It Could Happen Here Weekly 44
00:00Alphabet 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.
00:35So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads packagefor 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.
01:12And 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.
02:04The 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.
03:03The 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.
04:01He 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.
04:54He 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.
05:46It'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.
06:30And 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,
07:14which 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,
08:02who 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.
08:43In 57, as squadron commander, he was sent to the Soviet Union for trainingand flying MiG-17s, which I looked up, and it's a high subsonic fighter aircraftthat 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,
09:19separating 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.
09:55Assad, 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 crisisfor which several of its members, mostly young members, blamed the party leader,who at the time was Michel Aflach.
10:28He was a Syrian philosopher and sociologist and an Arab nationalist,and his ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athismand 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,
11:04which mitigated his transfer to Egypt.After Syria left the UAR in September of 1961, Assad and other Ba'athist officerswere 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,
11:39and 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.
12:09After 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 coupin 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.
12:47Because 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,
13:22because 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
14:01and 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.
14:38He 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!
15:14Okay, 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
15:44and 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,
16:13it 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 riotled 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,
16:41during 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 commandsand 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.
17:02And 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 partyby 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,
17:28the military committee overthrew the national command.The coup led to a permanent split in the Bath movementand the advent of neo-Bathism,as well as the establishment of two centersof 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,
17:51but despite his title, he actually had little power in the governmentand 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 secretaryof the Syrian regional command,instead of taking executive office,which had historically been held by Sunnis.
18:15Tadeed, trying to establish his authority,focused on civilian issuesand 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
18:39after the 1966 coup, and he sought revengeand 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,
19:04visited 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 guestsand 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,
19:29aka 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.
19:53But due to his prompt action and his protection of Jadeedand 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 intothan what I'm just going to say right now.But Druze are members of an Arabic-speaking ethno-religious group
20:23originating 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.
20:47I apologize that I probably mispronounced it,but the point is they practice their own sect of religionthat 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 wordin case people didn't know.Back to Syria.So after this incident took place,
21:13and 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.
21:40And 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 digestibleif these episodes were shorter instead of being an epic talethat could run over an hour.But yeah, let's say goodbye.This is Shireen, and this is what could happen here.
22:06Uh, 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.
22:36I'm so sorry.But last episode, um, we talked about Syriaand the history of how Hafiz al-Assadeventually came into powerand how he subsequently let his familybecome dictators of this countryfor over half a centuryand how they've destroyed it.
22:56But 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 mentioningthe 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,
23:19it'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 markedthe 19th anniversary of its founding,Israel went to war with the armies of Egypt,
23:45Syria, 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 wargo all the way back to the 40s,and there are moments in history
24:05that led up to this moment,but it was a huge turning pointin Middle Eastern history,and the consequences of it are still felt todayacross the region,and the outcome of this warbasically altered the map of the Middle Eastfor the foreseeable future,
24:23and it's further blocked this pathto any kind of potential peacebetween Israel and Palestine,and it just redrew the landscapeof this conflictand expanded Israel's territorial claimsand military dominance in the region.They gained a lot of territory during this war
24:43and had the help of the UN behind them.So, yeah.It was not good for Arab countriesso much more to get into there,but this war, essentially,talking about Syrian history,changed everything,and I mentioned earlier in the last episode
25:04that when the Baath Party took power in 63,there was some more perishingof 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 themin this June war,
25:25but yeah, there's so much more there.I will try to get into that later another time,but the Arab defeat in this June warled to Israel stealing the Golan Heights from Syria,and this provoked a furious quarrelamong Syria's leadership.The civilian leadership blamed military incompetence,and the military responded by criticizing
25:48the 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 demandedthat Hafiz al-Assad resign,and an attempt was made to vote him outof the regional command.
26:05This 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 Assadas 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,
26:24but 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 officersto oust the government,but at the time he actually refused,because he believed a coup during that timewould have helped Israel, not Syria,
26:48which 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 demonstrateshis unfortunately high intelligencefor someone so bad.Anyway, as I mentioned, this war was a turning point,and it was also a turning point for Assad,
27:09and the Baathist Syria movement in general.It soon began a power struggle with Jadidfor control over the country.Until then, Assad hadn't really shown ambitionfor 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,
27:32Assad did not play a leading role in politics,and he was usually overshadowed by his contemporaries.Patrick Seale was a British journalistand 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 contentto be a solid member of the teamwithout the aspiration to become number one.
27:56He 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 threatand although Assad didn't appear like he wanted powerfrom the outside,shortly after the war,Assad began developing a network in the military
28:17and promoted friends and close relatives to high positions.Assad believed that Syria's defeat in the June warwas 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,
28:45an armed guerrilla strategy and class struggle,had failed Syria, undermining its position.Although Jadid continued to champion the conceptof a People's War even after the June war,Assad opposed it.He felt that the Palestinian guerrilla fightershad been given too much autonomy,and their rating of Israel had made the war worse
29:06for the Arabs fighting.Jadid also had broken diplomatic relations with countrieshe deemed reactionary like Saudi Arabia and Jordan,and because of this, Syria did not receive aidfrom other Arab countries.While Jadid and his supporters prioritized socialismand the internal revolution,Assad wanted the leadership to focus on foreign policy
29:30and 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 becamethe talk of the army and the party,
29:51with a, quote,duality of power noted between them.By the 4th Regional Congressand 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 issuesand his arguments were firmly rejected.
30:12The military's involvement in party politicswas unpopular with the rank and file,as the gulf between Assad and Jadid widened.The civilian and military party bodieswere 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, notedthat Jadid's fatal mistake was to attempt
30:38to 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 forcesthrough his position as Minister of Defense,Jadid still controlled the security and intelligence sectorsthrough Abdul Qadim al-Jundi,who was the head of the National Security Bureau.
31:03Jundi, who was a paranoid, cruel man,he was feared throughout Syria, especially later in his life.In February of 1969, the Assad-Jadid conflict eruptedin 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.
31:35The reason for the violence was Rafat al-Assad's suspicionthat al-Jundi was planning an attempt on his brother Hafiz's life.The suspected assassin was interrogatedand eventually confessed under torture.Acting on this information, Rafat argued that unlessJundi was removed from his post, that he and his brotherwere in danger.Okay, let's take a break.
32:00BRB, 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
32:26and Al-Thaura, as well as radio stations in Damascusand Aleppo, were replaced by Assad loyalists.The Taqiya and Tartus, which are two al-Awaid-dominated cities,they saw fierce scuffles ending with the overthrowof 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 headof military intelligence, Al-Dubah,
32:54it 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 someonethat writes the history.So just pointing that out there,because she put that little nugget of information in my head.
33:15But as far as we're concerned in this summary,it is said that Jundi committed suicideafter his loyalists began to be arrestedand there was just continuing violencebetween 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
33:41and 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 formedwhere the Bath Party was in controland the Eastern Front, supported by al-Assad,
34:03was formed with Iraq and Jordan.Jadid's isolationist policies were curtailedand Syria reestablished diplomatic relationswith many of its foes, which is what Assad wanted.And while Assad had been in de facto commandof Syrian policies since 1969,Jadid and his supporters still held the trappings of power.After attending Jamal Abdel Nasser's funeral in Egypt,
34:31he was the president of Egypt.Assad returned to Syria for the Emergency National Congresswhere 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.
34:53He'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
35:15of 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 postsin Syrian embassies and abroad,Jadid refused, saying,If I ever take power, you will be dragged through the streets until you die.
35:43Assad 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 worldwas the disappearance of newspapers, radio stations, and television stations.A temporary regional command was soon established,
36:15and 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.
36:43Assad 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,
37:09and 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,
37:38and then you're free of me for the day.Okay.So we're back before the break.We were talking about Assad coming into powerand how his policies differed from Jadid'sand 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,
38:01or 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 partyafter hearing Assad's appeal.At the 11th National Congress, Assad assured party members
38:30that 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 decisivefor his direction and stability.
38:59Assad 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,
39:33but 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
40:02and 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-commandas commander of the presidential guard.Assad controlled the military through the Alawites,and the Alawites, with their high status,
40:28appointed 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,
41:02and 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,
41:36quote, created growing opportunities for state elites' self-enrichmentthrough corrupt manipulation of state market interchanges.Besides outright embezzlement,webs of shared interests in commissions and kickbacksgrew 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,
42:07who they were supposed to represent.This, coupled with growing Sunni disillusionmentwith 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 Islamduring its introduction to the Syrian political scene during the 1960s.Under the leadership of Mustafa el-Sabay,
42:40the Brotherhood had historically been a vehicle for moderate Islamduring 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 1970swith attacks on prominent members of the Bath-Alawi elite.
43:13As the conflict worsened, a debate began in the partybetween hardliners represented by Rafad el-Assadand 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 militarysecurity apparatus and political liberalization.
43:45The Sunni middle class and the radical left, believing that Bath's rulecould 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
44:22or 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 revivalor 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,
44:56beginning in 1980, the Islamists began a series of campaignsagainst 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
45:27who favored repression over concessions.Security forces began to purge all state, party, and social institutions in Syriaand were sent to the northern provinces to quell the uprising.When this failed, hardliners began accusing the United Statesof formenting and provoking the uprisingand 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.
