August 23, 2021 • 43 mins
In this episode, we introduce you to our team (Robert Evans, Sophie Lichterman, Mia Wong, & Garrison Davis) and discuss the future.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
That's happening here. Ship. We didn't want it to. We
were like, uh, it shouldn't happen here. That would be bad.
But now it is. And I'm Robert Evans. This is
the podcast about things are kind of falling apart and
maybe it would be good if they didn't fall apart,
or at least if while they were falling apart, we
did something that was better than the thing that fell apart. Anyway, Hi, everybody,
(00:27):
this is a podcast. I'm Robert Evans. As you can
note from this horrible introduction, which was was incompetently done,
half acidly done. Uh, subsequent weeks of the show are
going to be very different from the first week. We
started off with five very scripted episodes. My vision kind
of at the start of this was that first week
(00:47):
of this, the first five episodes would be ever green,
so that when we have new people over the coming
months and years, we can say, hey, if you want
to know what we're about, listen to episodes one through five.
It lays out our philosophy what this show is, kind
of gives you the background we think you need to
understand where we are in the world right now. Um,
but of course this is a daily show. I'm not
going to be writing a ten thousand words script every
(01:09):
single day, because that would literally be writing a novel
length work every week, and that would very quickly drive
me to drink. And also I don't think would be
as interesting as trying to be nimble. Um. So, this
week we're gonna try to give you kind of an
idea of what most of the weeks of the show
will be like. It's going to be a mix of
(01:29):
kind of breaking news coverage of some ongoing stories, speculation, interviews,
um so with I don't know, probably a little bit
of further ado. I would like to introduce I would
like to start this, this episode, this show, this beautiful
thing or terrible thing, whatever it winds up being either
beautiful or terrible, by introducing my team, the people who
(01:51):
actually do the most of the work on this while
I extract their surplus value and turn it into fancy liquors.
First off is Sophie Lichterman. Uh, Sophie, you exist, Hi? Apparently, Hey,
you're my executive producer. It's your job to make sure
that I do things like turn on my computer, um,
and that we have guests. Uh. Next up is Garrison
(02:16):
Davis Garrison, What what are you? That's a good question. Um,
I read books and articles and occasionally go to places
to learn about different resistance movements. I guess yeah, yeah.
We we actually sent you out to an Earth First
gathering a couple of weeks ago, and we're gonna have
(02:36):
some episodes about your experiences there in the very near future,
and I'm excited for that. Um. We also sent you
to a waffle house where you saw a guy get stabbed.
So really it's been quite a week of journalism for you,
and they're also there are also be some content around
that trip in the near future as well. I got
to talk to some other other researchers the climate change
(02:57):
and um, how that affects extremism, and look forward to
Garrison's three part or Fear and Loathing in the waffle
House in South Carolina in the very near future. I'm
excited for that quite a bit myself. Uh. And then last,
but certainly not at least, we have Christopher and Christopher,
how are you doing. Um, I'm doing pretty good. Well, okay,
I say I'm doing pretty good. I've I've just you know,
(03:19):
I'm I'm I am also a researcher, and being a
researcher means I've just come off of about six hours
of reading about Japanese war crimes. So that's what I do.
Kind of by definition, no one on this team is
ever doing all that well, which is which is the job. Christopher,
you are probably most prominently to people who use Twitter
the ice must be destroyed guy on Twitter. And I
(03:41):
became aware of you because if you're incredibly well researched
threads UM, particularly focusing on the history of revolutionary movements,
anarchist movements and include mainly like Southeast and in mainland Asia,
which is not a history political or or cultural that
I knew much about, UM, And so we brought you
onto Behind the Bastards UM to fill out for the
(04:04):
fact that I am not capable of, for example, doing
a mouse dung episode with any sort of competence UM.
And you've done a lot of great stuff there and
you will be You are a history of particularly like
left wing political movements nowhere UM in a way that
I can never be UM. And I have a great
deal of admiration for your ability to do that research.
(04:26):
So you will be helpful. Uh when when I say
wouldn't it be neat if someone had done this? And
you say, actually they did and here's how many people died,
And I say, oh damn, Okay, well that's good, Chris.
What are you reading about this week? Yeah? This this week? Yeah,
this is this is the this is the Japanese war crimes,
deep dive, this is Yeah, it's mostly been forced labor.
(04:50):
I made an executive decision that I was not going
to start reading about comfort women and that particular kind
of Japanese war crimes one hour before this podcast started.
But oh yeah yeah, so ah, man, that's the good.
That's the good war crimes right there. Um, I I
don't know, I I've spent like when it comes to
(05:12):
military history, I definitely spent less time in the Pacific
theater than I have uh in the Western theater. But
my god, like some of the Unit seven thirty one
ship is just among the darkest stories in history. But
that's not what this podcast is about. So, guys, I
brought everyone here today because number one, I wanted to
introduce the audience to the team, and number two I
kind of wanted to ask a big question, um, which
(05:36):
is you know, we had our first week where I
sort of laid out the scope of the problems confronting everybody.
Climate change, UM, the the rising authoritarian movements around the globe, UM,
the danger of weaponized unreality, and kind of the fundamentally
separate reality tunnels that people are getting increasingly trapped in
that make peaceful coexistence almost impossible. UM. And we attempted
(06:00):
in in that first week of shows to provide people
with some reasons for hope, with some paths forward. UM,
I am, despite it all, uh, not black pilled. And
and our goal is to avoid being a black pilled
podcast Garrison. You want to explain to the nice people
what black pilled means. All right, So I think followers
(06:20):
of of you and us as in a Hole are
probably familiar with pill culture of the coming coming coming
from the matrix. The term red pill got used a
lot by the far right, especially during Gammer Gate, to
be like introducing a new idea to someone's pilling someone.
If you're and if you're getting someone to become like
a conservative or for or like an alright person, you're
(06:41):
red pilling them. UM. So that that was what got popular,
and then because that became like a much more viral meme,
and pill was just got to be used on various
various other ideologies and even just like things. So if
I'm drinking coffee, I'm taking my coffee pill, etcetera. Bad
jokes by people who don't have much better things to do. UM.
(07:02):
But black pill is like uh, is like a duomer
pill or like a nihilism pill. It's like not being
able to see hope for the future. Everything is like
just like avoid you don't be able to see that,
you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. UM.
So that's kind of what black pill means when it's
used like online UM generally it's it's true. It's it's
people who are making like propaganda or making content who
(07:25):
are or or just you know, people like on forms,
chat rooms and stuff. We're trying to get other people
to become this kind of dysfunctional nihilist um and not
be able to really see any any future. UM. And
you know, there's a lot of issues with this, but
particularly it comes from kind of a very like privileged
place in in in a lot of ways, because the
(07:46):
people who are you know, seeped in this are not
gonna be the ones facing the worst consequences of climate
change or you know, localized collapses. UM. So that's that's
kind of the problem with this whole black pilling thing.
And it's because it's becoming increasingly pop are online. Yeah,
and I've seen a lot of this, so obviously, UM.
I I spend some time on the collapse subreddit because
(08:07):
that's a good information aggregator UM. And I have some
fans there, so they've been commenting on the first week
of shows, and one person was like, I I think
that he's he always understates the damn it, like how
serious climate change is going to be, and sort of
made the point that like basically, we're all going to die. UM.
And that's that's not that's not gonna happened. That's not
(08:28):
the situation. Number one, UM, have you heard if you
have you all heard of the Toba catastrophe. No, it's
an interesting thing. I just got informed about this and
have been doing a little bit of reading. It was
a super volcanic eruption that occurred about seventy five thousand
years ago. UM. And so like what does present day Sumatra, Indonesia,
it's one of the largest explosive eruptions in world history. UM.
(08:50):
And there's a theory and this is so this is
you know, obviously too far, too long ago, first hard evidence,
but there's a theory that this caused a global like
volcanic winter that lasted as long as a decade and
may have caused a thousand year long cooling episode. And
this is y'all may have heard that there are a
number of scientists who think that about seventy thousand years
(09:11):
ago there was a massive population bottleneck where the global
human population was reduced to an incredibly tiny number, which
is why like everyone can kind of trace their lineage
back to one of a very small number of people,
and kind of the theory is that the Toba explosion
caused that bottleneck. It was just so devastating to life
on Earth that like it caused or specifically to human life,
(09:32):
that it it reduced the global human population down to
a very tiny number. Um. But also if that's true,
we we did make it. It was seventy five thou
years ago. Like we're doing all right, which is not
to say, like when I say we're doing all right,
I mean the human species exists in sufficient number to
maintain biodiversity, right. I think people underestimate how many people
(09:56):
are who life right now? Yeah, and how adaptable our
species is. And that doesn't mean the problem is not
nightmarishly severe, because it is. The question is number one,
how miserable is life going to be? How many we
could still human beings could exist in completely sufficient numbers
for the maintenance of the population, and billions of people
(10:17):
could still die as a result of climate change, And
that's a problem, Like that's a that's a real issue,
But it is also not. Um, it's not a guarantee
that that many people will die, that we will let
it get that bad. It is at this point a
guarantee essentially based on all of the best that we have,
that we're going to hit one and a half degrees um. Absolutely,
(10:38):
and almost certainly two degrees just kind of based on
where things are politically now three degrees. Four degrees is
not a guarantee and can be stopped. Um. It is
an uphill battle. Uh And And but also because we
are talking about not just billions of human lives, but
hundreds or if not thousands of species around the planet.
