It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: Against the State by James Stout

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

James reads Margaret the first chapter of his new bookSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Yay. Woo! The reason that that's a fun bit is that when there's more than one person is that you can't synchronize things, like chanting over the Zoom. It's actually genetically. into me from years of watching football matches to synchronize, but I have to say a couple of words that unfortunately we cannot broadcast. Hello, and welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do

the reading because James Stout does it for you. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today, as you might have guessed by hearing his voice and the fact that I just said his name, is my colleague, my frequent collaborator, and my dear friend James Stout. Hi. Hi, Margaret. It's nice to be doing a podcast again. Last time we were on the floor of the bedroom of an Airbnb in Minnesota. Yeah. At midnight. Completely delirious. Yeah, absolutely exhausted. And having recovered from being locked out of said Airbnb in like minus 20.

Oh my God, I forgot about that. Yeah, we got locked. Yep, you all probably heard us talk about this a bunch of times. But we sure got locked out of an Airbnb and temperatures that are absolutely dangerous. Yeah, it's good times. James, we are here today so that I can be the book club where I don't have to do the reading because you, James, are going to do it for me. I heard you have a book. I do. I heard that because I've, well, I blurbed it. Yeah, your name's on the back of it. Yeah. What's this book? It's called Against the State. It's about anarchists at war, and it draws on the time I spent with revolutionaries in Myanmar and Rojava, which is part of Kurdistan, as well as my historical

research into the Spanish Civil War. It looks at how people have organized themselves horizontally during what is obviously a pretty stressful and difficult time for organizing, and what we can learn from that for our own, hopefully peaceable and much less dangerous organizing. I think it's fascinating for a lot of reasons, one, because we live in a real uncertain world and I'm with you on the sure hoping all of our organizing will get to be peaceful. but I'm certainly not certain of that. And, yeah, specifically, that's what always people have said, is like, ah, but you know, you need hierarchy.

And that's a delicate and careful, an important question where you're like, war absolutely is kind of the most authoritarian. It's sort of like, like there's kind of nothing more authoritarian than killing someone. Right. But there's also nothing more egalitarian than everyone having the ability to kill someone. Right. Totally. If you're in charge and you keep fucking up, any of the people you're in charge of can just kill you. Yeah. Yeah. Guns have that kind of equalizing effect. Yeah. In a, you know, we're capable of doing terrible things to each other with them. Yeah, yeah. One thing I want to push back on is that like, I don't like violence. I don't attend wars because I think it's cool to kill people or bomb people or any other. that stuff, I find that stuff horrible. I think the moment you stop feeling that, it's time for you

to move along as a conflict reporter. Some of the stuff of witness has been horrific. But also, I think it's beautiful that people are willing to go through those horrors to liberate themselves and other people. So I want to record that. I think that's great. And it's a great book. And we're going to read some of it, or you're going to read some of it. And I'm going to go, oh, and other reactions. Okay, cool. Yeah. But first I want to apologize. to the audience, your book isn't fiction. Your book is what you call nonfiction. Because normally you have like truth and then non-truth. Like lies is like kind of the opposite of truth. I like that non-fiction is the one that's marked. Like fiction is the default of the story. Non-fiction,

the real one. Yeah, it's like the negative. Yeah. But this book club will probably be, will probably be, continue to be mostly fiction, but we do try to also say, like, there's things worth reading and paying attention to, and we think James's book is one of them. And I also want to say that on April 19th, the day that this is released is a sad anniversary. It is the three-year anniversary of the death of three anarchist comrades who were killed in Ukraine, fighting to defend the road of life, which is a road in Bakhmut that carried humanitarian aid into the city. And you've probably, if you listen to my podcast, cool people who did cool stuff, I have talked about these three anarchists both in their own episodes a couple years ago,

years or so ago, and then recently also talked about it again a lot in my episode about Russian partisans. So if you want to hear more about it. But I just want to take a moment to remember Cooper Andrews from Cleveland Heights, a black autonomous who died. Finbar Kaffarki, an Irish anarchist from the Gaeltact on the west coast of Ireland, and Dmitri Petrov, who was a Russian, who spent his entire life, his adult life, fighting against Putin by organizing, by midnight arson, and eventually by fleeing the country and joining an army that opposed the government that was the dictatorship that he grew up.

up under. And so the three of them died on April 19th, I believe, 2023. That's how math works. It's the three anniversary. Yeah. I guess I'll just add that a friend of mine, Pierre, he was an anarchist, two, fighting in Ukraine, died in June of last year. One of the things he sent me from Ukraine before he passed was a mural of these three that he'd gone to visit, to pay his respects to them. Yeah. Anarchists are dying in that war, unfortunately, quite a lot, because when you live somewhere and someone invades it, you try to stop them. Yeah, I guess you don't get to always fight the war you want. Sometimes the war comes to you.

