Behind the Bastards - The World is Burning: Your Guide to the Current Uprisings

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

In Episode 92, Robert gives listeners a guide to the uprisings all over the world right now.FOOTNOTES: Catalonia's bid for independence from Spain explained Hong Kong is exporting its protest techniques around the world Wildfires blaze through Lebanon while emergency aircraft remain grounded Why are Lebanon's firefighting helicopters grounded? Lebanon protests: Huge crowds on streets as government acts Lebanon’s government proposes reforms as huge protests hit their fifth day A world on fire: Here are all the major protests happening around the globe right now Egyptian authorities threaten to 'decisively confront' protesters Curfew Tweet ‘This Is Ethnic Cleansing’: A Dispatch from Kurdish Syria China offers support to Spanish government amid Catalonia crisis Pro-independence protest in front of Chinese consulate in solidarity with Hong Kong Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam takes to Facebook to reach out to public, while strongly defending police force and questioning ‘puzzling’ calls for its disbandment What’s happening in Hong Kong? Some key questions, answered. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The implication of his words is quite obvious. By the Cold War era, the weapons available to nation states had grown so powerful that, if they went to war with one another again on a mass scale, civilization as we know it would be annihilated. But what if Albert was wrong? Brilliant as he was, Mr. Einstein was trapped, as we all are, in the time he lived. The towering armed giants of his era were the United States and the USSR,

and it was only rational to fear them unleashing hell upon each other and the world. But we live in different times now. Today, Russia and the United States still pack potent nuclear arsenals, but the great global conflict that increasingly sweeps our world is not a battle between nations. It is a clash between people who want to be free, and the authoritarians who want to squeeze them dry. You've seen some of this in the news. In the last few weeks, more than a million people have taken to the streets of Lebanon,

demanding the resignation of their government. Protesters in Hong Kong have continued their months-long battle against the state. Catalonians have taken to the street in their fight for independence from Spain. Revolutionaries in Rojava fight with machine guns and wire-guided missiles against the overwhelming firepower of Turkey, a NATO nation. Right now, as I type this, uprisings have lit up the skies and capital cities around the world, from east to west. Each of these movements has its own reason for taking to the street.

But I think most of these activists would agree with the sentiment I saw expressed on a poster board in Santiago, Chile. We're not from the left, and we're not from the right. We're from the bottom, and we are coming for those on top. This will be a different episode of Behind the Bastards than you normally get. This is traditionally a show that tells you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. In most days, I weave a tale of entertaining bastardry to a comedian guest who rides shotgun.

Today, my only guests are activists and journalists from around the world. Chile, Lebanon, Rojava. I decided this rather unorthodox episode was necessary because I truly believe that the future freedom of everyone listening to this depends on what we all do over the next year and change. The current uprisings around the globe are but a prelude. There will be more. The world is burning, and it will not stop anytime soon.

So let's begin. We can probably trace this current set of revolts to the protests in Hong Kong, which started on March 31, 2019. Now, the spark that started those protests was a proposed new bill, which would have allowed individuals to be extradited to China for a variety of crimes. Since Great Britain gave the island back to China in 1997, Hong Kong has been governed by an agreement generally summarized as one country, two systems. People in Hong Kong enjoy more personal freedoms than the citizens of mainland China.

They are, in effect, a semi-autonomous zone, not completely unlike the Kurdish cities of northern Iraq. But pro-China elements within the government of Hong Kong sought greater integration with China, which meant throwing many of the more subversive elements of their society under the bus. The people of Hong Kong did not want to see their friends and relatives sent off to mainland China to be beaten and tortured for their political beliefs. So they took to the streets. When the protests started seven months ago, most observers doubted that they would last more than a few weeks.

But the people of Hong Kong shocked and continued to shock the world with an array of innovative tactics for battling state power. They placed traffic cones over tear gas grenades and pour in water to disarm them. They deploy phalanxes of protesters armed with umbrellas to counter police projectiles. And they organized demonstrations that flow like water around the forces of the state. And against all odds, these tactics have worked. The activists of Hong Kong are still holding out. In fact, their movement has evolved from just a protest against a single law

to a series of five demands from the government. They want the state to officially retract the description of their protests as a riot. They want their jailed fellow activists freed and the charges against them dropped. They want an investigation into police brutality and they want universal suffrage, a chance to vote for their leaders without the involvement of the government in Beijing. The chief executive of Hong Kong, Kerry Lam, has ceded to only a few of the protesters' demands, retracting the extradition law but holding fast against the others.

The Chinese government has moved 12,000 troops onto the island and thousands more wait in the wings. Week after week, the clashes have continued. In the last month or so, a sixth demand has developed amongst the activists. The police force, they say, must now be entirely disbanded. On September 30th, Kerry Lam took to the last bastion of all would-be tyrants, Facebook Live. She did a carefully curated Q&A session where she defended the police of Hong Kong

who have been videotaped firing concussion rounds at journalists and shooting activists. She called the demand for the police to be disbanded, puzzling. Quote, I'm puzzled when I hear this, because when there are public order and safety issues such as theft or unfortunate attacks, people say they must ask police to follow up seriously, so police are playing a very important role and we must support them in law enforcement. And yet, the people of Hong Kong continue to turn out in their millions. Now that they have seen the police as an instrument of violent repression on a mass scale,

they are unlikely to go back to the way things were, not without being forced to do so by even greater violence. And so the protests continue, the whole situation hanging upon the edge of a razor blade. It is impossible to know how things will end. But the powerful images coming out of Hong Kong have inspired other acts of resistance around the world. It would be too much to call the protests on that island the spark that set our current fires of revolution. But they certainly provided fuel. Just ask the people of Catalonia. Now, Catalonia is one of the wealthiest and most productive regions of Spain.

