Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Victory is ours

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

Mark Galeotti takes us into the Soviet Gulag to tell us the brutal history of the Bitch War, ToE's Andrew Callaway checks in on the war on smoking and P.W. Singer explains how #likewar works. Plus Sleeper Net?

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Victory is Ours. Here in America, there's a lot of talk about the deep state. In Russia, it's deep crime. We've still got this very Western sense that there are distinctions between the world of politics, the world of business, the world of crime. In Russia, it's not like that. That's where this idea of deep crime comes in.

It's actually this notion that, in a way, the whole of state becomes underpinned by relationships with criminality, and it's incredibly hard to unpick the two. Writer Mark Galati has spent decades reporting on Russian politics and Russian crime. His new book is a historical portrait of one of the most brutal and dangerous gangs of them all, the Tattooed Vory. Part of this kind

of criminal subculture was this visual language of tattoos. It's not just that you had a tattoo because you thought it looked cool. Each tattoo had a meaning. You have, for example, tattoos on the hands that show what crimes you've committed. So in some ways, you've got your resume on your hands. It's a way of demonstrating who you are. You have tattoos that show which labor camps you went to. Because again, particularly if you've been to the ones in the high north, really tough conditions, most people didn't get back from those. If you survived a term there, it shows how tough you are. Lots of criminals have tattoos, but Vore tattoos are in a league of their own.

If you look, for example, in the Japanese Yakuza, they also have a tattoo culture, often these incredibly artistic works. But the interesting thing is their tattoos always stop at the forearm and around the neck, so that you might say they can be in the baths with their fellow Yakuza and showing off their tats. But on the other hand, then they can put on a suit or even go golfing and no one can see their tattoos. They can look respectable. Vort tattoos are not like that. I mean, you know, you have these things like, again, barbed wire tattooed across the forehead, things on your hands and everything else.

The whole point of Vore tattoos is to say, you ought to know that I'm a Vore. You ought to fear me. And you ought to know that I'm so disrespectful of your mainstream culture that I don't care. I'm willing to permanently mark myself off as a member of the Vore of the thieves world. So that's the whole point. The Vore culture is all about display. It's not just about being hard. It's about being known and seen to be hard. Vor tattoos function like a language, a secret language that you can understand only when you know the code. For example, the infamous black and white multi-pointed star. That was one of the signs of a vorwurzakonje, a sort of a particular authority figure.

One of the places you could have that star would be on your knee to symbolize I kneel to no one. When you actually had the emergence of this criminal subculture, it had this incredibly strict set of rules and codes of their own. Things like that, you know, you never ever would work for the government, even if it was convenient, even if it means that you would be able to be in a position to carry out a robbery or whatever. No, you could never do that. You had to abandon your own family. You never would cheat a fellow vore. Again, strong element of honour among thieves. And so much so that the authority figures that emerged within this subculture

were known as the vorei vasoconia, which literally means thieves within the law. Now, we probably understand it better as thieves in the code, let's say. But this is the whole point. They had their own law. And that was what really mattered. The Vori Code predates the founding of the Soviet Union. But when Stalin took power, this code was pushed to its breaking point.

When Stalin comes to power in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. He launches this extraordinary, horrific whirlwind of modernisation and terror. And particularly the labour camps, the gulags, they were at once a place where you dumped all the people whom you think, not even who are enemies of the state, but even might become them. It's a place you use to terrify the rest of society into submission, but it also increasingly becomes a source of, really, slave labour. The perverse and demonic brilliance of the Stalinist state is to basically recruit criminals to be the foremen, the controllers, and the guards over the rest of the convict population. Now, to do that obviously means breaking the code of the Vorovskoye Mir.

This was easier said than done. You could read these spine-chilling gugulag memoirs in which Vori, rather than be forced by the Soviet state to go and dig canals, cut down trees, whatever it was that they were required, would do things like eat ground glass or barbed wire or rip their own stomachs open with a hand-whittled knife just simply to say, ultimately, I get to decide what I do.

But then you had World War II, or as the Soviets and Russians today call it the Great Patriotic War, which was this awful battle for survival. Because they were not just simply fighting another country that was trying to invade. I mean, they were fighting a power that basically wanted to turn the entire Slavic people into illiterate slave labourers. And so you had criminals who genuinely volunteered to fight, even though it was breaking the code, but motivated by a sense of patriotism. And you had many others who were just forced, who were just swept up from the camps and put into punitive battalions and set off.

