Part One: That Time Volkswagen Operated a Slave Plantation in Brazil

Robert sits down with Maggie Mae Fish to discuss how Volkswagen went from Hitler's favorite auto-company to the owner of a slave plantation in the Amazon during the Reagan Era.

 

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastard. It's a podcast about
the very worst people in all of history, a topic
I am well suited to address because I am one
of the worst people in all of history, or at
least I feel that way because I am calamitously hungover.
I am the villain in my own life and very
angry at myself. Here to express rage at me. My

(00:29):
guest and friend, Maggie may fist fit. Is you see
how I'm doing today, Maggie, I see how I'm doing.
You see where my head is fu.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Oh my god, It's almost like I'm not hungover either.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
I mean more fucking electrolytes. Sure, Thursday night's a normal
party night, absolutely, when you have a normal human schedule
like us.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
How to say, for our kinds?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yes, it is, yeah, for our kind, normal healthy people
in the entertainment industry. Maggie, you and I go way back.
We were colleagues at the old place, cracked dot com.
And you have grown and spread your wings from there
like all of our wonderful colleagues, And you have a

(01:12):
YouTube channel now, and you've just came out with a
new project that I'm very excited to check out. Do
you want to talk a little bit about what you're
doing and plug your pluggables before we get into this episode.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
Absolutely, well, you know, I think it's apt. We're going
to be talking about supposedly someone.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Terrible, something terrible.

Speaker 4 (01:30):
God, Oh, I'm so prepared, much like. Yeah, the show
is called Amy's Den and Dreamhouse. It's on Nebula. It's
also about terrible things, terrible things that happened to you
in adulthood, you and all of us.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
So I'm very excited. I'm so excited to learn today, Robert, Well, we.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Are going to be talking about something terrible that I
did not know about. Actually, this is this is one
that kind of took me by surprise, the topic of
this episode, because we are to be chatting a little
bit about a car company you might know of called Volkswagen.
Do you know much about Volkswagen.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Volkswagen New Beetle driving you wild?

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Sure? Yeah, absolutely, that's one thing they're known for. Barbie
had one, Uh, Barbie had a Volkswagen and uh.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Some tenuous connections to Nazism.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Is that it's not tenuous, I'll tell you that much
right now. Maggie, Okay, will we talked a little bit
about that. I knew that like Volkswagen was connected to
the Nazis like a lot of car companies, right, Like,
there's no good car company. There's no like car company
that's just got like a spotless clean record, no war crimes,

(02:45):
no one evil was ever involved, you know, like fucking
obviously everyone's aware of the fun journey that Elon Musk
and Tesla have been on lately. But like Ford Motor
Company was founded by a notorious anti Semite, right, yeah,
people are aware, oh in Michigan. Yes, Ford wound up
being a valuable part of the United States is like

(03:08):
war effort, right, they made a lot of cars that
were used by the military. But Ford himself, Henry, would
have been much happier if the US has sided with
Nazi Germany.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
Right, Like absolutely, he's raring to go in my memory
of his young.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, yeah, raring to go with his Nazi newspaper about
anti Semitism. And it gets deeper than that, obviously. Toyota
in Mitsubishi got their start building war machines for the
Empire of Japan, and that's not clean work, you know, which,
as I love my Toyota.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Ditto, that's what I ad didn't know, okay, okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Oh yes, yeah, yeah yeah. Toyota in Mitsubishi, he made
a lot of a lot of cars, a lot of
vehicles for Imperial Japan, which did not get up to
anything good with them. And obviously every major German automaker
that existed in the thirties contributed to the Third Reich, right,
not just in terms of making cars for the very
but like utilizing slave labor, all that good stuff. So

(04:04):
that's not super surprising, right, just the fact that a
lot of car companies have evil backstories or were involved
with shady regimes. We're going to be talking about something
that did surprise me, which is that Volkswagen operated a
slave plantation in Brazil in the latter half of the
twentieth century. What I didn't know much about that.

Speaker 4 (04:25):
Whoa, oh, your words are catching up to my homeover brain.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yes, we're talking about Volkswagen's Brazilian slave plantation today. Okay,
you know, get everybody off on a good mood. Obviously,
we very rarely encounter fascism in our day to day
lives or on the news, so you know, it's always
it's refreshing to hear some history you.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Know, so just remind me of the yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Things used to be bad before we as a species
really figured everything out, you know, right, Yeah, so this
won't be entirely surprising if you're familiar with Volkswagen's origin story,

(05:14):
the fact that they had a slave plantation. Let's talk
a little bit about VW's origin story, right, because it's
a dark one. Woo. You know that, Like there's a
tenuous connection, right, and so we're going to get into
kind of what that connection entails. In February of nineteen
thirty three, right at the dawn of the Nazi regimes,

(05:36):
right after Hitler took office, Adolph Hitler appeared at a
car show in Germany to announce the start of a
people's motorization, right. And this was his plan and the
plan that the Nazi Party was really pushing to motorize
the right. The goal was eventually to have every family
have their own car, which is an ambitious goal at

(05:57):
this point. Right, we're still talking about like the military
is handling most things with horses, right, I mean, even
through World War Two, that'll be the case with the Germans.
Automobiles though, were a really direct symbol of the future
and futurism was a cornerstone of fascism, the early fascists,
and it starts in Italy. You know, this isn't something
that has its origins even with German fascists. Italian fascists

(06:19):
are obsessed with cars because they're obsessed with speed. Airplanes
are the same thing, right.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
Oh, that does make sense, actually, yeah, yeah, okay, yes, yes,
And that's kind of like fascism is at this point.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
It's not just looking back to these kind of like
quote unquote traditional values and this you know, desire to
return to these kind of more medieval attitudes of social organization.
There's also a lot of obsession with like the future
and with speed and all of this stuff. A big
part of Hitler's appeal and like a major cornerstone of
his campaign is that he flies everywhere. Right. This is
the first time in a democracy that a major political