45:57Under Afat al-Assad, the Islamic prisoners at the Tadmur prison were massacred.Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood became a capital offenseand 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 hardlinersfrom their passive supporters and violence was met with violence.So essentially this just led the Assad regime to murder a bunch of people,
46:34innocent, guilty, all of the above.So, yeah.One of the many instances where the Assad regime was extremely violentand engaged in horrific state terrorism.So we're wrapping up the end of this oneand 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 timewas the Hama massacre, which took place in February of 1982
47:05when the government crushed the uprising.Helicopter gunships, bulldozers, and artillery bombardment raised the city,killing thousands of people.The Baath government withstood the uprisingand 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.
47:38I talked to my mom a bit about this when I was preparing to record theseand 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 thingor even anything to each other.No one would dare speak a word on the phone.Definitely not allowed to each other.
48:06There 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 upand like the phone being this like, you just assume it was always tapped.You assume anyone could always hear you.
48:32You 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 highlightthat 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
49:06and 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 Syriaand teachers are a civic position there.
49:33Really, like most positions are governmental positions.And my grandma during these elections would throw out the noseand 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 immediatelyand the only ones that were kept were the yeses.And eventually there was an election that determined that Hafiz and his family
50:03would be in power forever.Al-Aabid yahab as al-Assad was a phrase that usedand 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
50:28and I would love for my mom to just give me more information about thisthat 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 Basharand how he became the dictator of Syriaand how he wasn't even meant to be the president of Syria.And yeah, a lot of interesting history
50:51that 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 episodesand we're going to continue and I'm just going to jump right in
51:28because there's a lot.Okay, so this is a continuation about Syriaand the terrible family that controls it, the assets.As I mentioned in the previous episodes,the Assad's have destroyed Syriaand the death toll that they are responsible foris literally incalculable by the UN,but it's said to be nearing half a million people,
51:50which is a lot of people.So Sam Dagger is a American Lebanese journalistand author who has lived and worked in the Middle Eastfor more than 16 years.He was based in Damascus in the early years of the current warbefore the government kicked him out in 2014,but he used his access to write about the inside storyof the Assad family.
52:12He 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 bookand 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,
52:35all over the towns and neighborhoodsthat had been taken over by the regime,graffiti on walls, probably by loyalistsor 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.
52:57They are in power forever.And the Assad regime routinely takes over deserted, destroyed areas,and these government militias come in and loot the areauntil it's nothing but rubble littered by thingsthat are left behind as people are fleeingand things that these loyalists find useless,like teddy bears and personal items,that actually tell a really devastating story
53:21about 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.
53:43That Bashar al-Assad and his family will remain in poweror else they will burn the country to the groundand 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 1971after overthrowing the prior government through military coup.
54:07Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000after 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 collapsedand the Berlin Wall fell and dictatorships were crumbling.The Soviet Union was seen as the main supporter or guardian
54:31of 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 reformand repackage itself so Hafiz al-Assadcould hand down the power to his eldest son, Bashar al-Assad.And Bashar was an army officerwho was essentially brought up to eventually fill this role,
54:52taking over for his father.And his military background fit the imageof this traditional leader of the Arab worldbecause so many of these leaders took over by military coupor had a background in military.But before we get into all of that,let's go back in time a little bitand talk about what went down.
55:11So a sort of succession crisis was triggered in November of 1983when 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 brotherwould 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.
55:37But apparently some believe that Refathad 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 officerresponsible for the Hama massacre of 1982.I briefly mentioned this in the previous episode at the end.
56:00It was a horrific massacre.And I think it especially is near to mebecause Hama is my mother's hometownand 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.
56:19But I did want to break up this massacrebecause most people have no idea that it even happened.In February 1982, as commander of the defense companies,Refat allegedly commanded the forcesthat put down a Muslim Brotherhood revoltin the central city of Hamaby instructing his forces to shell the citywith rockets, and this killed thousands of its inhabitants.
56:41Reports 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 Agencyestimates the total number of casualties to be approximately 2,000.However, U.S. journalist Thomas Friedman claims in his bookfrom Beirut to Jerusalem that Refat later said
57:11the total number of victims was 38,000 people.38,000 people.Refat also played a key role in his brother Hoppus's overthrowof Saadah Shadid and the seizure of power in 1970.This change in executive power is dubbed by some loyalistsas the corrective revolution.Refat was allowed to form his own paramilitary group,the Defense Companies, in 1971,
57:38and this soon transformed into a powerful and regular military forcetrained and armed by the Soviet Union.He was a qualified paratrooper,and he ran the elite internal security forces and the Defense Companiesin 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 committeeto run the country.
58:02But Refat was not included.The council consisted entirely of close Sunni Muslim loyaliststo Hoppus who were mostly lightweightsin the military security establishment.This caused unease,and the ally we dominated officer corpsand several high-ranking officers began rallying behind Refat,while others remained loyal to Hoppus's instructions.
58:24In March of 84, Refat's troops, now numbering more than 55,000with tanks and artillery, aircraft, and helicopters,they began asserting control over Damascus.A squadron of Refat's tanks took positionat the central roundabout of Kaffirsuse in Mount Qaseyun,overlooking the city.Setting up checkpoints and roadblocks,putting up posters of him in state buildings,
58:48disarming regular troops and arbitrarily arresting soldiersof the regular army, occupying and commandeering police stationsand intelligence building, occupying state buildings,the defense companies rapidly outnumberedand took control over both the Special Forcesand the Republican Guard.Although Damascus was divided between two armiesand seemed to be on the brink of war, Refat did not move.
59:11Hoppus was then informed that Refat was heading to Damascus,and he left his headquarters to meet his brother.British journalist Patrick Seal reportsan 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,
01:00:07and the Special Forces.The defense companies were so loyal to Refat.In the middle of 1984, Hoppus had returned from his sickbedand 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,
01:00:30actually saved her uncle by convincing her fatherthat 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 prevalentIlawite family, dominating the leadership of the security servicesbehind the Assad's.
01:00:53In 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 sizeand was transferred to another officer,and the entire unit was ultimately disbandedand absorbed into other units.Refat was then sent to the Soviet Union
01:01:17in an open-ending working visit.His closest supporters and others who had failed to prove their loyalty to Hafezwere 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 giftfrom Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.And although Refat returned to Syria for his mother's funeral in 1992
01:01:47and 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 Latakiadestroyed much of his remaining network in Syria.
01:02:14Large 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 competitionfor 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
01:02:45as previous vice president, alleging his dismissal as unconstitutional.He has made threatening remarks about planning to return to Syriaat a time of his choosing to assume his responsibilitiesand fulfill the will of the peopleand 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 structureon which Hafez based his rule.
01:03:13Instead 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 Assadwanted to normalize relations with Israel,the Syrian military had to withdraw its troops from the Golan Heights.
01:03:40Ali 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 Forceswith 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.
01:04:04He 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,
01:04:27an author, Paul Thoreau,reports that Bashar was driving 150 miles per hour.He was driving through Densfog to Damascus International Airportfor a flight to Frankfurt, Germany.He was on his way to a ski vacation in the Alpsin the early hours of the morning,and it was then that Bashar collided with a barrierand not wearing a seatbelt, he died instantly.
01:04:50After 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.
01:05:17The 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 billboardswith 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.
01:05:41Bashar'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 trainingin 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.
01:06:05But then, suddenly, he was fast-tracked on the path to succession.He was rushed to the military and the constitution changedso 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 transitionafter Hafiz al-Assad introduced the slogan,
01:06:34Bashar 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,
01:07:00was seen as the leader of the younger generation of Syria,the standard bearer of modernization.But the regime was and stayed very cynicaland 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.
01:07:27Unaware that, as Sam Dacher puts it,that Bashar is being mentored and tutored by peoplewho 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.
01:07:53Western governments had the impression that Bashar was someone they could do business with.He presented a modern, open-minded imageand even hosted notable positions from around the world in Damascus,including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.The US and Europe accepted this perceptionbecause 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,
01:08:18having 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.
01:08:43Bashar decided to marry someone who had lived all her life abroadas a British citizen, who was modern and assertiveand had a career in investment bakingand 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.
01:09:06The 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 couplebelieving 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.
01:09:29And Bashar al-Assad, as Sam Dagger stated in an interview,quote, shared intelligence with the Americansand even tortured people on behalf of the Americans.So, the West had a vested interest to justify its engagementand cooperation with Bashar by saying he's a reformer.Opening up Syria's economy was a big part of projectingan image of a reformed Syria.Before Bashar took power,
01:09:52Syria's economy was a centrally planned economy,also known as a command economy,which is an economic system where a government bodymakes 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 timeand cell phone companies were established.
01:10:18And while the economy may have opened up,everything was still in control of their regime.I wanted to bring up something that my mom mentionedabout the differences between Bashar and Hafezand 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,
01:10:43apparently there were at least three secret service stationsthat 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.
01:11:10She 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 alonein 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
01:11:31that 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.
01:11:51He 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.
01:12:15He writes,10 families run Syria and control everything.He continues to describe how this early period in Bashar's rulealso 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.
