Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 51

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

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

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Oh boy, it's 9-eleven, but a day after. It's 9-12. You will be listening to this on 9-12 after you have finished whatever it is that you do on 9-11, either either be sad or tell jokes or nothing at all. It's all fine. There's no wrong thing to do when you're thinking about a day where a really fucked up thing happened.

But that's actually untrue. There is one wrong thing to do, and we're going to talk about the wrong thing today. Because most people, I think, think back to the day after 9-11 as everybody was out of their minds with grief and fear and saying some really fucked up shit and generating a kind of fury that acted as propulsion and justification for a lot of very, very bad things. And it's not in general a time that we should look back on with particular pride or certainly, what's the word I'm looking for here, nostalgia. Everyone that is except for Glenn Beck. Now, James, we've got James Stout here. Chris, hey, Chris. What do y'all know about Glenn Beck? Because James, you are, this is controversial to say,

but I think we should rip the band-aid off. British. And Chris, you're very young, so I'm wondering how much do you know about Mr. Beck? He was like the, my memory of him, he was kind of like the, well, I don't know, er is not quite the right word, but he was like, he was like the guy in sort of like right wing shit head like punditry for a while. My memory of him, he was like, he was like a slightly more put together Alex Jones. Like he had like the weird pin boards and shit and like, is this the right guy? Yeah, he's Alex Jones with a budget in terms of kind of the space he fills. James, did you know, did you catch much of him?

No, so my engagement with Glenn Beck is mostly through like teaching American history classes and trying to explain like the explosion in lies and bullshit and hate that immediately follows 9-11. Yeah, but no, I've never really heard his stuff. Yeah, Glenn Beck, he's doing radio shit and stuff before 9-11. By the time he actually comes on the scene, it's a few years after 9-11 and he gets a show on Fox News. And Glenn is, you know, I watched him every night. My parents always watched him. My dad considered him to be like a really good historian, which is bleak.

But he was a unique sounding figure. So when Glenn Beck comes onto the stage, right, the biggest dude in right wing media is still Rush Limbaugh. But Rush has kind of taken a back seat in the last couple of years, especially right after 9-11, to guys like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. You know, and those are kind of, they are kind of like they are powerhouses in right wing media. And then you've got, well, those guys are on TV. You've got this cast of people who are like bargain basement discount Rush Limbaugh's on the radio and they're all kind of waiting in the wings for their chance to be the next big TV hero.

And those guys include people like, like Glenn Beck and also folks like Michael Savage. There's a couple of me, a lot of maniacs that you probably have not heard of that we don't need to dredge up. But Glenn Beck kind of sails out of the fever swamps of the right wing media and gets a fucking TV show on Fox News. And in very short order, he is the biggest fucking thing on the network. Fox News is the most popular network in the country and Glenn Beck is their number one host. In 2009, he's pulling in something like 3 million viewers a night. And yeah, he's very, very influential. And this is the point in time.

In 2009, by the way, the other thing that's happened that's big in right wing media circles is Barack Obama has been elected president. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you've got birtherism happening, but in general, I think one good way to think about it is that 9-11 supercharges the right, but in a very like populist way in a because there's this expectation like we talked about in the last episode, this expectation that people are coming back to God because there's been a big disaster. We're going to war and war always benefits, you know, the conservatives and the, you know, the party like we're going to win this war. And that's going to be huge for us. And you also have like just this this sense because Bush becomes the most popular president anyone can ever having that the the tide of history is with conservatism,

you know, in the immediate wake of 9-11. And then that all goes to shit because conservatives have terrible ideas for everything. And they launched two disastrous wars by 2009. There's not a lot of people who are going to like admit in public. No, I think they'll both those wars were good ideas that were handled well, right? Even the people who were who were real bullish about that stuff are like, well, you know, they didn't do this right or that right. Or it's impossible to win in that part of the world. And, you know, that's the I heard different versions of that from from different family members and stuff.

But there's this this real sense of agreement. And in the wake of Bush, like it's it's kind of taken for granted because about how disastrous his presidency had been that he was not, you know, it was not going to be a Republican who won that election. But the fact that it is Barack Obama, a black guy, they lose their goddamn minds. I think they'd been ready for I think even they would have been fine with Hillary Clinton. Obviously, they would have like got nuts on her like they did on Bill. But like, I think they would have I don't think that would have caused them to go crazy the way that Obama did. And it is it is not wrong to compare the impact to 9 11 in a lot of ways because it's this massive shock that shakes the center of their world that they view is an attack as an assault on like white middle class Americans.

And the shockwaves of that I mean, we're still dealing with them. But one of the things that's that's happening here is that after 9 11, they had the sense that history is with us, momentum is with us. And after Obama gets elected, you see the conservative movement get much more insular and much more conspiratorial and much more focused on like grievance and anger and revenge. Because they they know they're the nothing's going to bring back the people. So there's there's kind of nothing but but vengeance. And Beck is the guy who's going to tap most effectively into this feeling this feeling of fear and this need to feel like you're like you were right after 9 11 when it felt like everything was surging forward in the right direction. And so in 2009, he launches what he calls the we surround them campaign. Now, the we in this, I think is supposed to be conservatives and them is the government. But I think you can assume other, you know, if you think about the urban rural divide in this country, there's another meaning to that sort of thing.

Now, this this is a series of segments and specials on Beck show that grew very popular. So popular, in fact, that a lot of local right wing organizations start hosting viewing parties. This becomes like the earliest stirrings of the Tea Party movement, right? All of these right wing radio stations and stuff, these local talk radio stations and other organizations are holding viewing parties for to watch Glenn Beck talk about, you know, his do his we surround them act. And I'm going to play a clip for you now from one of these viewing parties. We're going to play a couple of clips. This is from one filmed by a talk radio station in Fort Wayne, Georgia. And yeah, it's it's it's something else. All right, so I want to I want to play this for you. I think it's a fascinating artifact and how the radio host chooses to introduce the event is noteworthy as is the man's appearance. Yeah, with 600 sick freaks watching Glenn Beck on Fox News for 912 project. It's amazing. So what?

It's interesting to me. I think it's it's kind of worth going over a couple of things there because that doesn't seem like a lot. But the fact that he he describes the guy, the people in there is sick freaks and and and like we're sick freaks. But like kind of taking pride in that that's what he assumes liberals would call them for watching Glenn Beck. You can see a shade in this of a lot of liberals because they're dumb were taken by surprise when like Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a basket of deplorables and they immediately adopted that name for themselves. No, you see the stirrings of it here, right? Like this is this is what the movements turned into. You're taking pride in the fact that you're outnumbered and despised. Also the 912 project. I'm intrigued. Oh, yes, that's that is that is coming. We're building to that. So anyway, we get some rock and guitar licks. Just just some some of the best preloaded rights free guitar music I've ever heard.

And then we pan into this very full conference room. There's like 600 fucking people in this thing. And they are as far as I can tell, all white. It is certain that the only people they talk to when they do like because, you know, the camera goes around to like get people's statements on the event. The only people who are featured on camera are white, like 100 percent of them. And I'm going to play a clip from that. Now, I'm glad you're doing this. I'd like to get our Constitution back. I love you for doing it. We're all behind you. Thank you. Hi, Glenn. We are Jackie and Bill Vettker. We're from Angle, Indiana. And we would like to thank you that you are helping us, we, the people, to take back our America. Thanks. You're the man, Glenn. What you're doing is great for America and an encouragement to all of us who are fed up with the federal government. Now, it's impossible. I know. I have not seen since I was a child. James, James, you might die. Yeah, there are a couple of extinct kinds of white guy in that video. The very last of them died to COVID when they cut a hole in the middle of their mask and went to a Lubies.

Yes. Now, here's the thing. I want to acknowledge something that is impossible to deny, which is that the fact that we are laughing at them in this way is part of why they got so angry and put Trump in office, right? Part of why liberal tears is a thing. Part of why there's so much focus on this desire of hurting the enemy. But also, they just all look impossibly American. These are the people I used to see in Barcelona from a hundred yards away. People would be like, how do you know an American? My friends would be like, first of all, you've come dressed as a fucking tree. Secondly, look at yourself. Some of the people who raised me are not. I grew up around these people. I grew up with these people. I am of these people. I think I wear better shirts. But it is like, you see in this, these people who feel like, and that's kind of the thing they're communicating, something has gone wrong with the country. And the thing that's gone wrong is they are looking out and people don't look like them. And in fact, people are looking at them like they look weird and people are making fun of their ways and their customs.

And this has taken them by surprise and they're extremely angry about it and seeing a black man as president, which is the least anyone could look like them. Barack Obama, many flaws. 2009, there was not many cooler looking dudes than Barack Obama. You have to understand, the bar is so low here that a reasonably well dressed person is dropping a nuclear weapon on six cavemen. It is chaotic. The show ends with Beck because they're watching Glenn Beck on a fucking projector and it ends with him near tears. He would cry on his show constantly, telling everybody there that they were all going to meet back together in six months to find some ways in which they'd managed to add some 912 energy to their lives. And we get to this more, but the thing he's saying is that the day after 911, we were the best version of ourselves as a country. Everyone was so godly and so loving and so united. And that's the thing that we need to get to deal with the horror of Barack Obama being the president. And obviously, the other thing happening, I don't want to be unfair here. It's not just that they're scared about Barack Obama. This is 2009. The economy has just completely shattered a fucking brick. The housing market is through the goddamn floor. Some actually scary things are happening too. It's just that they're kind of grafting all of them onto this specter that is Obama, you know? Anyway, yeah, so after this, we pan out to widespread applause in this very full room and then we cut to interviews. This time, I know everyone's going to be really excited here. There's a baby.

It's pretty cute. It's a pretty cute baby. This child has my reaction to this. It's so funny. It's so funny. Look at this. Let's get this baby's statement. Just shine it, blind it with a light until it weeps. That's the good stuff. This video has paused on a freeze frame of a guy in a suit that... Oh, they talked to this guy. They call him the best... I'll just play it. I wasn't planning to play this, but I will play it. Sir, you're the best dressed guy here. Did we have a good time today? Yeah, absolutely.

What did you think of the presentation? I thought it was nice. It was nice to get together with a lot of people. It was a great turnout. And I know that so many people still care. That exact kind of person was like the political class of the town I grew up in. These are the people who were like... The things they get up to were like, there was a guy who was taking money from the Sheriff's Department to try to abolish the police so that he could install the Sheriff's Department as the only law enforcement division in this town while he tried to sell... Oh, God. That is the kind of person I like... He has strong Republican city comptroller energy. Yeah. For like a town of 13,000 people.

Yeah, he's dressed much like Ricky Gervais dressed in the original office. He is literally the guy Ricky Gervais is making fun of. Yes, he is. So Beck paired his message of government accountability as he framed it. And this is what we're talking about the 9-12 project which follows we surround them with nine principles and 12 values which if followed would help bring your heart back to the mythical 9-12. This moment in which America was beautiful. We've gone from the 50s like there's this 15-20 year golden era to like we had one great day and if we could just get back to that everything will be fine. So here's the nine principles. Sorry, it's nine principles and 12 values. I want you to hold me accountable if I fuck this up in the future. The nine principles are number one, America is good. Number two, I believe in God and he is the center of my life.

Number three, I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday. Number four, the family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government. I say this a lot, but in the Roman Empire, the father of the family used to be able to execute his wife and children and you're a fool if you think that's not what these people want things to be like. Well, and they're slaves too. That's also very important. The slaves are a critical aspect of this, yes. Number five, if you break the law, you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it. This is, by the way, confusingly a reference to all the people who lost their homes in the housing crash. That's what he's talking about, that they didn't, you know, you can't bail people out.

Number six, I have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results. Number seven, I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable. Number eight, it is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion. And number nine, the government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me. Now, that's fun. There's some interesting things there, including the government can't force me to be charitable. I will, which like the site of that that is something that actually happened on 912 is a bunch of people showed up and volunteered to like at great personal cost because many of them got sick and died to help pull bodies out of the rubble and try to save people, right? And that the government literally did not need to tell people to do that because a bunch of cops actually refused to go do anything at all. Yeah. And the government knew about like, when the government did do something, they put a bunch of firefighters like inside of the range of whist the dust was toxic and then just fucking got them killed.

Yeah. And then spent the next 50, we had to have John fucking Stewart fight for them to get some kind of recompense from the federal government, which credit where it's due is a legitimately cool thing that he helped do. Like, why did it fall upon the daily show guy to ensure that? The guy who was doing transphobic bits at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's you know, didn't Ted Cruz vote against health care benefits for these people? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Which again, it's very funny that like the government can't force me to be charitable. Well, what that actually ends with is people actually volunteering and risking their lives. And then the government, the conservatives in the government callously voting to let them die in agony because like, well, why should I have to pay? All you did was rescue people during our country's darkest hour. Why should I have to pay? Like it's this, it's amazing shit. Now, I'm sure you're curious about those 12 values. They're really boring. Like it's like Boy Scout shit. It's like honesty, reverence, thrift courage.

Like, you know, it's not worth focusing on. The thing I've this entire time, think I've been thinking about this is the exact naming scheme that like, like if you just walked up to someone on the street and like asked him, what are the nine principles and 12 values? Like this, this sounds exactly like like this sounds exactly like what like a like a mid level like a mid level Chinese bureaucrat would name their campaign to like make sure that water restoration is done properly. Like it is the exact naming scheme of like, like campaign style stuff and like fucking like post post Malish China. Yeah, there's a lot to say about that and about Glenn Beck. But you know, so I got that list of 12 principles from Glenn Beck dot com. What I find interesting is that the principles as are up on his website right now, because this is a thing he still gets into every now and again, are somewhat different from the ones that he debuted on the episode of his show in which he introduced the 912 project. And I found the way he worded point eight point eight is it's not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion. I found the way he actually worded that in the show. Very interesting. And I want to play that for you now because it's it's quite a bit different. Do you agree with this? It's not un-American for anyone to disagree with my opinion. But my opinion or others opinions may be anti American anti American rhetoric would be anything that's destructive to the

Constitution and our country as the founders understood it unless you want to change that. There it is. Yeah, there we go. There we go. That's the real good grievance. Yeah. Yeah, I respect your right to say anything unless you're disrespecting the founders, of course. Yeah, which can which can which case I'd like SWAT teams will convince immediately, etc, etc. We are we are editing the wrench mobs. Now, after introducing those principles, he asks his audience to mail him personal photographs so he can put them together into a big we surround them graphic, which you can find if you really want to. It's yeah, it's if you want to get an idea of like the people who were listening to Glenn Beck, that'll give it to you. Now, here's what happens immediately after he gives the email address for people to send this to come. All right, the climate change people are pulling a page from Nazis.

What are your kids learning at school? Yeah, it's it's it's really incredible, right? It's also it's also things like you couldn't do this anymore. Not because you not not not actually because you can't say that about climate change, but because if you tried to say that about the Hitler youth, people would get mad at you. Oh, yeah, no, yeah, you're getting trouble. Oh, yeah, the Hitler youth defenders will be a very, very pro environment. I can hear Tucker Carlson saying that. Yeah, it's it's I just want to share with everyone that man by number five by Bob the builder hit the UK number one spot on September 12th, 2001. Wow.

Yeah, you know what, you know what, James, never forget. And the queen was still alive then she must have loved mombo number five. I bet there was a little bit of Monica by her side. A little bit above the border in the Queen. A little bit of Rita's all she needed. Get it died. Yeah. So the the 912 project as it kind of grew out of the we surround them campaign.

If you kind of I don't know, I found it written online. I can't exactly confirm this, but it seems like it kind of started when Beck took a call on his talk radio show. And this is a little bit a couple of years earlier from a guy named Ed in New Haven, Connecticut, who expressed feeling outnumbered as a conservative on the American political stage, right. And that's that's really like what the the all of this kind of grew out of is this response to the feeling like outnumbered. And I think that's an important thing to understand if you're trying to get to like the thing that the thing that they want to go back to when they talk about wanting to go back to 912 isn't anything to do with the actual terrorist attack. It's the fact that everyone was so frightened that they unthinkingly that they unthinkingly submitted to the right wing that was in power at the time. Right. Yeah, like that's what 912 is to them.

Yeah, like it was it was the last time conservatives were able to like effectively cancel like mass cult like they like the only time canceled culture has ever been real was like the Dixie chicks and they could just do that. Like if you if you didn't start all of your concerts, like if it's like Miley Cyrus didn't go on stage and like say something about the troops, they're getting of a concert, like they would just destroy you and you would never be heard from again. Yeah. Yeah, it was it was literally like legitimately scary to not be unthinkingly pro America and like wildly so and and that's what they want to get back to right is the fear of actually questioning conservative hegemony. So I want to play a clip from the episode in which Glenn Beck first introduces his 912 project to his audience of millions on March 15 2009. Here's how here's how this introduction goes. Hello America. They're waiting.

I'm backstage right now at Fox. I'm getting ready to show you that you are not alone. This this is your country, you're still in control, but it seems today like nobody gets it. Now, that is a fascinatingly blatant statement of white conservative supremacy, right? You're in charge, but nobody gets it. They don't understand that you're supposed to be running things, right? It's it's incredible how blatant it is, but it also like you do have to understand he's speaking to this real frustration. This is like where we get Trump is these millions of people are like, why don't they understand that we're supposed to be in charge?