(06:54):
candidate had traveled primarily by air to a bunch of
their appearances, and it was it allowed him to reach
a lot more places, and it also it fed into
this image that like fascism is this ideology of the future,
you know, not.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Familiar at all. Uh yeah, that's bringing no bells today.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
They're embracing AI and shit, right, but like it's the
same basic idea, right, this kind of like reckless embrace
of like speed and technology. And yeah, so one of
Hitler's immediate priorities is kind of announcing and trying to
really like propaganize the fact that like the third Reich
is going to be a motorized society, you know. And

(07:33):
in nineteen thirty four, the next year, the Reich Association
of the German Auto industry entered into talks with a
pioneering automobile designer, Ferdinand Porsche. That last name is probably
familiar to most people, right, this is the guy who
started Porsche, right, obviously, the Porsche Yes, mister yes. And

(07:53):
they sit down with Porsche and they ask him to
create a cheap and efficient personal automobile, something that would
be a wordable for like the average German family, and
something that like you could basically replace, you know, the
horses and other methods of transit with this cheap personal car. Right.
And the name that they give to this this people's

(08:14):
car is the Volkswagon, which just pretty much literally means
the people's car, right. The Vulcan is the people In.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
The very beginning yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Okay, yeah, yeah, that's where the name comes from.

Speaker 4 (08:24):
Great, get all your six you know, six thousand children
into the tiny car you motorized.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
You win. Yeah, get your huge Nazi family into this
tiny car, and yeah it'll be great. So, unlike many
of the Reich's policies, Hitler personally directed the search for
a people's car. There was a bunch of shit that
like Hitler was I mean even like to an extent,
like the Holocaust was a thing that like he delegated
a lot he is directly involved in, like the quest

(08:51):
to motorize Germany. In an extent, that's kind of rare
for him, right, because he is a big delegation guy.

Speaker 4 (08:57):
You know, Yeah, this is like a well beyond the work,
he's just delegating everything and like yeah, having sex all the.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Time, okay, Yeah, Like this is something he's personally obsessed with,
just kind of kind of in the same manner that
like he's obsessed with the rebuilding of Berlin and all
of these kind of like architectural programs where they're creating
these like massive buildings that will be symbols of the
new Reich. He's personally involved in that and he's personally
involved in this quest to motorize Germany. And Hitler never

(09:24):
knew how to drive himself. He was not a driver,
but he took great pleasure in being chauffeured around the country.
One of his hobbies was just having people drive him around.
He likes going on rides. Cars were more exciting back then,
you know, we hadn't gotten completely burnt out on them.
And Porsche, Fernand Porsche had been an advocate for something

(09:45):
like the Volkswagen for years prior to the Nazis coming
to power. So this was one of those things that
was really convenient for Porsche.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
Kismet, Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Exactly, it's kismet, you know. And his biographer Wolf from
Peida describes both Porscha and Hitler as made for each other,
writing quote, Hitler needed a creative mind to produce his
compact car suitable for mass production, and Porsche needed a
political backing to enable him to build it without financial pressure. Right,
So this is a match made in I mean, not heaven,

(10:15):
but it's it's really convenient to both men.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Well the other place, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah, in Porsche, I mean he's not not a Nazi,
but his primary he's he's obsessed with this quest to
make you know, a cheap automobile that's available for everybody.
And he just kind of he doesn't really give a
shit to sell who he has to work with to
make it happen. Right, His dream is just to get
this car made.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
So he's a good guy.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
He's a great man, right.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
The entrepreneur working for himself. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, he just doesn't give a shit, like about you know,
the fact that it's going to be produced by slaves.
About what matters to him is getting this car out
he has. He's got tunnel blindness over the Volkswagen. Now,
from the jump, the Volkswagen was not a purely civilian endeavor.
In nineteen thirty four, Porsche's company published a brochure laying

(11:02):
out that their future car also had to be practical
for particular military purposes. Right, And this is both like
Germany has limited resources. There's this kind of understanding that
if a war breaks out, these civilian cars will probably
get pressed into service.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
And also a bunch of volkswagons.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah yeah, yeah, the line okay beats walking.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
Okay, they're so unintimidated.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, you ever tried to walk to rush away? So
the Volkswagon becomes a cornerstone of what's called the Strength
through Joy program, which is a major set of policies
that's organized by the Reich Association for Leisure Activities. Now,
I've seen Strength through Joy translated by German publications as

(11:49):
Strength through Pleasure, and I think this is probably a
case where a lot of English translators maybe do a
better job of capturing the initial meeting, because strength through
Pleasure makes it sound weird in a way that it
wasn't like the idea was. You know, the Nazis when
they came to power, they had to signpost and kind
of adapt a lot of left wing talking points. You know,

(12:09):
initially early on there was a left wing of the party.
They get purged during the night a long knives, and
part of that is, well, these socialists are always talking
about stuff like vacation days. And you know, a big
thing that the USSR did and that Communist Yugoslavia did
was they would build all these gigantic like recreation hotels
and whatnot that were like resorts that were meant for

(12:30):
like working class people. Right, this was a major thing
that they were doing. And the Nazis tried to have
their version of that, in part because you know, this
is just a way in which they were kind of
trying to compete with the left, but also in part
because this was part of the promise of fascist right. Right, obviously,
do this.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
And this and this, you will get a fancy Hilton, Yes, yeah,
to swim in.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yes, exactly. We're going to steal all this shit from
these groups of people that are going to be forced
out of society and annihilated. And as a result, you'll
get a vacation every year, you'll get to go to
the beach with your family, you'll get a car. That
was the idea, right, This is never something that they
fully achieve, but this is the idea behind the Strength
through Joy program, Right, is we're kind of buying the

(13:15):
loyalty of the working class, of the classes that had
been unionized and had previously, in German electoral history, gotten
more towards left. The ideas we're going to kind of
get them on our side by promising access to all
of these luxuries.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Right, it's the Google method.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
You get, you know, a couple ping pong tables, right,
they'll say after work, yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yes, it's exactly how Silicon Valley used to work right,
strength through joy, productivity through joy, and so the motorization
of Germany is a big part of this. Right. The
idea that a normal party member would be able to
afford their own family car in a country that had
been as strapped with poverty and economic collapse is Germany
that had gone through something as devastating as a famine

