It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 101

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

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Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

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ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, everybody, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's Shereen, and today I'm joined by James and Robert to welcome our guest. In this episode, we are joined by Adam Broomberg. He is an artist, an activist, and an educator. He was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. His parents and his entire extended family are Holocaust survivors, and he had a very Zionist upbringing. We talked to him about how he grew up in apartheid South Africa, how he broke free from Zionism as a teenager, and how he's come to be a very vocal Jewish

anti-Zionist. He currently lives and works in Berlin and he's exhibited his art all over the world. He's also regularly on the ground in Palestine and he uses his work to raise awareness about the crimes committed daily by the IDF. Members of the German government have accused him and labeled him as being anti-Semitic because of his criticism of Israel. And we're going to get into all of it. I want to, so let's just go back into your background a little bit. Your family on both sides are Holocaust survivors and your ancestors like fled to South Africa. And that's where you grew up with your parents. And I read that you went to a Zionist school starting from age six. Can you tell us about your family background and your experience going to a Zionist school as a Jewish person?

So you remember the podcast you did about Lithuania and that particular character who was from the pale, who had to flee from the pogroms and all that stuff? Mm-hmm. So basically, this is part three. What he's talking about here is the Spanish Civil War, specifically about an episode we did more than a year ago. As many as 30% of the fallen volunteers who fought in some units in Spain were Jewish. Some of them, like Al-Cheikin, who I've written about a lot, had fled persecution in the Pair of Settlements at a very young age

and arrived in the USA to relative safety. But after a few years in the USA, they began to see the menace of anti-Semitism spreading back towards them through Nazi Germany and later through fascist Italy. And they decided to take up arms and stop it when it threatened to overwhelm democratic Spain. Imagine that kid gets on a boat, and that kid is my grandfather.

My grandfather's name is Joshua, right? And he's like a towering six-foot-three beautiful man. He's studying medicine. He's fleeing his mother. His family's not wealthy. The pogroms are going on. mother his family's not wealthy the pogroms are going on he's studying medicine um you know very bright guy um but every like cell in his body says you've got to get out of here also the also he gets this opportunity he meets a woman called dora klatschko, a grandmother who's like four foot two, right?

But comes from a very wealthy family in Lithuania. And it's kind of an arranged set up. And I think Joshua's paid. Anyway, they get on a boat bound for South africa some landed up in scotland or oddly because the boats bound for america they would they would they would disembark most of the um all of the people on board and tell them they were in america and then take a whole lot of other people and then carry on to America so they could double the fee, by the way. But anyway, so Joshua and Dora land up on the boat and they land in the port of Durban.

It's around 1933. Oh, wow. Okay. And they speak mostly Yiddish. They've never seen a black person in their life. They land up, you know, on these foreign shores. My grandmother, I think headed towards Johannesburg. And this I got from my mother on her deathbed my mom passed away December 17th last year so it's like six seven months ago and she you know she'd like she did it magnificently and she she managed to like tell those last little bits of stories and one of those was that her mother Dora had um had a child who died at nine months old and she was unknown in Johannesburg when the child died and Joshua her husband was

still in Durban so you can imagine the kind of the weirdness of that, right? I mean, imagine you're the father of your child not coming to be with you when you lose your child, coupled with the fact that they had both lost. I think Dora, my grandmother, was one of eight or nine children. I think only three survived the Holocaust. And her parents were killed. And the same with Joshua. So they lost all their family. And there they were at the bottom tip of Africa, right?

There they were at the bottom tip of Africa, right? Without any kind of orientation, really. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about, you mentioned how you described them as bottom feeders. I listened to another podcast you were on, and you said that your family suddenly really enjoyed and appreciated the change in status they had in society. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well, yeah. So, you know, they got on the boat, and their identity were they were Jews. So they were expelled from Europe as Jews.

The minute their toes touched the land in Africa, their identity transformed from being Jewish to being white. Right. Right? Yeah. Suddenly they were identified as white people. Like the word Jew almost like just fell off, you know, that yellow star that they had to wear, it just fell off. So suddenly they were like, oh, my God.

They were like utterly privileged, powerful, and in control, right? And with all of the corruption that apartheid provided for the elite, for the white supremacists, for the white people, the Jews who arrived were able to plug into that privilege. And there was about 250, 300,000 Jews who fled and arrived in South Africa. So it was quite a big community. And they did very fucking well, let me tell you. And I can tell you why I can tell you because my father I just saw about three days ago what's left of him when he was active

and like potent he was he was the the top tax lawyer in South Africa which means that his clients, and those clients are people who walked through my house, came through my house in the 70s and the 80s, were probably the most hideous characters in history. You know, we're talking Saul Kersner. You know, we're talking Sol Kersner. Sol Kersner started something called Sun City, and he exploited the Bantustan, the homeland system that apartheid built. And he built this casino hotel resort called Sun City. At this point in our conversation with Adam, we wanted to ask about his personal journey into anti-Zionism and where all began. So I think an interesting way to approach this then would be like,

obviously they found themselves and your parents have found themselves in this country, which is systematically discriminating against people, right? It's this apartheid South Africa. And Jewish people were at once active in the anti-apartheid movement, and as you're saying, also active in the apartheid government and the apartheid regime. And you found yourself, I guess, going to this school, which was explicitly Zionist.

And I'm wondering at what point, and I suppose this involves seeing what's happening where you are, as well as what's happening in Palestine. At what point did you make that connection and be like, huh, this, like what, because you're very explicitly anti-Zionist right like is is yeah yeah what was it something you read something you saw like what caused you to make that leap and how was that received in south africa so i think it's a mixture of things i think um i've got three older siblings so i'm the last born by seven years. I've got a brother, Paul, seven years older, a sister, Mandy, who's nine years older,

who lives in Israel. And my oldest brother, Jonathan, is 10 years older than me. Jonathan and Paul, Paul specifically, was very politically active. So he started an organization. Unlike Israel, in South Africa, the universities were like the bastions of the anti-apartheid movement, right?