01:12:34So she's Bashar's aunt.Rami Makhloof's personal wealth accumulated abroadwas 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 empireand became this new tycoon in Syria.
01:12:59He was the person who made sure that any economic openingwould benefit and enrich the Assad family.Before the Syrian civil war started in early 2011,he was considered one of the wealthiestand most powerful men in Syriaand controlled nearly 60% of the economy,including industries of real estate and telecommunication,aviation, the dairy industry, tourism, electricity, and oil trading.
01:13:22According to Syrian analysts,he is part of al-Assad's inner circleand no foreign company could do business in Syriaat the time without his consent and partnership.The last French ambassador to Syria had lunch with Rami onceand described him as acting as, quote,the king of Syria, puffing cigars and saying,I'm in control and everything happens through me.
01:13:45Fast forward to our present day.The economy has completely collapsedever since the uprising started in early 2011.It could be seen as an accumulation of the past decade.Syria's sanctioned hit economyhad always relied on Lebanon to sustain itself,but in the fall of 2019, Lebanon had its own crisesand it was an economic and political turmoil,
01:14:06which forced banks to control access to cashand prevent transfers abroad.Dagger explains, Lebanon has always servedas this economic pressure valve,not only for the regime, but also for average Syrians.A lot of Syrians had their savings, their life savingsin Lebanese banks.One analyst told me that Syrians had $1 billion
01:14:27in 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 downand the situation becomes progressively worse in Syria.The value of the Syrian lira
01:14:46had also extremely diminished and continues to.Trying to recover from this plummet of the Syrian economy,Bashar turned to capitaliststhat 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.
01:15:08The world saw this as a huge falling outbetween 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 paywhatever the regime was asking for.The economy was in a dire state
01:15:26and the regime urgently needed cash.So the government asked for money from the businessmenit had empowered in the first place,and most of them comply, but not Rami Mechlouf.In June 2011, Mechlouf statedthat he would, quote,quit the Syrian business scene.On May 1st of 2020,
01:15:45Mechlouf made an unprecedented public appeal to his cousin.He made this appeal on Facebook,saying that officials were seeking to seize his assetsas he was pressured to hand overan 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,
01:16:09said 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 forcesarrested some of his employees.He said,How could they do thiswhen I was their biggest supporter
01:16:24and their biggest servant during the war?However, speculations indicatethat 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 Mechlouffor control of diminishing resourcesafter collapse of the Syrian pound,
01:16:42along 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 authoritiesmight have targeted Mechloufin order to find resourcesprior to the implementation of U.S. sanctions
01:17:01related to the Caesar Act.On May 17, 2020, Mechlouf posted another video on Facebook,where he mentioned rising pressure on himto 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 courtplaced a temporary travel ban on Mechlouf.
01:17:21On June 25, 2020,the Syrian government terminated duty-free contractsin all ports and border crossingswith companies affiliated with Mechlouf.This drama between Bashar and Ramiresulted in talks of a rift in the regime's inner circle,and people were concerned that this would expose a riftin the Alawite community itself,
01:17:40which 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 membersof their religious sect, the Alawites,most of whom are nowhere nearthe wealth of the Assad family's inner circle.
01:18:02He was telling the Alawites thatwe 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 figurewho has been instrumental in supporting peoplethrough his business, a.k.a. Rami himself.And it wasn't necessarily untrue,
01:18:21but he wasn't helping people for free, obviously,and Rami had expected people to remain loyal to himdespite all of this.Basically, the Assad family had finished devouringthe 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.
01:18:43There 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 membersthat are still in Syria, we hear about the electricity
01:19:07being out for days and weeks,and then the water being out for the same amount of time,and the people are essentially being suffocatedby their own government.People are questioned and torturedand 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.
01:19:28It'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 itselfas the ultimate and only power in Syria,Bashad has actually been at his weakest point
01:19:54in the last two years.He is only still in his positionbecause the Russians and Iranians want him to be there,and he's only able to maintain his roleby playing off his two patrons against each other,Iran and Russia.This is a regime that always derived its powerfrom the army and from the security forces,
01:20:14but the army largely does not exist anymore.Yes, there are divisions that are trained by the Russiansin an attempt to put this army back together,but even the loyalists who support Bashad al-Assaddon't want to join the army anymore,they would rather leave the country.So the regime's only option leftis to continue to rule by fear.
01:20:33This has had mixed results,especially when you look at the uprisingsthat have continued since 2011,however much they have dissipated.People put themselves on the streets,not hiding their identities,vocally and loudly opposing the regimeand demanding for the removal of Bashad al-Assad.
01:20:50This 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 deathsin the Syrian civil war by opposition activist groupsvary between 500,000 people and 600,000 peopleas of March of 2022.And I think it's really notable
01:21:12that Syrians are vocally expressing their outrageand 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 correctionswere written down,
01:21:36the 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 demandsand what they wanted to fixand 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.
01:21:58But then, everyone who signed this petitionwas looked up, hunted down, sent to jail,some for decades and some people that are still there,and others fled the countryafter they started collecting people.This ilan dimashq was the beginning of the end.It was the end of the few libertiesthat people thought would come
01:22:19when 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 sayingthat Assad loyalists spray paint on the cities
01:22:41that Assad has demolished.Assad or we burn the country.It seems like both choices have come true.Bashar al-Assad has stayed in powerand 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,
01:23:00and 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 horrorsover the past 12 years.Syrian people, like all people,they want dignity, they want justice.
01:23:21And they can no longer accept living in this inhumane systemwhere your most basic rights as a human beingdepend 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
01:24:11was deporting people from Texas to Washington, DCto make Biden look bad by, you know,moving the problem to him.And as a political stunt, this has largely failed.As a humanitarian disasterinflicting untold human misery on completely innocent people,it is still continuing to unfold.And here today to talk about this with us
01:24:29is Amy Fisher with Sanctuary DMVand 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 happeningbecause, dear God,yeah, so I guess to start off,
01:24:49do you want to tell us a bit about what's been,I guess, how this startedand what the sort of initial reactionand non-reaction of the DC government has been?Sure.So, in April, Governor Abbott startedbusing people from the borderto DC.
01:25:10We knew from the get-gothat this was a racist publicity stunt,particularly because the first few buseswere dropped off right in front of the Fox News building.Yeah.And we all initially thought it was going to bea few weeksof busing people,
01:25:32and here we arein the middle of July,and the buses have kept coming.Buses arrive to DCbasically every single day of the week,except for Monday eveningsand Tuesday mornings,and there have been probably around
01:25:543,500 peoplebused from Texas to DC,and not too long after,Governor Ducey of Arizonastarted doing the same thingand busing people from the Arizona borderto DC,and the DC government has basically
01:26:16been unwilling to grapplewith the reality of what's happening.People are arriving to DCwith very, very little resources,typically like the clothes on their back.Sometimes they don't even have shoes on their feetwhen they get off the buses,and it's been kind of amazing
01:26:38to see the way that the DC community has responded.It's been like the type of responsethat makes me remarkably proudof being a DC residentand being from the area,so it's something that the DC governmentis turning a blind eye toand pretending like
01:27:02the reality that we are seeingwhen we are talking to peoplethat are getting off the buses day in and day out,it's entirely different from whatthe DC mayor is saying about the situation.Yeah, and I guess,well, okay, so before we talk, I guess, fullyabout the DC government's just
01:27:25catastrophic,I don't even want to know if I want to sayincompetence so much as just like,eh, we'll just let these people suffer.Can we talk a bit about what the community responses looked likeand what y'all have been doing?Sure, so maybe to back up a little bitto tell you about sort of like
01:27:43what the experiences of the people that are getting off the buses,these are people that are typicallycoming to the United States to seek asylum,they're being processed at the border for a few daysand I think what like have beencommonly started to be referred to as likethe perreras and yelleras at the border,so like the dog kennels, the iceboxes at the border
01:28:07and that are being paroled into the countryand so theCustoms and Border Protection, CBP,is releasing these folks tolike respite centers type of placesat the border in Texas,most of the folks are coming from Del Rioand Eagle Pass and then
01:28:31they're being told that there's these free busesto DC and it's a little bit mind-bogglingbecause we know that Governor Abbottis doing this busingpurely out of the most likeracist xenophobic intentionsand also for many of the folksit's a free bus to get to where they're trying to go
01:28:55and so people are riding on the busesarriving in DCand then you knowmany of them are tryingto get to other places along the east coastand many areplanning on staying in DCand so what
01:29:19has happened is we'vedeveloped a massive mutual aid responsewhich has been super cool soyou know we have a crew ofvolunteers that meet the busesand they arriveat Union Station and if you're not familiar with DCUnion Station is sort of the big transit center
01:29:43in the middle of DCactually relatively close to where the capital isit's sort of like the DC equivalentof like Penn Station in New York or something like thatand so they're dropped off in front of Union Stationwe have folks that will welcome themtypically we bring to folksto different churches around the area