And they're fighting for a more free world than they would experience if they were colonized by Russia. And often they die unheralded and like they don't get their respect they deserve, especially from the anarchist community because, yeah, the war itself is not an anarchist struggle. that these people are building their little beautiful worlds as they fight, right? Like people who are organizing horizontally, even in a military which itself is not horizontally organized. Yeah. They're fighting their own little struggle.

And as they do so, they're trying to build the world that they want to live in. We should respect that. No, I really like the way you phrased it where it's like you don't always get to pick the war that you fight. Because overall, like, you probably shouldn't fight wars unless you have to. And that usually means because someone has brought war to you. and my favorite Tolkien quote, I'll say a different quote

every single time I say that sentence, but those without swords can still die upon them is honestly at the end of the day, like, I mean, why I trained with firearms is that there are people wanted to hurt me, you know?

Those without swords can still die upon them. And so that's a great quote. You can be anti-war all you want, but there's a war there, you know? Yeah, and you can't argue with it. Yeah. It doesn't matter. If you are correct.

Yeah. The working class shouldn't shoot each other, but they're trying to kill you in your family. Yeah. At some point, you have to deal with that in a non-ritorical sense. Yeah. Well, and if people want to hear a little bit more also about those three particular fighters, but also there are a lot of other anarchist fighters. It's just three people died in one day.

And, you know, so often those are some of the ones that we write about the most. But if you go to anarchist federation.net, there's a tribute written to them. And yeah, but today, that's not the struggle we'll be talking about, but we will be talking about anarchists at war. We're going to read what? What are we reading? It's the first chapter of my book. It's called Mountains.

As you're here, it draws on some of Jim Scott's ideas. James C. Scott has influenced my work very much. He sadly passed away a couple of years ago. He was one of the founding members of Mutual Aid Myanmar as well. And it asked people to donate to the revolution in Myanmar in lieu of sending flowers after he passed. This is the anthropologist? Yes. I didn't know that he was...

Wait, nope, now I do. I remember it now. Yeah, okay. I always forget what I know. He did his field work there. Oh, no, I knew about that part. Yeah. I had forgotten that he stayed involved and can, yeah.

Yeah, very much so. And often had, at the time his passing had Burmese graduate students, I know. Yeah. Yeah, it was very involved in the struggle. Okay, are you ready? I am ready. All right, let's go. Against the state, anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, Myanmar, Majava by James Stout.

Chapter 1. Mountains Ethnicity and tribe begin, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state. James C. Scott, the art of not being governed. There isn't much to Feshkable. A few single-story flat buildings, a dusty courtyard, a small taxi rank, and a giant flag for anyone who has failed to notice that although the Tigris River runs through Kurdistan,

the Iraqi Autonomous Reader of Kurdistan, and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, A&ES, better known to Rashaba, are not an agreement about very much. On the eastern side of the border, two intelligence officials from the Kurdistan Regional Government, A more neoliberally aligned government that controls an area for Iraq as practically a separate country and has deep ideological differences with Roshava, quiz me for more than an hour about my intentions in Rajava. All the areas you're going to are under heavy bombardment, one of them told me. I advise you not to go. It was surreal to hear about the bombing from a very smartly dressed man, relaxing on a leather sofa,

while I sat across the room trying to squeeze my six-foot-three frame into a comically small chair. In the time since I'd boarded the first of a series of flights, buses and cars that had carried me from California to the bank of the Tigris River, Turkish drones had struck dozens of targets inside AANES territory. Those targets were not military facilities, but civilian infrastructure in the middle of cities. Power stations, oil wells, and a cooking gas bottling facility had all been bombed in the quiet of the night when death fell from the dark sky with no warning. electricity was intermittent and water wasn't running in some cities. This happens every autumn.

Turkey steps up its assaults on the independent Kurdish region that it sees as a threat to its ability to control Kurds within the Turkish borders. It's a concerted effort on the part of the Turkish state to make sure the democratic confederous experiment in Rojava ends in failure. Despite this and other difficulties, Rojava still exists as a society trying to build democracy without the state. That's why I was there. I suspected the intelligence agents knew that I already knew what was going on in Rushabah,

and that it was part of why I was going there. But I knew it was their job to tell me not to go. They weren't wrong. It was dangerous. As far as I could tell, I was entering at the same time as a handful of other journalists working in the region were leaving. Kurdish people are remarkably hospitable, so in addition to asking me probing questions about my past, the agents also invited me for lunch and offered me the Wi-Fi Code

while they debated whether they would allow me across the floating bridge over the Tigris. I politely declined the offer of lunch. I had no desire to delay in my trip and drive in Syria after nightfall, especially if we were going through regions and along roads where people had been killed in drone strikes the night before.

