Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 18

Episode Date: January 22, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeart radio and fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you,

but you can make your own decisions. Hey, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison, and today I'm going to be talking about some really big things and ideas, but hopefully I'll be talking about them in a way that contextualizes them and makes you remember that despite their magnitude, they're still very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll get started, and eventually it will kind of make sense. So right now, we are all living in one massive liminal space. For those less online than I am, I'll explain what I mean, liminal spaces became an online meme around late 2019 as a term to describe a certain type of picture that features architecture or like just a place that looks off, familiar, eerie, lonely, yet mesmerizing

and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on the liminal space subreddit for a while now, and there's an undeniable allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and rooms, and the effect that they have on me. Describing what makes a liminal space photo a liminal space photo, as opposed to just any other regular photo of a building or a room, can be tricky because, in part, the point is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking too much about the why. They're not spooky or scary in the traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space photo and where it gets its name, liminality, is a good place to begin to understand what type of feelings these pictures are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a transitional phase, and the ambiguity and disorientation

associated with being inside of a threshold, not on either one side per se, but somewhere in between. Now, that threshold can be many things. A literal, transitionary threshold between certain places is a common one. This can include stuff like hallways and airports. One of my favorites, though, is a threshold between time, an ambiguous, unspecific nostalgia that you can't quite place, but it feels awfully familiar, like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird indoor squishy playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room designed for a very specific, special purpose, but now no longer serving that. It's empty and out of date.

An abandoned mall or cheery birthday party room at an arcade photographed desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects of liminal space photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned. Usually, they have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality, like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting, and even when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like a Windows computer screensaver. One of the most popular liminal space photos is of an underground bunker in Las Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's outside, despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a certain type of

cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of synchronicity that is difficult to describe otherwise. Almost never is quote unquote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly exclusively focus on very human constructs, particularly ones that no longer serve their intended use, or maybe never did in the first place. So what do I mean by we're all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we are in between a historic economic and technological boom, one that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old, but on the other side of this valley is global climate catastrophe and destruction and change the likes of which humans have possibly never seen or at least remembered. We're in the transitionary period between

these two states, and that disassociation of not being fully in either one that that cognitive dissonance can be kind of mind boggling. It's like the nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak or that weird feeling of being alone in an empty church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate change transcends a regular perception of time, space, and with that cause and effect. It's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher Timothy Morton dubbed these massive space-time-altering objects as hyper-objects. Now Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly, so really the only way to discuss it or get into

the topic is to orbit around it, associating with adjacent ideas or words to get close enough to the topic to partially understand it even if you can't get quite there. Other possible examples of hyper-objects besides climate change can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere, or the solar system. But hyper-objects don't need to be just massive celestial things, they can also be the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth or the very long-lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as all of the styrofoam or plastic bags in the world. It can also be the sum of all the whirling machinery of capitalism or the state. Hyper-objects then are hyper just in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly manufactured

by humans or not. And hyper-objects aren't just collections, systems, or assemblages of other objects. They are things in their own right, and they affect more than just humans. They don't come into being just because humans notice them, they will have effects on the world whether or not they are observed. One of the more obvious differences between hyper-objects and ordinary objects is that you can't ever actually see a hyper-object in its totality. You can only ever witness a small extension or piece of a hyper-object. Now, this makes thinking about them kind of intrinsically tricky. It's like only seeing a fragmented shadow of a thing, and the effects that that thing has on all other things. Now, the more contrarian listeners might protest

that we never see all of any object, even ordinary ones. Now, it's obviously true that everything we see has a negative side, the part behind that we can't actually always look at, but can reasonably assume is there. Now, the difference is that hyper-objects transcend not only a regular conception of physical reality, but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a coffee mug and rotate it around in a pretty short amount of time, and witness each side an angle. Or if you want to get really fancy, you could make a 360 scan so you could see a projected version of the entire object. Or, you know, more simply just get three people in a room to all look at different sides of the mug, thus forming a consensual reality-based understanding of the whole object. Now, not only

can you not hold a hyper-object, but even if you could, the temporal effects would make it impossible to rotate it around to witness the totality of what's being held. And it would be way too big for multiple people to ever witness all sides of the thing. Quoting from Morton's book, Hyper-Objects, The Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, quote, Consider raindrops. You can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive your particular anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate? Not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system.

I can think of and compute climate in this sense, but I can't directly see or touch it. The gap between the phenomenon and the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world. Humans have been aware of enormous entities, some real, some imagined, for as long as we have existed. But this book is arguing that there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities, such as climate. These entities directly cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue. Hyper-Objects seem to force something on us, something that affects some core idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomena such as meteors and

blood red moons, tsunamis, tornadoes, and earthquakes have terrified humans in the past. Meteors and comets were known as disasters. Literally, a disaster is a fallen dysfunctional or dangerous or evil star, disaster, but such disasters take place against a stable backdrop. There is the Ptolemaic Aristolean machinery of the stars, which hold fixed stars in place. It seems as if there's something about hyper-objects that is more deeply challenging than these disasters. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old models of the disaster, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. A deep shuttering of temporality then occurs. For one thing, we are

inside hyper-objects, like Jonah in the Whale. This means that every decision we make is in some sense related to hyper-objects. These decisions are not merely limited to sentences and texts about hyper-objects. When I turn the key in the ignition of my car, I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration to Mars, they are relating to global warming. I am one of the entities caught in the hyper-object that I hear call global warming. Different hyper-objects have numerous properties in common. But for our purposes, we're going to discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyper-objects are viscous, meaning they stick to beings that are involved with them. They are non-local, in other words,

and any local manifestation of the hyper-object is not directly the hyper-object. They involve very different temporalities than the human-scale ones that we're used to. In particular, some very, very large hyper-objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate spacetime vortexes due to general relativity. Hyper-objects occupy a higher-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time, and they exhibit their effects inter-objectively. That is, they can be detected in a space that consists of inter-relationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyper-object is not just a function of our knowledge, it is also hyper-relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as humans.

Now, I'm going to go into the five different points of similarity in more detail to help flesh out what these things, hyper-objects, what they are, and how they might actually be a useful way to think about really big stuff. So, first off, viscous. Hyper-objects adhere to any object they touch, no matter how hard the object tries to resist. In this way, hyper-objects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyper-object, the more glued to the hyper-object it becomes. Now, the more you learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up noticing it in the world. This is the law of synchronicity. But the more you know about climate change, the more you realize how perversive it is. The more you discover about evolution,

the more you realize how much our entire physical being is caught in its mesh work. Immediate, intimate symptoms of hyper-objects are very real, vivid, and often painful. Yet, they carry with them this trace of unreality. A good example of hyper-object viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion of away. There is no away. Flushing vomit down the toilet doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way to the ocean, or the water treatment facility, and eventually just back to us. Again, I'll quote from the book Hyper-Objects, quote, light itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed.

Radiation is Sartre's jar of honey par excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us. Again, it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it. This is it folks, this is the ecological interconnectedness. Come in and join the fun, but I see that you're already here. Unquote. Yeah, that's fun. The next point of similarity we're going to discuss is the molten or Gaussian quality. Hyper-Objects are time stretched to such an extent that they become impossible to hold in the mind. Hyper-Objects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. The size of Hyper-Objects can make them basically

invisible, just because they're so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in Southern Oregon, one of the deepest lakes in the world, but it's not just deep, it's also very, very clear. So the water is so deep, yet so clear, it's like you're swimming in the sky. It's like you're swimming in nothing. It'd be like if you approach an object and more and more objects emerge. Because we can't see the end of them, Hyper-Objects are necessarily uncanny, they have to be. Just like my favorite liminal space photos, Hyper-Objects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in Hyper-Objects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and a familiar strangeness.

Next up is non-locality. Hyper-Objects are massively distributed in time and space, such as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality of the Hyper-Object. For example, climate change is a Hyper-Object that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations. Objects don't feel climate change, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, non-locality describes the manner in which a Hyper-Object becomes more substantial than the local manifestations that they produce. Putting Morton again, for a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade of red. Global warming for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes. Plastic for the bird strangles

it as it becomes entangled in a set of six-pack rings. What we are really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that are directly causal. The octopus of the Hyper-Object omits a cloud of ink as it withdraws from access, yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of its effects and effects. These phenomenon themselves are not global warming or radiation. Action at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the map with the territory. Hyper-Objects cannot be thought up as occupying a series of now points in time or space. They confound the social and psychic instruments we use to measure them. Even digital devices have trouble. Global warming is not just a function of our measuring devices, yet because it's distributed across the biosphere

and beyond, it's hard to see it as a unique entity. And yet there it is, raining down on us, burning down on us, quaking the earth, spawning giant hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces. The rain drops falling on my head in northern California, the tsunami that pours through the streets of Japanese towns. The increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor, like a moving illusion picture, global warming is real, but it involves a massive counterintuitive perspective shift for us to see it. Convincing some people of its existence is like convincing some two-dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape

in their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So our sense of being in a time and inhabiting a place depends on forms of regularity. The periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun coming up, only now we know that it doesn't really come up. It's now common knowledge that the moon's phases are just the relationship between the earth and the moon as they circumnavigate the sun. Hyperobjects seem to phase in and out of the human world. They occupy a higher dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on our regular three-dimensional human scale basis. But they might appear differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view. We can only see pieces of a hyperobject at a time. The reason why they appear non-local and

temporally foreshortened is precisely because of this trans-dimensional quality. We can only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a case of radiation sickness. If an apple were to invade a two-dimensional world, first the stick people would see some dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then a rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting circular blob diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point, and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly see climate change. You would need to occupy some higher dimensional space to see the hyperobject unfolding explicitly. Like the people in the two-dimensional flatland, we can only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with our world.

