Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 44

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? 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 iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host today, it's Shareen. And I'm going to be flying solo for the next few episodes. We are going to be talking about Syria, spoiler alert, I am Syrian.

And I think there's a lot of history and news about Syria that really goes under the radar and not a lot of people know about. So I thought it would be important to shed some light about how Syria became ruled by a dictatorship family. The Assad family have destroyed Syria. Imagine a country being run by the mafia. They're very powerful, very secretive, very, very rich. There are no numbers that can illustrate the scale of Syria's loss and destruction, literally, because the United Nations hasn't been able to calculate the death toll for years. So as I mentioned, these episodes are going to be about Syria.

The first two will be about how Assad rose to power, which has since led the Assad family to have control over Syria for more than half a century. And then the one following that will be about his son Bashar, who is the current dictator of Syria. And that one will have more topical information, maybe more like economic stuff versus historical information, which we're going to start with. But I think understanding the history of the Syrian government provides vital context to understanding the present. And there is a lot to cover here and a lot that I won't be able to get to, but hopefully we can chip away at it. And this is a good semi-coherent summary of how Hafez climbed his way to the very top of Syrian authority. So the Assad's, in Arabic it's al-Assad, so I apologize if I go back and forth between those two, but they're from Qardaha originally, a village in northwest Syria in the Serial Coastal Mountains.

The family name Assad goes back to 1927 when Ali Sulayman, who was Hafez al-Assad's father, changed his last name to al-Assad, which is Arabic for the lion. People say this is possibly in connection to his social standing as a local mediator and his political activities. All members of the extended Assad family stem from Ali Sulayman and his second wife, Naysa. The Assad's are Shia Muslims, more specifically of the Alawite sect. Alawites are a religious minority and they initially opposed a united Syrian state because they thought their status as a religious minority would endanger them. And Hafez's father, he shared this belief. After the French left Syria in 1946, many Syrians mistrusted the Alawites because of their alignment with France. Hafez eventually left his Alawite village beginning his education at age nine in Latakia, which had a Sunni majority.

He became the first of his family to attend high school and while he was in education, he lived in a poor, predominantly Alawite part of Latakia. To fit in, he approached political parties that welcomed Alawites. These parties, which also embraced secularism, were the Syrian Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the SSNP, and the Arab Bath Party. Bath is Baith in Arabic, but we know it as Bath spelled B-A, apostrophe A-T-H in English. And he joined this political party in 1946. Some of his friends belonged to the SSNP and the Bath Party embraced a pan-Arabist socialist ideology. And he proved to be an asset to the party. He organized Bath's student cells and he carried out the party's message to poor sections of Latakia and to Alawite villages.

He was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which at the time allied itself with wealthy and conservative Muslim families. Assad's high school accommodated students from rich and poor families and he was joined by poor anti-establishment Sunni Muslim youth from the Bath Party in confrontations with students from wealthy Brotherhood families. He made many Sunni friends and some of whom later became his political allies. While he was still a teenager, Assad became increasingly prominent in the party as an organizer and a recruiter. And he was the head of his school's Student Affairs Committee from 1949 to 1951. And he was also the president of the Union of Syrian Students. During his political activism in school, he met many men who would later serve him when he became president. And reading about this, I mean, I'll be honest and I learned a lot even preparing for these episodes.

It's so interesting because you read about this man and on the surface he seems not too bad when he started out. Like his ideas aren't terrible. I think power eventually corrupts everybody and I just have so many questions and thoughts about how someone becomes evil. I mean, that's such a blanket, like maybe like make believe way to describe someone. But the things that the Assad family eventually does is horrific. And it's interesting to see where this man started as a child, as a teenager. On one hand, it humanizes him. On the other hand, it just shows how much he had changed.

And maybe he was always this way and it's just on paper doesn't seem so bad. I don't know. Sorry. Tangent. Let's continue. So after he graduated from high school, Assad aspired to be a medical doctor, but his father could not pay for his studies. So instead, in 1950, he decided to join the Syrian armed forces. He entered the military academy in Homs and the flying school in Aleppo. And then he graduated in 1955, after which he was commissioned a lieutenant of the Syrian Air Force. He married Anisa Machlouf in 1957, who is a distant relative of the powerful Machlouf family. In 1955, the Syrian military split in a revolt against then-president Adib el-Shishakli,

which led Hashim el-Otasi to take power as president. He had been president before and Syria was again under civilian rule. So after 1955, el-Otasi, who in English, both him and el-Shishakli, they removed el in front of their names. So you'll see just Atasi or Shishakli. So when I say those, that's what I mean. It's just, it's hard to break when this is like the language in your head sometimes. But I got to stop with these tangents. See, this is my first episode and this is what you get. But after 1955, el-Otasi's hold on the country was increasingly shaky. As a result of the 55 election, el-Otasi was replaced by Shukri el-Kuwatli,

who was president before Syria's independence from France. The Ba'ath Party grew closer to the Communist Party at this time, but not because of shared ideology, but rather a shared opposition to the West. At the Military Academy, Assad met Mustafa Tlaas, which will be his future minister of defense. Assad was then sent to Egypt for a further six months of training. And when Jamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Syria feared retaliation from the United Kingdom, and Assad flew in an air defense mission. He was among the Syrian pilots who flew to Cairo to show Syria's commitment to Egypt.

In 57, as squadron commander, he was sent to the Soviet Union for training and flying MiG-17s, which I looked up, and it's a high subsonic fighter aircraft that was produced by the Soviet Union from 52 onward and operated by Air Forces internationally. The more you know. But essentially, he went to the Soviet Union to train and flying these things for 10 months. Let's go back to 58. Nope, we're not going back, we're going forward. In 1958, Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic,

separating themselves from Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan and Turkey. In 1958, Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic, UAR, separating themselves from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey. And these countries were aligned with the United Kingdom. This pact led to the rejection of communist influence in favor of Egyptian control over Syria. All Syrian political parties, including the Ba'ath Party, were dissolved, and senior officers, especially those who had supported the communists, were dismissed from the Syrian armed forces.

Assad, however, remained in the army and quickly rose through the ranks. After reaching the rank of captain, he was transferred to Egypt, continuing his military education with a future president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. However, Assad was not content with a professional military career. He viewed it merely as a gateway to a career in politics, a.k.a. power. After the creation of the UAR, the Ba'ath Party experienced a crisis for which several of its members, mostly young members, blamed the party leader, who at the time was Michel Aflach.

He was a Syrian philosopher and sociologist and an Arab nationalist, and his ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement. He's considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. So he had some opposition, however, because after the creation of the UAR, there was some unrest. To resurrect the Syrian National Branch of the Party, Assad joined others in establishing the military committee. In 1957 and 1958, Assad rose to a dominant position in the military committee,

which mitigated his transfer to Egypt. After Syria left the UAR in September of 1961, Assad and other Ba'athist officers were removed from the military by the new government in Damascus, and he was given a minor clerical position at the Ministry of Transport. Assad played a minor role in the failed 1962 military coup, for which he was jailed in Lebanon and then later repatriated. Here, Michel Aflaq, the Ba'ath Party leader, convened the 5th National Congress of the Ba'ath Party, where he was re-elected as the Secretary General of the National Command,

and then he ordered the re-establishment of the party's Syrian Regional Branch. There's a lot of congresses, there's a lot of branches, there's a lot of committees. It gets really confusing. Just these men shutting down and then reigniting these things. So bear with me here. At this congress, the military committee established contacts with Aflaq and the civilian leadership. The committee requested permission to seize power by force, and Aflaq agreed to this conspiracy.

After the success of the Iraqi coup led by the Ba'ath Party's Iraqi Regional Branch, the military committee hastily convened to launch their own Ba'athist military coup in March of 1963 against President Nazim al-Qudsi, which Assad helped plan. He helped plan this coup. During this coup, he led a small group to capture the Dumayyad airbase about 25 miles north of Damascus. Assad's group was the only one that encountered resistance. Some planes at the base were ordered to bomb the conspirators, and because of this, Assad hurried to reach the base before dawn.

Because the 70th armored brigade's surrender took longer than anticipated, however, Assad arrived there in broad daylight. When Assad threatened the base commander with shelling, the commander negotiated a surrender. Later, Assad claimed that the base could have easily withstood his forces, so his bluff worked, and this garnered him a lot of respect. Not long after Assad's election to the regional command, the military committee ordered him to strengthen the committee's position in the military establishment. In doing so, Assad may have received the most important job of all,

because his primary goal was to end factionalism in the Syrian military and make it a Ba'ath monopoly. He said he had to create an ideological army. To help with this task, he recruited Zeki al-Arsuzi, who was the person who actually indirectly inspired him to join the Ba'ath Party in the first place when he was young. Arsuzi accompanied Assad on tours of military camps, where Arsuzi lectured the soldiers on Ba'ath's thought, and gradually for his work, Assad gave Arsuzi a government pension. And Assad continued his bathification of the military by appointing loyal officers to keep positions

and ensuring that the political education of the troops was not neglected. He demonstrated his skill as a logistical leader during this period, and he was said to have a highly intelligent mastery of detail, which garnered him a lot of respect. I want to make this clear. I talked to my mom a bit about this and doing this research, and Assad was very smart. He was known as a very smart man. He knew what he was doing at every turn, despite what it seems like. This fell into his lap, or later you'll see that the president he overthrew had no idea.

He didn't see him as a threat. But, I mean, before and after he took power, he was known to be very cunning. And so, yeah, I just think that's an important little thing to take note of. Even in school, they were saying that he was an excellent student, so he has a plan, I think, for most of this. But let's take a little break, and we'll be right back to finish this up. Well, this part, I mean, okay, whatever, I'm sorry, bye. We're back! Wow!

Okay, so after he had been bathifying the military, he was promoted to major and then to lieutenant colonel, and by the end of 1964, he was in charge of the Syrian Air Force as the Air Force commander. Assad gave privileges to Air Force officers, and he appointed his confidants to senior and sensitive positions, and he established an efficient intelligence network. Air Force intelligence, under the command of Muhammad al-Khuli, became independent of Syria's other intelligence organizations

and received assignments beyond Air Force jurisdiction. Assad prepared himself for an active role in the power struggles that were soon to come. As I said, he's cunning, he knows what he's doing. In the aftermath of the 1963 coup, at the first regional congress, Assad was elected to the Syrian regional command, the highest decision-making body in the Syrian regional branch. It's so confusing, I can't keep track. And while this was not a leadership role,

it was Assad's first appearance in national politics, which is a significant thing to point out, because as you'll see, it only grows. During the 1964 Hama riot, Assad voted to suppress the uprising violently if needed. This decision to suppress the Hama riot led to conflict within the military committee, which I'm going to skip over because it's more clusterfucky than ever, but ultimately in 65, the eighth national congress,

during this, Assad was elected to the national command, the party's highest decision-making body. I know I just said that about something else, but that was about the Syrian regional branch. There are a lot of parties and commands and branches and committees, as I said. Just know that it's a group of men probably that just make decisions. But he was elected to this highest-making body, this party of people.

And it's said that Assad abhorred Afluk, the party leader of the Bathis party. Assad considered Afluk a autocrat and a rightist, accusing him of ditching the party by ordering the dissolution of the Syrian regional branch in 58. In response to the eminent coup that was about to happen, that Assad knew was going to happen, he left for London. In the 1966 Syrian coup,

the military committee overthrew the national command. The coup led to a permanent split in the Bath movement and the advent of neo-Bathism, as well as the establishment of two centers of the international Bathis movement, one Iraqi and the other Syrian-dominated. After the coup, Assad was appointed minister of defense. This was his first cabinet post,

but despite his title, he actually had little power in the government and took more orders than he gave. Salah Tadeed, who helped Assad establish the military committee years prior, was the undisputed leader at the time, and he opted to remain in the office of assistant regional secretary of the Syrian regional command, instead of taking executive office, which had historically been held by Sunnis.

Tadeed, trying to establish his authority, focused on civilian issues and gave Assad de facto control of the Syrian military, considering him no threat at all. During the failed coup of late 1966, Salim Hatoum tried to overthrow Tadeed's government. Hatoum was a military officer, and he felt snubbed when he was not appointed to the regional command

after the 1966 coup, and he sought revenge and the return to power of Hamoud al-Shufi, who was the first regional secretary of the regional command, after the Syrian regional branch's re-establishment in 1963. Oh my god, so many branches and everything. I'm just, can't you just assign on one group? Anyway, when Tadeed, Atasih and the regional command member Jameel Shaya,

visited the city of Suwaida, the forces loyal to Hatoum surrounded the city and they captured them. The city's droves leaders forbade the murder of their guests and Jameel and the Hatoum wait, so Jadeed and the others were placed under house arrest, with Hatoum planning to kill them at his first opportunity, because he wanted revenge. When word of the mutiny spread to the Ministry of Defense,

aka Assad, Assad ordered the 70th Armored Brigade to the city of Suwaida. By this time, Hatoum, who was a Druze, knew that Assad would order the bombardment of Suwaida, which was a Druze-dominated city, if Hatoum did not accept Assad's demands. So this led to Hatoum and his supporters to flee to Jordan, eventually, where they were given asylum.