There's there's an incredibly I don't know if you're going to get to this in like later. There's the next video on the fucking YouTube thing is from vices. Glenn Beck is a conservative in exile after Trump. Oh, yeah. I can chat a little bit about that at the end. I'll do a whole back episode of behind the bastards, but I really I want to keep digging into this. So I'm gonna I'm gonna press play again here. You know, you've lived your life in a responsible way.

You didn't take out a loan that didn't require any kind of proof of income, yet now you're being forced to bail those people out. You've been concerned about this country through the last administration and this administration. If you're like most people, both administrations, it's not about politics. You actually believe in something and you thought for a while there, your politicians did as well. And now you kind of realize, well, maybe maybe they don't. When you come home after a hard day at work, all you want to do is put your feet up. All you want to do is just relax and just watch a little television, catch up with what's happening in the world. But every time you turn that television on, it just seems like the whole world is spinning out of control.

So there's a lot going on there. But I think the thing that is most fascinating to me is that like the way he just blatantly is like cartel violence. It's a problem because it's not safe for our kids to vacation in Mexico anymore. Mexico only exists for spring break. Well, all problems are at their root about Americans, right? Like that's that's what's going on here. The other thing that's interesting to me is like that he throws into like Europe under siege thing, which was like like one of like the big like fascist things in like that period. Like word for word, Europe under siege, like fortress Europe shit.

Yeah, this is when Andy, Andy No started his like no-go zone. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think so. Right around here, maybe a little bit later. Members of my family who are extremely Caucasian live in some of those no-go zones. I lived in Europe in this period. It's just so ridiculous. Yeah, and it's it's incoherent. Like if you look at the specifics of everything because he's yelling about the financial crash because he has to be angry with it because a half of his market is terrified and losing money or has have lost jobs and stuff as a result of the crash. But you can't you can't portray it as a problem of like corporations rapaciously destroying and hollowing out the middle class.

So instead, the problem is that like foreign, there's a line in there about how like foreign corporations are just treating Americans like a market, which is like, well, how do Americans treat everything? Like, of course, they treat them like a market capitalism. It's not very coherent, but like what is coherent is this sense of grievance, right, that we have been, we as Americans have been specifically wronged. We're not and we as when he says Americans, obviously, he's only referring to a specific kind of American. But yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna press play again here. They're all beginning to wake up and wonder how did this happen to us? Mm hmm. So, yeah, the the words September 10th, 2001, just hit the screen as soon as he finishes that.

But I mean, what you're seeing in that is like the stirrings of what becomes Trumpism, you know, it's very clear. Yeah, very much so. And there's just like photos of white people up on the left and right. Yeah, like one of the most hideous like two columns I've ever seen in a video. One and a half of each. Yeah. Yeah, it's not done well. Their graphic design was they science had just simply had simply not advanced to that level yet.

Like I need people to understand this. There are supposed to be three lines of pictures going across the screen. The middle line is cut in the middle line is cut in half. There was half of one person's face on each side of the screen. Mm hmm. Yeah. And what they're what's being done here, what Beck is doing here is he's trying to take the anger and like that people still felt about 9 11 and turn it kind of towards in a different direction. Right.

Because what had actually happened on 9 11 was that a group of terrorists had attacked the literal center of American capitalism and of the American military industrial complex. Right. Those targets were picked specifically because of what they were. The Twin Towers contained one tenth of all office space in Manhattan. Their largest tenant was Morgan Stanley, which lost over 80% of its market value in the 2008 crash. Worst yet in Beck's eyes, the victims of the attacks are all New Yorkers. Now, I don't know if you're not in the conservative media bubble, you may not get it.

But like New Yorkers, that was like a slur. Yeah. Like literally like a slur to call somebody a New Yorker. Yeah. New York values. Right. Exactly. So Beck can't focus on the actual victims of 9 11 because they are people that it is in his best interest to train his audience to despise.

So instead, he focuses on how 9 11 was basically an act of disrespect against the this forgotten man, right? Who's now kind of surging up like that's what he's doing here. Right. That's what you have to do if you're Glenn Beck because again, you can't actually focus on the real victims of this, which is why. It's not incoherent ideologically for conservatives to talk the way they do about 9 12 and then vote not to help people who were first responders and had their fucking lungs filled with poison. Yeah, it's good stuff. So obviously, because Beck has to thread this needle, he focuses instead on how the attack hit American prestige and confidence. I remember how picture perfect the day was.

It wasn't a cloud in the sky and America seemed invincible and yet in the blink of an eye. That airplane appeared to hit a little bit down the building around the 50th or 60th floor. Again, it struck flush. The skies were filled with black clouds and our hearts were full of terror and fear. We realized for the first time how fragile we really were. Then something happened. So now it's September 12th and the first image we see after disaster and destruction is a group of firefighters holding a gigantic American flag with roughly the footprint of a school bus, right? And this is this is good, right?

This is and also it's a it's interesting that this is what he chooses is like the image of America like rebounding from this great defeat as opposed to like, I don't know, firefighters pulling people out of the rubble and saving their lives. Like, no, they got a big flag. That's how you know we're going to be okay. It makes sense though, right? Like the actual lives are unimportant. The thing that's important to save is the image of the American flag. Yeah, the center is also on the ground. Yeah, well, look, my flag code. Yeah, flag code is for the not us.

I'm going to continue here. We promised ourselves that we would never forget. On September 12th and for a short time after that, we really promised ourselves that we would focus on the things that were important. Our family, our friends, the eternal principles that allowed America to become the world's beacon of freedom. I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you and the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon. Now, I want to point out here, the choice of that clip, it's both because that was a very famous speech that Bush gave that really made his presidency in or at least the early part of it a lot of ways. You could argue that a significant amount of the kind of the political capital that he expended invading Iraq came from this particular speech and generally how he handled the days after the attacks. But it's interesting that they picked this because it really is, it's very much in line with this feeling and talking about the forgotten man, talking about they're not listening to us.

They don't know that we're in trouble. What Bush is saying here is, literal words are, I hear you and the people who knock these towers down are going to hear you, right? Your anger will have a reaction in the world, right? It will be met with fire and fury, right? That is the promise being made and it's this undercurrent and everything Beck's doing here of the thing that he is working with, the clay that he is molding is the fact that these people don't feel listened to and that they deserve to be listened to and that when they're angry at something, it should be hurt, right? That's the undercurrent. He's talking about family and togetherness, but that's what he's actually promising people. I'm really interested in this. This is probably 9, 12 or when everyone is giving this speech. I think I always come by. It's weird given where conservatism has gone, right? He's taken this in very much a clash of civilizations direction, but Bush was giving Islam is the fabric of America's speeches.

That week, he was speaking in mosques and two Muslims and being like, this is not a clash of civilizations. Obviously, he then went and killed millions of Muslims, right? Most of them innocent civilians who had nothing to do with or nearly all of them, right? But yeah, it's just interesting that his Bush who was giving this like, this isn't a clash of civilizations thing and it's become a clash of civilizations thing like eight years later. Yeah. And it's become but in a very different way, right? Because one of the things that I think is happening here is the problems that Americans, regular Americans are facing in 2009 are this massive economic strife caused by predatory lending, outright fraudulent business practices by major banks, the fact that the legal system had been changed in order to allow this massive con to go on. And then it had been followed by this massive crony capitalist bailout that ignored regular working people. Glenn doesn't want his viewers to focus on all of that, right? Because those are his backers, right? So instead, what he's doing is he's taking, they feel disrespected and vulnerable because they have been, right?

Now, there's unreasonable aspects to that, but they have been disrespected by the people who are stealing like all of the money in the country and fucking them over too and leaving their homes hollowed out, really addicted wastelands. But you can't focus on that. The cure is the cure that Beck offers them is not materially improving anyone's conditions. It's not altering the systems that people cannot prey upon others that way. It's by striking someone else. It's by striking back at that sense of agreement, right? It's by this is what's going to turn into owning the libs, right? Just hurting the left. Conservatism now is purely about harming groups of people they view as opposed to them. That's part of why trans people are so focused on by the right right now is that it's this symbol of liberalism to them and they want to hurt that symbol, right? This is the answer Beck is offering and it's going to be adopted by the thought leaders of conservatism. We don't need to focus on doing anything. Nothing can be done, right?

Nothing can be done. The grift is running out, collapse is coming. All that we can do is redirect the anger they feel it being fucked by us towards hurting other people. That's the magic that Beck is pulling off here. It's pretty cool. It's interesting too, I think. It worked pretty well. It's interesting to compare this, I think, to both Reagan and Nixon because this is very, very similar to Nixon talking about the silent majority and the suffering he's doing. Those people have an actual political project. Reagan is trying to completely annihilate the welfare state and they have stuff they're trying to do. But Bush was the time they tried to do stuff and Bush is so hated by this point that even Glenn Beck at the beginning of this is being like,

well, we had concerns about the last administration too and it was like, well, yeah, because he just by every conceivable metric just completely annihilated the United States. But yeah, it's like it's this interesting thing that like, yeah, this is the first time they've talked like this, but the level of nihilism is just like so much like the politics has been emptied of content to like such a greater extent. And I think part of it too also what's happening here is that like there's like the only thing left like for sort of like the capitalist who are backing back like the only thing left for them that they could possibly win is getting rid of Social Security. And they kind of like, oh, and Obama gave them the chance to do it and they kind of like blew it. But like they don't like this isn't like the Asian like they actually have like there's like there's there's tax-racialism like there's not actually anything for them really to do but they still have to sort of like maintain this constant vigilance against anyone even remotely trying to make the world better by taking away some of their power. And I think that's like another angle of why all of this is just sort of like this like incredibly empty nihilism because that's like that that's the only politics you can have to defend a group of people who've won. Yep. Yeah.

Well, that's a good note to end on. I hope you have all enjoyed getting to meet Glenn Beck in the 9-12 project. I know I've enjoyed it. Goodbye. So I'm here today with Aria and Anne. Aria, she lives at the Eden House over there in Kenya and is the chair of the management board at TransRescue and has over 40 years of trans rights activism. And they're going to explain today a little bit of what TransRescue is what Eden House is and the threats and attacks that they've been facing in the last couple of days here. So perhaps Anne, you could explain what Eden House is. And I think I really liked in your website where you explained a difference between like a hidey hole and a haven.

So if you could get into that, that would be wonderful. Sure. Eden House is a trans haven in Kenya. Our primary mission is that we help trans people escape from dangerous places. That implies that we help them go somewhere because of course they have to have a safe place to go to, which means we often end up renting an apartment short term or doing something like that while they get established in their new place. But the problem and of course that that was getting expensive in Kenya where we can move a lot of people because some areas of Kenya are quite dangerous, but the major cities are not quite so dangerous. And so we move people into the major cities. But we were trying to be efficient and save money and we thought about making a kind of temporary DOS house or a place with bunk beds to the ceiling and what have it.

But we realized that would still cost us money and it wouldn't be a very positive experience or affirming experience for the folks living in it. And we realized that we could instead do a trans haven. That is a place where a person could come and if they chose never leave, live the rest of their life if they want. So when someone comes to Eden House, they expect to receive help to find some income producing activity and as time goes on, they'll eventually be expected to contribute to the running of the house. Our plan is we just started a month ago, but our plan is by about the end of the year to have the house no longer be requiring funds from us and then we can do it again. We have space for eight people when we get up to eight and it doesn't look like it's going to bleed as dry. We can do it again and in the end, we end up with something that I think many trans people in any country would love to have because that's something as long as I've been around, there have been many discussions of building such places. It's a very admirable project and I know Gary and I just visited the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch. I've been before and it's really powerful to see how empowering those spaces are and how they can help people.

So I can see that you set up in Kenya. Was there a reason that you picked Kenya? Was there a very large trans community there or something that led you to... Frankly, in such places, people often have... There is the old queer, I know somebody who knows somebody system and people have kind of webs of trust and as a result, where we get people coming from to ask us to move them is very irregular. There are some countries we never hear from and we certainly know there are queer people there. We know the conditions are bad and we'd be happy to move people but we don't have a lot of penetration. In others, like Kenya, we're in the network and people are giving each other our contact info. Also, we have some capabilities. We had built up kind of a center there. So we decided to focus on Kenya. Kenya is relatively easy to get into as far as visas and so on. It's a place we can send people when we might have trouble getting them into, say, Europe or the United States. We're perfectly happy to end up with lots of folks. We like to make the place attractive enough that it's also a place that we even have people coming who aren't particularly in immediate danger. We're working from a philosophy of abundance that we want to grow and we have a rule of we don't want to make a place that we wouldn't want to live ourselves.

Honestly, Eden House is a nice place. It was the personal home of a rather wealthy family. It looks nice. Arya, would you maybe like to describe for us your experience at the house, what it's like and how places like this are important so that people can understand? Maybe if you could start with how you became aware of the Eden House and that this was an option that was available to you? Okay, so I met, we got in touch with Anne early this year. Yes, early this year, around February, January, if I'm not wrong. So that was before Eden was formed. So we really had a long discussion on us moving from where we were. We were at the coast and things were really, really brutal at the coast side of Kenya. Like we were going, a lot of stress, even lost one of our friends and yeah, it wasn't really good. It was really bad. So yeah, we had a discussion about moving to Eden House and it was a work in progress. So we took some time working on that. So eventually it happened and so we came to Eden House and it's a very beautiful place. I would agree with that.

Yeah, and also flew all the way to here because we were new here and there were some things that we needed done. And yeah, we are three of us currently in Eden House. I got in touch with Anne and the rest of the team. There was Doris on board. Actually, she's the person who was like, you know, responsible for the Malindi team. And yeah, the two sisters that I have, like, okay, they are my sisters because we've been through a lot of health together. So yeah, we come all the way from Malindi also. We are here together. And so far, when we got here, the place is very beautiful, but just needed a little, you know, here and their decoration and, you know, clarifications and modifying and, you know, pre-cashals whereby, you know, putting on security lights and the security wires. Yeah, still some things need to be upgraded, but, you know, we still need to resource for a lot so that we can have some things being done. But so far, so good. Everything is good. I'd interject that we're trying to foster a spirit of self-sufficiency.

And so we've been, we got everybody to make the furniture. Most of the furniture in the house has been made by the residents. And we're starting some various sort of fundraising, you know, or income activities. We've made a chicken coop and we're in the process of getting chickens and sewing machine. And one of our residents is a talented artist. We're going to set her up to have a place to sell her artwork. So that's the kind of things we're doing. Thank you. Arya, I'm really curious, kind of on a day-to-day basis, what are the things that you and the other people who are at the Eden House do in order to, like, protect yourself? Like, when you're going about town, when you're doing errands, is there like a degree of operational security that you have to keep in mind?

Yeah, actually, we have a rule whereby we don't go anywhere without letting each other know, especially if we're going to a long distance. Putting in mind, we are very new into this area, so we don't know a lot of places. So currently, we are just in the house trying to get to understand a few things. Actually, we've been doing the repairing. We have a chicken coop at the back. It's kind of a small place whereby we needed to fix some things. So we've been working on that so that we have the place ready for the chicken when they're ready to come in. And also, for me, I've been going around to see at least allocate some few places whereby, you know, we can feel safe. Like, the hospitals, I've been trying to get in touch with people like around here. I haven't been easy, but at least now I can say I can go to a hospital that at least it's kind of familiar with me.

Yeah, we also have a place where we buy these things, the house supplies and all that stuff. We are really trying as much as possible to minimize our moving around from places to places to draw attention. So we're just trying to go with time and see how people will accept us existing to this community. So we don't want to bring any attention whereby people start asking questions like, you know, what's happening there or what's not happening there. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed as well that the house used to belong to a politician. Is that right? So it has some measures of sort of external physical security as well? Yeah. Which is good. Maybe we can talk about, I know Kenya is a big country and it differs vastly depending on where you are and who you're with.

How is the climate towards trans folks? I haven't been in Kenya for probably 10, 15 years. How is the climate towards trans people have become like a big topic, like a culture war thing recently? Or is it sort of, can you explain, I guess, what it's like you were saying it seems like it can be a risk just to go outside, which is pretty sad. Yeah, it is a risk to go outside. Here in Kenya, in different sites of Kenya, like at the coast, okay, taking an example at the coast side from where I come from, it's really bad for the trans community because now they are very transphobic and homophobic people. Like most of the transphobic and homophobic people come at the coast side because these are people that tend to keep their culture and religious like, you know, more of a key thing in someone's life, more of like they use the Quran and the Bible to to criticize the trans people and the gay community. So being in that area, it's very, very bad and very, very risky for trans community. I wouldn't say it's not risky, but they are level of understanding of the trans community and the gay community. It's more of a way that they are kind of confused, not sure where to understand, but it depends with also the air that you are.

