Endless Thread - Update: Things Are (Still) Bad

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

In the aftermath of a violent mob storming the U.S. Capitol building, we got back in touch with Indi Samarajiva. Indi's a writer who lived through the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, and he was featured in "Things Are Bad," an episode we released last October in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The team caught up with Indi again to ask him about his thoughts on last week's events. Donate now: wbur.org/socks

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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Hey, guys, we've all been processing the attack on the U.S. Capitol last week and the attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory. And yes, we're technically on a break here at endless thread, but when the team regrouped the very next day, we wondered, what will Indy have to say about this? Indy Samarjiva is a writer we featured in last October's Endless Dread series in an episode called Things Are Bad.

We asked whether America was on the road to a second civil war. Indy lived through the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War, and he had a message for Americans. I moved back to Sri Lanka in my 20s, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don't understand.

They're waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That's not how it happens. This is how it happens. Precisely what you're feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever-rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you

while you think about dinner. If you're trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It's already fallen down. Now, at the time, Indy's words might have felt provocative. Now, they feel prescient. So we called Indy back up to hear his thoughts on the events of last week. Here's that conversation.

Indy, it's nice to talk to you again, even though the circumstances are not great. Yeah. But I mean, one of the circumstances is great. That's true. Fair point. So we talked to you a couple of months ago about, the possibility of a return to civil war in America and collapse, I think, more broadly. And I guess one of the things that I'd love to know is, has any of your thinking changed since we last spoke?

And all the things have happened that have happened over the past few months and especially last week. Look, I guess not really, right? Because I think a lot of these things you could have seen coming. Like, to me, the guy is walking in the streets with guns. Like that to me was the point where it became scary. And then it's almost like you throw a ball in there. Like what goes up, comes down. Like those guys were going to do something.

Like they're not sitting around talking about, you know, oh, this is fun, let's stop here. They're sitting talking around about the Turner Diaries. It's a story of like this coming race war and how essentially white people will have to fight for their existence. I saw some video, which is redirected from Parlor today. and it's essentially like a, you know, a rallying cry for this mob from Trump. They're piecing together speeches from his inauguration and like other stuff.

Talking about like, you know, this is your time, like stand up and fight. And they're talking about, you know, going out on inauguration day itself. And this, the guy who did it is like some VFX artists. And it showed a map of America. And it was blue and red. And then suddenly all the blue states like go out and the thing becomes red. And, you know, it's very scary. but these guys have been preparing for this for a long time.

Like the Turner Diaries was written a decade ago and people are still referencing it in those circles. And you're just seeing like this kind of poke out into your mainstream. And it's maybe, it's new for like mainstream America. But there's a certain segment of America where they've been, you know, preparing for liberals, for socialism, these things as like existential threats that you need to get up and get your gun and fight. And these people buying AR-15s are not buying it just for fun.

Like there's an ideology that goes with that. And that's been building for a long time. So when I wrote earlier, like that's kind of what I was seeing is that, you know, the seeds of all that stuff is there. And that happened in Sri Lanka as well, right? Like the seeds of resentment, they build and they build and they build. And by the time it comes out and by the time you become aware that it's time to stop it, it's too late because there's, you know, decades of preparation and indoctrination and stuff

that's coming behind it. My fear for America is that it's entering a cycle of violence. You may think that these isolated violent events, but my sense is that you're entering the cycle of violence. And Sri Lanka has gone through multiple cycles of violence. And they're usually about roughly 30 years age. Do you think that having witnessed what you witnessed last week and the news cycles that have happened since last week's events, do you think that people are finally waking up to some of the stuff that you've been talking about? I think people are definitely waking up.

Yeah, I think people are definitely waking up. So I was watching Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech or his video. And I thought that was very good. He's talking about Austria, the Nazi experience, how his father was mentally traumatized by that, how he hit them, and the trauma it made for all his neighbors. And I thought that was very good. And then he transitioned into this sort of,

but this is America. This is my Conan sword. We're going to temper the sword. We're going to come out stronger. and before. And I think there's a sense to like, I think Americans are kind of like children in that way. Like they want to be comforted. And sometimes you shouldn't be comfortable. It doesn't get better like that easily. These aren't all these things aren't all going to get devoured back in your mythology. Like it's actually more of an existential threat than that. So I wrote something else recently,

which is how like American exceptionalism is what's getting you killed. And I think that's the risk. So it's easy to like see this happening and slip back into the exceptionalism and that, oh, we're going to be okay and ignoring the fact that you have to do a lot of stuff to be okay and you have to really look clearly at where you are and where you were and some of that may not be pretty to look at and it may not be comforting so there's that even like this impeachment thing right you guys are taking forever to impeach them to impeach him like it may not even happen in time and there's like a debate about whether you're holding people accountable for this and whereas the other side is not having these debates they're like just let's get together and you know roll tide