(13:59):
so recently. That's really appealing, right, and it makes fascism
look really powerful, the fact that, well, you know, a
few years ago everyone was starving, and now we're talking
about giving everyone their own car. Right again, they never
do this, but it's important to Hitler and it's important
to the image of Nazism that they were trying to

(14:19):
do this right, that this was something that they were
talking about, right, And cars were expressly a luxury commodity
when Hitler took over. When he comes to power, only
about one fiftieth of the country owned automobiles. And the
idea is that cars are not cheap, right, And the
Volkswagen is supposed to cost just nine hundred and ninety
nine Reich's marks, and there will be like an installment plan,

(14:42):
so regular citizens are able to afford it, and it
is a big deal. Automobile ownership is intensely politicized from
the very earliest years of the Reich. The German General
Automotive Club expelled all of its Jewish members in nineteen
thirty three, and after Coristall Knock in nineteen thirty eight,
Jews were legally bidden from driving or owning cars in

(15:02):
the Reich. Hitler approves the first Volkswagen prototype near the
end of nineteen thirty five, and the late spring of
nineteen thirty eight, construction begins on the first factory in Wolfsburg.
Hitler himself made an appearance at the ceremony, basically cuts
the ribbon as they're creating and building this factory in Wolfsburg.
And at this point the Volkswagen which is known initially,

(15:22):
they don't start calling it the Volkswagen, it's called the
KDF Wagon, which I think is just like the strength
through Joy wagon. Basically, no, sure, right, yeah, they found
it better year. We can all agree Volkswagen rolls off
the tongue better than the KDF wagon. Oh yeah, no,
my friend's got this classic KDF wagon. It's still got

(15:43):
the swastikas on the back end and everything.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
Yeah, right, you'll fuck death wagon.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Right, Oh, Kill Death Fuck Wagon. Yeah, there we go.
So the idea in Nazi propaganda is that the KDF
wagon is going to be the symbol of the national
Socialist People's community, and the plant in Wolfsburg would be
known as the city of the KDF car. In short order,
Hitler promised more than one point five million of these
cars would be produced every year. Now they never achieve this.

(16:11):
This is never more than a propagandistic boast. Because they
start building the factory in nineteen thirty eight and World
War Two kicks off like a year later, and so
as soon as Germany gets into a war with everybody,
the military need for different vehicles and tanks, trump's the
desire to get civilians automobiles. You can only do one

(16:33):
at a time, basically, given the nature of the German
economy and their access to resources.

Speaker 4 (16:37):
And look at that they already have the factory going.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
That's so convenient. Yeah wow, really planning ahead right right.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
It just moves immediately over to like military production, right,
and resource shortages were so severe during this period of
time that Volkswagen has to almost immediately pivot to using
slave labor to meet production quotas as soon as the
war kicks off, and I want to quote from an
article the Holocaust Encyclopedia summarizing how this process got going.

(17:04):
Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of
the forced labor of Soviet prisoners of war. The factory
employed a variety of categories of workers, including German employees
and migrant workers, but also prisoners of war concentration camp inmates,
including Jews, and increasingly large numbers of Soviet and Polish
civilian foreign forced laborers known as Eastern workers. A first
concentration camp on the site our Bytesdorf, was established on

(17:27):
factory property in April of nineteen forty two. Forced laborers
eventually made up approximately sixty percent of the workforce at
the city of the KDF car. So, throughout the war,
the early Volkswagens you know, and the military vehicles they
pivot to making, are being made primarily by slaves, right,
Like that's from the jump VW is cars made by

(17:48):
slave labor, which is great, This is great.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
I mean you know, now we just have yes, a
very similar yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Now we just use slaves to get the rare earth minerals, right, yeah, yeah,
we use.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
Kids for cars. Now, So you know, it's it all
shakes up.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Well, their tiny hens can reach the precious minerals in the.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
Congo as they get their hair stuck in the weaving.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Well, shure, yeah, you're gonna lose some kids. Speaking of
child's slave labor, you know who doesn't use that. Whatever
sponsor comes next, unless it's like Haribo, if it's the
Gummy bear people, they definitely use child slave labor. Just
as that's up, we're back. So we're talking nineteen forty two.

(18:41):
The city of the KDF car is primarily using slave labored.
Now they're not making cars for civilians, the making cars
for the military concentration camp inmates because they need they
have to be skilled laborers. You can't just grab anyone
to help make a car, right, You need people who
have certain abilities or certain knowledge. So they're they're kind
of combe concentration camps. They're going to places like Auschwitz, right,

(19:03):
And in fact, a Volkswagen engineer travels to Auschwitz in
nineteen forty four to pick out three hundred skilled metalworkers
from their recently transported Hungarian Jewish population. War needs being
what they were, large portions of the factory had been
turned over to making munitions, so they're not just making
vehicles like they're increasingly just because of how desperate the

(19:23):
war is using these auto factories to make like tank
shells and artillery shells and bullets and stuff. Another six
hundred and fifty skilled Jewish female laborers are brought in
to make shells and explosives at the Volkswagen factory. Their
facility became a subcamp of the Neuangama concentration camp, and
by the war's end the plant consisted of four concentration

(19:44):
camps and eight forced labor camps. The number of Eastern
workers alone neared five thousand people, half of them female.
The number of skilled female laborers brought another issue, which
is that a lot of these female workers are arriving
at the slave factory pregnant, right, or they become pregnant
while they're working at the facility, for reasons I shouldn't

(20:05):
have to explain, you.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Know, yes, yes, And this is a problem.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Right for the Nazis, because you have kind of two choices.
One of them is ship these people back to where
they had been taken from, which is what they do initially,
right when they find that they've got pregnant Eastern workers,
is they just send them back to whatever camp they'd
come from. Ooops, put them back right right right? Oh yeah,
now I'm not ready to raise a baby since the

(20:30):
third right. But this isn't like a great solution because
they need these people, right. These are not interchangeable. These
are skilled like metal workers and the like, right, So
they want these people because they don't have enough people
who know how to do this kind of shit, and
they can't just send all of them back because they're
by definition doing work that the right doesn't have enough
bodies to accomplish. Fritz Sockel, who is the German Secretary

(20:52):
for Labor Allocation, reverses this policy late in the war,
like their morale actually does kind of matter to an
extra So you can't just like take their kids. I mean,
that's what they're going to do, but you have to
you have to at least pretend that you're going to
take care of these kids, right, because it does sort
of matter how productive these laborers are.