The Catalonian people have their own language and identity that goes back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Barcelona is generally seen as the political and cultural capital of that region. Starting in the early 1900s, Catalonia became the center of socialist and anarchist politics in Spain in the late 1920s. An alliance of affinity groups, which are collections of individuals with shared interests, coalesced into a resistance against the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. A number of different uprisings followed for the next decade, several of which were brutally suppressed by fascist general Francisco Franco. This all culminated in the Spanish coup of 1936, which was pulled off by an alliance of anarchists and socialists. For a while, these leftists held off the advancing forces of Spanish fascism.

But Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy backed Francisco Franco's regime, and the so-called democracies of the world let the resistance in Spain die. Catalonia was crushed under the fascist boot heel. In time, Spanish fascism died a natural death, and the nation today functions about as well as any other liberal democracy, which is to say that roughly half of the people there hate their government at any given time. Since 1978, the region, like Hong Kong, has had limited autonomy from the central government. In 2006, Catalonia won even greater independence, and was described as a nation in a new statute. But then came the 2008 financial crash, and bitter austerity measures introduced by the government to cut public spending. Catalonia represents 16% of Spain's population, but contributes about 19% of its tax revenue.

Many within the region resent paying so much into a government that continually cuts their benefits. That resentment was further stoked in 2010, when Spain's constitutional court reversed the statute that gave Catalonia greater autonomy. Separatists held a symbolic referendum on November 2014, which was outlawed by Spain. The vote showed substantial support for independence, and in the 2015 regional election, Separatists won big. This led, rather inevitably, to a full referendum on independence on October 1, 2017. The Spanish constitutional court declared this illegal. But the referendum went forward, and 90% of voters supported independence. Now, only 43% of the region actually voted, due in large part to a trade union boycott,

and other polls show that the Catalonian people are fairly deeply divided about independence. But the Spanish government came in and cracked down on the Separatists brutally. Madrid dissolved the elected parliament of Catalonia and arrested nine of the most prominent secessionists and brought them to trial. On Monday, October 14, 2019, all nine were convicted and sentenced to years in jail. This sparked a new and much more extensive series of protests against the government, as even people who'd been on the fence about secession reacted to the violence of the state. The latest series of Catalonian uprisings have been deeply inspired by the protests in Hong Kong. The primary organizing principle of the Hong Kong protesters, B-Water, seems to be particularly impactful on Catalonians.

The basic idea of this B-Water principle is that protests should be formless, shapeless, leaderless, and nimble, in order to counter the clenched fist of state power. Catalonians took this idea and ran with it, modifying it into their own revolutionary axiom, B-A Tsunami. They formed a group called Tsunami Democratic in September, which suggested mass civil disobedience in order to defend the autonomy of Catalonia. Once their leaders were sentenced, protests broke out across the region, blocking traffic and assembling in multiple public spaces to march on Barcelona's airport. As they marched, many of these activists chanted, we are going to do a Hong Kong. I'm going to quote now from an article in Quartz by Mary Hui, who has extensively covered the uprising in Hong Kong and is covering the uprisings in Catalonia. Quote,

At Barcelona airport on Monday, strikingly similar scenes played out, as thousands occupied both the terminal and the roads outside the building, eventually forcing the cancellation of at least 100 flights. Tsunami Democratic even distributed some 130 boarding passes via the messaging app Telegram so that protesters could enter the airport in a move reminiscent of some Hong Kong protesters who purchased cheap flights in order to enter the airport and circumvent a court ban on demonstrations in the building. In late September, the grassroots group Assemblia Nacional Catalonia even held a public forum titled Experiences of the Use of New Technologies in the Nonviolent Struggle, the case of Hong Kong. Quote, Quote, within a quote, I should say, we've been inspired a lot by the Hong Kong protests, although we are aware of the differences between both societies. A representative of Pignic X Republica, a digital platform designed to mobilize Catalans for political action, told Quartz,

The Hong Kong people have done a very good job in letting everybody else know about their fight through social networks. These are the first lessons we have learned from them, the use of these tools to mobilize the people and keep them informed. The protesters in Barcelona did not just content themselves with chanting, they lit garbage cans on fire, they damaged street signs and traffic lights, and did an estimated $1.7 billion in damage to the city. This sort of activism, the kind that ends with broken windows and serious financial damage to the state, is deeply frowned upon by many Americans, even by many American liberals. A lot of you probably feel uncomfortable with the idea, even if you generally support protests. I'd ask you to think about why that is, and to ask yourself if the state truly understands any language, but the language of damage done to its bottom line. The protests in Hong Kong have done even more financial damage. The stock market alone is down $500 billion since the beginning of the protests in March, and that doesn't include the financial cost incurred by a blockaded airport, by roads and streets cut off to traffic.