(10:58):
Um depend on us curbing emissions and us reversing to
the extent that that's possible. As much of the damage
as we can UM and I think it is kind
of the height of selfishness to just look at the
scale of the problem and go, well, we're doomed, so
don't try to do anything. So like, ever since that
(11:32):
climate report came out, there's been two narratives online that
I've seen quite a bit, which is does individual impact matter?
And what will the quality of life be? These are
these are both impossible to questions to answer. I mean
the first the first one was a little bit easier because,
like generally world individual consumer choices matter, probably not very much.
(11:57):
Of course, not that's not that's that we can look
at the history of how that's been pushed by certain companies.
I think a lots of people are already familiar with that,
which doesn't mean there's no And I do want to
be clear here when I when we say your your
individual decisions as a consumer are not going to UM
fix the problem in any meaningful degree. Learning how to
be comfortable and happy with less, learning how to personally
(12:19):
emit less, those are all still useful adaptations because part
of the story, part of the solution is how do
we fix this. Part of the solution is how do
we as individuals and communities adapt to this, and we
are going to have to adapt to less. That is
going to be a necessity. You can just look at
how in a lot of places weed crops have are
fifty lower than the harvest was last year in some
(12:42):
reasons like ninevah in Iraq, in northeastern Syria, um like
calamitous under production as a result of how bad this
summer is. That's going to continue to happen. We are
going to have to deal with less, not just because
we'll have less available, but because if we're trying to
take care of our community, that might mean even if
we can afford to consume at the level where we
(13:03):
need to personally do more, get by with less so
that we can give more to other people in our
community who can't afford anything. There's a and that's again
not going to taking care of the people in your neighborhood.
You know, setting up a four block radius where you
make sure there's you know, free fridges and soup kitchens
or whatever isn't going to fix climate change. But community
(13:24):
resiliency is an important part of building any building the
kind of dual power that I think is going to
be necessary to find climate change. It's also just a
necessary survival adaptation, and the fact that there are things
to do, the fact that there's so much to do
both to solve the problem on a big scale and
to take care of the people around us, that all
of us have a responsibility to do because we as
(13:45):
people are responsible for each other. Um, I think means
it's immoral to lose hope. Yeah, this is also precisely
the wrong one went to do it because and and
this this is one of you know, one of the
one of the reasons I'm excited to be doing this
is that I don't think generally the broad public has
a particularly good understanding of what's been happening the last
(14:06):
three years, which is that well, and you know, you
can go back into the decade, right, you know, so
I I like started doing activism stuff around thirteen with
the sort of second wave of revolutions from from the
air Spring, and so you know, and over the course
of that decade, you have you have an increasing series
of revolutions and they kind of they kind of peter
(14:26):
out and they kind of start to lose around but
then in eighteen they start again, and you know, I'm
gonna I'm gonna read a partial, like enormous emphasis on
partial list of places that had either full scale revolutions
or hundreds of thousands of millions people in the street.
So okay, starting starting Fromen, you have Haiti, Sudan, Algeria, Honduras, Chila, Ibraq,
(14:49):
Hong kong I, rands on their like third version of this.
Lebanon's had about three, Columbia's had three, h France at
the general strikes. There's also the Yello vest. There's there
was there was a six d person general striker p
there was There's been a bunch of stuff in India,
the farmer's protests. There's been stuff in Ecuador and Popua
Catalonia briefly, and you know, there there's something there, like
(15:09):
there there were a bunch of roadblockades last year in Canada,
like Canada when it went into revolt over a bunch
of pipeline stuff. And then you know, and then and
then and then there was last summer, and last summer
was sort of in the US and that that was
sort of this this this capstone of like the second
wave of revolutions in that decade, and you know, the
thing like this wave that that that again, that's that's
(15:31):
a very partial list, and that that sort of wave
of upheople right, it's it's a sign of both the
fact that you know, everyone realizes that the world is
just crumbling, right, and also that you know, people people
have sort of started to figure out that, like, you know,
the sort of ordinary political processes don't work, and that
(15:51):
if you get enough people together, you can like the
ordinary political process to cease to function. And you know,
I mean people there there's been a huge if forget
everyone to forget this last summer. But you know, people
were fighting the Secret Service at the gates of the
White House, like the president, like Donald truck was yeah,
(16:12):
like you know, like the like you know, the you know,
for for for about a week there, the cops completely
lost control of most major cities. Like you know, I'm
in Chicago and in Chicago, god, the street drinking in
Portland was beautiful. Just teenagers smoking cigarettes walking down the
right in front of the police station. Yeah, it's sorry,
(16:34):
I mean it's incredible. People like people, people like just
took control of them, like the Bracle Mile it was,
you know, and you saw for a very brief moment
just like what what a world without the police, for example,
would look like right, And you know, it was a
lot of parties, there's a lot of celebration, there's a
lot of people sort of there's there's a lot of
arts everywhere, right, And I think, what what have you
(16:58):
seen over the last three years? What we've seen ability
of the last decade is that you know, cycles revolutions
like this, You used to get them once every like
three decades, two, right, we got to in a decade.
And all the things that cause that, like all of
the all things thats inate financial class, everything that was
bad that caused everyone to go into the streets is
(17:18):
still happening, and they're still getting worse. And so this
is this is going to keep happening. This sort of
unrest is gonna keep happening. And and our job and
our responsibility is to make sure that you know the
product if this is actually a better world, because you
know they're there, there's there's basically you know this this
is the thing you learned study history that there's always
almost always bad things happening, there's almost always resistance to it,
(17:41):
and that resistance can win. And I think that's you know,
like that that's that's the important part of this. Yeah, yeah,
and it's it's this um. One of the things that
you're getting at there is one of the things that
I think most toxically the left, particularly in UM in
the West, HASH has lost in recent times, which used
(18:05):
to be a huge aspect of not just the anarchists left,
although it was massive among anarchists, but about the organized
left in general in the West. Was internationalism. Was this
idea that like the struggles in Spain, the struggles of
workers in Germany and England and uh in China, in
Poland and Indonesia, where we are all connected, and like
you would have the magazines that were like, you know,
(18:27):
part of these different workers organizations would have stories and
experiences from protests and strikes and uprisings all around the world,
and there was this this strong sense of international solidarity
and that has collapsed, and the collapse of it is
a long story. I think we should probably do a
special on it at some point. Aspects of it started
in World War One when there was this big understanding
among socialists in World War One that like, well, if
(18:49):
push comes to shoven there's a big European war, the
workers won't fight, right, We won't we won't massacre each other,
and then they did. Um Because you know, nationalism is
the hell of a drug. There's a lot of again
we're not doing the topic justice, but but a big
part of why it's so thoroughly dead right now is
these this this multinational series of kind of propaganda campaigns
(19:13):
orchestrated by a number of different governments, including our own,
in order to you know, in the case of like
Russian disinformation propaganda, make all these different left wing or
all these different kind of populist uprisings and populist movements
that are anti Russian political interests, call them color revolutions.
(19:33):
And you see, you know, the same thing is done
by the Chinese government, and our government does the same thing.
Like it's not a it's not a case of like, well,
we're better or or they're better. It's a case of like, well,
all of these governments have a vested interest in people
not seeing their interests as in common and their struggle
as the same. Um. But people are still struggling, and
(19:55):
one of the missing ingredients in the last couple of
years of increasing as as as Christopher did a great
job of playing out of increasingly massive um sustained revolts
against state power and against the global system that is
grinding us all under its boot heel. Is that, Um,
we did not have as as much of an international
(20:17):
kind of solidarity as we as we should have, UM,
And I think that's going to be necessary if we're
going to do you know, we talked about this in
the first week of episodes, um, and you were just
talking about a version of this, Chris. I think the
only thing that's really the only thing likely to get
us out of this without you know, blood letting on
a scale that nobody really wants to think about is
the equivalent of a heart attack at the centers of capital,
(20:39):
which can only happen when enough people are like, well,
I'm just not going to keep doing ship like I'm
not gonna keep I'm not going to keep doing the
ship that like keeps this system moving forward. Um, because
at the end of the day, you can like send
cops out to beat people, but you can't make me work.