But I gladly accepted the Wi-Fi code, booted up my tour browser, and tried to work out if my hotel was close to any power stations. Looking out the window and across the river, I thought about how much I wanted to visit Rajava and breathe the air in a society that was trying to do away with the state. In the 11 years since the Kurdish majority cities in North and East Syria managed to expel most regime forces in a bloodless show of force, the conflict in the region morphed from one about the character of the state in Syria to the existence of the state in Syria. In this conflict, the embattled Barthist regime, the increasingly authoritarian Turkish regime,

the remains of the so-called Islamic State and Iranian proxy militias in Syria have all found themselves a war with one another but united in opposition to the projects in Rojava and elsewhere in Syria that seek to redistribute power away from the state and toward the people. It was these people who had managed to emerge from the fire of a burning country and the darkness of the so-called Islamic State to secure their liberty, autonomy and equality that I wanted to visit. But first I had to persuade the two intelligence officers who were scrolling my Facebook page that I wasn't off to join the Islamic State. While I pondered if I had wasted my entire book advance, the intelligence agents called for a round of chai. A cinnamon-infused black tea served in tulips-shaped glass with a generous helping of sugar, a drink that seems as critical to human existence as oxygen in this part of the world. Iraqi Kurdistan's tea houses served as public spaces

where, even under the oppressive bath regime of Saddam Hussein, Kurds could gather and share their stories. Later they became places where the Peshmerger, a term that is translated as those who faiths death, the much-reveered fighters of Iraqi Kurdistan, could gather, plan, and even recruit. The intelligence officer at the border was no tea house. It didn't even have the requisite domino table.

But the intelligence officers still shared their stories as we sipped our tea. Soon enough, I was looking at Polaroid photos that had been immortalized through the miracle of social media. One agent's uncle was a Peshmerger leader, famous for his abilities with a rocket-propelled grenade. I briefly considered offering the Kurmangi word for the weapon, as she searched for the English one, and make a habit of learning as much of the language as I can before I travel, and I had been particularly charmed by the word Big Sphin, which Syrian Kurds used for the rocket-propelled

grenade. But my grandmother had been arrested entering Syria half a century before, and I decided that showing too much knowledge of weapons systems would be risking the same result. The other agent's grandfather had fought for years as a guerrilla against Sabathis, gravely holding out when the world had left the Kurds to dine in their thousands. At that time, the agent said to me, as he leaned across the sofa to emphasise the point, our only friends were the mountains. These days, the more status conception of Kurdish identity that's predominant in the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq

has descended from the mountains and resides in the giant villas and skyscrapers of Hulah, the region's capital, which is called a bill in Arabic. The government and its friends have built skyscrapers in the city with corporate logos light up the sky at night, just like the drone bombs lit up the sky in Rajawa. However, the mountains of southern Turkey in northern Iraq have remained home to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, better known by its initials in Kurdish, the PKK, or Partia Karakeren Kourdesdistani, for decades. In 1984, the group began an insurgency against a Turkish state in an attempt to establish

their own. However, over time, the group and its leader Abdullah Oshelan have moved beyond a state-based conception of Esther and instead have embraced an ideology of radical feminism, environmentalism, and what they call democratic and federalism. It was this ideology that had brought about the revolution and eventually the self-administration of a huge chunk of Syria. This way of thinking had come down from the mountains, swept across the plains, and defeated the Islamic state.

Now, having gained so much it was being bombed so heavily that its future was in doubt, and I wanted to see the only multi-ethnic democratic project in the Middle East before its adherence had to retreat to jagged peaks that I could see through a dusty afternoon in Feshkabor. Eventually, after a prolonged conversation about the care and breeding of sheep, including questions from the agent's family members who are now attending my interrogation remotely via WhatsApp, I was allowed to cross into Rajabar. Growing up with livestock didn't seem abnormal or all that useful to me as a child, but I've been pleasantly surprised with its ability to open doors in the most unlikely places.