But due to his prompt action and his protection of Jadeed and the other members that were captured, Assad earned Jadeed's gratitude after this incident. So I know I just casually mentioned this word a minute ago, and so just to the people that aren't aware of what it means, no, again, a lot more to delve into than what I'm just going to say right now. But Druze are members of an Arabic-speaking ethno-religious group

originating in Western Asia. They're largely in Lebanon and Syria now, and they originally developed out of Shia Islam. Even though most Druze members, or most Druze, rather, do not identify as Muslim, they practice their own religion that is called Druze-ism. I have been trying to say that word for a long time. Daniel cut out me saying it a bunch of times.

I apologize that I probably mispronounced it, but the point is they practice their own sect of religion that originated from the Shia Islamic sect way back when. But at this point, they're their own religious group. So moving on, I just wanted to shed light on that word in case people didn't know. Back to Syria. So after this incident took place,

and after Assad basically came to the rescue, Jadid had a lot of gratitude for him. And continuing in the aftermath of the 66 coup attempt, Assad and Jadid purged the party's military organization. Assad removed an estimated of 400 officers, and this was Syria's largest military purge to date. But the purges, which began when the Ba'ath Party took power in 63, had left the military weak.

And as a result, when the Six-Day War broke out, Syria had no chance of victory. I feel like this is maybe a good place to say goodbye for the day. I thought it would be more digestible if these episodes were shorter instead of being an epic tale that could run over an hour. But yeah, let's say goodbye. This is Shireen, and this is what could happen here.

Uh, here ya tomorrow. Talk to ya tomorrow. Why do I have this job? Okay, goodbye. Wow, we're back. This is Shireen, and this is It Can Happen. Oh, that's not even the name of the podcast. This is It Could Happen here.

I'm so sorry. But last episode, um, we talked about Syria and the history of how Hafiz al-Assad eventually came into power and how he subsequently let his family become dictators of this country for over half a century and how they've destroyed it.

But we are still in the 60s right now. So let's just continue from where we left off. Uh, last time I had just ended mentioning the Six Day War, uh, and how Syria was defeated in the Six Day War, this is a topic that should be episodes all on its own, but just to very, very roughly summarize, the Six Day War, as it's called,

it's also called the 1967 war and the June war. It's interesting because Israelis call it the Six Day War, and that's become the term that everyone uses, but differing terms for differing people, I suppose. But essentially on June 5th of 1967, just three weeks after it marked the 19th anniversary of its founding, Israel went to war with the armies of Egypt,

Syria, and Jordan, and defeated them, essentially, a very, very rough summary, and this led to Israel capturing, aka stealing the Golan Heights from Syria. And the roots of this war go all the way back to the 40s, and there are moments in history

that led up to this moment, but it was a huge turning point in Middle Eastern history, and the consequences of it are still felt today across the region, and the outcome of this war basically altered the map of the Middle East for the foreseeable future,

and it's further blocked this path to any kind of potential peace between Israel and Palestine, and it just redrew the landscape of this conflict and expanded Israel's territorial claims and military dominance in the region. They gained a lot of territory during this war

and had the help of the UN behind them. So, yeah. It was not good for Arab countries so much more to get into there, but this war, essentially, talking about Syrian history, changed everything, and I mentioned earlier in the last episode

that when the Baath Party took power in 63, there was some more perishing of the Syrian military, and Assad removed about 400 officers, which was the largest purge to date, but this had left their military weak, and obviously did not help them in this June war,

but yeah, there's so much more there. I will try to get into that later another time, but the Arab defeat in this June war led to Israel stealing the Golan Heights from Syria, and this provoked a furious quarrel among Syria's leadership. The civilian leadership blamed military incompetence, and the military responded by criticizing

the civilian leadership, which was led by Salah Shadeed, who was the person that was ruling the country. He had the most power at this point. Several high-ranking party members demanded that Hafiz al-Assad resign, and an attempt was made to vote him out of the regional command.

This motion was defeated by one vote, and this man was Abdel Karim Al-Jandi, who the anti-Assad members, they were hoping that he would succeed Assad as defense minister, but he became the deciding vote, and he said he did so in a comradely gesture. Remember this name, he will come back,

but yes, Abdel Karim Al-Jandi made it, so Assad wasn't voted out. During the end of the war, Hafiz was approached by dissident Syrian military officers to oust the government, but at the time he actually refused, because he believed a coup during that time would have helped Israel, not Syria,

which is very interesting, because he eventually took power by a coup, but he refused Everest because of the timing being wrong. Again, I think this just demonstrates his unfortunately high intelligence for someone so bad. Anyway, as I mentioned, this war was a turning point, and it was also a turning point for Assad,

and the Baathist Syria movement in general. It soon began a power struggle with Jadid for control over the country. Until then, Assad hadn't really shown ambition for high office, and he aroused little suspicion in others. No one really saw him as a threat. From the 1963 Syrian coup to the June war in 1967,

Assad did not play a leading role in politics, and he was usually overshadowed by his contemporaries. Patrick Seale was a British journalist and an author who specialized in the Middle East, and he wrote several books about the Assad family and Syria. And he said the Hafiz was apparently content to be a solid member of the team without the aspiration to become number one.

He also interviewed Hafiz at one point, so he had a lot of good information. This Patrick Seale, which I'll mention throughout. So although Jadid was slow to see Assad's threat and although Assad didn't appear like he wanted power from the outside, shortly after the war, Assad began developing a network in the military

and promoted friends and close relatives to high positions. Assad believed that Syria's defeat in the June war was Jadid's fault, and that the accusations against himself were unjust. By this time, Jadid had total control of the regional command, whose members supported his policies. But Assad and Jadid began to differ on policy. Assad believed that Jadid's policy of a People's War,

an armed guerrilla strategy and class struggle, had failed Syria, undermining its position. Although Jadid continued to champion the concept of a People's War even after the June war, Assad opposed it. He felt that the Palestinian guerrilla fighters had been given too much autonomy, and their rating of Israel had made the war worse

for the Arabs fighting. Jadid also had broken diplomatic relations with countries he deemed reactionary like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and because of this, Syria did not receive aid from other Arab countries. While Jadid and his supporters prioritized socialism and the internal revolution, Assad wanted the leadership to focus on foreign policy

and the containment of Israel. The Bath Party was divided over several issues, such as how the government could best use Syria's limited resources, the ideal relationship between the party and the people, the organization of the party, and whether the class struggle should end. The conflict between Assad and Jadid became the talk of the army and the party,

with a, quote, duality of power noted between them. By the 4th Regional Congress and the 10th National Congress in September and October of 1968, Assad had extended his grip on the army, and Jadid still controlled the party. At both congresses, Assad was outvoted on most issues and his arguments were firmly rejected.

The military's involvement in party politics was unpopular with the rank and file, as the gulf between Assad and Jadid widened. The civilian and military party bodies were forbidden to contact each other. Despite this, Assad was winning the race to accumulate power. Munif al-Rizaz, who was ousted in the 1966 Syrian coup, noted that Jadid's fatal mistake was to attempt

to govern the army through the party. Because Syria will always have... Their government is the military, essentially, is what I'm trying to say. Anyway, while Assad had taken control of the armed forces through his position as Minister of Defense, Jadid still controlled the security and intelligence sectors through Abdul Qadim al-Jundi, who was the head of the National Security Bureau.

Jundi, who was a paranoid, cruel man, he was feared throughout Syria, especially later in his life. In February of 1969, the Assad-Jadid conflict erupted in violent clashes through their respective prodigies. There was a Rafat al-Assad, who is Assad's brother, and he was a high-ranking military commander, and al-Jundi. So al-Jundi was the protégé of Jadid, and Assad's brother, Rafat, was his protégé, so to say.

The reason for the violence was Rafat al-Assad's suspicion that al-Jundi was planning an attempt on his brother Hafiz's life. The suspected assassin was interrogated and eventually confessed under torture. Acting on this information, Rafat argued that unless Jundi was removed from his post, that he and his brother were in danger. Okay, let's take a break.

BRB, listen to this. And we're back. Wow, okay. Let's continue. From the 25th to the 28th of February in 1969, the Assad brothers initiated, quote, something just short of a coup. Under Assad's authority, tanks were moved into Damascus, and the staffs of two party newspapers, the Al-Bahith

and Al-Thaura, as well as radio stations in Damascus and Aleppo, were replaced by Assad loyalists. The Taqiya and Tartus, which are two al-Awaid-dominated cities, they saw fierce scuffles ending with the overthrow of Jadid's supporters from local posts. Shortly afterwards, a wave of arrests in Jundi loyalists began. On March 2nd, after a telephone argument with the head of military intelligence, Al-Dubah,

it is said that Al-Jundi committed suicide. When I mentioned this to my mom, she said, well, that's what they say. Because originally, I'm reading this being like, okay, history. Obviously, you have to remember that there is always someone that writes the history. So just pointing that out there, because she put that little nugget of information in my head.

But as far as we're concerned in this summary, it is said that Jundi committed suicide after his loyalists began to be arrested and there was just continuing violence between his side and al-Assad. So this led to Assad now being in control. However, he hesitated to push his advantage. Jadid continued to rule Syria

and the regional command was unchanged. However, Assad influenced Jadid to moderate his policies. Class struggle was muted. Criticism of reactionary tendencies of other Arab states ceased. Some political prisoners were freed. A coalition of government was formed where the Bath Party was in control and the Eastern Front, supported by al-Assad,

was formed with Iraq and Jordan. Jadid's isolationist policies were curtailed and Syria reestablished diplomatic relations with many of its foes, which is what Assad wanted. And while Assad had been in de facto command of Syrian policies since 1969, Jadid and his supporters still held the trappings of power. After attending Jamal Abdel Nasser's funeral in Egypt,

he was the president of Egypt. Assad returned to Syria for the Emergency National Congress where Assad was condemned by Jadid and his supporters, still made out the majority of the party's delegates. However, before attending the Congress, Assad ordered his loyal troops to surround the building, housing the meeting. Again, this guy thinks ahead.

He's too smart. I hate him. He's dead, though, so whatever. I still hate you. So as he's being criticized and as he's being condemned, he has troops surrounding this building. And so the criticism of Assad's political position continued, but it had a defeatist tone, with the majority of delegates believing that they had lost the battle. And even though Assad was eventually stripped

of his government post at the Congress, these acts had little practical significance. When the National Congress ended on November 12, 1970, Assad ordered loyalists to arrest leading members of Jadid's government. Although many mid-level officials were offered posts in Syrian embassies and abroad, Jadid refused, saying, If I ever take power, you will be dragged through the streets until you die.

Assad imprisoned Jadid, and mensive prison until his death. Despite the intense clusterfuck of everything that preceded this, surprise, Hafiz's coup was actually calm and bloodless. When he eventually had his coup to take power and succeeded, the only evidence of change to the outside world was the disappearance of newspapers, radio stations, and television stations. A temporary regional command was soon established,

and on November 16, 1970, the new government published its first decree. So only in a matter of days. A lot can happen, man. According to Patrick Seale, Assad's rule, quote, began with an immediate considerable advantage. The government he displaced was so detested that any alternative came as a relief. He first tried to establish national unity, which he felt had been lost under the leadership of Aflaq and Jadid.