Um And Uh, that could do something. People who are
telling you it can't happen, or it can't work or
(21:01):
it can't be done are are full of ship. And
one of the things I want to cover that we
will at some point. Is how the how the movement
in Hong Kong came to a broad consensus about their
list of demands, And obviously that is in the process
of being crushed, you know, um in the long run,
there's and there's there's certainly criticisms to make, but also
they were up against a kind of insurmountable challenge really
(21:25):
without any kind of um aid from overseas. You know,
it was it was, it was. It was a noble,
doomed fight. But there's a lot of lessons, including how
this very decentralized movement came to an accordance about a
list of demands that that then became internationally recognized as
like these are the demands of this movement. Um. And
(21:46):
I think there's there's powerful lessons for kind of what's
going to be necessary for all of us in in
in that process. UM. Because I think hoping to kind
of overnight get everyone on board with we have to
overthrow the government and established socialism, I just don't see
that happening. Um. I. I we can't get Americans on
(22:09):
board with whether or not masks stop a pandemic. Um.
But could you get Americans, could you get a wide
variety of working class people from around the world on
board with, you know, a more focused list of things
that like they see is like well this this. You know,
you can get a lot of people who if you
have them talking about the politicians they support or like
(22:30):
how they identify politically, will get into screaming arguments. But
if you talk about like, boy, it sure seems like
we're all getting fucked over by this pretty same small
group of rich people, They'll all be like, yeah, I mean,
I'm more or less agree with that. If you say, like, hey,
it seems like the government's corrupt and shitty and incompetent
and never takes care of any of us, they all
agree with that, and you can get them. You can
if you focus on, hey, here's what we all need
(22:52):
to advocate for together, because it will make all of
our lives better. I think you'll have an easier time
with that than trying to convince somebody who's been educated
for fifty years to think socialism as the devil to
identify personally as a socialist. And maybe that's a little
less important than getting that person to agree that we
need to seize the wealth of the billionaire class UM
(23:13):
and reinvest it in a world that is sustainable and
survivable for all of us. I don't know that seems
like a better shot to me, So I guess the
question to ask is what gives each of you hope
right now. There's a couple of things. I think back
to the moment when I was reporting from the steps
(23:36):
of the Federal courthouse in Portland two or three nights
into things getting really fucking crazy, and I was standing
next to this middle aged mom with a respirator who
had gotten tear gas horribly the night before and come
came back out, and we were all yelling at the
or they were all yelling at the federal agents inside,
and she said, I don't see why we have to
(23:57):
wait it out here. Let's kick down the damn door.
And then she tried to do it. UM. And that, uh,
you know, there were some real moments. I think about
the line the pa length of Chud's with weapons breaking
and running last year UM, when enough of the city
came out to push them back. UM. I think about
(24:19):
the I think about the fact that UM, an unprecedented
mutual aid effort, was organized by huge numbers of regular
people around India to try to fill in the craps,
the well cracks, and the craps from their their government's
complete failure to handle the pandemic earlier this year. UM,
(24:39):
I think about, uh, what people would activists have been
doing in Puerto Rico for years as the US government
has consistently failed to deliver any sort of meaningful disaster relief. UM.
I think about the fact that while we are all,
every single person listening to this, ruled by venal cowards
(25:02):
who think of nothing but their own short term interests
and will kill the world to maintain those interests. Um,
the vast majority of us would give the shirts off
of our back to a neighbor in immediate traumatic need
because that's just what people generally do. Yeah. Mutual the
(25:24):
the heightened popularity mutual aid is something that's talked about
a lot in terms of what is giving people more hope.
I guess the other thing is like be able to see,
but like both see and experience a lot of like
um quote unquote, like many anarchies, UM like popping up
in different places and getting to like see the world
through a different through, like through like a different lens
(25:46):
for for even for however, briefly, you know, that's part
of you know, what happened staying at like the stop
line three camp. Part of what happened at like the
Earth First camp is like you get to very briefly
look at like the world without the same systems of
a hierarchy that we live in every day, and it's
like almost intoxicating, Like the way like once you can
experience that, you're like, why can't it always be like this?
(26:07):
Um and getting more people to experience that many anarchy
can will I think help people be more able to
like yeah, I'll I'll go across the country to help,
you know, do something for this pipeline to help protect
the specific forest. And then even like like even like
locally whenever there's like a you know, whether it's be
like a forest by are in your area, a hurricane,
(26:27):
be like, yeah, I'm gonna go help with the with
the relief efforts, because one, you're making people's lives better
and to it actually does feel good, like it actually
like it be able to being able to work as
a person with other people outside the regular systems of
hierarchy is super interesting. When we're stuck in such like
a repetitive cycle of you know, of our jobs and
(26:49):
of our bills and of all this kind of stuff,
but able to go outside of that. For however, brief
is is is a new thing that can get you
to really change your outlook on certain things. We saw
us a bit, you know, with the temporary autonomous zones
popping up. Um. We saw this a bit with like
the Red House in Portland, um. And like these these
things are by no means without flaw, Like there's a
(27:10):
lot of the same systems of oppression, like misogyny um
is still like in these spaces a lot um. You know,
there's there's still a lot of you know, like men
who get guns who want to be like the security
which can replicate a lot of police. Like we're going
to have to do an episode on protest security has
to and why those two children got fucking murdered. Yeah,
(27:31):
it's like like these these mani anarchies are not like
they doesn't make all these things go away, um. And
it actually gets a really good example of these Even
when you get to get rid of certain hierarchies, some
are still seeped into a lot of people's brains, Like
misogyny is one of them. And having having power over
other specific people. UM, so those are all things to address.
(27:52):
But being like you know at the top line three
camp that that was like run by um indigenous and
two spirit women, and that was like a y very
different environments then all of them like Redhouse and the
A Z s Um Red House was an eviction defense
in Portland's that was extremely successful in its goal, which
was to stop the eviction, but also had some problematic
(28:13):
elements people declaring themselves security and like threatening teenagers with
paintball guns over graffiti like some dumb ship, which doesn't
take away from the effective and very powerful aspects of it.
But you know, we should be able to analyze accurately
the failures and the successes of of things that are
kind of within our our wheelhouse of ship we broadly
(28:34):
agree with. Otherwise we're just cheer leading without analysis. Chris, Yeah,
I think there's a few things. So there's a there there.
There's a line from a Uruguayan journalists whose name I'm
about to butcher roul Zebitchy. I think um and he
(28:56):
he talks about how struggle like it's like it's like
a bolt of lightning that sort of illuminates a night
sky and what what what what that what that illumination,
what that bolt of lightning shows you is you know,
it's it's the previously obscure relation to domination and power,
and you know it, it's it shows you all of
the things that were sort of hidden before. And I
think this is what happened a lot over the summer, right,
(29:18):
I mean, you know, one of the things I always
think about was that so if if you had told
like even you know, even in the beginning of one
if you had told me that like even ten percent
of Americans would have supported burning down a police station, no,
it's it's impossible, right, And then you know, after it happens,
the like you know that burning down the police station
(29:39):
had a higher approve of reading the both presidential either yeah,
and you know, and this is something and you know,
in that moment, right like you know, the sort of
normal public opinion, everything shifted dramatically, just instantly, in a
manner of a week. Everyone went from sort of you know,
I say, if here obviously that there's always been people
(30:01):
struggling against the police, but it went from you know,
no one and no one in the US could ever
publicly say that they wanted a police station to get
burned down without like Fox News personally taking a mob
on them too. More than half the country thinks this
is good and and that that kind of transformation, the
(30:22):
way that it is actually possible for things to change
extremely quickly, and its possible things to get better extremely quickly,
and it's possible possible people's for for people to get
to to get used to and sort of and uh,
you know, it's worth noting that a huge part of
why a plurality of Americans supported burning the Third Precinct
(30:44):
was because a a single citizen with a camera had
the courage to film something that was wrong, and that
that instantly changed a lot of people's minds. Um, people
who would not have supported that. And if it had
just been sort of like if that had not been
(31:05):
a part of the of the equation, um. But because
the inhumanity of state violence was was rendered so stark
before them, there was for most decent people nothing to
do but say, well, yeah, what else were they going
to do? You know? Um? And as often as not,
like more than I think works of political theory or
(31:26):
tracks or newsletters or grand speeches, it is moments like
that that galvanized people into changing things. Is just seeing
something that's like all right, well fuck it, we gotta
like we gotta fox some ship up. Um. Yeah, that's
less eloquent than the quote you read, but what Chris
said was it was way more eloquent but prettier. Yeah.
(31:48):
I stole this. I stole this people who are better
at it than I am. But yeah, that's all. Yeah,
And I also I also would say whatever a thing,
you know, is it like they're like the control of
the state. The controls are capitalism, the control of you know,
(32:10):
these sort of systems of depression. It's not total and
it never it never has been in it probably can't be.
