The World is Burning: Your Guide to the Current Uprisings

In Episode 92, Robert gives listeners a guide to the uprisings all over the world right now.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Catalonia's bid for independence from Spain explained
2. Hong Kong is exporting its protest techniques around the world
3. Wildfires blaze through Lebanon while emergency aircraft remain grounded
4. Why are Lebanon's firefighting helicopters grounded?
5. Lebanon protests: Huge crowds on streets as government acts
6. Lebanon’s government proposes reforms as huge protests hit their fifth day
7. A world on fire: Here are all the major protests happening around the globe right now
8. Egyptian authorities threaten to 'decisively confront' protesters
9. Curfew Tweet
10. ‘This Is Ethnic Cleansing’: A Dispatch from Kurdish Syria
11. China offers support to Spanish government amid Catalonia crisis
12. Pro-independence protest in front of Chinese consulate in solidarity with Hong Kong
13. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam takes to Facebook to reach out to public, while strongly defending police force and questioning ‘puzzling’ calls for its disbandment
14. What’s happening in Hong Kong? Some key questions, answered.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Albert Einstein, famed smart Guy and inspiration for Bernie Sanders's
hair do, once famously stated, I know not with what
weapons world War three will be fought, but World War
four will be fought with sticks and stones. The implication
of his words is quite obvious. By the Cold War era,
the weapons available to nation states had grown so powerful
that if they went to war with one another again

(00:24):
on a mass scale, civilization as we know it would
be annihilated. But what if Albert was wrong? Brilliant as
he was, mister Einstein was trapped as we all are
in the time he lived. The towering armed giants of
his era where the United States and the U. S
s are, and it was only rational to fear them
unleashing hell upon each other and the world. But we

(00:45):
live in different times now. Today Russia and the United
States still pack potent nuclear arsenals. But the great global
conflict that increasingly sweeps our world is not a battle
between nations. It is a clash between people who want
to be free and the authoritarians who want to squeeze
them dry. You've seen some of this in the news.

(01:07):
In the last few weeks. More than a million people
have taken to the streets of Lebanon demanding the resignation
of their government. Protesters in Hong Kong have continued their
months long battle against the state. Catalonians have taken to
the street and their fight for independence from Spain. Revolutionaries
in Rajapa fight with machine guns and wire guided missiles
against the overwhelming firepower of Turkey and NATO nation. Right now,

(01:28):
as I type this, uprisings have lit up the skies
and capital cities around the world from east to west.
Each of these movements has its own reason for taking
to the street, but I think most of these activists
would agree with the sentiment I saw expressed on a
poster board in Santiago, Chile. We're not from the left,
and we're not from the right. We're from the bottom

(01:50):
and we are coming for those on top. This will
be a different episode of Behind the Bastards than you
normally get. This is traditionally a show that tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Uh And most days I weave a
tale of entertaining bastardry to a comedian guest whose rideshotgun. Today,

(02:10):
my only guests are activists and journalists from around the
world Chile, Lebanon, Rojava. I decided this rather unorthodox episode
was necessary because I truly believe that the future freedom
of everyone listening to this depends on what we all
do over the next year and change. The current uprisings
around the globe are but a prelude. There will be more.

(02:31):
The world is burning and it will not stop anytime soon.
So let's begin. We can probably trace this current set
of revolts to the protests in Hong Kong, which started
on March thirty one, two thousand nineteen. Now, the spark
that started those protests was a proposed new bill which
would have allowed individuals to be extradited to China for

(02:51):
a variety of crimes. Since Great Britain gave the island
back to China in nine Hong Kong has been governed
by an agreement generally summarized stas one country, two systems.
People in Hong Kong enjoy more personal freedoms than the
citizens of mainland China. They are in effect a semi
autonomous zone, not completely unlike the Curtish cities of Northern Iraq,

(03:14):
but pro China. Elements within the government of Hong Kong
sought greater integration with China, which meant throwing many of
the more subversive elements of their society under the bus.
The people of Hong Kong did not want to see
their friends and relatives sent off to mainland China to
be beaten and tortured for their political beliefs, so they
took to the streets. When the protests started seven months ago,

(03:34):
most observers doubted that they would last more than a
few weeks. But the people of Hong Kong shocked and
continue to shock the world with an array of innovative
tactics for battling state power. They placed traffic cones over
tear gas grenades and pour in water to disarm them.
They deploy phayleanxes of protesters armed with umbrellas to counter
police projectiles. And they organized demonstrations that flow like water

(03:56):
around the forces of the state and against all odds.
These tack picks have worked. The activists of Hong Kong
are still holding out. In fact, their movement has evolved
from just a protest against a single law to a
series of five demands from the government. They want the
state to officially retract the description of their protests as
a riot. They want their jailed fellow activists freed and

(04:18):
the charges against them dropped. They want an investigation into
police brutality, and they want universal suffrage, a chance to
vote for their leaders without the involvement of the government
in Beijing. The Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lamb,
has ceded to only a few of the protesters demands,
retracting the extradition law, but holding fast against the others.

(04:38):
The Chinese government has moved twelve thousand troops onto the island,
and thousands more await in the wings. Week after week,
the clashes have continued. In the last month or so,
a sixth demand has developed amongst the activists, the police force,
they say, must now be entirely disbanded. On September thirty,
Carry Lamb took to the last bastion of all would

(04:58):
be tyrants, ACE book Live. She did a carefully curated
Q and A session where she defended the police of
Hong Kong, who have been videotaped firing concussion rounds at
journalists and shooting activists. She called the demand for the
police to be disbanded puzzling. Quote, I'm puzzled when I
hear this, because when there are public order and safety
issues such as theft or unfortunate attacks, people say they

(05:21):
must ask police to follow up seriously. So police are
playing a very important role and we must support them
in law enforcement. And yet the people of Hong Kong
continue to turn out in their millions, and now that
they have seen the police as an instrument of violent
repression on a mass scale, they are unlikely to go
back to the way things were not without being forced
to do so by even greater violence. And so the