Assad differed from his predecessor at the outset, visiting local villages and hearing citizen complaints. The Syrian people felt that Assad's rise to power would maybe lead to change. And although Assad didn't democratize the country, he eased the government's repressive policies at the time. He cut prices for basic foodstuffs 15%, which won him support from ordinary citizens. Jadid's security services were purged,

and some military criminal investigative powers were transferred to the police. And the confiscation of goods under Jadid was reversed. Restrictions on travel and trade with Lebanon were eased, and Assad encouraged growth in the private sector. While Assad supported most of Jadid's policies to begin with, he proved to be more pragmatic after he came to power. Let's take a little break here. We'll be right back to wrap this little history lesson up,

and then you're free of me for the day. Okay. So we're back before the break. We were talking about Assad coming into power and how his policies differed from Jadid's and how he made an effort to differentiate himself. However, most of Jadid's supporters, they faced a choice. Either continue working for the Ba'ath government under Assad,

or face repression. Assad had made it clear previously, from the beginning, that there would be no second chances in his words. However, in late 1970, he recruited support from the Ba'athist Old Guard, who had supported Aflok's leadership during the 1963-1966 power struggle. An estimated 2,000 former Ba'athists rejoined the party after hearing Assad's appeal. At the 11th National Congress, Assad assured party members

that his leadership was a radical change from that of Jadid, and he would implement a, quote, corrective movement to return Syria to the true nationalist-socialist line. Assad turned the presidency, which had been known simply as, quote, head of state under Jadid, into a position of power during his rule, as the president became the main source of initiative in the government, his personality, values, strengths, and weaknesses became decisive for his direction and stability.

Assad institutionalized a system where he had the final say, which weakened the powers of the collegial institutions of the party and state. As fidelity to the leader replaced ideological conviction later in his presidency, corruption became widespread. The state-sponsored cult of personality became pervasive, and as Assad's authority strengthened, he became the sole symbol of the government. And it sounds normal now, I guess, when you think of, like, a dictator's face being plastered over buildings and stuff,

but it was very much like that in Syria, and it still is, as far as Bashar is concerned. But with Hafez, I mean, his image was plastered everywhere. You couldn't really escape it. He was the symbol of the Syrian government. And while Assad did not rule alone, he increasingly had the last word. None of the political elite would question a decision of his, and those who did were dismissed, removed from their positions, and stripped of their power. When Assad came to power, he increased the Alawite dominance of the security

and intelligence sectors to a near monopoly. The coercive framework was under his control, weakening the state and party. The leading figures of the Alawite-dominated security system had family connections. Rafat al-Assad, for example, controlled the struggle companies as his brother, and then Assad's son-in-law, Aiden Makhloof, was his second-in-command as commander of the presidential guard. Assad controlled the military through the Alawites, and the Alawites, with their high status,

appointed and promoted based on their kinship and favor, rather than professional respect. Therefore, an Alawite elite emerged from these policies, with Assad in full control of the military and the Alawites holding all the power. Which is very interesting, if you think back to the beginning of our first episode, where I mentioned that the Alawites are a religious minority, and originally didn't have a lot of power in the government, and through Hafiz al-Assad's coming into power, the Alawites are suddenly elite and in control,

and it's a huge flip from what it was decades prior. However, when Assad began pursuing a policy of economic liberalization, the state bureaucracy began to use their positions for personal gain. The state gave implementation rights to, quote, much of its development program to foreign firms and contractors, fueling a growing linkage between the state and private capital. Basically, what ensued was a huge spike in corruption. The channeling of external money through the state to private enterprises,

quote, created growing opportunities for state elites' self-enrichment through corrupt manipulation of state market interchanges. Besides outright embezzlement, webs of shared interests in commissions and kickbacks grew between high officials, politicians, and business interests. The Alawite military security establishment got the greatest share of the money, obviously, and the Bath Party and its leaders ruled a new class, defending their interests instead of those of the peasants and workers,

who they were supposed to represent. This, coupled with growing Sunni disillusionment with the regime's mixture of sadism, rural and sectarian favoritism, corruption, and new inequalities, fueled the growth of the Islamic movement. Because of this, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria became the vanguard of anti-Bathist forces. The Brotherhood had historically been a vehicle for moderate Islam during its introduction to the Syrian political scene during the 1960s. Under the leadership of Mustafa el-Sabay,

the Brotherhood had historically been a vehicle for moderate Islam during its introduction to the Syrian political scene during the 1960s. After Sabay's imprisonment, and under Issam el-Athar's leadership, the Brotherhood developed into the ideological antithesis of Bath's rule. Because of their organizational capabilities, the Muslim Brotherhood grew tenfold from 1975 to 1978. The Islamic uprising began in the mid-to-late 1970s with attacks on prominent members of the Bath-Alawi elite.

As the conflict worsened, a debate began in the party between hardliners represented by Rafad el-Assad and Bath liberals represented by Mahmoud el-Ayubi. The 7th Regional Congress in 1980 was held in an atmosphere of crisis. The party leadership, with the exception of Assad and his protégés, were criticized severely by the party delegates who called for an anti-corruption campaign, a new, clean government curtailing the powers of the military security apparatus and political liberalization.

The Sunni middle class and the radical left, believing that Bath's rule could be overthrown with an uprising, began collaborating with the Islamists. And, I mean, although they're called the Islamists, obviously they do not represent the entirety of Islam. Similar to Christian radical groups that hold onto the name Christian, they don't represent the entirety of Christianity, yada yada yada, body body blah. And although the word Islam is in the word Islamists, I want to draw attention to the fact that Islamism is not a form of the Muslim faith

or an expression of Muslim piety. It is rather a political ideology that strives to derive legitimacy from Islam. So, it's about political strategies that believe in a revival or a return to authentic, in quotes, Islamic practice in this totality. So, it's a political ideology, not necessarily a religion. I just want you guys to be aware of that, because I think a lot of people don't understand what that means. Regardless, believing they had the upper hand in the conflict,

beginning in 1980, the Islamists began a series of campaigns against government installations in Aleppo. The attacks became urban guerrilla warfare. The government began to lose control in the city. Those affected by Baathist repression began to rally behind the insurgents. The Baath Party co-founder Salah al-Din al-Bittar supported the uprising, rallying the old anti-military Baathists together. The increasing threat to the government's survival strengthened the hardliners

who favored repression over concessions. Security forces began to purge all state, party, and social institutions in Syria and were sent to the northern provinces to quell the uprising. When this failed, hardliners began accusing the United States of formenting and provoking the uprising and called for the reinstatement of, quote, revolutionary vigilance. After a failed attempt on Assad's life in June of 1980, the government began responding to the uprising with state terrorism.

Under Afat al-Assad, the Islamic prisoners at the Tadmur prison were massacred. Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood became a capital offense and the government sent a death squad to kill Baathad and Athar's former wife. The military court began condemning captured militants, which sometimes degenerated into indiscriminate killings. Little Care was taken to distinguish Muslim Brotherhood hardliners from their passive supporters and violence was met with violence. So essentially this just led the Assad regime to murder a bunch of people,

innocent, guilty, all of the above. So, yeah. One of the many instances where the Assad regime was extremely violent and engaged in horrific state terrorism. So we're wrapping up the end of this one and there's going to be a bit of crossover over this next event in the following episode, but the final most atrocious violence conducted by the Syrian government during this time was the Hama massacre, which took place in February of 1982

when the government crushed the uprising. Helicopter gunships, bulldozers, and artillery bombardment raised the city, killing thousands of people. The Baath government withstood the uprising and it made Syria more totalitarian than ever before, strengthening Assad's position as the undisputed leader of Syria. That is where I'm going to wrap up for the day. I did want to, I don't know, maybe just like set the tone for what Hafiz's rule was like.

I talked to my mom a bit about this when I was preparing to record these and she reminded me of a bunch of things that I had forgotten about. One was that I was in Syria when Hafiz was president, when I was younger. And I remember everyone being terrified to speak any kind of negative thing or even anything to each other. No one would dare speak a word on the phone. Definitely not allowed to each other.

There were all these whispers of the walls could hear you. No one trusted anybody. My mother described it as a culture of fear. And it, what 100% was, that's how Hafiz ruled. It was through fear, through like utter terror. And I just had forgotten a bunch of details about what I remember growing up and like the phone being this like, you just assume it was always tapped. You assume anyone could always hear you.

You can't trust anybody because you don't know what someone will do with the information. And there was a bit more that she mentioned that I wanted to just highlight that I didn't know where to incorporate in that timeline. But when the Iran-Iraq war happened, it was between 80 and 88, Hafiz sided with Iran. So after this, and during, everything was about supporting Iran. So all Syrian factories, all the food, it was all dedicated to war efforts to support Iran. My older sister at the time was a really picky eater

and apparently one of the only things she ate were bananas. And my mom remembers that she couldn't find even a banana anywhere. Like everything was hard to come by. It was really desperate times, even after the war ended. And every election in quotes was fraudulent. It was a joke. My grandmother worked as a school teacher in Syria and teachers are a civic position there.

Really, like most positions are governmental positions. And my grandma during these elections would throw out the nose and only include the yeses because the only option was yes or no. If you wanted to continue Hafiz's rule or not, those were the only two options. And she told us that the nose were discarded immediately and the only ones that were kept were the yeses. And eventually there was an election that determined that Hafiz and his family

would be in power forever. Al-Aabid yahab as al-Assad was a phrase that used and essentially this means until death or forever. You will be in power. It does have his name in there, but it implies his whole family. So it's just they gave him power forever. That is literally what that means. And yeah, I think there's so much more to talk about here

and I would love for my mom to just give me more information about this that I can share eventually. There's just so much and this episode is already getting kind of long. So I'm going to wrap it up here. In the next episode, we'll be talking about Bashar and how he became the dictator of Syria and how he wasn't even meant to be the president of Syria. And yeah, a lot of interesting history

that leads to some topical information that I think is important. So see you there if you want to. Bye. Wow, it's me again. This is Shari. This is also it could happen here. We've been talking about Syria for the last few episodes and we're going to continue and I'm just going to jump right in

because there's a lot. Okay, so this is a continuation about Syria and the terrible family that controls it, the assets. As I mentioned in the previous episodes, the Assad's have destroyed Syria and the death toll that they are responsible for is literally incalculable by the UN, but it's said to be nearing half a million people,

which is a lot of people. So Sam Dagger is a American Lebanese journalist and author who has lived and worked in the Middle East for more than 16 years. He was based in Damascus in the early years of the current war before the government kicked him out in 2014, but he used his access to write about the inside story of the Assad family.

He has a book titled Assad or We Burn the Country, which I admittedly have not read, it's like 500 pages, but I did pull a lot of info from the book and interviews that he's done about it, mostly in regards to the economic stuff that we'll get into later, but it was a very helpful resource. When Dagger was in Syria, he saw this phrase, Assad or We Burn the Country, which is the title of his book,

all over the towns and neighborhoods that had been taken over by the regime, graffiti on walls, probably by loyalists or government militias or whatever, or just people that love him, Barf. And in this case, they're talking about Bashar al-Assad, who is the son of the person we were talking about previously, Hafiz al-Assad, but it essentially also includes the entire family.

They are in power forever. And the Assad regime routinely takes over deserted, destroyed areas, and these government militias come in and loot the area until it's nothing but rubble littered by things that are left behind as people are fleeing and things that these loyalists find useless, like teddy bears and personal items, that actually tell a really devastating story

about the lives that used to occupy that space. Because these loyalists, these Assad-obsessed freaks, they take everything that they deem worth looting, even things like tiles and doors. So you're left with these ghost towns, literally, figuratively. The phrase, Assad or We Burn the Country, means exactly what it says it means.

That Bashar al-Assad and his family will remain in power or else they will burn the country to the ground and burn everyone who opposes the Assad regime along with it. And although Bashar al-Assad has now been in power for 22 years, he was actually never meant to be in power. His father, Hafiz al-Assad, appointed himself as president in 1971 after overthrowing the prior government through military coup.

Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000 after his father's death, and it continued their families' hold on Syria and its people. 1990 was a very significant year. Not only was it the year I was born, and that's why. But also, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell and dictatorships were crumbling. The Soviet Union was seen as the main supporter or guardian

of the Assad regime, but in 1990 it didn't exist anymore. So the Assad regime was suddenly in trouble. Its priority was to present an image of reform and repackage itself so Hafiz al-Assad could hand down the power to his eldest son, Bashar al-Assad. And Bashar was an army officer who was essentially brought up to eventually fill this role,

taking over for his father. And his military background fit the image of this traditional leader of the Arab world because so many of these leaders took over by military coup or had a background in military. But before we get into all of that, let's go back in time a little bit and talk about what went down.

So a sort of succession crisis was triggered in November of 1983 when Hafiz al-Assad, a diabetic, had a heart attack. On November 13th, after visiting his brother in a hospital, Refat al-Assad reportedly announced his candidacy for president. He did not believe that his brother would be able to continue ruling the country after this. When he did not receive support from Assad's inner circle, he made lavish promises to win them over.

But apparently some believe that Refat had been Hafiz al-Assad's first choice of successor. And it was an idea that some people say he broached as early as 1980. Refat al-Assad was the younger brother of Hafiz, and he served as vice president. Many believe him to be the commanding officer responsible for the Hama massacre of 1982. I briefly mentioned this in the previous episode at the end.