And he was in NUSAS, National Union of South African Students. And he started a thing called the End Conscription Campaign, which was to fight against forced conscription of white men who were compulsory, you know, called up into the army at the age of 18. And so given the fact that he was seven years older when I hit about 14 or 15 at 15 I went on a thing called opan which is kind of you've heard of birthright right yeah yeah opan is something so I went to the Zionist Jewish day school so every day I'd go I'd have to pray like going to the synagogue pretend to pray for about an hour right and I was looking at my school like my sister is like a gorgeous archivist and she made this little book

called Adam's life and I was looking at the school grades at the age of six and it was like Jewish studies and we know what those Jewish studies were, right? So you walked into the Jewish studies room and there was a little blue tin, which was the Jewish National Fund, and you would put your spare change in there and that money would go towards making the desert bloom, I say, in like bookmarks, right? So that money would go to planting planting 240 million pine trees, which are not indigenous in Israel. But just to swing back, so at about 14 or 15, what happened is in parallel, I was being told on a daily basis two things. I was being told, now you've got to to remember this was the heights of also the cold

war so there were these proxy wars that were being fought all around south africa in angola um in mozambique so in mozambique you had frilimo who were backed up by cuba russia right you had renard you had renarmo that were backed up by America and South Africa and they were running these kind of guerrilla bush wars right and many of my friends who were called up in the military would be flown into Angola or into into Mozique, be dropped there. And, you know, they were told, look, if something happens, you weren't here, you're not there, you know, we're not going to come and find you. What I'm referring to here are the proxy conflicts throughout Africa

that saw national liberation movements, often supported by Cuba and the USSR, fighting against various last-class colonial regimes and African anti-communist groups. These groups were often supported by the US under the guise of anti-communism. These wars include the civil war in Angola, the Namibian War of Independence, the Mozambican War of Independence, and the Zimbabwe War of Independence. You might know the last one as the Rhodesian Bush War, but Rhodesia doesn't exist anymore. Living in the United States, it's easy to use the phrase

Cold War as a conflict-free standoff mediated by nuclear powers, just something, without acknowledging that, in many parts of the world, proxy wars in these post-colonial states and the conflicts of decolonialization throughout the late 20th century made that period anything but cold. The point is, is that, so at the age of 14, I'm going to these schools and I'm being told every day that if apartheid ended, that would mean the end of the white people in South Africa, right? Because we were by far the minority, white people were by far the minority. I don't know what it was, 10%, 12%. And there was this kind of, you could see the fear because the walls started getting higher.

The security gates were built. The razor wire, the electric fences. It became more increasingly visible in the 80s, the fear. Keeping apartheid, keeping people apart. So I was told all the time, like, if apartheid ended, that would mean the end of white people. At the same time, I was told, given that my community was like second-generation Holocaust surviving, you know, the notion of

Israel as a place of salvation, a place of when the shit hits the fan, that's where we can go. Right. And that we were always told that. And we were also told daily, this is a land without people or a pupil without land. That became a kind of mantra. Honestly, it was like it was said to me over and over again, right? So but when and what started happening is I think that I became an activist at the age of 16. There's an amazing, she's now a dear friend of mine. We've reconnected.

She's a theater director called Yael Faba. And we started an organization called Links at the age of 16, which was to educate white kids about apartheid. And what we started to do was to literally kind of break the apartheid war. We'd start doing visits into Soweto. We'd start doing visits into Alexandria Township. And we started forming friendships. alexandria township and we started forming friendships and you know most most kids just didn't go out of the suburbs and suddenly we'd go away on these weekends like led by kind of

older activists and we'd all hang in the same you know we'd all sleep in the same dormitories and we'd start chatting and smoking cigarettes together. And so like genuine just basic childhood friendships started forming. And when that stuff, that profound, very successful othering that the propaganda of apartheid succeeded in creating, you know, apartheid succeeded in creating, you know, the black person as the other, as the enemy, which it does in Israel, right? On the other side of the apartheid wall is the worst enemy your imagination could possibly conjure up, right? And it's exactly the same process. And suddenly when I kind of pierced that wall and that started falling apart, then the kind of ideology around Israel and the notion that Palestinians didn't exist, suddenly they started to exist for me somehow.

And so it was around the age of 16 i'd say and it was it's interesting it was like through your experience of living in an apartheid state that you were able to i think appreciate that like that what was happening to the palestinian people was was like another form of settler colonialism i mean i think yeah like none of this none of this is intellectual so i think like everything that came to me or has driven to me is like is through lived experience it really is so i think it's like through these friendships that i realized and you know like touching touching skin and this is one of, this is the difference between apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel-Palestine, is that we were segregated by law, you know. I mean, mixed marriages were prohibited by law. Sex was prohibited between races. But the thing is that we were mixed together because the labor force was needed, right?

So like, you know, the 1916 Tax Act forced a lot of black migrant male workers into the cities to work on the gold mines, which meant that there was the presence of the other amongst us. And because there was the presence of the other, there was also the desire, and it is a sexual desire or essential desire, and the smells, and we would touch each other, and we would walk through the city and kind of rub up against each other. Now, my nieces and nephews, having grown up under the Intifada and because of the apartheid war, they've been deprived of that sensual experience of the other. In Palestine, Israel, you mean?