My interview completed, I began a circuit of small offices, where people would stare at me for a few seconds, look at my passport, write something down, and then send me forth to another official who would do exactly the same thing. It felt like an unconscious parody of the state's capacity to turn every action into an office visit and a form to be filled out. Eventually I was sent to a small waiting room and then to a long-suffering bus

that had just dropped a full load of people from Rojava on the eastern bank of the Tigris. On its return journey I was the only passenger. The driver pointed across the river and I nodded. He took a huge drawer and a terrible cigarette and set off across a shaky bridge that floats on oil drums and spans of Tigris. From Rojava, my fixer her butt and her brother DeWar

greeted me with smiles and, as is often the case, a remark about my height. We showed my passport to an official who smiled and addressed me in English to welcoming to Rojava and sent me to the immigration office, where I'd be given a sort of permission slip that allowed me to travel freely throughout the region. The role of the border officials in Rojava, it's not so much to check for visas and a payment of import taxes as to ensure that those entering are not a threat to the community, in a manner not so different to Catalan anarchist militiamen who seized border checkpoints between Spain and France in 1936. The Rojava official's permission slip also asked other group in the areas to accept their assessment that I was safe and should be treated as a guest.

Because I was entering a country that is not recognised by other countries, nobody stamped my passport. After offering me a cigarette, the man across a desk from me politely answered my questions about the half-dozen yellow and green-frame portraits and laminated little cards hanging from a tree in his office. All friends, he told me. All Shahid. Shahid, I soon learn, means martyr. You can't come to Rojavra and not learn that word. Fifteen thousand people, some of whom had come down for the mountains in 2011 to join a Syrian revolution, or in 2014 to take on the task of ridding the world of the Islamic State had lost their lives in the process.

In Camis, the capital of the AANES, Shahida everywhere. Their portraits, yellow back for men and greenback for women, smile at you from me. billboards on every roundabout, reminding you that many of the people who died to rid the world of the Islamic State would be too young to get a drink in a bar in the United States. Lined up in neat little rows in the martyrs grave lad in Camisio, they remind you that there is no such thing as a surgical strike, and that the grandmothers and children of the region paid with their life for the crime of living near a power plant or being in the street at the same time as a recognizable military leader.

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I spent the next few days in Rajabe, hearing Marta's stories from their friends. I met leaders in places where they thought they might be safe from bombing. And then nervously waited to hear if they made it home safely and sat in my hotel at night, wondering if the bangs and flashes were bombs in the distance or streetlights blowing their bulbs. I got up every morning with the fire of prayer, reminding us all that we'd made through another night, and now had to start another day that would inevitably begin with news of the people we were not waking up this morning. Every morning, before Habatn arrived, I'd walked through the market, ducking under canopies that were too low from my head, as if I needed a reminder I wasn't from here. But despite

standing out like a man with two heads, I felt welcome by everyone. Every morning, every month, morning, I shared cups of tea and stories with strangers and faced a pot quiz from merchants who seemed to have taken on the inestimable burden of improving my Comanji Kurdish via a pedagogical medium of pointing at vegetables and shouting their names. Later in the day, Harbat and Diwa sat with me for hours as we sipped tea and shared our stories, hopes and fears. With Habat and Dewa, I conducted interviews across Rajab. In Camislo, we heard a mother cry as she told me about how her

a 15-year-old son, had been a promising goalkeeper on his local football team until a missile from a drone landed next to the garage where he was repairing his motorcycle. Now he was another martyr, another grave in a cemetery, another yellow-backed photograph on a grieving mother's wall. In the mountains, there are caves and tunnels, places where you can look out the world without anyone looking down on you. In the city, there are houses, plazas, markets and shops. places where people sit at night with no idea if they'll wake up tomorrow.

After ten years of war, it's normal now. But sitting in my hotel room, listening to new friends play old songs on the tambour, a traditional string instrument, I was struck by the sadness of it all. The one thing most people here I met wanted was a better world for their children and a chance to influence their own futures. Having been attacked by the Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian and Turkish states, they no longer wanted a state at all.

Because they had reached this very reasonable conclusion, the states of the world wouldn't trust them with anti-aircraft missiles, the only tools with which they could prevent the slow destruction of their infrastructure. Instead, they were to be left alone to freeze or die as the drones they were powerless to stop, bomb their power stations, and picked off their children one by one. After several days in Roshava, at the urging of colleagues and family, had departed.