Speaker 4 (21:10):
They're going to lego land a nice farm weekend, nice
farm to get cigarettes.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
And so late in the war, Old Fritz establishes the
first nursery facilities at the Volkswagen concentration camps for children
of foreign laborers.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
So dark.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah, yeah, it's really bad because, as you might adage it,
a Nazi nursery for the children of slave labors, not
a great place for kids. Now on paper, these are
being described and being described to the pregnant workers as
birthing centers and places where infants will be watched and
cared for while their parents work. Right, Obviously, the Nazis

(21:51):
have no real interest in taking care of untermens children.
They don't want these people to exist at all.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Do have universal childcare for their slave labor? Wow? Yeah,
I have some strongly worded letters to write.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah exactly. I can't believe the Nazis would do something
with this bad. So the first nursery facility gets opened
at the Volkswagen camp in early nineteen forty three, and
I want to quote from the same write up again,
medical supervision of the maternity ward and children's home became
the responsibility of the factory physician, an overseer of Volkswagen's
medical facilities, doctor Hans Corbel. In time, children were sent

(22:25):
to a similar home in the nearby town of Ruin,
where the mortality was close to one hundred percent. It
is thought that three hundred and sixty five infants in toddlers,
the children of female Eastern workers who labored at Volkswagen,
died at Ruin. So this is just a death camp
for little kids, right. They're kind of pretending it's not
so that these people are are functional, but that is

(22:45):
what they're doing, is they're just killing these kids. Now,
at the end of the war, the Volkswagen factory manager
is a guy named Anton Pike Piech, and he winds
up in charge of a military unit made up of
Volkswagen employees acting as reserves who are supposed to be
like defending this factory. It doesn't work well, and as
soon as it becomes clear the war is lost, ol

(23:06):
Anton flees to Austria and hides out on the personal
estate of Ferdinand Porsche, who's his father in law. He
takes about ten million Reichs Marks with him. When the
Nazis lose and he tries to hide out there, it's
not going to be super successful because like it's Austria,
you haven't fled that far, Like it's still going to
be occupied. And yeah, he's going to get charged criminally

(23:29):
for his involvement here. As is doctor Corbel who ran
that child death camp nursery thing. Corbel actually gets charged
by the British occupying officials with criminal neglect in nineteen
forty six and he's executed in nineteen forty seven. And
again I just really want to emphasize these are all
Volkswagen employees, right, yes, and doctor Corbel is going to
be one of the very few VW employees to pay

(23:51):
for his war era crimes. Porsche and Pike, you know,
obviously we know who fred end Porsche is. Pike is
the guy who is managing the factory. They're both arrested
and held custody after the war, but the Allied authorities
never got a round really charging them with any crimes.
Volkswagen continues to operate after World War Two, and the
Wolfsburg plant remained the headquarters of the company up until

(24:12):
the modern era. They never changed their HQ from like
the place where they had slave factories, because again this
is this very German thing, and it's like, well, the
buildings are perfectly good, Like it's not the building we
go on to. Why would we change where we're based out,
No one, We have the factory right here. Wow, the

(24:35):
vibes yeah. I remember visiting saxon Housen, which is a
concentration camp near Berlin, was primarily for political prisoners ten
or fifteen years ago, and you know, as we're going through,
they point out this building and it's like and that's
where you know, the camp guards would be trained. And
I was like, oh, you know, what is it today?
And like, well, it's a police trading facility today. And
I was like, you guys, couldn't just make another building.

(24:57):
You're training cops here now, Like what the fuck did
no one sit down and talk about this? Okay, cool
stuff Germany sick joke. Who I mean, we're hardly ones
to talk these days, but come on, oh oh excuse me.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
We build our own cop towns from scratch.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
We do. But we still people still getting married at plantations,
right you know?

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
So it took forty years for there to be any
kind of open reckoning with Volkswagen company history on like
a serious scale. You know, this is the kind of
thing that builds increasingly, you know, once there's a couple
of decades distance from the war years.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Okay, yeah, it takes a little while, not that, like
there's none initially, but it does take a while for
things to really build up. This kind of culminates in
nineteen eighty six, as a part of kind of this
pressure for them to reckon with their past, Volkswagen hires
a historian named Hans Mulmsen to write a warts and
all history of the company, and this is, you know,
ar it's a partial reckoning, which culminates in nineteen ninety

(26:02):
one when the company created a fund to compensate former
slave laborers to the tune of some twelve million marks.
Additional reparations attempts are executed over the years, and so
there are some there's some effort taken to like payback
people that Volkswagen profited from enslaving. Right that happens some
near the end of the twentieth century. Now, I wouldn't

(26:26):
describe this as even the minimum you know it's worth, though,
really driving home the fact that even the proactive steps
Volkswagen took in this period only happened because their hands
were forced by constant attempts by activists to make the
autogiant reckon with its history. One of my favorite examples
of this is there's a really good art piece by

(26:46):
an Austrian artist Wolfgang Flats called it was all Adolph,
which is made using the hood of a VW beetle.
You can see that it's like the hood of a
Volkswagen beetle, an old one kind of rusted with a
swastika in the center and then the colors of the
flag running underneath it.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
That's good.