In Palestine, Israel, yeah. So that, you know, they've built this 12 foot this 12 foot 700 kilometer long concrete tsunami of a wall that divides people which means that you know until recently nobody uttered the word Palestinian because they didn't exist, right? And so for my nieces and nephews, what was on the other side of that wall was, like I said, their worst, the worst enemy that their imagination could conjure up. And children's imaginations are amazing, right? And I did say this a while back where, you know how Foucault spoke about, he spoke about the structures that were built around the plague.

And after the plague ended, you were still left with these structures, right? Now, let's think about the apartheid wall. You've got the 700 kilometer long, massive, like concrete thing. It goes like five meters underground. Yeah. Now, unlike Foucault's hypothesis, that wall has created the plague. hypothesis that war has created the plague that wall has created the enemy because what's on the other side of that wall that's only that's only accessible through these little checkpoints that are manned by these you know, like, little foot soldiers of the state.

That's the only way to penetrate that wall. So on the other side of that wall is whatever you tell the people is there. And that's the horror of that situation. I actually am kind of glad you brought up the plague idea because you mentioned that on a different podcast and I thought it was really poetic to illustrate that a plague can be constructed by the structure versus actually there being a plague. It's also kind of worth noting, you know, as you were talking about the restrictions on interracial marriage in South Africa, versions of that very much still exist to this day in Israel, including heavy restrictions on intermarriage between Israeli and Palestinian people. You know, that's a bigger topic than I want to just kind of casually get into it. There's a number of restrictions that exist into the present day because civil marriage is not really a thing there as it is in a lot of other countries. Yeah. So I wonder, like you said,

that Palestinian people existed in your childhood only as this sort of construct, right? This other construct. And your experience of black people in South Africa has shown you that those other constructs were false and misleading and served perhaps an agenda when you decided that like your stance was anti-zionism and then you said to your i'm guessing to your friends your family to your fellow children at the school like uh hey like this is fucked up here and this is fucked up there too how was the response

well it's like you know one doesn't come to these decisions overnight and like announce it right yeah so so there's vague memories i have like like i said, I was on that Opun trip, which is like this three-week or three-month trip. I mean, they send like 115-year-old kids. You live in a building in Jerusalem. And it's basically like this three-month propaganda tour, right? You're given a Bible and you're told that that's your guidebook. Literally. right? You're given a Bible and you're told that that's your guidebook. Literally, you traverse this place following the stories of the Bible and that's meant to be like your holy land. But I did have one of the, it's called a madrach, I think a teacher. He must have been 18 or 19.

I think a teacher, he must have been 18 or 19. He happened to be kind of like a vaguely liberal Zionist. And I remember clearly him taking me to an anti-Kahani protest. So there was still like Meir Kahani was alive. And we know that Meir Kahani, you know, the Kahanist movement, as you know, was a kind of, you know, they spawned the Ben-Gavirs and these fascists who are in power now. But at the time, they were deemed a terrorist organization by America. And I remember going to an anti-Kahani protest. So somehow that planted a little seed in me. And I guess, you know, I think the anti-Zionism came afterwards

because I was so focused on the anti-apartheid struggle because that's where I was and that's what I was doing. because that's where I was and that's what I was doing. And my university was either spent like running battles with riot police or smoking weed. I literally went to about three classes, honestly. I was definitely the odd one out in my school. I mean, you know, being a Zionist Jewish day school, I'm still, you know, I'm still probably perceived as like an absolute fucking aboriginal, you know?

Yeah. You did describe your mother in one podcast as a diehard Zionist. And so I can only imagine. And you mentioned your nephew and her husband both were in the IDF. So I can only imagine. husband, both were in the IDF. So I can only imagine. I think it's good to bring up that despite all of that, you were able to like think deeply about it and work your way out of that brainwashing essentially. Before I get too carried away, let's take our first break. We'll be right back. BRB. And we're back. I want to talk now about your experience in Germany and how you experienced state-level accusations of being an anti-Semitic person, even though you're just a vocal Jewish anti-Zionist.

Can you talk about what led this person? I didn't even know this person existed. Stefan Hensel, who is the anti-Semitism commissioner of the city of Hamburg. That's a position someone has. anti-semitism commissioner of the city of Hamburg that's a position someone has but what led him to call you these really atrocious things in so many newspapers and like basically like just libelous libelous stuff okay so so check it out so my my mom dies the 17th of December yeah I go away to a yoga retreat where there's, like, there's no, like, coverage.

I'm, like, I'm offline. I get back to Berlin and there's emails from, like, people I really trust, you know, and serious people in my life saying, you know, dude, you've got to respond to these allegations that are in like Die Zeit, Berlin und Zeitung, Taz, you know, basically every major newspaper in Germany and social media all over the place. There's this character, like you said, Stefan Hensel, who is the Commissioner of Antisemitism for the State of Berlin. Now, eight of the states of Germany have commissioners of anti-Semitism, right? None of whom are Jewish.

None of whom were elected. They kind of semi, it's super weird. They are, it's semi-legal. I mean, like nobody knows they exist they exist nobody knows like nobody elects them um this character stefan hensel and i don't want to pay too much attention to him because he's just like a nebulous islamophobic pro-zionist you know bureaucrat But anyway, he does a series of interviews. And to summarize the numerous interviews and his social media posts, I am called, quote, literally, a hateful anti-Semite who advocates for terrorism against Jews. Now, this is two weeks after burying my Jewish mother, who was a second

generation Holocaust survivor. Now, that is that definition of gaslighting, right? Now, as a white man, it's testimony to my privilege that I haven't experienced gaslighting on a daily basis as most women do. Certainly every Palestinian friend I have, they experience that every minute of their lives because their very essence is illegal, being Palestinian. You know, the blood that runs through their veins is illegal they don't exist because they're palestinian right um but but so i stand accused of these things and i'm like i'm gobsmacked i'm like and the reason is is because I've been vocal about my support and solidarity for Palestinian rights. And it was particularly about your support for the BDS movement, right? Exactly.