01:30:07that have opened up their spaces as respite centersfor us and wesit down with folks, we offer them some foodand really try and talk through what their needs areand help them as best as we can meet those needswhether it isfolks may have medicalor like trauma that they need to work through
01:30:31maybe they're trying to getto New York and so we'll help themcommunicate with family members or help them find their way to New Yorkfor the folks that arestaying in DC we've done our bestto help them find a way to kind ofget settled and put down roots in their new communitygetting them connected to community members that help them
01:30:55navigate DCteach them how to use the metro, help them get to theircheck in appointments as they're havingto jump through all of the hoops of iceand being surveilled by the state andhelping them have access tolawyers to explain their legal processand really just kind of like, I don't know
01:31:19I took a dude to targetto like help them go shopping andyou know, took folks to getjust like the random stuff that people needwhen they arrive in a new place in the same way that likeI don't know, if I had a friend moving to DC I would be likehey what do you need, like how can I help you get to know this placelike this is how our bike share program works
01:31:43like just the most basic welcomeget settledand talk a little bit more about what the sort of legal process looks like hereand what like for example like explain what check ins are andyeah sothe folks that are arriving are beingparoled inand so basically what it means is that
01:32:07they are then under surveillancefrom the federal governmentfrom ICE which is immigration and customsenforcement and what that looks likeis a little bit of a crapshootso many many of the folksare at the border given cell phonesthat have tracking on them
01:32:31and so with that cell phonesthey're being tracked by the government they basically have to take like selfiesever so often tocheck in and then they're basically beingsent to this program called ICE app which is theI can't remember the acronym it'sa supervision program and sothey have to go to an ICE office
01:32:55once they arrive in whatever city that they're arriving tooften times they're being askedto turn in the ICE cell phonesand having to download an app on their cell phonesif they don't have a cell phone they might be givenwhat many of the Spanish speakers called like a grietebasically like an ankle shacklefor electronic monitoring
01:33:19they'll have officersshow up at their house so sometimes they have tobe at home from 7am to 7pmso that immigration cancome by and make sure that they're still thereand basically that part of the programis entirely so the governmentcan keep a track of where these folks are
01:33:43it has nothing to do with the actual legal processthat they're trying to go throughto be able to stay here permanently soseparate and apart from that the vast majority of these folksare asylum seekers and so what that means is thatonce they're here they have a yearto apply for asylum and thenthey're pressed into the totally broken
01:34:07asylum system that hasyears long backlogs and things like thatand so then they'll be basically trying to find a wayto get an asylum grantto be able to stay here permanentlywhile also navigating the surveillancethat's happening on the ICE side of thingsso I know something that happens with
01:34:31like I guess regular prison laware people being forced to pay for the ankle bracelets?No. Thank God, okay. Which is likestill bare minimum but yeah. Still Jesus.I mean I will say thatone of the issues that we havestarted sort of tryingto figure out how to navigate is that
01:34:55what we're seeing is peoplethey get the ICE cell phones at the border and thenat their check in they're supposed to turn in the ICE cell phonesand then download this surveillance app on their phonemany folks don't have a cell phoneor the app only works if you haveI think a 5G phone soyou basically have to have like the fanciest of the phones
01:35:19which if you'rean asylum seeker and you just risked it all to come hereand you don't really have a supportin the US and now you're being toldthat you have to have this super fancy phoneor you get an ankle shackleit's just kind of a ridiculousthing knowing that it's okay maybe
01:35:43you're privileged enough to be able to be surveilled on your ownpersonal cell phone or you just have to have an ankle shackleat all times. So much of this process just likeit really feels just like it's justit's surveillance just sort of for the purpose of humiliationit's surveillance for the purpose of humiliationit's surveillance for the sake of somethis idea that
01:36:10we've been dealing with in the US sinceSeptember 11th thatimmigration is a national securityconcern that you knowif immigrants aren't being surveilled 24hours a day then like Lord knows what they could dowhen the reality is is these are folksthat are just like normal
01:36:34people trying to live their best livesand I also think how I think it's reallyimportant to say how much of this is alsoentirely based ongovernment funding andavailability that so often timesthe decision as to what kind of surveillance you're underis based upon what is available
01:36:58based on contractswith you know privatesurveillance companies and private prison companies that have a surveillance armand things like that. It's entirely profitdriven. Yeah definitelyagain I keep thinking aboutprisons and it's just like yeah I mean literally the same companiesdoing this kind of stuff and how yeah and like I think
01:37:22I don't know there's thiskind of likeI guess people it's just a prison industrial complex but yeah there's this wholethere's this sort of like state private sectorcomplex that both feed on each other where you have these companies takingfederal money to do stuff you have these companies who aretrying to have figured out ways to extract like money fromthe people that are surveilling
01:37:46and I guessokay keep keeping on the thread of the state making people's lives miserableumyeah so Muriel Bowser not doing anythinguh yeah we talked about that a bitso Muriel Bowser'smessaging that we have received has evolvedin there so
01:38:10sometimes she says that the majority of peoplethat are getting off the bus have everything they needand have family supporting them and so there actually is no reasonfor the government to step forward becausethese people already have all of their needs metwhichI would say maybeone person or one family
01:38:34has someone that's you know ready to meet themwhen they step off the bus but the vast majority of peopledon't and I would say thatwe're seeing an ever increasing amount of peoplethat don't have anybody in the United States and sothey really are in need ofa lot of supports to help themreally figure out their way here
01:38:58because they don't have cousinsor family friends or extended family whatever it may beto help them you know put down rootsin their new communitiesum and in recent weeksher messaging has shifted a little bit becausethere is actually a Spain based organizationthat got a grant from FEMA
01:39:22to support on the busesum and so now Bowser's responseis this organization Samu has itit's covered there's there's nolike refuse one refusing to even acknowledgethe fact that the mutual aid network has beenand continues to do the vast majorityof the welcoming of the folks that are arriving
01:39:46and twoonce againrefusing to acknowledge that there is any rolethat DC could beor should be playing hereyeah and it definitely it seems likeI don't know I mean it's a kind ofclassic like state two step
01:40:11what's like yeah on the one hand it's like okay there's no problemthe second thing is we found an NGO we can sort of likepretend is doing the actual workum and I guessthat that I I saw from y'all recentlywas a bunch of people got exposed to COVID while doing thisand there was likebasically you guys did basically a work stoppage
01:40:35so last weekum webasically hit a wallum many of our core organizers had beenexposed to COVID umwe were running out of funds becausethis work is expensiveum and
01:40:59we had been doing this as volunteersaround the clock you know 24 hours a dayseven days a week for monthsand last week we kind of hit a walland umtold this NGO that is receivingFEMA funding thatwe needed to take a beat
01:41:23and take two days whereyou know folks could get COVID testedand make sure they were in the clear to come back to workand rest andalso spend time like we you knowcall it a work stoppage but we're all still workingwe're all you know having conversations as to how we make this work more sustainablehow we find you know
01:41:47systems of support to makethis welcomelast and unfortunatelythat resulted in peoplebasically getting strandedat Union Station umand when our folks were able toreturn to welcoming buses on
01:42:11um you know later in the week they ended upwith like I don't know 30 additional peoplethat had basically been sleeping at Union Station becausethis other NGOthat you know is receiving federal fundingto do the work that the mayor is sayinghas it and therefore she doesn't have to do anythingdidn't show up
01:42:35and there were a handful of good Samaritansthat like you know would be at Union Stationand see a bunch of folks and they you know spoke different languagesand would be able to support them kind of here and therebut it really showed howum I think it really provedthe work that the Mutual Aid Networkhad been holding and that you know if we tried to take a step back
01:42:59things fallum and really showed how muchwe needothers to step in because the work that we've been holdinghas beenyou know wearing us downand hiding the situationa little bit right that people don't
01:43:23you know when we're able toreally show up and providethe folks that are arriving with the support that they needwhat it means is thatthe government isn't paying attention becauseit's not their problem in that momentum it means thatDC residents don't have to walk by
01:43:47asylum seekers when they're trying to get to the metro after workit means thatumyou know the people are cared forthe work that we're proud of and it's work that we're doing wellum but it's also work that we needsupport doing umbecause it's it's a lot
01:44:11and the numbers have increasedyou know andand we want to be able toprovide welcomewe want to be able to give the folks what they need butas long as we're sort of living in this worldwhere bus tickets are massively expensiveand food is expensive
01:44:35and you know we gotta help close peopleand help people meet their needsthen we have to have supportand that's just the realityyeah that's one of the things I think is really frustrating about this tooit's not like the resources that you just don't existbut it's not even like the state hasn't like attempted to put resources outbut it just got fed into this NGO complex
01:44:59people who are just doing nothing andI don't know like thethe way you get to see sort of both armsof what the state does or it's like okay on the one hand you have the part of the statethat's just hitting people with clubs that's justdoing this stuff and you get the sort of political arm of the state who just likeagain are just literally shuffling people's livesaround as you know as political theater
01:45:23and the political theater doesn't matter because these people's lives don't matterto the state or to anyone who has even a tiny bit of powerunless you know it's visible enough that people arelike the people have to see it and that peopleyou know get annoyed because oh hey look at thisthing happening that's like interfering with my life nowand you know and then it's like oh hey they're supposed to be part of the state that liketastes care people and it just isn't and that's