You might find you end up, for example, now we are even house is like for the few for the month that we've been here, the feedback that I can say I have from the community around here is they're like more of people that are calm and more of people who are you are more of used to their own personal things. They don't like, you know, put their nose into that to the things that they're not involved with. If you get what I mean. In other towns, having new people, people who like, you know, want to know why they're there and you know, all that stuff. But in this town that we have, we are in Eden House. It's kind of safe in a way that people are not putting their nose into us, like more of wanting to know about us, rather than they are welcoming us more of, you know, the landlord is kind of friendly, I would say that the Kibanda, Kibanda, it's more of a small grocery shops. So the Kibandas around here, the small grocery shop, the people who are selling the, you know, the groceries and all that stuff, they are friendly. I haven't, I haven't, in card or, you know, engaged or seen any transphobic or homophobic reaction towards the month that have been here. Most of the people here are much of welcoming, like I would say that. And yeah, it's really different from where I come from. Trust me, from the town that I come from, you can't walk with makeup or with anything that makes you look ghoulish or anything that makes you look resemble to a transgender or maybe gay or something. It will be a bad thing for you every day. Yeah. A little bit of the geography of Kenya. Remember that on Kenya's coast up in the north is the border with Somalia. And so the culture naturally mixes over the border. And this is also an area where lots of folks are coming over because of the political instability in Somalia. And it's an area of El Shabab terrorist activity. So that makes particularly the north part of the coast a rather dangerous place.

Yeah, just if people are interested, I know like the State Department sort of has a do not travel, like north of Lamu, pretty much. So like people can sit on the map. But yeah, there are certainly areas where risk would be higher. Unfortunately, talking of that, like it hasn't, there've been some attacks, right, threats against Eden House in the last couple of days. So if either of you would like to explain exactly what happened as far as you're comfortable, I think that would be great. Yeah. Let me explain because I think I'm the right person to explain that. So they've been there. Okay, this happened when I was around here, actually, we had an attack and one of the windows, people, people break into the house, not inside the house, but inside the compound. And they tried getting in the house. But yeah, thank God, the place has secured doors and windows. But they took off one of the glass from the window. And they tried to like, they had a stick that was, was, was holding a magnet on the end. So they were trying to use the stick with the magnet to pull out the keys so that they can have a clear entrance into the house. But thank God, we had removed the keys to where we used to, we normally used to put and kept it somewhere else. So the keys that were where they were targeting, they were only the keys to the meter box and the fridge. So they took those. And yeah, I presume they later realized that they wouldn't go through with those because they were not the right keys. So the next thing we wake up in the morning, the magnet was down on the floor. And we noticed that the window had the piece of glass missing. So that was the first incident that happened. So we reported that to, to the, to the landlord. And previous day before that happened, those neighbor who came by and they say that someone tried to break into their apartment and they were kind of curious because they never knew if people moved into this house so they just wanted to check in what was going on.

And we kind of get into like, you know, know each other and they kind of gave us a warning and that's why we removed the key and the day when they came, they couldn't get in. So yeah, after I left now, this is a recent incident that happened. Then the next night they came back and we found a couple of broken windows in the morning like they tried to pry some windows out and ended up breaking the glass and gave up. But, but yeah, that's so at the time, I think we all just thought of this as ordinary, you know, theft activity. But yeah, latest incident, it's pretty unclear, but this may be a more targeted attack. Yeah. And perhaps it's silly of me to even ask this, but could you speak a bit on what kind of help you can expect from law enforcement? If any, I would say, if any, I would say, like, you see, the place where we are staying from the law enforcement, I would expect that they put some like, you know, the, they have a name that they put that that the lights that normally the government supposed to supply, like, you know, the, what do they call that these lights that they normally have to support from street lights.

Yes, street lights. So the place that you are staying, there's no street lights. So if, if, if, if a police was to ask me, or, you know, any security measures that would want to be put, like I would say that they put the street lights, those would help at least, there'll be more lights for like, you know, that should scare people away, even if those people are thieves or anything, you see. So yeah, that's what I would say. Okay. Yeah. And I know two people were hurt in the most recent sort of act of aggression, right? Yes, yes. This was the day before yesterday.

Okay. Are they doing okay? Yeah, they're fine. Actually, I'm one of them. I have my arm injured back, not really deep. The other one is asleep. She had a really bad injured back stabbed and, you know, at the arm also caught. So yeah, eight stitches at the back, really bad. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's not good at all. Okay. So that, that's not great. Have you, since the attack, is there like an ongoing aggression against you? And it seems like someone's targeting the Eden House, right? If you ask me, I would say it's more of targeting the Eden House, because I don't understand why we would only be the only person, like the only people experiencing the same, the same incident over and over. Like the next, the next houses, they don't complain in such incident, like, you know, like this guy literally, if I'm just picturing the fact that we had to go out and, you know, turn on the machine

and we saw this guy and he just bumped into us with a knife and cutting us off. So I'm just picturing if this guy was waiting for, like, I'm just seeing it if he was waiting for more people to come so that they can attack coming inside the house. Why was he even standing there in the first place? Because we found him there and he was like, he came through me because I was the one who was in the front. So I just keep asking myself, like, why was he standing there? What was he waiting for? Yeah. Yeah, that's terrible. Yeah. And I point out that to get there, to get there, he had to climb a high stone wall topped with razor wire and get into position without triggering the motion detectors. Yeah. Which is, you know, not impossible to do, but it was, but they keep coming back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure people listening will be upset by this. Is there a way that people can, like, express a solidarity or support you financially? Yes. We need funds to keep running the house. And in fact, the guy escaped through a hole that was left only because we ran out of razor wire. We need funds to keep the project going. We need funds to also to support our primary work. We're continuing to get people out of places like Saudi Arabia. We have people, we have people who are kind of, who are in mid-travel right now.

And we have other people in hidey holes in dangerous countries. And we want to move all those people. And we'd like to start, right now, we're not even taking new folks on because we just have such a backlog. I'd very much like to fix that situation. So for all these reasons, you know, we're doing, we're happy with what we're doing, but we do need funds at the moment. Yeah. Let's get into that a little bit. The we here is trans rescue, right? Yeah. Yes. Trans rescue is a nonprofit and you're based in Europe and you move trans people out of dangerous situations. That's correct. We're based in, we're based in the Netherlands. We're a, a shtick thing, which is the, in the US, that would be a 501C3. We're an ANBI qualified shtick thing, which basically is a 501C3.

Okay. And you were telling us before we started the call that you think it costs you about 2,500 euros to move each person. Is that right? Yeah, that's the average. The average is probably slightly going down because, of course, to move somebody into Eden House from the coast might be as cheap as 80 bucks to send them a ticket and then a few hundred dollars of settling them in Eden House. On the other hand, getting people out of Saudi oftentimes means not only flying them, but sometimes flying our own personnel in and out on often kind of crazy routes. So a person might find themselves a long way from either Saudi or where they're finally going to end up. And as a result, and then so yeah, we end up having to spend a lot on plane tickets. And then we also, sometimes this takes months. We play paperwork games. We are not people smugglers, but we certainly are helping people get to a country where they can actually claim asylum for the most part, which means, you know, and successfully claim asylum. And that often means manipulating edge cases in the international travel system. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can see why that would be expensive and complicated. Yeah, so it's great that people can donate to you there.

Is there anything like I noticed you were asking before for some mutual aid help with your PR? Is that something that you still need? Like are there things people can do if maybe they don't have the means to donate? Yes, we're a small organization. We're not very large. And we actually are just cranking up our PR operation. We could use a press list. We could use, we could also use amplification from organizations with more kind of online cloud. We're basically a little group of people and for two years we operated as an informal group of activists. We realized that was probably not ideal for the very serious work we're doing. And so last December we reorganized as a proper shtick thing. But yeah, help with boosting our signal at the moment would be very useful. Anyone who can, you know, kind of spread the word of what's happened at Eden House that we would be very much appreciative. Yeah. Well, we can definitely do that. Yep. Hopefully other folks come too. It's just so people can find you. It's trans underscore rescue on Twitter. It's trans underscore rescue on Twitter. It's transrescue.org on the web.

I will share that fundraiser link when this comes out. Arya, how have things been for you the last couple of days? It must be pretty rough. I imagine not feeling safe at the house. Yeah. Actually, the advice that we got from the landlord and the neighbor, there's a neighbor here, a lady she came by and I have a number I called her the day we had an incident and she came in the morning when we had a talk. So she suggested that we shouldn't be going out late night and by 10 we make sure that all the doors are locked and yes, and stay safe inside. In case of anything, she asked me to call her and also the landlord asked me if in case of anything, if I hear any movement or any suspicious thing happening outside the gates, I just give them a call. It's good that people are sticking up for you in your community. Yeah, it's really good to hear. We appreciate that and on their behalf. What y'all are doing is very important and we're sorry that you're encountering this kind of resistance, but we hope we can help at least get the message out about what you were doing at Eden House. Yeah, much appreciated. Thank you. It's much appreciated. I regret that we spent most of the time on security. I'm more excited about many of the positive things we're doing. We're trying to set up a place where trans people can live their lives and thrive and have normal lives.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about how many people do you have at the Eden House right now if you're comfortable sharing that. We're going to settle as affairs and we'll be moving in. We've got space for eight at the moment. We've had a couple other people inquire but aren't there yet. We're kind of excited by the space we've got because there's actually room around us to grow so we're expecting to get bigger. Yeah, I hope you do. How many people is Trans Rescue been able to help as an organization overall? One way or the other, we've moved about two dozen people. Of that, roughly half have been the serious kind of get people out of Saudi Arabia type moves. The others have been folks that we helped in sort of less dramatic ways. It's a very meaningful contribution to a lot of people's lives so that's great. At least one person lives locally and it's great to occasionally have him over for dinner and know that we got him out.

Yeah, that must be really nice. It's important not to just center hatred but also about success. I love that. It's cool that you have plans to grow. I've seen that you have agricultural areas around so you're thinking of growing some food around the house. Actually, we have brought some foods. We have some vegetables like spinach, cabbage, tomatoes, green paper. Oh, nice. Yes. Did the gardens survive the flood? Actually, I was about to tell you that actually when the water was coming in, all the spinach went and lied down and we were kind of worried. But when the water stopped flowing down, the sun came out, they kind of started going straight.

I wouldn't be much worried about that but it's kind of freaking out because they all went down and were like, they're dead. We have a drainage problem in front of the house and recently there was torrential rain. Thankfully, spinach is hard to kill. Things I did not know about, Kenya, it hails there. Oh, yeah. I did not expect, I did not sort of imagine hail but it hails several times while I was there. And everybody was cold. Well, I was walking around in the t-shirt.

Yeah, I can add some robust weather in Kenya for sure. Yeah, I'm looking at these pictures. It's great to see you guys making your own furniture and doing all these things and really enjoying your time there as well as obviously we don't want to just focus on the threat. So hopefully you can go back to that. Hopefully people can support you. Aria, is there anywhere online people can find you? Do you have Instagram or Twitter or anything like that? Yeah, I do have a Twitter account. My Twitter handle is at rams-aria.

How do you, can you spell that out for us? R-A-M-S. Okay, Python. With an hyphen, lower hyphen. Under score. Yeah, yeah. Under score, Aria. Yes, then Aria, yes.

Okay, great. Yeah, and it's for yourself and is it, is it just trans rescue? Is there a personal one and anything else you'd like to plug in? My email, if someone wants to contact me, is Annie, A-N-N-I-E, at transrescue.org. Okay, yeah, hopefully. And we have a contact form on the website as well as people are interested in talking with us. Yeah. Okay, great. Is there anything else you'd like to get to before we finish up here?

Yes, at, on Fridays, we have a, we have office hours. So if you're in a country like the UK or the US and you would just like some advice or to explore your options, that's another service we offer as we're happy to talk with you on video about that. When would those be? They're at 6 p.m. central European summertime. Okay. Which I think works out to midday in the US.

Okay, some parts of the US. Yeah. People can look that up. And are your fingers primarily in English? Those are primarily in English. If you speak Arabic and or Farsi or Urdu, contact us. We can arrange to have somebody who speaks those languages talk with you. We maintain a telegram group, a trans rescue.

And if you get on there, you can use machine translation and talk with us. Oh, very cool. And we have Arabic speakers that monitor that. Amazing. Yeah. Hopefully people can take advantage of that if they need it. Thank you so much for your time. Like our platform is here for you.

If you want to share anything else, if anything else happens, please let us know. And we really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. All right.

Okay. Goodbye, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hey, welcome to it could happen here. This is Robert Evans.

And this is a podcast about things falling apart. And today we definitely have a things, well, I don't know, hopefully not falling apart, but certainly getting fucked up episode for you. This is going to be better part of the world that probably fairly few Americans spend much time thinking about. It's certainly a conflict that's kind of been lost in everything that's happening in Ukraine right now. But Armenia and Azerbaijan, their neighbor have been at a state of more or less regular war since 2020, since longer than that, but this kind of latest wave of it started in 2020. It was over a breakaway, well, what's often referred to as a breakaway region that both countries claimed and that stayed kind of independent for a very long time until 2020 invasion by the Azeris in this area, which is majority Armenian. And it was kind of a military disaster for the Armenian side.

The war went very badly, a lot of troops were killed, a lot of territory was taken, and ever since the Azeri military has been carrying out border strikes in and around areas that are kind of near their shared border with Armenia. Over the last 10 hours as I record this and I'm talking to you all on Monday, the 13th of September over the last about 10 hours. The Azeri military has launched a fairly unprecedented set of strikes within Armenian territory. So not just kind of hitting border areas and not just hitting military targets but hitting cities hitting civilian areas trying to move troops across the border. There's video evidence of this to talk about what's happening, what's been happening in the past over the last couple of years and what's happening now. I'd like to welcome on Joe Kasabian, Joe you will know from his podcast Lions led by Donkeys from his book The Hooligans of Kandahar and a number of other books that I think we'll talk about a little bit at the end here from his appearances on the behind the bastard Joe you are an American citizen but you're also Armenian and you're currently in Armenia. Yeah, I moved here a couple months ago permanently citizenship is we kind of have like our own repatriation laws, but I'm still waiting on that.

And so to go off a couple things that you said we've been at a state of war effectively since the 90s when we first gained independence from the Soviet Union. So without going into the incredibly complicated history of Nagano Karabakh or Artsakh, Artsakh still exists. They did not take all of it in 2020. But 2020 was a military disaster for Armenia, unequivocally so we lost over 4000 people, huge swaths of territory where their population became the victims of a regional genocide. There are no Armenians that have been confirmed to still be alive within that territory. There's endless videos of Azeri troops beheading old men and women and destroying homes and cemeteries and churches. And ever since the war ended in 2020 a month has not gone by where either Artsakh or Armenia itself has not been attacked. We've probably lost over 100 soldiers since then. These are kids, they're conscripts. We have military mandatory service here. So these are 18, 19 year old kids doing their two years of service on top of the civilians that are currently being bombed.

We don't know how many people are dead at the moment. And it's truly aggravating. Armenians live with this all the time. It's a sword hanging over our heads when this is going to happen. 2020 happened with unprecedented international support and not only support but willingly ignoring it. I mean, NATO powers helped Azerbaijan do this, Turkey and Israel. Israeli drone designers literally test flew a suicide drone into Armenian soldiers to sell it. I don't know what to say about it other than it should be another thing that the world should be united against and they never will. No, I mean, it's so frustrating. One of the things that I have had a lot of issue with, because obviously I, as you are, I'm supportive of Ukrainian people's attempts to so far quite successful attempts to stop Russia from taking over their homes. But one of the things that's happened alongside this is kind of lionization of a specific kind of Turkish drone, the Bayraktar, which was particularly effective in the opening stages of the war. Military equipment wonks can argue as to whether that was due to Russian kind of tactical failures and operational failures or whether it was due to new realities about how drones function.

But one of the things that was ignored in all of this kind of fetishization of this drone and people raising money to buy more of them is that the drones were really combat tested for the first time massacring Armenians. I try not to get too mad when I see stuff like that, because I understand whether Ukrainians are happy. I should point out, unequivocally, I support Ukraine's fight for independence, just like I wish people supported ours. And the wars effectively have the same kind of propaganda angle. Obviously, before Russia invaded Ukraine, they're talking about denotsification or demilitarization. When you look at their speeches and the rhetoric, it's that they believe that Ukraine does not have the right to exist and that Ukrainians are either a Russian or they also should not exist. And that's effectively what we're looking at, too. This is why Armenians constantly compare what is happening now to 1915. Azerbaijan continuously says they want Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh. They want it back, but that's not what they're attacking right now. If you look at the rhetoric of Aliyev and his government going all the way back to the 90s when his dad was in charge and a few other people. Their ideology is that Armenia is not a real state. They have claims over our capital Yerevan. They have claims over the south where they are invading right now.

And everywhere those soldiers go, they wipe out the local population of Armenians. There are no Armenian survivors in Hadrut or Shushi or any of these other places they took in 2020. They do not exist. And ever since then, they've been purposely going through and destroying any evidence that Armenians ever live there, which is ridiculous. Armenians have been living in these places since before Rome was fucking established. And this is obviously, we're talking about the Armenian genocide, which occurred during and concurrent to the late stages of World War I and was unrecognized by the United States until, what was that now, two years ago, Joe? Yeah, something like that. Certainly became the first president, first US president to recognize it. And this is because we've mentioned Turkey a couple of times that there's a couple of reasons for this, but most of them boil down to not wanting to piss off the Turkish government. The Turkish government has strong attitudes that essentially everybody in Anatolia is Turkish and all this has been great.