A protest that doesn't cost the government anything more than the manpower of its police is not much of a protest at all. Jordi Barbeta, a journalist and political writer in Barcelona, said that the protesters in Hong Kong have provided a global dimension to a local conflict by attracting mass international sympathy. This sympathy might be the only thing holding the Chinese military back from more aggressive intervention. Jordi recognized that, now and in the future, activists around the world could only hope to succeed in their struggles against oppressive states by generating mass awareness and international solidarity. To that end, protesters in Barcelona massed in front of the Chinese Consulate in a show of solidarity with Hong Kong. Prominent Hong Kong protestor Joshua Wong told Catalan News that he was worried about the excessive use of force by Spanish police. He stated, people in Hong Kong and Catalonia both deserve their right to determine their own destiny. Simultaneous rallies were held in Catalonia and Hong Kong, but as these activists expressed solidarity with one another, the governments oppressing them did the same thing.

The 12th of October brought this headline from the South China Morning Post. China offers support to Spanish government amid Catalonia crisis. China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said, quote, the government of the People's Republic understands and supports the Spanish government's efforts to protect national unity and its territorial integrity. The end result of the struggle for Catalonia and independence, like the protests in Hong Kong, is still very much up in the air. But both struggles offer important truths for the rest of us, including my fellow Americans. Dictators and authoritarian powers around the world, whatever ideology they claim to hold dear, will always stand together. Because the people on top always have more in common with each other than they do with you. This is why Turkish dictator Tayyip Erdogan and President Donald Trump were able to come to such a chummy arrangement about the future of the autonomous region of northeast Syria known as Rojava.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, an alliance of militias who protected the leftist revolution in that area, fought alongside U.S. forces for years. More than 11,000 of them died in the battle against ISIS. But when push came to shove, the American president felt more affinity for his fellow autocrat than he did for the revolutionaries of Rojava. So he abandoned them. I've talked about this issue at length on my podcast Worst Year Ever and a number of other places. For our purposes today, I'm going to let the words of a much better journalist than me tell the story. Chabad Abbas is a reporter, a documentarian, and a fixer living in northeast Syria. She's one of the most remarkable people I've ever met.

In mid-October, 2019, she wrote an article for the New York Review of Books. This is Ethnic Cleansing, a dispatch from northern Syria. I very much recommend reading the entire article, which will be linked on our website behindthebastards.com. I'd like to quote from the beginning of the piece now. This is Chabad. When my mom called to ask me where I was, I lied to her. Sometimes I do not want to worry her, as I'm often reporting on stories from places that aren't safe. When she said, get ready to move, I realized something was wrong. Kamishli was under attack.

Can't you hear the shelling? She screamed. She lives in Rimalon, a city an hour away, but she was here to visit my brother. The Turks were targeting my neighborhood, she said. That was Wednesday afternoon, October 9th, the first day of Turkey's attack on Rojava, western Kurdistan, as we call it in Kurdish. Kamishli, my city, was one of the few places in northeast Syria that had enjoyed relative peace despite Syria's eight-year civil war. In past years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made constant threats against us, but I never really expected him to make a move. The Americans were here, and they promised they would protect us, so Erdogan's bluster seemed meaningless. I was wrong. First, we experienced clashes with the regime forces of Bashar al-Assad.

Then it was our turn to face down the fighters of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State. After the group rose in 2014, ISIS detonated bombs and planted suicide attacks in Kamishli and the towns of northeast Syria. For all that, we never had artillery shelling before, so when my mother called, I was scared. Everyone was. That day, October 9th, I was driving back from Serikhanye, about 50 miles from Kamishli, when an airstrike targeted a military base a few hundred yards from the scene of a protest that I had been due to report on about a half-hour later. In the aftermath of the bombing, we feared we were going to be hit by another wave of Turkish planes. Everyone fled the scene. My colleague Alan, who is an exceptionally good driver, got us out of there in seconds. This is Robert again. And just a few months before Chabad wrote that, in August of 2019, journalist Jay Kanrahan and I spent more than a week in Alan's car with Chabad.

At that time, Rojava was at peace. We felt safe virtually everywhere. For days, we visited all women farming collectives, local communes, representatives of a justice system that was experimenting with art therapy as a treatment for captured ISIS fighters. The sheer amount of optimism we felt in the air was staggering. You could almost taste it. Neither Jake nor I wanted to return to Iraq when our visit ended. Today, however, Rojava is in chaos. Hundreds are dead, and an unknown number of ISIS prisoners have gotten free in the confusion. 200,000 civilians have been made refugees. I asked Chabad how the autonomous region has handled the flow of so many refugees in the wake of the fighting. Here's how she responded.

In the past days, to these shelters, and there is every time new numbers increasing very fast, and the humanitarian situation gets worse. And the response is so slow, comparing to the needs. In addition, it's worse as a result of the Turkish attack on the vital centers as the Turkish air strike. They hit the Alok Dam in Serekaniye, which is feeding the water to a city of Serekaniye and Hasaka and Tiltamir. And that results in a cut of water three days from those cities. And the situation of the population and the IDPs, it gets worse as a result of that. Also, I met many families and most of them basically from Tula, Abiyat, Serekaniye, and even some of them have been many times displacement as they were from Afrin. I think if the international response is limited, that's going to lead to a humanitarian crisis.