01:45:47just incredibly frustratingI don't know it'sI think ofa few things so when wefirst started seeing buses coming to DCyou knowthat people are dropped off in front of Union Stationand at the time there was
01:46:11an encampment of unhoused peoplethat you know had their tents and stuffin front of Union Station and so folks would get off the busand say you know what are the tents likewho are these people living in tents and sobe like welcome to the nation's capital of this place that you just cameto seek opportunity to seek safetyand you're immediately showing getting
01:46:35showed in the most you knowvisible terms possible of the wayit's being its own peoplebecause people in DC don't have housingand housing here is immenselyexpensive and thenI say in the early days becausein I think it was in May
01:46:59that encampment was clearedand so those people lost their homesandnowit continues to be a struggle thatyou know if we are unable to provide housingfor the people that get off the busthey are going into the DC shelter system
01:47:23that is already overrun becausethere is a housing crisis in DCand a looming eviction crisisand even for the folks that arehere on the busesif they don't have supportthey are thrust into this situation in whichthe state is preventing them from working
01:47:47they don't have a wayto work legallyfor at least a few monthspresumably untilyou know they can apply for a work permitif they file for asylumbut these are folks that don't have a wayto work legally that have
01:48:11zero support from the stateso how like tell me howsomebody is supposed tolive in the United Statesfeed themselves, feed their familieshave a roof over their headsurvivehave a cell phone for your
01:48:35surveillance app, have the meansto travel an houryou knowonce every few weeks to check in withICEif they are legally prevented from workingit's just, it's a total abandonmentof people
01:48:59who needand wholeheartedly deservesupportyeah and I think like it's honestly likehonestly I think it's worse than abandonment right, like if they justlike if these people were allowed to come into the US and the state did literally nothingat all, it would be better than the situation that exists nowlike it's not even just that they're being abandoned, it's that they're actively being prevented
01:49:23from like doing the things they need to liveand it's, I don't know, I think this is something you see on a sort of broader levelthere's a lot of, I don't know, back when I was in sort of socialtheory land there's a lot of talk about like necropoliticsand the state letting people die and it's like well yeah but like they're alsoactively helping to kill them too likeit's not just that the state abandons peopleit's that the state abandons people and then it takes the resources and prevents anyone
01:49:47else from using them and then you know and when it does sort ofyeah, I mean going back to sort of this NGO that's not doing anythingit's like yeah, when it does sort of send these resources outit's sending them into these, like into its ownsort of peristate complex with the sort of NGO sectorthat's just not doing anything and it's justI don't know, likeit's this bind, right, because it's like, yeah, like on the one hand
01:50:11like communities have to be able to support each other but it's likewe don't have the resources for itand that has to come from somewhereright and yeahit's impossible and it'sheartbreaking to see when DC is barely doing anythingfor the people that have been living here for generationsand then when we have new folks arrive
01:50:37they're thrust into thisimpossible situationandno one's really willing to engage with thatproblemand there are resourcesit's just a matter of whether you want toto use them for these purposes
01:50:59and this is a problem that we're seeingintimately here in DC but it's a problemthat's existing everywhere around the countryand DC is supposed to be a sanctuary citylike this isn't DC with a mayorthat's politically aligned with Governor Abbottthis isn't a DC with a mayorwho is attempting to be
01:51:25vehemently anti-immigrantit's a mayor whois claiming to represent a sanctuary citya city that is supposed to welcomeimmigrantsand yetsaying welcome doesn't actuallymean welcome
01:51:50I remember I'm in Chicago andChicago is also a sanctuary city and we had to physically stopdeportation flights with our bodiesI have this haunting memory I always rememberthe first big anti-ice like anti-kids and cages protests that we hadone of the groups that showed up to this thingit's called Heartland Alliancethey describe itself as this human rights and anti-poverty organization
01:52:13and they were literally running five child detention centers in Chicagoand it was likeI don't knowit's the rubber hitting the road ofsaying you're a sanctuary city and what does it look likeand it's like well it means that your migrant justice organizationslike run child prisons for immigrantsit's a refusal to engage with reality
01:52:38a little bit andyou know the NGO Samuthat is receiving FEMA funding topresumably abandon people at Union Station isalso you knowif things go their way trying to open upa facility in DC todetain unaccompanied children
01:53:02and that's welcome to the sanctuary cityit's probably worth mentioning it's likeSpain another country that has justpeople getting likeSpain has a part of North Africa that they controland people get shot at the borderby soldiers trying to climb fencesgetting in and it's this fun thing
01:53:26where we're seeing this has been happening for the lastI mean really like foreverlike last 500 years has been thisbut this incredible racist border systemis not just an American thing it's in Europeit's been exported into Mexico itselfit's a politicsthat's just sort of everywhere and like
01:53:50Frontex and the EU does this stuff like it's all justI don't know it'sborders are racist yeah and they kill peopleand they kill people and it feelsI don't actually think we have to goto like it's I think it's helpful to makethose analogies ofhow this is replicated across the world
01:54:14but I also think thatyou knowjust a few weeks agothere were over 50migrants that were found deadin the back of a tractor trailerin San Antonio includingyoung indigenous folks
01:54:38and we know thatthere have been thousands of thousandsof Haitians removed under1932and Haitians that are drowningin the water trying to find a wayto come to the United States to seek safetypeople are literally
01:55:02dying and trying to get hereandwhat the folks that are comingto DC in a wayare the lucky ones becausethey're from countries like Venezuelathey're from countries like Cubawhere US foreign policy finds it beneficial
01:55:26to allow them to enterto publicly sayyou know these are the quote-unquote right asylum seekersandthey're able to be paroled into the countryand still have to deal with all of this crapthat they're dealing withbut there's
01:55:50countless otherblack, brown, indigenous folksthat are arriving at the border and literally risking their livesand many losing their livestrying to get here becauseof these like racialized border systems that we haveand that we're exporting all throughout the Americaslike go south to Mexico
01:56:14to Tapatula and you basically have an open air prisonof black asylum seekersYeah, I mean there's something that likethe reason my family is here is because we were able tolike my grandpa got drafted into the Taiwanese armyand he was like no and because we were Taiwanesewe were able to get to the US but it's likeyou know if you were from South Vietnam sometimes they let you in
01:56:38if you were from Taiwan they would let you in but likeGod help you if you're from like Indonesia or just like fromI mean sometimes you get people from China but it's likeyeah theI don't know the way that justall of these people's lives are being used as geopolitical toolsand then you know once they get here they're being used as justsort of internal American political tools
01:57:02Yeah, it's just as much people getting killed at the borders and until we fucking makeborders go away like the stuff is just going to keep happeningandPeople are getting boarded onto buses and sent to DCbecause Governor Abbott thinks this is the way that he can run for presidentYeahby being the most racistxenophobic guy in town
01:57:24and these folks are just political toolsandit's devastatingandit'sit's really also kind ofamazing to be able to then also just likehang out with them and break bread with them
01:57:48and realize that we're all sort of fightingthis mess togetherYeah and I thinkI don't know likewe do a lot of episodes here that are incredibly depressing butyeah like I guess yeah it isn't I guess importantas a thing to sort of end on is it like yeah I know like wewe can take care of these people like we can
01:58:14if we actually fight this together we can beat these guyslike weI don't know like it isactually possible like these all of the things that we're talking aboutlike this stuff didn't use to exist it's not it's not somethingthat inherently has to exist and we can make it not exist againI think thethe response that we've had in DC has been
01:58:41a reallylike I can't say it enough how beautiful it isthat we have agroup of like over 200 volunteersthat have stepped upand we've been able to raise a remarkable amount of moneyand we've had like you know little kidssell cookies to support our efforts
01:59:05andit's really heartwarmingand people using their neighborhoodlistservs to you know get donationsof car seats to be able to you knowmake sure that when we're you know helping familieswe can make sure that like the little kiddos are able to liketravel in car seats safely and all of that and
01:59:29we've been able to and we're doing more of thisof like building relationships with folks around the country that are doing similar workor you know if someoneis taking a bus to New Yorkand it you know breaks down in Phillywe're able to mobilize other volunteers in Philly to just likemake sure that folks are like fine and okay and likeget on their next bus and that is
01:59:53amazing and beautiful and to meI think the thing that makes me optimistic and like madat the same time is thatthere are both at the federal leveland local levels just billions and billionsand billions of dollars that are being investedintosolutions that are based on
02:00:17like detentionsurveillance, border militarizationwhengod like if instead we justdevoted those billions and billions and billions of dollars into making sure thatlike when folks arrive here they can havelike a comfy bedto like lay in at night and have food
02:00:41and be able to like support their familiesI meanit kind of sounds revolutionarybut it's just like it's so simpleand there is such a concerted effort to dothe opposite of the most basichey welcome tomy town how can I welcome you
02:01:05there was if I remember my likeimmigration history right they usedthey had this program in the UK wherefor a while where they would bring okay you'd have a familythey're coming to the US and they get paired with a British family and the British family wouldlike show them the ropes and it worked really well everyone loved it and theystopped doing it because they once they brought people in like that they couldn'tdeport them because the entire community would show up and just be like no