There's there's always places where the state, for one reason
another is either forced to withdraw or has or you know,
it decides it doesn't want to be anymore. And you know,
you know there there's there, there's a good example of this,
(32:30):
and well, you know, partially can you can look at
what happening north in Syria, which you know is is
its own sortain episode of its own right, But I
mean one of one of these show on that. Yeah,
like you know, but but I think like the state
withdraws and then you know, there's there's sort of organizations
there that can actually like take power in a way
that's not quite that's not taking power. And then you know, subsequently,
(32:53):
I think, I think maybe more importantly is just the
reality of the feminist movement in you know. So so
the p k K is the Kurdish Yeah yeah, we're
Workers Party and started up in the mountains. Yeah yeah, yeah, yes,
and the list is now you know, a post I
(33:14):
guess you'd say, yeah, yeah, And you know, like they
like that. That movement was an incredibly hierarchical movements and
in a lot of ways it was a very patriarchical
movement because you know, it's it's a classical Martist Londonist movement, right,
they have they have a great leader, everyone follows a
great leader, everything sort of passes down, and and it
was mixed in with these kind of very traditional Kurdish
militant because Kurds have a long tradition of like kind
(33:35):
of militant warrior culture. So yeah, incredibly patriarchal in a
number of ways. Yeah. And then but then inside of it,
like a feminist movement in Burches and in a lot
of ways they win like they're there. You know, this
is this is how you get from this sort of
incredibly hierarchical institution to one that's significantly what democratic, that's
(33:56):
more a gallaternie on gender lines. That that that's how
you get all of that is there there. You know,
there's an internal feminist movement inside the PKK, and it
wins and and you know, I mean and part part
of that also has to do with Opo, who's leader
the p KK, sort of having a sort of ideological
come around. But you know, the the fact that it
(34:17):
is possible to you know, when when when you when
you have a radical movements that is doing a lot
of good things in some ways, in some ways it's
also incredibly flawed. It's possible for it to make it better.
And it's also it's possible for for you know, it's
it's possible to mount to consistent five for patriarchy in
in these spaces and win I think, is you know,
or I mean, you know, maybe not win, but at
least very dramatically change the balance of power. Yeah, it's
(34:41):
some I think it is incredibly important important to study
because it's it's a case of you have this movement
that the p KK that has done some really messed
up stuff and has some very problematic aspects in its history,
but it's also effective at doing a number of things,
including armed resistance. And you have internally this movement democratize
(35:07):
in a lot of ways. You have it, you have
it shed a lot of its patriarchal structure while still
maintaining its capacity for resistance, and it never stops. There's
always been and still are things that the p k
K does that that I'm not going to support or
defend um because there's some, although a lot less of
them now, and if you're going to kind of compare
them to the people they're fighting, I think they're committing
(35:28):
less war crimes in the Turkish government at the moment um.
But it's it's hopeful because part of what is necessary
is and part one of the things I think that people,
particularly online left get wrong is this kind of throw
the baby out with the bathwater sort of thing. You
get this a lot in the in the in the
dialogue around US veterans where there's a chunk of the left,
(35:50):
it's like, well, they're all war criminals and funk everyone
who chooses to do that, and it's like, Okay, well,
you're going to ignore number one, like people who are
eighteen years old, and depending on where they grew up.
A simple fact about human beings is that if everyone
around you when you're a child tells you this is
a good thing to do, an a moral thing to do,
you will probably grow up believing that is a good
(36:11):
and a moral thing to do. And some of those
people grow up to realize like, oh, you know what,
it was actually pretty fucked up. Uh, And and this
this is bad and I want to agitate and organize
against this thing without wanting to condemn and say like, also,
all of my friends are murders because you know what
they're they're they're not um not in the sense that
like every single person there is knowingly mass occurring civilians.
(36:35):
Is everybody enabling uh, structures that kill civilians? Yes? And
so are you, and so am I and so is
everybody listening to this. If you pay your taxes, if
you um, if you exist in this society, you are
enabling like every time you fill up your fucking gas tank. Um,
you're you're a part of it. We're all a part
(36:56):
of it. Um. And so I think this, this, I
think is the kind of condemnation culture is less effective
in this understanding that, like, if we accept that things
are fucked up and we agitate to make them less
fucked up. Um, you can sometimes accomplish remarkable things within
very flawed structures and systems. Um. And I think that's
(37:17):
better than I don't know, trying to just score points
over how much you know about how bad things suck.
I mean, I guess in in conclusion, uh, I think
(37:42):
society could be improved somewhat. I think the things that
are currently killing people could kill less people. Um. And
I think everybody has some responsibility to try and force
changes that make the world less violent and horrible. Uh.
And if you think the world could be less island
and horrible, um, then then I think we're more or
(38:04):
less on the same side, unless you think it could
be less horrible by murdering all of the Democrats because
they're harvesting the adrena chrome of babies, in which case
we're not really on the same side. To kind of
go full circle to the first thing we talked about
with like doom stuff, I think it's important to also
remember like we're we're not even we're barely even deciding
(38:26):
how we're going to live going forward. Right now, we're
at like at the pivotal point where we're deciding what
the Earth is going to be like in three hundred years,
like we are, and I would like this podcast to
also not be anthropocentric. I wanted to also focus on
like we're just part of this planet and there's other
species and other things that all that are all self
reliant on each other to continue going um. And we're
(38:49):
not just deciding how long someone like you know, me
is going to live or people you know younger than me.
It's deciding like we're like we're like we're at the
end of the human climate. We are now entering a
new age and we're deciding what that's going to be.
And it can be really really bad, or it can
be only a little bit bad, and we can and
we can adapt to that little little little bit of badness.
(39:09):
But I think it's really really bad that's going to
be very difficult. And that's where like we can't not
do anything right now because we're deciding so many important
things for centuries and even like millennia to come. And
that's like the other thing to help us not get
stuck in the black pill. Yeah, that's an incredibly important
point because it is like you, we're we're all we're
(39:35):
not just deciding like how livable is this, How pleasant
is the climate going to be for us? How livable
is it going to be for It's like we're deciding
are there going to be iguanas in the future? Are
there going to be truth slots? Are there going to
be redwoods and salmon? You know? Are we going to
have clouds? Will we have clouds in a century? Um?
I hope the es to all of it, And like, yeah,
(39:56):
that is why it is this. Um, the folks who
have spent billions of dollars kind of fighting against any
effective action against climate change and kind of muddying the
issue until it was too late to stop what's going
to be inevitably going to be a very dark scenario already. Um,
(40:18):
those people are now pushing the idea that like, well,
there's nothing that can be done, or there's nothing that
like we we can't none of the actions we take
would be worth taking and like whatever, or like there's
there's a variety of different kind of tax they've taken,
but they have a vested interest in the the reaction
that I see from a lot of people on the left,
(40:39):
which is like, well we're fucked, just prepare for collapse
like that. They win, they win if you take that. Yeah,
they would love they love that reaction. They're they're finally
like the new way, like the old way to pass
by people as by saying no, this isn't real, this
isn't a problem. The new way that passed by people
are saying this is a huge problem that can't be fixed,
and all they want is for people to be pacified.
(40:59):
And we have to actually resist that because that's the
easy thing to do. That's the thing that makes our
brains feel more comfortable, like we can like we can
relax into the doom, right, And we have to actively
fight that every day because it always infects our brains
and if it affects my brain like it, you can't
you can't escape, but you have to actively fight it. Yeah.
The reality is that if we accept doom, we will
(41:19):
all burn to death separately. Whereas if we take all
of their ship and we lock the worst of them
away in a dark hole for trying to kill the
planet um and we stop building a society around the
poisons that they profit from, then maybe there will be
claw slots and clouds in a hundred years um, and
(41:40):
that's worth fighting for. Do it do it for the iguanas?
Do it for what for the iguanas? H The anthropolgist
David Graber wrote something about neoliberalism where he said, deliberalism
is it's it's not an engine that produces anything economically,
as an engine that produces despair. That's you know, that's
its sole job. And not only is it so job,
it will sacrifice its own continue to existence to make
(42:01):
sure that people can't actually can't not only like I
can't imagine in the future, but are just sort of
are so beaten down that you know that the engine
of despair cans use him. They do nothing. And you
know I would say this, You know, the reason the
state cracks down so hard isn't because it's strong. It's
because it's weak. The you know, the the the the
(42:21):
reason that sort of engine and despair has to keep going,
Why why they have to keep telling you that it's
im possible, is because it is. If it were genuinely
impossible for us to do anything, they wouldn't have to,
like you know that there wouldn't be any need for propaganda,
right if if they were, if they weren't actually genuinely
afraid of the possibility that you know, we decided not
to give in to despair and do something. Yep, that's
(42:44):
as good as a note to end on as we're
going to find. So, uh, don't give in to despair.
Do it for the Iguanas. Uh and uh, you know
uh of products and services you can follow, can follow.
(43:05):
You can follow cool Zone Media on Twitter and Instagram.
You can uh you know you're probably already subscribed to
it could it could Happen Here pod because you're listening
to it, but if you're not, should probably subscribe to that.
You can follow, You can follow, You can follow the
podcast that Happen Here pod on Instagram in Twitter too, Yep.