Speaker 4 (27:03):
I wondered this was before or after a Volkswagen barbie
feels like it could be.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
I believe this is before. Well, no, no, no, I
think would have been right around the same time. That
was in the nineties, right, I think so. I think
this would have been contemporaneous to that, you know, more
or less. Yeah, good art, Yeah, I like it. Of course,
with a backstory like that, Volkswagen took great pains over
the next eighty something years of their long and storied

(27:29):
corporate history to avoid anything morally questionable. You'd never catch Volkswagen,
for example, enslaving hundreds and hundreds of people in order
to make a buck. Only of course you would, because
going into the fifties and sixties, all of the men,
not all, but a lot of the guys running Volkswagen
were former Nazis. In fact, many if not. Most of

(27:49):
like Volkswagen's executive suite, were guys who'd worked at Volkswagen
during the Third Reich and just hadn't been punished at all,
and they just kept working at Volkswagen after the war.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
That was so soon though, right, like, right, Okay, this
is the norm.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
This is the Norman German industry, the Norman German politics.
A lot of obviously there are guys who had been
on the left and who had gotten punished to wind
up in politics after the war, but a lot of
former Nazis wind up in business and politics running companies
after the war because most of them don't get punished.
And so this all is relevant to Brazil because in
nineteen sixty four, less than twenty years after the end

(28:26):
of World War Two, Brazil gets taken over by a
military dictatorship. Right, the democratically elected government gets overthrown and
the military takes over. The Brazilian military junta would govern
the country with an iron fist until nineteen eighty five,
so a little over twenty years. Like many dictatorships, they
did engage in massive infrastructure projects. Right, this is a

(28:47):
big part of like what the junta where they're kind
of claiming their legitimacy is that we're building highways, you know,
we're modernizing the country. We're pushing for large numbers of
civilians to move from these kind of more developed, crowded
urban areas and develop more of these massive chunks of
empty jungle wilderness, right, Yes.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
To get their own car, uh, their giant right. It rhymes,
It's true, Yeah, it rhymes.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
And a big part of this is like, well, we
kind of got to get rid of a lot of
the Amazon. You know, that's just wasted space. Brazil's going
to be a modern country. We got to pave over
that motherfucker. You know, we all agree all that. Yeah,
too much Amazon is a real problem for Brazil. You know,
we got to get rid of that shit so we
can have cattle farms and the like. So the fact
that the military junta does engage in this kind of

(29:36):
building and industrialization process, it's cited a lot by defenders
of the regime, including Gyr Bolsonnaro, who just got convicted
of doing a coup. But Bolsonnaro is very much influenced
by the military dictatorship, right, he is a guy who
will always see this as like the military dictatorship was
doing the right thing, and that's what we His whole
time and power was trying to go back to those

(29:58):
days in a lot of ways, right and this way.
He was a huge advocate for the illegal logging and
clear cutting of the Amazon. This is a thing that
was important to him. And this really, I'm not going
to say it starts entirely under the military junta, but
the military junta makes it a major part of the regime,
right is that we're going to get rid of this
fucking jungle and develop it. And so what you're seeing

(30:20):
in this period from the sixties to the early eighties
is the birth of the systematic state encouraged annihilation of
the rainforest. This has continued to be a celebrated cause
among the Brazilian right wing ever since. The overwhelming ideological
need on behalf of the military dictatorship to develop the
wild parts of Brazil led them to offer multinational corporations

(30:41):
a mix of tax breaks and public funds if they
would invest in projects that would help with the clear
cutting of the Amazon. Cattle ranching was the preferred way
of doing this, right, because if you're going to create
a cattle rancher, you got to cut down a shitload
of forest. His cows don't do great in super dense forest, right,
you want to replaced all those ease with pasture. Right.

(31:02):
And if you have huge herds of cattle, the jungle's
not going to grow back because the cows are going
to stomp everything down and right, exactly everywhere, yeah, shit everywhere.
This is so this is kind of seen as like
this is the perfect way to get rid of our
Amazon problem and ensure that we have more meat right now.
The process was in line with the military government's overarching

(31:25):
resource strategy in this period. Basically the translation was integrate
so as not to surrender, right, And this is kind
of an answer to colonialism international capitalism, where we're inviting
this stuff in. But we don't just want these foreign
companies to strip our land of value. We want them
to make Obviously, it's important they need to make a
profit or they won't be interested, and we want to

(31:47):
make a profit, but we also want to develop land
for other use by Brazilians.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
That's kind of the ideological underpinning of what's happening here.
Per an article in The Washington Post by Terrence McCoy
and Marina Diaz quote. Volkswagen Brazil, than the largest car
maker in Latin America, accepted the challenge in the untamed
municipality of Santana du Aruguaya. The Valet du Rio Crystallino Company,
a subsidiary whose leadership included Volkswagen Brazil's president Wolfgang Sour

(32:14):
and human resources director admun Gannum, obtained a large parcel
of land. Executives back in Germany and visioned to herd
of more than one hundred thousand cattle and an answer
to world hunger. This world not only needs cars, Volkswagen
president Rudolph Leading declared in nineteen seventy four, but also
meet this slave thing isn't like to make cars. They're

(32:35):
getting into the cattle business. A natural a move for Volkswagen.

Speaker 4 (32:40):
I mean no, I mean when they explain it, it
makes so much sense.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
You know. Yeah, the world needs not just cars but
meat too.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
I'm getting the vision.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
Okay, Yeah, So Volkswagen settles on a chunk of forested
land in the southeastern state of Para, which is about
one hundred and forty thousand hectares inside this like chunk
of land that they're going to turn into a ranch,
which means that Volkswagens like this plot that they have
purchased is larger than like the capital of Brazil itself.
This is a massive piece of property and the farm

(33:13):
becomes known as the Fazinda Volkswagen. Now, Volkswagen, being an
auto company, didn't have people on staff who knew how
to clear cut land or operate a cattle farm because
that's kind of outside of their wheelhouse. So the opted
to hire outside contractors who could do the job for them. Right,
bring in some guys and they'll know how to do

(33:34):
this stuff. And using contractors in this way, this is
not just a Volkswagen thing, right, As I said, the
military dictatorship is inviting all sorts of foreign multinationals into
the country to do stuff like this, to operate farms,
to clear the rainforest. And the standard is that you
have a subsidiary company that is in charge of whatever

(33:54):
efforts you're doing here in Brazil, and that company hires
local contractors to fight you laborers. And the colloquial name
for these contractors is gattos or cats. And I haven't
seen like a good explanation for why they're calling these
guys cats. But that's like what these guys who are
finding you kind of itinerant laborers, right, that's what they're called.