The brief patch called Hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans. The brief patch called Drought burns the plains of Russia and the Midwestern United States to a crisp, our body's itch with yesterday's sunburn. But don't relegate hyperobjects as a simple abstract notion. The game of hyperobjects as trans-dimensional real things is valuable. Global warming is not simply a mathematical abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world. Hyperobjects don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects. We tend to only think about hyperobjects as they phase in and connect to other, more static objects. This is a mistake and contributes to

non-action. Whether or not we perceive objects and hyperobjects connecting doesn't affect the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyperobject. What we experience as the slow, periodic re-occurrence of a celestial event, such as an eclipse or a comet, is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on our social and cognitive space for a while. The gaps I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware of the hyperobject and moments at which it isn't do not matter in relation to the hyperobject itself. Okay, and now on to our final point of similarity. Interobjective. Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint of a hyperobject upon

other objects revealed as information. It's all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and interobjectivity. For example, climate change is formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and the sea level rising, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than connected to an object that predates its own measurement. Hyperobjects exist in and between objects and things we deal with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined. Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a shadow-like

local manifestation of it. A mesh consists of relationships between crisscrossing strands and the gaps between strands. Meshes are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things, an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born, it is instantly a meshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The mesh isn't inside of all things, but is on the edge or floats on top of all things. Interobjective mesh is the extra-connecting layer between the mass and the mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia. Interobjectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front of objects,

in which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness and distribution of hyperobjects simply force us to take note of this fact. Hyperobjects provide great examples of interobjectivity, namely the way in which nothing is ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. This means that for every objective system, there is at least one entity that is withdrawn from the relationship. We see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaur's reality exists interobjectively. There is some form of shared

space between the rock ourselves and the dinosaur, even though the dinosaur isn't there directly. The print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot-shaped hole in a rock by humans 65 million years later. There is some sensuous connection then between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human, despite their vastly differing time scales. The dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather, the footprint is a trace of the hyperobject evolution that joins me, the dinosaur, and the mud together, along with the intentional act of holding them in the mind. I found the hyperobject banner as a useful tool to help my brain think about things that are

just too big, things that have effects so spaced out in time that using our ordinary models of thought are just inadequate. I can also reconcile the opposing views that cast climate change as the very real series of disasters or a complicated interlocking mesh of systems that can feel very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the real-world impacts things like hyperobjects can cause. Sometimes we forget that climate change is a thing we interact with every day and can inform choices we make. Now, the almost impossible-to-comprehend totality of our situation is not great for mental well-being. You can end up tailspinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping,

denial, and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into a void of negation. Things that are hyperobjects fundamentally break our conception of reality, temporality, and cause and effect. And it's already a really weird time to try to suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and services trying to usurp the real. That's what marketing is. First, we had the internet with its limitless possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world of social media with all of its fractured and fractal realities. There's immersive gaming and the allure of getting lost within thousands of unique worlds. And now we have VR, AR, and the metaverse. More layers of digital fabrication trying to be

passed off as an almost hyperreality. A promise to make a reality even more real and immersive than our status quo. The internet itself is another hyperobject. And all this extra reality can take a strain on the human mind. De-realization, the perception that actual waking reality is an artificial construct. The feeling of being de-attached from your surroundings, like the world's made of cardboard or you're looking at everything through a cloud of fog, is becoming more and more common, especially among so-called Gen Z, the generation that grew up with the internet being a staple of life. Now, how we got here is a disassociation between humans and what we call nature or the environment. The problems aren't getting fixed because we're so disassociated

from the effects, just as the effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. All of the worst effects of climate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years. And that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance. That I don't know how to understand that, and that making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet also urgent. It's both, and it's neither, and it's confusing. The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. It produces this lack of immediate and close proximity consequences. We must purposely remove these layers of separation and abandon our anthropocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature. It's the same thing. We are all part of this

big mesh. This sacred idea of nature isn't natural and can never be naturalized. We have to learn how to have an ecology without nature, without nature as a separate thing. To have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this idea that nature being separate from us, once and for all, we have to kill the Anthropocene in our own head. A quote from one of Morton's other books titled Ecology Without Nature, putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar, does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical act of sadistic possessive admiration. So within Morton's branch of philosophy, reification, the making of a thing into a thing, is precisely the reduction of a real object to

its sensual appearance for another object. Reification is reduction of one's entity to another's fantasy about it. Nature is a reification in this sense, and that's why we need an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn nature into something more fluid, it might work. Now, most of our modern political discourse can be boiled down to what things are real and what things are not. Hyperobjects and climate change don't just play into this debate, but crash into it, decimating all the other toys in this sandbox. As Morton says, the threat of global warming is not only political, but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And, oh boy, do we be experiencing the simultaneous disillusionment of reality

and the overwhelmingly real presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The worry is not whether the world will end, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. The idea of the end of the world is very active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind of fosters its own negation. The end of the world is coming idea is not really effective, since, to all types of purposes, the being that we are supposed to feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone. This does not mean that there's no hope for ecological politics and ethics and a better future far from it. In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly held belief that the world's about

to end, unless we act now, is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyperobject concept is to then awaken us from this dream that the world's about to end, because action on Earth, like the real Earth, depends on it. The end of the world has already happened. Using the hyperobject idea helps sort out these overly systematic things into a package that I can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language for a feeling, being able to name it that is empowering, a way of finding a handhold in the dim light of confusion rather than scrambling around in the dark. So how would you convince two-dimensional flatland people

of the existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world? Now, hyperobjects can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around climate denial. You can't point to something like rising sea levels and say, that is climate change, because yeah, that isn't climate change the hyperobject. Rising sea levels are just an environmental effect, and since the effects are so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of room for cognitive dissonance when people point at extreme weather and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology, our seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations, missing the fact that almost

all of our problems don't have a shared root cause, but instead are just part of a massive shared bungee cord-like mesh network. When so many local manifesting problems and natural disasters are blamed on climate change, even if you believe climate change is the cause, which it, you know, it is, it still feels weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's such an amorphous, shape-shifting, time-traveling idea that for the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing their real physical effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard for them and their understanding of reality. For many people, rejecting hyperobjects is a lot easier than thinking about them. Because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to

problems so displaced in time is not only difficult, but encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the air right now won't reach their full effects for decades and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem. In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The cause is our brief luxury and the effect is terraforming the world. And we are right now caught in between, the uncanny hyperobject of all liminal spaces. The end of the world has already happened. We are on the path and about to enter- During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple

Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen

to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. A new world. We are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal space hallways. The door behind us is closed and at the other end of the hallway is a black hole. We cannot backtrack and re-enter the door behind us. Already, are we getting sucked forward into the hallway? But there are many doors ahead of us and we get to choose which one to open. At this point, we have passed some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked into thinking that there are none left. We must not focus on preserving an old way of life, but instead need to carefully carve out our new reality.

We need to pick our new door. Well, that is my essay read thing episode amalgamation about hyperobjects, liminal spaces, and our new reality. I hope you found some of the ideas useful, despite their kind of abstract and anti-abstract nature. If you want to learn more about this, I would recommend reading Timothy Morton's book, Hyperobjects. It is an academic read, but it's not that bad. I would recommend picking it up if you want to learn more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them more in the future. Thank you for listening, everybody. See you on the other side. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation.

So, who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Look through your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasuring pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. Their fearless guide to this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org.

Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. I'm Jake Halpert, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We control the courts. We control absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think

he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, podcast. I'm Robert Evans. Sovi, is that it? Unfortunately, I'm so sorry. I just apologized really quick because that's a lot to take in. No, that was a good introduction. That was a good introduction. We got across the gist of what's happening. Who else is here with you, Robert? That's a great question. Is Garrison here? I think they are here. Is Chris here? Is St. Andrew here? I am indeed. Excellent. Why don't

you take over and do my job for me? That sounds great. Awesome. Good idea. Fantastic. What's happening, everybody? I am St. Andrew. Back to guest host yet again. Last time we spoke about you know, soft climate change denial and continuing the theme of me talking about whatever I want to talk about as per contractual obligation. Today, I wanted to explore a concept that I brought up in one of my recent videos, self and community actualization. Yeah. Right. So first thing is getting some context, of course. I mean, when most people hear self-actualization, they probably think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? The famous pyramid that management staff tend to use and hang up in their offices and such. Los Angeles yoga ladies. The context in which I've

heard self-actualization the most. Yeah. Yeah. That whole goop kind of vibe, you know. Yeah. But yeah. So self-actualization, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the old psych 101 stuff. You know, I mean, it's traditionally represented as a pyramid, but it was never how Maslow himself actually depicted it. It was actually something that later interpreters of his work ran with and popularized. And so that as a result of that pyramid, there are a lot of, you know, critiques of Maslow's theory that don't quite engage with his theory, but rather engage with interpretations of his theory by other people. But you know, I think it's still an interesting way to depict human needs. And I think it's a good launching point to start thinking about

and start discussing, you know, human needs where you'll think you're on the pyramid right now, just for posterity's sake. Oh, right up on the tippy top. Oh, for real. That's awesome. I mean, I've been very lucky to do exactly like what I want to do for a living most of my life. And now I own goats. So it doesn't get any better than that. Including one absolute unit. Yeah, he's fucking massive. He's a chalky buddy. What about Karen? Chris? I really don't know. I don't spend too much time thinking about models like this, especially around the kind of my own goals and like where I see myself.

But I don't know. I mean, I'm doing like I'm, I'm, I'm relatively stable with my like actual physical needs. So I guess, yeah, just trying to figure out what I actually want out of life, like a lot of younger people do, I guess. Right, right. So I guess that's more on the esteem or, yeah, more self actualization side of things. Yeah, yeah. And it's harder because you can say like, well, within the context of like, what is possible, I'm, I'm, I'm where I want to be and I'm doing stuff that I want to be doing. But also everything feels like a disaster around me all the time because the times I'm in, which makes it difficult to be as. Right. I was about to say, is anybody really

on the safety needs category of the pyramid? I mean, some people, like, absolutely, yeah. No, I mean, in this group. I mean, yeah, like we, we, we are. That's just right. There's like a weird, there's like a weird disassociation between what's actually going on and what we know could be going on in like the larger sphere. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very good way of thinking about it is like, yeah, my immediate needs are met. Am I very concerned that large chunks of the places I love will be unlivable? And, you know, there will be a, that we're kind of staring in the face of a variety of calamities that, that could make everything worse for me and everybody I care about.

Absolutely. But I can't do anything about that right now. The other thing I was going to point out is that with like, with like the physio needs is, you know, that includes sleep. Oh yeah. Well, once we get to that. Now you're talking about being the sun shining down on the pyramid and it gets up there, you know. This is the sleep. The sleep scientists have had their pockets in big bed for far too long. That's right. Apologies, Andrew. Please go ahead. The cozy industrial complex is the problem.

It's fine. I was just going to say something else today. I was going to say that, you know, the pyramid, as we are discovering in this conversation, doesn't really accurately map out, you know, needs and human psychology really. Because I mean, not just because our brains aren't shaped like pyramids, but also because at any point in time, we can be straddling multiple sections and parts of the needs. So for example, we could all be breathing air and drinking water and having our food and stuff met right now. And, you know, you might be like really respected and stuff in your field. And you might have a certain, a good sense of self esteem and stuff. But then at the same time, you know, you're not in a safe place or you may be dealing

with like a debilitating health condition or you may be lacking certain resources that you need to like thrive, right? So and then maybe, you know, you have your food, water, shelter, sleep, all that. And, you know, you're secure and you have what you need and whatever, but you have no friends, you know, you have no intimacy, no family, no sense of connection with other people. So you're kind of like living in this bubble, just floating through life. You know, I mean, your bubble is safe, it has what you need, but there's not that social aspect. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what's interesting about this is because as we start to talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we start to see the structural and societal impact on, you know,

our psychology and on our needs, right? Because if you want to talk about our safety needs, for example, or let's get straight to the bottom to the basic, if we want to talk about our physiological needs, water is now a packaged and commodified product, right? Food is something that is inaccessible to many, not because we don't have enough food, but because the distribution of it to meet the needs of all is not what's prioritized on the capitalism, right? There are people who are lacking in shelter, you know, and a lot of people are sleep deprived by the systems we're living in. Yep. And same thing with safety, you know, we are basically literally threatened by climate change and, you know, we are atomized from our relationships and stuff because so many of

us have to work so hard, you know, every day, five days a week or more, eight hours or more per day, and it really just strips us of our social connections. And with our esteem needs, we're sort of stripped of that by, you know, these commercial messages that we get about, like, you're not this unless you have this and bye bye bye kind of thing, right? And in self-actualization, isn't even really a thought for a lot of people because they're still busy trying to reach all those other things? Or they don't even have the time to think about how they can become who they are. And we get into that a bit more later on in this discussion, but they don't really have the time or the sense to think about that because they've been so restricted by their circumstances,

right? And on top of that, restricted by, like, the messages that they would have gotten, you know, whether it be in the school system or through ads or whatever the case may be. So I think looking at the pyramid, of course, it's incomplete and the issues with it, but it does illuminate some interesting things that, you know, we're dealing with right now. I mean, yeah, like, it definitely is easier to self-actualize and have esteem once your needs are met. But I think definitely there's an ability to jump around, especially when, you know, you have, like, large-scale depression and alienation and disassociation. Like, it's a weird sense where you can kind of hop around the pyramid quite often, even if you have certain things met.