So BDS, Boycott Divestment Sanctions, has become a kind of, it's like one of these terms that emerges in the world it's like terrorism or war on drugs or uh what are the terms can we come up with you know it's like it's one of these catchphrases and it's like bds yeah and it's like it's just like people don't even associate it with boycott divestment sanctions. If you break it down, you know, what ended apartheid in South Africa? There was no there was no sudden moral awakening. Basically, the Cold War ended. Reagan and Thatcher, who were total supporters of apartheid South Africa, suddenly the Cold War ended, South Africa wasn't that important an asset, and there was international

pressure, and more and more people started to see what the atrocities that were going on, more people started to see what the atrocities that were going on and sanctions and divestment started to happen right so polaroid the company polaroid i did a project about this was one of the first companies that colluded with the south african government but also divested when that when they were exposed. And that led to a number of banks divesting from South Africa. So sanctions and divestments, and essentially the South African government in the late 80s was financially broke. So they were forced to the negotiation table

because they were broke. Not because they were broke, not because they woke up one morning and said, oh, my God, we're oppressing the majority of black people in this country. And, you know, so it's just like they were forced to. So it's just like they were forced to. And so BDS, which is a peaceful, nonviolent means of resistance that started during the Second Intifada, has become one of these catchphrases. And I'll tell you a story. And this all came to a head around last year's Documenta, which happens in the city of Kassel in Germany. Now, Documenta is a really interesting art event

in the art world calendar. And last year, Documenta that was was a very very interesting little theater play so what happened during documenta last year is that um there was a group of palestinian artists who were invited to show work, and their space was invaded. And graffiti was sprayed on the walls. There were two things were sprayed. One was the number 187, and then the word Peralta. Can you explain what those both mean?

I'm not exactly sure, but 187 I can tell you. Okay. And the reason I can tell you is because 187 was spray painted outside my front door, inside my apartment building. And 187, as any gang member in california will tell you is the californian penal code for murder and when you spray 187 it's a death threat oh my god and so really intense and so And so what the media did in Germany is said, oh, no, no, no, hang on. There's a hip hop band in Hamburg called 187. I wonder where that came from.

Wow. Yeah, I was going to mention that Sublime also has a few songs with 187. Oh, they were just Sublime fans, that graffiti pop-up. Yeah, they liked that one Sublime song about the 92 riots. The radical branch of the Sublime fan club came for you. I mean, I'd love to hear this music, 187. Buddy, I think you don't want any Sublime. No, no, I really do.

After this, I'm going to actually listen to it. So on the morning, so back to Documenta, so they spray painted the staff, and then there was a furor because there was an Indonesian collective who did a giant mural. And one of the characters in this mural depicted an IDF soldier, an Israeli Defense Force soldier, or an Israeli occupying force soldier, as a pig. Right? Policeman soldier as a pig, right? Policeman, soldier as a pig.

I mean, that's an old trope. We've all done it, right? They're the pigs. Police are the pigs. But there was an IDF as a pig, and so it was deemed anti-Semitic. And fair enough. It's like it's Germany. It's an Israeli person in a uniform depicted as a pig.

It's tasteless. You know, it's tacky. Immediately, they kind of covered the miroir, right? But bang, the troops came in. The Israel lobby, the Jewish lobby came in boom right they seized the opportunity and they hit and and suddenly the word bds came in right and so the two curators from gurang rupa who were amongst the collective who were curating that year's documenta

were visiting professors at the art school in Hamburg where I had been a professor for the previous six years okay

and Stefan Hensel like a little the previous six years. Okay. And Stefan Hensel, like a little kind of surgeon, he pinpointed these three little pernicious kind of pro-Palestinian people that were inside a German university, and he wanted to remove them with his little tweezers and and so he grouped us together and he slammed the word anti-semitism he accused us of being anti-Semitic. And so he weaponized this word. And this word, like, it's such an interesting word, right? Anti-Semitism. It's like, so here you've got a guy. Now, he's never declared, and not that it's of any interest to me,

whether he's Jewish or not. I mean, I don't think he has the right to buy into my lineage of trauma. He doesn't have that right. But he married a Jew. He named his son, I think, David or something, right? he named his son I think David or something right there's all these kind of

like gestures to make him seem like he's has the ability to say these things not a loophole as much as a kind of as a kind of dress code right

my son's called yeah my son's called david i'm married to a jewish person i've lived in israel for six years i ran the yudisha uh gym the israelisha germanisha organization you know israel organization, which is like, you know, an Islamophobic kind of weird old weird-ass think tank. I don't know what they do, right? But the point is, here's this guy, and I bet you I would lay money on it that his parents or his grandparents were perpetrators during the Holocaust. And this is the way, this is the psychological twist. This is the beautiful little whoo that the mind does to get oneself out of feeling feeling shit about yourself yeah i mean even attempting to remove

those people from their posts it's like that's a great example of of germany using anti-semitism like weaponizing it at an institutional level like that's uh that's really unfortunate. I do want to mention this really quick. In 2019, Germany tried to make BDS a hate crime. And even though it was challenged and then it was found to be unconstitutional, the fact that that attempt was made, from what I understand, there's still an attitude in Germany about BDS being this illegal-ish thing. Is that fair to say? about BDS being this illegal-ish thing. Is that fair to say? Exactly. So it's like, you know, my father was a lawyer, as I said. So I know the difference between law and justice. And I know what a test case means. So you bring something to trial means it enters into the language of society, right?