(34:16):
The gattos are paid a flat fee to find workers
and meet certain production quotas. Uh oh right, Yes, anyone
who's study the history of capitalism, you know how this
is going to end. Right, Okay, we could go back
to the very birth of capitalism during the age of
sale under the Dutch and British East India companies. Right,

(34:36):
there's a starvation genocide and Bengal at the end of
the seventeen hundreds that kills somewhere between like ten and
thirty million people, and it's a product of the British
East India company has these local guys. These are like
generally like English employees, but they're like local contractors and whatnot.
They want to get the most profit out of their
territory by maximizing how much food they're extracting from like

(35:00):
these different regions, these villages, and they don't really care
if there's enough food for the people who live there,
because anything that's not being shipped out and monetized is
money that they think is going out of their pocket.
And so tens of millions of people are going to
starve to death. So these guys, these local employees of
the company can maximize their own big right, a.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
Classic potato famine situation. Let's take all of it.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah, right, this is an old story, right, and Volkswagen's
going to put a kind of a different spin on it.
But you can sort of see like this is not
like coming out of nowhere, right.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Right, They're gonna tell it again.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Ugh, yeah, yeah, exactly. The Gato's hired by Volkswagen, tralled
distant towns in the Sticks, places like Mato Grosso and
Tokatin in order to find workers, and they promise these
people good contracts. On paper, these are good jobs. There's
high pay. They're promising them. You'll get free medical care,
you'll have quality housing. And so these laborers, and these
are generally people who come from bumfuck nowhere, right, are

(36:02):
signing on thinking like, Okay, we'll I'll be away from
home for like six months or a year, and I'll
save up a bunch of money and I'll come back
to my families with this healthy nest egg that we
can use to fund the next stage of our lives. Right,
Like a cat like a cat, exactly, like a cat
like a cat. Yeah, per the Washington Post quote, that's
not how things worked out, not for any of them.

(36:24):
The Gattos drove them to isolated chunks of forest up
to eighty kilometers from the entrance of the Volkswagen farm itself.
They were expected to pay for their housing, for their food,
and for their medical care. Since there were no towns,
certainly not ones the armed guards watching them would allow
them to visit, they had no choice but to pay
whatever price that Gatto's decided to charge for these services.
In short order, they found themselves in debt when the

(36:45):
actual circumstances of their labor proved to be much rougher
than they'd been promised, and who tried to return home
were stopped by men with guns. One employee, Manuel Lima,
told interviewers later of his experiences, which began in April
of nineteen eighty one, and not you know, this gets
started the seventies, but most of our stories of these guys,
our accounts kind of start in the eighties. That's so recent, right,

(37:06):
this is happening when Reagan's in office. The only water
was from a filthy well swarming with mosquitoes. We all
got sick. Feverish with malaria as I was weak. I
left midway through the logging. Seventeen of us sought the
pay we were owed, but they didn't want to pay,
and Lima and his group are forbidden from leaving, right
They're like, okay, give us our money, we're too sick
to continue. They're like, you don't. Aren't owed any money,

(37:29):
and also you're not allowed to leave, and so the
Gattos forced them to return to clearing the forest at gunpoint.
Lima and six of his friends are only allowed to
leave five months later because they had been worked so
near to death that the Gattos decided keeping them was
more trouble than it was worth. They did not get
paid for their work. Quote, we left penniless and gravely ill,

(37:50):
he recalled. So that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, it looks like.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
It all worked out. Her dreams came true.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
It looks like it all worked out. Yeah. Yeah. I
mean I am reading this and being like, wow, you know,
writing comedy for the Internet not such a bad gig.
You know, a lot of us did leave penniless and
gravely ill, but not that bad, you know.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Wo wow.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Anyway, speaking of the Internet, let's hear some ads from
the internet, and we're back. So we're telling the stories
of some of these Volkswagen laborers who aren't technically they're
working for a subsidiary of Volkswagen. They're directly employed by

(38:35):
a contractor. So VW can say, well, these were never
our employees, but like they're working Volkswagen's land.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
We had no idea, Yes, we didn't know.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
How could we have known. Another laborer, L. E. S. Decarmo,
was interviewed in November of nineteen eighty three about his experiences.
He recalled, we worked four months clearing the land through
rain and biting flies. On Sundays, we walked sixteen kilometers
from meat and other food for ourselves and our companions.
At the end of the felling, we didn't get a
single cent the Gatto Herminio said. We still owed thirteen

(39:07):
and sixty you know, off the local currency. Right. So
what you're seeing here, what's happening to these people. The
term for this is debt peonage. Right. This is not
chattel slavery, right. These people are technically employees, unlike you
know slaves brought over from the you know, Atlantic slave trade.
It's the modern right, it's wokes slavery. You know, they're

(39:31):
being paid employee kind of. They're being paid now they
have to pay for their health care and food and
their housing obviously first, and that winds up being more
money than they can possibly earn. And they can't leave
until they've made up for the debt that they owe
the company as soon as they start working. But they're not,

(39:53):
like you know, owned by the company right legally, legally, yeah, legally,
it's different from channel slavery, right and how dare you?
And like, the logic is whenever these people are like,
but you're not letting them leave, their argument is like, well,
but they owe us money. You wouldn't expect this isn't
a charity. You wouldn't expect Volkswagen, or you wouldn't expect

(40:14):
these these gattos to lose money because their employees couldn't
avoid going into debt, right, you know. And the reality
is they don't have any choice. For one thing, they're
out in the middle of the jungle. They can't just
go like buy or like rent houses because there's not
like villages and towns that they're allowed to live in.
So they have to get their food and stuff from

(40:35):
these you know, Volkswagen basically, or these different like gattos.
They don't have a choice here, so they're just fucked
as soon as they get hired. One unnamed worker later
informed a fact finding delegation of Sal Paulo legislators, quote,
all I did was work to pay for jeans, flip
flops and little food. Nine months of relentless labor cutting
trees for the multinational under the orders of the contractor,

(40:56):
and I was trapped with no way out. Now, I
think we've set up here how gnarly this system was
and hideous. I think it's important here that we take
a little bit of a substantial digression, because it would
be wrong for me to talk about Volkswagen's operations in
Brazil as if they were just descended from the company's
birth as an organ of the Nazi state. Now would

(41:18):
it be right for me to make it seem as
if the military junta that ruled Brazil for much of
the latter third of the twentieth century was something totally
novel in the nation's history. Slave labor was rampant during
the military dictatorship and after. Because it's still a major
problem in Brazil to this day. It's rampant because slavery
has always been key to the Brazilian economy since its

(41:39):
birth as a colony. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database was
first published in nineteen ninety nine and as a collection
of detailed files on some thirty five thousand slave trafficking
voyages starting in fifteen twenty and continuing until eighteen sixty six,
it represents the most detailed accounting of the history of
chattel slavery as an import industry. While these files represent

(42:00):
just a fraction of the total number of humans forcibly
transported from Africa to the New World and elsewhere, it
still includes files on some ninety thousand plus enslaved Africans,
and according to this database, Brazil took in more enslaved
Africans than any other place on the face of the planet. Right,
Brazil is the number one place where the Atlantic slave
trade sins people. Nowhere else even no single place comes close, really, right?