So not that we can make a total comparison between Sri Lanka and the United States, but based on what you saw happen there, what do you think we might see happen here? So I can tell you from here, there's an image of a guy Johnston Fernando throwing, you know, law books at everyone and smashing chairs and being a thug. And I think he's like Minister of Housing or something now. So these guys are in power. So the nature of something like, say, a Reichstag fire is that you light a fire, you cause chaos, and then you, you're, you. you say, hey, look at all the chaos, you need us. And then you can ride that into power. And that's what these guys did to a large degree. As in, they created a bunch of chaos. And then they said, look, the country's chaotic. You need to change government. And so then they got voted in.

That's kind of how this works, right? And that's what worries me about, like, Trump and his supporters now, because they have every incentive to just make everything as chaotic as possible. And then after a while, voters for whatever reason are just like blame it on whoever's in power, which is what happened to us also. So it's actually quite, you know, in Game of Thrones, they say chaos is a ladder. And the person who creates the chaos often holds a ladder. Up to a point. One thing I would note from Sri Lanka is these things usually kill the person who, so look at how, look at how threatened Mike Pence was. So our first prime minister tried to ride racism to power and it ended up being a monk that killed him. So what did they say? The revolution devours, it's,

It's young. As in, Republicans think they can ride this, but they'll be the first in line. One of the things that people are talking about again after last week's events is the huge failure of law enforcement in the last week to stop these, you know, insurrectionists, these extremists from getting into the Capitol. And obviously, there's been a realization, too, that a lot of law enforcement, were actually among the insurrectionists or at least some law enforcement and the fact that, you know, white supremacy, to quote the rage against the machine song,

some of those that workforces are the same that burn crosses, right? So you recently wrote something about how the country, Georgia, was an interesting example to look at when considering police reform in the U.S. Can you talk a little bit about that? So Georgia, from what I know, Georgia the country,

when the new leader came and the police force was so not trusted and essentially extractive, which is, I think, what police force has become, is that, look, you know when you have a computer problem and you can, like, go through a million settings and try and fix it, or you can just turn it off and turn it on again? So he essentially did that with the police force. And I think that's an underrated policy intervention, which is just turning it off and turning it on again. So I think they fired like a good 80, 85 percent of the police force, I think starting with the traffic guys. And then they just re-recruited them in like a normal way. So you got rid of all, you know, the corruption and the cliques and the corrupt cops holding even the decent ones down.

And they just restarted the police force. And I think the police force became one of their more trusted institutions. I think that's also an opportunity to maybe reevaluate what your police force should be doing. Like maybe traffic is okay, but maybe, you know, not mental health or other things. And maybe they don't need torture powers to do all these things. I think, yeah, I think turning it off and turning it on again is underrated. In your most recent piece on Medium, the subtitle is America is exceptionally fucked. Yeah.

I like that we can always count on you for the real talk, Indy. Can we get unfucked from this moment? I mean, is there, do you think that given what went down in the Capitol last week, has something been broken that cannot be fixed or at least can't be put back together the way that it originally was? Yes, I think America can be fixed, but to be completely honest, you don't have like an Amazon Prime subscription to life. It's just you're not going to get next day delivery on it. It's going to take time and more time than you're willing to give. And I do think Americans aren't thinking in that way.