(05:44):
protests continue. The whole situation hanging upon the edge of
a razor blade. It is impossible to know how things
will end, but the powerful images coming out of Hong
Kong have inspired other acts of resistance around the world.
It would be too much to call the protests on
that island the spark that set our current fires of revolution,
but they certainly provided fuel, just as the people of Catalonia. Now,

(06:08):
Catalonia is one of the wealthiest and most productive regions
of Spain. The Catalonian people have their own language and
identity that goes back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
Barcelona is generally seen as the political and cultural capital
of that region. Starting in the early nineteen hundreds, Catalonia
became the center of socialist and anarchist politics in Spain.
In the late nineteen twenties, an alliance of affinity groups,

(06:30):
which are collections of individuals with shared interests, coalesced into
a resistance against the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera.
A number of different uprisings followed for the next decade,
several of which were brutally suppressed by Fascist general Francisco Franco.
This all culminated in the Spanish Coup of nineteen thirty six,
which was pulled off by an alliance of anarchists and socialists.

(06:51):
For a while, these leftists held off the advancing forces
of Spanish fascism, but Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy backed
Francisco frank Those regime and the so called democracies of
the world let the resistance in Spain die. Catalonia was
crushed under the fascist boot heel. In time, Spanish fascism
died a natural death, and the nation today functions about

(07:14):
as well as any other liberal democracy, which is to
say that roughly half of the people there hate their
government at any given time. Since nineteen seventy eight, the region,
like Hong Kong, has had limited autonomy from the central government.
In two thousand and six, Catalonia one even greater independence
and was described as a nation in a new statute.
But then came the two thousand eight financial crash and

(07:35):
bitter austerity measures introduced by the government to cut public spending.
Catalonia represents sixteen percent of Spain's population but contributes about
nineteen percent of its tax revenue. Many within the region
resent paying so much into a government that continually cuts
their benefits. That resentment was further stoked in two thousand ten,
when Spain's Constitutional Court reversed the statute that gave Catalonia

(07:58):
greater autonomy. Set artists held a symbolic referendum on November
two thousand fourteen, which was outlawed by Spain. The vote
showed substantial support for independence, and in the two thousand
fifteen regional election, separatists one big. This led rather inevitably
to a full referendum on independence on October first, two
thousand seventeen. The Spanish Constitutional Court declared this illegal, but

(08:21):
the referendum went forward and ninety of voters supported independence. Now,
only forty three percent of the region actually voted, due
in large part to a trade union boycott, and other
polls show that the Catalonian people are fairly deeply divided
about independence, But the Spanish government came in and cracked
down on the separatists brutally. Madrid dissolved the elected Parliament

(08:42):
of Catalonia and arrested nine of the most prominent secessionists
and brought them to trial on Monday, October fourteenth, two
thousand nineteen. All nine were convicted and sentenced two years
in jail. This sparked a new and much more extensive
series of protests against the government, as even people who'd
been on the fence about secession we acted to the
violence of the state. The latest series of Catalonian uprisings

(09:04):
have been deeply inspired by the protests in Hong Kong.
The primary organizing principle of the Hong Kong protesters, b water,
seems to be particularly impactful on Catalonians. The basic idea
of this b water principle is that protests should be formless, shapeless, leaderless,
and nimble in order to counter the clinched fist of
state power. Catalonians took this idea and ran with it,

(09:27):
modifying it into their own revolutionary axiom, be a tsunami.
They formed a group called Tsunami Democratic in September, which
suggested mass civil disobedience in order to defend the autonomy
of Catalonia. Once their leaders were sentenced, protests broke out
across the region, blocking traffic and assembling in multiple public
spaces to march on Barcelona's airport. As they marched, many

(09:50):
of these activists chanted, we are going to do a
Hong Kong. I'm going to quote now from an article
in Courts by Mary Hui, who has extensively covered the
uprising in Hong Kong and is covering the uprisings in Catalonia.
Quote at Barcelona Airport on Monday, Striking the similar scenes
played out as thousands occupied both the terminal and the
roads outside the building, eventually forcing the cancelation of at

(10:13):
least one hundred flights. Tsunami Democratic even distributed some one
hundred thirty boarding passes via the messaging app Telegram so
that protesters could enter the airport, and a move reminiscent
of some Hong Kong protesters who purchased cheap flights in
order to enter the airport in circumvent a court ban
on demonstrations in the building. In late September, the Grassroots
Group Assembly in Nasional, Catalania even held a public forum

(10:36):
titled Experiences of the use of New Technologies and the
non violent Struggle the Case of Hong Kong. Quote quote
with un a quote. I should say we've been inspired
a lot by the Hong Kong protests, although we are
aware of the differences between both societies. A representative of
picnic x republica digital platform designed to mobilize Catalans for
political action, told courts the Hong Kong people have done

(10:58):
a very good job in letting every buddy else know
about their fight through social networks. These are the first
lessons we have learned from them, the use of these
tools to mobilize the people and keep them informed. The
protesters in Barcelona did not just content themselves with chanting.
They lit garbage cans on fire. They damage street signs
and traffic lights, and did an estimate at one point
seven billion dollars in damage to the city. This sort

(11:21):
of activism, the kind that ends with broken windows and
serious financial damage to the state is deeply frowned upon
by many Americans, even by many American liberals. A lot
of you probably feel uncomfortable with the idea, even if
you generally support protests. I'd ask you to think about
why that is, and to ask yourself if the state
truly understands any language but the language of damage done

(11:43):
to its bottom line. The protests in Hong Kong have
done even more financial damage. The stock market alone is
down five hundred billion dollars since the beginning of the
protests in March, and that doesn't include the financial cost
incurred by a blockaded airport, by roads and streets cut
off to traffic. A protest that doesn't cost the government
anything more than the manpower of its police is not

(12:05):
much of a protest at all. Jordy Barbata, a journalist
and political writer in Barcelona, said that the protesters in
Hong Kong have provided a global dimension to a local
conflict by attracting mass international sympathy. This sympathy might be
the only thing holding the Chinese military back from more
aggressive intervention. Jordy recognized that now and in the future,