(42:25):
WHOA Yeah, And this is something I don't think a
lot of Americans are, particularly I think Brazilians are, but
a lot of Americans aren't aware.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
We just assume we're the best at everything, that.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
We were doing the most of this and like to
be clear here, as we'll talk about we were intimately
involved in the Brazilian slave trades, so we're not clean
on this either.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
We played a supporting role in there.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, oh yeah, but this is a huge deal in Brazil.
For an API article by Eleanor Hughes, nearly five million
kidnapped Africans disembarked in Brazil, more than twelve times the
number taken to mainland North America. Brazil the last country
in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in eighteen eighty eight.
So that's pretty stark, and that's why these problems continue
because it's always been so key to how Brazil has operated.

(43:11):
For additional context, the estimated total number of people taken
from slave ships from Africa to the Americas is around
ten million. This means Brazil or Portuguese America as it
was known for most of this period, accounted for somewhere
near half of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Right like massive,
it's possible to exaggerate.

Speaker 3 (43:33):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Now, the importation of enslaved Africans to the United States
was legally halted in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Obviously,
slavery continues in the US after that point, but we're
not legally importing slaves right from the Atlantic. It still
happens to an extent, and people are still selling enslaved people,
obviously until the end of the civil war, but it continues.

(43:55):
The importation of these people continues in Brazil for much longer.
Slaves provide the main source of workers in coffee plantations
in Brazil. After eighteen thirty one, Brazil finally abolished the
importation of slaves, right, uh huh, Okay, yeah, it's key
to the growth of coffee as a world industry.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
And even after eighteen thirty one, when the formal ban
is put in place, around a million enslaved Africans are
forcibly imported to Brazil and what Yale University Press author
Leonardo Marx described as one of the greatest crimes of
the nineteenth century. Even by nineteenth century standards, we're just
saying something because we did a lot of crimes against

(44:34):
humanity in the old nineteenth century.

Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah perspective, huh.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
Yeah, they're doing bad by the standards of like slavery
in the nineteenth century. Brazil is on another level. Leonardo
goes on to write the new context of illegality, however,
changed some of the characteristics of the slave trade to Brazil.
In order to circumvent authorities, especially the British Navy, slave
traders increasingly employed US resources in their operations. US built

(45:02):
ships became a predominant feature of the transatlantic slave trade
for their speed and quality good old American manufacturing, as
was the case in most sectors of maritime commerce. More
complicated was the fact that the U. S Flag also
started to be used by slave traders as a cover
to protect them from the actions of the British Navy.
The United States was one of the few countries that
refused to establish anti slave trade treaties with the British

(45:24):
that included the mutual right of search, which had been
one of the causes of the War of eighteen twelve. Consequently,
the country managed to suppress the slave trade to its
own dominions, but it had much less success in curtailing
its participation in the traffic to other places, such as Brazil.
US companies based in Rio de Janeiro simultaneously became the
main sellers of US ships and the main exporters of
slave produced coffee. Most of this coffee went to the

(45:45):
United States, whose consumption of the hot beverage expanded as
part of the construction of its own national identity, as
opposed to the tea drinking British.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Oh, we are.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Intimately involved in why slavery is such a big deal
in Brazil, right, were providing the ships, we're providing legal
cover to the people doing this illegally, and we're buying
all the coffee that these slaves are producing, right right, Well, it's.

Speaker 4 (46:06):
First to former own identity, and that's like really important.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
And to be fair, the British, their hands are not
clean because they're into tea instead of coffee. They start
a war and Shina over this, right. Yeah, Look, if
you like a hot caffeinated beverage in the nineteenth century,
you're getting involved in something fucked up. Also the twentieth
and twenty first centuries. Whatever, you know, you know.

Speaker 4 (46:33):
You don't got a hand in to Mormons, but they
were a gast hotbed, is that you know?

Speaker 2 (46:38):
Yeah, they've got their Mormon tea with a fedra in it. Yeah,
that's good, that's local. Yeah. So US entities remained intimately
involved in the Brazilian slave trade until the eighteen fifties.
When it was unevenly but largely suppressed. Slavery did not
officially end inside Brazilian territory until the early eighteen nineties,
and again there's still a problem with slavery day, like

(47:00):
there's a sizable amount of effort that goes on in
Brazil to deal with modern day slavery. During the long
period in which slavery was practiced openly in Brazil, there
were regular periodic escapes of enslaved workers who would form
their own settlements, sometimes containing more than a thousand runaways
during their height, and the state where Volkswagen operates its ranch, Para,

(47:21):
was a particular hub of these communities due to its isolation.
This is relevant to the reason the military hont To
focused on developing the area, right, the fact that there's
so many of these, like freed slave colonies, that that's
part of the history here, that a lot of the
people who are going to be working and enslaved on
this plantation are themselves the descendants of slaves, right, or
at least partially the descendants of slaves since the time

(47:44):
of Portuguese colonization. This region of the country, which is
so isolated and heavily forested, had represented a barrier to
every kind of authoritarian system in the territory. The jungle
stood in opposition to the colonial government that the racial
caste system, and now of the dictatorship, they chose to
tame the jungle using the raw manpower of in many cases,

(48:05):
descendants of the same slaves who once sheltered in the
jungles they were now tearing down right, right, Yeah, it's
pretty it's pretty blak, right, but it also makes sense
like these the fact that these areas are so hard
to reach means that they're a threat to the power
of the regime, and so that's an additional reason to
want to do this.