At the end of the war, these convicts were sent back into the camps. The Stalinist system was so paranoid that it looked at Soviet prisoners of war in Nazi concentration camps and basically said, you should have fought to the death. What were you doing allowing yourself to be captured? Awful thing is you had these trainloads of Soviet prisoners of war being liberated from Nazi prison and concentration camps and just under armed guard being marched into filtration camps

and most of them then being sent to Stalist Gulags. Where again, because they had been soldiers, as far as the traditionalist body were concerned, they were bitches. If you broke the code and collaborated with the state, you became, at least in the eyes of your former thieves-in-laws, the Blatnya Asuki, which translates to bitch. So all of a sudden, whereas before the war, the majority of the underworld was traditionalist,

with a small handful of collaborators, now suddenly you had a huge array of collaborators. And so what you have is this whole war that breaks out within the Gulag system. The Bitch War plays out in the background in a number of my favorite Russian novels and stories, like Shalamov's Konya Tales. Thanks to Mark Gulati's research, I now understand how the Suki were able

to kill so many traditionalists. A lot of it had to do with the jobs they were given in the Gulag. Like cooks and barbers, which may not sound exciting, but obviously it means that they have access to sharp metal things. It is the Suki, with the help of the state, who win the bitch war.

And after Stalin's death, the gulags open up, and the Suki move into the Soviet underworld. From the late 50s, early 60s, the Soviet underworld is now dominated by a criminal subculture that has the worst of both worlds. It has the toughness and the brutality and the ruthlessness of the old Vorobskoy Mir. And yet it now is much more politically savvy, much more willing to cut deals with local officials and so forth. The Vory both predates and outlives the Soviet Union. It does very well in the chaos of the 1990s. When Putin comes to power, he brings order and reasserts the primacy of the state. But according to Mark Galati, this special relationship between the state and the Vory lives on.

In fact, it still exists. The best way of being a gangster in Russia is to be the state's gangster. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about a 1930s thug forcing people to go out and cut down trees in the Siberian wastes, or if it's a modern computer hacker who knows that as the price of getting away with doing business and cloning credit cards is from time to time, someone from the security agencies is going to come and say, we'd like you to break into that particular political party's computer systems or whatever. So totally different looking gangsters, but the same process at work.

Yes, the old Vrovskoi Mir is dead. But the point is, the process is whereby it died and changed. It's a little bit like the caterpillar may be dead, but the criminal butterfly still lives on. The world may be on fire, but in San Francisco, it is not easy to light up. TOE's Andrew Calloway has this report. It's hard to smoke in San Francisco. You got to try really hard. You got to really want it. That's my mom, Barbara.

And she, like me, is a big smoker. But unlike her, I have no memory of a time before the war on smoking. Go to a bar and get a drink and, you know, they give you an ashtray and those days, you know, there's no more of that anymore. That was fun stuff. But hey, it's a new age. The first shots fired in the war on smoking were the laws. Like, you have to stand 20 feet from a doorway in San Francisco to smoke, which means you have to stand in the gutter or inside a dumpster or something. You know, you really feel like a pariah. The next incursions in the anti-smoking offensive were waged with judgment. Everyone hates it. I think of myself as this pigpen character. You know, from everywhere,

I got this little cloud of cigarette smoke around me. Me too, big time. But on the other hand, it's such a satisfying thing to do that, you know, occasionally you become belligerent about it. It's like, no, I'm gonna, this is not illegal. I'm going to do this. I'm going to be

the least asshole I can be about it, but I'm not quitting. When I flew back to California for Thanksgiving, it was the tail end of the campfires there. San Francisco had the worst air quality of any city in the world, but that didn't bother my mom too much. Well, I read one report that said the air quality today is like smoking 16 cigarettes. And I was like, ooh, I'd take that. Even with the air so bad already, my mom doesn't feel any less judgment smoking outside. One driver who was wearing a mask kind of looked at me over his mask as though you were looking over your eyeglasses,