(12:26):
activists around the world could only hope to succeed in
their struggles against oppressive states by generating mass awareness and
international solidarity. To that end, protesters in Barcelona massed in
front of the Chinese consulate and a show of solidarity
with Hong Kong. Prominent Hong Kong protester Joshua Wong told
Catalan News that he was worried about the excessive use
of force by Spanish police. He stated, people in Hong

(12:50):
Kong and Catalonia both deserve their right to determine their
own destiny. Simultaneous rallies were held in Catalonia and Hong Kong,
but as these activists express solidarity with one another, the
government's oppressing them did the same thing. The twelfth of
October brought this headline from the South China Morning Post,
China offers support to Spanish government amid Catalonia crisis. China's

(13:11):
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said quote, the Government of the People's
Republic understands that supports the Spanish government's efforts to protect
national unity and its territorial integrity. Being result of the
struggle for Catalonian independence, like the protests in Hong Kong,
is still very much up in the air, but both
struggles offer important truths for the rest of us, including

(13:32):
my fellow Americans. Dictators and authoritarian powers around the world.
Whatever ideology they claim to hold, dear will always stand
together because the people on top always have more in
common with each other than they do with you. This
is why Turkish dictator taip Air Dooan and President Donald
Trump were able to come to such a chummy arrangement
about the future of the autonomous region of Northeast Syria

(13:54):
known as Rojava. The Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF, an
alliance of a issues who protected the leftist revolution in
that area, fought alongside US forces for years. More than
eleven thousand of them died in the battle against Isis.
But when push came to shove, the American President felt
more affinity for his fellow autocrat than he did for
the revolutionaries of Rojava, so he abandoned them. I've talked

(14:17):
about this issue at length on my podcast Worst Year Ever,
and a number of other places. For our purposes today,
I'm going to let the words of a much better
journalist than me tell the story. Kabat a Boss is
a reporter, a documentarian, and a fixer living in Northeast Syria.
She's one of the most remarkable people I've ever met.
In mid October two thousand nineteen, she wrote an article

(14:37):
for The New York Review of Books. This is Ethnic Cleansing,
a dispatch from Northern Syria. I very much recommend reading
the entire article, which will be linked on our website
behind the Bastards dot com. I'd like to quote from
the beginning of the piece. Now, this is Khabbat. When
my mom called to ask me where I was, I
lied to her. Sometimes I do not want to worry her,

(14:58):
as I'm often reporting on stories from play says that
aren't safe. When she said get ready to remove, I
realized something was wrong. Komischli was under attack. Can't you
hear the shelling? She screamed. She lives in Rimmelan, a
city an hour away, but she was here to visit
my brother. The Turks were targeting my neighborhood, she said.
That was Wednesday afternoon, October nine, the first day of

(15:18):
Turkey's attack on Rojava Western Kurdistan, as we call it
in Kurdish. Commischli, my city, was one of the few
places in Northeast Syria that had enjoyed relative peace despite
Syria's eight year civil war. In past years, Turkish president
Receipt Type Erdowin made constant threats against us, but I
never really expected him to make a move. The Americans
were here and they promised they would protect us, so

(15:41):
Edwin's bluster seemed meaningless. I was wrong. First we experienced
clashes with the regime forces of Bishar al Assad. Then
it was our turn to face down the fighters of ISIS,
the so called Islamic State. After the group rose in
two thousand and fourteen, ISIS detonated bombs and planted suicide
attacks in Kamischli and the towns of northeast Syria. For
all that, we never had artillery showing before, so when

(16:03):
my mother called, I was scared. Everyone was. That day,
October nine, I was driving back from Sarah Khanyi, about
fifty miles from Commichali, when an air strike targeted a
military base a few hundred yards from the scene of
a protest that I had been due to report on
about a half hour later. In the aftermath of the bombing,
we feared we were going to be hit by another
wave of Turkish planes. Everyone fled the scene. My colleague Alan,

(16:26):
who was an exceptionally good driver got us out of
there in seconds. This is Robert again, and just a
few months before, Kabat wrote that. In August of two
thousand nineteen, journalist j Canrahan and I spent more than
a week in Alan's car with Kabat. At that time,
Rojava was at peace. We felt safe virtually everywhere. For days.

(16:46):
We visited all women farming collectives, local communes, representatives of
a justice system that was experimenting with art therapy as
a treatment for captured ISIS fighters. The sheer amount of
optimism we felt in the air was staggering. It almost
tasted Neither Jake nor I wanted to return to Iraq
when our visit ended. Today, however, Rojaba is in chaos.

(17:08):
Hundreds are dead and an unknown number of ISIS prisoners
have gotten free. In the confusion. Two hundred thousand civilians
have been made refugees. I asked about how the autonomous
Region has handled the flow of so many refugees in
the wake of the fighting. Here's how she responded, I
went to in the past days to these shelters, and
there is uh every time, new numbers increasing very fast,

(17:32):
and the humanitian situation get worse and the response is
so slow comporting to their needs. In addition, it's it's
wars as a results of the Turkish attack on the
virtual centers. As the Turkish air strike they hit they
unlogged them in Surigny, which is feeding the WATA to
a city of Serikani and Hasseta ntil Timer and that

(17:55):
result a cut of WATA three days from those cities.
And this situation of the population and the IDPs, it's
gate wars as a result of that. Also, I met
many families and most of them basically from Trilabias Regani
and even some of them have been many times displacement
as they were from Afrin. I think if the international

(18:17):
response is limited, that will gonna lead to a humanitarian crisis.
Even I met the head of the West Municipality of
the Hassaka, Mohammed Shammy, and he was explaining to us
how it's there is a pressure on the city and
there is no support. For example, he gave an example
about the needs of the bread. He said, we use

(18:38):
it to back thirty five tones of the floor daily
for Hassaka. Only last days we are baking fifty tons
and we cannot cover the needs of the population. So
the situation every day, every hour, gate wars and wars,
and there is a gap and and all the organizations
have to respond to these needs. In the face of