And when you say, is BDS anti-Semitic and you test this thing, suddenly there's this presumption and there is a presumption that BDS is anti-Semitic. that PDS is antisemitic. And I can give you concrete examples of how it's happened, how it's played out over the last couple of years. Oh, wait, I want James to mention, you looked up that word, right, James? Isabel Peralta, yeah. I'm familiar with her, unfortunately.

And I think this kind of lines up with the sort of, she came on the scene in 2021. I had been around doing anti-Semitism for a long time. She is a self-described fascist in Spain. She's part of a group, or at the time was leading a group called Juventud Patriotica, which is patriotic youth. And like the speech that she's most famous for was delivered at a commemoration for the División Azul, which is a blue division.

They're the Francoist volunteers who fought for Nazi Germany, which, you know, if you're commemorating that, you're kind of a piece of shit. And then she went on to be a further piece of shit, I suppose, by like, she's very explicit in her anti-Semitism, right? She doesn't do what a lot of these people do and kind of veil it. She talks about Jewish people as the eternal enemy. And it's worth pointing out that in Spain, Spain has had what's largely called antisemitism without Jews, or sometimes called that, because Spain conducted an ethnic cleansing,

or it conducted a, literally they'll call it an Olympiatha, like a cleansing and a removal of Jewish people. And Spanish Jewish population is still very small uh and so this sort of virulent anti-semitism that we're seeing on her behalf it had impacts all around europe and she was kind of the uh the most prominent and outspoken anti-semite for a little while there so that was the name they graffitied along with 187 yeah i guess trying to tie this document to her disgusting anti-semitic uh which is entirely distinct things right like i think as you were saying adam like that by by putting the two in the same phrase we conflate them when when they are entirely distinct things and she i think all of us would agree is a

terrible person they are as we're sensible views but but if we dig a little deeper we get to the core which is why did the nazis and the zionists collaborate in the 1930s because they had the same desire. They wanted the same outcome. They wanted the Jews out of Europe. They wanted them to move to Palestine, right? Zionism was a European project started in the early 20th century in Vienna. They wanted the Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. The Zionists did. So they collaborated. And I think, really, truly, I think that we do face a real threat of real anti-Semitism in Germany. And I have two children.

My daughter is 13. Her name is Lani. My little boy is 10. His name is Marlo. And if you look at the police report of 2022 that was released in Berlin, of 2022 that was released in Berlin, there are multiple, numerous incidents of visual and quite violent incidents

of real antisemitism, right? Yeah. And why are we not addressing that? incidents of real anti-Semitism, right? Yeah. And why are we not addressing that? Because my kids are in danger. And instead, we have the Minister of Culture, whose name is Claudia Roth, stand up a couple of weeks ago on a Friday night at the opening of Haka Weh,

you know, a huge institution that my dear friend Bonaventure, who comes from Cameroon, he's been made the head of this institution. And it's a Friday night and the hall is full of people. And it's glorious. It's a beautiful night. And when you have diversity like you've never seen, this is like queer, diverse, blackness, indigenous thought. It's queer thought. It's like fucking peaches is there everyone's there you know what i mean and claudia roth takes the stage she takes the microphone

and what does she say she says there's silence in the room, and she says, BDS is anti-Semitic. Like, what the fuck? Yeah. BDS is anti-Semitic. And I'll tell you, I love Bonner. Now, let me tell you about Bonner Ventura. Bonner came from Cameroon 13 years ago. He has a PhD.

His PhD is in biotechnology. He worked all day building pacemakers while he set up a cultural institution called Savvy Contemporary. And Savvy represented the BIPOC community in Berlin and in Germany, right? Bonner is a genius. He deals with post-colonialism like, I mean, he's a maestro. He's amazing. What he has done, he's changed the landscape of this country he's brought colonialism

into the into the discourse of the country into the culture right but my fear is is they've used him as a trojan horse and they've got the German states have got their fist up his fucking ass. And that night, when he, it was Bonner's night, it was the night of diversity. There comes this pernicious minister of culture and she stands up and out of the blue she says, BDS is anti-Semitic. Bonner, because he's such a graceful, smart man, and because he knows that we are fighting intersectional struggles that happen at different velocities and happen at different speeds and come at different angles. He came up on stage and he said, we come in peace. It scares me.

No, I can only imagine what it was like to be there in person. I mean, it sounds mortifying, especially if you're Palestinian or Arab or just an anti-Zionist in general. I brought up a story here that I heard Adam talk about on a different show, but future me is recording this now because I wanted you to have some more context to the story so you can really grasp the irony of it all. It's a great example of the divide and intensity that happens or that can happen with anti-Zionists and Zionists within the Jewish community itself. Adam said that some of the people who he had assumed were friends and allies have disappeared, which is one of the prices you pay for criticizing Israel. Adam had been spending

more time in Hebron, what he described as a wasteland. He said in a previous interview that you spend 10 minutes in Hebron and you get the notion of apartheid, occupation, and Jewish supremacy. You get it, and no one has to utter the words. Adam has documented violence in places like maximum security jails, Afghanistan in 2003, Iraq in 2005, but he said the two times he's felt the most existentially and physically a threat of death, one of those times was last year when he was in Hebron and him and his team went to take photos of olive trees. Olive trees in that area can be 2,000 to 4,000 years old, and since 1967, Israeli settlers have destroyed one million of these trees. I have an episode about this and

the significance of the Palestinian olive tree, about how it's not only an immensely important crop, but also a symbol of Palestinian culture and resistance. I talk about this in that episode as well, but it bears repeating that destroying olive trees is one of the most clear examples that Zionism isn't about wanting to return to a sacred land that is destined to you. Instead, Zionism is hateful and inexcusable. Adam shares this sentiment, which I appreciate, and I really loved learning about his work with olive trees. I just don't think Zionists have any kind of rebuttal or reasoning to support why the hell they keep destroying olive trees

decade after decade? Like in what universe can you say and believe that you have a genuine attachment to that land, a biblical right to that land? Like how could you say that you love that land as a sacred space, but then also go and destroy what Adam describes as its quote, but then also go and destroy what Adam describes as its, quote, oldest indigenous citizens, a.k.a. the olive trees. That's not a person who loves that land. That is a person who is driven by hate. So Adam is working to preserve and protect these trees.