you know, with kind of a look like, how can you be smoking a cigarette? I mean, I'm interpreting, right? But it was definitely a, what the hell are you doing kind of look. When you see people walking around with gas masks on and you're smoking a cigarette, you feel kind of guilty. Even if it's a minuscule amount, you're still contributing to the bad air quality. And also, you're not even taking the precaution of smoking through your mask. My mom didn't even bother buying a mask, but my friend Anne did. I saw on Instagram that she'd invested in a pretty fashionable one. It's not, I don't know that I would call it a fashionable

mask. It made me feel a little bit like I was wearing, like, a burka. So, wait, did you ever take off your respirator mask in order to smoke? No. I just, like, wouldn't put it on when I was going out to smoke a cigarette. The first few days, I would only smoke on my porch or something in my own space. I didn't, like, walk around or, like, go out on the street during the daytime. But then at night, it felt different because you couldn't smell it as much and you couldn't see it and it was cooler. And I would just get beat. I was just like drinking a lot and going out and walking

around and smoking and just, you know, carrying on. Anne felt more comfortable smoking outside in the fire than my mom. But that doesn't mean she's not taking the fires seriously. In fact, she's prepping. I mean, this is the second year in a row. So in anticipation of what will now be like a regular thing,

I bought an air filter. I bought all of these herbs. Powdered mushrooms. I got some marshmallow root. I have some powdered Tulsi. What's the powdered Tulsi? I'm not really sure.

It's holy basil. It's supposed to be good for things. This is just like part of climate change now. We just got to get used to like having to live in respirator land. Yeah. I'm ready for next time. Okay, so I'm standing out here having a cigarette. And above me, the sun is like this insane, surreal death ball in the sky.

Like real end of the world type imagery. And just under it, there's this sea of SUVs waiting to get on the freeway. Nobody's afraid to be out driving in their car, but I'm hiding out by the dumpster to smoke, voiding stares from people. You know, like the guy judging my mom from his car. The thing that's actually burning a hole in the ozone layer? I was kind of hoping that maybe with the fires, there could be an armistice and the war against us smokers. Considering, you know, entire towns are getting burned off the face of the earth.

People are getting displaced and dying. Maybe, just maybe, we could band together and focus on the real problem. The climate apocalypse is actually beginning. I mean, at least with this cigarette, I'm just killing myself. But, you know, I do understand as a former driver, it's hard to give it up. But every bus that I see pass by is practically empty. People are so addicted to taking Lyfts and Ubers. Although I wonder, is addiction really the right word? I love smoking. I really do love it. If I didn't, I would have quit by now.

I'm not even interested in not being addicted to cigarettes, which is, you know, my particular problem. My first cigarette was like a highlight of my life. I was born to smoke. And when I die of lung cancer, I will say it was worth it. I'm not sure that my husband said that when he died of lung cancer, but he had quit. And I know I could quit. There are drugs and there's patches and there's all this stuff. But I just, I don't want to give it up. I don't want to give it up i don't want to give it up but if you're not going to give it up you have to not whine when you got to face the music you can't whine you just say i earned it you know i earned this lung cancer so you're prepared to not whine well I might whine about the pain but I'm not going to say

I'm not going to sue a tobacco company excuse me are you alright? yeah yeah totally too much smoke? let's have another one

okay it's not just that I cover my mouth when I cough. It's I teach my kids to cover their mouths when they cough. And none of that is about protecting yourself. It's about you're responsible for protecting everyone else that you come into contact with. There's a digital version of this. We ought to look at people who knowingly spread disinformation, false stories, conspiracy theory. We ought to look at them the same way that we do the person who coughs on their hand and then reaches out to shake your hand. Peter Singer is a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Think Tank. He's also just co-authored a book along with Emerson T. Brookings called Like War. Like War

is not just another word for cyber war. If cyber war is hacking networks, like war is hacking the people on the networks. Everybody knows that if you want to hack people on the network, you use social media. And in LikeWars, we learn how marketers, pop stars, and politicians do this. We also learn how ISIS used social media to win actual battles. You cannot tell the story of the rise of ISIS without referencing social media. There's a picture that Peter likes to point to that kind of sums up just how prepped ISIS was for like war. It's an Instagram portrait of an ISIS fighter. He's got his grenade, he's got a knife, he's got a gun, and then he's got his smartphone with Instagram open.

