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to

(01:52:04):
get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as
the Denver shooter is not trans, has never claimed to
be trans. He just has dyed hair. This individual pictured
did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is
not pictured. Now, Lastly, though the person pictured as the
Euvaldi shooter is trans, this is not the actual Euvaldi shooter.

(01:52:27):
It's a random trans girl who was one of two
trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the
shooter as transgender. The other two people in this image
is the Nashville shooter who does appear to be trans,
and the perpetrator of the Aberdeen workplace shooting. But back
to Madison, Wisconsin. So after all of that transvestigating, what

(01:52:48):
do we have just another columnbiner with neo Nazi ties.
The right has gotten so good at deploying the trans
shooter as a smoke bomb it obscures the reality of
the ov availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization,
and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth.

(01:53:09):
Instead of focusing on all that on the victims of
this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to
spend a whole day debunking the late shooters pronouns. And
that's the point, that's what they want us talking about.
Those who delete their quote unquote trans terrorist posts after
being conclusively proven wrong, will try the exact same shtick

(01:53:31):
in a few months after the next mass shooting goes viral.
Others won't even care that much. They'll just leave up
their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel
they helped to create. I'm going to close with a
quote from Sartra. Never believe that fascists are completely unaware
of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their

(01:53:54):
remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves,
for it is their ada visari who was obliged to
use words responsibly since he believes in words. This post
has been deleted. Welcome to It could Happen Here, a

(01:54:30):
podcast about the worst coups in all of history. I'm
your host, Via Wong, and we are returning to one
of the worst coups I have ever seen, because a
whole bunch more stuff has happened in our most recent,
unbelievably dogshit coup in South Korea, the six hour coup
at which President Yun declared martial law and tried to

(01:54:52):
shut down the National Assembly, and then the National Assembly
got together and voted to end the martial law, and
then it stopped extremely.

Speaker 13 (01:55:03):
Bizarre in baffling series of events. And you know, when
we last left our intrepid heroes, the people of South Korea,
they had just successfully overturned a coup. No one quite
knew what was gonna happen in the aftermath. We knew
an impeacha vote was coming, a vote to impeach President Yun.
The reason we're coming back to this, though, is that
the aftermath of all of this has been absolutely baffling,

(01:55:26):
and I think this has all been lost in the
news cycle because about a trillion things are happening right now,
but the situation in South Korea has been unbelievably weird,
and so we're now going to take a look at
the actual impeachments of President Yun and the unbelievably bizarre
path that led to it, because oh my god, the

(01:55:47):
more I talk to people, the more I realize that
people don't know how unbelievably unhinged everything has been since
since the military coup, because everyone has moved on. So
we're going back. So immediately after the coup, there is
this whole wave of military guys going like we didn't
know we were taking part in the coup, We're totally innocent, like, oh,
they just let us out of the trucks and suddenly

(01:56:08):
we were at the National Assembly.

Speaker 4 (01:56:10):
We were like, oh, what are we doing?

Speaker 13 (01:56:12):
And there's also been this whole thing of all these
special forces guys going like oh yeah, no, no, yeah,
we totally could have taken the National Assembly in twenty
minutes if we wanted to. We just we just like
didn't want to take a National Assembly, Like we didn't
we didn't really want to do it, man.

Speaker 4 (01:56:26):
Like our heart wasn't in this coup.

Speaker 13 (01:56:28):
And like, really, I have seen the videos of that shit, man,
Like I didn't see you like going in there and
kicking ass and taking names. I saw you getting your
ass kicked by a guy just like blowing your ass
up with a fire extinguisher and like not being able
to break a bunch of very well constructive barricades set
up by like fucking Senate aids. So that's been extremely funny.

(01:56:49):
So you like vanished for the entire time this coup
was going on, and like nobody knew where he was
and no one had seen him and things were kind
of fiasco e.

Speaker 4 (01:57:00):
He was just gone.

Speaker 13 (01:57:01):
So he finally like reappeared, right and as he sort
of reappears, he tries to like do this explanation of
why he did the coup. It goes about as badly
as you would expect from someone who just failed the
worst coup that we've ever seen. Here's from MPR quote.
In his speech on Thursday June, a former chief prosecutor

(01:57:22):
attempted to justify his actions and downplay its significance. He
argued that the opposition's quote legislative dictatorship unquote paralyzed state
affairs and disturb social order. Now this, this is going
back to the thing you know he did at the time. Right,
he has this thing where he keeps calling the Parliament,
which is controlled by the Democratic Party, which is like

(01:57:42):
the liberal opposition party. He kept calling the parliaments like
opposition anti state forces, and like, my brother in Christ,
what the fuck is a legislative dictatorship? I mean, like,
you know, you could be really strictly anarchist about it
and be like, well, yeah, all legislative dictatorships, but my dude,
you are not living under a dictatorship because the parliament

(01:58:06):
that your country elected hates you and refuses to pass
your dogship budget because no one likes you. That is
simply not what the word dictatorship means. It reminds me
of this thing where like, you know, if if you
go back and you read like people in the eighteen
hundreds talking about or like eight like seventeen hundreds too,
you'll read them talking about monarchies, right, and they'll be like, Ah,

(01:58:28):
if the king can like overrule the will of the nobles,
we would be living in a peer dictatorship. It's like,
what the fuck are you talking about? Like Surri, you
live under a monarchy, like you are already in a dictatorship.
You are also like part of the authoritary and aprahas
of the dictatorship, and this is just like the inverse
of that where it's like, ah, the legislature won't let
me do whatever the fuck I want, so this is

(01:58:49):
now a dictatorship. And so like you know, that's simply
not what the word dictatorship means. And you can't get
away with that shit as much in a country where
people like in living memory have lived through an actual
military dictatorship and understand what that's like. The parliament refusing
to pass your terrible budget, that's not an excuse to

(01:59:10):
institute martial law and try to shut down the legislature.
So this was not received well as you would expect
from whatever unhinged speech that was. He did apologize for
imposing martial law, which is a very funny place to
end up, is like you try to do a coup
and then you have to go on TV and apologize
for trying to do the coup and also try to

(01:59:31):
argue you didn't just try to do a coup. So
this is received very poorly, as we sort of predicted, immediately,
the opposition Democratic Party immediately tries to impeach you. And
from the way the headlines kind of work in the West,
and from the way this is being talked about, and
even from the way this episode sort of opened, you'd
think that this impeachment vote was how we got impeached.

(01:59:52):
But no, no, the first impeachment vote is not how
Un gets impeached. Everything is way weirder than that. Now
Yun's party, the People's Power Party, which is henceforth going
to be called the PPP because I am not going
to say the words People Power Party over and over again.

Speaker 4 (02:00:10):
Good lord.