Follow the things, Listen to the things that will help
(43:26):
us keep making more stuff. God speed, goodbye, and speed
for the Iguanas.
That's happening here. Ship. We didn't want it to. We
were like, uh, it shouldn't happen here. That would be bad.
But now it is. And I'm Robert Evans. This is
the podcast about things are kind of falling apart and
maybe it would be good if they didn't fall apart,
or at least if while they were falling apart, we
did something that was better than the thing that fell apart. Anyway, Hi, everybody,
(00:27):
this is a podcast. I'm Robert Evans. As you can
note from this horrible introduction, which was was incompetently done,
half acidly done. Uh, subsequent weeks of the show are
going to be very different from the first week. We
started off with five very scripted episodes. My vision kind
of at the start of this was that first week
(00:47):
of this, the first five episodes would be ever green,
so that when we have new people over the coming
months and years, we can say, hey, if you want
to know what we're about, listen to episodes one through five.
It lays out our philosophy what this show is, kind
of gives you the background we think you need to
understand where we are in the world right now. Um,
but of course this is a daily show. I'm not
going to be writing a ten thousand words script every
(01:09):
single day, because that would literally be writing a novel
length work every week, and that would very quickly drive
me to drink. And also I don't think would be
as interesting as trying to be nimble. Um. So, this
week we're gonna try to give you kind of an
idea of what most of the weeks of the show
will be like. It's going to be a mix of
(01:29):
kind of breaking news coverage of some ongoing stories, speculation, interviews,
um so with I don't know, probably a little bit
of further ado. I would like to introduce I would
like to start this, this episode, this show, this beautiful
thing or terrible thing, whatever it winds up being either
beautiful or terrible, by introducing my team, the people who
(01:51):
actually do the most of the work on this while
I extract their surplus value and turn it into fancy liquors.
First off is Sophie Lichterman. Uh, Sophie, you exist, Hi? Apparently, Hey,
you're my executive producer. It's your job to make sure
that I do things like turn on my computer, um,
and that we have guests. Uh. Next up is Garrison
(02:16):
Davis Garrison, What what are you? That's a good question. Um,
I read books and articles and occasionally go to places
to learn about different resistance movements. I guess yeah, yeah.
We we actually sent you out to an Earth First
gathering a couple of weeks ago, and we're gonna have
(02:36):
some episodes about your experiences there in the very near future,
and I'm excited for that. Um. We also sent you
to a waffle house where you saw a guy get stabbed.
So really it's been quite a week of journalism for you,
and they're also there are also be some content around
that trip in the near future as well. I got
to talk to some other other researchers the climate change
(02:57):
and um, how that affects extremism, and look forward to
Garrison's three part or Fear and Loathing in the waffle
House in South Carolina in the very near future. I'm
excited for that quite a bit myself. Uh. And then last,
but certainly not at least, we have Christopher and Christopher,
how are you doing. Um, I'm doing pretty good. Well, okay,
I say I'm doing pretty good. I've I've just you know,
(03:19):
I'm I'm I am also a researcher, and being a
researcher means I've just come off of about six hours
of reading about Japanese war crimes. So that's what I do.
Kind of by definition, no one on this team is
ever doing all that well, which is which is the job. Christopher,
you are probably most prominently to people who use Twitter
the ice must be destroyed guy on Twitter. And I
(03:41):
became aware of you because if you're incredibly well researched
threads UM, particularly focusing on the history of revolutionary movements,
anarchist movements and include mainly like Southeast and in mainland Asia,
which is not a history political or or cultural that
I knew much about, UM, And so we brought you
onto Behind the Bastards UM to fill out for the
(04:04):
fact that I am not capable of, for example, doing
a mouse dung episode with any sort of competence UM.
And you've done a lot of great stuff there and
you will be You are a history of particularly like
left wing political movements nowhere UM in a way that
I can never be UM. And I have a great
deal of admiration for your ability to do that research.
(04:26):
So you will be helpful. Uh when when I say
wouldn't it be neat if someone had done this? And
you say, actually they did and here's how many people died,
And I say, oh damn, Okay, well that's good, Chris.
What are you reading about this week? Yeah? This this week? Yeah,
this is this is the this is the Japanese war crimes,
deep dive, this is Yeah, it's mostly been forced labor.
(04:50):
I made an executive decision that I was not going
to start reading about comfort women and that particular kind
of Japanese war crimes one hour before this podcast started.
But oh yeah yeah, so ah, man, that's the good.
That's the good war crimes right there. Um, I I
don't know, I I've spent like when it comes to
(05:12):
military history, I definitely spent less time in the Pacific
theater than I have uh in the Western theater. But
my god, like some of the Unit seven thirty one
ship is just among the darkest stories in history. But
that's not what this podcast is about. So, guys, I
brought everyone here today because number one, I wanted to
introduce the audience to the team, and number two I
kind of wanted to ask a big question, um, which
(05:36):
is you know, we had our first week where I
sort of laid out the scope of the problems confronting everybody.
Climate change, UM, the the rising authoritarian movements around the globe, UM,
the danger of weaponized unreality, and kind of the fundamentally
separate reality tunnels that people are getting increasingly trapped in
that make peaceful coexistence almost impossible. UM. And we attempted
(06:00):
in in that first week of shows to provide people
with some reasons for hope, with some paths forward. UM,
I am, despite it all, uh, not black pilled. And
and our goal is to avoid being a black pilled
podcast Garrison. You want to explain to the nice people
what black pilled means. All right, So I think followers
(06:20):
of of you and us as in a Hole are
probably familiar with pill culture of the coming coming coming
from the matrix. The term red pill got used a
lot by the far right, especially during Gammer Gate, to
be like introducing a new idea to someone's pilling someone.
If you're and if you're getting someone to become like
a conservative or for or like an alright person, you're
(06:41):
red pilling them. UM. So that that was what got popular,
and then because that became like a much more viral meme,
and pill was just got to be used on various
various other ideologies and even just like things. So if
I'm drinking coffee, I'm taking my coffee pill, etcetera. Bad
jokes by people who don't have much better things to do. UM.
(07:02):
But black pill is like uh, is like a duomer
pill or like a nihilism pill. It's like not being
able to see hope for the future. Everything is like
just like avoid you don't be able to see that,
you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. UM.
So that's kind of what black pill means when it's
used like online UM generally it's it's true. It's it's
people who are making like propaganda or making content who
(07:25):
are or or just you know, people like on forms,
chat rooms and stuff. We're trying to get other people
to become this kind of dysfunctional nihilist um and not
be able to really see any any future. UM. And
you know, there's a lot of issues with this, but
particularly it comes from kind of a very like privileged
place in in in a lot of ways, because the
(07:46):
people who are you know, seeped in this are not
gonna be the ones facing the worst consequences of climate
change or you know, localized collapses. UM. So that's that's
kind of the problem with this whole black pilling thing.
And it's because it's becoming increasingly pop are online. Yeah,
and I've seen a lot of this, so obviously, UM.
I I spend some time on the collapse subreddit because
(08:07):
that's a good information aggregator UM. And I have some
fans there, so they've been commenting on the first week
of shows, and one person was like, I I think
that he's he always understates the damn it, like how
serious climate change is going to be, and sort of
made the point that like basically, we're all going to die. UM.
And that's that's not that's not gonna happened. That's not
(08:28):
the situation. Number one, UM, have you heard if you
have you all heard of the Toba catastrophe. No, it's
an interesting thing. I just got informed about this and
have been doing a little bit of reading. It was
a super volcanic eruption that occurred about seventy five thousand
years ago. UM. And so like what does present day Sumatra, Indonesia,
it's one of the largest explosive eruptions in world history. UM.
(08:50):
And there's a theory and this is so this is
you know, obviously too far, too long ago, first hard evidence,
but there's a theory that this caused a global like
volcanic winter that lasted as long as a decade and
may have caused a thousand year long cooling episode. And
this is y'all may have heard that there are a
number of scientists who think that about seventy thousand years
(09:11):
ago there was a massive population bottleneck where the global
human population was reduced to an incredibly tiny number, which
is why like everyone can kind of trace their lineage
back to one of a very small number of people,
and kind of the theory is that the Toba explosion
caused that bottleneck. It was just so devastating to life
on Earth that like it caused or specifically to human life,
(09:32):
that it it reduced the global human population down to
a very tiny number. Um. But also if that's true,
we we did make it. It was seventy five thou
years ago. Like we're doing all right, which is not
to say, like when I say we're doing all right,
I mean the human species exists in sufficient number to
maintain biodiversity, right. I think people underestimate how many people
(09:56):
are who life right now? Yeah, and how adaptable our
species is. And that doesn't mean the problem is not
nightmarishly severe, because it is. The question is number one,
how miserable is life going to be? How many we
could still human beings could exist in completely sufficient numbers
for the maintenance of the population, and billions of people
(10:17):
could still die as a result of climate change, And
that's a problem, Like that's a that's a real issue,
But it is also not. Um, it's not a guarantee
that that many people will die, that we will let
it get that bad. It is at this point a
guarantee essentially based on all of the best that we have,
that we're going to hit one and a half degrees um. Absolutely,
(10:38):
and almost certainly two degrees just kind of based on
where things are politically now three degrees. Four degrees is
not a guarantee and can be stopped. Um. It is
an uphill battle. Uh And And but also because we
are talking about not just billions of human lives, but
hundreds or if not thousands of species around the planet.