Even I met the head of the West municipality of the Hasaka, Muhammad Shammi, and he was explaining to us how there is a pressure on this city and there is no support. For example, he gave an example about the needs of the bread. He said, we use it to bake 35 tons of the flour daily for Hasaka only. Last days, we are baking 50 tons and we cannot cover the needs of the population. So the situation every day, every hour get worse and worse and there is a gap and all the organizations have to respond to these needs. In the face of ethnic cleansing out of sheer desperation, Rojava invited in the Assad regime and the Russian army. This was not a decision anyone wanted to make. Many people in Rojava had risen up against Assad in the early days of the Syrian civil war.

I asked Hobat how she felt that this development would affect the women's revolution in Rojava. The regime is representing the patriarchy system. On the contrary, Rojava is representing the women's revolution. Women of Rojava built last eight years specific system for the women in all levels, military, economically, politically, and they made impact in the education via teaching the genealogy, which is a women's science on the mentality of the new generations. In addition, the implementation of the co-presidency system in all the institutions starting from coming to the highest official ranks allowed very effective participation of a woman to lead this region beside the men. I interviewed Dubai Dali, the co-presidency of a society protection forces in Al-Jazeera canton about this subject and she said, we know how to protect ourselves. Now, after a years of experience and we are not afraid of a regime coming back, it's obvious that the women of Rojava will not lead their gains easily, but there is a great risk on the women evolution in case the regime take over Rojava. I do believe that the regime will first target the women specifically because this is what make Rojava unique on a global level. The very last thing I asked her was what, if anything, people outside Syria could do to support Rojava in its struggle. Here was her answer.

I think the people of the outside can help Rojava and specifically all the feminist movements have to rise up for Rojava. Otherwise, we as a woman all over the world might face the risk to lose the women revolution. Any activity to support Rojava like demonstrations, donation, buy-code Turkish goods and rise the awareness of the western community about what is Rojava facing. Currently, it's a genocide, it's a ethnic glancing and it's a demographic changing and everyone have to take the responsibilities in order to make some steps and that's what will help Rojava for sure. She's calling for solidarity. The same sort of solidarity the protesters in Hong Kong and Catalonia have expressed for one another. Whenever I write or talk about Rojava, people always ask me, where can I send money to help? And you might do some good by donating to the Kurdish Red Crescent. But at the end of the day, the people of Rojava, like the protesters in Hong Kong, won't be helped by any money you could send. What might help them is your solidarity. Your willingness to harangue your elected leaders on their behalf or to get into the streets and protest at the Turkish embassy or the Chinese consulate or wherever it might get attention. There are protesters in Germany right now who have protested in front of buildings of companies that supply arms to the Turkish nation.

The United States supplies plenty of weapons to Turkey. There are places you could gather. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called Insync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another group of humans who could really use your solidarity right now are the people of Santiago, Chile. As I write this, the city has been convulsed by marches and brutal clashes between police and demonstrators for more than a week. If you read most of the news about what is happening, it places the blame on a 4% hike in the cost of public transportation. I was lucky enough to sit down with two activists in Santiago over Skype. Saul is an American, living in Santiago over the last eight years with his wife, Stephanie, and native Chilean.

They told me to be wary of attributing just one cause to the protests. What initially started this protest was a group of a bunch of students who were evading the metro. So to protest the rise in the fare, which is the second or third time they've raised the metro in the last three years. So it's the most expensive metro in South America and even though for someone from the United States it might seem it's still very cheap, or how are they only protesting over 10 more cents or whatever. But in Chile, if you make the minimum wage, you could be spending almost 20% of your wage on the metro. So it is very expensive here. And so what happened is a lot of students were getting together as like a big group.

And so there would be hundreds of them and they would all rush into the metro together and jump over the turnstiles. And so that's how it all started. And then the police were very heavy handed in their reaction and got very violent. And then it got kind of worse from there. And so the protest exploded into more of a general protest because there's been a lot of problems in Chile. And there's a lot of inequality and a lot of things that have never been fixed since the dictatorship. So they're still using the same constitution that was written by Pino J. And yeah, and there's lots of other things. Yeah, the corruption of Pinera, the current president, and then a lot of people protest over the last couple of years about the pension plans, the AFP.

Saul speaks fluent English, so he does most of the talking for the segments of the interview, including this episode. But his wife talked quite a lot too, and I'm going to include the full audio of this interview and all of the other interviews and an episode that will drop tomorrow. It's just going to be a straight recording of all the interviews. There will be a normal episode on Thursday. You can get back to your regularly scheduled comedy. Now I've interviewed several other Chilean dissidents over Twitter and crippling inequality in that nation is one thing that every single one of them has brought up as the real cause of these protests. One popular meme circulating among activists in Santiago is a picture of a glacier with a tiny peak of ice above the waterline and a gargantuan mountain of ice underneath it. The image is labeled social uprising in Chile. The bit above the water is the 4-cent metro fare increase, and the bit below the waterline is extremely high social inequality, decades of abuse of power, almost everything is privatized, including water, high taxes and low benefits, precarious jobs, miserable pensions,

politicians' outrageous salaries and benefits, high student loan debts, unfair justice system, political police and military corruption, predatory lending and banking system, and more. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, measures income equality via something called the Gini Coefficient. This ranges from zero, the minimum, which would exist in a perfectly equal society, to one, which would presumably be a society in which Jeff Bezos owns everything and we have to pay rent for access to our own bones. Chile's Gini Coefficient is among the highest on the planet,.50. I'm going to quote now from a write-up in Borgen magazine. Despite the high tax bracket, a higher proportion of tax tends to be levied on individuals from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. This system greatly reduces the disposable incomes and consumption ability of the common people. As a result, the poor in Chile often suffer from malnourishment and hunger because they are unable to afford basic necessities.