This doesn't necessarily mean you have something, you know, above or below. Yeah, like, I, when it comes to, like, actual people that I associate with, you know, all of whom are folks who have to, like, have to work in order to live, I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about happiness in terms of, like, self-actualization. It's always in terms of, like, when I get my student loans paid off, you know, when I get my, when I'm able to take care of this health problem that I have, like, when I have enough money. It's basically everything boils down to, for most people, when I have enough money to not be as suffering as much from the specific thing or to not be scared about not having enough money, which is,

I think, more what I get from people when they're talking about, like, aspirational goals than I would like to do this thing that fulfills me as a person. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like, so, like, any kind of actual self-actualization becomes this, not just a luxury, but a luxury that's just unimaginable? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Some people can't even imagine. I know people who have just basically given up on, like, ever being able to repay their loans, right? Like, they've just resigned themselves to, like, this is my life now for all eternity. This is, this is it, you know, and I can't blame them. Who can really blame them when that is the reality? You know, for a lot of people, taking themselves out of debt is not possible. Even if they did get a whole bunch of

the money or able to, like, pay off a bit more per month, you know, this love interest rates, they're just, like, so highly exploitative that they're basically sooths for the rest of lives. Of course, we had to have that brief moment of, damn, the system sucks, as is typical on, it could happen here, but I want to switch shift our attention now to another society and another culture that has approached this human needs and human psychology and human society thing differently, right? What's been coming to a lot more people's attention lately is that Abraham Maslow, he was actually partially inspired to develop his theory by his stay with the Six Seeker Blackfoot. And I went into some of the details on the video on my channel,

rethinking Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so I go a bit more in there. But basically, what he discovers, what I get to in that video is that, well, firstly, some cultures view us as being born self-actualized, right? Like the Six Seeker Blackfoot, meaning that... Yeah, and that's the Blackfoot, just for a little bit of context, are an Indigenous people. I think Confederation is how they tend to refer to themselves in like Montana, I think Idaho... Abuja, Canada as well. Yeah, up in Canada. Yeah, kind of like Idaho, Montana, and parts of Canada. Like that's Blackfoot territory. There were also, Maslow spent time with them. El Run Hubbard lied about having spent a lot of time with the Blackfoot. Fun fact there, please. I didn't know that.

There's a lot of Scientology lore I've yet to catch up on. But yeah, so with Maslow's model, self-actualization is essentially self-fulfillment, right? The tendency for the individual to become more and more what one is, and to become everything that one is capable of becoming. So it's like fulfilling your potential as a person, as a partner, as a parent, as a talent, as an artist, as a whatever. Just fulfilling your potential as a person, right? But to say that we are born self-actualized, that framing more looks to seeing us each as born in the world with a spark of divinity, because of course this is tied into their spirituality. Born with a spark of divinity and with a great purpose embedded in us. And what self-actualization is linked to in

these cultures, inextricably linked to that is, is community actualization, right? So community actualization is a concept that places the actualized individual in the context of community. So instead of just upholding the individual alone, which Maslow's hierarchy has been critiqued for sort of doing, community actualization incorporates the web of relationships that supports each of us as individuals. Basically, it recognizes that we cannot be self-actualized solely as individuals if there's not like a broader network or broader web that is supporting us. You know, we're not islands standing alone, you know? Yeah, yeah. We were touching on that point a bit, a bit previous, but less eloquently. Yeah, it's much easier to have the ability

to actualize your goals into actions when you are less alienated and you have all these other things around a community. Yeah, it is that I think like the lack of community self-actualization is kind of what we were talking about in terms of like, yeah, things are great for me in as much as things are great, you know, in the system we live in, but I don't feel that, you know? Yeah, you can look aside and you're like, everything's actually really bad. I'm just kind of in my little bubble and I'm trying to expand my bubble to be around, you know, and help more people, but it can be overwhelming sometimes. Yeah, I mean, there's only so much one person could do and that's kind of the whole point of

community, right? Our community supports our basic needs and basically equips us to manifest our purpose. So the community would be there to, for example, and we could get into this a bit more, design a model of education that supports us in expressing our unique gifts, right? Another part of the 60s black philosophy involves cultural perpetuity, where there's an important consideration of those who came before and those who are coming after seven generations forward and seven generations backward, as I had it explained to me. So that is something that I think would have been useful when it came to discussions of, you know, climate change and it's very relevant now because we are seeing the older generations basically shrugging and

feeling like, you know, well, it's Gen Z's problem now, you all can take care of it, you're all the future, kids are all right, all that. When they're basically on the download saying, fuck them kids, you know? Yeah. Wait, can I say that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, you can always say fuck them kids. I say that to Garrison all the time. Go down. All right, yeah, yeah. But speaking of kids, I think we could compare and contrast basically how childhood is approached in our society versus how it would be approached in a society that values community actualization. I mean, and I'm just speaking from my experience here, of course, you all are free to talk about your own. I, from like primary school and stuff,

I remember it constantly feeling like I had to compete with my fellow classmates. I mean, you know, I was friendly and stuff with everybody and stuff. But since I was like, usually at or close to the top of my class, I always felt this kind of pressure to just beat them out and continue to be the best gifted kid ever. You know, so there was a sense of like constant competition with others that wasn't really balanced out with a kind of collaborative sort of approach to like basically training us from like an early age to learn to cooperate and work with people as people and as comrades, you know, although comrades is a way to put it. But yeah, I just remember there was a sort of sense of sort of atomization that

undercoded that sort of educational approach. I feel like that's pretty universal in a lot of parts of our modern world. We definitely really embed that sense of competition into very young kids, whether that be in school or like wherever. Because yeah, that was definitely my experience, even like in private school in Canada a long time ago. And I know that's that's a thing across, you know, across the ocean as well on on the other side of the pond. Yeah, we are back. That doesn't sound like us. Are we are we really back? Sorry, it's 10am. All right, so when we're to look at like childhood and education and stuff in a society that value

community actualization, what sort of things do you guys think we would be seeing in that sort of society? What sort of approaches do you think would be embedded from an early age? I'm trying to put it into words. So kind of one of the things I'm currently in a living situation, right, where I have a, I'm working with a group of people on a chunk of land. And so every week we do projects on it to make it better, which is tremendously satisfying. And I think in a in a society where that kind of self actualization, like you've been talking about was more common, kids would feel that way about doing things that improve their community, like that that that that take care of the people around them that make, you know, wherever they live, a better place to

live, like that would be that would be in the same way that like, I go out each weekend thinking that will be a fun thing to do to like to improve the place that I'm living, I think that would be I think that would be kind of a common feeling like that would be a common activity as a kid to go engage in projects like that. Yeah. And I mean, we already see children doing that, right? Except they do it in Minecraft. Yes. Yeah. Like the impulse is being directed somewhere currently. This isn't a thing you have to this isn't a thing you have to like splice into kids, little brains to make them want to do it kids love making shit. Exactly. Like, if you give a child an opportunity and you sort of facilitate that, like they

are very a lot of them. I can't really generalize because I know some kids will like you do what you ought to do. I want to stay in my corner. But there are a lot of kids as well who would be like very, very willing to be helpful, you know, they really like they just adore being a helper and being someone who can support whether it be in the kitchen, you know, with like a little broom or whatever, sweeping whatever the case may be. So some like kids don't want to be part of a community, you know, because we are social animals. It's just that right now it's directed at like Minecraft servers or whatever. Yeah. I think one of the things that I would really focus on because this is just kind of in my experience is teaching young kids how to cook and then having

them cook or at least help cook food for other people. I think it's a really great kind of skill to learn. But also it does this weird thing to your brain when you do that is like you get very happy when you cook food for other people. Yeah. And I think it's a really good kind of emotional impulse to give kids is like, hey, this is you can make people feel good by doing things for them. Um, and because that makes you feel good and it makes them feel good and then that really builds that whole sense of community. So yeah, it cultivates self-lessness. Yeah. Yeah. Some some some kids could be a little egomaniac. But like both self-lessness, but it also teaches you to like do stuff for yourself as well. Right. It's a good skill to be self also be self-sustaining.

So I think that's why I really enjoy teaching kids cooking. I used to I used to be a culinary instructor because I'm really just passionate about that specific thing. Yeah. I mean, for me, personally, I develop an oneurysm whenever anyone's in the kitchen with me. There's definitely moments where there's too many people in a kitchen that is frustrating. But if you do it right, you can get you can get a 13 year old cooking you an entire like really, really nice holiday dinner. Which is what I, which is what I was doing when I was 13. I was cooking all of the holiday dinners for my entire family because I just I wanted to learn cooking. So it's it's definitely possible if you're a parent and you want less time in the kitchen, teach your kid how to cook.