(10:58):
Um depend on us curbing emissions and us reversing to
the extent that that's possible. As much of the damage
as we can UM and I think it is kind
of the height of selfishness to just look at the
scale of the problem and go, well, we're doomed, so
don't try to do anything. So like, ever since that
(11:32):
climate report came out, there's been two narratives online that
I've seen quite a bit, which is does individual impact matter?
And what will the quality of life be? These are
these are both impossible to questions to answer. I mean
the first the first one was a little bit easier because,
like generally world individual consumer choices matter, probably not very much.
(11:57):
Of course, not that's not that's that we can look
at the history of how that's been pushed by certain companies.
I think a lots of people are already familiar with that,
which doesn't mean there's no And I do want to
be clear here when I when we say your your
individual decisions as a consumer are not going to UM
fix the problem in any meaningful degree. Learning how to
be comfortable and happy with less, learning how to personally
(12:19):
emit less, those are all still useful adaptations because part
of the story, part of the solution is how do
we fix this. Part of the solution is how do
we as individuals and communities adapt to this, and we
are going to have to adapt to less. That is
going to be a necessity. You can just look at
how in a lot of places weed crops have are
fifty lower than the harvest was last year in some
(12:42):
reasons like ninevah in Iraq, in northeastern Syria, um like
calamitous under production as a result of how bad this
summer is. That's going to continue to happen. We are
going to have to deal with less, not just because
we'll have less available, but because if we're trying to
take care of our community, that might mean even if
we can afford to consume at the level where we
(13:03):
need to personally do more, get by with less so
that we can give more to other people in our
community who can't afford anything. There's a and that's again
not going to taking care of the people in your neighborhood.
You know, setting up a four block radius where you
make sure there's you know, free fridges and soup kitchens
or whatever isn't going to fix climate change. But community
(13:24):
resiliency is an important part of building any building the
kind of dual power that I think is going to
be necessary to find climate change. It's also just a
necessary survival adaptation, and the fact that there are things
to do, the fact that there's so much to do
both to solve the problem on a big scale and
to take care of the people around us, that all
of us have a responsibility to do because we as
(13:45):
people are responsible for each other. Um, I think means
it's immoral to lose hope. Yeah, this is also precisely
the wrong one went to do it because and and
this this is one of you know, one of the
one of the reasons I'm excited to be doing this
is that I don't think generally the broad public has
a particularly good understanding of what's been happening the last
(14:06):
three years, which is that well, and you know, you
can go back into the decade, right, you know, so
I I like started doing activism stuff around thirteen with
the sort of second wave of revolutions from from the
air Spring, and so you know, and over the course
of that decade, you have you have an increasing series
of revolutions and they kind of they kind of peter
(14:26):
out and they kind of start to lose around but
then in eighteen they start again, and you know, I'm
gonna I'm gonna read a partial, like enormous emphasis on
partial list of places that had either full scale revolutions
or hundreds of thousands of millions people in the street.
So okay, starting starting Fromen, you have Haiti, Sudan, Algeria, Honduras, Chila, Ibraq,
(14:49):
Hong kong I, rands on their like third version of this.
Lebanon's had about three, Columbia's had three, h France at
the general strikes. There's also the Yello vest. There's there
was there was a six d person general striker p
there was There's been a bunch of stuff in India,
the farmer's protests. There's been stuff in Ecuador and Popua
Catalonia briefly, and you know, there there's something there, like
(15:09):
there there were a bunch of roadblockades last year in Canada,
like Canada when it went into revolt over a bunch
of pipeline stuff. And then you know, and then and
then and then there was last summer, and last summer
was sort of in the US and that that was
sort of this this this capstone of like the second
wave of revolutions in that decade, and you know, the
thing like this wave that that that again, that's that's
(15:31):
a very partial list, and that that sort of wave
of upheople right, it's it's a sign of both the
fact that you know, everyone realizes that the world is
just crumbling, right, and also that you know, people people
have sort of started to figure out that, like, you know,
the sort of ordinary political processes don't work, and that
(15:51):
if you get enough people together, you can like the
ordinary political process to cease to function. And you know,
I mean people there there's been a huge if forget
everyone to forget this last summer. But you know, people
were fighting the Secret Service at the gates of the
White House, like the president, like Donald truck was yeah,
(16:12):
like you know, like the like you know, the you know,
for for for about a week there, the cops completely
lost control of most major cities. Like you know, I'm
in Chicago and in Chicago, god, the street drinking in
Portland was beautiful. Just teenagers smoking cigarettes walking down the
right in front of the police station. Yeah, it's sorry,
(16:34):
I mean it's incredible. People like people, people like just
took control of them, like the Bracle Mile it was,
you know, and you saw for a very brief moment
just like what what a world without the police, for example,
would look like right, And you know, it was a
lot of parties, there's a lot of celebration, there's a
lot of people sort of there's there's a lot of
arts everywhere, right, And I think, what what have you
(16:58):
seen over the last three years? What we've seen ability
of the last decade is that you know, cycles revolutions
like this, You used to get them once every like
three decades, two, right, we got to in a decade.
And all the things that cause that, like all of
the all things thats inate financial class, everything that was
bad that caused everyone to go into the streets is
(17:18):
still happening, and they're still getting worse. And so this
is this is going to keep happening. This sort of
unrest is gonna keep happening. And and our job and
our responsibility is to make sure that you know the
product if this is actually a better world, because you
know they're there, there's there's basically you know this this
is the thing you learned study history that there's always
almost always bad things happening, there's almost always resistance to it,
(17:41):
and that resistance can win. And I think that's you know,
like that that's that's the important part of this. Yeah, yeah,
and it's it's this um. One of the things that
you're getting at there is one of the things that
I think most toxically the left, particularly in UM in
the West, HASH has lost in recent times, which used
(18:05):
to be a huge aspect of not just the anarchists left,
although it was massive among anarchists, but about the organized
left in general in the West. Was internationalism. Was this
idea that like the struggles in Spain, the struggles of
workers in Germany and England and uh in China, in
Poland and Indonesia, where we are all connected, and like
you would have the magazines that were like, you know,
(18:27):
part of these different workers organizations would have stories and
experiences from protests and strikes and uprisings all around the world,
and there was this this strong sense of international solidarity
and that has collapsed, and the collapse of it is
a long story. I think we should probably do a
special on it at some point. Aspects of it started
in World War One when there was this big understanding
among socialists in World War One that like, well, if
(18:49):
push comes to shoven there's a big European war, the
workers won't fight, right, We won't we won't massacre each other,
and then they did. Um Because you know, nationalism is
the hell of a drug. There's a lot of again
we're not doing the topic justice, but but a big
part of why it's so thoroughly dead right now is
these this this multinational series of kind of propaganda campaigns
(19:13):
orchestrated by a number of different governments, including our own,
in order to you know, in the case of like
Russian disinformation propaganda, make all these different left wing or
all these different kind of populist uprisings and populist movements
that are anti Russian political interests, call them color revolutions.
(19:33):
And you see, you know, the same thing is done
by the Chinese government, and our government does the same thing.
Like it's not a it's not a case of like, well,
we're better or or they're better. It's a case of like, well,
all of these governments have a vested interest in people
not seeing their interests as in common and their struggle
as the same. Um. But people are still struggling, and
(19:55):
one of the missing ingredients in the last couple of
years of increasing as as as Christopher did a great
job of playing out of increasingly massive um sustained revolts
against state power and against the global system that is
grinding us all under its boot heel. Is that, Um,
we did not have as as much of an international
(20:17):
kind of solidarity as we as we should have, UM,
And I think that's going to be necessary if we're
going to do you know, we talked about this in
the first week of episodes, um, and you were just
talking about a version of this, Chris. I think the
only thing that's really the only thing likely to get
us out of this without you know, blood letting on
a scale that nobody really wants to think about is
the equivalent of a heart attack at the centers of capital,
(20:39):
which can only happen when enough people are like, well,
I'm just not going to keep doing ship like I'm
not gonna keep I'm not going to keep doing the
ship that like keeps this system moving forward. Um, because
at the end of the day, you can like send
cops out to beat people, but you can't make me work.