Settlers pour gasoline down the center of the tree trunk, so by the time you see smoke, the tree is already dead. He was there in Hebron with a camera, taking photos of the tree trunk so by the time you see smoke, the tree is already dead. He was there in Hebron with a camera taking photos of the trees, and then Jewish settlers sent these packs of kids that he said were ages 5 to 17, dressed in full religious garb, accompanied by the Israeli military. Adam and his crew kept getting attacked by these kids as the military stood by, but he explained that you can't lift a finger to defend yourself because these kids are minors. Adam talked about this and said, if I was Palestinian and I pushed back, I would be shot on the spot. The fact that I'm Jewish, I would just be removed

and the work would simply be over. So he got beaten pretty badly several times and apparently there's footage of it somewhere. And his experience in Hebron again is one of those two times that he's felt the most existentially and physically at the threat of death. The second time happened a few days later, which is the story I briefly mentioned to him in the recording that we did, that I want to talk about more here. So a few days after that incident, Adam returned to Berlin, and it happened to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, which is widely known as the beginning of the Holocaust. It's also called the November Pogrom, and it was a pogrom against

Jews carried out by the Nazi party with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on the 9th and 10th of November in 1938. The German authorities looked on as this happened without intervening. The name Kristallnacht is literally translated to Crystal Night, and this name comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. So back to Adam's story. A memorial for Kristallnacht is held at the site of the two oldest synagogues that had been burned down in Germany. Adam arrived there with a crew holding signs that said, Jews against fascism everywhere. He's surrounded by fellow Jewish people. And this big guy comes up to Adam and Adam describes this guy as being much bigger and much taller than him. And so this big guy looks down at Adam and he says, get rid of those signs. Who gave you the

right to be here? Adam responded, quote, the death of 90% of my family. What troubles you about the sign? Are you anti-Semitic? Are you fascist? Are you bothered by the word everywhere? Have you got this weird synesthesia thing where you see the word everywhere and you see Israel? Do you think I'm implying that there's a possibility that Israel could have fascist traits? In response to this, this big guy starts attacking Adam. So Adam ran, absolutely terrified. He ran and sought protection from the German police. The irony of a Jewish person feeling his life threatened by another Jewish person and then seeking refuge from the German police, Adam says this was the most surreal moment of his life. So, so ironic. But let me flip that story on its head, right?

And now, okay, so it's 1988 and I am on the front page of a newspaper and I get home to my mother and she's furious she's fucking furious because there I am on the front page of the newspaper and I'm whole I'm I'm there my face is there and I'm holding up a flower and in front of me is a is an is a South African riot policeman right and it was one of the demonstrations I was at at the age of 18 on the campus at Wits University, all right? And I got into shit from my mother who said, what the fuck are you doing standing in front of the riot police? I got into shit from the

Black Student Society because we as white students took orders from the Black Student Society. He said, what are you doing holding a flower to the fucking pig? Dude, it's like, this is not the 1960s. We're fighting a struggle. So I got in the shit from both sides, right? Yeah. Now, cut to May, a few months ago, I'm in Oranienplatz. There is a commemoration organized for the ongoing Nakba. All right. We know what the Nakba is, the catastrophe. Right. So in 19, we don't have

to explain that. But all for two, the year before that, all commemorations for the Nakba were banned. commemorations for the Nakba were banned. And in May, the commemorations for the Nakba organized by Palestinian groups were banned. So Yudish Astima, which means Jewish Voices, the organization, they organized a commemoration. And we gathered together on a beautiful Sunday morning. And, you know, it was really lovely. And there were kids there, there were old people, it was great. And we were all, all gathered together there. And we gave the platform to some Palestinian voices who were just speaking about freedom from the river to the sea, you know, and suddenly the riot police came, boom boom you know lines of them intersected us and I was faced again at the age of 52 not 18 so flip from 1988 to 2023 and I'm facing eye to eye

with a fucking white riot policeman. And it was the same riot policeman. And you know what I said to him? I said to him, where was your grandmother during the war? And he didn't answer me. And I said, do you know where my grandmother was? And he said, I don't care. At which point I turned around and two or three, and there's footage of this from every single angle, two or three of these riot policemen jumped on top of me, brutally beat me and arrested me handcuffed me they handcuffed me so tightly that they had to call the fucking fire brigade to cut the handcuffs off me and like hang on it gets worse then an hour

later i'm on the front page of the berlin at zeitung there i am being marched off by German police, riot police. And you know what the headline says? 100 anti-Semitic Palestinian protesters disrupt Jewish memorial. Wow. Check it out. Check it out. And you know what? I think it's still up there. Yeah.

Okay? This is where we're at. This is where we're at in this country like forget fact checking this is not a palestinian i'm a fucking jew you've arrested a fucking third generation holocaust surviving jew you motherfucking nazi and they they tell me denazification never happened in this country there's no such thing as neo-nazis they're nazis man and this stefan hensel he wants the jews out of germany that's what's underneath all of this shit right because if they were worried about antisemitism, let's talk about antisemitism, okay? Because I've got kids and they need to be safe.