It was sad to be leaving this hopeful, friendly and hard-worn people. place. A friend who fought against the Islamic State in Rajaba told me that Rajavra is special because it's real. He was right, of course. The fact that Rajav is not just a utopian dream in the mountains or an idea in a book, but a daily reality for millions of people is remarkable. That Rajava has held onto its gain, rather than retreat into the mountains, is admirable. As a young leftist, anarchism existed for me only in history books, in mutual aid groups, in the woods and in the moments when we stood in the street and saw the police back away. Now, young leftists around the world

and pack their bags and come and see for themselves gains and incredible struggles of organising without the state. Long before the Kurdish Freedom Movement took up arms in 1984, the mountains were an ally of anyone looking to escape the state. In his 2009 book, The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott, one of anarchism's few defenders in the academy, developed the idea of uplands as areas that are inherently harder for the state to exercise control over

and where people can go to choose a life without the state. States, Scott argues, spread out from urban centers into areas that didn't impede their roads and railways, and they left the upland areas relatively untouched until much later in their consolidation. These areas were harder to generate revenue from and harder to make legible for the state in terms it understood, like grains sent to granaries, taxes extracted from people,

or soldiers drafted into armies. The state, as he argues in seeing like a state, might seek to make these areas more legible, but it meets resistance from free people who reject the need for fixed family names, units of measurement, and documented land ownership, in favor of their free association according to mutually agreed upon norms. This slower and incomplete state expansion into the mountains,

at times met with the active resistance of free people, allowed for what Scott calls shatter zones to emerge, where people could seek refuge from the control and coercion of states. In two cheers for anarchism, Scott argues that these people need not and often did not identify as anarchists, but that through the use of an anarchist squint, we can understand their actions and worldview in a way that explains them much better than the state perspective,

which simply sees these people as backwards, unruly, or, as one Burmese guerrilla commander put it to me, wild. In states and in histories it consider the state inevitable, in a final form of human society, the free people who resist the state's attempts to make the uplands into legible areas are cast as the domain of barbarians or unruly hill tribes. These descriptors are applied as readily to the picks and Scots of the United Kingdom as to the Karen of Burma

for the fictional peoples of Georgia Arar Martin's Game of Thrones. If we start from the assumption that the state is the final form of human organization, it follows that people outside the state are behind the people inside it. Scott argues that if we view the state as a choice, we can see the people outside it as having chosen to avoid the state and instead to make their lives in the freedom offered by terrain that is less capable of what the state sees as quantifiable production. Terrain, where they can often exist outside the state's monopoly on the legitimate,

legitimate use of violence. It was in just such a mountain range, one that remains beyond the control of the state to this day, but the ideals I had travelled so far to learn about were born. Sitting on a wobbly table in a town in Kurdistan, in the shadow of the mountains were the K-CK. The Kormo Sivaka in Kurdistan Community's Union still maintains its strongholds. Zagros Hiwa, the group's spokesman, told me that he'd taken a long and risky journey from the group's bases to meet me. The region had been hampered by Turkish drone strikes against KCK-affiliated leaders all month.

The KCK is an umbrella organization that brings together the various armed and political groups dedicated to implementing the leader Abdullah Ojoland's ideology of democratic and federalism, making the KCK's representatives high-value targets for the movement's enemies. I smuggled myself into town, Hewer told me,

because coming to my place would be too risky. Hewa and the friend who accompanied him sat across a little wrought iron table friendly. All of us seated on those small metal chairs that seemed custom made me look as awkward as a giraffe limbo dancing. Both Hewa and his friend seemed aware the situation was high risk for them. And our conversation was marked with pauses as cars or pedestrians passed by. Every time a shop and near death we fell silent. And our conversations picked up again, only once they'd gone on their way. cars parking or any movement above were met with furtive glances such was a degree of concern that we were even eschewing the chide this time when it's safer he were promised i'll be able to come and meet in the mountains we talked for an hour about gender the state the french and spanish revolutions the situation that was unfolding in gaza at the time many of the insights you'll find out the chapters of this book came from that hour in which he was seemed to weigh every word

against the risk he'd taken to join me and his years of experience in a Kurdish freedom struggle. He was glad I had come to Rochava because it was important for me to see proof that people could exist without the control of the state even in places that had once been subject to it. Before we parted ways, he passed on a recommendation for a museum

that I should visit on my travels, one with exhibits on the genocidal campaigns pursued by the Baathis Iraqi state against the Kurdish people following the Iran-Iraq war. A few days later, I found myself at loose ends and decided to travel to Slamani, one of the largest Kurdish cities, and certainly one of the more charming, to visit the museum he'd recommended. On entry, after walking through a hall filled with thousands of pieces of broken mirrors, each one representing a life cut short by state violence. I walked to the Peshmerga Museum.

The first room, simply houses, a black and white photo of the snow cat peaks that my driver had insisted on taking. me to see on the drive to Slamani. On the wall next of the photo, a museum label repeats in English and Sourani Kurdish, what the intelligence officer had remarked on, those days when we had no friends but the mountains. But you and I have friends. Friends that hold us close. Friends that interrupt us and friends that we don't consider friends. We have sponsors.

Lucky us. Yeah. And I'm sure they know what we're here. Yeah, I'm sure. They're so... The people with the gambling website, mattresses, they love this shit. They're all about it.