Yeah. I mean, I come from a family of child cooks, right? I remember this one time I think I was making like a carrot cake with my mom. But I was used to like licking my fingers when, you know, you make that cookie cookie dough and stuff. Yeah. But I licked my fingers when the when I cracked the egg. Oh, oh boy. She was like, stop. You can't do that. You know. So I just remember that was one of the experiences in the kitchen. It really stood out to me. Lessons will be learned about like bacteria. Yeah, you know, it's really it's a holistic learning experience, you know, knives. Yeah, you get to get to learn how to use knives, get to learn about heat, you know, there's a lot of a lot of good lessons you can learn inside. Get siren safety chemistry,

you know, yeah, yeah, or mixed in there, you know, even math, even absolutely fractions. It's one of the only times I use fractions is in cooking and baking. Yeah, I mean, I mean, as embarrassing as it is, I use Google when I want to convert measurements still. But I mean, it's just there. It's more convenient. But yeah, I absolutely agree with that example, you know, like the use of like cooking lessons and that sort of thing to support, to support like kids self actualization and also like community actualization. Because of my experience, the thing I default to is different versions of like the youth liberation argument. But because of how people have been using that term on Twitter right

now, I don't want to talk about it. It's been causing a lot of like, really dumb fighting about what that term actually means and who coined it and like that kind of stuff. But that's kind of where I default to in terms of like, what self actualization could be in a community setting. Youth liberation is one of those things I'm really passionate about. And I honestly don't know who coined it or what discourse is happening about it right now. But it definitely informs my approach and ends up influencing like a lot of the things that I discuss. Like whenever I talk about like an issue or whatever in society, a lot of times it really boils down or starts from an early age, it starts through the education system or it's

fostered there or incubated there. So I think a lot more discussion should be happening about, the place of young people and the education system and stuff alongside of course, all the other struggles and discussions and discourses about struggles we've been having. Yeah, I'm just trying to view like anarchistic, like, liberatory frameworks as like trying to achieve that self actualization and to some degree like the like a steam level and then also like the community and belonging level. Even if you don't have all of your physical needs met all the time is how these types of frameworks can be, can almost just like jump around that and be like, despite me not having all of these base needs met, if I if I have like a radical model of the

world, I can still try to achieve that type of freedom because I can work outside the box to get it. Yeah. And so I think that that that's kind of what I was I was trying to get at is at least on you know, like like a like whether it be like a youth lib framework or just like general like radical anarchism in general. Yeah. And I mean, parts of thinking outside the box involves, you know, looking at other people who have thought outside the box, who have reinvented and reconsidered and sort of transformed their approach to things like education and child care and really all the aspects of society that we take for granted as, you know, just being a certain way, you know, when we talk about things like education and childhood and the place that

plays in community actualization, I tend to think a lot about, you know, all the things we can do to not fit into into capitalist moods, you know, to really facilitate folks potential, not just through the cooking classes, for example, but even through, you know, workshops and field trips, I mean field trips now are just kind of like this thing that, you know, kids go to from time to time or they have to walk in a single fire line and all these different things. But what I envision when I think of, you know, learning is something more akin to like less restriction to just the four walls of a classroom and more the whole world is your classroom. You know, the whole world is a place where, you know, you can explore and you can roam and you can develop yourself, you know,

without all these barriers and controls that we place on kids that end up suffocating their imagination of what things can be. And I mean, when you have that sort of educational model where, you know, the youth are able to explore different avenues and direct their own education routes, you know, you also end up, which is what has happened in education models that we've seen throughout many different cultures of the world. You see that it facilitates relationships with the community members, right? And everybody benefits because you have, for example, wasn't exactly something like apprenticeships. And you have, you know, for example, people getting support from the kids in the kitchen or, you know, in the workshop or in library or whatever

the case may be. And not only the kids developing their skills, but they're also developing relationships with different members of the community with different backgrounds with different experiences. And it really serves almost as I see it as a way to guard against this sort of style of parenting where they've been kind of seen popularized lately, where, like, the child is basically the exclusive property of the parent. And you can't tell anybody how to raise their child and the parent always knows best in that kind of approach. I think it's a good antidote to that because the child may expose to a lot more of life and of people. I think that, to me, is the sort of youth liberation route that I see developing. It requires, of course,

a total transformation, but, you know, no proposal could really be approached in isolation. Yeah, and it's easier to achieve when you're around other, right? It's easier to achieve once, if you are already in a community where these things can be fostered, then it's a lot less of a lofty goal. Yeah. I think there's a kind of interesting, I don't know if case study is the right word, but there's part of Italy that had a really, really long-running anarchist education experiment. And so they were basically able to sort of reform local school systems. And it worked, but, you know, they produced a bunch of really good schools and, you know, the schools are based on sort of like cooperative learning, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know,

I mean, the model still exists today. And, you know, it's like, yeah, they made some of the best schools in Europe, but the society around them didn't change. And so sort of bizarrely, they ended up making these schools that like produced, you know, they're very good schools, they produce extremely good students, but then they also like produce an extremely, you know, well educated and good like capitalist cadre, basically. And so I think there's a sort of, you know, if we go back to sort of the community aspect of this, it's like, yeah, there's a sense to which even if you have, you know, you get some form of self-actualization, you get some form of sort of, you know, communal and cooperative like education for children and stuff like that, the whole society has to move

with it. Or otherwise, you just wind up sort of feeding the beast more effectively. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that is that you also see that kind of problem with like the WeWork guys, right? The Adam Newman and the two co-founders of that came out of an Adams case, Akibats in Israel, which, you know, started with kind of socialist foundations. And the other founder had grown up in like a commune in rural Oregon. And they both wound up making like this ultra capitalist real estate company. So yeah, if you, it's, you know, there's a lot that's said and there's a lot of value in kind of like carving out sections of culture for the things you believe in to try to get shelter from the storm. But yeah, as you were kind of noting, Chris, it does also just wind up kind of

reinforcing the dominant social system. If there's not a kind of more basic upheaval of the way things work. Yeah, if there's no, you know, political philosophy and the good in it, and there's no connection with, you know, broader social movements and sort of confederation with other projects, you know, it could very easily be co-opted, you know, in isolation. Yeah. And I guess, I guess that's, you know, like that that's what happened to self actualization as a concept for the most part is that it got taken over by kind of weird grifters and yeah, like self care. Yeah, yeah. And take these concepts and just sort of twist it and transform it into,

you know, capitalist sense is even something like, like with this was in some interesting discussions happening surrounding like luxury and what luxury means around certain within certain circles on Twitter. And Kim Kimberley Foster from for Harriet, excellent YouTube channel. She mentioned that to her at least in this long but really good video, she spoke about how luxury to her was basically, you know, finding the ability to rest when you need to rest and to be able to be supported. Whereas luxury now, but the luxury is like popular understanding is more so about consumption and consumerism. So even when you have something we're like, and this is specific to the black experience, of course, because for a long time, you know, black women have been

expected to like toil and labor and support not only their communities, but also, you know, junior slavery, also, you know, their white masters and that kind of thing. There was a push for the black woman luxury movement to sort of reclaim, you know, a space for black women to just be able to enjoy themselves and be themselves. But that quickly became something that was just like, you know, just get the bag. Just the sort of hyper capitalist, hyper consumerist, bougie kind of approach to luxury, where the original roots of the movement, which was about finding rest was sort of lost. And I mean, that's a bit of a tangent. So I'll try to connect that back to what we're saying. I think when it comes to things like rest,

the ability to rest, I think that that can only really be found in community. And if there is a lack of community support to, you know, pick up the slack when you need to rest and you need to revive yourself and you just need to recharge, barring that, of course, rich people can pay for a sort of a full community in the sense of having, you know, nannies and maids and butlers and tutors and all these people to basically support their lifestyles and support their freedoms. But most people lack that. And so I think part of self actualization as we're mentioning earlier is ability to rest. And I see that as linked with community, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think that definitely ties into our recent discussions on anti work and how

anti work is a lot more feasible if you are in a community support, like network and right and you have people to rely on. Yeah. And definitely like, you know, self actualization as the ability to like to just rest when you want to is a very is a very powerful thing and very enticing. And that definitely plays into the whole like anti work, like idea, I guess. Yeah. I mean, to connect the anti work thing to just general, you know, unionization and striking efforts, right? Like I was seeing people calling for a general strike the other day. As if we haven't learned a lesson. But they were calling for that. But what they were not realizing was that without these structures in place to support striking efforts, it's not going to be enough, you know, if people cannot

support themselves and their families, the strike cannot last. You know, it's only with this community and with the community coming together to support people. Can they, you know, not just fight for the rights in the striking and unionization context, but also, you know, to be able to find leisure to find rest as with the, you know, anti work discussion. And to sort of turn this to a discussion on organizing more generally, you know, we are at the end of the day, a very communal ape. And if we would suggest focus on ourselves as individuals, I think as capitalism in its antisocial nature expects us to, I think we would all suffer as a result. You know, our goal as people, as any one person should be not just to, you know,

uplift ourselves, but also to enrich the worlds of those around us and to cultivate the community that as we support, they, you know, will support us. And I mean, as we prefigure the sort of, you know, you know, culture of support of, you know, care and of empathy and that sort of thing. I think our organizing efforts would as a result be a lot more powerful, be a lot more potent, be a lot more enriching and a lot more imaginative. So, unless any of you have anything else to say, to sort of bring this to a close. I just want to leave us with some food for thought in terms of how we can incorporate community actualization in action, right? Because it's one thing to say,

it would be wonderful to have a community to support you and that kind of thing. But, you know, a lot of people are pretty isolated and stuff right now. So, I guess I actually put it into sort of a five-stage kind of approach, starting with firstly facilitating collective belonging among diverse groups, right? So, we want to look at bringing people together. Obviously, they would have different backgrounds and different needs, different ones, different personalities, but bringing people together, whether it be at work or on the block or at school or whatever the case may be, just for a cookout or for a lime or any kind of party or interaction. Obviously, depending on where you are, that may not be the safest thing to do,

considering COVID and everything. But, to just bring people together, not even necessarily to proselytize to them about anarchism or socialism or whatever, but at the very least, start connecting the nodes and start connecting the different parts that can eventually come together to become something greater, you know? I mean, you don't need to wait for a calamity, this sort of thing to happen. But, of course, we have seen as well where natural disasters have brought communities together that weren't together before. I think, however, it would be better to not wait for that kind of thing to happen and to just bring people together from now, start some conversations, get things going, right? And then from there, you want to be facilitating

solidarity and struggle, right? So, whether it be, you know, solidarity is a bit of a buzzword now, or at least it's become a buzzword, but I think whether it be with disaster relief funds or solidarity strikes and protests or, you know, with basic mutual aid support, you know, whether it's material or emotional solidarity in struggle, I think that is another crucial part in, you know, building community and incorporating eventually community actualization. Because what that does is it shows others that I have your back and, you know, others are able to see that, you know, they can have mine as well. It helps to build that sense of trust. You also want to sort of cultivate probably a sense of community pride and a sense of being able to rely on community

networks. You know, we spoke about mutual aid networks, but also things like skill shares or workshops or material support, you know, if somebody needs food, being able to support, for them to know that they have people they can go to to support them in a time of need that is powerful, you know, not many people forget that, not many people forget the time that they were at their most dire point and, you know, their community stepped up to support them, you know. If you want to see a insurrection in our lifetimes, you don't start guns-blazing, you know. You start with a crate of food. You start with a helping hand. You start with money if people need it. And then from there, you know, you get into the realm of community achievements,

where your community is collectively able to celebrate the things that well have accomplished together, you know, whether it be establishing a community garden that is able to supplement people's fresh produce supply or whether it be that. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to

become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize? That this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When the communities come together and they've fixed something that was broken on the streets or even that they've come together and were able to train people with like some really helpful skills, where they're now able to support themselves and bring other things to the table as well.

And then from there, I think that sort of approach would foster fulfillment in community and figure as community actualization. Yeah, I mean, and this is this is all it's a big topic and it's a much bigger topic than just like what do you what changes do you want to make around the edges? Like what things should people advocate for or even just like advocating that the system be torn down? Like as was kind of evident when you asked how could we build a community in which kids feel more self-actualization from engaging in the community and there was that kind of blank moment. When you actually talk about like reconfiguring society at such a fundamental level, it's a big topic.