I think you're actually a very young civilization. And you're only like a few hundred years old. I think your democracy is only 55 years old as in one person, one vote. Like, look, Sri Lanka has a written history going back well over 2,000 years. and like it's always been, things have always been getting fucked up and then like a little bit unfuck. And so we have a sense of like time and even like rebirth and like the sense that, you know, you know,

this stuff just keeps looping. And I think Americans are used to being sort of the center of the universe and the center of time and that's just not the world you live in. The subhead of your piece gets at this point. But throughout your recent piece, you kind of talk about this idea that, you know, Americans always think that the U.S. is sort of uniquely amazing. the greatest country in the world, and that this way of thinking in your mind is a big part of the

problem. Why? Well, I think it's like pain. You would think that it's great to not feel pain. But if you don't feel pain, then if you run into something, you know, you won't pull your foot back and you'll break your toe. Or if you touch something hot, you won't pull back and you'll burn yourself. And I see the American body politic is like that. Exceptionalism is this idea that you're untouchable, you're the strongest country, you're the oldest democracy, you're the richest people. And so even when you're facing things in reality, which tell you this isn't true, and even when people are telling you that this hurts them, like even when poor people or undocumented people or black people are telling you, hey, like this society is hurting us, you're like, no, no,

it doesn't hurt. We're exceptional. We don't even have these problems. These problems aren't even possible here. So you're like a body politic that doesn't feel pain. So you're going to take damage. So I think you need to put down exceptionalism. You need to sit in the pain that you're in.

You also wrote that white Americans are not used to examining how you suck, but this dooms you to never getting better. And that's sort of connected to what you're talking about here as well, right? Yeah. Look, I think for white Americans, there's a sense that, oh, things are messed up. But for a lot of black people, for a lot of immigrants, they were like, no, no, this has been messed up. We've been telling you, you just haven't cared because it hasn't bothered you.

And also there's as part of like white identity where it's like great to be American. Like you feel good. You feel like you're on the winning sports team. Like it's a new-engal Patriots. Like they win every year. It's the Yankees. And you're proud of that association. And then you start to lose and you're like, why?

Well, and I can say to just anecdotally people in my extended circle, I would say, it's not just that white Americans have not been paying attention to the suffering of black and brown people in our country. It's that I think a lot of people think that it's black and brown people's fault that they haven't had the best experience in this country. And that's like a, that's like an offshoot of this white Americans not used to examining how they suck. I think there is a real fallacy in thinking that if you suck, it's your fault. No, and I've been a part of that also, right? Like the whole like sort of startup culture, right? So I ran a startup here. And that, I, I, is that if you work hard, if you, you know, are innovative and you're smart, you can get ahead.

And if you haven't got ahead, it's because you didn't work hard. So I write on Medium and a lot of articles about like, how do billionaires like wake up and what do they have for breakfast, as if that's like what's stopping you, you know? Like, and I only examined this recently in myself because I was like, wait, how did I manage to start a startup? Oh, my parents loaned me like $5,000. And then like my, you know, my in-laws loaned me like a bunch of money. And then I was able to just lose money and be stupid for a long time and like fail a long time. And that's how I did it. It wasn't like I had some great idea, you know? And then I thought, wait, like, what about all the people who can't afford to fail as much as me? There was someone who commented in our endless

thread subreddit when we shared the first episode that we did with you. They said that the episode seemed pretty melodramatic. And they said, I don't buy this whole idea of a civil war. The whole narrative about you won't know it until it's already here. to drive uncertainty about the question seems hyperbolic. So granted, that was a couple of months ago. I won't presume to know how this person feels about what happened in the Capitol last week. But what might you say to that, that, you know, maybe we were being melodramatic about collapse, but now we've seen a real form of that.

I mean, I think if you don't like melodrama, you're going to get drama soon enough. I tweeted something about that, which is that the point. of like a fire alarm is that it tells you when there's smoke. It doesn't tell you when there's fire. If it told you when there was fire, then there'd be no point because your house would already be on fire and you'd know. I'm not trying to predict the future. And a lot of people have been talking about this. A lot of immigrants in your midst, a lot of people from out of the country, a lot of people from out of the country, a lot of black people have been talking about this. Nobody's trying to predict the future. We're trying to stop it. In my case, like, we're trying

to help you because we're all interconnected. People are just saying like these are the signs, the same stuff has happened here, we're not so different as humans. But the idea that someone saying something scary is being melodramatic, I mean, come on, look, with COVID-19, you should figure that out. People tried to warn you, and then people are like, oh, don't panic. And now you're at a point where, like, you have to panic and there's nothing you can do about it. That's the point of, like, what if everyone, like, heard a fire alarm and said, oh, don't panic. Like, that'll be disorderly. And it's like, no, you idiots, like, that's trying to tell you so you can stop your house from lighting on fire. By time your house is on fire, you don't

don't need to know. And I think that comes back to exceptionalism. Like, people just think that it can't happen to them. And I think this also new in American history. Like, American history was pretty chaotic. He was at some brief period where things were stable. But if you ask, like, your grandparents' order, they probably remember some crazy shit. You've seen your own country, Sri Lanka kind of claw itself back from extreme violence and civil war. What do you think the incoming Joe Biden administration can or should do to prevent the kind of violence that you saw? Or further violence, I guess I should say, since we've already seen violence. Look, I think Biden's tendency is to sort of reach across the aisle.