There were no Greeks, there were no Kurds, there were no army. And this has led to, I mean, it's led to ethnic cleansings and genocides against the Armenians and against the Kurds. One of the things that was being done in Rojava that I found so compelling was an attempt to educate and attempt by the Kurds there to educate people who were joining the YPG about Kurdish complicity in the genocide against Armenia, because they recognize themselves as victims of the same thing. You know, starting, I think. It's hard to say starting in, right, because we're trying to talk about concurrent conflicts, but they all go back. Everything's going back quite a while. You mentioned Aliyev a little bit ago, and I don't want to talk about him. We're talking about Ilham Aliyev, who's the current president of Azerbaijan, the fourth, and of course the son of the former leader, which is always a recipe for a good, functional democracy. Also his wife is vice president. Yeah, and his wife is vice president, which is nice. It's just like House of Cards. Yeah, he's the Kevin Spacey. His attitude and rhetoric towards Armenians in general is eliminationists at best. Like, he's, I mean, the countries put out stamps that show Armenia being fumigated, like dirt went during the height of the pandemic, which like as a genocide scholar, you know, generally when I see a picture of a place being gassed, I get suspicious.

They've talked about how it was a good thing that in the 90s Armenians were driven from Baku and the Bakupro pogroms and a few other places. I mean, weren't there like literally like some of those trophies at arms shows and stuff, like pieces of captured equipment with blood on it and stuff. And they also had, honestly, one of the weirdest, like it's incredibly offensive and racist, these characters of Armenian soldiers who like at the same time, they're like racist towards Armenians, but also vaguely anti-Semitic. Like, they looked like a character of a Jewish person that come out of their Sturmer with like, you know, and I understand how stereotypically people think Armenians look in like these racist art where we have, you know, big hooked noses and big eyebrows and things like that, which admittedly I know I meet both of those personally, but that's besides the point of like if you look at the pictures and they were taken down because like even like Israel was like, ooh, that's a bit much. And like they help that happen. But like also to talk, you can't talk about Azerbaijan without talking about Turkey, because they have this ideology that's like two people, one state. They do believe in like pan-terrainism, especially Erdogan.

I mean, he's been ever since he's gone like full fascist. That's something he's been hammering the drum on and like this is an extension of that. He's effectively a neo-automatist. He wants to reunite the Ottoman Empire, which is fucking insane, but also has real life things, you know. But also to bring us, you know, to the conflict that Americans are more focusing on, as we've talked about before, this is another similarity between what Russia is doing in Ukraine and what Azerbaijan and Turkey are doing in Armenia. They're both these kind of redemptionist dreams of people who want to bring back some sort of lost imperial splendor, right, and are utilizing kind of the tactics that the tactics of genocide in order to try to make that happen. Yeah, I think for Turkey, it's a lot of this lost splendor, especially as their economy shits itself from mismanagement. And I think for Azerbaijan, it's the other way around. In the 90s, when we fought the first Karabakh war, Armenia won. I mean, it wasn't from being militarily superior or having more money. It had to do with two largely unorganized forces in the fallout of the Soviet Union and Armenia ended up winning. And ever since then, that loss has been something of like national, it's kind of like the national myth, though, of Azerbaijan, because before then, Azerbaijan is a national identity.

You simply didn't exist. It's relatively new. And that loss in that war became the defining moment. That's where the loss to Armenia was internalized and like it became school curriculum that Armenians were at fault for everything. We're subhuman. We've been compared to cockroaches. Like, for instance, if you have, say, my last name, you cannot legally enter the country of Azerbaijan. Like, you cannot enter that country within Armenian last name. It's racism and fascism is state doctrine there. So when, you know, their oil production kicked back up from after the war damages and after the fallout of the Soviet Union, on top of military reforms that have been lasting for 30 years, they're the ones on the upswing now, not Turkey, in my opinion. And it also helps their fighting someone like Armenia, which, you know, Armenians that we have military history and everything, but we have no fucking money. We have no natural resources. We have no allies. We have no one's going to airdrop pallets of fucking Heimars and Yerevan like nobody's coming to help us. We have AKs that fought in the first war. We have BMP ones that have probably seen more combat than most people who are still alive.

That's an armored personnel carrier, essentially. We have nothing. I'm not going to speak about the capabilities of the Armenian military, but like, you can imagine what a small landlocked country with a small population, not a lot of money can feel. It's not a lot. Yeah, it's not a lot. And this kind of gets us to another topic that has to be broached with this, which is kind of talking about the relationship of Russia to all this, because one of the things that's very frustrating about this conflict is that Americans particularly tend to want things very simply. So you hear you've got a Russian client state, which is how it's not what Armenia is. I'm not saying that, Joe, obviously, but is how it's easy to kind of, especially like kind of in the boil out sort of break things out as it's like, OK, you've got this state backed by Russia and then you've got this other state fighting it that's backed by Turkey. Well, Turkey's part of NATO. They're part of, you know, the fight against Russia, so they must be the good guys and none of that's accurate. Absolutely. But I think it's important to explain why.

So, I mean, it's really hard to explain Armenian Russia's relationship other than imperialism. Obviously, Armenia has been conquered by countless countries throughout our fucking long history, but the most recent one being the Soviet Union, which we did not join willingly. And then after the fall, the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation were solidly within Russia's fear of influence and by no active choice of ours. We're members of the CTSO, we're members of the Eurasian Economic Union, and neither of those were by choice. We were strong armed into it because there's no, there's nothing else. There's no other option. And as far as it goes, it's like the brotherly relationship or this client state. It would be exactly like someone blaming Ukraine for what happened in Maidan or blaming Ukraine for what happened in 2014 or what happened now because they're trying to get away from that. I mean, we can't. We don't have the resources to do it. I just, just for an example of how Armenia plays like tight ropes this shit. Never once have we voted in favor of Russia during this war. We like they're like our representatives to the UN or our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, our Prime Minister is solidly neutral because that's the best he can do. Right.

You know, he's either voted against. He's voted. He's abstained. He's never voted for to support Russia during this war at all. Now, obviously, back in 2014, there was a different Armenia. We had a pro EU movement here that was quite strong. This is before I lived here, of course, that voted to declare our intentions to want to join the EU. I believe this is under President Sergisian. And it passed overwhelmingly in the popular vote because unlike the people invading us, we are a free and fair democracy with the freedom of speech and expression and everything else that people like to claim they want to defend, but they don't. And after a five minute meeting with Putin, it was gone. There is no more referendum and we decided not to join the EU anymore. By we, I mean the president. After that, we had our Velvet Revolution in 2018, which got rid of him and distance ourselves from Russia as much as we realistically could. So in 2014, I believe, for instance, Armenia kind of slightly supported Russia when it came to annexing Crimea. And now you can kind of see why the president was a fucking stooge. That's not the case anymore. We now have a parliamentary system and as much as I am not the biggest fan of Prime Minister Pashinyan, he's not that guy.

That's not like the 2014 to 2020 and Armenia is a different fucking world. And I know, like you said, people really like to simplify these things. They want this to be a team sport. They want this to be NATO versus Russia and, you know, people like Belarus or whoever else. But there's a there's a pretty big fucking difference here. We have not actively supported this war. There has been anti-war protests outside my fucking window since the war has started. Ukrainians have flooded here by the thousands and they have met nothing but Armenians who have welcomed them with open arms. Russians have come to and we're not the biggest fans of them, but what can you do about it? You know, like, yeah, we're solidly neutral in this. And it's one of the things that fucking, I mean, granted, neutral government wise, people wise, absolutely, we're not neutral. And one of the things that pisses me off the most is that people can see the realities of the war in Ukraine where they can see right through Russian propaganda when it's like demilitarization, denazification, whatever. And they can see on its face that's complete and utter bullshit. But like when, because, you know, Ukraine is fighting for their sovereignty, their independence and the right to exist that we all have. And when it comes to us, we don't get that. They're like, oh, well, we're calling for both sides of deescalate and maybe Armenia shouldn't have fucking started this.

We haven't done anything. It was fucking midnight last night and the South started being bombed. What the fuck is there to be deescalated? You can't deescalate self defense. So you have what is a really uncomfortable situation and one that a lot of people don't like talking about the reality of because essentially when you have a country like Azerbaijan that is insisting on repeatedly violating the territory of its neighbor. And that has proven a will not just a willingness but an eagerness to engage and engage in acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. You have two options for dealing with that other than let them do it, right? Option one is send in peacekeepers to stop the aggression. Now, Russia has troops that were called peacekeepers in the area. You know, there's you could debate prior to the invasion of Ukraine how good they were at that job. But they certainly are not capable of doing it now. So then the question is, okay, who else is peacekeepers are going to come in, right? And if that's not a realistic solution and you don't want to let Azerbaijan just do a genocide, then what you do is you give them weapons, Armenia weapons, not Azerbaijan.

People are already doing that part, unfortunately. The U.S. and NATO included. Indeed. And again, there's this, we're all kind of in terms of like the discourse around this in the United States living in the shadow of the war on terror in which an irresponsible quantity of weapons were handed out to an irresponsible variety of groups and many of them went to bad ends in bad places. The reality is that, you know, we're sitting on a fucking stockpile of weapons here in the United States as tall as the sky and handing over a tiny percent of that when people talk about like we're giving this much aid to Ukraine. We're not spending that much cash straight on aid to Ukraine. We're picking up shit we have in mothballs and we're handing it to them because we've spent all of our treasure on a pile of guns larger than you can conceive of in terms of its actual size and weight. And I don't know, like when I think about what is to be fucking done here, realistically, I would like for Armenia to have access to javelins and some fucking stingers. One of the things that pisses me off is like, like you said, there's two options here. You do nothing and you're complicit in a genocide. That's what this is. Like, it's like being silent in, you know, in 1945. It's being silent in 1915. It's being silent Rwanda. We were silent during most of those things and we saw how they all ended. You sure were.

Like there's only one way this fucking ends if we don't get guns. And that's with a lot of dead Armenians that by supporting Azerbaijan or sitting out, that is what you explicitly support is thousands and thousands of dead civilians. Like that's the only way this ends. And that is, again, and I hate that we keep going back to Ukraine, but it's relevant because it's the conflict that people are actually focusing on the people who are counter on on anti side, providing weapons to the Ukrainian military and make claims about corruption, which they could also make about the Armenian government sure and claims about, you know, arms trafficking and all that stuff. And that's what they are. And Ukraine, by the way, is a country with a deeper history of corruption. Significantly. The Armenian government even. For all of its faults, the Armenian government is less corrupt than Ukraine.

Yeah. Yeah. You haven't seen a ton of that happening. What you have seen is the weapons that have been handed to them, blowing up invaders, tanks and aircraft. And the sheer quantity that has been destroyed is evidence that that weaponry has been used pretty responsibly. And when you are talking about a group of people facing annihilation, I'm simply not worried that they're going to sell their stingers to fucking ISIS or wherever. Right. Who the fuck are we going to sell them to? We have Turkey on one side and Azerbaijan on the other. We're going to sell them to Georgia. That's actually fine.

Like, you know, and that's. I don't know. I think people are fucking gutless. You saw this happen in February before or in January before the war in Ukraine started when people like, oh, weapons are only going to make it worse. No, they're fucking not. You know what's worse than an armed population defending itself is an unarmed one being murdered anyway. And we, in case nobody paid attention because they probably didn't, you can go back and look at the video footage of what happens to unarmed Armenians in 2020. And it's the same fucking shit ISIS did to Yazidis.

It's the same fucking shit they did to Kurds. And it's the same fucking shit that will happen again if we do not get what we need to defend ourselves. And I don't give a fuck if you don't like Russia. I don't fucking like Russia either. But it's the reality that we live in. If you are fucking intelligent enough to realize the diplomacy and geopolitics of how Ukraine ended up in the war that they're in now, you should understand why we are in the situation that we are into. You cannot realistically believe we deserve what is happening unless you also believe Ukraine deserves what's happening to them.

It's impossible. I, I don't know. This is obviously, how could this not be, like, emotional? And it is just feeling like, I can't, and it must be so much worse, obviously, just being there. But, like, this feeling of a fucking train coming at you, and people aren't gonna do shit because there's this fucking problem with optics. And it's more complicated when we talk about, I'm talking about, when I talk about optics, I guess we're talking about discourse. When it comes about, like, why politically the United States is unlikely to do anything like what we've suggested. It's more complicated than that.

And a decent amount of it comes down to the fact that we have, what is it, 13 nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey right now? Yep, and Incirlik, which is land stolen from Armenians from the genocide. Yep, great stuff, America, well done. We really knocked it out of the park. What is it that people can do to help outside of, you know, trying to become informed about the conflict, which I think we can talk about some sources at the end of this. Are there places, you know, Red Cross style things that people can donate to, to help, to the extent that that's kind of thing is helpful? Yeah, I mean, generally, crowdfunding for weapons systems is illegal unless you're Ukraine nowadays. Yeah, I'm thinking more about medical aid.

The Armenian Red Cross is always a good option. They helped a lot in 2020. They still help now. We still have a ton of internally displaced people. There's also the Hindramin Fund, which directly funds wounded servicemen, because we really don't have a VA exactly here. There's quite a few other ones. But the Armenian Red Cross is, of course, the most reliable and easy to donate if you're in the West, for sure. You don't have to navigate any confusing Armenian language websites, because it's hard. And Armenia isn't great at the internet, so most of them don't have translations. Yeah, I understand I'm a little bit more emotional than most people probably hear me on podcasts, but I'm mad. How could you not be?

I'm mad. I'm fucking frustrated. I don't know how much longer people can let this kind of thing happen. I hope the EU's gas this winter is fucking worth it, because this is what you got. This is what that deal got us. So I hope you're nice and warm in the fucking winter, because we probably won't have power, or we'll have more dead, or whatever. But real glad you pivoted away from Russian gas and signed a deal fucking Azerbaijan, you spineless fucks. And the spinelessness is deeper than that, because the reason why the fucking gas crunch that led to that deal happened in the first place was among a number of things, years of ceding to Russian government aggression in places like Georgia and in places like Ukraine. And you've got that here. You have the invasion by Azerbaijan almost two years ago now.

And then there's another one in 2016 before that. Yeah. And no pushback, right? No, zero. The thing is, and this is not a popular kind of thing to go to talk about on the left, but it's true. If you want to pay attention to why that whole World War II situation got so goddamn bad, a big part of it is they're not being any kind of effective rules-based international order to stop bigger countries, or at least more aggressive ones from fucking with their neighbors. And one of the things we were supposed to have learned from that war is that you don't let people do that. It's bad. Yeah, it should be that hard to explain to people that when a motherfucker shows up. Yeah, like it shouldn't be that hard, Tix. I don't care what your politics is. I mean, everybody knows that we're both very left-wing.

But when someone comes and continuously fucks with you, the only way to make them stop is by hitting them in the goddamn face until they realize it's not a good idea. I don't care. Diplomacy doesn't work when one side only wants you dead. You can't debate my right to live, or my neighbor's right to live, or these kids' right to live, or whatever their fucking schools bombed right now. There's no debate to be had. You have to hit them until they fucking stop. I'm sorry, there's not going to be any de-escalation of fucking genocide. It's not how this works. People tend to get this in the immediate sense when you're talking about some fucking bigot in front of you. Everybody loves cheering on a video of some guy dropping a racial slur and getting knocked to the ground. Obviously, those are a lot of fun. Right, those are great. The moral is that if you let assholes, the actual moral of why it's important to punch Nazis in the face when they're doing Nazi shit, is that if you just let them do Nazi shit and you try to appease them and calm them down,

you'll often calm them down here and there, and they'll back off, but they'll have gotten a little bit more. They'll have gotten a little bit of what they want. They'll have gotten a little bit further, and they just keep making shit worse until somebody actually does fucking drop them. It's the same with... And again, we just talked about what the great lesson of World War II should have been, and the thing that actually happened is the generation that took power in the United States and in a lot of other Western countries after that, not exclusively the West, but I think we're talking about our people here, immediately went and fucked around and carried out acts of aggression all over the world. It doesn't mean the basic lesson is bad. The lesson is, we should not have been allowed to do that, but that should not be a thing that the world accepts. You can't just sit back and be like, oh, well, that country's gonna go do a genocide now, but it's far away, so there's nothing to be done, other than continue to buy the oil of the people doing the genocide and thereby fund the genocide. It's fucking unconscionable, man. Even if you want to look at this as like the West also fucked around during the Cold War, which like, yeah. You're sure everybody did.

They didn't fuck around so much in Southeast Asia after the US got punched in the fucking face in Vietnam, did they? That's right. There was a lot less fuckery. It shouldn't be this fucking complicated. I don't care what political ideology you subscribe to. It's self-defense. It's collective mutual self-defense. When we need help, you give us fucking help. It shouldn't be that fucking hard. To be fair, for some people, it will never truly matter because they don't see countries like Armenia or countries like Azerbaijan as having agency to do their own things and want their own things. And if that is you, I hope to see your house on CNN one day. That sounds like an old Russian curse, like may your house be on CNN one day.