And it's one that I think it's important to introduce to people the idea like, hey, we really gotta be, we really gotta figure this out. This is important to like everything we say we believe answering this question is going to be key. And it's it's it's a tough one. So I don't know, I think sometimes people come into episodes, we do on stuff like this, like looking for, okay, well, how are you? What's your suggestion for how to do that? And at the moment, like I agree with the how imperative this is. But in terms of actionable stuff, it's this is a big open-ended question in my head. I mean, I think I think Andrew laid out a lot of the stuff that we've we've talked about both like, you know, within our kind of own community groups. Yeah, in terms of the things in terms of like,

like, you know, like connecting nodes. And I think it's a really important thing to think about in community groups. Yeah, in terms of the things in terms of like, like, you know, like connecting nodes and all like the steps that we can do to have there be like more, like more connecting branches of the tree, and how to strengthen those. I think that it's a good, yeah, it's like we can't we don't know what your community is like, or what your what your situation is. All we can really say is, here's the broad thing is that, that you can try or have worked for other people in the then based on what your situation is, you can apply those plug plugables. Yeah, you want to plug your plugables, same Andrew. Yes, of course. Well, you can follow me on Twitter at underscore St.

True. And of course, on YouTube, St. Andrewism. Check out my stuff. You know, I have the video on rethinking Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and some other fun, practicing things as well. Check it out. Check it out. And stay thinking about stuff. Yeah, thinking is good. Yeah, thinking is good. The Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld. The criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement, we cover all facets of the game. Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify for more lucid activities. We just discussed the ramifications and repercussions of these activities. Because after all, if you play against the game, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. Our heart radio is number

one for podcasts. But don't take our word for it. Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall. I said it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade over. We found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the

evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to check out Drink Champs, your number one music podcast on the Black Effect podcast network. Hosts NORE and DJ EFN sat down with artist and icon, Yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, Yay returned. And everybody had to sit back and

watch the real leader. Check out Drink Champs conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome, it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart and sort of how you can put them back together. This is again, another mostly things fall apart episode. Here with me is Garrison. Hello. Hello. And joining us today to talk about, well, a pretty wide range of things, but about the drug war in Mexico, about paramilitaries, and I guess also I guess about the narco state is Alex Avina, who is an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University and has written several very, very good articles that

I've read recently. Alex, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for joining us. So I wanted to start by talking about an article that has come out fairly recently that is about essentially the transition, particularly in Guerrero from I guess the sort of 60s, 70s, dirty war in Mexico to the drug war. And I guess I want to just start from because I don't think this issue is particularly well known. I want to, I guess, start with sort of an overview of how we got into the sort of dirty war in Mexico in the 60s, because I think, I don't know, like I think if anyone, if people know stuff about this, it tends to be the very dramatic sort of like massacre in 1968, but it's been, it went on

for longer than that and has a sort of deeper history. So can you bring us into that? Yeah, for sure. So I'll start off by saying that generally, when most people think about dirty wars and Cold War Latin America, Mexico is probably the last country that they think of having one, right? Like there's a certain exceptionalism that Mexico has enjoyed until relatively recent, and relatively recently, amongst academics and especially historians, right, where we're in the last 10, 20 years, we started to uncover Mexico's own version of a dirty war that we are more familiar with in other places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, etc. Mexico's dirty war though, and if people know a little bit about this period, like as you mentioned, right, they

know about the infamous student massacre at the Lolco on October 2, 1968. But my research focuses on the southern state of Guerrero, it's on the Pacific coast, it's made famous by the resort city of Acapulco, and I wrote a book and published a book in 2014 that really traced the emergence of armed resistance in the state of Guerrero during the 1960s and 70s. And that was my entrance into this idea of a Mexican dirty war, of the Mexican state practicing systematic state terrorism against political dissidents, and in my case, armed guerrilla dissidents, who enjoyed the backing of dozens of rural communities, and even urban poor working class neighborhoods in places like Acapulco in the late 60s and early 1970s. That's a very regional

story, right? That's another thing that kind of distinguishes the Mexican dirty war from other Latin American cases is that the dirty war was localized to a few major cities and then to very specific locales on the countryside, Guerrero being the most bloody theater. The way that these guerrilla movements emerged, they really began as these popular civic minded social movements in the late 50s, early 1960s, and they protested things like political authoritarianism and economic injustice. But they did so essentially within the confines of the Mexican constitution. They followed the law. Mexico has the characteristic in Latin America of having the first great social revolution of the 20th century. You do have a post-revolutionary government that emerges from

the 1910 revolution that has to pay lip service to the radical traditions, to the revolutionary traditions that came out of that movement. And for that reason, the Mexican constitution that was passed in 1917 in its time was the most radical social democratic constitution in the western hemisphere. And peasant communities, campesino communities in the state of Guerrero believed the letter of the law. So when they started to protest authoritarian state governors, police violence, army violence, economic injustice in the 60s, they followed the rules and they followed the laws. And each time that they did so, they experienced pretty horrific instances of both state violence exercised by the military and the police, but also everyday forms of violence

practiced by gunslingers who were working for landed elites. And that then radicalized some of the social movements into two separate guerrilla movements that were led by rural communist school teachers, Genaro Vasquez and Lucio Cabañas. And Lucio Cabañas' movement in particular, the party of the poor, they ended up creating a guerrilla force of about the high estimates, about 300 fighters. A more realistic estimate is somewhere from 150 to 200. But the key is that in Coastal Guerrero and in some of the mountains, mountain communities of Guerrero, they obtain a pretty substantial amount of popular support, which then leads the Mexican government that had been ruled by the PRI. And it was ruled, Mexico was ruled by the PRI for like

eight years. They sent in the military and they waged this pretty horrific counterinsurgency that did things like disappear people, torture, rape. They raised entire communities. And that's generally what's known as a dirty war in Mexico. It's rural theater. Its main rural theater was in a place like Guerrero, where we think there was almost a thousand disappearances from 1969 up until the early 1980s. Yeah. And one of the things that the interested me a lot sort of reading through this was that it's sort of weird for an insurgency in that you get aspects of both kind of the kind of like classical 70s urban guerrilla movement. But it's also a very much a rural movement. You have, you know, I mean, like one of the stories you tell on this is about like a group of people

who did one of the classic urban 70s thing, which is that, you know, they did a bank robbery. And then two people get tortured and the rural guerrillas sort of get hunted down. And I was wondering about the dynamics of this, because it seems like it seems like you have these groups that are kind of unusually moving back and forward between like having bases in cities and having bases in these rural areas. Yeah, that's one. So usually when folks think about these guerrilla movements in Guerrero during the 60s and 70s, they think of them primarily as a, you know, very fairly typical rural guerrilla movement, as you just described. But these two movements, one led by Lucio Cabañas, the party of the poor, the other one by Genaro Vasquez, the ACNR,

Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria, from the very onset, they tried to connect the rural to the city, whether it was cities in Guerrero, like the resort city of Acapulco, particularly working class neighborhoods on the outside of the city, or the state capital in Chilpanzingo, which housed the state university, right? So both of these movements made pretty substantial inroads into that community. And then also into Mexico City. So they tried, their idea was not necessarily to start as a strictly, as a strictly rural movement, but their idea was always to expand, because I think to the cities, and I think quite rightly, they perceived that what the Mexican state was going to do to them was try to corral them in the state of Guerrero and prevent them from

logistically and politically expanding beyond that. And in the end, they were, that's exactly what happened. And that's how these movements were ruthlessly crushed. That, and it took a lot of terror to separate these armed movements from their popular base of support. But a lot of this has to do with the fact that both Vasquez and Cabañas were school teachers, and they were involved in union movements that were national in scope. They were in move, they were in Lucio Cabañas was in the Mexican Communist Party, right? So he had extensive urban experiences and networks throughout the country. So their perspective was always to connect the rural to the urban, particularly because Mexico by the 70s was a rapidly urbanizing country, right? It was going, it becomes for the

first time in its, well, first time is its post-colonial history, it becomes primarily an urban country. So, so they, they, they try these really interesting experiments to try to connect the two theaters. But as you, as you mentioned, right, they did that typical 1970s thing of robbing banks and their terminology was expropriation, right? But that, that then exposed them to, to police actions. And, and anytime any of their militants were captured, they were immediately tortured, information, you know, that they were interrogated horrifically. And that in from Intel was used to, to hunt down their, their, their comrades up in the mountains and get rid of. Yeah. And I think that that's a good place to move towards sort of the other side of this,

which is partially the Mexican state response. But the part, the part of it that was really interesting to me was about how, you know, so, so part, part, part of what these groups are fighting are these sort of very, very local, like, sort of landed elites. And I, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how these sort of local elites merge, are able to merge with and sort of like co-opt in a lot of ways, the, the military units that are deployed? Yeah, that's one of the, the biggest. So let me see how I can answer this question. Cause there's, there's, so it, what I, what I try to do in this article, and it's part of my broader ongoing research is to kind of connect the, the violence, the state violence of the Mexican dirty

war as it, as it happens in Guerrero in the seventies with, with something else is happening simultaneously, which is like the so-called drug war and the exponentially increasing cultivation of drugs in a place like Guerrero, particularly marijuana and then opium poppies that are used to produce heroin. So what I try to do in the article that you're referencing is kind of to show there's a longer history in Guerrero of how power is, is exercised at the local level and how some of these local landed elites are able to weather the 1910 Mexican revolution. They're able to weather the agrarian reform efforts that, that occurred in 1930s and 40s. And, and really these, these families, one of the things that, that captures my attention of Guerrero is that, you can tell

who's in power by just by, almost by looking at their last name, because there's this remarkable continuity in the state of who has managed to exercise power at the local level, political, social and economic power for decades now, for generations. And you can track how power works by looking at families. And what I do in this article is to look at a couple of landed elite families that had managed to stay in power for decades. So there's certain that landed in this article I focus on one municipality called Cuyuca de Catalan, which is in the hotlands region of Guerrero. During, you know, probably from about 2008 to 2015, it was in the top three in Mexico for opium and heroin production. So it becomes this massive drug producing region.