(18:59):
ethnic clins in out of sheer desperation, Rojava invited in
the Assad regime and the Russian Army. This was not
a decision anyone wanted to make. Many people in Rajava
had risen up against Assad in the early days of
the Syrian Civil War. I asked her about how she
felt that this development would affect the women's revolution in Rojava.
Regime is representing the patriarchy system. On the contrary, Rojava

(19:20):
is representing the woman revolution. Women of Rojaba built last
eight year specific system for the woman in all levels military,
economically and politically, and they made impact in the education
via teaching digitology, which is a woman's sense on the
mentality of the new generations. In addition, the implementation of
the co presidency system and all the institutions starting from

(19:41):
coming to the highest official ranks allowed very effective participation
of a woman to lead this region beside them and
interview with the bidality co presidency of a society. Protection
forces in Al Jazeera kanton about this subject, and she said,
we know how to protect ourselves now a there are
years of experience and we are not afraid of a

(20:03):
region coming back. It's obvious that the woman of Rojaba
will not lead their gainst easily, but there is a
great risk on the woman evolution in case the regime
take over Rojava. I do believe that the region will
first start get the woman specifically, because this is what
makes Rojava unique on a global level. The very last
thing I asked her was what if anything people outside

(20:25):
Syria could do to support Rojava in its struggle. Here
was her answer. I think the people of the outside
can help Rojaba, and specifically, all the feminist movements have
to rise up for otherwise we as a woman all
over the world might face the risk to lose the
woman revolution. Any activity to support Rojaba like demonstrations, donation

(20:49):
by Code Turkish goods and rise the awareness of the
Western community about what is Rojava facing currently. It's a genocide,
it's an ethnic glancing, and it's a demograh demographic changing
and everyone have to take the responsibilities in order to
make some steps and that's what'll going to help Rojaba.

(21:09):
For sure. She's calling for solidarity, the same sort of
solidarity the protesters in Hong Kong and Catalonia have expressed
for one another. Whenever I write or talk about Rojaba,
people always ask me where can I send money to help?
And you might do some good by donating to the
Kurdish Red Crescent. But at the end of the day,
the people of Rojava, like the protesters in Hong Kong,

(21:30):
won't be helped by any money you could send. What
might help them is your solidarity, your willingness to harangue
your elected leaders on their behalf, or to get into
the streets and protest at the Turkish embassy or the
Chinese consulate, or wherever it might get attention. There are
protesters in Germany right now who have protested in front
of buildings of companies that supply arms to the Turkish nation.
The United States supplies plenty of weapons to Turkey. There

(21:52):
are places you could gather. Another group of humans who
could really use your solidarity. Right now are the people
of Santiago, Chile. As I write this, the city has
been convulsed by marches and brutal clashes between police and
demonstrators for more than a week. If you read most

(22:12):
of the news about what is happening, it places the
blame on a four percent hike in the cost of
public transportation. I was lucky enough to sit down with
two activists in Santiago over Skype. Saul is an American
living in Santiago over the last eight years with his wife, Stephanie,
a native Chilean. They told me to be wary of
attributing just one cost to the protests. What initially started

(22:35):
this protest was a group, a bunch of students who
were evading uh the metro so to protest the rise
in the fair which is the second or third time
they've raised the metro in the last three years. Um.

(22:57):
And so it's the most expensive metro in South America.
And and even though for someone from the United States
it might seem it's still very cheap, or how are
they only protesting over ten more cents or whatever? But um,
in Chile, if you make the minimum wage, you could
be spending almost of your wage on the metro. It

(23:18):
is very expensive here. And uh so what happened is
a lot of students were getting together. It's like a
big group and so there will be hundreds of them
and they would all rush into the metro together and
jump over the turnstiles and so the h that's how
it all started. And then the police were very heavy

(23:40):
handed in their reaction and got very violent, and then
it got kind of worse from there, and so the
protest exploded into more of a general protest because, um,
there's been a lot of problems in Chile and there's
a lot of um inequality and a lot of things

(24:01):
that have never been fixed since the since the dictatorship,
so they're still using the same constitution that was written
by pinol j and um. Yeah, and there's lots of
other things, Yeah, the corruption of Pinera, the current president,
and then a lot of protests over the last couple

(24:23):
of years about the pension plans the AFP. Sault speaks
fluent English, so he does most of the talking for
the segments of the interview I'm including this episode, but
his wife talked quite a lot too, And I'm going
to include the full audio of this interview when all
of the other interviews in an episode that will drop tomorrow.
It's just going to be a straight recording of all
the interviews. There will be a normal episode on Thursday.

(24:45):
You can get back to your regularly scheduled comedy now.
I've interviewed several other Chilean dissidents over Twitter, and crippling
inequality in that nation is one thing that every single
one of them has brought up as the real cause
of these protests. One popular memes sir reculating among activists
in Santiago is a picture of a glacier with a
tiny peak of ice above the water line and a

(25:05):
gargantuan mountain of ice underneath it. The images labeled social
uprising in Chile. The bit above the water is the
forcent metro fare increase, and the bit below the water
line is extremely high. Social inequality, decades of abuse of power.
Almost everything is privatized, including water, high taxes and low benefits,
precarious jobs, miserable pensions, politicians, outrageous salaries and benefits, high

(25:28):
student loan debts, unfair justice system, political police and military corruption,
predatory lending and banking system, and more. The Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development the o e c D measures
income equality via something called the Genie coefficient. This ranges
from zero, the minimum which would exist in a perfectly
equal society to one which would presumably be a society

(25:50):
in which Jeff Bezos owns everything and we have to
pay rent for access to our own bones. Chile's Genie
coefficient is among the highest on the planet point five
zero and when to quote now from a write up
in Borgan magazine. Despite the high tax bracket, a higher
proportion of tax tends to be levied on individuals from
poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. This system greatly reduces the disposable incomes