I believe it's from the Balkans. I can imagine some little old lady saying that to you. We have the right to freedom as much as anyone else, and not only that, we've achieved it. Armenia is a moderately progressive place. We're still working on some things. We have the freest democracy in the region. We have great standard of living for most people, and it was only getting better. This is a place that has freer and fairer elections and virtually anyone else over here to include Russia, to include fucking Ukraine, to include Turkey, to include all these places that people insist are worth defending. I'm just curious why we're not. Why are Armenians less than? What did we ever fucking do to deserve this? It's incredibly depressing. Maybe we're not the right shade of white. I don't fucking know anymore, man.

It's really weird to me. Even internationally, geopolitically, the Secretary of State Blinken urged both sides to de-escalate. Suck my fucking dick. What are we de-escalating? They're invading us. I would like to ask Al Qaeda. How do you de-escalate that? I would really like to ask the city of New York to de-escalate when planes flew into the World Trade Center. Get the fuck out of here. How do you de-escalate this? They're bombing cities. It's maddening, and it's not going to end until someone fucking ends it. We can't. We just had a generationally destroying war two years ago that we've not recovered from. We have an entire society that's dealing with various different forms of PTSD. We don't have the institutions to take care of all of the victims from two years ago. We didn't get any help then either, and we're not going to get any help now. I think, again, there's this tendency towards isolationism in the left brought on by the Iraq War. If nothing is done, if there's no international response to this, and if the Azeris aren't stopped by auto-Catholic resistance, then it won't stop with Armenia, because violence of this sort never does. There's a book. I'm interested in your thoughts on it, actually, Joe, but I found it quite illuminating a number of years ago.

An Inconvenient Genocide by Adam Haaschild, which is about the Armenian genocide and its influence on Hitler, making the point that even though Hitler never was anywhere close to Armenian, neither were any fucking German troops, for that matter, particularly close. Imperial German troops were very much in charge of a lot of different death squads. It's a weird story. Hitler's Germany, I apologize. I meant the Wehrmacht. To be fair, they tried. The point that Haaschild was making was that Hitler was not engaged in the Armenian genocide, but he paid attention to it, and the fact that the young Turks got away with it, and got to take that, take land that, as you pointed out, is currently occupied by some US nuclear warheads, was part of what emboldened him to do not just the Holocaust, but everything he did in Europe, and there was a line specifically in reference to the Holocaust from Hitler. I believe it was during this table talk that was like, essentially, he was saying, well, of course, we'll get away with it. Nobody remembers Armenians anymore. Yeah, it's literally on the wall of our genocide museum. Did anyone do anything to Turkey? Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing is like, it goes back to 2020, right? Like, everybody was saying, because I mean, I understand the politics behind Artsakh are messy for people who are not from this region,

and I don't have enough time to go into them. The majority Armenian population that was given to Azerbaijan by the Soviet Union with absolutely no process, and they attempted to vote to join Armenia while we were still in the Soviet Union, which is well within the rights, according to the Soviet Union's constitution, if such rights functionally existed, which they did not, and that's what started the first war. But in 2020, every war has been about that ever since, effectively, at least politically on its surface, because internationally is recognized as part of Azerbaijan, because they go off old Soviet maps for fucking reasons. I don't know. I mean, we could talk about Sykes-Picot. Yeah, exactly. But like, you know, in 2020, people were saying that like, oh, if this will all end, if Armenia simply gives up Artsakh, which we don't claim Artsakh. I mean, some people do. The government does not. We don't recognize it as an independent country either, which they themselves have declared themselves. It's messy, I understand. But it's not within the Republic of Armenia to negotiate the nonexistence of the Republic of Artsakh. That is their right to self-determination. That is politically what the government believes.

Now, they were saying, well, now that these areas have been taken over by Azerbaijan, we can finally move towards peace. There was fucking peace talks a week ago. Prime Minister Pashunyan met with Aliyev, I believe in Belgium. I'm not entirely sure. They literally met a week ago. Maybe it was two weeks ago. It was very recent. But the thing is, is every time this peace process starts again, this happens, because it's not about Artsakh. It's not about Nagorno-Karabakh. It's not about any of these. It's about our fundamental right to exist. They do not believe in it. It wasn't about Jews being involved in business. It wasn't about Jews marrying Germans. It was about their fundamental right to exist. It's all it is. It's the same could be said for Palestinians. This isn't about Palestinians. Absolutely. Fucking Israelis are just placing Armenians in Palestine as well. It's not about these small little nibbles that they're taking.

It's not about the freedom of movement. It's not about your right to date someone which came up recently. They made some Israeli law against that. You have to declare your romantic intentions before you go into the West Bank or whatever. It's not about those things. Maybe that'll make it easier to get the American leftists on this one. Right. No, no, guys. Israel's the bad guys here. We can do this. Fuck, even Noam Chomsky wouldn't deny this genocide. Yeah, yeah, there you go. That's not entirely true. He probably would. But the thing is, it's not about these small nibbles. It's not about your right to do X or your right to do Y.

It's not about art socks, right? The freedom. They don't believe you should exist. And they will take and take and take and take until you're fucking powerless and they can wipe you out. That is their goal. I mean, you can see that in Palestine. You can see that in Arsach. You can see that increasingly in Armenia. You can see that's what Russia's goal was in Ukraine. It was Russia's goal in Georgia. It's how imperialism fucking works. It doesn't have to have an American flag or a British flag over it for that to be what it's called. It's genocidal imperialism. And if you're too dumb to fucking see that, I don't know what else to tell you. I don't know how else. Do you need me to draw in fucking crayon?

I think we're both getting angry here primarily at groups of people who I don't believe are the primary listeners that we'll have on this. Not necessarily, no. But I get it. No, it's this constant fucking thing you have whenever there's a war anywhere and you are like, well, what is the solution? Well, the people who are the victims need to have access to weapons. And if you're saying, which I agree with, sending in U.S. or whatever troops to X country usually doesn't work out, then what is the option? Give them fucking weapons. Yeah, and honestly, what would make the situation worse if we had American soldiers here? Yeah, I just don't think that's a thing that logistically the U.S. military can do. Well, it would never happen. There's not even a base here.

There's some situations where, yes, military assistance could make a situation worse. Bad things will happen. You cannot deploy large amounts of weapons or soldiers to a specific area without there being some kind of negative effects. However, you have to realistically weigh the good and the bad. Yeah, the world military, the allies bombed Germany flat, but they stopped the fucking Holocaust. Yeah, we blew up a fair amount of people in the 90s. We stopped the genocide. We blew up the shit out of ISIS, and there was also some civilian casualties, which fucking sucked. Quite a few. You stopped the Yazidi genocide with the assistance of the PKK and the YPG and the YPJ.

You cannot unleash military power without the acceptance that innocent people are going to die. The way that you weigh that is more fucking people are going to die if you don't. That's, I think, the key of it and probably the point to close on is that it's not a decision. Do we bring violence to this situation or not? The question is, how lopsided will the violence be? Will the violence be one state armed by its allies massacring an under-equipped military and then civilians until there's no one left of the people who inhabited that area? Or will those people have the equipment to defend themselves? That's the question.

The only way for the situation to not be violent is for Azerbaijan to not do what they're doing right now. If some sort of diplomatic pressure works, I will be unbelievably psyched to eat both of our words in this. If fucking Blinken manages to, I have no idea how you actually have an impact here, but that would be lovely. I just don't think it's likely. Don't get me wrong, there's a time for diplomacy and that time ends when troops attempt to cross the border or they start cluster bombing our cities. There's a time for diplomacy and not that you can do two things at once. And to be completely clear, I'm not calling for the 101st to fucking land in Yurovon or whatever. I don't want the American military to come here.

We'll take care of ourselves, but we need the tools to do so. The fact remains is you can be vehemently against war. I know I am. I've fought in them. They fucking suck. I do not want war to happen to anybody, but when it comes, talking's over, or at least it hits the back burner. There's negotiations going on in Ukraine and Russia that we don't hear about, but at the same time Ukraine knows they have to continue doing violence in the meantime. You can't just like, whoa, guys, let's just hit the brakes and let's have a fucking peace conference in Belgium or whatever.

The Sunniak is being bombed, the Goris is being bombed, like Armenians are dying. There's no words that will fix that. What will fix it is fucking artillery systems, high Mars, GPS guided weapons, fucking body armor. We don't even have first aid kits. There's things that we need that can happen in addition to political pressure because political pressure is great if we ever have it, but there needs to be something in the meantime. The director of Doctors Without Borders one time said something that was incredibly controversial when he said it because he's a doctor and he runs a charity. He said, you can't stop a genocide with doctors.

And he meant that you need to give people fucking weapons because, like we already said, and then I promise I'll stop talking. There's two ways that this ends. We defend ourselves and we survive or you sit by and you do nothing and there's thousands of more graves full of Armenians by the end of this. That's it. I mean, once upon a time the world said never again and that shit has had a big fucking asterisk next to it ever since and people need to prove them. So you need to fucking prove the words actually mean things. If you want to defend democracies and shit like you do in Ukraine, I have a fucking democracy for you to defend and we need weapons. I think that's as good a note as any to end on Joe Cossabian, host of Lions led by Donkeys, author of the Hooligans of Kandahar.

You've got other bunch of other books that have come out now. Yeah, I'm the victory of death series out if you enjoy military sci-fi. And I have another one coming out in October called the frontier core. You can preorder it now. If you look on my Twitter, you can find a link to preorder it. It's free if you have Kindle Unlimited for the ebook. So yeah, also, if you don't feel like giving me money, that's great to donate to the Armenian Red Cross. They need it more than I do.

Yeah. All right, everybody. That's the episode. Hey, welcome to It Could Happen Here podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together. And this is another Andrew episode. Hello. Hello. Yes.

Greetings. We have Chris. We have James. We have myself. And we have Andrew, obviously, who I'm going to hand the reins off to. Awesome. So hello again to another episode of me talking about different stuff and quite fittingly considering today is the day that Queen Elizabeth has passed into the pits of hell.

We are deeply, as a citizen under the Commonwealth, we are deeply saddened by the loss of the Queen Elizabeth. All my colleagues have reached out to me today and I am okay, guys. That is so funny. Today, we will be discussing a current member of the Commonwealth. One of quite a few twin island nations in the Caribbean that being Antigua and Barbuda, and more specifically, Barbuda. Barbuda is an example of African resilience. It's an example of a society in touch with this environment.

It's an example of the capability of the commons as an institution. And it's an example of sticking it to the crown to be quite honest with you. Nice. I mean, I'm excited to learn more about that. Yes. So I don't think many people know about Barbuda and its history. I doubt most people could place it on a map. But it represents quite the interesting story.

So to begin, I should probably explain what is a Barbuda. Barbuda is an island located in the eastern Caribbean, forming part of the sovereign state of Antigua and Barbuda. It's located north of the island of Antigua and is part of the Leeward Islands of the West Indies. It comprises about 62 square miles. So it is about 62 square miles, which is 160 kilometers. And it's one of the flattest islands in the Caribbean. Its soils are very shallow and in fertile.

It is a very arid island with very little rainfall and very frequent droughts. Its scrub wilderness is roamed by deer and pigs and descendants of the animals that early European traders and settlers would have imported. It also has a pre-settlement evergreen woodland that consists of white cedar, tapentine, and whitewood, alongside columnar cactus and thorny shrubs and grassy glades and other species that have grown up in soils that have been degraded by the clearance of charcoal burning and grazing and just general human activity. Most Barbudans, I would say, engage in shifting cultivation,

but none of them are full-time farmers. The countryside is mostly uninhabited because the law required that all Barbudans lived in or near the island's one village, which is Codrington, and according to the 2011 census, there were roughly 1,634 people on the island. Of course, that has changed in recent times, and we'll get into that shortly. Barbuda is yet another example of a distinctive community emerging out of the colonial era that swept through the Caribbean. I've mentioned the maroons before, the different maroon communities that have existed

on the different Caribbean islands and in Guyana and Suriname, but I think Barbuda and their story represents really the diversity of how colonialism manifested in the region. Barbuda's people have a sense of identity and attachment to locality, that is, I think, very distinctive and very unique among people of the Caribbean. Not to say that the rest of us don't have a sense of identity or an attachment to locality, but their story and their tradition reaches back over two centuries of near independence and quite significant levels of autonomy, which was unheard of in most of the Caribbean

due to the legacy of slavery. Representing a very close-knit and traditional community, Barbuda's approach to using and student the resources reflects that long legacy of isolation, of ecological constraint being on such a small island, of familial closeness having such a small population, and of social interdependence, considering the series of administrators that they had dealt with and how each of those administrators neglected or ignored them. Barbudans, both women and abroad, are still very much attached to their island

because they have long held it in common. So we'll be diving into a brief history of exactly how they reached this point, what institutions they've developed for common ownership and communal land use, and how emigration has played a role in that, and unfortunately how the combination of Hurricane Irma and the Doctrine and the Shock Doctrine have contributed to their current situation. So for more than 200 years from the late 17th century, Barbuda was leased by the crown to one family, the Codringtons,

hence the name of the village being Codrington. The original leasy was a guy named Christopher Codrington, he was the governor of the Leeward Islands, and his heirs lived in England, so they pretty much neglected it after he had died. Barbuda would have supplemented the lucrative sugar estates that Codrington had in Antigua with timber and ground provisions and fish and livestock and draft animals. Barbuda being surrounded by coral reefs often had ships wrecked near the island, and so they also salvaged resources from those ships.

And so as late as the 1850s, the Codringtons were getting £4,000 a year from Barbuda and stock, and £300 a year from salvaging operations on the island. That's just over £643,000 today, per year. And it just demonstrates, of course, that even though they were more independent than most other enslaved people, because the island wasn't as profitable, they were still being exploited. Initially, the island was only worked by a few indentured whites, but then when enslaved people were brought in from Africa,

the enslaved population began to rise, and they began to establish that sort of culture and community that we see to this day. Because they were neglected, because the island was very little inhabited, they housed and they fed themselves through their own efforts and were basically spared of the rigors of the plantation regimen because of how unprofitable the island was, because its soils were so sandy and arid and unflutile. So between 1800 and 1832, being free in many respects,

Barbuda's population was able to rise from 300 to 500, and they built a cohesive, creole community whose solidarity was able to thwart the efforts of local overseers and absentee proprietors to try to get them to labor on Antion estates or to get them to be more quote-unquote productive for their overseers. Because they had such a several hundred strong community on that island that had established itself for generations, no overseer, no manager could just pull up in there and just say,

why don't you try and co-woose them into doing what he wanted them to do. This is in stark contrast to a lot of the other Caribbean islands where managers and overseers had a lot more presence and a lot more power to destroy families, to split up communities, to ferment divisions, because the island just, they basically neglected it and in that neglect, they took advantage of that neglect of the material conditions that created that neglect to strengthen their community bonds and to strengthen their autonomy.

As Emancipation came around, Codrington himself even was like, wow, good for them, pretty much because almost all of them who were like to quote him directly, one united family so attached to Barbuda that force alone or extreme drought can alone take them from that island. In other words, as a displaced indigenous African people, they reforged a connection to the new land that they had inhabited

and rooted themselves in that land. One particular tradition they have is the burial of one's umbilical cord on the island itself, and so that's been going on for generations where a new child is born and the umbilical cord is buried on the island, and so even when Barbudans move abroad, they still have that strong tie to the island itself. So after Emancipation ruled around in 1834, Barbuda in life didn't change that much.

The transition from slavery to being free was not as abrupt or as consequential as it was in other parts of the Caribbean. They didn't become landowners, they didn't necessarily get any political power automatically because Barbuda was still being assigned to Crown Leases, which had certain agreements and contracts in place with the Crown, that kind of thing.

But they were, I mean, they were still being exploited, but things were a bit easier for them to transition compared to other places. An 1835 agreement had secured Barbuda's employment on Covington Enterprises at specific rates of P. But after the contract had lapsed, it really reverted to a sort of a relationship of coercion. They wouldn't pay them their wages,

they would take, quote unquote, recalcitrant Barbudans and transport them to Antigua in jails or plantations, and they would continue to just siphon off of the island. One of the only exports really on the island at the time was cattle, mostly for Covington's estates in Antigua. Cattle, sheep, and firewood. And the people themselves were engaged in cultivating provisions, yams, potatoes, corn, and supplying their own farm industry,

their own clothing, their necessities. So Barbudans would continue with their different occupations, their hunting and their fishing, their provision, tending their cottonwood and burning charcoal and salvaging wrecks. Sometimes they would be employed by proprietors with governments, most times they either disregarded these authorities or acted in open defiance. And so agents of the state would often complain about Barbudans

and their disregard for the crown's property and the estates' property. They would often be accused of poaching Covington's cattle, and so there was one attempt in particular to seize all their guns and send them off of the island. And so when the government did step in and condemned Barbudans for taking cattle when they wanted to take cattle, Barbudans basically pulled in a reverse card and demanded redress against interference with their livelihoods.