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So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Over years of reporting on Revolution in War, I've made a lot of friends in the mountains and often reflected on Scott's theories. I was particularly excited to visit Myanmar, where Scott had worked extensively as an anthropologist

and to see the revolution he supported until his passing. When Scott published the art of not being governed in 2009, many of the freedom fighters in Myanmar, who I spoke with on a trip there in 2022, would have still been in middle school. Even if they'd been older then or especially precocious, it would have been very hard of them to read Scott's work because access to the internet and literature

was heavily controlled by the military government. 12 years later in 2021, they would find themselves in one of the very shatter zones that Scott had been talking about. The hills at a Thai-Burmese border, where I met these freedom fighters arch up from the Moe River that divides the two countries. The steep and densely wooded slopes are hard to farm, harder to pave, and harder yet to control. They stand in sharp contrast to the seven-lane motorways, giant pagodas of Neipitur, the capital city that the military began building in 2002 to create an impenetrable fortress in the country's

arid central plains. After the coup, young people seeking to escape the reach of the state fled Myanmar cities for these mountains and jungles, places where the Burmese state never really enjoyed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence that characterizes the barbarian state. Following the coup and the bloody repression of the use demands of democracy, it was from Yangon, Mandalay and Nepitur, the young Burma people, the majority ethnicity that has long dominated the military and governance of the country, fled. And it was in these mountains that they found safety and refuge from the state. On a Zoom call was Sayyam Montenay, a leader in the Mandalay People's Defence Force, an armed revolutionary popular front formed after the coup to fight for a genuine,

bottom-up, substantive democracy for all of Myanmar's ethnic groups. He wanted to make very clear to me that they were not, quote, wild people. This, he said, has been a constant refrain from the military hunter they took up arms against in 2021. The young, city-dwelling Burma people had come to the mountains where the state had told them wild people lived, because they wanted human rights and democracy. Ironically, these things that are supposed to be guaranteed by the state were only available to them because of the assistance of the people the state deemed ungovernable. When the Bama city dwellers arrived in the mountains, they had been warmly received by the Ta'ung National Liberation Army,

whom they had been long told hated Bama people. When Monteney left Mandalay, he was nervous. Quote, he expected some problems because of the different races, his translator 9-9 told me. They had been told most of the ethnic minority groups in Myanmar hate the Bama people. But when he actually reached the Ta'ang region, he found out that there is no hatred for the people. the Burmese people, 9-9 said. Instead, he found the TNLA was a, quote, well-formed military,

and that they were also following a code of conduct. Montenay found that the TNLA was happy to stand shoulder and shoulder with him in his battle for a form of democracy based on bottom-up community empowerment, not strict majoritarianism, and the appearance of elections. And, to his great surprise, quote, most of the leaders from the TNLA have liberal ideas, and they, They also want to welcome the young leaders from the revolution. He did run into one problem, though, quote. The Ta'ung region is very cold for people from the Mandalay region, so we're still having problems with the weather, but now we're getting used to it.

Montenay's assumption that the Burma people would be discriminated against was typical. Andy, my fixer and friend, who seemingly never tired of my asking him to explain the complexities of race, language and identity in Burma, told me he'd had similar ideas growing up. He says the hate he was taught eventually had a way of making itself manifest, even if it has no basis in reality. Quote, it was a really harsh reality for them, the minority ethnicities, Andy told me. It's not just a Burma military, it's also Burma's people that didn't care or do anything, while there, the minority ethnic groups, being killed.

So they have this hate against Burman people, which is very understandable. At first, Annie didn't question where the hate. hate came from, and he assumed hostilities between ethnic groups were natural. He said he began to question this in 2017. Quote, the Rohingya thing happened in 2017. I was 17. I started getting phone calls from my friends in Western countries, Westerners. They would be like, hey, what's happening in your country?

Why are you killing all the Muslims? I'm in Mason, Thailand, and I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never heard anything like that, right? And then I try to learn a little bit more. that everyone had such intense opinions about it. But at some point, I'm like, ah, fuck, I don't know anymore, because the military was still in control at that time.

So they controlled the news. They controlled the media. It wasn't until Andy experienced repression himself that he realized that, just like he was, many of the minority ethnic groups were victims of state violence misrepresented in state propaganda. Quote, you're a kid. You're trying to get by day to day.

because he didn't really think about it. And for me, that went on for a long time until the military coup happened in Myanmar, and he said. In reconsidering his politics, Andy also reconsidered his own identity. He spent much of his childhood in a refugee camp

just across the Myanmar-Tailand border where most of the refugees were Karen. I'm half-Bemar, half-Karene, he said. I don't identify myself as Karen anymore, because when we're in the refugee camp, we got so much shit for being. half Bama. So that was the time when I was like, fuck her in people. In changing his view of ethnicity, he has also changed his view of politics and of the once revered Bama, Doreung San Suu Kyi.