So it's kind of this like meta moment. In the summer of 2014, ISIS launched its invasion of Mosul, even though the defending forces outnumbered them almost 10 to 1. In the past, when you were going to conduct an invasion, you didn't let the world know about it. You tried to keep it secret. You think of the Battle of Normandy. Instead, ISIS recognizes that social media has changed all that. You think of the Battle of Normandy. Instead, ISIS recognizes that social media has changed all that, and they want the world to know. They want the world talking about it. In fact, they create a hashtag, All Eyes on ISIS. ISIS has a plan to push its message

viral online. So as it's invading, not only the people in the invasion force are pushing out, we're coming for you. It's also got fanboys around the world. So its message goes viral and its message is not just we're coming, but it creates a story of inevitable victory. And then that online story of inevitable victory becomes real. And the defending force, even though it's about 10 times the size, basically dissolves and collapses. I often think about how scared these soldiers must have been to just drop their weapons and run. What did they see on their phones? But in the U.S., we were just as scared.

Polls showed that Americans' fear of terrorism was off the charts. We were more afraid in the wake of ISIS than we were a month after 9-11. Eventually, ISIS was dislodged from Mosul. But the fear they spread through social media, that led to a string of major victories. Social media allowed it to achieve the ultimate goal of terrorism, which is, of course, not just the physical side, but to create that kind of fear with real political effect. For example, when we did studies of the 2016 election, among both general and Republican nominee voters, those that consider terrorism to be the most important issue tilted for Donald Trump.

For Peter, the greatest battle in the history of like war, or the greatest battle that's been fought thus far, is the election of 2016. Facebook itself notes that over 140 million Americans were exposed to Russian disinformation in this period. The scale of it was massive, however you want to cut it. But if we truly hope to understand how this battle was fought and won, first, we need to get our bots straight. What's important in the artificial voices is to be able to understand the differences of them, to get the vocabulary right. You've got sock puppets, which are real humans posing as someone else online.

And then you've got bots, which is a non-human. It's essentially an algorithm that is posing as a human. They can operate in cohesion with each other, but they can also operate independently. The botnets have become so large and so powerful, it makes sense that they get all the attention. But during the election of 2016, the sock puppets too performed a very important role. One of the aspects that we now understand about a lot of different activity, but in particular the Russian disinformation campaign, is that it would make an initial foothold trying to pose as someone or some organization that was trusted. And it might be posing as a U.S. Army veteran, a grandmother from Texas, a news source. And importantly, that news source would be reporting news that fit your prior

worldview. One of the most effective of this, for example, was one that posed as the unofficial hub of Tennessee Republicans. And importantly, in these early stages, they would push information that you found interesting and validated the way you already looked at the world. And then by setting that kind of track record of trust, it would then be activated later on to bring other information to manipulate you. We just don't know how many of the soccer moms, Black Lives Matter activists, truck drivers, and MAGA dads, the ones who were chattering away during the election of 2016. We just don't know how many of them were sleeper agents, or even how

long they were chattering away before they were weaponized. And we may never find out. But there is a question about the internet I believe, like war, can help us answer. And that's, is the internet a force for good or is the internet a force for bad? For decades now, we've been told that it's neither. For decades, we've been taught that it's both. For decades, we've been assured that the internet is neutral. What if all of this was a cover? Yeah, I'm talking sleeper internet. You see, back in 1990, there were a couple of political scientists working at the Rand Corporation. These guys coined the term cyber war. In 1990, they understood that in the future, computer hackers would have the ability to remotely target economies and disable military capabilities.

But in like war, we learned that these two political scientists went further. In their report, they also sketched out something they were sure would come with cyber war, something they called net war. What was so fascinating, you go back to the early 90s, is they're making the point, hey, it's not just going to be hacking that matters, but you might see groups, nations, try and kind of manipulate what's on the internet itself.