Um And Uh, that could do something. People who are
telling you it can't happen, or it can't work or
(21:01):
it can't be done are are full of ship. And
one of the things I want to cover that we
will at some point. Is how the how the movement
in Hong Kong came to a broad consensus about their
list of demands, And obviously that is in the process
of being crushed, you know, um in the long run,
there's and there's there's certainly criticisms to make, but also
they were up against a kind of insurmountable challenge really
(21:25):
without any kind of um aid from overseas. You know,
it was it was, it was. It was a noble,
doomed fight. But there's a lot of lessons, including how
this very decentralized movement came to an accordance about a
list of demands that that then became internationally recognized as
like these are the demands of this movement. Um. And
(21:46):
I think there's there's powerful lessons for kind of what's
going to be necessary for all of us in in
in that process. UM. Because I think hoping to kind
of overnight get everyone on board with we have to
overthrow the government and established socialism, I just don't see
that happening. Um. I. I we can't get Americans on
(22:09):
board with whether or not masks stop a pandemic. Um.
But could you get Americans, could you get a wide
variety of working class people from around the world on
board with, you know, a more focused list of things
that like they see is like well this this. You know,
you can get a lot of people who if you
have them talking about the politicians they support or like
(22:30):
how they identify politically, will get into screaming arguments. But
if you talk about like, boy, it sure seems like
we're all getting fucked over by this pretty same small
group of rich people, They'll all be like, yeah, I mean,
I'm more or less agree with that. If you say, like, hey,
it seems like the government's corrupt and shitty and incompetent
and never takes care of any of us, they all
agree with that, and you can get them. You can
if you focus on, hey, here's what we all need
(22:52):
to advocate for together, because it will make all of
our lives better. I think you'll have an easier time
with that than trying to convince somebody who's been educated
for fifty years to think socialism as the devil to
identify personally as a socialist. And maybe that's a little
less important than getting that person to agree that we
need to seize the wealth of the billionaire class UM
(23:13):
and reinvest it in a world that is sustainable and
survivable for all of us. I don't know that seems
like a better shot to me, So I guess the
question to ask is what gives each of you hope
right now. There's a couple of things. I think back
to the moment when I was reporting from the steps
(23:36):
of the Federal courthouse in Portland two or three nights
into things getting really fucking crazy, and I was standing
next to this middle aged mom with a respirator who
had gotten tear gas horribly the night before and come
came back out, and we were all yelling at the
or they were all yelling at the federal agents inside,
and she said, I don't see why we have to
(23:57):
wait it out here. Let's kick down the damn door.
And then she tried to do it. UM. And that, uh,
you know, there were some real moments. I think about
the line the pa length of Chud's with weapons breaking
and running last year UM, when enough of the city
came out to push them back. UM. I think about
(24:19):
the I think about the fact that UM, an unprecedented
mutual aid effort, was organized by huge numbers of regular
people around India to try to fill in the craps,
the well cracks, and the craps from their their government's
complete failure to handle the pandemic earlier this year. UM,
(24:39):
I think about, uh, what people would activists have been
doing in Puerto Rico for years as the US government
has consistently failed to deliver any sort of meaningful disaster relief. UM.
I think about the fact that while we are all,
every single person listening to this, ruled by venal cowards
(25:02):
who think of nothing but their own short term interests
and will kill the world to maintain those interests. Um,
the vast majority of us would give the shirts off
of our back to a neighbor in immediate traumatic need
because that's just what people generally do. Yeah. Mutual the
(25:24):
the heightened popularity mutual aid is something that's talked about
a lot in terms of what is giving people more hope.
I guess the other thing is like be able to see,
but like both see and experience a lot of like
um quote unquote, like many anarchies, UM like popping up
in different places and getting to like see the world
through a different through, like through like a different lens
(25:46):
for for even for however, briefly, you know, that's part
of you know, what happened staying at like the stop
line three camp. Part of what happened at like the
Earth First camp is like you get to very briefly
look at like the world without the same systems of
a hierarchy that we live in every day, and it's
like almost intoxicating, Like the way like once you can
experience that, you're like, why can't it always be like this?
(26:07):
Um and getting more people to experience that many anarchy
can will I think help people be more able to
like yeah, I'll I'll go across the country to help,
you know, do something for this pipeline to help protect
the specific forest. And then even like like even like
locally whenever there's like a you know, whether it's be
like a forest by are in your area, a hurricane,
(26:27):
be like, yeah, I'm gonna go help with the with
the relief efforts, because one, you're making people's lives better
and to it actually does feel good, like it actually
like it be able to being able to work as
a person with other people outside the regular systems of
hierarchy is super interesting. When we're stuck in such like
a repetitive cycle of you know, of our jobs and
(26:49):
of our bills and of all this kind of stuff,
but able to go outside of that. For however, brief
is is is a new thing that can get you
to really change your outlook on certain things. We saw
us a bit, you know, with the temporary autonomous zones
popping up. Um. We saw this a bit with like
the Red House in Portland, um. And like these these
things are by no means without flaw, Like there's a
(27:10):
lot of the same systems of oppression, like misogyny um
is still like in these spaces a lot um. You know,
there's there's still a lot of you know, like men
who get guns who want to be like the security
which can replicate a lot of police. Like we're going
to have to do an episode on protest security has
to and why those two children got fucking murdered. Yeah,
(27:31):
it's like like these these mani anarchies are not like
they doesn't make all these things go away, um. And
it actually gets a really good example of these Even
when you get to get rid of certain hierarchies, some
are still seeped into a lot of people's brains, Like
misogyny is one of them. And having having power over
other specific people. UM, so those are all things to address.
(27:52):
But being like you know at the top line three
camp that that was like run by um indigenous and
two spirit women, and that was like a y very
different environments then all of them like Redhouse and the
A Z s Um Red House was an eviction defense
in Portland's that was extremely successful in its goal, which
was to stop the eviction, but also had some problematic
(28:13):
elements people declaring themselves security and like threatening teenagers with
paintball guns over graffiti like some dumb ship, which doesn't
take away from the effective and very powerful aspects of it.
But you know, we should be able to analyze accurately
the failures and the successes of of things that are
kind of within our our wheelhouse of ship we broadly
(28:34):
agree with. Otherwise we're just cheer leading without analysis. Chris, Yeah,
I think there's a few things. So there's a there there.
There's a line from a Uruguayan journalists whose name I'm
about to butcher roul Zebitchy. I think um and he
(28:56):
he talks about how struggle like it's like it's like
a bolt of lightning that sort of illuminates a night
sky and what what what what that what that illumination,
what that bolt of lightning shows you is you know,
it's it's the previously obscure relation to domination and power,
and you know it, it's it shows you all of
the things that were sort of hidden before. And I
think this is what happened a lot over the summer, right,
(29:18):
I mean, you know, one of the things I always
think about was that so if if you had told
like even you know, even in the beginning of one
if you had told me that like even ten percent
of Americans would have supported burning down a police station, no,
it's it's impossible, right, And then you know, after it happens,
the like you know that burning down the police station
(29:39):
had a higher approve of reading the both presidential either yeah,
and you know, and this is something and you know,
in that moment, right like you know, the sort of
normal public opinion, everything shifted dramatically, just instantly, in a
manner of a week. Everyone went from sort of you know,
I say, if here obviously that there's always been people
(30:01):
struggling against the police, but it went from you know,
no one and no one in the US could ever
publicly say that they wanted a police station to get
burned down without like Fox News personally taking a mob
on them too. More than half the country thinks this
is good and and that that kind of transformation, the
(30:22):
way that it is actually possible for things to change
extremely quickly, and its possible things to get better extremely quickly,
and it's possible possible people's for for people to get
to to get used to and sort of and uh,
you know, it's worth noting that a huge part of
why a plurality of Americans supported burning the Third Precinct
(30:44):
was because a a single citizen with a camera had
the courage to film something that was wrong, and that
that instantly changed a lot of people's minds. Um, people
who would not have supported that. And if it had
just been sort of like if that had not been
(31:05):
a part of the of the equation, um. But because
the inhumanity of state violence was was rendered so stark
before them, there was for most decent people nothing to
do but say, well, yeah, what else were they going
to do? You know? Um? And as often as not,
like more than I think works of political theory or
(31:26):
tracks or newsletters or grand speeches, it is moments like
that that galvanized people into changing things. Is just seeing
something that's like all right, well fuck it, we gotta
like we gotta fox some ship up. Um. Yeah, that's
less eloquent than the quote you read, but what Chris
said was it was way more eloquent but prettier. Yeah.
(31:48):
I stole this. I stole this people who are better
at it than I am. But yeah, that's all. Yeah,
And I also I also would say whatever a thing,
you know, is it like they're like the control of
the state. The controls are capitalism, the control of you know,
(32:10):
these sort of systems of depression. It's not total and
it never it never has been in it probably can't be.