It was a horrific massacre. And I think it especially is near to me because Hama is my mother's hometown and it's probably my favorite place in the world. They have these water wheels that are like, I don't know, they mesmerize me. But that's another story entirely. We can be all sappy at another time.

But I did want to break up this massacre because most people have no idea that it even happened. In February 1982, as commander of the defense companies, Refat allegedly commanded the forces that put down a Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the central city of Hama by instructing his forces to shell the city with rockets, and this killed thousands of its inhabitants.

Reports range from between 5,000 and 40,000. But the most common suggestion is around 15 to 20,000. Still, a shit ton of people. And this became known as the Hama massacre. A declassified document from the Defense Intelligence Agency estimates the total number of casualties to be approximately 2,000. However, U.S. journalist Thomas Friedman claims in his book from Beirut to Jerusalem that Refat later said

the total number of victims was 38,000 people. 38,000 people. Refat also played a key role in his brother Hoppus's overthrow of Saadah Shadid and the seizure of power in 1970. This change in executive power is dubbed by some loyalists as the corrective revolution. Refat was allowed to form his own paramilitary group, the Defense Companies, in 1971,

and this soon transformed into a powerful and regular military force trained and armed by the Soviet Union. He was a qualified paratrooper, and he ran the elite internal security forces and the Defense Companies in the 70s and early 80s. But things changed when Hoppus suffered a heart attack in late 83. As he was recovering, Hoppus established a six-member committee to run the country.

But Refat was not included. The council consisted entirely of close Sunni Muslim loyalists to Hoppus who were mostly lightweights in the military security establishment. This caused unease, and the ally we dominated officer corps and several high-ranking officers began rallying behind Refat, while others remained loyal to Hoppus's instructions.

In March of 84, Refat's troops, now numbering more than 55,000 with tanks and artillery, aircraft, and helicopters, they began asserting control over Damascus. A squadron of Refat's tanks took position at the central roundabout of Kaffirsuse in Mount Qaseyun, overlooking the city. Setting up checkpoints and roadblocks, putting up posters of him in state buildings,

disarming regular troops and arbitrarily arresting soldiers of the regular army, occupying and commandeering police stations and intelligence building, occupying state buildings, the defense companies rapidly outnumbered and took control over both the Special Forces and the Republican Guard. Although Damascus was divided between two armies and seemed to be on the brink of war, Refat did not move.

Hoppus was then informed that Refat was heading to Damascus, and he left his headquarters to meet his brother. British journalist Patrick Seal reports an intimate moment between these two brothers. He writes, There was a clear division and tensions between forces loyal to Hoppus, namely the Third Armored Division, the Republican Guard, the various intelligence services, the National Police,

and the Special Forces. The defense companies were so loyal to Refat. In the middle of 1984, Hoppus had returned from his sickbed and assumed full control, at which point most officers rallied around him. At first it seemed like Refat was going to be put on trial. He even faced a questioning that was broadcast on television. However, it is believed that Hoppus' daughter, Bushra,

actually saved her uncle by convincing her father that it would disgrace the family. It might cause tensions not only within the Assad family, but within the Mechlouf family as well. Both Hoppus and Refat had married women from the Mechlouf family, and they also just happened to be the second most prevalent Ilawite family, dominating the leadership of the security services behind the Assad's.

In what first seemed like a compromise, Refat was made vice president with responsibility for security affairs, but this proved to be simply a fancy title in post. Command of the defense companies was trimmed down to an armored division size and was transferred to another officer, and the entire unit was ultimately disbanded and absorbed into other units. Refat was then sent to the Soviet Union

in an open-ending working visit. His closest supporters and others who had failed to prove their loyalty to Hafez were purged from the army and bath party in the years that followed. Upon his departure, Refat acquired $300 million of public money, including $100 million Libyan money on a loan. In 2015, he claimed that the money was a gift from Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. And although Refat returned to Syria for his mother's funeral in 1992

and for some time lived in Syria, he was thereafter confined to exile in France and Spain. He nominally retained the post of vice president until February of 1988, at which point he was stripped of this title. He had retained a large business empire, both in Syria and abroad, partly through his son Sumer. However, the 1999 crackdown involving armed clashes in Latakia destroyed much of his remaining network in Syria.

Large numbers of Refat supporters were arrested. This was seen as tied to the issue of succession, with Refat having begun to position himself to succeed the ailing Hafez, who in his turn sought to eliminate all potential competition for his designated successor, his son Bashar al-Assad. In France, Refat, who is still alive, has loudly protested against the succession of Bashar to the post of president, claiming that he himself embodies the only constitutional legality

as previous vice president, alleging his dismissal as unconstitutional. He has made threatening remarks about planning to return to Syria at a time of his choosing to assume his responsibilities and fulfill the will of the people and that while he will rule benevolently and democratically, he will do so with the power of the people and the army behind him. Anyway, Refat's coup attempt to weaken the institutionalized power structure on which Hafez based his rule.

Instead of changing his policy, Assad tried to protect his power by honing his governmental model. He then gave a larger role to Bashar, his oldest son, who was subsequently rumored to be his father's planned successor at the time, and this kindled jealousy within the government. At a 1994 military meeting, the chief of staff said that since Assad wanted to normalize relations with Israel, the Syrian military had to withdraw its troops from the Golan Heights.

Ali Haidad replied angrily, we have become non-entities, we were not even consulted. When he heard about his outburst, Assad replaced him as commander of Special Forces with the Alawite Major General Ali Habib. Haidad also reportedly opposed dynastic succession, keeping his views secret until after Bashar's death in 1994, and when Assad chose Bashar al-Assad to succeed him.

He then openly criticized Assad's succession plans. Okay, before we go back to 1990, let's take a quick break. VRB. Okay. So back to 1990, the regime had done everything in preparation for Bashar to take power. However, on January 21st of 1994, while Bashar was driving his Mercedes at a high speed,

an author, Paul Thoreau, reports that Bashar was driving 150 miles per hour. He was driving through Densfog to Damascus International Airport for a flight to Frankfurt, Germany. He was on his way to a ski vacation in the Alps in the early hours of the morning, and it was then that Bashar collided with a barrier and not wearing a seatbelt, he died instantly.

After his tragic death, the regime made sure to elevate the Assad name in the process. Shops, schools, and public offices in Syria closed, and the sale of alcohol was suspended in respect. He was elevated by the state into the martyr of the country, the martyr of the nation, and the symbol for its youth. A great number of squares and streets were named after him. The new international swimming complex, various hospitals, sporting clubs, and a military academy.

The International Airport in Latakia was named after him, Bashar al-Assad International Airport. His statue was found in several Syrian cities, and even after his death, he's often pictured on billboards with his father and his brother. He also has an equestrian statue in Aleppo. Even in November of 2020, a museum dedicated to him was inaugurated at the Latakia Sports City.

Bashar's untimely death obviously had unforeseen consequences. It led to his lesser-known brother, Bashar, to assume the mantle of president in waiting. At the time, he was content undertaking postgraduate training in ophthalmology in London. Bashar was seen as the shy, unassuming younger brother, and for his whole life up to this point, he was overshadowed by his father and his older brother, Basin.

But then, suddenly, he was fast-tracked on the path to succession. He was rushed to the military and the constitution changed so that the minimum age required of the president was not 40 but 34, exactly Bashar's age at the time. Bashar became president following the death of his father, who died on June 10th of 2000. Bashar's posters and his name were also used to secure a smooth transition after Hafiz al-Assad introduced the slogan,

Bashar the future. His quote-unquote election was a yes-or-no referendum, a popular vote, on whether the Syrian people wanted him as their president. And so surprised he won with at least 97% of the vote. So after the vote, Bashar is sworn in, and he's presented to his people as the savior, as the one who's going to open up Syria and reform the system. Dr. Bashar, as some refer to him,

was seen as the leader of the younger generation of Syria, the standard bearer of modernization. But the regime was and stayed very cynical and was not at all sincere about these reforms. However, Bashar performed his role and acted the part, cracking down on corruption, reaching out to all sectors of Syrian society. Back in 2000, some people were even calling this the Damascus Spring. And the Syrian people were seeing things change.

Unaware that, as Sam Dacher puts it, that Bashar is being mentored and tutored by people who have been empowered by his father to kill, torture, and disappear people because they had dared to speak out against the regime. These hardliners were grooming him and telling him, yes, you can present yourself as a softer version of your father, but know that in order to hang on to power, you have to be as ruthless as your father, if not more.

Western governments had the impression that Bashar was someone they could do business with. He presented a modern, open-minded image and even hosted notable positions from around the world in Damascus, including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The US and Europe accepted this perception because they believed that it was in their best interest to do so. And to ensure that this image of Syrian leadership was being presented to the world, the regime was strategic,

having Bashar show that he was different from his father, even in the choice of who he married. In December of 2000, Assad married Esma Achlas, a British citizen of Syrian origin from Acton London. She was much different than Syria's previous First Lady. She wasn't from the religious sect that the Assad's belonged to, the Alawites, who are still a religious minority. She is actually of a Sunni majority.

Bashar decided to marry someone who had lived all her life abroad as a British citizen, who was modern and assertive and had a career in investment baking and talked about going to Harvard for business school. She was even featured in Vogue. Come on, Barf. In an interview in 2005, Esma said, quote, the issue here is not how Muslim women decide to dress.

The issue is what Muslim women are doing in their society today. It doesn't matter how we dress or what we look like. So, hearing this and other things, Western leaders are looking at this modern, educated couple believing they are different, and more importantly, that they are more suitable to their interests. In the post-911 era, the United States was looking for allies in the so-called war on terror.

And Bashar al-Assad, as Sam Dagger stated in an interview, quote, shared intelligence with the Americans and even tortured people on behalf of the Americans. So, the West had a vested interest to justify its engagement and cooperation with Bashar by saying he's a reformer. Opening up Syria's economy was a big part of projecting an image of a reformed Syria. Before Bashar took power,

Syria's economy was a centrally planned economy, also known as a command economy, which is an economic system where a government body makes economic decisions based on the production and distribution of goods. Syria's economy was in the mold of the Soviet Union's economy. But when Bashar took over, the economy began to change drastically. In the early 2000s, ATMs were seen in Syria for the very first time and cell phone companies were established.

And while the economy may have opened up, everything was still in control of their regime. I wanted to bring up something that my mom mentioned about the differences between Bashar and Hafez and how they genuinely believed he was going to bring modern change. He was doing it all right on paper. But when Hafez was in power in the early 80s, or my mom was talking about her experience in the late 80s, early 90s,

apparently there were at least three secret service stations that monitored everyone in every neighborhood, three per neighborhood. And because my mom was going back and forth from America to Syria, my father as well, they would send for my mom. They would request that she go to the secret service. And she was asked there about the Syrians she knew in the states, what they were doing, what they did, who went to the mosque.

She had to write everything she did in detail. She did this every time she visited Syria. And my father went through the same thing. At one instant, she was saying that one time they left her alone in a room for three hours. Because they do this to purposely humiliate you. They make you anxious, they make you scared. And this was just something of normal procedure

that a lot of Syrians experienced. Just constant terror. As I mentioned, it's a culture of fear. And this is one of the ways that they promoted that. But after Bashar took power, this changed. These places were taken down. And it just genuinely looked like Bashar was an improvement. He studied in the West.

He opened up the internet. Because previously, the internet was only allowed for news. And it just seemed promising. And before we get into anything further, let's take another break, BRB. We're back. In Saddam Dacker's book, Assad or We Burn the Country, he describes how tightly controlled this new Syrian economy is.

He writes, 10 families run Syria and control everything. He continues to describe how this early period in Bashar's rule also brought the rise of another figure, Rami Makhloof, Bashar's cousin. He is related to the Assad family through his mother, who was the sister of Anisa Makhloof, Hafs al-Assad's wife.

So she's Bashar's aunt. Rami Makhloof's personal wealth accumulated abroad was estimated to be in the excess of 10 billion in 2020. His father, Muhammad Makhloof, played the role of the regime's financier, basically Hafs al-Assad's money man. As Bashar al-Assad became president, Makhloof's son Rami inherited this business empire and became this new tycoon in Syria.

He was the person who made sure that any economic opening would benefit and enrich the Assad family. Before the Syrian civil war started in early 2011, he was considered one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Syria and controlled nearly 60% of the economy, including industries of real estate and telecommunication, aviation, the dairy industry, tourism, electricity, and oil trading.