Speaker 13 (02:00:11):
The PPP get a lot of credit from people outside
of South Korea for like, you know, some of their
members legitimately did show up to Parliament to vote against
the martial law declaration, and at the time in the
last episode, I said, that's bullshit. You don't get credit
for voting against martial law. And also like most of
them weren't there, and I kind of got shipped for this,

(02:00:32):
And I have been absolutely one hundred percent vindicated because
the piece are vote, the first one rolls around, The
first one happens very quickly after the first coup, right, well,
the first QUP hopefully the only coup, hopefully is not
a second cue, but it happens very quickly, and Okay,
so the vote rolls around, and the entire PPP, the
entire party except maybe like two people just walk out

(02:00:54):
of the chambers, and because they walk out of the chambers,
the vote fails because they don't they don't have quorum.
If you don't have quorum, is like there's like a
minimum number of members that has to be in attendance
for whatever you're doing to be legal to stop like
two people from showing up in the middle of the
night and being like, aha, i am the Parliament. We've
just passed this like order that makes me dictator or whatever.
And again the entire PPP just walks out and they leave,

(02:01:17):
and the vote fails because the PPP managed to whip
basically its entire membership into trying to keep Uni in power.
And here begins the what the fuck is going on
part of this episode because A all reports we have

(02:01:40):
suggest that Yun was planning to have the leadership, but
the PPP arrested, and B he just literally tried to
do a coup and they're still backing him. And see
we stumble into a very very thorty question that I
saw from people in Korea, like the moment after all
this stuff happens, but didn't really hit the western press
until later, if at all, didn't really hit like the

(02:02:01):
mainstream consciousness. And this question will become a parent in
a second. So here's from the Guardian. Senior PPP politicians
have claimed you can continue as president while delegating his
powers to the Prime Minister. An arrangement Park. That's Park
Schoon Day, who's a very powerful Democratic Party politician. An
arrangement Park described as quote a blatant constitutional violation.

Speaker 4 (02:02:23):
With no legal basis. Now this is true.

Speaker 13 (02:02:26):
What Park is saying is right, right, and the fact
that the Guardian is saying like that their way of
framing this is Oh, the opposition party person says that
this is a blatant violation of constitutional law with no
legal basis. That's not just a thing that he says, like,
this is true, Like there is no legal mechanism for well,
we don't want to impeach our presidents. But also he

(02:02:49):
just tried to do a coup, so is said, we're
going to take his powers away and give it to
the Prime minister so he can still serve without us
impeaching him. Like, that's not a thing. You can't do this,
there's no mechanism for this. The Democratic Party people are
just completely correct here. But because for some reason the
Guardian feels it, I mean, it's the Guardian right, like,
but they feel it necessary to sort of both sides again,
a fucking coup.

Speaker 4 (02:03:08):
This is where we are. Here's more from the Guardian quote.

Speaker 13 (02:03:12):
The leader of the PPP, Hondung Hun, said at the
weekend that Yun would not be involved in foreign and
other state affairs, with control of the administration shifting to
the Prime Minister. Hon Duk su Han said Yun's televised
apology was effectively a promise to leave office.

Speaker 4 (02:03:30):
Now, no, it wasn't.

Speaker 8 (02:03:32):
It was not a promise to leave office.

Speaker 13 (02:03:34):
What the fuck are you talking about? Like, everyone could
just go listen to his apology. He didn't say that.
He did not say he was gonna leave office, right
and no, hell he says it's effectively a promise to
leave office.

Speaker 4 (02:03:43):
But it simply isn't.

Speaker 9 (02:03:44):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:03:44):
Everyone could just see this and again, like you know, okay, So,
like the thing that the thing that the PvP is
trying to do, right, the BVP is trying to have
their prime minister like gain control of of the administration. Now,
there is a mechanism to do this under the constitution.
It's called impeachment. I think it happens where you get impeached,
is that.

Speaker 4 (02:04:01):
You get kicked out of office.

Speaker 13 (02:04:03):
As we're gonna get to this later, but you get
kicked out of office and the prime minister gets put
into power and this happens until this pre court decides
whether whether whether your impeachment should go through it or not. Right, So,
like there's a mechanism for this, but the PvP doesn't
want to like impeach union, but they also don't want
him seemingly running the country because he appears to be
like absolutely unhinged and just again declared martial law and

(02:04:24):
tried to knock off the legislature.

Speaker 4 (02:04:26):
So you have this, you have this whole sort of
steaming mess.

Speaker 13 (02:04:29):
Of a situation where the PvP is trying to like
have it both ways of like not having union power
but also not impeaching him. But this also begs one
very important question, whula fuck was running the country between
the first.

Speaker 4 (02:04:44):
Appiachment vote and the second one. No one knows, No
one knows who was running this fucking country.

Speaker 13 (02:04:50):
This is a country with fifty one million people, and
nobody knew who was fucking running the country. And this
this barely made the news. I'm going insane, How how, why?
Why is this a thing that just like completely disappeared
beneath the fucking like chatter of the news waves. This
just vanished entirely. And speaking of vanishing entirely, we were

(02:05:10):
gonna vanish entirely to do these ads.

Speaker 4 (02:05:25):
And we are back.

Speaker 13 (02:05:28):
So, as you would imagine from a situation where again
you have a country, you're fifty one million people, where
no one knows who is running the country, things have
been extremely chaotic. So you know, we covered in the
last episode that like a bunch of ministers were resigning,
right because you know, they had just taken part in
a coup and they were like, well, shit, the ex

(02:05:50):
defense minister, who's one of the people who's been sort
of implicated as being like saying that he's to a
large step behind the coup, like is true. But I mean,
this is a cooperative effort between un the Defense minister
and a bunch of the people in the army, and
the defense minister who resigned in disgrace like got thrown
in jail. So that's fucking wild, Like you just got

(02:06:11):
like arrested by the police. A bunch of testimony also
has come out from the National Assembly investigation, which I'm
not covering much of the testimony from the National Assembly
investigation because it's really unclear exactly how reputable all this
stuff is because a lot of people are just saying shit, right,

(02:06:34):
and some of it may be real. Some of it
maybe some of that people have you know, obtained their sources,
but some of it's probably not. But like to get
a sense of like the kind of stuff that is
coming out in this investigation, one of the big claims
was from I think it's from like a TV host
who claimed he got texted it by a guy in
the army, but apparently he was saying that the plan

(02:06:57):
by union in the army, the plan was to have
the head of the PPP called and then drop a
North Korean uniform nearby to like do a false flag
and implicate North Korean special forces. Now this is unbelievably unhinged, right,
what the fuck? And it probably isn't true, but you know,

(02:07:20):
the source isn't great, But like who knows, right, Like,
we don't actually know if they're playing to do this
and fucked it up, or if they weren't playing to
do this, or if this person is this person just lying,
this person did get this text, but the person was misinformed.
We don't know if this is just like misinformation that's
being spread around. This is a good demonstration of what
the sort of chaos of this moment has been. And

(02:07:43):
you know, and there's been a lot of other stuff
that I think in any other time and place probably
would have been like front page news. So one of
the things that happens in this whole process is that
the South Korean police tried to raid the house of
the president, and you know, like as as part of
their investigation, there's a whole thing where Union's been ordered

(02:08:04):
by like the investigatorial services to not leave the country
because he's just actively under investigation for this military coup
being illegal by just like the regular ass police. And
so South Korean police like try to raid his house
and they can't do it because the South Korean equivalent
of the Secret Service stops them from doing the raid.
And this in and of itself is something that like

(02:08:25):
again would be a giant news headline at any other
point in time, and it's just been completely lost, and
it's like it's not sort of clear right now how
this is all sort of going to play out, and
whether the police are going to be able to do this,
and you know, what's actually gonna happen to you un

(02:08:46):
after he presumably leaves office. I mean, I guess the
Streme Court could save him, but like, you know, there's
a real chance that he and we're going to get
into this morning a second, there's a real chance that
he just like fucking goes to prison, right and unlike
the last president who was going to move from office,
like I can't imagine him getting pardoned by the next
administration because that was merely an unhinged corruption scandal involving

(02:09:08):
the president of South Korea being under the influence of
a shaman and doing.