(26:13):
and consumption ability of the common people. As a result,
the poor in Chile often suffer from malnourishment and hunger
because they are unable to afford basic necessities. Poor education
also forms the bedrock of economic inequality in Chile. Thousands
of young people have recently called for more education, reform
and peaceful demonstrations. A majority of the population is lacking
the skills that are essential for attaining good jobs and incomes. Moreover,

(26:35):
this inequality is also prevalent and higher education, as the
poorer unable to pay for college and other institutions of
higher learning. Additionally, Chile has had to juggle with the
issue of corruption at the hands of the rich and
powerful oligarchs in the country. These powerful entities often evade tax. Similarly,
the Ministry of Public Services unit has also been caught
up in various corruption scandals since two thous and two

(26:56):
due to a lack of resources and misallocation of funds.
So we're seeing in Chile is people at the top
who have access to basically all of the money, who
are not taxed nearly enough of their income, and who
are increasingly pushing the burden of funding the government onto
the people who have almost no money. It's a problem

(27:16):
that doesn't sound familiar to anyone else in the world.
By the way, the Genie coefficient of the United States
is point four three, just a little bit under point
five zero. And um, it's really interesting because in Chile
almost uh ten family are they have control uh for

(27:38):
all the they are they they are they have control
with the gang. Yeah. So it's it's similar to the
United States, where there's you know, a couple of hundred
billionaires that are kind of controlling everything. But in Jilian

(27:59):
it's literally ten families, and these ten families are are
very very rich and have a lot of control in
the country. Um. But but yeah, so it's it's about
a lot of things um the protest now. On October nineteenth,
President Piniera announced that he was reversing the fair increase,
but this did not assuage protesters. Thousands continue to take

(28:22):
to the streets. Bonfires lit up the Santiago sky, and
unrest began to spread to other cities in Chile, like Valparaiso.
Late that night, the government declared martial law. General Javier
Ettiaga de camp told citizens. We invite all citizens to
return to their homes and to evaluate the measures that
the government has arranged and cooperate to protect their family,
their integrity and their own assets. This is the first

(28:45):
time Chileans have reverted to military rules since the era
of Dictator Augusto Pinochet from nineteen seventy three to nineteen ninety,
and by all accounts, the state's repression of these demonstrators
has been brutal. At least eighteen people have been killed
in the protests, and by the time you hear this,
that number will likely be much higher. I like to
quote now from an article in the Guardian than interviewed
one protester. I was coming home and the military patrol

(29:07):
stopped me, said one bruised and blooded man as he
stumbled home in the early hours of Tuesday morning. They
put me in the truck and bang, bang, bang. They
smashed me in the head with the butt of a gun.
I begged them to stop it. They kept on kicking me,
and they took my friend away. There's video now circulating
on Twitter if Chilean soldiers detaining a protester and then
as casually as you or I might swat a mosquito,

(29:28):
shooting him in the leg with an M sixteen. The government,
for its part, claims all these people are looters or criminals,
general terms the state now applies to anyone it does
violence against one protester I interviewed on Twitter. Juan told
me this. Whenever they give a speech mentioning our current situation,
they talk about the protesters that way, criminals or bad
elements of society, or similar expressions, giving to understand that

(29:52):
this is a criminal matter rather than one of policy,
which explains the curfew, the soldiers on the streets, and
so on. And now here's uh Saul and his wife
Stephanie expressing very similar opinions. The police respond to often
peaceful protests with with tear guys and um and violence,

(30:14):
and now of course there's been declared the state of
emergencies and now you have the military in tanks in
the streets too. And why you said that the police
have gotten more aggressive and more violent this year, Why
would you do you have do? Is there a reason
behind that? Do you think like, is there some sort
of cause to that that you can see? No, it's

(30:35):
not any reason. It's only a strategy of the government.
But it is a bad idea. And in UM, a
couple of months ago, we saw some car of the
cuffs uh driving in the in the passel really traditionally
the center of the city and uh tear gas. Oh yeah, yeah.

(31:00):
A couple of months ago there was some crazy protests
and the police we were driving through like plaza, their armost,
like the downtown, like the center of the historic center
of town, and and and throwing tear guys that people
who aren't even protesting. And um, But to answer your question,
I think that it just has to do with the government,

(31:22):
because um, a couple of years ago the president was Bachelete,
who is more center left, and so I think the
police now under Vinera understand that they kind of have
carte blanche to do whatever they want and that they
won't be reprimanded for um violence against protesters. And when this,

(31:46):
when this current wave of like heavy street actions broke out,
were y'all there for sort of the beginning of that.
Were you there on sort of the first day that
this like really kicked off into um, you know, a
citywide sort of thing rather than just kind of a
fair protest. Yeah, definitely. So we Um we live about

(32:07):
step six or seven blocks from the Plaza Italia, which
is the Metro Bacadado, which is like the center of downtown,
and it's the historic place where protests always start and
and so we're kind of in the thick of it.
And then also we are right by this intersection where

(32:29):
when the protest really got serious two nights ago, um,
the there were five buses that were burned right at
our intersection, so um yeah, it's kind of right outside
our door. These burned busses have become part of one
of several conspiracy theories that have grown up around the protests.
Whenever there is mass civil unrest in the country, people

(32:49):
from one are both sides of the conflict will cook
up conspiracies, and the world being what it is, some
of those will be true. Most of the conspiracies in
Santiago center around the burning of three busses and the
arson attack on the headquarters of an L Chile power
company who recently hiked their prices. When I first encountered
video of the n L building burning, it was being
celebrated by non Chilean leftists as a justified attack on

(33:12):
a corrupt capitalist institution. But every Chilean I've interviewed has
expressed severe doubts as to whether or not these arson
attacks were the work of protesters. Yeah, like you know,
we're not typically uh like conspiracy there as people, but
as far as like what a lot of people have

(33:32):
been talking about is with both the n L Electric Company, UM,
with the fire that happened on their their staircase right there,
fire escape, and there was a number of suspicious things
about it. You know, it started on the eleventh floor,
so it's like, how could a protester do that? And