Poor education also forms the bedrock of economic inequality in Chile. Thousands of young people have recently called for more education reform and peaceful demonstrations. A majority of the population is lacking the skills that are essential for attaining good jobs and incomes. Moreover, this inequality is also prevalent in higher education as the poor are unable to pay for college and other institutions of higher learning. Additionally, Chile has had to juggle with the issue of corruption at the hands of the rich and powerful oligarchs in the country. These powerful entities often evade tax. Similarly, the Ministry of Public Services unit has also been caught up in various corruption scandals since 2002 due to a lack of resources and misallocation of funds. So what we're seeing in Chile is people at the top who have access to basically all of the money, who are not taxed nearly enough of their income, and who are increasingly pushing the burden of funding the government onto the people who have almost no money.

That's a problem that doesn't sound familiar to anyone else in the world. By the way, the Gini coefficient of the United States is 0.43, just a little bit under 0.50. It's really interesting because in Chile, almost 10 families have control over the country. Yeah, so it's similar to the United States where there's a couple hundred billionaires that are kind of controlling everything, but in Chile it's literally 10 families, and these 10 families are very, very rich and have a lot of control in the country. But yeah, so it's about a lot of things at the protest now. On October 19th, President Piñera announced that he was reversing the fair increase, but this did not assuage protesters. Thousands continued to take to the streets.

Bonfires lit up the Santiago sky, and unrest began to spread to other cities in Chile, like Valparaiso. Late that night, the government declared martial law. General Javier Itoriaga de Camp told citizens, This is the first time Chileans have reverted to military rule since the era of dictator Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990. And by all accounts, the state's repression of these demonstrators has been brutal. At least 18 people have been killed in the protests, and by the time you hear this, that number will likely be much higher. I'd like to quote now from an article in The Guardian that interviewed one protester. I was coming home and the military patrol stopped me, said one bruised and bloodied man as he stumbled home in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

They put me in the truck and bang, bang, bang, they smashed me in the head with a butt of a gun. I begged them to stop, but they kept on kicking me, and they took my friend away. There's video now circulating on Twitter of Chilean soldiers detaining a protester, and then as casually as you or I might swat a mosquito, shooting him in the leg with an M16. The government, for its part, claims all these people are looters or criminals. General terms, the state now applies to anyone it does violence against. One protester I interviewed on Twitter, Juan, told me this. Whenever they give a speech mentioning our current situation, they talk about the protesters that way. Criminals, or bad elements of society, or similar expressions.

Giving to understand that this is a criminal matter rather than one of policy, which explains the curfew, the soldiers on the streets, and so on. And now here's Saul and his wife Stephanie expressing very similar opinions. The police respond to often peaceful protests with tear gas and violence. And now, of course, there's been declared the state of emergency, so now you have the military and tanks in the streets, too. And you said that the police have gotten more aggressive and more violent this year. Why would you, is there a reason behind that, do you think? Is there some sort of cause to that that you can see? No, it's not any reason. It's only a strategy of the government, but it's a bad idea.

A couple of months ago, we saw some car of the cops driving in the Paseo really traditionally in the center of the city. And as a tear gas, do you agree? Oh, yeah. A couple of months ago, there was some crazy protests and the police were driving through Plaza de Armas, like the downtown, like the historic center of town, and throwing tear gas at people who weren't even protesting. But to answer your question, I think that it just has to do with the government, because a couple of years ago, the president was Bachelet, who is more center left. And so I think the police now, under Pinera, understand that they kind of have carte blanche to do whatever they want and that they won't be reprimanded for violence against protesters.

And when this current wave of heavy street actions broke out, were y'all there for sort of the beginning of that? Were you there on the first day that this really kicked off into a city-wide sort of thing, rather than just kind of a fair protest? Yeah, definitely. So we live about six or seven blocks from Plaza Italia, which is the metro baccadano, which is like the center of downtown and is the historic place where protests always start. And so we're kind of in the thick of it. Also, we are right by this intersection where when the protest really got serious two nights ago, there were five buses that were burned right at our intersection. So yeah, it's kind of right outside our door.

These burned buses have become part of one of several conspiracy theories that have grown up around the protests. Whenever there is mass civil unrest in a country, people from one or both sides of the conflict will cook up conspiracies. And the world being what it is, some of those will be true. Most of the conspiracies in Santiago center around the burning of three buses and the arson attack on the headquarters of Enel Chile, a power company who recently hiked their prices. When I first encountered video of the Enel building burning, it was being celebrated by non-Chilean leftists as a justified attack on a corrupt capitalist institution. But every Chilean I've interviewed has expressed severe doubts as to whether or not these arson attacks were the work of protesters. Yeah, like, you know, we're not typically like conspiracy theorist people,

but as far as like what a lot of people have been talking about is with both the Enel electric company with the fire that happened on their staircase, right? Their fire escaped, and there was a number of suspicious things about it. You know, it started on the 11th floor, so it's like, how could a protestor do that? I don't know. And of course, it only burned that, the fire escape and didn't touch anything about the main building. So there's a lot of suspicion here of that and then of the idea that possibly it was the police or the government who started that as a way to justify bringing in the military and all of that and starting the curfew. And what's that thing is very similar is these five buses that were burned outside of our apartment. It was very strange because yes, there's there's almost never five buses all right next to each other on the street on the corner and and then there's also been videos that have been passed around. There's a video that happened on social media where you see that these buses were like discontinued so they were already like in bad situation or bad shape.