She's not really a part of this revolution anymore, I think, especially for us. People will say different things. If you ask someone else about their opinions about her or the NLD, the NUG, they would say something different. But for me, I focus more. on the ethnic groups and tried to speak more about how they feel, and what they feel, and I speak for them when I speak. In Mayshot, I met Andy and his brothers every night. After long, hot days of heart-wrenching interviews, somewhat clandestine meetups, and the occasional car bomb, we'd meet to eat street food in tiny plastic chairs, and drink cheap beer that was pretty good, and cheap whiskey that was pretty awful. Our last night, after being systematically humiliated at both pool and karaoke,

We talked about politics. I told Andy I don't vote often and that I'd rather spend my time doing something with my hands. And I see voting as more of a harm reduction call than a meaningful chance of political expression. My explanation of anarchism wasn't my best work. But perhaps a young man who has experienced so much state violence is well-placed to understand it through his own life experience. A few months later, he asked me for some books to read. A few months after that, I saw him on social media engaging with friends Roshava. It wasn't until I was waking up to the call to pray in Camislo, more than a year

after I had met Andy, that I realized how much he thinking on the state had evolved, with eyes blurry from lack of sleep, and a faint buzz puncturing the half-light. There might have been a drone or just a half-dead air conditioning making a valiant effort to defeat the desert heat. I saw an unusual number of encrypted messages on my phone. Andy had sent a video, and I rushed over to the chair in the corner of the room they had to stand on to get good Wi-Fi signal. As a video loaded, I saw the young men and women of the Karaini nationalities defense forces. A unit formed after the coup to fight against the junta and for the people. One of them stepped forward, I began reading a speech which, to my great surprise, expressed the solidarity with the people of Rajaaba. From a world apart

and without the help or recognition of the community of states, these two groups had found one mother. Soon I was suggesting readings on Myanmar to interested friends in Rojava, a reading on democratic confederism to teenage guerrillas in the Burmese jungle. After so many years, and so many lies from the US and other allies who had abandoned them after they stopped being useful, the people of Rojava had finally found a friend other than the mountains. Yeah. That's a good uplifting end to that chapter too. Yeah, I need to leave them feeling a little bit hopeful, you know. Yeah. Well, you know, what's funny is like there's so many thoughts about this, but there's thoughts I just have about the entire book and the stuff that you've written in it. And it talks about these two revolutions and it compares them or it puts them in position alongside of the 1936 revolution in Spain, the more explicitly anarchist revolution. And I don't know. There's just, I actually have too much to say to do a book club about one chapter. I just.

I think this shit is so important. I think it's so important to understand ourselves placed in this larger history that continues to this day. And also specifically that like things that don't necessarily call themselves anarchist but are often influenced by anarchism. But that's not even what's important because we are also influenced by them. And how it feels so modern and true to be anti-state in this. way. And I love the way that you're talking about these two communities of people who are just have realized that they're like, oh, this state thing is not working out for us. And it, it feels like in such a contrast to the way that the 20th century and the 19th century, like, talked about

revolution. Yeah, like, revolution was seen, and it's still understood by many people, right, including many people on the left as like a national liberation. Right. And the way that the nation liberated itself was by co-aligning itself with a state. that is not the way that these people understand for evolution. Yeah. And it's specifically multi-ethnic. And like, I love understanding that internationalism is like,

well, this is going to come across awkwardly because nationalism has lots of meanings. But it's like nationalism plus. And I mean nationalism in the very old-fashioned sense of like national liberation, right? Yeah. You know,

a colonized people who don't want to be colonized anymore. And I just, I really like the idea of like, you know, how are you talking about like this leftist revolution where you're hanging out and you're still woken up by the call to prayer because like people are still having lots of cultures there I don't know where I'm going with us yeah like I remember sitting in my little bedroom in rush over there like sometimes it's hard to sleep you know when trap all a lot and then you know

that people are dying and tomorrow you'll probably drive past the place where they're dying and that they're like doing a call for blood at the hospital because they've run out. So I struggled to sleep and I could sit in my bedroom and look out and I could hear the call to prayer and at the same time look at a church and then I could go out of my bedroom and at almost any time there would be some you see the people. You see the people's faith is closer to Zoroastrianism, right? They have a peacock angel which I respect to fuck out of. Fuck yeah.