They basically were like, I'll quote one petition that was written by Barbudans in 1869. We are deprived of the use of our firearms whereby most of us live in shooting any large fish, turtle or wild birds. We are told to take out licenses yet if we are seen with a gun, not even shooting, we are taken before the magistrate of Antigua and severely punished for it. Our little gardens are gone to waste and if such as are,

still in a little cultivation was to be injured by weather and we by sickness are not able to have the fences repaired directly. It is taken and ruined, saying our intention is only to catch the wild beasts of Mr. Codrington's. Eventually, I guess the Codrington's got tired of having to not profit as well as they could have of having to deal with these independent people. Their relinquish on their lease in 1870, they took all their horses and cattle off the island leaving only the day and sheep

because they currently round up day and sheep as effectively at that point. Basically, they left. I always find it interesting when Europeans bring a bunch of European animals wherever they go. Let me just go and set up an estate here in the middle of nowhere and introduce a bunch of deer and sheep and rabbits and stuff. I think it happened in Australia as well. They just let a bunch of rabbits just go loose just for hunting.

It's like, oh, let me, like, get a hobby that's not shooting animals. But anyway. So because Bobbida was seen as unprofitable, each leasee that got their lease from the Crown got its resources as much as they could and neglected its inhabitants. William and Robert Dougal of William and Robert Dougal's Bobbida Island Company never invested the annual 1.5 or 1,500 pounds required by their lease.

Only 700 pounds rather than their promised 6,000 worth of stock were introduced with barely a score of abutants employed as cruisers. And even though they allegedly attempted to plant certain coffee, cola, cocoa, another fruit, they neglected that too. And eventually in 1898, a derelict Bobbida was forfeited to the Crown for a non-payment of rent. When a government official visited the island, he found the deer were almost exterminated.

The satinwood and logwood were depleted. The cattle were famished. The fences were in disrepair. They had four men to round up about 100 horses, 80 cattle and a bunch of cows. And the two paddocks that existed on the island had long since become filthy and fiercely overgrown, not only with bush but dense thickets. Dr. Dougal's gunners also apparently had a really bad sense of aim because a lot of the fences were just riddled with bullets.

And so because the island and the people were starved and degraded by the Dougals, the colonial office had revoked their lease. And basically excused the few villagers who had taken some of the cattle for themselves. Bobbida also protested the fact that whenever these leases would pull up on their island, they would always be taking their stock, closing their provision grounds, threatening to evict them, basically doing everything they could to be hostile towards the people on the island. And so only their own traditional hunting and farming and stuff enabled Bobbida to survive.

Of course, government being the government didn't really care about the people that much. So even though the leaseholders were gone, they didn't really get much out of it. The people that is. So after the determination of the lease, the colonial government, the Leeward Islands colonial government in Antigua basically took over the island and they established a government stock farm in 1901, some cotton plots in 1903. They gave some grants to pay for fencing and cutting wood and cotton experiments and cattle purchases and mule breeding and the Bobbidens took the government grazing lands for their own purposes.

And basically enclosed a portion of that land and left it for the government stock and left the rest of the pasture, the richest parts of the pasture, for their own horses and cattle and donkeys. So while the government had to deal with like this small, small portion of land with like some very weak insufficient meadow, the rest of the community was able to flourish with a nice rich pasture for their cattle. And still, despite that, the stock farm, the government stock farm still flourished with 161 horses, 108 cattle and five mules by 1905.

And cotton, surprisingly, also became profitable on the island. A crop that really didn't flourish, they are told, during slavery, was now starting to pick up in the beginning of the early 20th century. They began shipping cotton out and employing a bunch of Bobbidens and now Bobbida was being seen as a super profitable place. However, because of that cotton boom, Bobbidens were able to buy passage overseas. They were able to raise a standard of living and it ended up causing a labor shortage that led to conflict.

After a shipwreck of the island in 1915, the island manager went to check out what was going on with the salvagin and he caught a bunch of Bobbidens, salvagin. But salvagin for their own profit instead of his profits. And so in retaliation for him trying to stop them from salvagin for themselves, the Bobbidens burnt his boat and his wagon. And so in retaliation for that, the governor of Antigua started to impose these previously unenforced rents on cultivated plots. So like he wanted to charge like five shillings per acre per year.

And he also doubled animal head taxes. And so by introducing these taxes, introducing these rents, the government was basically trying to get, not just to punish the people for daring to be free, but also trying to force them to work on their cotton plantation. Of course, Bobbidens, having lived so freely for so long didn't want to work on these cotton plantations, especially not after slavery. And so the people petitioned the crown against this kind of semi-intentioned servitude that the governor was trying to introduce.

And it seems that Mother Nature was on their side because they won their case due to drought. All the crops were basically ruined by drought, cutting on cotton profits, cutting on cattle profits, cutting on crop and corn profits, and all this happened in 1916. And then in 1922, Bobbidens was hit by a hurricane more severe than they'd ever seen before. And so that brief period where Bobbidens was seen as striking gold

for the government came to an end. And Bobbidens continued to cling on to their customary modes of subsistence, of self-reliance, of survival, of their plots and their livestock and their fishing grounds, of continuing to be their own masters because 250 years of experience had taught them how unreliable and exploitative all these other alternatives that bosses or non-natives that the government was trying to introduce were to them. And they learned that only ownership in common would guarantee their access

and guarantee the protection of their island from environmental exploitation. And that's where we get to the interesting part because they had already long thought of themselves as owners of the island, as possessing the island for themselves, even though on paper it wasn't the case. Even though on paper they were being handled between the crown and the different leaseholders that the crown would introduce. Bobbidens, two Bobbidens, being so small, being so homogenous, having such meagre soils, having such strong tight connections and bonds,

so what are all of this collectively? It wasn't like... When I say strong connections, family bonds, I don't mean it in the sense that some of the other lands in the Caribbean were sort of parceled out because in the Caribbean there are lands that are held by certain families and it passes down the family and it's growing down for generations It wasn't this idea that these particular families owned the land. It was that all of them together owned the land.

Serious, real, communal land ownership. They'd use the land for generations to raise ground provisions, to hunt deer and wild pigs, to keep goats and sheep, to keep cattle, to cut firewood, to fish and so on. They had no documents that said that they had these collective rights on the island and yet they all insisted with one voice, the Barbuda was theirs alone. No outsiders could tell them otherwise. Furthermore, they had proven again and again that outside proprietors

were powerless in the face of their attempts to run the island for themselves because they would continue to graze their cattle wherever they wanted to graze their cattle. They would continue to fish wherever they wanted to fish, salvage whatever they wanted to salvage, cultivate wherever they wanted to cultivate. Who's going to stop them? Clearly nobody. They couldn't even get, outsiders couldn't even get like a rent out of Barbudans. So by 1920, Barbudans had gotten legal entitlement to roughly half of the island

and by 1983, they controlled virtually all of its resources, basically de facto. Unfortunately, against their will honestly, Antigua and Barbuda were joined together by putting them in the streets and so Antigua and Barbuda is the country that exists today. But one of the primary concerns of Barbudans were that they were able, were that they be able to maintain sole ownership, sole control, sole communal control over the lands of Barbuda. Land ownership has been an issue that Barbudans have had with Antigua for a very, very long time now, for decades now. And really all Barbudans want is to maintain their common ownership for themselves alone. And so they've maintained that through the Barbudan Council,

defending the land and declaring that no land in Barbuda can be sold or developed without the permission of the Barbudan Council. And so now to explain basically how common land use works in Barbuda. Two distinctive and useful modes of land use, shifting cultivation for provision grounds and open range prostrage for livestock. Because the soil is so weak, shifting cultivation is a necessity. And so after one or two years of planting exhausted soil, they move their fencing, they move their grounds of between half an acre to two or three acres and plant their sweet potatoes, yams, maize, beans, pigeon peas, squash, peanuts, etc. elsewhere. So the old land could, you know, regenerate.

But this constant cultivation is something that occurs that grants really no permanent rights to any one individual. You do have use rights as the principle of use of fruit over the area cultivating, but you don't have permanent ownership over that piece of land that you're cultivating. And they have that system in place because they recognize, living on the island for generations, that Barbuda's ecology is extremely fragile, extremely limited. Its resources are limited. And so they have to safeguard their sustenance for generations to come. Yeah, it's fascinating actually.

I didn't know anything about that. Yeah, it really is. Similarly with the slash and boom cultivation, they also had the management of open-range livestock being very much unrestricted. They're actually feral cattle that exists on the island, in addition to the more teemed and penned animals. And so how they basically, they allow all their animals to, you know, mix and mingle of different families or different individuals would have their specific cattle or horses or sheep or whatever, airmarked or branded. But for the most part, they've maintained this sort of open-range husbandry because it helps to sustain their unity. It helps to maintain their, and strengthen their social bonds and their community solidarity to basically ensure that everyone is taken care of in a place that is so scanned of resources.

And lastly, through one of the ways that they maintain the balance of the island is through immigration. Their population has basically stayed at that level because they stayed within the limits of the resources they have on the island. And so young Barbudans have had to leave the island while still maintaining their communal use rights to the land. And then eventually they would make remittances of money or resources and periodic returns that would help to introduce, you know, health care resources and housing resources and education resources to the island. So some of the, like, completely isolated from the outside world living in this sort of bubble, they do still have that exchange going on. Most of the immigrants live in three primary communities, St. John's Antigua, of course, seeing as their neighbor. A lot of them are in New York City. I mean, a lot of Caribbean people in general are in New York City, but Barbudans are in New York City.

And a lot of them also live in Britain, in Lancaster, as part of the West Indian exodus that took place all the way back in the late 1950s. So to sort of wrap things up here, their communal ties and their solidarity have allowed them to cope with a harsh environment and to successfully navigate a succession of misinformed aloof, sometimes actively hostile and mostly incompetent proprietors, managers and administrators. Being so unified and holding themselves in solidarity, they have managed to maintain their traditional resource ownership, their communal land tenure and their fragile ecology. Completely and totally rejecting the assertions that the economists carried hard and made about the tragedy of the Collins. It has not been a tragedy for Barbudans, it has been a triumph. Until recently, unfortunately, in September 2017, Hurricane Irma damaged and destroyed up to 95% of the island's buildings and infrastructure. And as a result, all of the islands and habitants had to evacuate Antigua, leaving Barbuda empty for the first time in hundreds of years.

Wow. I mean, two years later by February 2019, most of the residents have returned to the island. However, Prime Minister of Antigua, Gaston Alfonso Brown, he's been leader since 2014, has been making moves essentially to privatize Barbuda. His background before entering politics was being a banker and a businessman. And he seems to be employing the shock doctrine tactic of using environmental catastrophe and social displacement to accelerate capitalism. Essentially, after Hurricane Irma swept through and most of the residents became homeless, communication systems went down. Antigua and Barbuda got relief, £120,000 of relief for Barbuda. That's not very much.

Not very much at all. But it would take over $100 million to rebuild the homes and the infrastructure in Barbuda. All the critical infrastructure that existed, the food supply, the medicine, the shelter, electricity, water, communications, waste management. And as one person said, the director of Antigua and Barbuda's National Office of Disaster Services, Fillmore Mullen, he said, in my 25 years of disaster management, I've never seen something like this. It is optimistic to think anything like this could be rebuilt in six months. They have to rebuild entirely all of their public utilities. And so essentially what Prime Minister Gaston Alfonso Brown is trying to do is revoke communal land ownership, allow the residents to buy some land,

and use the rest to basically introduce resorts and hotels and other tourist attractions to help fund the rebuilding efforts. But of course, we know where that money is actually going to go. And that's as far as I know about the situation. Unfortunately, I don't have any connections in Antigua and Barbuda yet. But unfortunately, that is what has been going on. Another example basically of disaster capitalism, trying to seize and accumulate through violence and through exploitation as usual. I hope that we've seen and been inspired by Barbuda's efforts. And I hope that Barbudans are able to continue to prove themselves resilient in the face of this disaster.

That's fascinating. Do you know, I'm interested in these diasporic communities, like you said, there's one in Leicester and stuff. Do they still have a very strong community coherence, like when they go elsewhere? You said they tend to gather in certain spots. I'd be interested in how those folks, I guess, dealt with a very different life in New York or Leicester or wherever. Right. Well, like other Caribbean people who have emigrated, we do tend to concentrate in certain places where we already have family connections. I think most Caribbean people have at least a relative living abroad. An uncle, a great uncle, a second cousin, a cousin, whatever.

So it sort of builds from there. So you try and create a piece of home and sort of settle and concentrate in those areas and live in those areas and support each other in those areas. Yeah. And that, I would say, helps with the adjustment. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so you can find me on YouTube.com slash Andrewsum on Patreon.com slash St. Drew and on Twitter.com slash underscore St. Drew. If you, Bob, you're done, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. I would love to learn more about the situation going on and wish you all the best.

Solidarity forever. Please. Who's dying today? It's the queen. It's the queen. Well, correction, she's not dying. She's dead. That lady's dead. That lady's dead.

Yeah. Very sad, obviously. Yeah. Very sad. Grieving podcast today brought to you by It Could Happen Here. It's all of us. It's me. It's Gare.

It's Chris. It's Robert. And it's the ghost of the queen. We're talking about the queen. She's dead. What's up with that? Yeah, she's real dead. I haven't seen, you know what I haven't seen that I'm disappointed of is a new version of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch involving her corpse and its fancy casket.

There's still time. There's still time. We can change that. Now, my question is, James, is that legal in the UK now? Absolutely not. No. You will get so arrested. Not even arrested.

This is the worst part. People have just like, I don't understand what the fuck is wrong with people, but they have become volunteer cops to defend a guy who's been credibly accused of pedophilia. I'm disappointed in us. They do not be policing your fellow people for exercising some of the very few rights that the conservative body has taken away from them actually. But yeah, you've only let yourself down. I'm disappointed. Yeah, they really, really hate anyone who is not thrilled about the monarchy. Yeah.

Arresting people for having not my king signs. I see that Jedwood is taking it to the fascist state, which is great to see. So we're going to be talking about the queen or former queen. I do want to note that the day the queen died, a big wave of condolences came in, including from Domino's Pizza UK. Wow. Which if you don't understand, the queen had a very deep relationship with Domino's. So this does mean a lot. They were lovers.

Among those who posted their condolences was Hamilton West End. The Britain RMT, which is like the British Railway Union, stopped their strike, which I think is the most pissant coward thing I've ever seen a union do. British cycling suggested that people not go out for a bike ride during the time of the Queen's funeral. Are you fucking serious? My God. They're literally closing food banks. She was 96. Deal with it.

They're closing food banks. I think the funniest one was Les Miserables posted, everyone at Les Miserables is deeply saddened by the passing of Her Majesty the Queen. And we offer our sincere condolences to the royal family. We joined together with the people of the United Kingdom and all around the world and mourning her loss, which they then deleted an hour later. If there's one thing that Miserables is about, it's about people all over the world mourning the loss of monarchy. It's the main thing about it. So yeah, most of on Twitter was definitely split between these companies posting how they're so sad that also a lot of people pretty thrilled that the Queen died. It's kind of funny because we were all shocked by the 96-year-old woman who died of natural causes.

She was so young. I know. She was at an age that if you reversed her age and told me she had died, I still wouldn't have been surprised. She was at an age where even if you flip the numbers, she's still old. Yes, she's still old. It is great to see the Telegraph today running a headline. Five mile queue to view Elizabeth Seconds coffin will see horrible stories of suffering. This is a country where people will not be able to heat their homes this winter.

It's a country with an explosion in food insecurity and this is what we're doing. The British, okay, so the crown did not call directly for a blood sacrifice. The British people are just bound and determined to have people die. They're lining up in the streets to sacrifice themselves for the dead queen. It is a magical thing. Don't do us all that way. There's some people showing up with not-my-king signs and getting assaulted by mobs. Actual, not just police, but regular ass people.

Most people are not that concerned. It's just like the TERFs in Britain. A small minority of people who do nothing but tweet and write for the Guardian who misrepresent the opinions of most British people who are not that concerned. A lot of these British people do show up in person and shut down... Yes, it is not the case that there isn't widespread support for this kind of shit. It's just that it's not uniform and the people who do speak up also tend to get arrested. It's sort of amazing, it's like, okay, Britain got industrial capitalism

before any other country on earth, right? The bourgeoisie has one job. One job, their one job is to destroy feudalism and the British couldn't do it. They had the largest head start of any country on earth and they couldn't do it. It's incredible, it's miraculous. They were co-opted into these feudal elites through things like the Great Reform Act which used property as a proxy for land or a capital of the proxy for land. And it's worked remarkably well and now we just do false consciousness shit like this.

How good is your false consciousness game when people who can't heat their homes are sleeping on the street to say goodbye to presumably a billionaire who never cared about them? It's miraculous. Absolutely, who was not equipped emotionally to have ever cared about them. Who's like so would never have allowed her to care about them. Yeah, I mean, as lots of people were romanticizing the monarchy and the queen and doing their performative mornings, obviously there was a wave of other people being like, hey, the royal family is kind of fucked up.

They've stolen billions in dollars in jewels from countries like India and across South Africa. They're continuing to benefit from Britain's history of colonialism. Earlier this year during the Queen's Jubilee celebration, an old Kenyan revolutionary fighter used the occasion to call for an explanation from the queen for why she hasn't been compensated after being tortured with axes by British troops. People should look at the way Britain treated the Mao Mao. I have stuff on this later for this episode, actually. We're going to be talking about that.