And then there's a video that's been passed around of the police like escorting one of these buses like very slowly almost like they're escorting it here so they can burn it and again use it as justification to ratchet up the police response. So it's hard to say and you know, you don't want to be a conspiracy theorist but certainly there's there's suspicious things happening in that regard and on the street here. Almost every Chilean that we've talked to has said that they pretty much believe that it was the police that that we're doing that. Now, I don't want to act as if I have any real understanding of who's correct here. It is entirely possible that pissed off protesters committed these arson attacks. It's also possible that the state did so to justify President Pinera's declaration, we are at war, and his assumption of martial law. That's the thing about serious civil unrest. Once your government starts gunning down people in the streets, all kinds of conspiracy theories suddenly become plausible. Another local Chilean activist I found on Twitter, who goes by the name Antifa Alfredo, sent me a translation of an anti protest meme that blames all the unrest on Venezuelan President Medeiro and essentially frames the uprising in Chile as a communist conspiracy. It's basically framed as a flow chart that starts with financing politicians and parties close to our ideologies, networking in universities and NGOs, degrading the meaning of social values, indoctrinating young people in liberal ideas, constitutional accusation, it's Chile's time for impeachment, and so on and so forth. So it's basically like a little flow chart showing that everything happening in Chile right now is part of this communist conspiracy cooked up by Medeiro and the Bolivarans, which is kind of one of the names for the communist revolution in that country.

And I've seen zero evidence that this is actually true, and I share it mainly to make the point of how confusing these situations can get, particularly to an audience of foreigners who are unlikely to understand the nuances of the politics in the region. Most Chileans in Santiago are unlikely to be convinced by this last conspiracy theory, unless they already believe in some sort of all-encompassing communist plot to destroy their nation. But conspiracies like this can play a role in cutting off international solidarity with activists. More conservative members of foreign nations might see something like this and become convinced that the government of Chile is only trying to defend themselves from an insidious Venezuelan plot. The same behavior occurs on the left, by the way. You do not have to look far to find people on Twitter condemning the Hong Kong protests as Western-backed and part of a capitalist conspiracy against the communist government of China. In my opinion, all conspiracies like this are a way to distract and detract sympathy from real human beings fighting for their lives. I have my own political beliefs, but whenever I see people facing rubber bullets and tear gas grenades and extrajudicial murder at the hands of the state, I'm always going to side with those people over their government, no matter where that government lands on the political spectrum. On the day before I wrote this episode, Friday the 26th of October, more than 1.2 million people took to the streets of Santiago to protest. That should be all the evidence you need that this is not just some conspiracy, and is in fact the result of very real, very honest anger. Some Chileans continue to take to the streets at night, in violation of the curfew. Others, not willing to risk it, stay at home, but contribute to the protest by banging on pots and pans to make noise and, in Juan's words, signalling their discontent. The early stages of the protests in Santiago were pure expressions of local fury, based more on emotion than calculation, but as the days have worn on, Chilean activists have found themselves looking out towards Hong Kong for inspiration.

When I first interviewed Juan on Sunday the 20th, he told me, there isn't a greater level of organizing or planning. It's not like the Hong Kong protests, for example, I guess we're not very sophisticated protesters. And then he sent me a smiley face sticking its tongue out. But a few days later, on the 24th, I ran across a video on Twitter. It shows hundreds of protesters in the streets of Santiago. A police tear gas grenade comes sailing over the crowd and lands in the middle of it. A dozen or so men and women quickly surround the grenade, dump it into a plastic bag and douse it with water. Linked in the video was a tweet from a Hong Kong activist from four days earlier, explaining this exact method for dealing with tear gas. The only recent protests to eclipse the uprising in Chile, in terms of scale, are the ones currently happening in Lebanon. On the 20th of October, more than 1.2 million people marched against their government nationwide, and on the 19th, more than a million people assembled in Beirut alone. Now, the Lebanese nation only has a population of 4 or 5 million, which makes these protests the proportional equivalent of some 80 million Americans taking to the streets two days in a row. And if you follow mainstream Western news sources reporting on the unrest, they'll generally blame it all on WhatsApp.

On October 24th, 2019, Public Radio International published an article titled, How Lebanon's WhatsApp Tax Unleashed a Flood of Anger. But as with the public transit tax in Chile, the events being looked at as causes of this unrest were just the straws that broke the camel's back. In fairness to PRI, the actual article does go into this in a little bit of detail, but we all know that in the social media era, most people barely read past the headlines. So I sat down with Joey Ayub, a Lebanese writer and Middle East North Africa editor for IFFEX and Global Voices. He's been present for many of the marches in Lebanon, and he pointed out that a lot of the recent unrest in his country was actually kicked off by a series of brutal wildfires and an incompetent government reaction to the crisis. Lebanon actually had horrible wildfires back in 2008, which inspired a group of citizens to raise money to buy a small fleet of firefighting helicopters to protect the country in the future. Now, these helicopters were very successful in putting out wildfires for a couple of years, but due to outrageous corruption, money to repair those helicopters was funneled away towards God knows what and who. And by 2012, the fleet was no longer operational.