According to Syrian analysts, he is part of al-Assad's inner circle and no foreign company could do business in Syria at the time without his consent and partnership. The last French ambassador to Syria had lunch with Rami once and described him as acting as, quote, the king of Syria, puffing cigars and saying, I'm in control and everything happens through me.

Fast forward to our present day. The economy has completely collapsed ever since the uprising started in early 2011. It could be seen as an accumulation of the past decade. Syria's sanctioned hit economy had always relied on Lebanon to sustain itself, but in the fall of 2019, Lebanon had its own crises and it was an economic and political turmoil,

which forced banks to control access to cash and prevent transfers abroad. Dagger explains, Lebanon has always served as this economic pressure valve, not only for the regime, but also for average Syrians. A lot of Syrians had their savings, their life savings in Lebanese banks. One analyst told me that Syrians had $1 billion

in deposits in Syria itself, versus $40 billion of Syrian deposits in Lebanon. And then what happens in Lebanon? When the banking system crashes, there are protests in the streets of Lebanon. That outlet that Syrians had shuts down and the situation becomes progressively worse in Syria. The value of the Syrian lira

had also extremely diminished and continues to. Trying to recover from this plummet of the Syrian economy, Bashar turned to capitalists that he had empowered 20 years prior, including his cousin, Rami Mechlouf. Bashar asked Rami for $230 million, specifically in back taxes. It was described essentially as being a shakedown.

The world saw this as a huge falling out between Syria's richest man and its president, a dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Other prominent businessmen, not just Rami, were also targeted, and they all quietly agreed to pay whatever the regime was asking for. The economy was in a dire state

and the regime urgently needed cash. So the government asked for money from the businessmen it had empowered in the first place, and most of them comply, but not Rami Mechlouf. In June 2011, Mechlouf stated that he would, quote, quit the Syrian business scene. On May 1st of 2020,

Mechlouf made an unprecedented public appeal to his cousin. He made this appeal on Facebook, saying that officials were seeking to seize his assets as he was pressured to hand over an excess of $130 billion, I think that's what all those zeros mean, an excess of $130 billion liras due to tax evasion. Mechlouf, who was a part of Bashar al-Assad's inner circle,

said he would pay the president himself, but not the state. Two days later, he posted another video on Facebook, where he mentioned that Syrian security forces arrested some of his employees. He said, How could they do this when I was their biggest supporter

and their biggest servant during the war? However, speculations indicate that the Syrian First Lady, Esma al-Assad, had been responsible for this whole plot, the reason being that, quote, many businessmen loyal to Esma competed with Mechlouf for control of diminishing resources after collapse of the Syrian pound,

along with sanctions, made the space in which they compete narrow and difficult. This is according to Dr. Muhannad al-Hajj Ali, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center. In addition, the Syrian authorities might have targeted Mechlouf in order to find resources prior to the implementation of U.S. sanctions

related to the Caesar Act. On May 17, 2020, Mechlouf posted another video on Facebook, where he mentioned rising pressure on him to hand over profits, or he might be arrested. On May 19, 2020, the Syrian government seized all assets belonging to Mechlouf. On the 21st, a Syrian court placed a temporary travel ban on Mechlouf.

On June 25, 2020, the Syrian government terminated duty-free contracts in all ports and border crossings with companies affiliated with Mechlouf. This drama between Bashar and Rami resulted in talks of a rift in the regime's inner circle, and people were concerned that this would expose a rift in the Alawite community itself,

which had supplied the bulk of the fighting forces for the regime. Because in these Facebook videos, Rami wasn't only appealing to his cousin, his patron, with whom he built a 20-year symbiotic relationship with, he was also appealing to the average members of their religious sect, the Alawites, most of whom are nowhere near the wealth of the Assad family's inner circle.

He was telling the Alawites that we had sacrificed everything for the regime, and our sons were killed in order for the regime to remain in power. And instead of being rewarded for the fruits of this, the regime was going after an important figure who has been instrumental in supporting people through his business, a.k.a. Rami himself. And it wasn't necessarily untrue,

but he wasn't helping people for free, obviously, and Rami had expected people to remain loyal to him despite all of this. Basically, the Assad family had finished devouring the Syrian state and its resources, and it had now started to devour each other. As of 2020, 80% of Syrians live in poverty, and 40% are unemployed.

There is unrelenting inflation, and basic goods have doubled or tripled in price. Rice, flour, sugar, coffee, everything has become obscenely expensive. There's hardly any meat and gas is priced in American dollars, which you could only imagine how high that goes. When my family and I talks to our family members that are still in Syria, we hear about the electricity

being out for days and weeks, and then the water being out for the same amount of time, and the people are essentially being suffocated by their own government. People are questioned and tortured and kept in prisons for absolutely no reason, and the only way they can get out is by bribing the prisons. Thousands of dollars for no reason.

It's just about greed, it's about power, it's about terrible people, these monsters. Just destroying this beautiful place. Syria is so beautiful, and my heart breaks for the land and for the people. So, although the Assad regime continues to present itself as the ultimate and only power in Syria, Bashad has actually been at his weakest point

in the last two years. He is only still in his position because the Russians and Iranians want him to be there, and he's only able to maintain his role by playing off his two patrons against each other, Iran and Russia. This is a regime that always derived its power from the army and from the security forces,

but the army largely does not exist anymore. Yes, there are divisions that are trained by the Russians in an attempt to put this army back together, but even the loyalists who support Bashad al-Assad don't want to join the army anymore, they would rather leave the country. So the regime's only option left is to continue to rule by fear.

This has had mixed results, especially when you look at the uprisings that have continued since 2011, however much they have dissipated. People put themselves on the streets, not hiding their identities, vocally and loudly opposing the regime and demanding for the removal of Bashad al-Assad.

This behavior, as we've seen, is unacceptable by the regime, and it's led to the regime all but destroying its own country. Estimates of the total number of deaths in the Syrian civil war by opposition activist groups vary between 500,000 people and 600,000 people as of March of 2022. And I think it's really notable

that Syrians are vocally expressing their outrage and there's just a history there of so much trauma. In 2005, for example, my mother was telling me that a list of demands, so like, what's math? Six years after the first uprisings occurred in 2011, in 2005, a list of demands or corrections were written down,

the things that people wanted to fix of the government. Free press, free expression, they wanted to make the government a democracy, and Bashar allowed them to list their demands and what they wanted to fix and hand it over to him to look at, essentially. In Arabic, this is called ilan dimashq, and it seemed like maybe an open conversation could happen.

But then, everyone who signed this petition was looked up, hunted down, sent to jail, some for decades and some people that are still there, and others fled the country after they started collecting people. This ilan dimashq was the beginning of the end. It was the end of the few liberties that people thought would come

when Bashar al-Assad took power. He named everyone who signed, everyone who supported the news people to press as terrorists. And I think, in spite of that, six years later, there was still an uprising. It was an accumulated need to fight back. And so, going back to that saying that Assad loyalists spray paint on the cities

that Assad has demolished. Assad or we burn the country. It seems like both choices have come true. Bashar al-Assad has stayed in power and he's also burned the country to the ground. And the more he stays in power, the worse life gets for Syrians. The country is destroyed, families are shattered,

and many, many people have died. The cost is insurmountable. But a lot of Syrians don't see this fight as over. Their injustices and grievances remain the same, even after experiencing indescribable horrors over the past 12 years. Syrian people, like all people, they want dignity, they want justice.

And they can no longer accept living in this inhumane system where your most basic rights as a human being depend on your proximity to power. Anyway, this is Shareen. Thank you for listening. I sincerely appreciate your time. And I'll see ya. And in that episode, we mentioned that Abbott's newest stunt

was deporting people from Texas to Washington, DC to make Biden look bad by, you know, moving the problem to him. And as a political stunt, this has largely failed. As a humanitarian disaster inflicting untold human misery on completely innocent people, it is still continuing to unfold. And here today to talk about this with us

is Amy Fisher with Sanctuary DMV and the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network. Amy, thank you for joining us and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me so excited to be here. Yeah. Somewhat less excited that this is happening because, dear God, yeah, so I guess to start off,

do you want to tell us a bit about what's been, I guess, how this started and what the sort of initial reaction and non-reaction of the DC government has been? Sure. So, in April, Governor Abbott started busing people from the border to DC.

We knew from the get-go that this was a racist publicity stunt, particularly because the first few buses were dropped off right in front of the Fox News building. Yeah. And we all initially thought it was going to be a few weeks of busing people,

and here we are in the middle of July, and the buses have kept coming. Buses arrive to DC basically every single day of the week, except for Monday evenings and Tuesday mornings, and there have been probably around

3,500 people bused from Texas to DC, and not too long after, Governor Ducey of Arizona started doing the same thing and busing people from the Arizona border to DC, and the DC government has basically

been unwilling to grapple with the reality of what's happening. People are arriving to DC with very, very little resources, typically like the clothes on their back. Sometimes they don't even have shoes on their feet when they get off the buses, and it's been kind of amazing

to see the way that the DC community has responded. It's been like the type of response that makes me remarkably proud of being a DC resident and being from the area, so it's something that the DC government is turning a blind eye to and pretending like

the reality that we are seeing when we are talking to people that are getting off the buses day in and day out, it's entirely different from what the DC mayor is saying about the situation. Yeah, and I guess, well, okay, so before we talk, I guess, fully about the DC government's just

catastrophic, I don't even want to know if I want to say incompetence so much as just like, eh, we'll just let these people suffer. Can we talk a bit about what the community responses looked like and what y'all have been doing? Sure, so maybe to back up a little bit to tell you about sort of like

what the experiences of the people that are getting off the buses, these are people that are typically coming to the United States to seek asylum, they're being processed at the border for a few days and I think what like have been commonly started to be referred to as like the perreras and yelleras at the border, so like the dog kennels, the iceboxes at the border

and that are being paroled into the country and so the Customs and Border Protection, CBP, is releasing these folks to like respite centers type of places at the border in Texas, most of the folks are coming from Del Rio and Eagle Pass and then

they're being told that there's these free buses to DC and it's a little bit mind-boggling because we know that Governor Abbott is doing this busing purely out of the most like racist xenophobic intentions and also for many of the folks it's a free bus to get to where they're trying to go

and so people are riding on the buses arriving in DC and then you know many of them are trying to get to other places along the east coast and many are planning on staying in DC and so what

has happened is we've developed a massive mutual aid response which has been super cool so you know we have a crew of volunteers that meet the buses and they arrive at Union Station and if you're not familiar with DC Union Station is sort of the big transit center

in the middle of DC actually relatively close to where the capital is it's sort of like the DC equivalent of like Penn Station in New York or something like that and so they're dropped off in front of Union Station we have folks that will welcome them typically we bring to folks to different churches around the area

that have opened up their spaces as respite centers for us and we sit down with folks, we offer them some food and really try and talk through what their needs are and help them as best as we can meet those needs whether it is folks may have medical or like trauma that they need to work through

maybe they're trying to get to New York and so we'll help them communicate with family members or help them find their way to New York for the folks that are staying in DC we've done our best to help them find a way to kind of get settled and put down roots in their new community getting them connected to community members that help them

navigate DC teach them how to use the metro, help them get to their check in appointments as they're having to jump through all of the hoops of ice and being surveilled by the state and helping them have access to lawyers to explain their legal process and really just kind of like, I don't know