(33:55):
I don't know, um, And of course it only burned
that the fire escape and it didn't touch anything about
the main building. And there's so there's a lot of
suspicion here UM of that, and then uh of the
idea that possibly it was the police or the government
who started that as a way to justify um, bringing

(34:18):
in the military and all of that and starting the curfew.
And what's that thing is very similar is uh these
five buses that were burned outside of our apartment. UM.
It was very strange because yes, there's there's almost never
five buses all right next to each other on the

(34:39):
street in the corner and UM. And then there's also
been videos that have been passed around what'sapp and um
social media where you see that these busses were like discontinued,
so they were already like in bad situation, their bad shape.
And then there's a video that's been passed around of
the police like escorted one of these busses very slowly,

(35:02):
almost like they're escorting it here so they can burn
it and again use it as justification, um to ratchet
up the police response. So it's hard to say, and
you know, you don't want to be a conspiracy theorist,
but certainly there's uh, there there's suspicious things happening in
that regard and on the street here. Almost every chile

(35:25):
and that we've talked to has has said that they
pretty much believe that it was the police that that
we're doing that. Now, I don't want to act as
if I have any real understanding of who is correct here.
It is entirely possible that piste Off protesters committed these
arson attacks. It's also possible that the state did so
to justify President Piniera's declaration we are at war and

(35:46):
his assumption of martial law. That's the thing about serious
civil unrest. Once your government starts gunning down people in
the streets, all kinds of conspiracy theories suddenly become plausible.
Another local Chilean activists I found on Twitter goes by
the name Antifa al Farrado sent me a translation of
an anti protest meme that blames all the unrest on
Venezuelan President Madeiro and essentially frames the uprising in Chile

(36:09):
as a communist conspiracy. It's basically framed as a flow
chart that starts with financing politicians and parties close to
our ideologies, networking and universities and NGOs degrading the meaning
of social values, indoctrinate young people in liberal ideas. Constitutional accusation.
It's Chili's term for impeachment uh and and so on

(36:29):
and so forth. So it's basically like a little flow
chart showing that everything happening in Chile right now is
a part of this communist conspiracy cooked up by Madeiro
and the bowlev Orens, which is kind of one of
the names for the communist revolution in that country. And
I've seen zero evidence that this is actually true, and
I share it mainly to make the point of how
confusing these situations can get, particularly to an audience of

(36:52):
foreigners who are unlikely to understand the nuances of the
politics in the region. Most Chileans and Santiago are unlikely
to be convinced of this last conspiracy theory unless they
already believe in some sort of all encompassing communist plot
to destroy their nation. But conspiracies like this can play
a role in cutting off international solidarity with activists. More
conservative members of foreign nations might see something like this

(37:15):
and become convinced that the government of Chile is only
trying to defend themselves from an insidious Venezuelan plot. The
same behavior occurs on the left. By the way, you
do not have to look for to find people on
Twitter condemning the Hong Kong protests as Western BacT and
part of a capitalist conspiracy against the Communist government of China.
In my opinion, all conspiracies like this are a way

(37:35):
to distract and detract sympathy from real human beings fighting
for their lives. I have my own political beliefs, but
whenever I see people facing rubber bullets and tear gas
grenades and extra judicial murder at the hands of the state,
I'm always going to side with those people over their government,
no matter where that government lands on the political spectrum.
On the day before I wrote this episode, Friday, the

(37:56):
twenty six of October, more than one point two million
people took to the streets of Santiago to protest. That
should be all the evidence you need that this is
not just some conspiracy and is in fact the result
of very real, very honest anger. Some Chileans continue to
take to the streets at night in violation of the curfew. Others,
not willing to risk it, stay at home but contribute

(38:17):
to the protest by banging on pots and pans to
make noise and, in Juan's words, signaling their discontent. The
early stages of the protests in Santiago were pure expressions
of local fury based more on emotion than calculation. But
as the days have worn on, Chilean activists have found
themselves looking out towards Hong Kong for inspiration. When I

(38:37):
first interviewed Juan on Sunday the twenty, he told me
there isn't a greater level of organizing or planning. It's
not like the Hong Kong protests, for example. I guess
we're not very sophisticated protesters, and then he sent me
up smiley faced with sticking its tongue out. But a
few days later on I ran across a video on Twitter.
It shows hundreds of protesters in the streets of Santiago.
A police tear gas grenade comes sailing over the crowd

(39:00):
and lands in the middle of it. A dozen or
so men and women quickly surround the grenade, dumped into
a plastic bag, and douse it with water. Linked in
the video was a tweet from a Hong Kong activists
from four days earlier explaining this exact method for dealing
with tear gas. The only recent protests to eclipse the
uprising in Chile in terms of scale are the ones
currently happening in Lebanon on the twenty October, more than

(39:23):
one point two million people marched against their government nationwide,
and on the nineteenth more than a million people assembled
in Beirut alone. Now, the Lebanese nation only has a
population of four or five million, which makes these protests
the proportional equivalent of some eighty million Americans taking to
the streets two days in a row. And if you
follow mainstream Western news sources reporting on the unrest, they'll

(39:44):
generally blame it all on What's App. On October twenty,
two thousand nineteen, Public Radio International published an article titled
how Lebanon's What's app tacks unleashed a flood of anger.
But as with the public transit tacks in Chile, the
events being looked at as causes of this unrest just
the straws that broke the camels back. In fairness to
p r I, the actual article does go into this

(40:05):
in a little bit of detail, but we all know
that in the social media era, most people barely read
past the headlines. So I sat down with joey Ayoub,
a Lebanese writer and Middle East North Africa editor for
if X and Global Voices. He's been present for many
of the marches in Lebanon, and he pointed out that
a lot of the recent unrest in his country was
actually kicked off by a series of brutal wildfires and

(40:26):
an incompetent government reaction to the crisis. Lebanon actually had
horrible wild fires back in two thousand eight, which inspired
a group of citizens to raise money to buy a
small fleet of firefighting helicopters to protect the country in
the future. Now, these helicopters were very successful in putting
out wildfires for a couple of years, but due to
outrageous corruption, money to repair those helicopters was funneled away

(40:48):
towards god knows what and who, and my two twelve
the fleet was no longer operational. Here's Joey the wildfires.
That was last Monday, So that's fourteen the night of
the fourth into the fifteenth, and classed about forty eight
hours and it was Yeah, and those for the that

(41:08):
was well lost basically years worth of teas lost. Usually,
so I think there was something I came against teas
that's horrible. That's usually an average. Yeah. Uh So that
obviously pasted a lot of people off because the government
was utterly incapable on reading whatever wants to deal with it.