Speaker 4 (02:09:14):
A bunch of corruption that did a bunch of horrible shit.

Speaker 13 (02:09:16):
But this is, you know, this is like he tried
to do a coup, right, So it's sort of unclear
if he's going to get saved from that. It does
seem very likely that he's going to face a bunch
of charges for this because everyone is unbelievably pissed off.
Here's from DW. On Monday, former head of Special Warfare

(02:09:37):
Command Kwak Jung Gwyn and former head of the Capitol
Defense Command Legion Wu were arrested on charges of deploying
military personnel to the parliament. Former chief of the Defense
Counterintelligence Command Yo En Hung has been accused of orchestrating
the implementation of martial law, and Army Chief Park Ensiu

(02:09:59):
has been s suspended from his role. Yun's former Defense
Minister Kim Yung hyun, who stepped down immediately following the
boarded martial law declaration, and former Interior Minister Lee Song
Men also face investigations. So what we're seeing here effectively, right,
is the house cleaning of the ranks of the Korean
military who've been involved with this whole thing, right, and

(02:10:20):
they're going through a lot of different people. Part of
this is also clearing out some of like the clicks
in the military who've been sort of backing Yun and
who people have suspected have been a bunch of people
behind a lot.

Speaker 4 (02:10:33):
Of this stuff. And this is a good and necessary process.

Speaker 13 (02:10:37):
The entire time this has been going on, everyone has
been terrified of the possibility of a second coup and
the only way to avoid that in the short term
is to remove the senior leadership of the military and
get them away from their troops. They don't have the
ability to sort of plan anything, and sometimes this can
make people just go for it, right Like that, that's
what happens in Bolivia. It looks like where the oblivion

(02:11:00):
qu was a product of, you know, people trying to
do house cleaning and get rid of military guys before
they did a coup, and so that this makes them
go off half cocked, and like, you know, that's a
bad situation for I mean, it's bad situation for everyone
that says that there's a coup happening, but it's a
bad situation, especially for the military, because they don't have
their coup preparations in place, so it's easier to knock
them off. But what's interesting about this too is that

(02:11:23):
to a large extent, we're seeing other parts of the
Korean state like really go after the military, right, And
this I don't know, I mean, like I'm hoping this
kind of like has a precedent inside of the sort
of Korean like liberal democratic societal norms that like, you
can't let this just unhinged military do all of this stuff.

(02:11:48):
That the precedent of this sort of like military house cleaning,
I think is a good one, Right, this is.

Speaker 4 (02:11:54):
Going to be a rare, a rare.

Speaker 13 (02:11:57):
Mia agrees with the people who founded the US moment
because oh my god, those people suck shit like a
bunch of slave owning, gedicidal bassards. But you know, one
of the things that they were right about is the
political danger to any democratic system of having a standing army, right,
and especially when you have set a standing army that's
like permanently on a semi war footing. The way the

(02:12:18):
South Korea is is there's always a real political risk
that they attempt to seize power and you have to
fucking stop them from doing that. And ideally you just
fucking acts as much of it as you possibly can, right,
And I mean I think you should act. You acts
the entire political system to make sure this doesn't happen.
But you know, this is a this is hopefully a
good first step. I also want to mention that the

(02:12:41):
specific charge of insurrection is being thrown at a lot
of these people and also at Un himself, and like
he absolutely did it, right, Like, there's not much of
a dispute that he did in fact do an insurrection
under under sort of Korean law, and this technically like
carries the death penalty, but I.

Speaker 4 (02:13:02):
Don't think they're gonna kill him.

Speaker 13 (02:13:03):
But you know, this is the sort of severity of
this stuff under the Korean legal system. And Okay, so,
like all of this fucking chaos happening, right, And eventually
there's a second impeachment vote, and this time the public
pressure is enough that the PPP stays in the chamber
to vote no, and only about a dozen Like per MPR,

(02:13:26):
only about a dozen PPP lawmakers actually vote to impeach
the guy who just tried to have their fucking parliament disbanded,
you know. And this is like one of the really
depressing things about this, right, even after everything, right, and
this is something that we can trace back to sort
of the roots of the conservatism of the PPP even
after all of this shit, right, Like, these people still

(02:13:47):
backed him. And that's a really really grim and depressing thing.
And part of the reaction to this has been from
the South Korean trade Union Movement, which has been calling
for just to straight up the disbanding of the PPP
as a political party, right, And that's something that I
think is extremely reasonable. Again, if your party's president tries
to do a military coup, I think I think you

(02:14:09):
shouldn't be allowed to have a party anymore.

Speaker 4 (02:14:12):
This is the liberal opinions, right, Okay.

Speaker 13 (02:14:16):
So like eventually this vote does go through, and the
stage that we're at right now is that, Okay, so
once you get impeached by the National Assembly, you're suspended
from all your duties and the Prime Minister takes power.
So it's happening right now is he doesn't have any
power formally, but we're still in this sort of holding period.
We're waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in and

(02:14:37):
either like approve the impeachment or not. And that's kind
of where things stand now after an unbelievably unhinged week
at a half of just everything being extremely unboud two weeks,
I guess everything being just unbelievably extremely weird. And yeah,
but I think I think there is a mild hopeful note,

(02:14:58):
which is that like, if if you fight back against
these people, they can be defeated. It sucks, but you
can eventually get them to crumble. And all I can
really say for this is I hope the South Korean
people prevail over the shitty military dictators, and I hope
that we too are able to sort of prevail in
the US against our sort of equivalents of these forces.

(02:15:42):
Welcome to It could happen here a podcast that I
introduced the same way almost every time.

Speaker 10 (02:15:46):
I don't know.

Speaker 13 (02:15:46):
You listen to the show, right, you're listening at like
some point in the future, you probably know the things
fall like apart putting back together again intro.

Speaker 4 (02:15:55):
I don't have to do it.

Speaker 13 (02:15:56):
We are doing something that we have done before, and
I guess we'll continue to you, which is talking to
other anarchist media projects about their work and how things
are going, and.

Speaker 4 (02:16:06):
Yeah, the general why, how what of it all?

Speaker 13 (02:16:11):
And today we're talking with the Collective Anarchist Writers, and
very specifically we're talking to Shirley Branson who is a writer,
translator and teacher currently living in so called New York,
Parla Joy Bergman who lives across the border in Canada
and is a mom, writer, artist and loves crows.

Speaker 4 (02:16:27):
Very important.

Speaker 13 (02:16:27):
We'll be coming that back to that in a second.
And Vicky Ostiwil, who is a worker, writer and agitator
based in Philadelphia. And all three of you, welcome to
the show.

Speaker 9 (02:16:36):
Hi, thanks for having us, Thanks so much for having us,
for having us, love our project. Also, just wanted to
give a shout out to our fourth member, Danny Berlison,
who's not here today because she's working paid work, who
just rounds us out so beautifully and wanted to say
her name.