Here's Joey. The wildfires that was last Monday, so that's the 14th, the night of the 14th to the 15th, and it lasted about 48 hours. And it was what, 1300 hectares? Yeah. Yeah, and those 48 hours we lost basically a year's worth of trees lost usually. So I think there was something like 3 million trees. That's horrible. That's usually an average. Yeah.

So that obviously pissed a lot of people off because the government was utterly incapable on willing whatever we used to deal with it. You had pretty much, we haven't had civil servants paid in like 20 years. So these are all volunteer forces and you had even had like the civil defense forces from the Palestinian camps that stepped up that helped. And you had basically volunteers just doing it themselves. There wasn't really anything until two things happened that put them off. One is Greece, Cyprus and Jordan basically sent some helicopters and whatever. And the other thing is we got lucky because it started raining the day after. Yeah.

So that's pretty much why the damage was more or less limited if you want. And so the fact that after all of this, just like a day later or something, the first thing the government can think of doing is to impose attacks on WhatsApp, which is obviously a free service that people use because actual phone services are extremely expensive in Lebanon. That was kind of, as everyone has been saying, that whole store that broke the campus back thing. And then you had protests on that Thursday evening. So that's basically a week now. And in that protest, you had lots of roadblocks. You had basically some of the usual protests that we have been seeing before.

And during that protest, one of this, if you want, symbols that became this, I don't know, point of unity, I guess, is there was a bodyguard of one politician, took out his gun, started scaring people. People were not scared. They were actually fighting back. And then you had this woman who kicked him. And that became this sort of meme and it became super popular and that kind of galvanized everything. And then after that, it became sort of like a daily story. More people come down. There's a bit of repression. Then the next day, even more people come down.

Kind of a familiar story if you see what I'm going with this. Yeah. And now it's day number eight and people are still in the streets and it's way more than just in Beirut. The protests in Beirut started off with the air of almost a carnival or perhaps a dance club. And there was, in fact, DJs and dancing. But there was also a powerful sense of solidarity that grew between people day after day and built upon itself. The only reason these protests have not been crushed by the government is that activists were able to mobilize enough people from a wide enough swath of society that mass brutality simply was not an option.

72 hours into the campaign, Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced a new economic package, halving the salaries of public officials, revamping the electricity sector and eliminating a bunch of do-nothing government jobs that existed to suck money away from the poor and squirt it into the hands of rich connected people's children. This was rightly celebrated as a victory by many activists, although the protests are ongoing and most Lebanese believe there is much more to be done. The success they've seen already is proof of how much can be accomplished and how quickly it can be accomplished when enough of the nation gets on the same page.

Now that may seem impossible when a nation is divided as the United States, but prior to these protests, Lebanon's divisions seemed unbridgeable too. You know, two days ago was the 30th anniversary of commemoration, whatever, of the Ta'af agreement. The agreement that was signed in 1989 that ended the Lebanese Civil War and they signed it in the city of Ta'af in Saudi Arabia. And that system sort of codified sectarianism even more than it was before the war. It did a number of things that I won't get into now, it's not that relevant, but what it did really is make it almost basically impossible for anyone to identify

in any other way other than with your sect. So the fact that I am from a certain sect, it doesn't matter if I am a believer or not or an atheist or not, none of these things matter. What matters is that this is your sect. And so you vote according to that and you vote according to sect according to where your family is supposedly originally from. So for example, I can vote in Ashrafiyah, but I don't live in Ashrafiyah. I live in a different part of Lebanon.

And that's part of the reason why it's been so difficult to really organize because for example, when there was a municipal elections in 2016, something like a quarter of, sorry, like there's four times more people who actually live in Beirut than people who are registered to vote in Beirut. So you have many of my friends who live in, I don't live in Beirut, but they live in Beirut. And so they were helping organize people who are officially registered in Beirut including people who don't live there to vote there.

So that's kind of just like a small example of why it's been so difficult on all levels to really organize for an alternative to the sectarian system that we have now. And yet, with no centralized structure, with no hierarchy of leadership, the people of Lebanon have been able to, at least somewhat, transcend the divisions built into their society to stand up and force basic change. The exact nature of the problems that must be confronted will differ from country to country with every protest. But as we see when we observe all of these movements side by side, the basic script for effective change is always the same.

Pick a few concrete things that everyone agrees need to be changed. Get enough people out into the street and disrupt the normal flow of life. And make the nation effectively ungovernable and unprofitable until you get what you need. Now, the fact that this is all relatively simple does not make it easy. Nor does it mean that every uprising like this is guaranteed to meet with success. Quite the opposite, really. And this, rather tragically, brings me to Egypt. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in 2013 via a super fun military coup. Since his predecessors had been famously swept out of power by popular unrest and mass demonstrations, he spent much of his time in power making such things impossible in the future. And CSI knows something that only the very smartest dictators learn. You cannot let protests start. Because once they start, they can grow exponentially, like things did in Lebanon. And then there are too many people out in the street to shoot. And then you have to make concessions. And then you fall. In late September 2019, an exiled former military contractor named Mohammed Ali started posting a series of videos documenting massive corruption within the Egyptian military.