02:01:29and so they stopped doing it and it's likethat's a problem like that's the problem that like people are thenwelcomed and loved by their communitieslike that shouldn't be a problem that we have to solve that should be likeoh this is a resounding successyeah instead it's like it's like actually living in a betterworld actually having a community where people care for each otherwhere people take care of each other and where people love each other or people will fight
02:01:53for each other like that is something that the state seizes a threatandI don't know I guess it's thisother thing where it's likethe better world we could be living inis literally being builtyou can walk down the street and you can seepeople taking care of each other and then it's like
02:02:17here is the state who's the only thing that they want to dois just make everyone's lives increasingly miserableyeahlike is it that's hardto just say hey likefolks want to be able to just like livethat's it it's all they want to be able to dois just like live
02:02:41they want to be able to work they want to be able to supporttheir family they want to be able to be safethey want to be able to likeeat good food and have fun andthe state is doing everything butallowing that to beand our like mutual aid workis helping folks navigate and do
02:03:05as much of that as possibleyeah I think I think that's a good note to end onunless you have anything else I don't think socool okay so where can people goto find and support this work and where can they go to likegive money if they want to or actually help volunteer it tooyeah so we havea link tree that has
02:03:29all of the linksto support us in all the ways so if you're here in DCand you want to be able tosupport or if you want to donatewe have really coolt-shirts that we sell that say melt icethat are designed by one of our volunteersand so it's the link
02:03:53tree is like the link treeslash DCTXsolidarity 22 andif you follow that link you will be able tosee all about our workyou know get the demands that we havefor Mayor Bowser support us in person financiallywhatever it is all of that lives there
02:04:17and yeah we will put the link in the descriptioncool that'd be great I'll make sure you have ityeah thank you and yeah thank youthank you so much for joining us thank you for having meyeah and this has been Nick and Appen here go help your neighborsand go make the state not be able to prevent you from doing thatwelcome to it could happenon the internet the only podcast
02:04:57I'm Robert Evans and todaywe've got St. Andrew back in the studiowe don't actually have a studio that was a liethat was a lie that you'd think I was coolerSt. Andrew how are you doing today I am goodI'm good Andrew dropped the saint oh shitI'm sorry you're right you're right you're rightwe should probably yes I'm sorry that's good
02:05:21because I'm the longest seatso okay if I understandCatholicism right that means you undidsomeone else's three miraclesI know nothing what Catholicismokay well there you gopretty sure you havethis is a Protestant background here
02:05:42my knowledge of Catholicism is that to be a saintyou have to do a couple of miracles but the last one is always something to dowith being dead like they just decide that whatever you dowhen you're a corpse is like oh it's a miracleoh CatholicismAndrew what are we talking about todaytoday we're going to be talking about something thatI would say more traditional Catholics
02:06:05may have some disagreements withChristian Christians may have some disagreements with and that isthat is our entire audience is thatthis podcast is completelylistened to by the Pope's Swiss guards100% Vatican citywe have deep penetration in the Vaticanthat's an interesting choice of words
02:06:27considering the end of Pride Month but you knowwe'll allow italright so what are we talking aboutwe'll be talking about human evolutionparticularly as it pertains tohuman cooperationthe origins of human cooperationI love this shit
02:06:50I think that people tend to emphasize human competition a lotbecause Catholicism wants us to believethat we are these competitivedog-eat-dog I don't know where that term came fromby the way I've always been curious about thatas far as I know dogs don't eat each otherbut it's an interesting phraseand I think it's kind of apt here
02:07:14there's this idea that we're justcompeting all the time that we're fightingto survive over the fittestand that only the strong survivewhen people talk casually aboutprehistoric times it representsthe stories that we even told about itand as a result it tends to be very
02:07:38competitive, highly patriarchal, highly violentjust constant interpersonal violencethat was a justification used to reinforcethe state or the state of natureit's everybody against themselvesand so as a result a state has to be introducedwe trade some of our freedoms for the safetythat the state is supposed to provide
02:08:02but as far back as Proudhonand really even further because let's be realit's a very European conceptit's not something that can be projected towards all human societiesand all human philosophies but Proudhon was one of the firstwhite guys I guess in his time periodand in his field to really challengethat notion with mutually
02:08:26de facto evolution of course thestudies and stuff that he would have donethe knowledge that he would have shared would have been known and studiedby people before him but he was one of the firstto really bring all that knowledge together into one placeand then years laterAmerican anthropologist and primatologistwas born I mean she wasn't born that but she became
02:08:50that later in life in 1946that would be Sarah Blaffer-Hurdyand so she made many major contributionsto evolutionary psychology and sociobiologyespecially pioneering our modern understandingof the evolutionary basis of female behaviourin both non-human and human primatesin 2002 she was recognized as
02:09:14one of the 50 most important women in scienceand in 2014 mothers and otherstogether with her earlier workHurdy the National Academies Award for Scientific Reviewingin honour of her insightful and visionary synthesisof a broad range of data and conceptsfrom across the social and biological sciencesto the importance of biosocial processes
02:09:38among mothers, infants and other social actorsin forming the evolutionary crucible of human societyin essence she got an award becauseshe recognized the fact that the relationship between mother and childand how humans raise their childrenis vitalin our evolutionand in our becoming human
02:10:02that's fascinatingI didn't know any of thatwe do recognize, now in our science we recognize more and moreprimatologists at leastthat other great apes ratherthey do carethey share and they empathizea lot more than we may have originally thought
02:10:26but humans still winat the caring competitionbecause of something like official anatomyand how we structure societyis probably one of the more pro-socialof the other great apesit's interestingI've read stuff about empathy in apes
02:10:50but it's always in the context of the ones we taught sign language tothe one I'm remembering particularly isthe one on the name the scientist gaveCocoher reaction to 9-11because it was on the tv or some shitbut I never hear emphasized the same degreeor maybe I just have not
02:11:14sought it out but it's lessdiscussed as evidence of empathywithin the societiesthat they built would be the term for themtheir communities, whatever you want to call themI was interesting as wellCoco was a gorillaand regarding sign language is interesting
02:11:38video essay talking about sign languagebut Coco was a gorillaand humans are closely related to two groupsthere was being bonoboschimpanzeesand we tend to look at chimpanzeeswhich tends to be more violentand people use them as an example
02:12:02despite the fact that we have millions of years of evolutiondiverging from chimpanzeeslast common ancestor was like 6-7 million years agothat's a bit distantI've been talking 5 or 6 yearsand I consider us pretty far apartyeahand then on top of that
02:12:26there was enough time for some serious divergencesto start happeningthe fact thathumans walk uprightand chimpanzees still have that ball-like gateit's actually something thatI learned recently, evolved on two separate occasionsthat being that particular kind of knuckle walk
02:12:50yeahI just found that kind of fascinatingbesides the pointwe tend to look at chimpanzees as our closest examplebut bonobos which are a lot more socialI would say a lot more cooperativeand less violent than chimpanzeeswe actually share a lot of similarities
02:13:14in terms of our behaviourand they're also one of the few animal speciesthat have been recognised as having sex for pleasureand not just procreationso good for themwhen we talk about evolution, a lot of it has been shaped by Darwineven though science is not about figuresand big figures and their big ideas
02:13:38but stillseeing as Darwin was the one who really introducedthe idea of competitionthe idea of all thatin evolution, those sorts of notionswhich came really out of his timein industrialising competitive worldit really overstates the role of competition
02:14:02as a driving force in evolutionwhen in realitycooperation was a far more potent forcewhen it comes to pro-social human tendenciesdoing things to benefit othersthat's what pro-social isDr. Hurdy really comes downon the cooperation side of things in her book
02:14:26Mothers and Others where she brings together all this evidencethat we are basically descendantsof the alien species of cooperative breederscooperative breeding is a practiceamong some animal speciesother mammals do it but I think we are one of the fewwe only create apes who do itand there are other primates who do it
02:14:50other monkeys who do it but none closely related to uscooperative breedingis basically the practice or the reproductive strategywherealloparental care is providedto the offspring ofthe children of certain parents in the groupalloparental care is
02:15:14basically the practice ofit's basically non-directparent carecare provided by individuals other than the parentsby having thatnetwork in place by havingthe process of alloparenting in place is how we were able to beso successful as a species in our distribution
02:15:38in ourestablishing ourselves in all these different environmentsbecause humans spread fairly rapidly around the globeand we've established ourselves and created culturesin all sorts of unique environmentsand inhonestly we are the most successfulout of the primates in that regard so kudos to us
02:16:02and that is because of cooperative breedingdid you just woo Robert?yeah of courseyes likewe had to ratio the rest of the primates you knowvery very based of usliterallywe're ratioing everything on this goddamn planet
02:16:26except for chickenscorn is definitely ratioed usfor surecows too mancows, chickens andthere's one otherfor sureI mean there's so many different species of goats
02:16:50and there's only one species of humanswhat's the population of dogs?actually every time I look it's less than you'd expectwhat?900 millionthat's ridiculousI want more, give me more dogs900 million is like rookie numbers
02:17:14it's like a couple of billion just based onyeah every time I look it up I recall being likeoh there's not as many dogs as I thought there wereI guess they went cooperative for yearssure not and only 400 million catsthose are rookie numbers catscome on catsit's actually probably