Speaker 13 (02:16:53):
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this, and partly I'm
excited to talk about it because the acronym for this
is caw and there's a whole crow theme going on
and we love a crow here in Portland. It is
maybe our big thing.

Speaker 9 (02:17:07):
Yeah, I'm in Vancouver. Well I was in Vancouver just
up from there, but Pacific Northwest, and so it's pro highway.
You know, thousands and thousands of crows.

Speaker 14 (02:17:17):
Oh yeah, I got it. I think the crow is
like what ultimately sealed the project for us, honestly, Yeah, hell.

Speaker 4 (02:17:24):
Yeah it was.

Speaker 15 (02:17:25):
It really came together around around the Corvid theme, I think.

Speaker 16 (02:17:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:17:29):
Yeah, in the combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence,
and never ending spite, I think are all sort of
motivating factors for.

Speaker 1 (02:17:36):
All of us.

Speaker 9 (02:17:37):
So yeah, and that there are collective and have meetings
often throughout.

Speaker 14 (02:17:42):
The day, a collective called a murder which is also
pretty badass.

Speaker 4 (02:17:49):
Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland. We have the
Mega Murder.

Speaker 13 (02:17:53):
So every every like morning, all the crows sort of
fly off into their different like little murders and they
go you know, they go out and hang out in
the city, and then at a round sunset every day,
all of the crows fly back into the city. They
have their like giant mega murdering meeting. There's thousands and
thousands of them. You know, you look up and you
just see them like the herds like that, the murders
of crows flying past. And if you there's different spots

(02:18:15):
in Portland where you can just go see all of
the all all all the crows hanging out and you know,
doing doing doing whatever the things crows do. When literally
an entire cities where the crows gathered together every night.

Speaker 16 (02:18:27):
Oh no, it's a spokes council.

Speaker 1 (02:18:31):
But.

Speaker 13 (02:18:32):
It's all a spokes also because all of them are there,
I feel like that's an assembly.

Speaker 7 (02:18:37):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:18:38):
Vancouver, it's called it's called the Crow Highway. Yeah, hell yeah,
because it's so massive and goes forever and ever and
ever to their roost. Brief story on crows and resistance.
A really incredible story in Vancouver when a park was
a colonial person created a park in the downtown which

(02:18:59):
was like the placed a lot of Indigenous people in
their homes and designed this park that was filled with
crows as well. They also brought in animals from Europe
as well to make it pretty, and the crows made
it really hard for these animals. And so the City
of Vancouver for fifty years from nineteen hundred to nineteen

(02:19:21):
fifty gave free range to the Vancouver gun people to
go into the park and shoot crows every day, Oh
my god. And when I see like the amount of
crows that are still alive, it's just some metaphor for
indigenous resilience, you know, like it's just so powerful. So

(02:19:42):
it's another reason why I'm like interested in terms of
where I was like living.

Speaker 14 (02:19:47):
As I've been gathering images for our project that I've
been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking people
because I think that's good. So it's like, you know,
the follow up to what you were saying, Carla, is
the crow's revenge.

Speaker 10 (02:20:03):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (02:20:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:20:04):
One of the things that you know, you kind of
have to do here in Portland is you have to
kind of like negotiate with the crows. You have to
like you leave them like peace offerings and you sort
of you know, when your friends come, you let you
introduce them to the crows or the crows know that
you're okay.

Speaker 9 (02:20:18):
It's very sweet, shiny things.

Speaker 4 (02:20:21):
Yeah, we love a crow based society.

Speaker 13 (02:20:24):
And speaking of a crow based society, yeah, do you
want to, I guess, give a brief sort of overview
of what cause is before we get sort.

Speaker 4 (02:20:31):
Of more into it.

Speaker 15 (02:20:33):
Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that.

Speaker 1 (02:20:35):
As VICKI by the way.

Speaker 15 (02:20:36):
Yeah, So CAU is sort of like I mean, it's
an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is a
collective of anarchist writers. It's also a corved appreciation working group,
and there's a lot of different acronyms for it. And
what we are doing is we are bringing all for
at first, just all four of our efforts together. So
a lot of us work on separate podcasts, We have
pedagological tasks, We have many activist projects at center around culture.

(02:21:00):
You know, I have a newsletter, Surely has a Patreon,
Kyla has a newsletter, Danny has has also has like
an email list. There's just all these different projects, and
we realize that, like for all of our talk about
mutual aid and working collectively, when it comes to writing
and creativity, the market has been so fractured and so
alienated and sort of so turned into like everyone has

(02:21:22):
an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another, you know,
even though they don't want to be like they want
to be. But that's sort of ultimately what's happening is
that there's limited sort of customers and there's also this
other trend going on right now of this really exciting
kind of worker owned journals. A lot of them local journalisms.
There's some in New York and Chicago, and there's one
in Ashville and all over the country as well as

(02:21:43):
like on special topics, so like Aftermath, which like does
I think the other video games, and there's four or
four media, it does tech. There's just like all these
different sort of sites doing this sort of thing, and
I think in some ways all of us are sort
of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort of
stolen and destroyed by capital, you know, in a big way.

Speaker 7 (02:21:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:22:00):
So there's sort of two goals that we have, and
I think Carla Carla speaks really eloquently to some of this,
but one of which is to make writing radical culture
work beautiful, joyful, fun and also critical like movement work.
To make it sustainable for us and for anyone else
who wants to share in this project, who we can
sort of expand towards, but also to make it easier

(02:22:22):
for people who are reading to have access to these
things like in one place, instead of having to you know,
decide who they care for and who they like in
order to sort of you know, do that mac of
like who can I afford to subscribe to, like I personally,
I don't know if it's true for everyone else, but
personally I usually have about two or three people I
can afford to subscribe to a month, and I switch
it out, just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know,
or something like that that was very technical and financially focused.

(02:22:45):
But what we're really excited to do mostly is support
each other's work, because I think we all really love
and admire each other's work and have for a long time,
and this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of
my writing just being for me, it's for Shuley and
Carla and Danny No, And that just makes it feel
more inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.

Speaker 14 (02:23:05):
Yeah, I mean connected to the financial aspect, but I
think when we are initially discussing this, the experience of
being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. Yeah,
and if you're trying to get paid for that, you
have to sell it to people, right, And so it's
very hard to get paid at all for writing, and
it's very hard to place your writing in venues that

(02:23:26):
publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle
because people do not really want to publish things that
come to anarchist conclusions, Like they want you to do
all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you
to think about like what an action is like, so like,
you know, you could write for some of the lefty
so called lefty socialist whatever rags, but they don't.

Speaker 16 (02:23:49):
Yeah, they won't feature anarchists.

Speaker 14 (02:23:50):
They basically even just act as if anarchism doesn't exist,
never exists, you know, never existed. They erase the whole
history of it. The only serious kind of political force
is some kind of democratic socialism. So to us, we
wanted to create a place where we can do the
writing we want to do without having to make compromises
and what we want to.

Speaker 16 (02:24:10):
Say just to get published.

Speaker 14 (02:24:13):
Because that, yeah, just that game of like of shopping
your stuff around is it's demeaning. It's totally time consuming.
It distracts you from actually doing the work. So we
were like less banned together instead of each of us
going off wasting our time trying to write.