And you can't reach across the aisle if the other people are going to slit your throat. Like at some, and I think the U.S., just look at your own Civil War history. Like, your politicians then tried and tried to accommodate and accommodate and accommodate, and it just didn't work. And, you know, these people aren't actually going to compromise. You can't negotiate with fascism. If you read Rise and Follow Third Reich, people try that with Hitler. They're like, oh, like Hitler, he was let out of jail on the condition that he would engage

through the democratic process. And then he did. And he just took over through the democratic process. There's nothing built in a democracy that prevents fascism. If you want, I think Hitler got in with like 38%. I think if you have like essentially one third of the country that's down with fascism, which you 100%. Yeah, it's more like 47% here, I feel like.

Yeah. So then that's very dangerous. And so if you look at someplace like South Korea, they take this shit very seriously. So South Korea, Moon Jae-in's entire presidential campaign was based on this public prosecutor's office. And the current debate there is they removed the public prosecutor because they thought he was corrupt. And they passed all this legislation to prosecute people, to prosecute public corruption. And every living ex-president in Korea has a criminal record.

Essentially, two of them were pardoned, and then I think two of them are in jail right now. And they take that very seriously. And if you don't have that accountability at the top level, then they'll just keep coming back. It's like if you give a mouse a cookie, pretty soon they're going to want some milk. Like if you give these bastards a coup, pretty soon they're going to take the whole thing. I didn't think that we were going to get children's book, fascist comparison, but I actually, I think it works. We're watching that for Christmas. Indy, what do you think people who are just waking up?

What do they need to do? Just look to the people around you who've been saying this. And I don't mean like random people in Sri Lanka. I'm just like a canary in some other coal mine. Like there's black people around you who have known this shit was bad. They've lived it. They've been organizing on the ground. They've been saying, you know, stay woke.

People like, you know, conservatives make fun of that phrase, woke. What woke means if you go into some town where you're in danger of, you know, being lynched or hurt, like stay woke, stay woke, stay alert. These people have been warning you. Look to those people. put them in positions of leadership because they're just far more aware

of the threats around you. It's like those are your fire alarms so you should listen to them now. It's not like you need to suddenly accelerate your perception because it's just too slow. I read a lot of like American op-eds and shit and it's, you know, no offense,

but it's like the same white guys figuring shit out in real time. You know, why do that? There's people who have been aware of this for a long time. And you have people like this in your government. There's like Corey Bush There's a AOC.

There's people who are essentially black or at least aware on some level. And then these people can help lead you out. So look for those people around you who have been aware and who have been organizing and work with them. What about the other side? What should Republicans be doing? Republicans should leave the Republican Party. Yeah, they should leave the Republican Party. Like it's become essentially like a fascist, white supremacist party.

I think Colin Powell has said I'm not a Republican anymore. Start another party. So that's what people have done here. They've done it for other reasons, but you can start other parties. Like I think that's another case where you need to turn it off and turn it on again. That was the party of Lincoln, but by God how it has fallen. It's become the party of the Confederacy. I'm not trying to create any false or forced optimism where maybe there isn't any.

But is there anything that's giving you hope right now? that I'm not in America. What do you mean? No, no. Anything that gives me hope? No, yes, something is giving me hope. Like, I do think the conversation is changing dramatically. I think the conversation is changing dramatically. So mainstream people are calling this a coup, which is what it is, and it's what it was a long time ago.

That's good, and I think you're beginning to fight, and that's really good. And the only thing I would tell you, you know, if you keep waking, waiting for louder and louder fire alarms, eventually you have a five-alarm fire. Indy, thank you so much. No problem. All right, take care.

Bye, Andy. Bye, bye-bye. Indy Samarjiva. He's a writer living in Sri Lanka. You can find more of his work on Medium and on our website, WbUr.org slash endless thread. Take care out there, everyone.

Talk to you soon.