02:17:38it's probably for the bestmy dad always says that we need more dogs in the worldto fix the fucked up humansI feel a lot of pressure to put on dogsthat's completely fairI feel like that's really our jobto fix fucked up humansdogs for that
02:18:02I mean cats and dogs are pulling a lot of weight as it iswhat are ferrets doing?what are ferrets doing?what are ferrets doing?fucking ferretsand like fucking goldfishwhat have they been doing lately mother fuckersget off your asses and stop us from killing people
02:18:26goldfish stop the war in Ukraine goldfish come onI mean to get to cut goldfish some slackthey're busy dying because people don't want to take care of thempeople treat them like house plantsI didn't think we would have Andrew being a goldfishapologist on this podcastbut here we areI don't think goldfish have committed any war crimes
02:18:50not that I know ofthey haven't stopped any war crimes eitherthis is my personal guilt talkI've neglected my fair sharespeaking of cross species cooperationwhen I was younger and living in Texasthere was this one day we're out in our backyard areaand we see walking through the alley behind our houses
02:19:14this massive turtle probably 300-400 poundseasily like 3 or 4 feetin circumference on his shelljust like an enormous animaljust like strolling around the neighborhoodwe see in Texas wildso we try to corral himwe can't lift him he's massive
02:19:38but we corral him into our yard areaand give him some cucumbers and eventually his person comes aroundand the guy explains that when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came outa lot of people bought a bunch of different kinds of turtlesthinking they were good pets but they didn't realizethat there's a lot of the turtles that get soldand they smell bad all the timehe had adopted this turtle and it lived in his yard
02:20:02and he said like, yeah he's really strongI have a good fence but every 2 or 3 yearshe'll just walk through itmost of the time he chooses to stay in the yardbut every couple of years I'm just gonna go on a walkand he's like yeah he just breaks through the fenceit takes him about a secondno
02:20:26is this animeand no this is not my weeb coming out storyI have not read or viewed much in that regardbut I started back here recentlyand in the first episode they establishedthat all these people are coming to Tokyofor like some kind of fighting competitionand the way that they established those people are dangerous
02:20:50and so they're in the process of being put to deathlike one person is beinginjected or something, one person is being electrocutedand one person is being hung and they all manage to break freeafter they dieand break off the prison easilythis one guy he was imprisoned underwaterhe breaks out of the underwater prison
02:21:14and swims several miles up to the surfaceand it's likefor some reason that turtle breaking out of hisenclosure whenever he choosesjust reminded me oflike they're trying to establish his power levelshe's too powerful to be containedand he's probably still alive because they live forever
02:21:38which is again why they're bad petsyeah because what did you do about slaverywell he may not have been around for slaverybut what are you going to do the next timethey're slavery turtle, are you going to stop itI don't think so, you're a turtleis that something you should be telling me Robertwe've all been paying attention to the Supreme Court
02:22:02it's not going to go well in the futureRobertleave the turtles out of thisif they stop the Supreme Court I will stop shitting on the turtlesyou're just doing that meme from 2020 where people were likeI gave up my plastic straws for the turtleswhere are they nowthat was a thing, yeah it was bad
02:22:26I don't remember thatwellI will say that I meanat least we're cooperative breedersour tendency of cooperative breeding tendencyprobably has something to do with the fact that weadopt other species as petsand as members of our family
02:22:50because you don't really see other animals doing thatI think there's some kind offish or crustacean or somethingthat keeps another speciesas livestockthere's a couple of species that do versions of that for sureright but I meanwe love our dogs and our cats
02:23:14our ferrets and our snakes and our tarantulasour ferrets, question markpeople are trying todomesticate foxes so we could love them toothere are peoplewho keep big catslike caimanswe just want to take all these creatures
02:23:38and we want to love themI don't know what that says about usother than the fact that our cooperative natureextends beyond the boundariesof us as a specieswe inherited very high levels ofmutual tolerance, of perspective takenand other pro-social impulses
02:24:02from ancestors who use our parental careand provisioning of the young to surviveI mean we didn't inventcomplex cooperation, our pre-human ancestors didbut we elaborated upon ityeahit's always interesting to me to think about thatI think back up to when the first time I ever went
02:24:26to a war zone was Ukrainewe were in this little town called Devkaand there was this big, the way they do the heatingthey have these vents going underneaththe houses to supply them with gasand there's this bigcentral box thingand there's a few of them in the town
02:24:50I guess it's like thenexus of housesor whatever heating systemso it's warmand when the war started a bunch of people fledand they left pets behindsometimes they didn't have a choicethere were cats and dogs
02:25:14and people who lived thereturned that little junction box intoa cat and dog sanctuaryso there were dozens and dozens of puppies and kittensliving together in this big heating boxin the middle of this being taken care ofby all these local ladies who would scrounge up foodevery morning and make sure they were all taken care of
02:25:38and it was interesting because you could see all these cats and dogsliving together and all these people coming together to take care of animalsthey didn't knowand all of the people were doing their level bestto murder the folks like a mile and a half awayand vice versaso we contain multitudes of human beingsthat's part of it too
02:26:02the fact that we are so eager toshare in other's emotional statesto empathizeand the way that we are so eager toand give and share with those who are unrelated to usI meanthere are a lot of species that do not raise their young at alland they are those that do
02:26:26and try to kill other people's youngand they are those that do and just take care of their own youngbut weeven in this super individualisticcapitalist world we still find ways to look out for each otherand I think that's beautifulof coursecooperative breeding doesn't mean that there is constant
02:26:49like Barney the Dinosaurlike cooperationall the timethere still can be competitionbutbehaviorally and atomically and emotionallymodern humans are cooperative breedersand the crazy part is
02:27:13those three traitsbehavior, anatomy and emotionthose traits do not evolve simultaneouslyso for example our physical featureslike our eyes and the fact that our eyeswe can see the whites in our eyesand that way we can put ourselvesin other people's perspectives and that kind of thing
02:27:37you know the fact thatwe are prone to sharing our smilesand the fact thatyou know our vocal cords have such rangewe should be able to communicate so many different thingswhile these are hallmarks ofthe fact thateven before
02:28:01our super big brains developedwe were already getting these traits that would have helped usin cooperationbut I wonder a lot of the time though becausea lot of these traits were developed before languageit's like what was the first word of humanitywhat was the first sentencewhat was the first thing we said
02:28:25and how did other people react when the person said itI could imagine thatit was something that developed independentlyon multiple different occasionsin different placesbut I still wonder like whatthose first conversations might have been aboutyeah I mean I think a lot of them probably would have been arguments
02:28:49with other people who didn't want us to do wordswho were ultimately rightyou know if onlyyeahI don't know it's interestinglike we just did a couple of episodes aboutthe history of gynecologyand one of the things that we talked about at the start
02:29:13was like the prehistory of medicinewhich likely began in an organized wayby like likely the first people practicing medicinein any way were pregnant women and women who had been pregnantand were trying to help each other survive pregnancyand I wouldn't be surprised if thatI mean food gathering is obviously the other onebut I wouldn't be surprised if like language started
02:29:37as a way to try and like communicateand better survive makingbabies because it's like super dangerousand also entirely necessaryand something that kind of particularly benefits from communicationI don't know I wouldn't be shocked if that was like the first thing we talked aboutso to speakthat makes sense
02:30:01what I'm also thinking as well and it just occurred to meit is probably possible that the first languagewas not spoken languageI feel like it may have been like a form of sign languageyou know because you know we have these handsand people tend to talk with their hands sooh yes I thinkhypothesis is that we use our hands to communicate things
02:30:25before we started speakingI mean the fact that we were able to teach apesother apes to use sign languageI think that's a good sign thatwe can learn to communicate without faceyeah I mean it's also probably how our communicationwith dogs started because that's one of the thingsthat makes them special is they're pretty much alone in animals
02:30:49and that they like instinctively grow upunderstanding that when we gesture at them it means stufflike if you point dogs will look where you're pointing a lot of the timerather than at you which is like a rare trait in animalsso yeah I think you're probably right on the money therehuh I didn't even think about thatthat's trueand of course that makes it fun because you could always fake them out and throw something
02:31:13stupidAnderson doesn't fall for that shitshe does not fall for that shitI can't fake her outthat's probably why she's the woman of the housepretending to throw stuff at a dogand then it goes running and then it realizes that you faked itlike that's the best
02:31:37I can't relate because if I try to do that she looks at me likeoh okaySophie where you need to go is Corgi Kahnin San Francisco one of these yearswell they let Anderson in even though she's only part Corgithere's nothing but acceptance at Corgi Kahnacceptance and hundreds of Corgi'sfrolicking in the surf in rules
02:32:01she'll try to herd them allthey are all trying to herd all of themthey are all very excitedand don't know what to do with each otherso as the book progressesHardy spends some time talking about how we are similar toand different from other great apesit's really about how we use eye contact
02:32:25and smiles to bondeven from a young agewe tend to hear about itbut not that babies cries are soattuned toward attentionand capturing the attention of peoplethese are all likebastards
02:32:49yeahI was a screamer apparentlyI used to rell ballin fact one story I was told was thatsomeone called and was likesomething happened to Andrew and my parents were likenah he's just cryingthere's like three o'clock in the morning
02:33:13butI mean look at me nowI'm balling for justiceone interestingtreat that humans havethey tend to like share our babies with othersother great apesthey tend to have constant contact