Yeah. I mean, I was reading the other day a news article from, I think, 51 or 52, that was about one of the, God, now I'm spacing out his name, but he was a Wehrmacht general who was, you know, commanded troops on the Ost Front, survived the war, and later got into German politics. It was an article about one of his political rallies where protesters were broken up and beaten up by German police officers. And it's kind of this same, like, yeah, what was your family doing during those 12 years you know like it's it's rare it's a question you can ask but it's rarely really a question right right yeah like there was never any that's such an important point you know particularly when we talk about like why there is you know such what you can call technically support for israel that's rooted as you noted

often in just getting jewish people out of germany like there was never any kind of real denazification no yeah not on a systemic level this is all about white supremacy man because i'll tell you what and this goes deeper um on the 15th of july they made a law in Berlin that all public swimming pools, they claimed that there was a rise in violence in public swimming pools in Berlin. OK, particularly in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, which, as we know, are the areas of black migrants, particularly Palestinian, Middle Eastern migrants, right? And in fact, if you look at the statistics, from 2019 to 2022, violence has gone down by 21 or 23%. I can't remember correctly.

So that's incorrect. But now we have a position where at the entrance of every swimming pool, there is a police van, and they are ethnically and racially profiling people who come into swimming pools, right? profiling people who come into swimming pools, right? And there is basically a law that says that there shall not be more than three men, read, three men of color in a public swimming pool, okay? And this is where we're heading. Felix Klein, who's the Federal Commissioner of Antisemitism, Stefan Hensel, who's the Hamburg one, these people, the mayor of Berlin on Pentecost night, he tweeted, check out, check out his tweet. He tweeted something, it went like this, it said, like this it said we wish everybody a happy pentecost and we wish our guests a lovely time our guests this is like dude i mean you know yeah it's like it's genuine it's genuine it's grim it's fucking grim man and you know these people want a white, they want a white Aryan Christian fucking country.

Yeah. They want the dark people out. I mean, that's a huge part that people don't realize is that Zionism is mostly white supremacy and mostly very anti-Jewish because it advocates for just like the expulsion of the Jews again. Well, it's a fucking mental illness is what it is. I don't disagree with you.

I just wanted to reflect like maybe as we end up on how far the needle has swung. When we talk about like anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and sort of where, because they do overlap, yeah uh but they don't they are not the same thing and uh I think about how there's this letter that the New York Times published like it was in the late 1940s 48 49 it co-signed by a lot of prominent Jewish intellectuals including Hannah Rent Albert Einstein talking about the uh the settler policies in Israel at that time and byionist groups at that time as fascist which is something that would now be considered to be like anti-semitic like that's calling israel

fascist was what got you chased at him by that guy it's considered to be anti-semitic in germany right like these are people who you know that had lost family members you know like in their nuclear family to the holocaust like prominent um jewish intellectuals who would now be considered i guess anti-semitic under this like by saying shit the new york times would publish and the times wouldn't publish that now yeah yeah you know a few of us got together in oranian plots in the place where we were arrested in may a few like jewish friends of mine like some from brooklyn some from israel some from here and you know five nights ago um a young palestinian man was arrested by 12 israeli policemen and they branded a, they cut with a knife, the Star of David into his cheek. Oh my God.

Yeah. And there's footage of this. And they literally cut the Star of David into his cheek. And we wore red Stars of David at this vigil tonight. And it just strikes me as ironic, you know, like 80 years ago, my ancestors were forced to wear a yellow star as a lapel on their armband or stuck to their jackets to shame them, to declare them as Jews, as dirty Jews in public. And now I feel like I've got to wear this red star because of our collective shame,

because of what's being done in our name by the state of Israel and by Zionism. And this is not allowed to be done in my name. Really. Sorry to be so grim. Fuck. No, I mean, if there was ever an ending. It's a grim story, yeah. Yeah, it's a grim story, but I think it's a great place to end.

There's still so much I want to ask you. I would love to know your thoughts about liberal Zionism, but that's going to have to wait for next time. Thank you for giving us time in the middle or the early mornings. Thank you so much. Of course. Adam, where can people find you online and help support the advocacy you're doing? Mostly, I'm

a bit of a geriatric, so I'm just on Instagram, Adam Brunberg. Great, good stuff. I'll put it in the description for anyone that is curious thank you for doing your work everyone go follow Adam make sure everyone doesn't

let's protect Adam and his family out there but thank you again thank you guys thank you Adam really appreciate it and that's the episode. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show,

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a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. trying my best to help along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers to to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian crisis at the united states southern border and people are being held in the open desert in hakumba where it gets hot in the day gets very cold at night and there are children there are old people there are young people all the support

they're getting is from mutual aid workers. They maybe get some water from Border Patrol, from federal government and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast to ask you if you can to help. We've all spent all of our time and most of our money. The last few days, week trying to help. We're all pretty broke and we're all pretty tired. But I could really do with your support and i'm going to give the venmos and cash apps and paypal information for two organizations who i dearly love and whose work i have seen is extremely

effective and is the only thing keeping this situation from being a lot worse and please don't think that if you don't have much money that you shouldn't give we can work do a lot worse and please don't think that if you don't have much money that you shouldn't give we can work do a lot with a little so if you only have five bucks that is great five bucks is a tarp for someone to sleep under or a few hot meals and what we're going to buy is food blankets tarps water the things that stop people dying in the desert those two organizations border kindness and free shit collective can be found online at Border Kindness and at Free Shit PB on Twitter. For Border Kindness, the Venmo is at Border-Kindness. The Cash App is $BorderKindnessCash.

And the Zelle and PayPal information is info at BorderKindness.org. Free Shit Collective are at Free Shit Collective on Cash App and PayPal and at Free Shit PB on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Now, this is not one of those times where it's about how to put things back together again.