(41:31):
You had pretty much we haven't had several servants paid
in like twenty years of these old volunteer forces, and
you had you even had like this about defense forces
from the Palestinian camps that stepped up that helped, and
you had basically volunteers just doing it themselves. There wasn't
really anything until two things happened that put them off.
One is Greece cyclists in Jordan basically sent some you know,

(41:54):
helicopters and whatever. And the other thing is we got
lucky because it started gaining the day after. Yeah, so
that's pretty much why, like we the damage was more
or less limited, if you want. And so the fact
that after all of this, just like a day later
or something, the first thing the government can think of
doing is to impose it acts on what'sapp, which is

(42:16):
obviously free service that people use because actual phone services
are extremely expensive. And Lebanon that was kind of you know,
as everyone has been saying that, you know, that whole
sort of poly comes back then and then you had
protests on that like that Thursday evening, so that's basically
weak now. And in that protest you had lots of

(42:37):
good blogs. You had basically some of the usual protests
that we have been seeing before. And during that protest,
one of this if you want symbols, that became this Uh.
I don't know the point of unity, I guess is
there was the bodyguard of one one politician took out
his gun, started scaring people. People were not scared, they

(42:59):
were actually fighting act. And then he had this woman
who kicked him. Uh. And that became this sort of
meme and it became super popular and that kind of
galvanized everything. And then after that it became sort of
like a daily story. More people come down, there's a
bit of a passion than the next day, even more
people come down, a familiar story if you if you

(43:19):
see what I'm going with this, and now how it's
day in number eight and people are sitting in the
steats and it's way more than justin by roots. The
protests in Beirut started off with the air of almost
a carnival or perhaps a dance club, and there was
in fact DJs and dancing, but there was also a
powerful sense of solidarity that grew between people day after

(43:40):
day and built upon itself. The only reason these protests
have not been crushed by the government. Is that activists
were able to mobilize enough people from a wide enough
s wife of society that mass brutality simply was not
an option. Seventy two hours into the campaign, Prime Ministers
Sadhariri announced a new economic package, halving the salaries of
public officials, read amping the electricity sector, and eliminating a

(44:02):
bunch of do nothing government jobs that existed to suck
money away from the poor and squired into the hands
of rich connected people's children. This was rightly celebrated as
a victory by many activists. Although the protests are ongoing
and most Lebanese believe there is much more to be done,
the success they've seen already is proof of how much
can be accomplished and how quickly it can be accomplished

(44:22):
when enough of the nation gets on the same page.
Now that may seem impossible and a nation is divided
as the United States, but prior to these protests, Lebanon's
division seemed unbridgeable to you know. Two days ago was
the thirtieth anniversary or commemoration whatever off the TOEF Agreement,
the agreement that was signed in that ended the Libanese

(44:43):
Civil War, and they signed it in the city off
in Saudiahevia, and that system sort of codified sectarianism even
more than it was before the war. It did a
number of things I won't get into now it's not
that relevant, but what it did really is make it
almost basically impossible for anyone to identify, for like, in

(45:06):
any other way other than with your sect. So the
fact that I am from a certain sect, it doesn't
matter if I am a believer or not, or in
atheists or not, None of these things matter. What matters
is that this, this is your sect, and so you
vote according to that, and you vote according to sect
and according to where your family is supposedly originally from.

(45:28):
So for example, I can vote in a Shefie, but
I don't live in a shefe I live in a
different part of Lebanon. And that's part of the reason
why it's been so difficult to really organize, because, for example,
when there was the municipal elections in thousands sixteen, uh
something like a quarter of story, like, there's four times

(45:48):
more people who actually live in baby boots than people
who are adjusted to to vote in bay boots. So
you have many of my friends who live and I
don't live in Baywood, but they live in they live
in baby Boots, and so they were helping organized people
who are officially registered and maybe including people who don't
live there to vote there. So that's kind of just
like a small example of why it's been so difficult

(46:13):
on all levels to really organize for an alternative to
disc thanks with them that we have now. And yet
with no centralized structure, with no hierarchy of leadership, the
people of Lebanon have been able to at least somewhat
transcend the divisions built into their society to stand up
and force basic change. The exact nature of the problems
that must be confronted will differ from country to country

(46:34):
with every protest, but as we see when we observe
all of these movements side by side, the basic script
for effective change is always the same. Pick a few
concrete things that everyone agrees need to be changed, get
enough people out into the street and disrupt the normal
flow of life, and make the nation effectively ungovernable and
unprofitable until you get what you need now. The fact

(46:57):
that this is all relatively simple does not make it
easy zy nor does it mean that every uprising like
this is guaranteed to meet with success. Quite the opposite, really,
And this rather tragically brings me to Egypt. Ab del
Fata Alcisi came to power in two thousand thirteen via

(47:19):
a super fun military coup. Since his predecessors have been
famously swept out of power by popular unrest and mass demonstrations,
he spent much of his time in power making such
things impossible in the future. CC knows something that only
the very smartest dictators learned. You cannot let protests start
because once they start, they can grow exponentially, like things

(47:40):
did in Lebanon, and then there are too many people
out in the street to shoot, and then you have
to make concessions, and then you fall. In late September
two nineteen, an exiled former military contractor named Muhammad Ali
started posting a series of videos documenting massive corruption within
the Egyptian military. He called for a million people to

(48:00):
march in the streets. This was, of course, just a spark.
More than one third of Egyptians live in poverty. Most
of the people who did take to the streets cited
economic grievances as the reason they stood up but sadly
they did not stand for long because CC's military was
there to crush their will. And I'm going to quote
from the Guardian. Now more people have been arrested since