I took a dude to target to like help them go shopping and you know, took folks to get just like the random stuff that people need when they arrive in a new place in the same way that like I don't know, if I had a friend moving to DC I would be like hey what do you need, like how can I help you get to know this place like this is how our bike share program works

like just the most basic welcome get settled and talk a little bit more about what the sort of legal process looks like here and what like for example like explain what check ins are and yeah so the folks that are arriving are being paroled in and so basically what it means is that

they are then under surveillance from the federal government from ICE which is immigration and customs enforcement and what that looks like is a little bit of a crapshoot so many many of the folks are at the border given cell phones that have tracking on them

and so with that cell phones they're being tracked by the government they basically have to take like selfies ever so often to check in and then they're basically being sent to this program called ICE app which is the I can't remember the acronym it's a supervision program and so they have to go to an ICE office

once they arrive in whatever city that they're arriving to often times they're being asked to turn in the ICE cell phones and having to download an app on their cell phones if they don't have a cell phone they might be given what many of the Spanish speakers called like a griete basically like an ankle shackle for electronic monitoring

they'll have officers show up at their house so sometimes they have to be at home from 7am to 7pm so that immigration can come by and make sure that they're still there and basically that part of the program is entirely so the government can keep a track of where these folks are

it has nothing to do with the actual legal process that they're trying to go through to be able to stay here permanently so separate and apart from that the vast majority of these folks are asylum seekers and so what that means is that once they're here they have a year to apply for asylum and then they're pressed into the totally broken

asylum system that has years long backlogs and things like that and so then they'll be basically trying to find a way to get an asylum grant to be able to stay here permanently while also navigating the surveillance that's happening on the ICE side of things so I know something that happens with

like I guess regular prison law are people being forced to pay for the ankle bracelets? No. Thank God, okay. Which is like still bare minimum but yeah. Still Jesus. I mean I will say that one of the issues that we have started sort of trying to figure out how to navigate is that

what we're seeing is people they get the ICE cell phones at the border and then at their check in they're supposed to turn in the ICE cell phones and then download this surveillance app on their phone many folks don't have a cell phone or the app only works if you have I think a 5G phone so you basically have to have like the fanciest of the phones

which if you're an asylum seeker and you just risked it all to come here and you don't really have a support in the US and now you're being told that you have to have this super fancy phone or you get an ankle shackle it's just kind of a ridiculous thing knowing that it's okay maybe

you're privileged enough to be able to be surveilled on your own personal cell phone or you just have to have an ankle shackle at all times. So much of this process just like it really feels just like it's just it's surveillance just sort of for the purpose of humiliation it's surveillance for the purpose of humiliation it's surveillance for the sake of some this idea that

we've been dealing with in the US since September 11th that immigration is a national security concern that you know if immigrants aren't being surveilled 24 hours a day then like Lord knows what they could do when the reality is is these are folks that are just like normal

people trying to live their best lives and I also think how I think it's really important to say how much of this is also entirely based on government funding and availability that so often times the decision as to what kind of surveillance you're under is based upon what is available

based on contracts with you know private surveillance companies and private prison companies that have a surveillance arm and things like that. It's entirely profit driven. Yeah definitely again I keep thinking about prisons and it's just like yeah I mean literally the same companies doing this kind of stuff and how yeah and like I think

I don't know there's this kind of like I guess people it's just a prison industrial complex but yeah there's this whole there's this sort of like state private sector complex that both feed on each other where you have these companies taking federal money to do stuff you have these companies who are trying to have figured out ways to extract like money from the people that are surveilling

and I guess okay keep keeping on the thread of the state making people's lives miserable um yeah so Muriel Bowser not doing anything uh yeah we talked about that a bit so Muriel Bowser's messaging that we have received has evolved in there so

sometimes she says that the majority of people that are getting off the bus have everything they need and have family supporting them and so there actually is no reason for the government to step forward because these people already have all of their needs met which I would say maybe one person or one family

has someone that's you know ready to meet them when they step off the bus but the vast majority of people don't and I would say that we're seeing an ever increasing amount of people that don't have anybody in the United States and so they really are in need of a lot of supports to help them really figure out their way here

because they don't have cousins or family friends or extended family whatever it may be to help them you know put down roots in their new communities um and in recent weeks her messaging has shifted a little bit because there is actually a Spain based organization that got a grant from FEMA

to support on the buses um and so now Bowser's response is this organization Samu has it it's covered there's there's no like refuse one refusing to even acknowledge the fact that the mutual aid network has been and continues to do the vast majority of the welcoming of the folks that are arriving

and two once again refusing to acknowledge that there is any role that DC could be or should be playing here yeah and it definitely it seems like I don't know I mean it's a kind of classic like state two step

what's like yeah on the one hand it's like okay there's no problem the second thing is we found an NGO we can sort of like pretend is doing the actual work um and I guess that that I I saw from y'all recently was a bunch of people got exposed to COVID while doing this and there was like basically you guys did basically a work stoppage

so last week um we basically hit a wall um many of our core organizers had been exposed to COVID um we were running out of funds because this work is expensive um and

we had been doing this as volunteers around the clock you know 24 hours a day seven days a week for months and last week we kind of hit a wall and um told this NGO that is receiving FEMA funding that we needed to take a beat

and take two days where you know folks could get COVID tested and make sure they were in the clear to come back to work and rest and also spend time like we you know call it a work stoppage but we're all still working we're all you know having conversations as to how we make this work more sustainable how we find you know

systems of support to make this welcome last and unfortunately that resulted in people basically getting stranded at Union Station um and when our folks were able to return to welcoming buses on

um you know later in the week they ended up with like I don't know 30 additional people that had basically been sleeping at Union Station because this other NGO that you know is receiving federal funding to do the work that the mayor is saying has it and therefore she doesn't have to do anything didn't show up

and there were a handful of good Samaritans that like you know would be at Union Station and see a bunch of folks and they you know spoke different languages and would be able to support them kind of here and there but it really showed how um I think it really proved the work that the Mutual Aid Network had been holding and that you know if we tried to take a step back

things fall um and really showed how much we need others to step in because the work that we've been holding has been you know wearing us down and hiding the situation a little bit right that people don't

you know when we're able to really show up and provide the folks that are arriving with the support that they need what it means is that the government isn't paying attention because it's not their problem in that moment um it means that DC residents don't have to walk by

asylum seekers when they're trying to get to the metro after work it means that um you know the people are cared for the work that we're proud of and it's work that we're doing well um but it's also work that we need support doing um because it's it's a lot

and the numbers have increased you know and and we want to be able to provide welcome we want to be able to give the folks what they need but as long as we're sort of living in this world where bus tickets are massively expensive and food is expensive

and you know we gotta help close people and help people meet their needs then we have to have support and that's just the reality yeah that's one of the things I think is really frustrating about this too it's not like the resources that you just don't exist but it's not even like the state hasn't like attempted to put resources out but it just got fed into this NGO complex

people who are just doing nothing and I don't know like the the way you get to see sort of both arms of what the state does or it's like okay on the one hand you have the part of the state that's just hitting people with clubs that's just doing this stuff and you get the sort of political arm of the state who just like again are just literally shuffling people's lives around as you know as political theater

and the political theater doesn't matter because these people's lives don't matter to the state or to anyone who has even a tiny bit of power unless you know it's visible enough that people are like the people have to see it and that people you know get annoyed because oh hey look at this thing happening that's like interfering with my life now and you know and then it's like oh hey they're supposed to be part of the state that like tastes care people and it just isn't and that's

just incredibly frustrating I don't know it's I think of a few things so when we first started seeing buses coming to DC you know that people are dropped off in front of Union Station and at the time there was

an encampment of unhoused people that you know had their tents and stuff in front of Union Station and so folks would get off the bus and say you know what are the tents like who are these people living in tents and so be like welcome to the nation's capital of this place that you just came to seek opportunity to seek safety and you're immediately showing getting

showed in the most you know visible terms possible of the way it's being its own people because people in DC don't have housing and housing here is immensely expensive and then I say in the early days because in I think it was in May

that encampment was cleared and so those people lost their homes and now it continues to be a struggle that you know if we are unable to provide housing for the people that get off the bus they are going into the DC shelter system

that is already overrun because there is a housing crisis in DC and a looming eviction crisis and even for the folks that are here on the buses if they don't have support they are thrust into this situation in which the state is preventing them from working

they don't have a way to work legally for at least a few months presumably until you know they can apply for a work permit if they file for asylum but these are folks that don't have a way to work legally that have

zero support from the state so how like tell me how somebody is supposed to live in the United States feed themselves, feed their families have a roof over their head survive have a cell phone for your

surveillance app, have the means to travel an hour you know once every few weeks to check in with ICE if they are legally prevented from working it's just, it's a total abandonment of people

who need and wholeheartedly deserve support yeah and I think like it's honestly like honestly I think it's worse than abandonment right, like if they just like if these people were allowed to come into the US and the state did literally nothing at all, it would be better than the situation that exists now like it's not even just that they're being abandoned, it's that they're actively being prevented

from like doing the things they need to live and it's, I don't know, I think this is something you see on a sort of broader level there's a lot of, I don't know, back when I was in sort of social theory land there's a lot of talk about like necropolitics and the state letting people die and it's like well yeah but like they're also actively helping to kill them too like it's not just that the state abandons people it's that the state abandons people and then it takes the resources and prevents anyone

else from using them and then you know and when it does sort of yeah, I mean going back to sort of this NGO that's not doing anything it's like yeah, when it does sort of send these resources out it's sending them into these, like into its own sort of peristate complex with the sort of NGO sector that's just not doing anything and it's just I don't know, like it's this bind, right, because it's like, yeah, like on the one hand

like communities have to be able to support each other but it's like we don't have the resources for it and that has to come from somewhere right and yeah it's impossible and it's heartbreaking to see when DC is barely doing anything for the people that have been living here for generations and then when we have new folks arrive

they're thrust into this impossible situation and no one's really willing to engage with that problem and there are resources it's just a matter of whether you want to to use them for these purposes

and this is a problem that we're seeing intimately here in DC but it's a problem that's existing everywhere around the country and DC is supposed to be a sanctuary city like this isn't DC with a mayor that's politically aligned with Governor Abbott this isn't a DC with a mayor who is attempting to be

vehemently anti-immigrant it's a mayor who is claiming to represent a sanctuary city a city that is supposed to welcome immigrants and yet saying welcome doesn't actually mean welcome

I remember I'm in Chicago and Chicago is also a sanctuary city and we had to physically stop deportation flights with our bodies I have this haunting memory I always remember the first big anti-ice like anti-kids and cages protests that we had one of the groups that showed up to this thing it's called Heartland Alliance they describe itself as this human rights and anti-poverty organization

and they were literally running five child detention centers in Chicago and it was like I don't know it's the rubber hitting the road of saying you're a sanctuary city and what does it look like and it's like well it means that your migrant justice organizations like run child prisons for immigrants it's a refusal to engage with reality

a little bit and you know the NGO Samu that is receiving FEMA funding to presumably abandon people at Union Station is also you know if things go their way trying to open up a facility in DC to detain unaccompanied children

and that's welcome to the sanctuary city it's probably worth mentioning it's like Spain another country that has just people getting like Spain has a part of North Africa that they control and people get shot at the border by soldiers trying to climb fences getting in and it's this fun thing

where we're seeing this has been happening for the last I mean really like forever like last 500 years has been this but this incredible racist border system is not just an American thing it's in Europe it's been exported into Mexico itself it's a politics that's just sort of everywhere and like

Frontex and the EU does this stuff like it's all just I don't know it's borders are racist yeah and they kill people and they kill people and it feels I don't actually think we have to go to like it's I think it's helpful to make those analogies of how this is replicated across the world

but I also think that you know just a few weeks ago there were over 50 migrants that were found dead in the back of a tractor trailer in San Antonio including young indigenous folks

and we know that there have been thousands of thousands of Haitians removed under 1932 and Haitians that are drowning in the water trying to find a way to come to the United States to seek safety people are literally

dying and trying to get here and what the folks that are coming to DC in a way are the lucky ones because they're from countries like Venezuela they're from countries like Cuba where US foreign policy finds it beneficial

to allow them to enter to publicly say you know these are the quote-unquote right asylum seekers and they're able to be paroled into the country and still have to deal with all of this crap that they're dealing with but there's

countless other black, brown, indigenous folks that are arriving at the border and literally risking their lives and many losing their lives trying to get here because of these like racialized border systems that we have and that we're exporting all throughout the Americas like go south to Mexico

to Tapatula and you basically have an open air prison of black asylum seekers Yeah, I mean there's something that like the reason my family is here is because we were able to like my grandpa got drafted into the Taiwanese army and he was like no and because we were Taiwanese we were able to get to the US but it's like you know if you were from South Vietnam sometimes they let you in

if you were from Taiwan they would let you in but like God help you if you're from like Indonesia or just like from I mean sometimes you get people from China but it's like yeah the I don't know the way that just all of these people's lives are being used as geopolitical tools and then you know once they get here they're being used as just sort of internal American political tools