Speaker 13 (02:24:31):
Yeah, and I think one of the other issues with
this too also, like the pay is just so bad,
Like even though almost especially the leftist groups like page
is so rancid, and all of the combinations of those
things make it really really hard to just sort of
be an independent writer. And also, okay, jumping back a
second to the racing anicism exists. This is why the

(02:24:52):
one that makes me always lose my mind is Like
I'm specifically going to name Jocobin here because I don't
like them, but like, one of the things that jacumum
will do is though covering a strike that is organized
by the IWW it is an IWW union, that they
will have pictures of the strike where there are a
bunch of people holding IWW banners, and they will never
mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike.
So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy

(02:25:16):
of silence I guess about our politics and the stuff that.

Speaker 4 (02:25:20):
We do in the world.

Speaker 16 (02:25:21):
It's so glaring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit.

Speaker 14 (02:25:24):
And then the podcasts associated with the dig like they
will specifically will be talking about history where anarchists have
been very involved.

Speaker 16 (02:25:32):
And they just will not mention them.

Speaker 14 (02:25:34):
I'm like, and they sometimes there's really good history and
analysis on that podcast, but like, this is an omission
that they clearly are choosing.

Speaker 13 (02:25:42):
Yeah, and I think, you know, self organization is effectively
the only way out of this, because why is you
just sort of I don't know how I have to
deal with all the sort of media gatekeepers like sitting
there in front of you with a stick going no
anarchism of balk Yeah, and.

Speaker 15 (02:25:58):
Even the projects that have sustained, that have survived, which
are all really awesome, you know, like and exciting, like
very few of them have offered real sustainability, like on
a professional level, and like I've been publishing like quote
unquote professionally for fifteen years, and like I'm the like
newest writer on the scene, like from our crew basically,
like we're incredibly experienced, and all of us have books out,

(02:26:20):
all of us have edited volumes, all of us have
like podcasts, and like are people who I like, really respect,
whose names I think are big and important in the
world of theory and activism and like in the Anglophone
world especially, and none of us can sustain ourselves as
writers as such because of the way that just you know,
both politically but also just like the way the market
has come down and it just feels like something we

(02:26:42):
could apply our politics to solving as a workplace issue
rather than just sort of as like a you know,
are you committed enough to sacrifice all your time issue?
And so hopefully like that will also function to make
more work available to produce and to platform and to
yeah to to sort of work as an example simultaneously.

Speaker 13 (02:27:02):
Unfortunately, speak of speaking of sustaining work as a platform. Unfortunately,
the way we are sustained here is with these ads.

Speaker 4 (02:27:08):
So hold on and we are back, and this, I
guess brings us to the kind of work that's happening here.
And I was very.

Speaker 13 (02:27:25):
Excited because one of the things y'all have done is
an interview with Rouls of Becky, who is the author
of like one of my favorite quotes of all time.
I think I've said on this show like multiple times
that I weirdly ran into in a sort of completely
unrelated book called Rhythms of the Patchacouti, which is about
the sort of the water and gas wars in Bolivia.
I talked about this book on the show like all

(02:27:47):
the time. This quote goes roughly like struggle illuminates the
divisions of a society like lightning illuminates the sky.

Speaker 4 (02:27:54):
And I love it.

Speaker 13 (02:27:55):
It's like it's like it's the best explanation of what
happened during twenty twenty that I've ever seen, And this
is sort of what's happening like right now too, is
like you have these sort of flashpoint moments where where
you know, suddenly, like all of how society works very
briefly becomes visible and you have this sort of moment
when you're eludinated by it to act. And so I'm
really excited that you are talking to him, And yeah,

(02:28:18):
because you talked to Pet a bit more about what's
been going on and what's to come.

Speaker 9 (02:28:22):
I'm sure thanks. That was a highlight definitely this shear
was talking to Raoul obviously, you know a podcastco. We
talked for quite a bit longer than what was on
the show, and I think like reading his newest book
that was translated and then doing that show with him,
it was completely connected to me, like reaching out to

(02:28:44):
Schuley about doing Call, because there is a way that
that he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries
that those Bapotistas are working on, like this idea of
really truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality
or autonomy that we don't actually enact in our day
to day lives. And so I really started to reflect

(02:29:06):
on my own life that way. And not so much
Vicky at this point yet, but like Huli and Danny,
both of them, like we just were blurbing each other's
books and like supporting each other to connecting to publishers
or trying to connect each other to publishers, and just
like trying to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath
even when we're all really committed to not being competitive,

(02:29:29):
but there's like it is, like there's a you know.
So all is to say that for me, like collaboration
is at the heart of what we're doing here in
a deep, deep way. And for me, collaboration just means
that when something is created that wouldn't be created otherwise
without this collaboration. So I'm just really excited to see

(02:29:49):
what sparks and comes up individually, but also like with
each other and even like through collaborations like this show
with Raoul and like how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah,
so like for myself, I'm going to definitely focus on
collaboration in a deep way. I don't think I'll write
very much solo stuff for the for call, I think

(02:30:09):
it will always be in conversation with others and just
trying to double down on on doing it together instead
of individual pursuits.

Speaker 13 (02:30:21):
Yeah, And that's something I think is useful for everyone
listening to this, is that, like it's a lot easier
to develop better ideas, and you know, it makes your
writing more clear. It makes the way that you, you know,
just the way you act in the world a lot
more clear when you're working with other people, and it's
you know, it's it's it's the process by which the
best stuff gets created.

Speaker 15 (02:30:41):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's really like true. And
I think like I have for a long time now
sort of accepted that writing is never going to support
or sustain me. And all I needed was a push
from a few other people to be like, wait, what
if we like actually tried to do it collectively, to
be like, oh, yeah, like I could actually try that,
Like I don't have to just accept that, Like I'll
always have like a full time job plus whatever writing,

(02:31:02):
like in whatever hours I can steal, you know, and
like you know, with great difficulty put out some writing
sometimes and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting
out enough to like sustain myself, like that whole process.
I think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle,
you know, of having gigs and work and lots of
other important things to do and and you know, sort
of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like,

(02:31:24):
what's so inspiring about? You know, because Carlin and as
Carlo was just mentioning, they sort of brought I'm the
last one on the on the crew, and I was
sort of the closer, you know or whatever. But I think, like,
I don't know what that means genuinely, but but I
was brought in. And I think just having them propose
it already just as a project that we've been thinking
of has like changed the way I've been thinking about
what is possible with the writing I'm already doing. And

(02:31:47):
so I think, like, just to underline that point and
go on and on, collaborations really really like important and
supporting one another.

Speaker 1 (02:31:55):
So is so powerful.

Speaker 14 (02:31:56):
Yeah, When carl and I initially had like the seed
come versation of this, like Carlo said something about collectivizing
as writers, like we talk about it with all these
other other workplaces and industries and whatever, and it was
like like when when she said that, I was like, oh, yeah,
like that makes so much sense. Like we're off here
doing our own thing, and as Vicky said, you do

(02:32:19):
it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable.

Speaker 16 (02:32:23):
You steal your time to.