A 2017 estimate found that the royal family is estimated to be worth $88 billion. Yeah, and a lot of that's obviously not in straight up cash, which is one of the ways. People are talking about, oh, Charles inherited half a billion. No, Charles inherited tens of billions of dollars. They own a lot of land. Yes, they own a huge amount of land. Charles has his own real estate empire that he created while he was waiting for his mom to fucking croak. And they also have a fortune, a really actually uncountable.

You have to think about their wealth like the Vatican. There's no actual way. It's functionally limitless money because so much of what they own is priceless antiquities, many of which were stolen from other people. Yeah, and it's hard to put a tangible number on their value and their celebrity status. What is that fucking diamond in the crown worth? There's no real way to appraise that. And I want to point this out, if they tried to sell the diamond, almost certainly what would happen is the British people would give her $3 billion and they'd give her the diamond back. Yeah, they'd crowd fund it. Yeah, they'd stop doing the subsidies for heating that they've just started doing and buy the diamond back.

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the heating thing briefly because I think an anchor on BBC was discussing how news of the Queen's passing basically interrupted all other news in the UK, including statements being given on the 80% price increase in energy bills and the rising cost of living, stating that those topics, the topics of cost of living and the rising energy bills was, quote, insignificant now due to the gravity of this situation. We can insert this clip here. I haven't saved for Daniel because it's wild. Doctors in Scotland were concerned about the Queen's health coming as Liz Truss was making a rather important statement concerning the future of energy bills. That, of course, insignificant now given the gravity of the situation we seem to be experiencing with Her Majesty. An old lady died. She was not a very nice old lady. I've known old ladies who were nice that died and I was sad.

I've known old ladies who were not nice that died and I didn't really care. In any case, it's not a big deal because old people, that's what human beings do when they reach 96, is they die a lot of the time and it's okay. It's okay. Outside of everything about her, it's fine. Queen Elizabeth was the longest reigning monarch in the history of Britain. Probably close to the longest and maybe Ramsey's the fucking second is up there. 69 years, you don't run into a lot of competition in terms of length of reign. 70 years. She ascended the throne in 1952. It's worth noting that a lot of old ladies are going to die in Britain this winter because of this energy processing. It's also worth noting that the Queen tried to use a bunch of state poverty money that was earmarked for schools, hospitals and low income families to pay Buckingham Palace's heating bill.

Oh, wow. That's wild. That's great. Well, you wouldn't want an old woman like that to be out in the rain. Ah, that's very wrong. Because I believe the Crown estates did evict people during the COVID-19 pandemic, talking of old folks being kicked out into the rain. Wow. For around two weeks after the Queen's death, basically all of Britain kind of grinds to an halt. Honestly, one of the base parts about this is that this does potentially cost the UK economy billions of dollars because they just shut down for two weeks.

So this is like the equivalent of the boat getting stuck in the canal. Just the Queen dying. I do want to make a quick note for everybody. The longest reigning verifiable monarch, according to this Wikipedia page that I just skimmed, is Subhuza II of Swaziland, which was a British protectorate until 1968. He reigned from 1899 to August of 1982. 1982 years. So you know what, Elizabeth? Not that impressive. I am a Subhuza II stan now.

Absolute Chad shit. The fact that he just snuffed it before he got to see apartheid and very Chad. That is a bummer. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, just looking at some of the evictions the Crown estates have done over the years. You can look those up. It's pretty heartbreaking shit.

Well, luckily, the Queen actually did not die in Buckingham Palace. She died in a castle in Scotland. That's great because Buckingham Palace is a hideous monument of trash. The castle she died in looks pretty cool. Yeah, one thing you're supposed to get with a monarchy is like really rad looking castles. It is like neat. The castles are cool except for Buckingham Palace, which looks like fucking tenements. Yeah. Buckingham Palace is a building that dares you to go steal back all of the wealth that they stole from you to build it.

So the plan for if the Queen died in this Scottish castle was called Operation Unicorn, which is wild. No one could have guessed. What is the Unicorn? 96 year old woman dying is not a Unicorn situation. Operation Squirrel or something. How is this giving a couple their third? I don't get it. I know. So the plan for this type of thing is the Queen died on last Thursday afternoon.

It was announced the following Friday morning after the Queen dies. They call Operation Unicorn. They then call they send like emergency alerts to all the British leaders, you know, the new Prime Minister who is incredibly funny. And, you know, all of all these people are notified. And then press press gets notified that next morning as as as they did. So staff members in the castles and palaces all got sent home. All parliamentary business gets postponed. Everything, everything shuts down, which means all of the stuff they were working on on energy bills gets shut down.

Like they were working on trying to figure out what the fuck they're going to do for this 80% cost increase. All that gets shut down until late September. So that's that's cool. But no, this is actually kind of a unique thing because because of how long Elizabeth reigned. The last death of a monarch was in the fifties. So it's it's been a while since this has happened. So everyone's kind of rusty. Like, no, like we aren't as prepared for this.

If it's OK, my my hope is that we get a couple of we get people get a lot of experience with dead British monarchs in the next decade. I'm hoping I'm hoping we get a bunch. King Charles III. I don't think we'll be around for too long. Yeah, I've seen that man's hands and it's. And I mean, here's the thing where every every time a monarch dies, it's kind of it's like a top down rolling general strike. So if we get enough of them in a row, we can start doing serious damage to capital. By the way, quick, quick note about the Chad.

So booze of the second of Swaziland died died with a thousand grandchildren. Oh, my God. Jesus Christ. Jesus. Wow. Man, and always pictured shirtless. Elizabeth cannot compete. No, I'm fine with that not being the case, actually. I don't want to see any conversation there. Yeah. And he probably wasn't racist to any of their partners.

No, actually. We can say about the real family is he here's a neat thing. He and he took all control of all non swat or of all Swazi land and mineral rights from non Swazi interests that had gained control during colonialism and indigenized all of that, which is dope. So there you go. Yeah. So booze of the motherfucking second. Yeah. That's what we call a God King.

I have to go and get injected with a small dose of a disease. Well, let's cut everything but injected in that, Chris. Hey, Daniel's back. So let's take an ad break and we'll be back to learn more about the Queen. You know what else will give you a small dose of a disease? That's right. That's right. Yes, these products and services.

Yeah. I was going to say the Queen of England, but the way is not true, isn't it? And we're back. So yeah, been a while since a monarch died. Last time this happened in the 50s, mourners wore black armbands to show respect for King George. That's the one who is like a big fan of Nazis, right? I don't think we're going to see. So I don't think that tradition is going to continue.

I doubt we're going to see a wave of black armbands. No. If anyone was going to do it, it would probably be the Anglos. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, it was Edward VIII who abdicated and then was replaced by the guy who you were talking about. Okay, that's the guy like Nazis, Edward VIII. So all the UK flags are going to be flown at half mast until the day of the funeral. And then the day of the funeral is going to be a bank holiday as well.

So that's pretty exciting. That's great. I hope that the poor get to eat sweet meats or something provided by the crowd. No, no, no. Again, they're just closing down on the food banks. Almost all businesses in the UK will close. The stock exchange is going to close. Following Princess Diana's death in the late 90s, business owners in Britain felt that they were forced to close their shops or cancel sporting events the day of the funeral,

lest they feel the rage of the tear-stained hordes outside. That's an incredibly funny way of talking about monarchists though. Thank you, The Guardian, for that amazing quote. It's unbelievable. And at least with Diana, it was actually sad, like she was a nice person who was badly treated in her life by the royal family and died tragically and young, as opposed to somebody who got everything they want from the day they were born and died at 96. So then, currently, they are assembling the quote Ascension Council to formally declare Prince Charles the King, which he's already known as King Charles, but there's a whole separate formal process. Yeah, because he could pick another name still.

He says he's not. He's confirmed that. Good. Yes. King's Charles have a good history in the UK. They don't often get executed. So the council will make the proclamation of Ascension to be read on proclamation day. It will be soon after the death, and that'll be somewhere in London.

How do they still have all this shit like? There's so many weird rituals that they still do. Both houses of parliament are suspended until after the official state funeral, and all politicians have to wear new allegiance to the newly ascended monarch. This is really like genuinely the world's most pathetic ruling class. Like, oh my God. Jesus Christ. It's pretty funny. You are the bourgeoisie.

You have one job. Well, but also like back in the day before we had monarchs and capitalism, whenever you had a new coronation, whenever there was something big that happened with the monarchy, the thing they would do is make sure everybody had a shitload of food and nice stuff. The king would give it away. It's all over the world. Cultures would do this. Even the czar did this. Yeah, it's what you do when you come to power because they were at least that scared of the people where it's like, all right, I got to like do something to ring in this rain good so they don't start to wonder why do we have a king now. So I'm going to give him a bunch of fucking food and then they'll be like, oh, the king is the guy who gives us food every now and then that's dope.

It's amazing now that in the UK, it's just like, all right, we've got a new monarch and the old one died. So you guys, a lot of you don't get to eat for a while. You know, King Charlie 73 is the oldest person in British history to become king, which is, I think, a great side. Very unsobuse of a second of him. And then we're also getting a new queen technically. The Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, which again, all this sounds made up, is now the queen consort. So that's exciting. That's thrilling.

I'm thrilled for Queen Camilla. It is the Duchess of Cornwall. Are you kidding me? And Queen Elizabeth's coffin is being prepared to lie in state, meaning it'll be presented for the public to view so they can cry on the coffin, which is pretty cool. Oh, or cry near the coffin. They don't want the pores to get too close. Meanwhile, Soboosa, the second, turns Swaziland into a major asbestos exporter, which Queen Elizabeth also never did. So when the queen dies, do they like preserver and formaldehyde or whatever?

Yeah, they've got some fancy embalming or shit. They have some fancy ass shit. They were probably embalming her while she was alive, just as her limbs stopped working, squirting some in. The queen's body will lie in state until the day of the funeral, so then become a public holiday. There's at least a 10 day morning period starting the day after her death. And then she'll be transported to Westminster Abbey by gun carriage for the state funeral. And then after the funeral, she'll be buried in the King George VI Memorial Chapel. And I believe her, the body of her late husband, Prince Philip, who died last year, will be moved from the vault that he's currently at to beneath the chapel to join here.

So that's pretty funny. Yeah. I don't know nothing to say about that other than it's funny that they've just got that dude in a fucking freezer. It's really funny. And the new coronation will cost billions of pounds. That's good. That's a good because England's like doing great right now. They've got plenty of money for all the necessities. You know, everything's going well.

Cost of living. Great cost of living is really down. So it's it's a good idea to spend billions of dollars making a little death cult about this elderly woman. That's good. Just like the last like big royal wedding cost between 1.2 billion and 6 billion pounds, which is quite quite the quite the specter of their 1.2 to 6 billion. Like, huh? I mean, I feel like at that point, all money's fake. Like the cost of the coronation is expected to be similar, if not a little bit higher.

So great. Yeah, you got to you got to spend a lot of money on a coronation for fucking Charles so that you can because that's what real countries do in 2022. That's very real country shit. Speaking of money, new currencies are already being printed. And in fact, that'll be cheap, though. And in fact, portraits of Charles have already been made on currency. There's like a reserve of money depicting the next king. It's like this being stored to like move it in for when the Queen died.

It's like they already had lots of this money saved. Think of how funny it would have been if like six months before this happened, his 72 year old ass had a heart attack. They have to like burn all that money. Yeah, they've got to burn all the Charles bucks. He's not going to be around long. I will say that's funny. Think, Christ, that Britain no longer has the world's reserve currency. Yeah. Can you imagine?

No, we took on this network on our various shows. We spend a lot of time digging into ugly aspects of American history and American culture. But let's all celebrate one thing that I'm legitimately proud of, which is that a long time ago, people here were like, that seems stupid to let those that family run everything. Why are we? Why are we doing that? Let's get those fuckers out of here. At least we did that, although now a bunch of Americans are being fucking bootlickers too. And in Oregon and a bunch of other states, we're putting in the flags that have staff, which like, you know, not know why this country exists.

This is the one base thing we did. Yeah, like even the US, which like probably has the most murderous bourgeoisie in human history, at least we did our bourgeois revolution. Damn it. Like at least we destroyed feudalism. So now we're going to move on to the next segment of the show entitled an incomplete list of politicians, warmongers, generals, and otherwise bastards who Queen Elizabeth II bestowed awards. So I have quite the collection of people here. Let's start with Palestine.

So Shimon Perez served as President and Prime Minister of Israel. He got a Nobel Peace Prize in like the 90s for an interim peace deal that like failed in the long run to turn into an actual treaty. Pretty sure he was assassinated. No, I don't think. No, no, no, no. That was Rabin. I think Rabin was the one. And Rabin was the one who you could argue might have deserved an award. But Perez is kind of known as more of like a peaceable leader. He's like compared to some of his colleagues, you know, specifically with like the various ethnic cleansings that they do in Palestine.

Perez has kind of seen as like the good guy. And then in the mid 90s, he was facing a major right wing backlash in his home over the peace deal with the Palestinians and in the middle of an election campaign, which he was kind of losing. So during this time, he unleashed Operation Grapes of Wrath, which caused 400,000 Lebanese to flee their homes with almost 800 of them fleeing into a United Nations base in Kwanah, I believe it's called, in South Lebanon. And he didn't really stop there in order to kind of appease the right and Al Jazeera calls it in an attempt to shore up his military credentials before a general election, which he then lost to Benjamin Netanyahu. He ordered the army to strike this U.N. shelter, killing 102 civilians, mostly women and children. At the time of the attack, Perez said that in my opinion, everything was done according to clear logic and in a responsible way. I am at peace. Perez said that the compound had been hit due to an incorrect targeting based on erroneous data. But United Nations investigations found it unlikely that the shelling was unintentional because they were savaring the area heavily beforehand.

So he did this massacre, killed like 100 people to boost his polls for the right-wingers in this election. In November 2008, Queen Elizabeth awarded him with an honorary knighthood. He was knighted in the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George. And during his knighthood, like that day, Perez spoke to the Queen about the escalating Israeli-Palestine conflict saying that, quote, the British learned from the Bible and we learned from the British democracy. Earlier that year, IDF launched Operation Hot Winter, a military campaign targeting the Gaza Strip in response to a series of homos rockets that killed one 47-year-old Israeli student, which that attack was in response to the IDF killing eight homos members earlier that month. But during the IDF's Operation Hot Winter, 110 Palestinians were killed, 54 of them were children.

And then a month, just one month after Perez was knighted, the 2008 Gaza War broke out, also known as the Gaza Massacre. And that was started by the IDF, who called it Operation Cast Lead, a three-week large-scale military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The massacre resulted in 1,400 Palestinian deaths and 13 Israeli deaths, four from friendly fire. So it's just a massacre. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that was like a few weeks after Queen Elizabeth knighted the then-president of Israel, who previously served as the Prime Minister, which is more of like a real role. Anyway, moving on to more fun people, 1989 Queen Elizabeth awarded Ronald Reagan with an honorary knighthood.

That's good. Now, thankfully, the way honorary knighthoods work is you don't become a ser, because ser is a title reserved for people from Britain. I'm not mistaken, you can't hold office in the United States if you are a knight. Oh, I think it's an old rule we have. Yeah, I didn't know that. I didn't recall reading something about that. No, it's not in the Constitution, but there's something about. Yeah.

But even though you can't become a ser because you're not from Britain. Okay, here we go. No title of nobility. This is Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution. Oh, it is in the Constitution. The title of nobility shall be granted by the United States and no person holding any office of prophet or trust under them shall, without the consent of the Congress, except of any president, emolument, office or title of any kind whatsoever, from any king, prince or foreign state.

Fascinating. Yeah, so again, the people who made this country for all of their flaws looked at the British monarchy and were like, that's fucking nuts. Yeah. Because Reagan was received on airy nighthood, the one benefit he does get is that at dinner parties, Reagan was able to sit closer to the Queen than the unknighted former presidents. That's good.

I'm glad that we have to... Like, honestly, look, again, I hate that I'm coming across as like America flex shit, but I feel like any president of the US should be able to pull up Riker style, flip a chair around, sit down next to her and say, look, we've been pulling your ass out of the fire for the last century. Like, you don't get to fucking make me sit somewhere, I'm the president of the United States, and you're a doddering old queen of a fucking third rate power. I hate that I just went like full fucking whatever there, but honestly, that's fucking ridiculous. Yeah, it's like maybe the only country ever that the US gets moral superiority over that still exists.

It's like the British Empire. Like, seriously, lady? Unbelievable. The one other president who was knighted was George H.W. Bush, who was knighted into the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. Well, he did look like he could use one a lot of the time. A rarely awarded top order of knighthoods. That's good. I'm glad he got that. British officials said that the knighthood marked the close relationship between the Republican president

and Britain's conservative government, particularly during the Gulf War. Yeah, that was a real moment of trial and tragedy for the British royal family. They had to sit there and watch while people burned conscripts alive. Yeah, they were really at risk there. I'm going to quote from the book Royal Babylon by English poet and activist Heathcote Williams, quote, the fact that each US president's record, without exception, would earn them seats on the dock at Nuremberg or the International Criminal Court on genocide charges, doesn't deter the royal family from honoring them.