Yeah, it's just as much people getting killed at the borders and until we fucking make borders go away like the stuff is just going to keep happening and People are getting boarded onto buses and sent to DC because Governor Abbott thinks this is the way that he can run for president Yeah by being the most racist xenophobic guy in town

and these folks are just political tools and it's devastating and it's it's really also kind of amazing to be able to then also just like hang out with them and break bread with them

and realize that we're all sort of fighting this mess together Yeah and I think I don't know like we do a lot of episodes here that are incredibly depressing but yeah like I guess yeah it isn't I guess important as a thing to sort of end on is it like yeah I know like we we can take care of these people like we can

if we actually fight this together we can beat these guys like we I don't know like it is actually possible like these all of the things that we're talking about like this stuff didn't use to exist it's not it's not something that inherently has to exist and we can make it not exist again I think the the response that we've had in DC has been

a really like I can't say it enough how beautiful it is that we have a group of like over 200 volunteers that have stepped up and we've been able to raise a remarkable amount of money and we've had like you know little kids sell cookies to support our efforts

and it's really heartwarming and people using their neighborhood listservs to you know get donations of car seats to be able to you know make sure that when we're you know helping families we can make sure that like the little kiddos are able to like travel in car seats safely and all of that and

we've been able to and we're doing more of this of like building relationships with folks around the country that are doing similar work or you know if someone is taking a bus to New York and it you know breaks down in Philly we're able to mobilize other volunteers in Philly to just like make sure that folks are like fine and okay and like get on their next bus and that is

amazing and beautiful and to me I think the thing that makes me optimistic and like mad at the same time is that there are both at the federal level and local levels just billions and billions and billions of dollars that are being invested into solutions that are based on

like detention surveillance, border militarization when god like if instead we just devoted those billions and billions and billions of dollars into making sure that like when folks arrive here they can have like a comfy bed to like lay in at night and have food

and be able to like support their families I mean it kind of sounds revolutionary but it's just like it's so simple and there is such a concerted effort to do the opposite of the most basic hey welcome to my town how can I welcome you

there was if I remember my like immigration history right they used they had this program in the UK where for a while where they would bring okay you'd have a family they're coming to the US and they get paired with a British family and the British family would like show them the ropes and it worked really well everyone loved it and they stopped doing it because they once they brought people in like that they couldn't deport them because the entire community would show up and just be like no

and so they stopped doing it and it's like that's a problem like that's the problem that like people are then welcomed and loved by their communities like that shouldn't be a problem that we have to solve that should be like oh this is a resounding success yeah instead it's like it's like actually living in a better world actually having a community where people care for each other where people take care of each other and where people love each other or people will fight

for each other like that is something that the state seizes a threat and I don't know I guess it's this other thing where it's like the better world we could be living in is literally being built you can walk down the street and you can see people taking care of each other and then it's like

here is the state who's the only thing that they want to do is just make everyone's lives increasingly miserable yeah like is it that's hard to just say hey like folks want to be able to just like live that's it it's all they want to be able to do is just like live

they want to be able to work they want to be able to support their family they want to be able to be safe they want to be able to like eat good food and have fun and the state is doing everything but allowing that to be and our like mutual aid work is helping folks navigate and do

as much of that as possible yeah I think I think that's a good note to end on unless you have anything else I don't think so cool okay so where can people go to find and support this work and where can they go to like give money if they want to or actually help volunteer it too yeah so we have a link tree that has

all of the links to support us in all the ways so if you're here in DC and you want to be able to support or if you want to donate we have really cool t-shirts that we sell that say melt ice that are designed by one of our volunteers and so it's the link

tree is like the link tree slash DCTX solidarity 22 and if you follow that link you will be able to see all about our work you know get the demands that we have for Mayor Bowser support us in person financially whatever it is all of that lives there

and yeah we will put the link in the description cool that'd be great I'll make sure you have it yeah thank you and yeah thank you thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me yeah and this has been Nick and Appen here go help your neighbors and go make the state not be able to prevent you from doing that welcome to it could happen on the internet the only podcast

I'm Robert Evans and today we've got St. Andrew back in the studio we don't actually have a studio that was a lie that was a lie that you'd think I was cooler St. Andrew how are you doing today I am good I'm good Andrew dropped the saint oh shit I'm sorry you're right you're right you're right we should probably yes I'm sorry that's good

because I'm the longest seat so okay if I understand Catholicism right that means you undid someone else's three miracles I know nothing what Catholicism okay well there you go pretty sure you have this is a Protestant background here

my knowledge of Catholicism is that to be a saint you have to do a couple of miracles but the last one is always something to do with being dead like they just decide that whatever you do when you're a corpse is like oh it's a miracle oh Catholicism Andrew what are we talking about today today we're going to be talking about something that I would say more traditional Catholics

may have some disagreements with Christian Christians may have some disagreements with and that is that is our entire audience is that this podcast is completely listened to by the Pope's Swiss guards 100% Vatican city we have deep penetration in the Vatican that's an interesting choice of words

considering the end of Pride Month but you know we'll allow it alright so what are we talking about we'll be talking about human evolution particularly as it pertains to human cooperation the origins of human cooperation I love this shit

I think that people tend to emphasize human competition a lot because Catholicism wants us to believe that we are these competitive dog-eat-dog I don't know where that term came from by the way I've always been curious about that as far as I know dogs don't eat each other but it's an interesting phrase and I think it's kind of apt here

there's this idea that we're just competing all the time that we're fighting to survive over the fittest and that only the strong survive when people talk casually about prehistoric times it represents the stories that we even told about it and as a result it tends to be very

competitive, highly patriarchal, highly violent just constant interpersonal violence that was a justification used to reinforce the state or the state of nature it's everybody against themselves and so as a result a state has to be introduced we trade some of our freedoms for the safety that the state is supposed to provide

but as far back as Proudhon and really even further because let's be real it's a very European concept it's not something that can be projected towards all human societies and all human philosophies but Proudhon was one of the first white guys I guess in his time period and in his field to really challenge that notion with mutually

de facto evolution of course the studies and stuff that he would have done the knowledge that he would have shared would have been known and studied by people before him but he was one of the first to really bring all that knowledge together into one place and then years later American anthropologist and primatologist was born I mean she wasn't born that but she became

that later in life in 1946 that would be Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy and so she made many major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology especially pioneering our modern understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behaviour in both non-human and human primates in 2002 she was recognized as

one of the 50 most important women in science and in 2014 mothers and others together with her earlier work Hurdy the National Academies Award for Scientific Reviewing in honour of her insightful and visionary synthesis of a broad range of data and concepts from across the social and biological sciences to the importance of biosocial processes

among mothers, infants and other social actors in forming the evolutionary crucible of human society in essence she got an award because she recognized the fact that the relationship between mother and child and how humans raise their children is vital in our evolution and in our becoming human

that's fascinating I didn't know any of that we do recognize, now in our science we recognize more and more primatologists at least that other great apes rather they do care they share and they empathize a lot more than we may have originally thought

but humans still win at the caring competition because of something like official anatomy and how we structure society is probably one of the more pro-social of the other great apes it's interesting I've read stuff about empathy in apes

but it's always in the context of the ones we taught sign language to the one I'm remembering particularly is the one on the name the scientist gave Coco her reaction to 9-11 because it was on the tv or some shit but I never hear emphasized the same degree or maybe I just have not

sought it out but it's less discussed as evidence of empathy within the societies that they built would be the term for them their communities, whatever you want to call them I was interesting as well Coco was a gorilla and regarding sign language is interesting

video essay talking about sign language but Coco was a gorilla and humans are closely related to two groups there was being bonobos chimpanzees and we tend to look at chimpanzees which tends to be more violent and people use them as an example

despite the fact that we have millions of years of evolution diverging from chimpanzees last common ancestor was like 6-7 million years ago that's a bit distant I've been talking 5 or 6 years and I consider us pretty far apart yeah and then on top of that

there was enough time for some serious divergences to start happening the fact that humans walk upright and chimpanzees still have that ball-like gate it's actually something that I learned recently, evolved on two separate occasions that being that particular kind of knuckle walk

yeah I just found that kind of fascinating besides the point we tend to look at chimpanzees as our closest example but bonobos which are a lot more social I would say a lot more cooperative and less violent than chimpanzees we actually share a lot of similarities

in terms of our behaviour and they're also one of the few animal species that have been recognised as having sex for pleasure and not just procreation so good for them when we talk about evolution, a lot of it has been shaped by Darwin even though science is not about figures and big figures and their big ideas

but still seeing as Darwin was the one who really introduced the idea of competition the idea of all that in evolution, those sorts of notions which came really out of his time in industrialising competitive world it really overstates the role of competition

as a driving force in evolution when in reality cooperation was a far more potent force when it comes to pro-social human tendencies doing things to benefit others that's what pro-social is Dr. Hurdy really comes down on the cooperation side of things in her book

Mothers and Others where she brings together all this evidence that we are basically descendants of the alien species of cooperative breeders cooperative breeding is a practice among some animal species other mammals do it but I think we are one of the few we only create apes who do it and there are other primates who do it

other monkeys who do it but none closely related to us cooperative breeding is basically the practice or the reproductive strategy where alloparental care is provided to the offspring of the children of certain parents in the group alloparental care is

basically the practice of it's basically non-direct parent care care provided by individuals other than the parents by having that network in place by having the process of alloparenting in place is how we were able to be so successful as a species in our distribution

in our establishing ourselves in all these different environments because humans spread fairly rapidly around the globe and we've established ourselves and created cultures in all sorts of unique environments and in honestly we are the most successful out of the primates in that regard so kudos to us

and that is because of cooperative breeding did you just woo Robert? yeah of course yes like we had to ratio the rest of the primates you know very very based of us literally we're ratioing everything on this goddamn planet

except for chickens corn is definitely ratioed us for sure cows too man cows, chickens and there's one other for sure I mean there's so many different species of goats

and there's only one species of humans what's the population of dogs? actually every time I look it's less than you'd expect what? 900 million that's ridiculous I want more, give me more dogs 900 million is like rookie numbers

it's like a couple of billion just based on yeah every time I look it up I recall being like oh there's not as many dogs as I thought there were I guess they went cooperative for years sure not and only 400 million cats those are rookie numbers cats come on cats it's actually probably

it's probably for the best my dad always says that we need more dogs in the world to fix the fucked up humans I feel a lot of pressure to put on dogs that's completely fair I feel like that's really our job to fix fucked up humans dogs for that

I mean cats and dogs are pulling a lot of weight as it is what are ferrets doing? what are ferrets doing? what are ferrets doing? fucking ferrets and like fucking goldfish what have they been doing lately mother fuckers get off your asses and stop us from killing people

goldfish stop the war in Ukraine goldfish come on I mean to get to cut goldfish some slack they're busy dying because people don't want to take care of them people treat them like house plants I didn't think we would have Andrew being a goldfish apologist on this podcast but here we are I don't think goldfish have committed any war crimes

not that I know of they haven't stopped any war crimes either this is my personal guilt talk I've neglected my fair share speaking of cross species cooperation when I was younger and living in Texas there was this one day we're out in our backyard area and we see walking through the alley behind our houses

this massive turtle probably 300-400 pounds easily like 3 or 4 feet in circumference on his shell just like an enormous animal just like strolling around the neighborhood we see in Texas wild so we try to corral him we can't lift him he's massive

but we corral him into our yard area and give him some cucumbers and eventually his person comes around and the guy explains that when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out a lot of people bought a bunch of different kinds of turtles thinking they were good pets but they didn't realize that there's a lot of the turtles that get sold and they smell bad all the time he had adopted this turtle and it lived in his yard

and he said like, yeah he's really strong I have a good fence but every 2 or 3 years he'll just walk through it most of the time he chooses to stay in the yard but every couple of years I'm just gonna go on a walk and he's like yeah he just breaks through the fence it takes him about a second no

is this anime and no this is not my weeb coming out story I have not read or viewed much in that regard but I started back here recently and in the first episode they established that all these people are coming to Tokyo for like some kind of fighting competition and the way that they established those people are dangerous

and so they're in the process of being put to death like one person is being injected or something, one person is being electrocuted and one person is being hung and they all manage to break free after they die and break off the prison easily this one guy he was imprisoned underwater he breaks out of the underwater prison

and swims several miles up to the surface and it's like for some reason that turtle breaking out of his enclosure whenever he chooses just reminded me of like they're trying to establish his power levels he's too powerful to be contained and he's probably still alive because they live forever

which is again why they're bad pets yeah because what did you do about slavery well he may not have been around for slavery but what are you going to do the next time they're slavery turtle, are you going to stop it I don't think so, you're a turtle is that something you should be telling me Robert we've all been paying attention to the Supreme Court

it's not going to go well in the future Robert leave the turtles out of this if they stop the Supreme Court I will stop shitting on the turtles you're just doing that meme from 2020 where people were like I gave up my plastic straws for the turtles where are they now that was a thing, yeah it was bad