Speaker 3 (48:26):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Yeah. And slavery is so baked into the very fabric
of Brazil's economy that it's return during the period of
the junta's time in power was reversion to the mean
more than anything else. The website Amazon Today has done
a good job of documenting other less famous cases of
confirmed slave work during the same period that Volkswagen's ranch
was in operation. Quote, in June of nineteen eighty five,

(48:48):
the farmer Sebastio Terboi from Rodonia was accused of keeping
more than one hundred mining farm workers under a captive
regime on their farms, one of which was on the
border with Bolivia. The workers were recruited by the cat
Itamar magal Verdepino and transported on behalf of Salvador Fernandez,
owner of a restaurant. They were forced to work in
deforestation from four o'clock in the morning until the sun disappeared,

(49:10):
did not receive the promised payment, slept in canvas camps
and were watched by twenty armed guards. So this is
not again, this is something that's much bigger than just Volkswagen.
And these are always very similar cases. Right, You're seeing here,
like this isn't even a multinational corporation. This is like
a guy who owns a restaurant. That is this is
like his side business, yes, you know, helping to keep

(49:30):
these people enslaved in order to mine for him.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
Well, you know, he watched the podcast, he listened to
all their advice.

Speaker 4 (49:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right yeah, fellow entrepreneur.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
Right, he caught a YouTube ad telling him, like, you know,
the ultimate kind of passive income is just owning people. Right. So,
another complaint made by representatives of the Federation of Workers
in Agriculture in nineteen ninety five found slave labor being
practiced at a farm called Nova Deli and Para. Seven
workers were found to have been kept for years and
only given food. Investigation into this farm revealed another owned

(50:04):
by the same person, with a clandestine cemetery in it
filled with quote bones and signs of incineration of bodies
covered by tires in black plastic. Such graveyards are a
common sight in uncovered Brazilian slave plantations.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
My tires sorrious.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yeah right, I think just to hide it, right, you
burn some tires on top of it, and it kind
of obscures what's airid there. I found another more recent
article from twenty twenty four in the Intercept, which discusses
a farm that was expropriated by the Brazilian state in
two thousand and eight under an amendment to the Constitution
in two thousand and one that allowed land from people
holding slaves to be confiscated and turned over to the

(50:40):
descendants of its victims. Such actions are important, but they
don't reverse the damage generations of slavery did the fabric
of Brazilian society, some of which is what allowed the
junta to take power in the first place. Per An
article and the impact of slavery on local institutions in
Brazil from the Latin American and Caribbean Center by Andrea
Papadilla quote A widespread reliance on slave labor may have

(51:01):
heightened racial cleavages, making resource sharing through taxation and public
goods more difficult. Second to high incidence of slavery deprived
a large share of the population of a political voice
and limited competition between municipalities. Since slaves could not vote
with their feet, this reduced the strength of citizens demands
and the accountability of local politicians. Thus, slavery is likely
to have affected the development of fiscal capacity and provision

(51:23):
of public goods, both directly and indirectly. On one hand,
slaves lecked even the limited political voice that free Brazilian
citizens had. On the other, slavery influenced the settlement of
foreign migrants and therefore the extent to which this dynamic
group of citizens was able to shape local institutions. Right, so,
the fact that this such a huge chunk of the
country is enslaved, it means both the state develops in

(51:46):
such a way where this chunk of the populace goes
most of the length of the state's existence without having
any kind of a voice in politics, and that contributes
to the development of these authoritarian systems. Right again, you
can look at similar things have happened in the United States,
right and are continuing to happen.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
You know, it's so perfect, it's the perfect formula.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, really incredible. Oh wow, yeah. And
you know, up to this the present day, in Brazil,
black and biracial Brazilians are likely to be poor, to
face imprisonment, and to die early than their peers. Only
about a quarter of Brazil's Lower House of Congress come
from this segment of the population. So Volkswagen's operations in

(52:26):
Brazil were nothing new for it or for Brazil, except
for one crucial fact, which is that they would eventually
be subject to a reckoning. And we will talk about
that and more in Part two. Are we feeling Maggie?

Speaker 4 (52:38):
Whoa ugh? Good?

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Good?

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Yeah, I'm feeling great.

Speaker 3 (52:44):
This is so fascinating. I feel great, yeah, aring for so.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Yeah, we will talk a lot about what happened next
and how this all continued. But first, why don't you
plug your pluggables? Oh?

Speaker 3 (52:59):
Yes, how does one transition? I feel like my brain's
been cooked.

Speaker 4 (53:04):
Well, you know what if you're feeling down, if you
feeling a little sad after this episode, you know over
a nebula like, Yeah, there's a show called Amy's Dead
and dream House.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
It also tackles, yeah.

Speaker 4 (53:16):
Some pretty dark topics, but you know, the fun guys
of a kid show. So go check that out. And
then yeah, you can find my video essays just at
my name Maggie may Fish. We do a very fun
one coming out about true crime and Ganda. So you know,
I can't wait for fun just fun things at the

(53:37):
top of my brain right now.

Speaker 2 (53:39):
You know, well, check that out, check out Maggie's whole
ouvra of work, and you know, check out the history
of slavery in Brazil. It's probably something we should all
read more about. It's pretty bleak, I don't know. Also,
maybe I was gonna say, don't buy a Volkswagon, but
really there's not a car you can buy without some
sort of nightmare history to it or nightmare present too.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
It really is what towlsman are you picking up?

Speaker 2 (54:05):
You know, I will say Volkswagen's worse than most. You know,
they got caught a couple of years ago for just
like massively committing fraud on an enormous scale, like lying
about the emissions of their diesel vehicles, like yeah, like
it's a huge deal. And then we could talk about
like the fact that they operate factories and Zinjang and
China that they have a really questionable human rights record too.

(54:28):
But I don't know, You're not going to find a
clean auto maker here. So steal a car. That's what
I'm saying. Everybody, steal all of your vehicles.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
Steal a car.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
That's the only ethical way to buy a car. Yeah,
auto theft. Great, all right, Well that's part one. Everybody.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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Speaker 3 (54:59):
You get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
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