He called for a million people to march in the streets. This was, of course, just a spark. More than one-third of Egyptians live in poverty. Most of the people who did take to the streets cited economic grievances as the reason they stood up. But sadly, they did not stand for long, because Sisi's military was there to crush their will. And I'm going to quote from The Guardian now. More than 1,900 people have been arrested since rare protests broke out last weekend. And on Thursday, the Ministry of the Interior affirmed that it will confront any attempt to destabilize the country with decisiveness, according to local media. Central Cairo was heavily guarded as riot police. Vans of security officials and plainclothes police spread out among the network of streets surrounding Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt's 2011 revolution. The figures for the arrests were compiled by the Cairo-based NGO, the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights.

Bystanders and others who had little to do with the protests were reportedly detained along with the demonstrators, and those arrested being held across the country. Now, when people did try to march in Egypt, police met them with tear gas, with rubber bullets, with real bullets, and with brutal clubbings. They also blocked off access to much of the internet, restricting Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and Skype, as well as a number of international news sites in order to make it impossible for Egyptian activists to coordinate with one another, or to share their stories with the rest of the world. All of this worked. The protests in Cairo fizzled out. Sisi's reign is, for now, seemingly secure. 60,000 political prisoners still languish in Egyptian jails. And authoritarians around the world viewed this development with as much optimism as I have for the protests in Lebanon. Just days later, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised the dictator for positive progress in the relationship between the two nations. U.S. President Donald Trump called Sisi his favorite dictator and said of the suppressed protests in Cairo, everybody has demonstrations.

Now, the Guardian spoke with several Egyptians about their reasons for protesting and for not protesting. Syed, a 34-year-old fast-food employee, gave a response that I think embodies exactly how dictators want their people to feel. I never went to a protest, and I never will go. There is a lot of things wrong in the country. Some people are literally eating from the garbage, but protesting in riots will make things worse. God knows I agree with what they say, but I'm alone and I have no one to defend me, so I can only focus on putting bread on the table. Now, the good news is that unspeakable brutality does not always halt people from standing up. Sometimes, things can get so bad that no amount of bullets and battery will dissuade a population. And this is what we are seeing right now in the nation of Iraq. The basic story there is the same one we've dealt with this whole episode. The government and Baghdad is corrupted and incompetent. It squeezes the average people of the nation dry while offering them piss-poor public services and little hope of a better future. The people there got angry, and so they started protesting. The police and security forces responded with almost unbelievable bloodshed, killing multiple men by firing tear gas canisters directly into their skulls. I've seen some utterly unspeakable x-ray images of the corpses of these protesters, skull shattered and deformed by massive metal cylinders of poison. It's beyond comprehension in some ways.

More than a hundred people have been murdered so far, and as I write this, the protests are still ongoing. It is possible that the violent sweeping Iraq right now will degenerate into a vicious conflict, not unlike the Syrian Civil War. I hope things will go better. The people of Iraq deserve a break. And more than anything, they deserve your attention and your solidarity. They are a part of this great global uprising, and their future freedom is tied directly to yours. In 2011, as the Arab Spring reached Syria and protests turned to gun battles, the world and the United States largely turned away. There is an excellent New York Times column, which I would advise you all to read. It always comes back to Syria by Rania Abu Zed. I'm going to quote from that now. The Syrian war enabled a resurgent Russia to expand its influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Qatar imported their feud into Syria, backing different rebel groups and fomenting rivalries that in part helped splinter the armed opposition. Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah supported the government of Bashar al-Assad. Hezbollah's domestic Lebanese opponents supported the rebels. At one point in Lebanon, every fourth person was a Syrian refugee. Jordan, too, has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis. Turkey, the conduit for foreign fighters and munitions into rebel ranks, absorbed 3.6 million Syrian refugees, and hosts the world's largest refugee population. All of Europe, by comparison, is home to about 1 million Syrian refugees, an influx that has nonetheless upended Europe's politics.

And then there was the rise of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda's use of the Syrian conflict to rejuvenate its ranks and recruit men and money. Both groups exported horror well beyond Syria's borders. The flood of refugees from Syria and the rise of ISIS are intimately tied, with the fact that Donald Trump is the president in our very own nation, and with the fact that Nazis now march in Germany again, and with the fact that the city of Portland, Oregon has become an irregular battlefield for fascists and anti-fascists. None of the terrible things happening in our world occur in a vacuum. It is something of a cliche right now on social media to refer to the terrible news that so dominates our daily lives as evidence that we live in the darkest timeline. Much of the reason things are so very grim right now is the complete failure of liberal democracies around the world to respond effectively to the Syrian civil war. Many people thought that since the country was, in Donald Trump's words, 7,000 miles away from them, what happened there was not their business. But it was. And what is happening in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Chile, in Hong Kong, and in many other nations around the world is all of our business. I didn't even cover the protests in Ecuador, in Indonesia, in Russia. The world is a fire with rage right now.

Those of us who live in islands of stability can turn our heads away and focus on our own personal problems, as Syed in Egypt focuses on putting bread on the table. But if we do that, the hope for a better world is truly lost for all of us. And that's, that's the episode. That's what I got for you now. You can find us online, behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at Bastards Pod. You can buy T-shirts on T-public, but really what you ought to do is find a way to get involved, find something that you can do, even if you just start by putting in an hour and a week to some sort of activism, something near you or far from you. Just don't let this moment in history pass you by. There's people out there fighting who need your solidarity. There's things near you that need to be fought for. Go do it.

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. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science,

and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.