Not through theft, but by the hacking of people on the networks, by driving ideas viral through a mix of likes and lies and the network's own algorithm. And it's notable that they're saying this really before the internet has even been opened up to the masses. This report was immediately classified. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Victory is Ours. Before the Theory of Everything, I had a radio show called Too Much Information. It ran on the station WFMU. And before that, I had another version of Theory of Everything. And my first show was called Your Radio Nightlight. In the future, for our post-mid-roll segments, I'm going to dip into this archive and play you something that you may not have heard before. So after the break,

a very special segment on war. Thanks to our new sponsor, Dashlane. Dashlane makes your digital identity safe and simple by providing a tool that remembers all your password stores and autofills all the information you need from your credit card to your street address when entering forms and works seamlessly across all of your devices. The application Dashlane makes life so much easier by not having to keep track of all of your work and personal passwords, and it works on Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. I have it on my laptop and my phone,

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All right, a TMI flashback from January of 2010 from an episode called Most Precious Thing. My name is Desmond, Desmond Aymabwaji, and I live in Sweden. Originally, I come from Ghana, but I've lived in Sweden for about 20 years. After having had my education in England, of course, I've been also to the USA and studied also a little bit in Africa. But I've been living in Sweden and then have been working as a researcher doing research. My books are published on the internet, Lulucom. What I have been able to do and which I'm sure that either now or later on in life people are going to discover is that people usually find ways and means to go to war because they want to go and steal. There is always something that they have in mind that they want to steal. And this is what I call stealing covetous order.

You like something in another country, you are there to steal. First, there is a kind of stealing and you covet. You have a covetous attitude towards that. So you take those things and then they become yours. It has never been made clear to the world about this disorder, that it is not something that we could take it lightly, but it is something that is wrong. It's a disorder that human beings have to go to another land, steal or kill the people, and take everything that is there. So, obviously, in the history books, there are many occasions where, you know,

one group of people have gone into another group's land to take something, whether it be gold or oil or land itself. But are you saying then that it's not really about those things? It's actually a mental illness? It's a kind of illness, because I have used an illustration from Abraham, who had been the founding father for the Jews. That he, you know, through the scriptures said that he was just standing somewhere and looking at an expanse land, lying somewhere.

And then that very night that when he slept, he had a dream and he was told that if he could follow him, then of course that God or his forefathers would say that I'm going to give you all this property. And this has been a style which many Europeans took those days. People could dream about something, and instead the God has given it to me. The next day, they take a weapon and then go and kill somebody. And you as a DJ now, let's reason about this.

Supposing somebody should do something like that. You dream about something that your God said that he would give you the property of another neighbor. And the next day, you don't wait for this God to find a way to give it to you, but you go and kill this person and take his property. Supposing we should take this to the law court, what do you think will be the result? I would be in jail.

Yes, because, I mean, in the world of scientists, dream is nothing but just imagination, sleep imagination. What goes on in the daytime could in the night appear to you in different forms. So you cannot base your conclusions or even facts on dreams. They are nothing in the world of science. So this is the whole thing about war. Wars were engineered by sick people, sick men.

I have made a very, very strong point somewhere in connection with the coming of religion and so forth. And the same kind of situation that we see that those people who became founders of these important religions that we see in the world,

they, in modern terms, would have been put in the psychiatric ward. So the whole thing is about illness. It's a mental illness, something that has been kept away from the world for a long time, and this time it has been able to be unveiled through this discussion that I've done and the articles that I've presented. So Desmond, now that you've discovered that the secret to understanding war is mental illness, how have your theories been received? I know that you've self-published your book about this, but how has this message been received by others when you've written articles?

That's a very interesting question. Usually, as an academician, the usual way should have been to send these articles to journals or scientific journals. But I discovered at the time when I was writing this that these messages should be sent to the whole world for people to ponder over it. I had some letters sent to me to two occasions that maybe I could come to Oprah. You could just imagine I have about 21. Is it over now? No, no, no. I'm just saying that my question is about like, how does the theory become practice? I mean, these are very tangible theories that should be accepted either now or later. As an academician, I know that there is a saying

which is that a theory is only accepted when the one who propounded it is dead. So, Desmond, let's think to the future then. Let's say that you've passed on. How do you imagine your theories being put into place? The medication. This episode was produced by me and Andrew Calloway. Thanks to Mark Galati, Barbara Calloway, Anne Griffith, and P.W. Singer.

Peter's book is called Like War, The Weaponization of Social Media. And Mark's book is called Dvory, Russia's Super Mafia. You can find links to both books on the show page at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is also a founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.