I don't remember that well I will say that I mean at least we're cooperative breeders our tendency of cooperative breeding tendency probably has something to do with the fact that we adopt other species as pets and as members of our family

because you don't really see other animals doing that I think there's some kind of fish or crustacean or something that keeps another species as livestock there's a couple of species that do versions of that for sure right but I mean we love our dogs and our cats

our ferrets and our snakes and our tarantulas our ferrets, question mark people are trying to domesticate foxes so we could love them too there are people who keep big cats like caimans we just want to take all these creatures

and we want to love them I don't know what that says about us other than the fact that our cooperative nature extends beyond the boundaries of us as a species we inherited very high levels of mutual tolerance, of perspective taken and other pro-social impulses

from ancestors who use our parental care and provisioning of the young to survive I mean we didn't invent complex cooperation, our pre-human ancestors did but we elaborated upon it yeah it's always interesting to me to think about that I think back up to when the first time I ever went

to a war zone was Ukraine we were in this little town called Devka and there was this big, the way they do the heating they have these vents going underneath the houses to supply them with gas and there's this big central box thing and there's a few of them in the town

I guess it's like the nexus of houses or whatever heating system so it's warm and when the war started a bunch of people fled and they left pets behind sometimes they didn't have a choice there were cats and dogs

and people who lived there turned that little junction box into a cat and dog sanctuary so there were dozens and dozens of puppies and kittens living together in this big heating box in the middle of this being taken care of by all these local ladies who would scrounge up food every morning and make sure they were all taken care of

and it was interesting because you could see all these cats and dogs living together and all these people coming together to take care of animals they didn't know and all of the people were doing their level best to murder the folks like a mile and a half away and vice versa so we contain multitudes of human beings that's part of it too

the fact that we are so eager to share in other's emotional states to empathize and the way that we are so eager to and give and share with those who are unrelated to us I mean there are a lot of species that do not raise their young at all and they are those that do

and try to kill other people's young and they are those that do and just take care of their own young but we even in this super individualistic capitalist world we still find ways to look out for each other and I think that's beautiful of course cooperative breeding doesn't mean that there is constant

like Barney the Dinosaur like cooperation all the time there still can be competition but behaviorally and atomically and emotionally modern humans are cooperative breeders and the crazy part is

those three traits behavior, anatomy and emotion those traits do not evolve simultaneously so for example our physical features like our eyes and the fact that our eyes we can see the whites in our eyes and that way we can put ourselves in other people's perspectives and that kind of thing

you know the fact that we are prone to sharing our smiles and the fact that you know our vocal cords have such range we should be able to communicate so many different things while these are hallmarks of the fact that even before

our super big brains developed we were already getting these traits that would have helped us in cooperation but I wonder a lot of the time though because a lot of these traits were developed before language it's like what was the first word of humanity what was the first sentence what was the first thing we said

and how did other people react when the person said it I could imagine that it was something that developed independently on multiple different occasions in different places but I still wonder like what those first conversations might have been about yeah I mean I think a lot of them probably would have been arguments

with other people who didn't want us to do words who were ultimately right you know if only yeah I don't know it's interesting like we just did a couple of episodes about the history of gynecology and one of the things that we talked about at the start

was like the prehistory of medicine which likely began in an organized way by like likely the first people practicing medicine in any way were pregnant women and women who had been pregnant and were trying to help each other survive pregnancy and I wouldn't be surprised if that I mean food gathering is obviously the other one but I wouldn't be surprised if like language started

as a way to try and like communicate and better survive making babies because it's like super dangerous and also entirely necessary and something that kind of particularly benefits from communication I don't know I wouldn't be shocked if that was like the first thing we talked about so to speak that makes sense

what I'm also thinking as well and it just occurred to me it is probably possible that the first language was not spoken language I feel like it may have been like a form of sign language you know because you know we have these hands and people tend to talk with their hands so oh yes I think hypothesis is that we use our hands to communicate things

before we started speaking I mean the fact that we were able to teach apes other apes to use sign language I think that's a good sign that we can learn to communicate without face yeah I mean it's also probably how our communication with dogs started because that's one of the things that makes them special is they're pretty much alone in animals

and that they like instinctively grow up understanding that when we gesture at them it means stuff like if you point dogs will look where you're pointing a lot of the time rather than at you which is like a rare trait in animals so yeah I think you're probably right on the money there huh I didn't even think about that that's true and of course that makes it fun because you could always fake them out and throw something

stupid Anderson doesn't fall for that shit she does not fall for that shit I can't fake her out that's probably why she's the woman of the house pretending to throw stuff at a dog and then it goes running and then it realizes that you faked it like that's the best

I can't relate because if I try to do that she looks at me like oh okay Sophie where you need to go is Corgi Kahn in San Francisco one of these years well they let Anderson in even though she's only part Corgi there's nothing but acceptance at Corgi Kahn acceptance and hundreds of Corgi's frolicking in the surf in rules

she'll try to herd them all they are all trying to herd all of them they are all very excited and don't know what to do with each other so as the book progresses Hardy spends some time talking about how we are similar to and different from other great apes it's really about how we use eye contact

and smiles to bond even from a young age we tend to hear about it but not that babies cries are so attuned toward attention and capturing the attention of people these are all like bastards

yeah I was a screamer apparently I used to rell ball in fact one story I was told was that someone called and was like something happened to Andrew and my parents were like nah he's just crying there's like three o'clock in the morning

but I mean look at me now I'm balling for justice one interesting treat that humans have they tend to like share our babies with others other great apes they tend to have constant contact

they don't let others touch their children at all probably because other mothers tend to want to kill their kids or cause harm to their kids so they tend to be very protective of them whereas our parents have not only shared our young with others but our parents have also been

breastfeeding the young of others and masticating and passing hard to digest foods to infants I'm mixing up my terms a bit in terms of what is a primate and what is an ape whatever but momma sets and tamarinds

which are calitricids they are also cooperative breeders and they're very fast breeders as well rapid, rapid breeders so good for them it's also typical of our species we tend to be very fast breeders and that's why we really showed all the other great apes what I find interesting as well

is that we be able to breed so rapidly despite the fact that our do you remember the word for like carrying a child I'm just blocking right now I think you're thinking of the incubation period that's what you're trying to think of yeah but that's such a that feels like a very dehumanizing way of putting it

I'll just say the carrying a baby and the costs that it includes on a human's body it is like a whole thing it's a whole thing for people of having so many in one lifetime despite the costs necessary to raise each other other animals

they have like maintenance seasons they have set amounts of children they could have in their lifetime but no we could just there are stories of women who have had dozens of kids which is unfortunate circumstances because in those cases it tends to be not necessarily willing

but the fact that we are capable of having many kids lends toward the importance of having support systems in place because other animals don't tend to have more children they can care for if that is the care for children a lot of them just eat their kids if they can't care for them

exactly yeah whereas we kind of evolved to have support systems in place speaking of eating babies there is a dark side to that because even though we tend to have these children we are supposed to have these support networks

to care for them the practice of infanticide is actually something that has a long history in human practice where if a mother determines that they are not able to raise their child they don't have the support systems in place to care for that child

different practices would typically be used to deal with that child and that's of course what makes the anti-abortion stances so inhumane because the whole reason

that abortion is so important is because it protects the autonomy and the agency of people who can carry children and yet in this world it continues to atomize us and individualize us and separate us and so people have their support networks

so weakening our support networks is still expected to and punished heavily if you do not just pump out as many children as you can it's really sick when it comes to those support networks most people are familiar with extended family

grandparents and in fact an infant's survival is significantly affected by a grandmother's presence which is why humans tend to live long past their reproductively viable period human females live after menopause for a pretty long time in comparison to other species

and of course their grandmothers and their fathers their sisters and godparents and really a lot of other cultural systems in place even polyandrous mating I think I mentioned that in a previous

episode there are also forms of local, flexible residence patterns where you always have kin around to take care of your infants and I would say that it's kind of tough because a lot of people these days

struggle with their extended families it's very much cool I love you but I'm glad we live in a separate kind of situation extended families have a lot of prunes and cons which is why we actually find interesting examples of chosen families

throughout different societies and also even there's some evidence that that might have been the case in the past as well where unrelated people would form groups together as one example I remember reading about and of course this can't necessarily be extended to prehistoric times but I've seen it in multiple different hunter-gatherer situations

but where you have this clan system in place and you can no matter how far you travel you can expect to receive care from members of your clan in North America I think it was like the Bayer clan and the Elk clan and all these different clans in Aboriginal Australia

they also had different groups as well and so people were able to interact with each other across huge distances and settle in different places and connect with others to find kin even though they weren't necessarily directly related there's a book called that sets it on that I read many many years ago that's about the evolution of human sexuality

and how different cultures have looked at things like what makes someone a parent and there's all these different attitudes before we had the scientific understanding of how babies are conceived that we have now there were all these different attitudes like this idea and I forget the name but they still exist somewhere in Latin America

and their belief was essentially that when you got someone pregnant that was the start of the process and then after conception the person with the baby would go around and pick I remember that the idea was that when they fucked that person's essence gets added to this forming child

socially it means that for that community children weren't seen as having one father they were seen as having a bunch of fathers all of whom were responsible for teaching the kid and raising it which is a very sensible way to organize your little society is to ensure that the kids coming up have as many adults who are responsible for them as possible

which is broadly speaking the best thing you can do for kids is to have a bunch of adults be interested in their success exactly because if you have one of the best hunters in the village raising your child and you have the best craftsmen in the village raising your child and you have the best fishers in the village raising your child that child is going to have a very well-rounded education

and is going to be able to learn a lot of different skills that they're going to need that's just one of the many positive effects that they give us on the development of a child's world view and sense of self, their concept of self and others their concept of empathy the concept of independence how they view the world as either dangerous or insecure or giving

and welcoming and so I mean we are so used to this nuclear family world view which is these independent households that we don't consider the fact that having a broad range of people raising them is actually crucial to their personal development as children

to their human development really having all those different perspectives and stuff in place and I mean that's part of what Hurdy talks about especially in her final chapter that being how in modern times the accumulation of property the emergence of patriarchy

even the stuff in the post-industrial era all of these would prompt a shift from cooperative breeding from cooperation between groups to war between groups especially with property because when you have property you have a need to hold on to that property and the whole idea of property is

you and yours the exclusion of all others right you know and so at the end of her book she also speculates that we might be losing our art of nature because we are continually evolving but she wonders what might the potential evolutionary effects be

for your rearing children who are not living in intimate contact with a variety of caregivers especially within those first two years of life infants, rare and responsible care-taking relationships develop innate potentials for empathy, mind-reading and cooperation and collaboration with the outcome of complex interactions between both genes

and nature so the question is how can these innate potentials remain more than potentials you know I mean because the development of them is far from guaranteed a lot of children these days are raised without extensive social contact I mean even in the year of Covid where a lot of children are isolated at home

especially the height of the pandemic I really wonder if we will see like a mocked like distinct generation of like within a range of two years of children who just aren't as socialized because for those first two years of their life

they were kind of isolated because there's this lack of empathy, lack of cooperative skills and lack of attachment that may cause us to miss the mark it's really trauma but trauma doesn't necessarily stop people from

continuing that trauma from reproducing and carrying that on and so I really am really curious as to see what the effects that might be and also what we can do to try to curb that negative impact the last question she asks is really will humans in the future still be empathetic and curious about the emotions of others

because of our ancient heritage or kuno kia and I'm paraphrasing here or will these systems that we have in place evolve us in a more Machiavellian direction? Well I guess that's the mystery that we're all going to get to watch unfold in pieces at least over the course of

the rest of our lives and everyone else's lives it is I don't know I think the overall archivist speaks more to the things about us that are good to increasing cooperation because that is like the story of the last couple hundred thousand years of human evolution although at the same time some of that a lot of that cooperation

has gone towards fucked up ends as well I mean all of the good and the bad things happening right now are one way or the other examples of cooperation it's yeah I don't know let's hope things get better I hope so too and I think we can do more than hope I think we can act

yeah we're going to have I mean like that's the thing right like part of how specifically in the United States I mean but internationally too the right has gotten so much over the last really five or six years in particular is cooperation across borders and across like ideological differences like there's there has been like tremendous sustained cooperation that has allowed them to amass

power the power that they're currently exercising and the only thing that's going to actually counter that is the cooperation an organization of a much larger amount of people like there's not that many of those folks it's why they've had to be so organized there's a lot more of us but we also can't stop fighting about shit so it is it is like we are going to have to evolve in real

time to cooperate better with one another and more effectively in order to in order to wrench the wheel back that's true anyway let's not lose hope and let's not lose your plugables Andrew yeah yes you can follow me on Twitter I don't have this course seen true

and find me on YouTube at Andrewism hell yeah hell yeah well folks that's going to be all for us here today and it could happen here until next time go happen somewhere else hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of CoolZone Media

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