02:33:37they don't let others touch their children at allprobably because other motherstend to want to kill their kidsor cause harm to their kidsso they tend to be very protective of themwhereas our parentshave not only shared our young with othersbut our parents have also been
02:34:01breastfeeding the young of othersand masticatingand passing hard to digest foods to infantsI'm mixing up my terms a bitin terms of what is a primateand what is an apewhateverbut momma sets and tamarinds
02:34:25which are calitricidsthey are alsocooperative breeders and they're very fast breeders as wellrapid, rapid breedersso good for themit's also typical of our species we tend to be very fast breedersand that's why we really showed all the other great apeswhat I find interesting as well
02:34:49is that we be able to breed so rapidlydespite the fact that ourdo you remember the word for like carrying a childI'm just blocking right nowI think you're thinking of the incubation periodthat's what you're trying to think ofyeah but that's such athat feels like a very dehumanizing way of putting it
02:35:13I'll just say the carrying a babyand the costs that it includeson a human's bodyit is like a whole thingit's a whole thingfor people of having so many in one lifetimedespite the costs necessary to raise each otherother animals
02:35:37they have like maintenance seasonsthey have set amounts of children they could have in their lifetimebut nowe could justthere are stories of women who have had dozens of kidswhich is unfortunate circumstancesbecause in those cases it tends to benot necessarily willing
02:36:01but the fact that we are capableof having many kidslends toward the importanceof having support systems in placebecause other animals don't tend to have more childrenthey can care forif that is the care for childrena lot of them just eat their kids if they can't care for them
02:36:25exactlyyeahwhereas we kind of evolved to have support systemsin place speaking of eating babiesthere is a dark side to thatbecause even thoughwe tend to have these childrenwe are supposed to have these support networks
02:36:49to care for themthe practice of infanticideis actually something that has a long historyin human practicewhere if a mother determinesthat they are not able to raise their childthey don't have thesupport systems in place to care for that child
02:37:13different practices would typically beused todeal with that childand that's of coursewhat makes theanti-abortion stances so inhumanebecausethe whole reason
02:37:37that abortion is so importantis because it protects the autonomyand the agencyof people who can carry childrenand yetin this world it continues to atomize usand individualize us and separate usand so people have their support networks
02:38:01so weakening our support networksis still expected toand punished heavily if you do not justpump out as many children as you canit's really sickwhen it comes to those support networksmost people are familiar withextended family
02:38:25grandparentsand in fact an infant's survival is significantly affectedby a grandmother's presencewhich is whyhumans tend to live long past theirreproductively viable periodhuman females live after menopause for a pretty long timein comparison to other species
02:38:49andof course their grandmothers and their fatherstheirsisters and godparentsand really a lot of othercultural systems in placeeven polyandrous matingI think I mentioned that in a previous
02:39:13episodethere are also forms oflocal, flexible residence patternswhere you always have kin aroundto take care of your infantsandI would say that it's kind of toughbecause a lot of people these days
02:39:37strugglewith their extended familiesit's very much coolI love you but I'm glad we live in a separatekind of situationextended families have a lot of prunes and conswhich is why we actually findinteresting examples of chosen families
02:40:01throughout different societiesand also even there's some evidencethat that might have been the case in the past as wellwhere unrelated people would form groups togetheras one exampleI remember reading aboutand of course this can't necessarily be extended to prehistoric timesbut I've seen it in multiple different hunter-gatherer situations
02:40:25butwhere you have this clan system in placeand you canno matter how far you travel you can expect toreceive care from members of your clanin North America I think it was like the Bayer clanand the Elk clan and all these different clansin Aboriginal Australia
02:40:49they also had different groups as welland so people were able to interact with each other across huge distancesand settle in different placesand connect with others to find kineven though they weren't necessarily directly relatedthere's a book calledthat sets it on that I read many many years agothat's about the evolution of human sexuality
02:41:13and how different cultures have looked at thingslike what makes someone a parentand there's all these different attitudesbefore we had the scientific understandingof how babies are conceivedthat we have now there were all these different attitudeslike this idea and I forget the namebut they still exist somewhere in Latin America
02:41:37and their belief was essentially thatwhen you got someone pregnantthat was the start of the processand then after conceptionthe person with the baby would go around and pickI remember thatthe idea was that when they fucked that person'sessence gets added to this forming child
02:42:01socially it means that for that communitychildren weren't seen as having one fatherthey were seen as having a bunch of fathersall of whom were responsible for teaching the kid and raising itwhich is a very sensible way to organize your little societyis to ensure thatthe kids coming up have as manyadults who are responsible for them as possible
02:42:25which is broadly speaking the best thing you can do for kidsis to have a bunch of adults be interested in their successexactly becauseif you have one of the best huntersin the village raising your childand you have the best craftsmen in the village raising your childand you have the best fishers in the village raising your childthat child is going to have a very well-rounded education
02:42:50and is going to be able to learn a lot of different skills that they're going to needthat's just one of the many positive effectsthat they give us on the development of a child's world viewand sense of self, their concept of self and otherstheir concept of empathythe concept of independencehow they view the world as eitherdangerous or insecure or giving
02:43:14and welcomingand so I mean we are so used to thisnuclear family world view which is these independenthouseholdsthat we don't consider the fact thathaving a broad range of peopleraising them is actually crucialto their personal development as children
02:43:38to their human development reallyhaving all those different perspectives and stuff in placeand I mean that's part of whatHurdy talks about especially in her final chapterthat being howin modern timesthe accumulation of propertythe emergence of patriarchy
02:44:02even the stuff in the post-industrial eraall of these would prompt a shiftfrom cooperative breedingfrom cooperation between groupsto war between groups especially with propertybecause when you have property you have a needto hold on to that propertyand the whole idea of property is
02:44:26you and yours the exclusion of all othersright you knowand soat the end of her bookshe also speculates that we might be losing our art of naturebecause we arecontinually evolvingbut she wonders what might the potential evolutionary effects be
02:44:50for your rearing children who are not livingin intimate contact with a variety of caregiversespecially within those first two years of lifeinfants, rare and responsiblecare-taking relationships develop innate potentialsfor empathy, mind-reading and cooperationand collaborationwith the outcome of complex interactions between both genes
02:45:14and natureso the question is how can these innate potentialsremainmore than potentials you know I meanbecause the development of them is far from guaranteeda lot of children these days are raised without extensive social contactI mean even in the year of Covidwhere a lot of children are isolated at home
02:45:38especially the height of the pandemicI really wonderif we will see like a mockedlike distinct generation of likewithin a range of two yearsof children who justaren't as socializedbecause for those first two years of their life
02:46:02they were kind of isolatedbecause there's thislack of empathy, lack of cooperative skillsand lack ofattachment thatmay cause us to miss the markit's really traumabut trauma doesn't necessarily stop people from
02:46:26continuing that trauma from reproducing and carrying that onand so I really am really curious as to see what the effects that might beand also what we can do to try tocurb that negative impactthe last question she asks is reallywill humans in the futurestill be empatheticand curious about the emotions of others
02:46:54because of our ancient heritage or kuno kiaand I'm paraphrasing here or will these systemsthat we have in placeevolve us ina more Machiavelliandirection? Well I guess that'sthe mystery that we're all going to get to watch unfoldin pieces at least over the course of
02:47:16the rest of our lives and everyone else's livesit is I don't knowI think the overall archivistspeaks more to the things about us that are goodto increasing cooperation because that is likethe story of the last couple hundredthousand years of human evolution although at the same timesome of that a lot of that cooperation
02:47:40has gone towards fucked up ends as wellI mean all of the good and the bad things happening right noware one way or the other examples of cooperationit'syeahI don't know let's hope things get betterI hope so too and I think we can do more than hopeI think we can act
02:48:04yeah we're going to have I mean like that's the thingright like part of how specifically in the United StatesI mean but internationally too the right has gottenso much over the last really five or six yearsin particular is cooperationacross borders and across like ideological differenceslike there's there has been like tremendoussustained cooperation that has allowed them to amass
02:48:28power the power that they're currently exercisingand the only thing that's going to actually counter thatis the cooperationan organization of a much larger amount of peoplelike there's not that many of those folks it's why they've had to be so organizedthere's a lot more of us butwe also can't stop fighting about shit so it isit is like we are going to have to evolve in real
02:48:50time to cooperate better with one another and more effectivelyin order to in order towrench the wheel backthat's trueanyway let's not lose hopeand let's not lose your plugables Andrewyeah yes you canfollow me on Twitter I don't have this course seen true
02:49:14and find me on YouTube at Andrewism hell yeahhell yeah well folksthat's going to be all for us here today and it could happen hereuntil next time gohappen somewhere elsehey we'll be back Monday with more episodesevery week from now until the heat death of the universeit could happen here is a production of CoolZone Media
02:49:38for more podcasts from CoolZone Media visit our websitecoolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio AppApple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcastsyou can find sources for it could happen here updated monthlyat coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening
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