There's there's always places where the state, for one reason
another is either forced to withdraw or has or you know,
it decides it doesn't want to be anymore. And you know,
you know there there's there, there's a good example of this,
(32:30):
and well, you know, partially can you can look at
what happening north in Syria, which you know is is
its own sortain episode of its own right, But I
mean one of one of these show on that. Yeah,
like you know, but but I think like the state
withdraws and then you know, there's there's sort of organizations
there that can actually like take power in a way
that's not quite that's not taking power. And then you know, subsequently,
(32:53):
I think, I think maybe more importantly is just the
reality of the feminist movement in you know. So so
the p k K is the Kurdish Yeah yeah, we're
Workers Party and started up in the mountains. Yeah yeah, yeah, yes,
and the list is now you know, a post I
(33:14):
guess you'd say, yeah, yeah, And you know, like they
like that. That movement was an incredibly hierarchical movements and
in a lot of ways it was a very patriarchical
movement because you know, it's it's a classical Martist Londonist movement, right,
they have they have a great leader, everyone follows a
great leader, everything sort of passes down, and and it
was mixed in with these kind of very traditional Kurdish
militant because Kurds have a long tradition of like kind
(33:35):
of militant warrior culture. So yeah, incredibly patriarchal in a
number of ways. Yeah. And then but then inside of it,
like a feminist movement in Burches and in a lot
of ways they win like they're there. You know, this
is this is how you get from this sort of
incredibly hierarchical institution to one that's significantly what democratic, that's
(33:56):
more a gallaternie on gender lines. That that that's how
you get all of that is there there. You know,
there's an internal feminist movement inside the PKK, and it
wins and and you know, I mean and part part
of that also has to do with Opo, who's leader
the p KK, sort of having a sort of ideological
come around. But you know, the the fact that it
(34:17):
is possible to you know, when when when you when
you have a radical movements that is doing a lot
of good things in some ways, in some ways it's
also incredibly flawed. It's possible for it to make it better.
And it's also it's possible for for you know, it's
it's possible to mount to consistent five for patriarchy in
in these spaces and win I think, is you know,
or I mean, you know, maybe not win, but at
least very dramatically change the balance of power. Yeah, it's
(34:41):
some I think it is incredibly important important to study
because it's it's a case of you have this movement
that the p KK that has done some really messed
up stuff and has some very problematic aspects in its history,
but it's also effective at doing a number of things,
including armed resistance. And you have internally this movement democratize
(35:07):
in a lot of ways. You have it, you have
it shed a lot of its patriarchal structure while still
maintaining its capacity for resistance, and it never stops. There's
always been and still are things that the p k
K does that that I'm not going to support or
defend um because there's some, although a lot less of
them now, and if you're going to kind of compare
them to the people they're fighting, I think they're committing
(35:28):
less war crimes in the Turkish government at the moment um.
But it's it's hopeful because part of what is necessary
is and part one of the things I think that people,
particularly online left get wrong is this kind of throw
the baby out with the bathwater sort of thing. You
get this a lot in the in the in the
dialogue around US veterans where there's a chunk of the left,
(35:50):
it's like, well, they're all war criminals and funk everyone
who chooses to do that, and it's like, Okay, well,
you're going to ignore number one, like people who are
eighteen years old, and depending on where they grew up.
A simple fact about human beings is that if everyone
around you when you're a child tells you this is
a good thing to do, an a moral thing to do,
you will probably grow up believing that is a good
(36:11):
and a moral thing to do. And some of those
people grow up to realize like, oh, you know what,
it was actually pretty fucked up. Uh, And and this
this is bad and I want to agitate and organize
against this thing without wanting to condemn and say like, also,
all of my friends are murders because you know what
they're they're they're not um not in the sense that
like every single person there is knowingly mass occurring civilians.
(36:35):
Is everybody enabling uh, structures that kill civilians? Yes? And
so are you, and so am I and so is
everybody listening to this. If you pay your taxes, if
you um, if you exist in this society, you are
enabling like every time you fill up your fucking gas tank. Um,
you're you're a part of it. We're all a part
(36:56):
of it. Um. And so I think this, this, I
think is the kind of condemnation culture is less effective
in this understanding that, like, if we accept that things
are fucked up and we agitate to make them less
fucked up. Um, you can sometimes accomplish remarkable things within
very flawed structures and systems. Um. And I think that's
(37:17):
better than I don't know, trying to just score points
over how much you know about how bad things suck.
I mean, I guess in in conclusion, uh, I think
(37:42):
society could be improved somewhat. I think the things that
are currently killing people could kill less people. Um. And
I think everybody has some responsibility to try and force
changes that make the world less violent and horrible. Uh.
And if you think the world could be less island
and horrible, um, then then I think we're more or
(38:04):
less on the same side, unless you think it could
be less horrible by murdering all of the Democrats because
they're harvesting the adrena chrome of babies, in which case
we're not really on the same side. To kind of
go full circle to the first thing we talked about
with like doom stuff, I think it's important to also
remember like we're we're not even we're barely even deciding
(38:26):
how we're going to live going forward. Right now, we're
at like at the pivotal point where we're deciding what
the Earth is going to be like in three hundred years,
like we are, and I would like this podcast to
also not be anthropocentric. I wanted to also focus on
like we're just part of this planet and there's other
species and other things that all that are all self
reliant on each other to continue going um. And we're
(38:49):
not just deciding how long someone like you know, me
is going to live or people you know younger than me.
It's deciding like we're like we're like we're at the
end of the human climate. We are now entering a
new age and we're deciding what that's going to be.
And it can be really really bad, or it can
be only a little bit bad, and we can and
we can adapt to that little little little bit of badness.
(39:09):
But I think it's really really bad that's going to
be very difficult. And that's where like we can't not
do anything right now because we're deciding so many important
things for centuries and even like millennia to come. And
that's like the other thing to help us not get
stuck in the black pill. Yeah, that's an incredibly important
point because it is like you, we're we're all we're
(39:35):
not just deciding like how livable is this, How pleasant
is the climate going to be for us? How livable
is it going to be for It's like we're deciding
are there going to be iguanas in the future? Are
there going to be truth slots? Are there going to
be redwoods and salmon? You know? Are we going to
have clouds? Will we have clouds in a century? Um?
I hope the es to all of it, And like, yeah,
(39:56):
that is why it is this. Um, the folks who
have spent billions of dollars kind of fighting against any
effective action against climate change and kind of muddying the
issue until it was too late to stop what's going
to be inevitably going to be a very dark scenario already. Um,
(40:18):
those people are now pushing the idea that like, well,
there's nothing that can be done, or there's nothing that
like we we can't none of the actions we take
would be worth taking and like whatever, or like there's
there's a variety of different kind of tax they've taken,
but they have a vested interest in the the reaction
that I see from a lot of people on the left,
(40:39):
which is like, well we're fucked, just prepare for collapse
like that. They win, they win if you take that. Yeah,
they would love they love that reaction. They're they're finally
like the new way, like the old way to pass
by people as by saying no, this isn't real, this
isn't a problem. The new way that passed by people
are saying this is a huge problem that can't be fixed,
and all they want is for people to be pacified.
(40:59):
And we have to actually resist that because that's the
easy thing to do. That's the thing that makes our
brains feel more comfortable, like we can like we can
relax into the doom, right, And we have to actively
fight that every day because it always infects our brains
and if it affects my brain like it, you can't
you can't escape, but you have to actively fight it. Yeah.
The reality is that if we accept doom, we will
(41:19):
all burn to death separately. Whereas if we take all
of their ship and we lock the worst of them
away in a dark hole for trying to kill the
planet um and we stop building a society around the
poisons that they profit from, then maybe there will be
claw slots and clouds in a hundred years um, and
(41:40):
that's worth fighting for. Do it do it for the iguanas?
Do it for what for the iguanas? H The anthropolgist
David Graber wrote something about neoliberalism where he said, deliberalism
is it's it's not an engine that produces anything economically,
as an engine that produces despair. That's you know, that's
its sole job. And not only is it so job,
it will sacrifice its own continue to existence to make
(42:01):
sure that people can't actually can't not only like I
can't imagine in the future, but are just sort of
are so beaten down that you know that the engine
of despair cans use him. They do nothing. And you
know I would say this, You know, the reason the
state cracks down so hard isn't because it's strong. It's
because it's weak. The you know, the the the the
(42:21):
reason that sort of engine and despair has to keep going,
Why why they have to keep telling you that it's
im possible, is because it is. If it were genuinely
impossible for us to do anything, they wouldn't have to,
like you know that there wouldn't be any need for propaganda,
right if if they were, if they weren't actually genuinely
afraid of the possibility that you know, we decided not
to give in to despair and do something. Yep, that's
(42:44):
as good as a note to end on as we're
going to find. So, uh, don't give in to despair.
Do it for the Iguanas. Uh and uh, you know
uh of products and services you can follow, can follow.
(43:05):
You can follow cool Zone Media on Twitter and Instagram.
You can uh you know you're probably already subscribed to
it could it could Happen Here pod because you're listening
to it, but if you're not, should probably subscribe to that.
You can follow, You can follow, You can follow the
podcast that Happen Here pod on Instagram in Twitter too, Yep.
Follow the things, Listen to the things that will help
(43:26):
us keep making more stuff. God speed, goodbye, and speed
for the Iguanas.
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