Speaker 14 (02:32:24):
Do it, right, Even the supposed jobs that are there
to enable you to write actually make you do all
this other work. So like the time for writing is
always like endlessly deferred. And you know, we have that
image also like of the patron or something, or like
Virginia Woolf says, you need money enough to have a
room of one's own. But if we put ourselves together

(02:32:46):
in this way, then we are trying to, yeah, I
don't know, create more time for ourselves to write. And then,
like going back to something Vicky said earlier about like
reinventing the newspaper, there was a time in anarchism where
I think we talked about this amongst ourselves, like where
like every block had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper. Right,
It wasn't like, yeah, you had one newspaper telling all

(02:33:08):
the anarchists, but to think it was like it was
hyper local in a way, and there was so many voices,
and so I think that's another thing that we want
to do is like help for that proliferation, because in
the sort of spirit of collaboration, like the reason to
write as an anarchist for me is to have conversations
to produce the possibility for people to like receive it
and then contact me into and I get into conversations

(02:33:31):
with people and learn things from them.

Speaker 10 (02:33:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:33:33):
I think it's an angle there too, where like I
think we're kind of okay. So I was a tiny
baby when all this was happening, so I'm gonna have
to rely on y'all for this. But like, you know,
one of the things I get from sort of reading
the record about like the older anarchist movie. I mean
when I say older, I mean like like anti anti
globalization era stuff was like there seems like there was

(02:33:53):
a lot more of a kind of like anarchist media sphere.

Speaker 9 (02:33:56):
Are you talking about like the late nineties, Yeah, and like.

Speaker 4 (02:33:59):
Like to the two thousands to some extent like a
Battle Seattle.

Speaker 9 (02:34:03):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that was like the you know,
the birth of anarchy again, right, Yeah, I was definitely
around I'm in my late fifties, but the same struggle
was there like that, yeah, that we're swimming in liberalism
and like that socialist worker like capturing of the movement

(02:34:23):
was just as powerful then, and it was you saw
it at all the rallies and stuff, and you know,
immediately anarchism was marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and
not practical for the revolution, and this is why it
splintered off and all these kind of sectarian movements in
the That's my take anyway, I think.

Speaker 4 (02:34:42):
That no, it makes sense, it makes sense.

Speaker 9 (02:34:44):
I mean I've hashed this out with so many older anarchists.
I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies, Like we
talked about this a lot phenomena with Scott Crow, and
you could just see the direct line of where it
went into sectarianism from this sort of rebirth. Sorry I
went off on a different thing instead of like journals
and media.

Speaker 13 (02:35:03):
But yeah, no, no, well this is good too, because
like I think that's the other thing I've been realizing
is like people don't I mean in my generation too,
but like people younger than me don't really know the.

Speaker 4 (02:35:12):
History of this stuff.

Speaker 13 (02:35:13):
Like all the time I have conversations with people where
I started talking about like the Wahaka Uprising, and they
have no idea what I'm talking about, and I'm like,
oh no, we need to like we need to like
resuscitate the history of like the two thousands, because stuff
happened there.

Speaker 15 (02:35:27):
So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I
was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at
the moment. And some of that was actually because a
lot of what was going on in the alter globalization
movement in that period was happening through culture. I think
most famously, like touring punk bands would also bring zine
libraries with them, so they would have someone destroying zines

(02:35:47):
and playing the show. And like, I mean I got
radicalized through punk. I know a lot of people who
did that. Was you know when I finally did, it
was after that movement had largely crusted. But I think
there was a lot of focus on culture and also
a critique of clture was also pretty central to how
people were thinking and moving. And I think the explosion
of social media and like posting and like the sort

(02:36:09):
of quote unquote democratization and leveling of communication capabilities, which
in some ways was more real in the early twenty
tens than it is certainly than it is now. It
wasn't totally like a made up narrative, but there was
also it was also over relied on. I think people
sort of reached for a kind of like, well, we
anyone who can use these tools to communicate, like that's valuable.

(02:36:31):
So critiquing sort of media in general, or critiquing sort
of capitalist media is sort of beside the point because
we can go around it. We can sort of go
we can you know, go on Twitter and subvert it,
and we can like do all these you know, go
sideways around it. So I was, you know, a participant
in to Occupy Wall Street twenty eleven, which people also
don't know anything about because that's just being older. But

(02:36:51):
Occupy Wall Street was started by a magazine called Adbusters,
which came out of the WTO movement and sort of
managed to stick around. And by two thousand eleven, when
they did that, we thought it was like a joke.
It was like, oh, these culture jammers who like make
fun of advertisements, like they started the movement. Like that's ridiculous, right,
Like that's silly, and like this is not to defend Adbusters,
I think.

Speaker 4 (02:37:11):
Whatever, Yeah, there's some issues with them. But yeah, yeah,
they also did think.

Speaker 15 (02:37:16):
I don't know, yeah, But also I think that reaction
of like culture jamming is sort of stupid or like,
you know, like talking about who wants to talk about culture?
At this point, I think that that made sense in
the context in which we were moving and organizing. But
like now, once again, it is clear that by abandoning
the cultural sphere in many ways, we have in fact
lost a tremendous amount of ground. So I think it's

(02:37:36):
actually really important to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory,
that aren't just news, but that are like really talking
about art and beauty and like excitement and joy and
fiction and all these things that we find really important
because you know, I think a lot of people sort
of think, well, it's a crisis moment, you know, the
world's ending, why would you do that? But like the
world has been ending since fourteen ninety two, Like the

(02:37:58):
world worth defending has been ending since then, and it
hasn't ended yet. And one of the ways it hasn't
ended is by indigenous and black and other marginalized cultures
and stories and narratives and works of art has been
an important mode of history and resistance just as much
as organizing and struggle, And yeah, I think we can
move some struggle into that terrain right now. And I

(02:38:20):
think there's a lot of craving for it now because
I think also for a while things felt really oversaturated.
But the last five years, the Internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No,
everything feels like streaming is a mess. Like everything's a mess.
There's no access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates
what they're doing. They know it's exploiting the artists. They know,
you know, Spotify is giving people pennies, and that you know,

(02:38:41):
Hbo and all those you know, all the all the
streaming services you know, support Amazon, and they're they're just miserable, right,
And I think there's there's a real opening and a
real desire for something else at this moment, at the
same time that things are indeed quite on fire, literally ecocidally,
but also also sort of politically, yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:38:59):
Speaking, everything being on fire, we need to take an
ad break and then we will come back. And I
think the deliberate political intervention here we are back from
capital healthscape to mildly less capital healthscape.

Speaker 1 (02:39:19):
Ye.

Speaker 4 (02:39:19):
Actually you're gonna.

Speaker 14 (02:39:20):
Say, yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing,
because when you know, when after October seventh, when people
are getting together to try to figure out how in
the United States to do some kind of work and
action and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian
Liberation movement, like people were just sort of like, what
the hell can we even do? And one of the
things that I would say to people is like just

(02:39:42):
putting up stickers and writing about Gaza on the walls,
like in graffiti has a huge impact in it. It's
overlooked often, I think, as like something that's effective, but
we can see that there has been a giant cultural
shift after October seventh in terms of people's awareness of
the Israeli Gino side against the Palestinians and then support

(02:40:02):
for the Palestinians. I think that it has to do really,
you know, post October seventh, with the fact that this
was like kind of plastered everywhere, and so it's easy
to kind of think that that isn't action. But to me,
in a way, doing something like that is more effective
than the kind of marching in circles that we can
do that we call protest, and you know, like going

(02:40:24):
back to punk, I think also punk has gets a
bad rap sometimes because you know, in that line of
like the kind of bookschin lifestyleism. But I don't think
we should downplay like punk created its own culture of
people doing everything themselves to make it happen. It's where
I got radicalized too. And they were like it was anarchists, right,

(02:40:46):
It was like explicitly anarchist, and you were living in
an anarchist way and like creating things in an anarchist.