Yeah, you see a peacock for the first time. You're like, that's divine. Oh shit. It even has lots of eyes. Oh, fuck. Yeah, like, why the fuck would you not? Yeah, yeah, this thing absolutely slaps. Yeah.

I would spend a lot of time with them, right? They would sing me their songs. And then I did the little Chumbabamba for them. I played them Seven Nation Army, because you can do that on one street. I think it really wasn't a fair exchange. Like, here's a thousand years of culture, and I'm like, we got Chumbabwamba and Seven Nation Army. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like, do, do, do, do, do. They were very complimentary anyway, which is kind of them. But it made me think that, like, I think sometimes people think anarchism is just doctrinal thing, right? And we do things this way because anarchists do them that way. I think we do it because we want a world where many worlds can exist. And like the core of anarchism to me, say this a lot in my book, is that we need to create ways to take care of each other that are not reinforcing ways to control each other. Yeah, fuck yeah. And that was a beautiful thing I saw in both of these places that like it is not about a doctrine.

And it's not about something that like, and I think that there are some great things we can learn from theory. But like people aren't doing this because a dead Russian dude with a beard said it was a right thing to do. Totally. That doing it because they want to be nice to each other and they're sick of people being shitty to them. Like that is a much more powerful motivation. actually for these people anyway. And I think it's a much more beautiful thing, that it came inherently from their desire to be free

and to see others liberated too. Well, you have a book out. You just read a chapter of it. It's called Against the State, and it's by James Stout. And where can people get it? Anywhere, I think, where good books are sold, AKPress.orgs slash against the state.

That's a publisher, so you can buy it from them, and I'll send it to you. And sometimes you get nice stickers when that happened. You can buy it from your local bookshop. You should support your local bookshop, especially if it's a progressive space where people can go and enjoy books. I'm sure Jeff Bezos will sell it to you if that's how you roll.

Also, people can get it from another worker on cooperative, which is Firestorm Books in Asheville, North Carolina. If you're like, I want to buy it from a local bookstore, but I don't have a local bookstore. Firestorm books will sell a team. Yeah, buying from Firestorm. Yeah, I bought a book from them last long ago. Got some cool stickers.

They sell that Protect Transkid shirt with the, with the bowie knife as well. You could really stack up. Yeah, you can buy it from any of those places. It doesn't bother me. It is in paperback, so you don't have to wait for that. You can read Mark's very nice blurb at the back. You can also buy an e-book.

I'd encourage you to buy the paperbook because there's some beautiful photographs on the front and I really like the cover design. Yeah, there's a good cover. You got anything else do you want to plug? Do anywhere else do you do writing? I do a lot of writing. You can find me on Substack.

or Patreon just by searching my name. I think my subtext is officially called The Future is Unwritten, so you can look for that as well. It's a Joyce Strummer quote. I think Joe Strummer is one of the more important theorists of the 20th century. I used to have that written on the door of my squat. The door of my bedroom within a squat was, our future is unwritten. And I knew it as a crime thing quote, not a Joe Strummer quote, and I feel like kind of a weird poser for that, even though... What song is that from?

What song is that from? I don't remember, actually, now. I don't think it is. I think it might be from an interview. Oh, shit. Okay, cool. I have to check my clash sourcing. I will plug another thing that I didn't make.

The podcast that Chuck D made about the clash is the single best podcast that anyone has ever made. Okay. I try and listen to it at least once a year. All right. Well, my anecdote was also about the clash. Have you ever seen the video of people realizing that paper planes was a sample by MIA? Really? The people didn't know that?

Yeah. So there's like people who are like starting to. listen to Straight to Hell, which is my favorite clash song. Yeah. And they're like, wait, what's happening? Yeah, exactly. They're like, what the fuck? This is weird.

What's happening? Yeah. Yeah, the main hook from MIA's paper planes was written by people who held on to better politics than MIA eventually did. I like that song paper planes a lot. There's a good video of Joe Strummer stealing pillows from hotels when they're on tour as well. It's another movie eventually getting in trouble with the cops for it because he consistently steals pillows.

All right, that's it for whatever the show is. It's not cool people to do cool stuff. Cool Zone Media Book Club. That is it for Cool Zone Media Book Club. We will see you next week, probably with more fiction. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I also am on Substack, and I have another podcast that is called Cool People Did Cool Stuff.

And you have another podcast called It Could Happen Here. Yep, listen to that one. Everyone who's listening probably already knows that. But maybe this is the first thing you've listened to, in which case, now you know. And yeah, until next time, Buck Ice, Free Palestine, take care of each other and some other stuff. Do good things.

Yeah, be nice. Bye. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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