So I go back in time, and I kind of trace like who was in power in this region, who owned land, who owned the resources throughout the 20th century, and how they were responsible for essentially creating this little narco fiefdom as it currently exists, and trying to figure out which families were involved. So on the one hand, you have these families that have been in power from like the 1920s and 30s, and they're still exercising power. And then when we get to the 1970s, and you have this, this horrific dirty war, this counterinsurgency that the state and the military are waging against communities in Guerrero, that opens up new possibilities for new families to come in into ally themselves with locally stationed military units. And they work together to wipe

out guerrillas and guerrilla supporters. And at the same time, they start to, you know, kind of dip their toe into this world of narcotics production. Because really in Mexico in the 1970s, especially by the mid 1970s, it becomes a number one provider of marijuana and heroin to the United States. And this is part of just a broader global history of narcotics, right? There's US led drug interdiction efforts in places like Turkey, Afghanistan, and in the, in Southeast Asia, and efforts to suppress the drug production there creates this, you know, what people usually refer to as a balloon effect. It just displaces the drug production somewhere else because the demand in the US is still there. And that because in that creates in Mexico, the number one provider

of narcotics by the mid 1970s. And that then has an impact locally in the place of Guerrero, which is again, simultaneously experiencing a guerrilla insurgency, a dirty war, and then also the ramping up of drug production. One of the most interesting parts of this that I didn't know about was about how, I mean, like how explicitly, because I've read a lot of, well, not a lot, but I've read about a lot of how, particularly like after like when the sort of after sort of the various upheavals in 2006 in Mexico with the Oaxaca uprising, with the Zapatistas making ultra moves, and the CP presidential election about how you get the drug war is the sort of like military solution

to these leftist movements. But I was interested in how, I mean, incredibly explicit they are about this, like the anti guerrilla operations are like, they don't call them anti guerrilla operations. They talk about like bandits and like they're explicitly like, no, no, no, this is an anti narco operation, even though, you know, they're going and massacring like essentially peasants and occasionally guerrillas, but just a bunch of just random like campesinos. Yeah. Yeah, there's a there's a great quote that I got from for this article. You know, this is wonderful researcher in Mexico Carlos Flores was a really good book on kind of like the failed state in Mexico and drugs and military. And in that study,

he managed to interview a military participant in the dirty war in the 1970s. And he has this great quote that I included in this essay, which he says, this military guy says, basically, look, with the marijuana growers, we had no problem. We had no beef. But with the gorillas, we had to fuck them up. And for me, like that, that direct quote kind of encapsulates like what the drug war in Mexico has been historically and in his current form. Like, and this is something that I learned from people like sociologists and journalists, Don Paley, right? Like the war on drugs, the war on poor people. And it becomes in 1970s, it becomes a really useful cover for the type of horrific violence that the state is practicing in a place like Guerrero

against these popularly supported gorilla insurgencies. So publicly and to the international audience and to its own domestic national audience, the Mexican state is saying, look, we're not waging a dirty war. We're not waging a counterinsurgency. We're fighting a war against cattle wrestlers against cattle thieves and against criminals against drug dealers. When in reality, they're waging a war against poor people who are supporting these different gorilla insurgencies led by these rural communist school teachers. So that's, and that's in the rural theater, right? It's really interesting when you think about how the Mexican state in the 70s will criminalize urban guerrilla movements. You know, Mexico had like 38 guerrilla movements in

the 1960s and 70s. That sounds like people don't really recognize that, right? Like 38 to 40 different rural and urban guerrilla organizations. The big urban one that managed to create, I don't know, 10 to 12 different focos or foci was the Liga Comunista 23 September, the Communist League of the 23rd of September. They became such a big threat in the urban theater that the Mexican president, Luis Echeverria, devoted his 1974 State of the Union, basically the Mexican version of the State of the Union. He devoted a pretty good chunk of it to these quote, unquote terrorists, right? So for the urban guerrillas, he referred to them as terrorists. And then he does this thing where he says, you know, most of these terrorists

are unpatriotic. They, and I'm going to paraphrase some of his language, they reveal high indices of homosexuality of like just basically othering them to the point that they're seen as like the most despicable other in Mexico, in Mexican society. And that then opens them up to getting wiped out, which fulfills a similar function as calling the rural guerrillas nothing more than cattle wrestlers, cattle thieves and narcos, right? So it's all this counterinsurgency like discursive strategy that justifies the elimination of these people. But at bottom, these are just wars against the drug war is a war against poor people. And you see that to this day, you see that, you know, most one of the things that really animates my research about the history of drug

wars in Mexico is that I really want to push back against, you know, journalistic treatments that that will say, look, Mexico's war on drugs began in 2006, when President Felipe Calderon way, you know, launched the military against these different drug trafficking organizations. And you know, historians like myself who work on this were like, wait, no, Mexico's had a series of drug wars, right? There's a historian, Alec Dawson, who talks about has a really excellent book on peyote. And he talks about how the war on drugs begins in like the colonial era, right, in terms of how the Spanish colonial state criminalized indigenous consumption of drugs like peyote for for their own ritualistic cultural practices. The 1970s is another moment where you have a form of drug war

that the Mexican state exercises. But from my perspective, it's just, it's almost like a cover as a way to wage war against political dissidents and armed guerrilla challenges to its rule in Mexico. Yeah. And I think that's an important way of looking at it also is just a way to understand why, you know, like, if you're looking at it from the perspective of like a policymakers, like, oh, well, we spent all this time doing the war on drugs, like, why are there more drugs? And it's like, well, yeah, because I mean, the point isn't really about, like, I mean, I think, okay, I want to make a caveat here, which is like, it's not like there's a such a thing as like a quote unquote good war on drugs that you could wage. Like, there's no, there isn't a version of this

that's like, oh, no, if we actually just try to like focusing on stopping these people, it would work. But it's like, no, but simultaneously, yeah, it's that the goal isn't really about like, it's not about drugs, it's just about killing poor people. And I think, yeah, I think that's that's a good way of framing it. And I think also, it's an interesting way of looking at why you start to see these sort of supposedly like anti narco units just immediately start doing like getting to the trade. Because they're like, they're positioned to make a ton of money off of it. Like, it's yeah, they're not done. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I don't know, this is an interesting question about like the structure of the state here too, because you know, like in Chicago,

this is another like, this is the thing that happens all the time is yeah, you get these, you get these anti drug units that are you know, incredibly specialized to get a bunch of money and then they immediately turn around and start like just do like just enter into the drug trade. And so I was one of the other things. Yeah, I was just been interested in this of just about there's there's seems to be these these very these very interesting sort of alliances between paramilitaries cartels, the police and the military that open up and I this I know this is an incredibly broad like it's a question you can like, you know, devote academic disciplines to but I was wondering

how you look at the state in the context in a context like this because yeah, I mean, in a context where, you know, it's not the state doesn't really have monopoly on violence. Right. Yeah. No, that's a that's a huge question. And there's how you I mean, essentially, the question is like, what is the state? Yeah, that question always terrorizes me. Yeah. And how you answer that question then leads has consequences to how we think about things like the drug war or, you know, violence in Mexico or a variety of different things, right? But so what I what I do in this article is on Coyuca de Catalan is to just simply look at what the state looks like at the local level, right? Particularly like its repressive apparatuses.

And what you see in a place like Coyuca de Catalan because you see kind of like it's a multi scalar issue, right? Where you have generations of conflicts over land and land tenure, and who gets to control rural markets, who gets to control access to rural markets and rural production, right? So there's already like a built in structure that's exploitative that has somehow managed to weather a big social revolution and a grain reform effort. And on top of that, then during the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the

little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become

the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the 60s and 70s, you get industrialized narcotics production placed on

top of this preexisting structure. So it's almost like no surprise then that the gunslingers that used to work for landed elites will now serve as not just gunslingers for landed elites who are terrorizing campesinos, but now they're also going to work with local narcotic narcopharmers, drug farmers, and traffickers. And then at the same time, they're going to do their best to co-op to buy off military units that are stationed at the local level, police units that are stationed at the local level, local judges, local magistrates, local political officials. And it creates a very dense network at the local level of people who are working together to maintain power, but at the same time, make sure that this really profitable political economy of narcotics is

going to thrive. And this is at the very local level, right? So in some ways, those local interests of the cornucle of the state will conflict with the state in Mexico City and how to resolve those tensions and becomes a big deal. So the guy, the military participant that I referenced earlier, he was actually sent in from outside of Guerrero into Guerrero to wage counterinsurgency. And he talks in this book about how they didn't know what to do when they see their soldiers, comrades, obviously collaborating with local narcos, even though this guy and his unit have been sent in to wipe out the narcos. So what ends up happening is that the goal is never to eradicate from a national level, from a state national level, the goal is never to eradicate the drug

trade in Mexico in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The goal is to rationalize it. The goal is to control it. And the goal is for the state to be able to maintain power over it. And this leads us to what some scholars were referred to as a plaza system, that different narcotic trafficking organizations will control different parts of Mexico, but the overall power they have to kick back to are different state officials. And there's a recent really great book by Ben Smith called The Dope that just came out. It's really like the first really good English language big history of the Mexican drug trade. And he essentially, he says that the Mexican state is a racket. It's a racket and it's ensuring that this drug trade exists and it's centralized and it's

rationalized in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But by the 90s, it starts to lose control as the state itself is neoliberalized and becomes smaller. And its capacity to control these different groups becomes weakened. So that's like the big national level, right? And then that takes us to the scale of the international, which is a whole another thing. But at the very local level, what does this look like? It looks like if you're a drug farmer, right? Because another thing in Guerreros that these drug farmers are like small scale, right? They're small scale. They have a little bit of autonomy, but they're small scale. But they're selling their product to these traffickers. And these are the traffickers usually that will have connections to local landed families,

who have connections to military, to police, to politicians that will ensure that this economy will continue to thrive in a profitable way. By the late 70s, and this is something else, I think that I need to do a little bit more research on, but you see it happen elsewhere in Mexico, and especially in the Northwest and a place like Sinaloa, which is usually seen as the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. But I think in the late 70s, both in Sinaloa and Guerrero, the dirty war and the sending of the military and mass in a place like Guerrero, it not only takes out armed resistance to the Mexican state, but it will also take out small scale narco traffickers who don't want to play. They don't like the rules that the Mexican state

is imposing upon them in order to make money and traffic drugs. So I've seen a couple of documents where secret police spy agent documents where they say, okay, yes, these campesinos who are accused of being guerrillas, yes, we are disappearing them. But apparently some small scale drug traffickers are also being disappeared because they're not, they don't want to go along with the rules being imposed by the Mexican military. And that's something that you see in Sinaloa in the late 70s, when something called Operation Condor gets launched, and you get thousands of troops and federal police who go up there. And instead of eradicating the drug trade and getting rid of these different traffickers, what they do is they centralize it, they rationalize it. They make it

more efficient. In a counterintuitive way, it's state violence that actually leads to the formation of things that we think about as cartels and not the other way around, because the very trade begins within the confines of the Mexican state. In part two of this interview, we're going to drill deeper into that question and look at how the state's attempt to get in on the drug trade created the cartels and how they sort of lost control of them, leading to an incredible increase in paramilitary violence and death and destruction. And on that happy note, this has been it could happen here. Join us again tomorrow for that. And in the meantime, stay safe and don't die. If you want to find us, we're at

happen here pod on Twitter or Instagram. You can also find other work that we do at CoolzOnMedia on Twitter. If for some reason you can you want to continue venturing onto the Hellsides. Goodbye. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit. On the podcast 90210MG, join Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 90210 superfan and radio host, Sissony sits in