(48:21):
rare protests broke out last weekend, and on Thursday, the
Ministry of the Interior affirmed that it will confront any
attempt to destabilize the country with decisiveness. According to local media,
central Cairo was heavily guarded as riot police, fans of
security officials, and plain closed police spread out among the
network of streets surrounding Tafrir Square, the epicenter of egypt
two thousand eleven revolution. The figures for the arrests were

(48:43):
compiled by the Cairo based GEO, the Egyptian Center for
Economic and Social Rights. Bystanders and others who had little
to do with the protests were reportedly detained along with
the demonstrators, and those arrested being held across the country. Now.
When people did try to march in Egypt, police met
them with tear gas, with ubber bullets, with real bullets,
and with brutal clubbings. They also blocked off access to

(49:04):
much of the Internet, restricting Twitter, Facebook, Messenger. In Skype,
as well as a number of international news sites, in
order to make it impossible for Egyptian activists to coordinate
with one another or to share their stories with the
rest of the world. All of this worked, the protests
in Cairo fizzled out. Cecy's reign is for now seemingly secure.
Sixty thousand political prisoners still languish in Egyptian jails, and

(49:28):
authoritarians around the world viewed this development with as much
optimism as I have for the protests in Lebanon. Just
days later, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised the dictator
for a positive progress and with the relationship between the
two nations. U S President Donald Trump called CC his
favorite dictator and said of the suppressed protests in Cairo,

(49:49):
everybody has demonstrations now. The Guardians spoke with several Egyptians
about their reasons for protesting and for not protesting, sayed
a thirty four year old fest employee gave a response
that I think embodies exactly how dictators want their people
to feel. Quote I never went to a protest and
I never will go. There is a lot of things

(50:11):
wrong in the country. Some people are literally eating from
the garbage, but protesting and riots will make things worse.
God knows. I agree with what they say, but I'm
alone and I have no one to defend me, so
I can only focus on putting bread on the table now.
The good news is that unspeakable brutality does not always
halt people from standing up. Sometimes things can get so
bad that no amount of bullets and battery will dissuade

(50:34):
a population. And this is what we are seeing right
now in the nation of Iraq. The basic story there
is the same one we've dealt with this whole episode.
The government in Baghdad is corrupted and incompetent. It squeezes
the average people of the nation dry while offering them
piss poor public services and little hope of a better future.
The people there got angry, and so they started protesting.

(50:54):
The police and security forces responded with almost unbelievable bloodshed,
killing multiple men by firing tear gas canisters directly into
their skulls. I've seen some utterly unspeakable X ray images
of the corpses of these protesters, skull shattered and deformed
by massive metal cylinders of poison. It's it's beyond comprehension
in some ways. More than a hundred people have been

(51:17):
murdered so far, and as I write this, the protests
are still ongoing. It is possible that the violent sweeping
Iraq right now will degenerate into a vicious conflict, not
unlike the Syrian Civil War. I hope things will go better.
The people of Iraq deserve a break, and more than anything,
they deserve your attention and your solidarity. They are a
part of this great global uprising, and their future freedom

(51:40):
is tied directly to yours. In two thousand eleven, as
the Arab Spring reached Syria and protests turned to gun battles,
the world and the United States largely turned away. There
is an excellent New York Times column which I would
advise you all to read. It always comes back to
Syria by Ranya Abuzed. I'm going to quote from that now.

(52:01):
The Syrian War enabled a resurgent Russia to expand its
influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Cutter imported
their feud into Syria, backing different rebel groups and fomenting
rivalries that in part helped splinter the armed opposition Iran
and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah supported the government of Bisharh
al Assad Hesbala's domestic Lebanese opponents supported the rebels. At
one point in Lebanon, every fourth person was a Syrian refugee. Jordan,

(52:24):
too has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis. Turkey,
the conduit for foreign fighters and munitions into rebel ranks,
absorbed three point six million Syrian refugees and hosts the
world's largest refugee population. All of Europe, by comparison, is
home to about one million Syrian refugees, on influx that
has nonetheless upended Europe's politics. And then there was the

(52:45):
rise of the Islamic State and Al Qaida's use of
the Syrian conflict to rejuvenate its ranks and recruit men
and money. Both groups exported horror well beyond Syria's borders.
The flood of refugees from Syria and the rise of
Isis are intimately tied with the fact that Donald tr
Rump is the president in our very own nation, and
with the fact that Nazis now march in Germany again,
and with the fact that the city of Portland, Oregon,

(53:07):
has become an irregular battlefield for fascists and anti fascists.
None of the terrible things happening in our world occur
in a vacuum. It is something of a cliche right
now on social media to refer to the terrible news
that so dominates our daily lives as evidence that we
live in the darkest timeline. Much of the reason things
are so very grim right now is the complete failure

(53:30):
of liberal democracies around the world to respond effectively to
the Syrian Civil War. Many people thought that since the
country was, in Donald Trump's words, seven thousand miles away
from them, what happened there was not their business. But
it was. And what is happening in Iraq, in Lebanon,
in Chile and Hong Kong, and in many other nations

(53:50):
around the world is all of our business. I didn't
even cover the protests in Ecuador and Indonesia and Russia.
The world is a fire with rage right now. Those
of us who live the islands of stability can turn
our heads away and focus on our own personal problems,
as say it in Egypt, focuses on putting bread on
the table. But if we do that, the hope for
a better world is truly lost. For all of us.

(54:15):
And that's that's the episode. That's what I got for
you now. Uh. You can find us online behind the
Bastards dot com. You can find us on Twitter and
Instagram and at Bastard's Pod. You can buy t shirts
on te Public. But really, um, what you ought to
do is find a way to get involved. To find
something that you can do, even if you just started

(54:36):
by putting in an hour in a week to some
sort of activism, something near you or far from you. Um,
just don't let this moment in history pass you by.
There's people out there fighting who need your solidarity. There's
things near you that need to be fought for. Go
do it.