Speaker 16 (02:40:53):
Way, and it was this whole other world.

Speaker 14 (02:40:55):
So like, if we put our anarchist energy into culture,
it's part of making a world that we want to
live in, you know, over and against this world, this
hell world that we're also trying to destroy at the
same time. So I think we shouldn't kind of just
like dismiss this as as less important than the other

(02:41:16):
kinds of actions that we can take.

Speaker 13 (02:41:18):
You're here, yeah, And that brings me to something I
wanted to sort of ask about, like more deliberately, which
is like, what's the kind of specific political intervention that
you're trying to make into this moment with this project
and both stor I guess a bit more generally too
big question.

Speaker 9 (02:41:35):
I mean, my work has always been about intervening around
any kind of dominant narratives that things are just now bad,
or that people don't know what anything, or pedagogically they're lacking.
Like I've always tried to intervene around this idea that
we've always been otherwise, and we always are, and there's
always cracks everywhere and eruptions of batical ways of being,

(02:42:00):
knowing and doing, and so it's like a deepening of that.
And I think probably on a systemic thinking systemically is
really about disrupting individualism or liberalism or empire, whatever you
want of colonialism to really like live it in the everyday.
So that's partly that. And then on just a super
practical level, like you know, all of us don't have wealth,

(02:42:23):
don't have generational wealth, are working all the time to
try to meet and meet and some of us are
have housing insecurity and other real basic needs are insecure
and health stuff and so like actually showing up for
each of us is at the core of it. For me,
like I it feels so good in my body to

(02:42:45):
know that I'm not just showing up to think about
what to do for cow. For me, it's like in
the act of collectivism for each other, and so I'm
just open to what sparks and emerges with our work.
I don't have an agenda except for to disrupt and
intervene belief systems that are ideologically driven by empire. And

(02:43:10):
I also came of age in the early eighties in
the punk scene and had a venue space and to me,
punk is and I would say hip hop is well
underground hip hop stuff is like always The way to
disrupt being captured by empire or from liberalism is to
keep that punk ethos of doing it together and keeping
it low to the ground.

Speaker 15 (02:43:30):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I just like to build on that, Carl,
because I think that was really beautiful. Second, everything that
you said is it like many of us have a perspective.
You know that huge structural change is going to need
to come, and that often that will come through these
big social movements, that these explosions of energy that you know,
these lightning strikes, right, But you can't force those, you
can't make those happen. Yeah, and in the meantime you can.

(02:43:54):
I think I've spent a lot of my in the
meantimes in trying to sort of organ stuff that sort
of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just
feels often feels like wheel spinning, you know, like I'm building,
I'm trying to build mass movement organizing like you know,
like whatever that means. And in the twenty tens, like
one of the things that happens from like twenty eleven,
are you by two thousand nine, but definitely twenty eleven

(02:44:16):
to twenty twenty was that wherever you were, it was
never more than probably eighteen months before there was like
something else going off in the streets. And so although
those could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult,
you still had a lot of periods where you know,
you could just sort of be waiting and it would
just sort of happened.

Speaker 1 (02:44:32):
Again.

Speaker 15 (02:44:32):
That was certainly what I was doing in that decade
in a way that I don't think I appreciated until
it was over, because the last four years has been
very different. The rhythm has been very different since the
pandemic started. And I can't just say Panini on this podcast, Okay,
everyone does it right, yeah, Sin since the dynamics started,

(02:44:53):
you know, those rhythms have been disrupted, and I think
the Biden counter revolution against Way twenty, which has also
really disrupted those things in that space. It has felt
very clear to me personally. And I'm older, you know whatever.
I'm like, you know, a movement elder at this point,
just because our movements are so you focused now, because
I'm actually old. Like the decade before twenty eleven, from

(02:45:14):
like two thousand and one, you know, from from nine
to eleven until it sort of occupies sort of how
I periodize it a bit. There wasn't a ton of
street movement. You had the Iraq War stuff that was really,
really big, and there were important exceptions to that in
the US. I'm doing a potted history here. Obviously there's
exceptions to this, but you definitely had all this time,
and the stuff that was sustained and remembered were largely
like sort of cultural projects, and so like I think

(02:45:35):
like now as we're moving into this era here in
North America on Turtle Island of extreme repressive danger, right, like,
we shouldn't like joke about it or downplay it. Like
we were facing a lot of extreme repression and fascists
back in the streets in a big way. It doesn't
feel like big political organizing of the kind that happened
during the first Trump administration where people did a lot

(02:45:56):
of marching in circles, but there were targets for the pressure,
you know, like they don't feel as relevant now, but
now I'm really off, way off. But no, but no,
I think so, I think like I think like we're
in this moment where the fascists both are quite empowered
and very unfocused. They're confused, they don't really have us
in their sights, like they think Liz Cheney is just

(02:46:17):
as much a revolutionary as Assadashikur or whatever, right, and
like that leaves us some space to move and to
build things that can maintain the spirit of resistance, that
can reproduce a culture of resistance that can also organize.
And another thing that has really been important for me
recently with Kaw is that I've been doing an organizing
project that I won't talk about the details of, but

(02:46:38):
that the skills have largely come from punk music that
I did in the twenties twenty is being in a
touring punk band, and those skills have made this organizing
really easy. And that's been a huge thing for me
because I'm working with other people who are younger who
don't have that experientially.

Speaker 2 (02:46:52):
Oh, how do you do this.

Speaker 15 (02:46:53):
I'm like, oh no, no, it's so easy. You just
like do this. You know, here's these skills I learned
just from doing music, And like, I don't think that's
just like accidental, as Shuley was saying, like the DIY
nature of some of that work, the culture work. You know,
maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The bands I was in
certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever, but they gave
me all of these powerful skills and ideas and concepts

(02:47:14):
for doing really important work. And I think that that's
also a reason to pursue DIY culture in a way
that's genuinely sustainable and world building.

Speaker 14 (02:47:23):
I think like if I can build off this too,
and I'm going to try to do some tying together
of things. But like one of the ways that I
think about my contribution is to think about like let's
not like don't look there, let's look over here. And
that can mean of multiple things, which is often when
people think politically, they're looking at these big moments or

(02:47:44):
big actions or like top down solutions, which means that
we take our attention away from these other places where
we're doing all this stuff like carloisting, like we're already
doing a lot of important kind of like life making work.
And then also there's moments in in our movements where
we have to be like you all look over here
while we do stuff over right, Like you don't want

(02:48:06):
to be seen all the time, so we have to
be able to direct our attention to the things that
we do and then also keep some of that stuff
under wraps, and that means it's hard sometimes to see
and because it's so decentralized, and anarchism really functions through decentralization,
like we're not always aware of how much power we
actually have and what's going on at.