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and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart Radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is often and today about state and paramilitary violence. And we're back with part two of our interview with Alexander Avenia about the state and paramilitary violence and the cartels in Mexico. The immediate thing I was thinking about this was it reminds me a lot of some stuff I read a while back about smuggling people over the border and about how the American militarization of that destroyed, because as the U.S. tries to make the border more and more unsafe, it becomes harder and harder, and it means that the people

who can actually do it, you need to have access to more resources and more technical capability, and that also, in a lot of ways, helped the cartels because, well, it's like, okay, so who actually has a bunch of organizational expertise with smuggling routes and a lot of money? And I think that's an interesting way of looking at what the national application of state power does, which is that it seems almost like what's happening is that when you get these massive access to state power, it's not that they flatten, like, you know, it's not that they just sort of wipe out our resistance. What they do is they, yeah, what you were saying is like, they centralize the drug trip, but they also,

they centralize the sort of violent apparatuses, and it means that, yeah, like, yeah, if you're going to survive that, you have to be incredibly efficient and incredibly violent, and you have to also sort of start, like, you have to start playing with it, like, playing by the rules of the state of exception, which is, you know, and that's like how, I guess, the violence level and organizational centralization happens. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, no, I think you're, I think you're right. And I think it's also becomes part of the, to add, I mean, so to add, you know, fuel to the fire, even more so, it's become a strategy of, like, the DEA and counter narcotics forces in Mexico to do what you just described, but then also to sow

dissension amongst the different drug trafficking organizations, right? So that then also increases the violence, right? So if you can get, you know, it was pretty well known that a chapel, for instance, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel until recently, well, let's not say leader, one of the most prominent traffickers of the Sinaloa cartel until recently, like, he was giving up people, he was giving information on rivals to the DEA and to other other counter narcotics forces, right? And that's part of the strategy. The strategy is to fragment these groups. And that only increases the violence and you see that violence at the very localized level. And this is what Guerrero's suffering from right now, right? Guerrero for a long time is under the control of one single drug

trafficking organization slash family from the state of Sinaloa, the Beltran Leibas, right? They used, they were originally aligned with their actually cousins with the Chapo Guzmán's family. They had a falling out in the mid 2000s and they went to war. And that had disastrous consequences for the people of Guerrero because it fragmented the drug trafficking organizations and it forced different local groups to take sides. And that's kind of how I end the article that you're referencing, right? Where different local groups start to take sides and that increases the level of violence at the local level and communities suffer greatly. And that's also a consequence of like the kingpin strategy, right? Like this idea that if you take down the perceived

leader of a drug trafficking organization, that's somehow going to have an impact on drug production. No, what actually happens is it fragments the organization and it creates more violence at the local level. Well, at the same time, it gives a chance to like XDE agents to go on like, you know, national media and be like, oh, yes, the capture of the Chapo is going to have a great impact on the drug trade. No, it will not. Like it just increases the violence. And I think that the thing that's very clear from this article, and I think it's clear if you, you know, if you look at the drug trade is it's like, no, it's largely economic stuff. And like one of the things you're talking about is, you know, is that these peasants who are even the

people who've been able to hold onto the collective land basically get forced by the lamb bakes to like produce sesame. And it's like they can't make any money off of it. And I don't know how directly it looked to me a lot like that was directly one of the things that starts to lead to the shift to the drug trade there because you have all these people locked into this crop that like just can't support them. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just the bigger story there is really the failure of the post-revolutionary Mexican state to really help spur agricultural production at the level of these small holding peasants and these rural communities that are these ajivos who have received land from the Mexican state. If anything, most of the state subsidies and the

state structure, state support for agriculture from the 40s, you know, up until the 80s, that was all directed to big agro businesses that were producing export crops in places like Sinaloa, right? They're producing winter crops for the American market or winter fruit for the American market, right? So in the absence of like meaningful state support for small holding agriculture, that small holding agricultural sector that is meant to feed Mexico, you know, some of these farmers in a place like Coyuca de Catalan, they'll say, okay, well, we're growing this thing that the agricultural bank is telling us to grow sesame, but we're not making a lot of money off of it. But on the other hand, by the late 60s, they see that marijuana production is really increasing

due to American demand. If I can do both things, you know, I'm going to make a lot of money and I'm going to allow my family to make a pretty good living while staying in the countryside, while not having to migrate to Mexico City, or while not having to migrate to these agricultural fields in Northern Mexico or even into United States. So because it's like really rational economic response to a broader macroeconomic situation that has put them in that position. And you still see this to this day, right? These small farmers, they still own their land, they'll grow certain crops on it and it almost serves as a shield for, you know, the opium poppies that they're growing on the same plot of land, but in a part that's a little, you know,

harder to access and it's a little bit more hidden, right? But it's trying to find a way at a bottom to make a dignified, you know, how to make a life of dignity for your family when you're living in the countryside, when you're living in a place like Cuyuca de Catalan and Guerrero. And then you see that, you know, the gringos are going crazy over Acapulco Gold in the late 60s. And you have, you know, north gringo traffickers coming into Guerrero with new seeds, or you have Sinaloenses coming into your state saying, you know, grow these, here are some marijuana seeds, grow that strain, you know, and they can buy off, you know, local politicians and soldiers and police. That's one of the ways that you get the emergence of industrial proportion

production of marijuana and opium poppies in Guerrero in the 60s and 70s. And again, at the same time that this massive dirty war is being waged against two different peasant guerrilla movements, right? So it's like a really messy like social matrix that's occurring at the same time. I guess one other thing I wanted to talk about was about how the political parties sort of work into this, because I guess like my experience with this sort of like the kind of like narco state fusions with like 20s and 30s China, and there it's like, like you're, I don't know, I mean, the communists have an actual independent political base outside of like like the Green Gang, but like the KMT, it's like, like this is basically just a, like this, like

this is just like a narco organization with like a flag planted on it. And I'm wondering how, like, on what end of the scale we're working with, with the PRI and also like with the other Mexican parties, because it seems like there are like parts of like a functional state app, like a party state apparatus, or like a party apparatus, and then parts of it that are just like, this is a cartel? Yeah, it's, that's a huge question. It's, it's, um, yes, I really resist it. No, no, no, it's all good. I've, I've stopped understanding this within the framework of like a narco state, right? Because to think about a narco state, you really have to think about how a state was captured by these drug trafficking organizations. And, and I historically and currently, I don't think that

describes what's, what's happening in Mexico. I think what you, and again, it goes back to the question of what is the state, right? Like the questions that drive me and like, just, I'm going to be thinking about this decades down the road, right? But because you have, you know, you, it depends on what part of the Mexican state you're also referring to, right? So if we're talking about the military, the military has all segments of the military have always had an important role to play in the production and trafficking of narcotics from Mexico into the U.S. From the, from like the 1910s, right? The military governor of Baja California, this guy by the name of Colonel Esteban Cantu, he was helping traffic opium into the United States during

the Mexican revolution, right? And this has been a constant, right? The guys that I talk about in my article, this guy who ends up, he, he's a general by the time he's, he's arrested in 2002. But this guy, Maria Costa Chaparro, he was like the main counterinsurgent theorist and, and, and, bright mind of the Mexican military that gets sent to get rid on the 70s to wipe out these different guerrilla movements. But he's after they wipe out the guerrilla movements, he stays on, he serves as a kind of like the leader of the state police forces and what he starts to do, he starts to buy up land, allegedly, that will start producing opium poppies and marijuana. And this guy from the late 70s, up until he's arrested in 2000, it's pretty clear that had,

he had been collaborating with different narco trafficking organizations. He gets arrested by his own military in 2000, because he, it was pretty clear that he had been protecting and collaborating with this, you have Juarez Cartel and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. So, you know, one of these like anti, anti guerrilla, anti narco narcos that will, you know, actually get, go to jail for about six years, because it was pretty apparent that he had been, for a long time, collaborating and protecting the different narco trafficking organizations, right? So that's the military. Then you have like the secret police that gets formed in Mexico, the DFS in 1947, with the help of the FBI. The DFS becomes like this political police that the

Mexican president can use to tamp down on political dissent. They're the ones, you know, spying, surveillance. By the 60s and 70s, they're also torturing, disappearing. And with that level of impunity and power, they also get into the drug game by the 70s and 80s. You have the federal judicial police. They're the ones who control for this, during this 50s, 60s and 70s, really. They're the ones who are controlling the kickbacks that they're receiving from narco traffickers until the military moves in in the 70s and takes over for them, right? So the repressive apparatuses within the Mexican state of the 20th century play a really key role, if not the role, in helping foster, create this political economy of narcotics. Now, how do we view that in relation

to the PRI, right? The party that emerges from the Mexican revolution, the party that will rule Mexico generally will say from the late 20s up until the year 2000, well, you have pretty important, you know, political officials within the party throughout the 20th century that are directly linked to narco traffickers and directly linked to military officials who are obviously involved in the game as well. But at no level can we say it's a narco state because the narcos haven't captured the state. It's actually the other way around. It's the Mexican post-revolutionary state that's trying to get its hands around this thing that's growing within its own confines and they lose control of it. By the late 80s and 90s, they've effectively lost control of this thing.

And that's when you see the rise of these highly centralized drug trafficking organizations like this, you have Juarez Cartel, that's making a ton of money off of cocaine. So I guess it seems like it's almost like you're dealing with from the very, very local level where you have these sort of landed elites and their gunslingers. It's almost sort of like miniaturized fractal version of the state where you're getting these very, very small sort of like, you know, like feudal domains and they sort of expand upwards and stand upwards. But yeah, and I guess the interesting part to me is how the paramilitary dynamics of that and how the power of these sort of landed elites and the power of the... The use of power from the top seems to strengthen them

where, you know, if you're looking at this from how this is supposed to work in theory, if you're someone who actually is like trying to eliminate the drug trade, you'd think it'd be the way around that like the application of power would shatter, but it sort of doesn't. It causes these like these build-ups, these apparatuses, and then they fragment and they rebuild again, but it's you're not ever actually dealing with these sort of like micro state, like, yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And if anything, the paramilitarization is also like a long, it's a process, right? So like the first, if we can use this term, the first paramilitaries were used to wipe out a grain reform-minded campesinos in the 30s and 40s. But you don't really

have like a paramilitarization of the drug trade in Mexico to a certain extent, because you have the military and the police to do your dirty work, right, if you're a nautical. That's a more recent phenomenon that you start to see in the 90s and especially in the 2000s. So right, the case that everyone points to are these, the elite of the elite in the Mexican military, the gaffes, these guys are like the Navy SEALs or the Special Force, you know, the Army Rangers, the Mexican military. A bunch of these guys in the mid to late 90s decide, you know what, we don't want to work for the Mexican military, we're just going to, we're going to desert and we're going to go hire ourselves out to the Gulf cartel. And they become really the first like paramilitary wing of a major

drug trafficking organization. And these are guys, some of which probably most likely were trained at the school of the Americas or received American specialized training, now switching sides and protecting a pretty powerful drug trafficking organization, like at the time in the 90s, that was the Gulf cartel. And these are the infamous setas, right? These are the Z's. They're called the setas because that was like their military code. There was always a Z in front of a number. So Z1 was kind of like the leader, the first guy who took 12 or 13 guys with him to desert. And they hired themselves out to this drug trafficking organization. And they become like the paramilitary unit. The rest of the group see that and they're like, oh,

shit, like we got to catch up, right? Because these like, and these guys, the gaffes, you know, they have a counterinsurgency experience, you know, they were the ones who were fighting against the Zapathistas and Chiapas in the early 90s, right? They were the ones that they were sending to. Yeah, they were the ones who were fighting against the new cycle of guerrillas that emerging Guerrero in the mid 90s, the EPR. And then when they're used for counter narcotics operations, they look at the situation, they say, you know what, we're not going to fight on the side of the military, we're going to hire ourselves out to this Gulf cartel, we're going to make a ton of money. But they have a lot of skills, right? So the rest of the drug trafficking organization