For by an ironic twist, each US president morphs into George III, against whom their forebearers fought. Which is a nice little quote by this English writer. In the pretty good book Royal Babylon, if you want to learn about how fucked up the monarchy is, this is a pretty fun book. Let's see, who else should be? Let's talk about Norman Schwartz and Kov.

Uh, Schwartz Kov. Norman Schwartz Kov. He was the guy who actually ran the Desert Storm campaign. Yes, he said that the dead Iraqis, quote, weren't worth counting among casualties of war, and that, quote, I want every Iraqi soldier bleeding from every orifice. Yeah. I mean, you know, Schwartz Kov was a guy who fought in Vietnam and took the loss hard. And I think he, a big part of why,

a big part of what was going on with Desert Storm was a desire to quote, unquote, reclaim like our military pride by beating the shit out of a smaller country. Which is not to say that like, I don't believe there was, like, Iraq had invaded a neighbor and occupied it. That's bad. Something should have been done. But the whole, the whole like masturbatory, I want all of their fucking conscript soldiers, these like teenage kids to die is, is, is, is, is like sick lunacy as was the masturbation over the,

anyway, whatever, we don't need to talk about the go for here. He was anyway, he was, he also received a knighthood after all of that stuff, which is fun. Also, Elizabeth gave a knighthood to Colin Powell, who facilitated, covered up and justified many U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. Hey, hey, Garrison, facilitated coverups. Yes. Yeah.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Most famously Mai Lai. Yes. The Mai Lai massacre is the biggest thing that he was, that he was involved in. There were others. There were others. He also likes, he's that guy.

I think he's like, like the thing I think is important, he is probably the one person on earth in the Bush administration who could have stopped the Iraq war if he wanted to. And he didn't. Yeah. Like he knew that it was all bullshit. And he was like, nah, fuck it. Let's do this war.

I'm going to go lie to the UN. Quoting Powell, we burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with ronson and ziplinators. Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh said that his people were like the sea in which gorillas swarm. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference does it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?

So anyway, night, night, night, Colin Powell. So true. So true, buddy. Probably the least problematic person among this list in 1995, the Queen approved an honorary knighthood to former US Secretary of State. What's Henry kiss, kiss, anger, kiss, kiss, anger. Yeah, he was he was just kind of a functionary, very not not a big deal. We should probably skip over that.

I think I think that's how it's pronounced. Yeah, he was he was appointed an honorary night commander in the most distinguished order of Saint Michael and Saint George. Jesus Christ. Well, here's the thing. It's so funny. We must applaud the British for for honoring the most popular American in China. It's a very progressive decision for her.

Yes, Kissinger. I think a few of Kissinger's assistants also got a knighted Brent Skrullcroft. Scowcroft. Scowcroft. Yeah, he got he got knighted. The people from the iron contra drugs and arms affair stuff got knighted. There was a lot a lot of like war criminal dudes got knighted in this in this like late 90s period. I wonder what was going on there.

Also, J Edgar Hoover was was was knighted of. Which is pretty funny. And then the the an economic financier who endorsed really bad derivatives to make the housing bubble kind of blow up Alan Greenspan. Another American. Oh, he also Greenspan like he got knighted. We could we could horrible person that that man that man has killed more people than most generals. Like he has. Oh boy.

Yeah, he is. He is pretty bad. I think I think we can do an ad break and then James is going to join us again to finish up by talking about Ireland and Kenya. Because there's there's a lot of stuff in Ireland and Kenya. So anyway, do you know who won't receive a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth? That these products and services because I was going to say Queen Elizabeth because she's too dead to death. She's dead. That's a joke.

She can't give them a night because she's dead. Anyway, here's the ads. Very funny. We're back and you know, I need to keep the audience informed about important network business for cool zone. So I want to let you all know that as he was coming back from getting his shot, James texted us all, OK, I'll be on in one sex. And there's a lot of jokes that we could make about that as a network. And I'm not going to make them, but I'm going to urge you to make them yourself in your own heart and head and then tweet them to James. James is at James is at I write OK on Twitter.

That's right. That's my Twitter handle. I wrote OK. You can see a picture of me. Anyway, so we're now going to talk about mainly mainly two places where British colonialism and imperialism had devastating effects under Queen Elizabeth and a few a few pretty pretty evil people that that Elizabeth then also knighted who who were doing like directly doing this British colonialism. Let's talk about Kenya a little bit. So during the 1950s, British tried to get control of lands in Kenya that they that they had violently.

They were trying to try to try to keep keep control of land that they had previously stolen native Kenyans fought back in the Mao Mao uprising. Now, we have historians, historians have documented widespread torture by British forces, including the crushing of testicles with pliers in the internment of up to 320,000 people in concentration camps, where they then endured slavery, starvation, murder and rape, rape with blunt objects. Meanwhile, 1.5 million Kenyans were confined to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages as documented by historian Caroline Elkins in her Pulitzer Wise winning Britain's gulag. So this was all overseen by the Queen as the head of state. And by the way, she was 31 at this point, you don't you don't get to say, well, she just come and you know, was just listening to her advisors at 31 years old. You are young, but you are old enough to not be complicit in a genocide. Yeah, especially when you're the head of state like come on. As the Queen of England, she had some leverage. She is not like, oh, you came and you worked, you were a tax collector in fucking South fucking Shire, England, and you happen to be in doing that job when the Mao Mao were being suppressed.

No, no, no, she was there. And she she she knew about stuff was going on was heavily involved because she was giving out like she was working with people who were doing pretty like egregious things. According to Kenya's biggest newspaper, The Daily Nation, a British policeman named Ian Henderson was known in Kenya as the torturer in chief. And was the kind of the guy behind preparing a whole bunch of bogus evidence in the 1953 trial where six leading Mao Mao uprising figures were convicted, including the future first president of independent Kenya. Now, Queen Elizabeth II honored Ian Henderson, again, the torturer in chief with the George Medal, Britain's highest civilian award in September of 1954 for his work in Kenya. So it's important like he wasn't military, he was just a policeman, which is why he gets a civilian award. But so like she knew what was going on was giving out individual police officers awards for their roles in crushing the in crushing these independent uprisings. You know, who never would have done that is so who's at the second? Absolute clown.

I do not know enough events. I don't know how he acquired 1000 grandchildren. I'm not going to make any claims. To be fair, there's probably some shady shit in Soboos of the Seconds rain. But the main thing he was known for was taking back control of Swaziland's indigenous industries, being a good neighbor to the other African countries once they gain their independence and of course, exporting a shitload of asbestos. So any any other notes on on Kenya? Yeah, so just before I do want to just briefly raise the Elkins. That was a very unconventional and very good book for a young academic and she deserves a lot of credit for writing it in the process of writing that book and then trying to write her second book. And obviously, she dealt with a lot of backlash from rank her first book. She uncovered that Britain had hidden classified, destroyed and refused to disclose a mountain of records about its colonial crimes in Kenya. And this is like an ongoing issue that goes on until the 20 teams that there are public records court cases about this.

And it's, it's so like we can see this like, it's wrong to say that this is like a just a relic of another era right Britain is has continued into this era like the ideology of the government from then to now is virtually indistinguishable. Right. It's neoliberal conservatives, they have continued to hide rather than face justice for these crimes, right rather than say sorry, rather than say what we did was wrong. They've tried to cover up this shit. And like, we need to remember that when we talk about like this is not a crime of the past. See, these are ongoing acts of genocide and genocide denial that we keep doing. And I should mention, so I think we're talking about operation legacy. So there are a bunch of different instances of the British government like destroying other records. One of the other fun things they recover, they seem to have been covering up and we don't we don't know exactly what was in those records because again, they were just like they were destroyed. But one of the other things that was in this records is about a second time that that the UK put a bunch of people in concentration camps while Queen Elizabeth was president, which was they did this. They also did this in Malaysia. They put a million people. They did this in a lot of places while she was while she was clown president, which is to say I just to say Queen. We're going to actually be talking about Malaysia in just a sec.

That was an emergency, not a war. It's important to. Yeah, so so Ian Henderson, the the torturer in chief who received this award obviously had to leave Kenya shortly after the 50s because things happened. And then he he got he got moved to Bahrain. And during a wave of pro independence revolts in Bahrain in 1968. And Henderson was appointed the head of the secret police and served as so until 1998. And over the course of his tenure, he became known as the butcher of Bahrain, quoting the Guardian quote, during his time, his men allegedly detained and tortured thousands of anti-government activists. Their activities are said to have included the ransacking of villages, sadistic sexual abuse and using power drills to maim prisoners. On many occasions, there have said to detain children without informing their parents only to return them months later in body bags, unquote.

Yeah, and the Bahrain stuff. It's also worth mentioning like that never stopped. Like, no, it stopped being him in charge. It only stopped him being in charge in 1998. Yeah, yeah. And in 2011, there's another revolution against like the Bahraini like monarchy. And I mean, it ended essentially with the Saudis rolled tanks across the border. But one of the things that happened was that the British helped like the Bahraini government like hunt down dissidents. I just bust out my lecture on this Hanselo Park stuff and we want to talk more about there were 15 miles of files that they found that have been hidden. I mean, this that was that was also the case in Ireland, which we're going to talk about later.

The odd file. I lose emails all the time. That's similar to 15 miles of paperwork. So in 1984, Ian Henderson was awarded by Queen Elizabeth with a CBE for services to British interests in Bahrain. And he also received a knighthood in the most excellent order of the British Empire. So this this was after he was already known as the butcher of Bahrain. This this is this in 1984. He's well into his tenure. He is torturing children, killing them, kidnapping them, maiming people.

And that's when he gets knighthooded for his services to the British interests in Bahrain. So yeah, that's that's Ian Henderson. Now, during Henderson's time in Kenya, he was just a part of the small team that was developing a new form of counterinsurgency pseudo gangster tactics, kind of weaponizing like gang, gang warfare for British interests. The other person who was kind of running this operation was an Englishman named Frank Kidson. So he in he was also serving in Kenya and then on New Years in 1955, Kidson was awarded the British military cross in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Kenya. And three years later, he gained a bar to that battle for his work in the Malaysian emergency, quote unquote.

So during Britain's brutal, brutal war in Malaysia. He he played he played a part in the concentration camps, which Chris mentioned. The process was known as visualization as they forced people into these concentration camps all over the course of a famine. And they were invading Malaysia to fund Britain's kind of post war reconstruction. So he he was in Kenya, Malaysia. He also went to Bahrain, just like Henderson did. He went to Yemen, Aden and Cyprus, all places where the British state is known for doing the widespread use of torture. And then he went to he went to Northern Ireland and not shocking turn of events.

He then was the professional head of the British Army during the Iraq war described Kidson as quote, the sun around which the planets revolved, saying that quote, he very much set the tone for the operational style in Belfast. The buddy, buddy, the notorious military reaction force, the MRF, which was accused of being behind a string of illegal shootings of Catholic teenagers in the early 70s, was based at Kitson's headquarters outside Belfast, and one of the units under his command was nicknamed Kitson's Private Army. Its official name was one para. And these were the people that did Bloody Sunday. So in 1972 in Derry, 15,000 people gathered outside to protest against detention without trial at 10 past four.

British paratroopers opened fire, 28 people were shot, some in the back as they fled, 14 people were killed, seven of whom were teenagers. And it was Kitson's Private Army who fired all 108 shots in Derry during winter of 1972. One of the victims, the first teenager named Kevin, 17 years old, he was shot from behind while trying to crawl to safety. Yeah. The bad Murphy massacre was at the same time as well. These are very well documented things that people can read about that we don't need to describe in detail, but they're not nice. England bad Elizabeth Queen. In 1972, Frank Kitson was knighted, again, same year as the massacre, was knighted by the Queen for galliant and distinguished service in Northern Ireland,

and was promoted to Commander of the Order of the British Empire. A few years later, he became a Major General and the, quote, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. Again, what the fuck is going on? It is nice that he and former head of the CIA, George H.W. Bush, got to hang out in their fancy club, though. These people are so fucked up. So later Kitson served as Commander-in-Chief for the UK Land Forces from 1982 to 1985, and was the aid decamp general to Queen Elizabeth, directly to Queen Elizabeth from 1983 to 1985. So yeah, that's fun.

It's worth noting that the Order of the Bath is like a... I believe that some of those other honours, that Queen's honours that you've talked about, are selected by a committee or perhaps by government, I'm not quite sure. The Order of the Bath is supposed to be the personal... The Queen's specific selection, yeah. Yeah, and the sovereign is head of the Order of the Bath. It's the big diamond-shaped metal thing you'll see. You all tortured so dreadfully well. I'd love to give you this fancy award for jamming screwdrivers into children.

Turning them on, who till it do? Off to go, breed another corgi. That's the ghost of the Queen you were promised at the start of the episode. So throughout the 2000s, Kitson remained a key adviser on US military strategy during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is much that the US has done, which is also war crimes and torture in those wars. Yeah, and we should also mention... Okay, there's a thing you'll get from Insurgency nerds who are talking about the Mai Lai like, emergency, quote-unquote, it's like the one's accessible kind of insurgency.

And that's just not true, like the insurgency started again after they stopped. And second, you can tell how well this went by the fact that that guy also was helping the US do a rock in Afghanistan. And the only thing he's ever managed to accomplish is killing an enormous number of people. Yeah, I mean, he was just a sea of dubs there. Yeah, he's worked out in all those countries. He was heavily involved in Aden and Yemen, which led to 200,000 deaths between 1962 and 1970. And today British armies still continue the same process of overseeing the bombing of Yemen. Yeah, it's good stuff.

I mean, there's no one the US is innocent of just to... Oh, no, we're the ones arming the Saudi coalition, whatever you want to call it, that's murdering people in Yemen. I think the brain doesn't have the capacity to make as many bombs as the US is sending to Yemen, I would doubt. But all of these processes and all of these people are still continuing the same colonialism and the same... Yes. All of the same oppression, like this isn't like quote-unquote the past. It's an ongoing thing that the monarchy awards and perpetuates. They've had to downsize it a little bit because, you know, it just doesn't work as well as it used to.

And so the thing they decided to do to downsize it was stop paying off the populace and just start policing them harder. But the money has kept flowing to the royals. Yes. Yeah. So anyway, in the Malay emergency that Britain did pioneer the use of Asian orange. So that's another gift that we've given to the people of the United States. Well, thank you, James, for that one. Yeah, you're welcome.

Any time it's that, it's T-Coses with the Queen on its stuff corgis. You know, I want to suggest if you are looking for a way to properly mourn Queen Elizabeth. Maybe check out the film Churchill the Hollywood Years, a truly exceptional movie. If you just type it into Google and look around on YouTube, you can find a full copy of it. It features Christian Slater as Winston Churchill and Nev Campbell as the recently deceased queen. And I don't know who it is that they got to play her father, the former king. But he's basically portrayed as like a drunk and also like every time there's a big fancy party. He's just constantly staring at everyone's drinks because he's angry that they're drinking his champagne because he's a big fucking spin thrift.

Very funny, very good send up of the royal family. Also, Heinrich Himmler conducts a satanic wedding and by replacing a crucifix with a chicken. It's a good movie. Just like in real life, just like in real life. I'll also recommend you check out the book Royal Babylon. I was able to get it a free copy online through great methods. So anyway, yeah, that if you want a nice like poetic history of how the Queen is fucked up and the monarchy sucks. Royal Babylon's a nice easy read.

Did you get into the bowls line sisters as well? Did you do that? No. They lived two people who were disabled, they are the Queen's cousins. The royal family basically announced they were dead, but they weren't dead. And they lived in an institutional home for, I think it was, it was called the Royal Earl's Wood Institution for Mental Defectives. And they lived there more or less anonymously, completely disowned by the family on a very small stipend until they died. And that is not a nice way to treat your cousins.

Well, this only cements my opinion that monarchy is bad. Something about Foucault and Boomerangs and colonialism. Yeah, abolish the monarchy. It's always OK to celebrate the death of a king or queen. Doesn't matter who they are. Doesn't matter how it happens. It's bad for the concept of monarchy is the only thing more toxic than the concept of inherited wealth. And both are deeply tied to each other.

Fuck the Queen and fuck all of her relatives, except for the ones who give up their positions and power. Those people are cool. Yeah. Don't tell police people whose parents were killed by colonial regimes on the internet either. Yeah. Overthrow the government of Britain. Yeah. Look, we always this podcast from the beginning has been directly in favor of an insurrection against the crown.

The one thing that you do have to hand it to the Queen for is seeing Liz Truss as Prime Minister and immediately dying, which is an appropriate response. Yeah, to be fair, me too. Committing ritual suicide with a corgi. Again, King Sabuto II did destroy democracy in Swaziland, but then he replaced it with something that kind of sounds like democracy, and that's more than Queen Elizabeth did. Yeah, we just started at point B with something that kind of sounds like democracy.

So, I know what King I'm going to stand in the future. All right, Robert. Well, that's a t-shirt. I'll be getting you for Christmas. Thank you. A new tattoo, too. Short, short live King Charles III.