Speaker 16 (02:48:26):
Any one moment.

Speaker 14 (02:48:27):
And going back to the kind of moments, even tracing
back to the Battle of Seattle, and I think it's
like ever more present today in all of the kinds
of organizing for street actions that are being done, that
a lot of the groundwork for any of these moments
is done by anarchists, and then it's not either claimed
by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists, Like we make

(02:48:48):
everything sort of run, and anarchism makes everything run, and
then it just gets ignored because it's not about taking credit,
it's not about kind of imposing itself. And so I
think like that kind of in between of seeing what
we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then keeping under
wrap so that we can keep chugging along, and then

(02:49:10):
just also being aware of when our work is being
stolen and then repurposed for something that goes against what
we want.

Speaker 16 (02:49:15):
I think these are all ways for us to prepare for.

Speaker 14 (02:49:18):
Those moments of like explosion or eruption where anarchy really
manifests and then we can kind of taste freedom for
a moment, love it.

Speaker 12 (02:49:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:49:28):
I think though the way I've always thought about it
was just kind of like, is this like flame tending
process where in these sort of low cycles, your job
is to keep the flame alive and eventually you know
that you're going to see it, Like you know you're
going to see the explosion again, right, You're going to
see the flame. But like that, that doesn't happen unless

(02:49:49):
the flame is still there and unless people have been
tending it and people have been trying to make it grow.
And you can't necessarily just like add fuel to it
and be like, ah, it's gonna.

Speaker 4 (02:49:58):
Grow now, right it?

Speaker 13 (02:50:00):
You know, you don't you don't really have control of
how it sort of moves and grows, it expands, but
you have control over your ability to like make sure
that it keeps.

Speaker 9 (02:50:08):
Going absolutely all about Bambers.

Speaker 4 (02:50:12):
Yeah, And I think also, like I think about the
punk metaphor a lot.

Speaker 13 (02:50:16):
Like one of the ways that I've been thinking a
lot about like what we're doing here and it could
happen here is we kind of took the like we
took the ridge against the machine gambit, which is to say,
we were like we're like, Okay, we're going to go
to try to go somewhat mainstream in order to I
mean bridge but obviously like well, way bigger than we did,
but like we're going to go try to some We're
going to go like somewhat mainstream so we can like

(02:50:36):
spread this thing to a larger group of people. That's
also very very dangerous in the sense that like it's
very easy to sort of just lose yourself in the
kind of mire of like the field you've walked into.

Speaker 4 (02:50:47):
But on the other hand, the.

Speaker 13 (02:50:48):
Upside about it is that we're not the only people
doing this, right, and there's all of you out there
who are who are doing this, Like everyone on this
call is doing this, like is doing the like like
the DIY work that is going to be the core
of what this whole thing becomes. And the more the
more of these media projects we get and the more
that people are able to sustain themselves doing this, the

(02:51:10):
more that we're sort of able to break, like I
don't know, just like the model maniacal substack control of
like taking your money and giving it the transphobes kind
of thing.

Speaker 4 (02:51:20):
The better shape we're going to be in the years
to come exactly.

Speaker 15 (02:51:24):
And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad
at doing is accepting that we do require money and
asking for it. So I'm going to do that for
the squad.

Speaker 1 (02:51:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:51:33):
We are currently fundraising because it's actually really hard to
make something sustainable for four people. Yeah, man, because we
have a fundraiser going on. If you like what we're
talking about here, you can donate to our Indiegogo literally
anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're going
to have a pay what you want subscription model, so
everything will be subscribed. But we really want to have
three months worth of living wage for all of us

(02:51:55):
to do two days a week on it, right, So
we're not even you know, we're not talking full salaries.
That's forty five thousand dollars because four people for three months,
it's not even a tremendous amount of money because we're
including solidarity funds in that and like paying any writers
who contribute, like lots of other stuff. So yeah, if
you have a few bucks and you know, maybe you're
thinking about, you know, getting off of one of those
substacks or something, and you want to throw our way,

(02:52:16):
we would be absolutely honored. I'm very excited to accept
anything in this launch. And if you don't have that money,
which is i know true for a lot of us,
which is why we feel bad asking for the money
because there are so many people who need it right now.
You can subscribe online. You can find us on social
media and keep in touch until we do launch, and
then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also
a really great way to support us. But if you

(02:52:38):
have a few bucks you want to throw, if you
want to give someone a present of a year's membership,
you can get that for one hundred dollars for the holidays,
you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with our work,
we'd really really appreciate it.

Speaker 13 (02:52:49):
And yeah, thanks Vicky, yeah, and I don't know, I'm
excited for this. There's already been a bunch of great
stuff that's up on the site. We will have links
to everything in the description. Yeah, thank you, thank you
three for coming on the show. And I'm really excited
about this.

Speaker 9 (02:53:04):
Well, thanks for having us.

Speaker 16 (02:53:06):
Yeah, thanks for the chance to share it.

Speaker 14 (02:53:07):
And like I always say, like if anyone is interested
and wants to get in touch, I'm happy to hear
from you.

Speaker 9 (02:53:12):
And yeah, yeah, same, and reach out to us too.
A few ideas on what cost stands for. We love
hearing from people. My favorite is kN the anarchist right,
that's what it stands for. I don't know who came
up with that. I think that might have been Schuerlier, Victy,
but it's a good one.

Speaker 16 (02:53:28):
TVD, TBD.

Speaker 9 (02:53:31):
So yeah, send in what you think. And we also
are going to have an advice column that's going to
be launched soon. Yeah, so send us questions or individually
or whatever, but you know, disrupt individualism, reach out to us.

Speaker 15 (02:53:43):
Yeah, thanks so much. And yeah, as a long time listener,
first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here.

Speaker 1 (02:53:49):
So thank you Mia so much.

Speaker 4 (02:53:50):
That's not true, hold time all right, sorry, I.

Speaker 15 (02:53:56):
Just go on so many podcasts.

Speaker 9 (02:54:01):
Sorry.

Speaker 15 (02:54:01):
Yeah, well anyway, it's really exciting to be here and
talking to everyone, and we have to meet y'all in
the future. And kay, we'll have a well, we will
have a discord community. We'll be having like writing class.
We're gonna have a lot of like really exciting stuff.
So even if you can't throw in money right now,
please sign up to our website, cosh anythings dot com.
Stay in touch and find out all the really cool
stuff we're doing.

Speaker 14 (02:54:22):
And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we're
already doing is now going to have a home and call.
So like my essays and podcasts, Vicki's reviews and essays,
and Carla's many projects which include podcasts and writing and
these interviews, Danny's writing and classes.

Speaker 16 (02:54:42):
Yeah, this is all moving there.

Speaker 9 (02:54:44):
Plus new things doing it together.

Speaker 13 (02:54:48):
Yeah, in that spirit, you two, dear listener, can can
do things together and go disrupt this world. So go
do that now instead of listening to whatever else it
tappling on the show. This is ending is not going well,
but go go to srub fas get it.

Speaker 1 (02:55:04):
Thanks so much.

Speaker 2 (02:55:06):
Hey, we'll be back Monday. With more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 1 (02:55:12):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 9 (02:55:15):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 13 (02:55:25):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here
listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 1 (02:55:29):
Thanks for listening.

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Behind the Bastards News

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