see that and they're like, we got to play catch up. And you see the paramilitarization of this conflict. And in certain parts, that's what's driving. I think has played a really big role in driving some of the bloodshed and violence that we've seen in Mexico, particularly since 2006, where we can speak of probably 400,000 homicides since 2006, at least 100,000 disappearances. A lot of that has to do with, you know, the people who are fighting are paramilitaries, right? They're receiving training from Colombian military advisors, they're receiving training from Israeli military officials, they're receiving training from Guatemalan special forces, these guys called the Kaybiles who committed some of the worst atrocities during the Guatemalan conflict

of the 70s and 80s. My family's from Michoacán, which is the state north of Guerrero. And I remember when probably 2005, six or seven, I was down there doing research in the Disney family, and they reported on the arrest of two Guatemalans and two Colombians in this random far off part of Michoacán. You're like, what were these two Colombians and two Guatemalans doing there? Well, there were most likely like special ex-special forces in those countries, militaries, who had been hired by local organizations to train their soldiers, to train their paramilitaries. So that's, I think, that has driven a lot of the violence, right? And you see it's, in terms of techniques they use, their weapons, their armament, the the logics of

of how to take down their enemies. Yeah, I remember I read an article, like, okay, I've literally lost all sense of time. I think it was like mid last year about a cartel, just basically running a military operation, just shutting like, just shutting down a city. I'm god, I really wish. Yeah, that was pre-pandemic. That was. Yeah, it was pre-pandemic. Oh my god. Yeah, I remember because that was on the day and the day after it happened. I think I spent way too much time on Twitter talking shit to people. That was when, I think you're referring to when the detachment from the Mexican military in the city of Culiacán, which is the capital of Sinaloa, Culiacán is seen as like, Sinaloa is

the cradle of the Mexican drug trade and like, Culiacán is the capital of it, right? I think, I think you're referring to when the Mexican military detachment tried to arrest one of the sons of El Chapo, right? And they actually found him, they localized it, they located him and they tried to arrest him. And like, the hills just came down on the city of Culiacán and you had hundreds of narcos or paramilitaries who came down and essentially forced the military and the state to hand over El Chapo's son to them. And for, and the reason why I was like, you know, spent way too much time on social media going after people is because people said, oh, this is an example of a failed state. Oh, look at the new president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he's lost

control of the, of the state, like he's toutowing to narcos. And it was much more complicated than that. And something similar had already happened in the previous administration where these different, like particularly in the city of Guadalajara, where they even shot down a military helicopter, a police helicopter, and they essentially shut down the entire city because one of their leaders had been captured. Okay, so one of the things you, one of the things you talk about the end of the article is about these, this environmentalist group that gets like, they all get arrested, while like their lawyer gets killed after he starts talking about like connections between business owners and the party and the narco trades. I guess, what do you, how do you sort of like,

like, how do you leftist movements sort of navigate this space? Because you have, it seems like you have on the one hand, you know, you have all these paramilitaries, and then you also have a state that is like, incredibly violently hostile to you. And I guess, I don't know, like, I guess you sort of have this appetista model of this combination of sort of like, armed struggle and social pressure. But I guess, like, how do people navigate this? Sort of like, it seems like a really disastrous, like, place to be trying to do leftist politics in. Yeah, it's really difficult, right? And I think that's, again, going back to the the thesis that the war on drugs is actually a war on poor people, it's, you know, leftist movements,

dissident movements in Mexico have to, well, for one, I'll say this, in a place like Guerrero, it's these movements that have provided, I think, the, the most accurate, like, X-ray analysis of what the state is at the local level, right? So this, this guerrilla leader that I talk about in the article, Comandante Ramiro, who, who was around in the late, you know, 2007, 2008, 2009, like, based on his travels in the mountains of Guerrero and kind of like the actions that he was engaged in, for him, it was very clear that the military was collaborating with all narcotrafficking organizations, not just the one, not just like the most powerful one, right? So at the national level, there was a lot of discourse of, well, this dark drug

trafficking organization is going at it with this one. And a place like Guerrero, this guerrilla leader looks at the situation, he's like, actually, they're all working together. And not only that, but they have the police in the military. And what are they doing? They are going after poor communities up in the mountains who don't want to grow opium poppies or who want to organize a different way, an alternative model of, of living, of social pre-production. What they'll say is, you know, the, what the military is doing in terms of drug interdiction is they'll only go and, and, and burn some opium poppy fields and not others. And that's because the owner of that old poppy and poppy field that they burned didn't pay up. So, you know, now current

movements in Guerrero, particularly indigenous movements in Guerrero, there's a recent report that a, that an indigenous group just put out, and they're linked to the Congress, Congress Nacional Indigen, the CNI, I can't remember the acronym, where they talk about a criminal state existing in, in the, in the part of Guerrero, that is known as La Montaña, which is a heavily indigenous area on the border on the eastern part of the state. And what they say is what we see here is a, an alliance between narcos, political parties, military detachments, and transnational corporations. And so, and in Guerrero, those transnational corporations are usually have something to do with mining, and they're usually Canadian. So, how do you navigate that? Like that is like,

like the, the correlation of forces, if we want to use that kind of terminology, like from a perspective of a, of a group that, that wants to resist this, it's, it's, it's damn near impossible, right? Like you have everything going against you. And yet, in Guerrero, people are still resisting, right? You have the students of Ayotzinapa, they're still protesting, they're still organizing, even after the disappearance of their 43 comrades back in September of 2014. And we still don't have a clear answer as to what happened. You still have, you know, you have the model of autonomy that like, that, that certain indigenous communities like the community in Chedan and Michoacan have practiced, which is essentially they kick out all political parties,

they kick out all police officers, and they self-organize at the communal level, almost like a community police force. And you see that in Guerrero as well. There's all, you know, there's, there's challenges with that. There's a, that usually brings on a lot of violence. And the people of Chedan have really suffered for, for trying to go this, for trying to protect themselves, right? They've, they've suffered a lot of casualties. And there you have a, this combination of like Narcos and illegal logging, right? And so the community there on the one hand is trying to protect their ecology, but they're also trying to defend themselves from Narcos who have taken over local political parties, and they don't want them in their, in their town. In Guerrero,

you have community police forces, and you've had them since the 1980s and 1990s. But that's raised a lot of issues in terms of, you know, what happens when one community police force gets co-opted or co-opted or corrupted by a political party or by even a narco. And then that, that group is used to hit against other community groups who are still trying to organize for, for a, for a radical alternative. So it's, it's on one level, it's really depressing, right? Because everything is stacked against groups and communities and organizations in a place like Guerrero who want a better world, who want to create a better world. But in the longer scope of Guerrero's history, they still resist. They still resist. And to me, that's one of the things

that fascinates me about this place and about its people, about its communities, that the odds have always been stacked against them. And nonetheless, they still resist. They still try to, against overwhelming odds, they still try to carve out a better, more just, more dignified existence for them and for their communities, even at great risk, you know, for their well-being. And they're willing to risk everything. So they're still there. They're still there, even though the forces that they're facing are extremely powerful. Yeah, I think that's a surprisingly hopeful note to end on. Which is that, yeah, even in like, you know, places with just incredible concentration of violence and different kinds of sort of power against you that people, people, people continue to fight.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's one of the lessons that we definitely get from a place like Guerrero or a place like Chiapas, right, with the Sapatistas who are still there, who have still managed to, I mean, they've managed to reproduce themselves generationally, which is really difficult for an armed insurrectionary group, right? Like, they've managed to do that and to carve out at great cost as well, right? They're currently right now suffering, they've been suffering for more than a decade, a low intensity warfare that's been waged by the military and their paramilitaries. But they're still there with their example, right? And I think part of the power of them and the people in Guerrero is their example alone is

threatening to the powers that be. And that's why there's always an effort to exterminate them. So just by virtue of surviving and defending themselves, that's like a small, it seems like a small thing, but they're providing an alternative. And I think that's where their example is really important. And I think there's a real argument that the whole sort of anti-globalization, like that wave of struggle, like is something that was kicked off by the Sapatistas. And not just on the sort of like, they were the first people to go into revolt, but it's like, I mean, explicitly, like the way they brought, you know, like social movements from across the world together and the way they, you know, the way that they had, they got, the way they got people talking,

the way they had people training each other, the techniques and the sort of ideas that they're exchanging that they like, like they set off like a wave of revolt that lasted for like, I don't know, if you start in like 1999 and like the end of it's like 2006. Yes. Yeah, it was incredible. Yeah, no, I think they're, and even if you want to go, this might take us off topic a little bit, right? But like scholars who focus on like Venezuela would say, actually, the first one was the Caracas, right? In the late 80s, when you have a popular rebellion in Caracas, Venezuela, against neoliberalism, against neoliberal austerity measures, right? And then so I've had that, I've had a talk to friends, I'll be like, yeah,

the Sapatistas were the first ones. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. It started in Caracas in 1989, I think it was the Caracas, but yeah, no, I think their global example, it continues to be a really powerful one. For me, personally, it's like, I still remember my parents had, my parents are migrants from Mexico, they had this, this big satellite dish in our backyard, so we can beam in TV stations from Mexico. And I remember January 1, 1994, we woke up, right, groggily, to celebrate New Year's, and my parents turned on the TV to see Mexico City News, and there was Marcos, right? And there were the Sapatistas. And there were then the Mexican politicians saying, no, don't believe what, don't believe your eyes. This isn't, you had a guy,

I remember you had a guy go on TV, I think, saying something like, this is not an indigenous movement, because if it was an indigenous movement, they would be using machetes, not rifles, something really condescending, like the level of racist condescension that came out of Mexican politicians in response to this movement was super high, right? But I remember, I was in junior high, and I remember seeing it, and I'm just like, there has to be something wrong for these people to do this, right? And that just led me to want to do more research and to do more reading. And that I think is really powerful. And I still think it's really powerful. So the more we can get the word out about these movements in Guerrero and Chiapas and other

parts of Latin America, I think, I think it's still really important. And I think, especially today, we really, we do need a bit more hope in these dark pandemic times. Yeah. I was trying to figure out a speaking of hope segue, and I couldn't quite get it. Do you have anything that you want to plug? Where can people find you? Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me on. This is a lot of fun. You can find me on Twitter. I think the pandemic, my Twitter consumption has really gone up. It's been awful, but you can find me at alexander underscore avina. Yeah. Something I want to plug. No, I think if you go on my Twitter page, you'll see you'll be able to

get the link to the to the article that we've been talking today about about the drug from dirty war to drug war in Guerrero. I recently published a book review of this really fascinating book on the connection between the Israeli arms industry and like Cold War Latin America. So you can find that on my page. But yeah, it's we have anything else to plug. Whenever I finish this damn book on drug wars, have me back on. Yeah, definitely tangible to plug. But right now it's just short little articles. Well, thank you again for coming on the show. Yeah, this is this has been a good happen here. You can find us in the usual places if you want to venture on social media for some reason, please don't. It's it's a bad place. But yeah, thank you and goodbye, everyone.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. I'm Tanya Sam, host of the Money Moves podcast powered by Greenwood. This daily podcast will help give you the keys to the kingdom of financial stability, wealth and abundance with celebrity guests like Rick Ross, Amanda Seals, Angela Yee, Roland Martin, JB Smooth and Terrell Owens. Tune in to learn how to turn

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