This is one of those episodes about why everything is absolutely awful. And one of the reasons why everything is absolutely awful and something I've been driven progressively more and more insane by in the past sort of half a decade is the way people think and talk about class in the United States. Why, for example, do people think that Trump is working class? Why am I watching people argue that being a barista isn't actually being a worker? Why are all these millionaires driving Ford F-150s while simultaneously claiming that they are also somehow working class? Why are billionaires fleeing to Colorado and Wyoming to cosplay as workers by wearing jeans and t-shirts to bars?

Why is every white ring dipshit posting the same video of a guy in an oil rig committing approximately 60,000 OSHA violations? Why is it that the only part of the working class that anyone ever seems to call the working class is the white working class? Why is it that when people talk about the white working class and then try to explain it with data, and this is true across the entire ideological spectrum. Why do they start defining working class by things that are objectively not class like education levels? And this reached a breaking point with me a few weeks ago and has finally caused me to snap and write this. Now, I've given the game away a little by leading with the white working class stuff, because a lot of the reason that everything sounds so nuts is that when people talk about class in the US, most of the time what they're actually talking about is race and gender. And this pisses me off

because I think more about class than a lot of people with my ideology usually do. And I think it can actually be a very useful way to understand the world. However, comma, thinking and talking about class as a kind of floating signifier that you can just jam conservative racial and gender politics into is a really, really bad way to talk about class. On top of just the racism and the sexism, this way of looking at class reduces class, which is a social relation, into aesthetics and grievances. And this leads to the question, how did this all happen? Now, you could take a really expansive look at this here and go back to Aristotle or start later with Locke or something,

but I'm not going to do that because, well, okay, partially because this would be 17 years long if I tried to do this, and this episode is already now three episodes. The other reason I'm not going to do this is that the actual story of how everything got like this is the story of how the right adapted and distorted the incredibly successful leftist conception of labor that built the identity of the working class in the 1800s and 1900s. And in order to do that, we need to talk about the labor theory of value. Now, when I talk about the labor theory of value, there are two things going on here. You have, on the one hand, Marx's law of value, and then you have the set of slogans that are passed down the main line of the workers movements. And these are not the same thing at all, even though when someone just says the labor

theory of value, if that's a thing that you've heard of, you probably immediately think Marx. So for example, let's get a sense of sort of what this kind of like sloganeering looks like. Here's the beginning of the Gotha program, which is the program of the German Social Democratic Party in late 1800s. It begins, quote, labor is the source of all wealth and all culture. Now, Marx hates this line. He writes a thing called the Critique of the Gotha program, where he goes on a giant rant about how, you know, nature also produces use values and so on and so forth. But, you know,

Marx's sort of bitterness at this aside, labor is the source of all wealth is a very, very common sentiment. It's the expression of the sort of common understanding of production class and nature of value in the 19th and early 20th century. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Abraham Lincoln, a man who is by no means a socialist and is in fact the president of the United States, talks like this. Here's Lincoln, quote, Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not existed first. Labor is superior of capital and deserves much

the higher consideration. Now, this is obviously not something you'd ever hear from a president of the United States today, and we'll come back to Graybridge's argument about why that is later, but I want to get a bit deeper into not just the common conception of the labor theory of value, but what the sort of capital W capital M workers movement believed in. And this, as it turns out, has a tenuous relation to Marx, but is not the same thing. And I think it's different enough that I'm actually not going to spend another like 15 minutes trying to explain marx's version of the labor theory of value or marx's law of value because it doesn't ultimately matter that much which which is a very weird thing to say about the actual sort of you know about about about sort of marx's role

in the labor movement but it kind of doesn't so what I'm going to do instead is read. Well, I should. I should. Okay. I should also mention, like, we are going to get a bit more into, like, the things that Marx actually wrote and why they mattered to the specific movements like next episode. But, you know, we'll deal. We'll deal. We'll deal with that tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm going to read a bit from the journal Endnotes from Unity and Separation. I'm going to read a bit from the journal Endnotes, from Unity and Separation. Supporting workers' claims to respectability was a vision of their destiny with five tenets. 1. Workers were building a new world with their own hands. 2. In this new world, workers were the only social group that was expanding, whereas all other groups were contracting, including the bourgeoisie. 3. Workers were not only becoming the majority of the population, they were also becoming a compact mass, the collective worker, who was being drilled in the factory to act in concert with the machines. 4. They were thus the only group capable of managing the new world in accordance with

its innermost logic. Neither a hierarchy of order what it was in a conquest of power, the achievement of which would of the identity of the working class. It's how people understand themselves as workers. In Marxist terms, this is the class in itself becoming the class for itself. This is the identity that produces the workers' movement. It's the expression of what people believe about themselves. Now, there are ingrained ideological assumptions here that go sort of beyond peer arguments about class, right? This is an argument about a very specific kind of factory worker. And in some sense, I think the focus on the factory worker as like the sort of emblematic,

like bearer of this, and this is true both of the theorists of the time and for people like Endnote sort of looking back on it from like a hundred years later. I think this is kind of a distraction from what a lot of the actual base of the workers' movement is,

which is to say like coal miners and workers involved in energy logistics. You know, you could take, for example, like the beating heart of the anarch' movement is, which is to say like coal miners and workers involved in energy logistics. You could take, for example, like the beating heart of the anarchist movement in much of the 20s and 30s are these Andalusian coal miners whose militancy and ability to sort of control the supply of coal that the capitalist class relied on for production gave them enormous leverage. And as the historian Timothy Mitchell has argued, it was this sort of capacity to break the economy through shutting off the coal supply through strikes and sabotage, which workers at the time like think of like the strike as a kind of sabotage. It's this capability that informs a lot of the sort of politics and

sense of possibility of the 20th century workers movement and you know given what but you know given what what the people who are like you know working in a coal mine or like you know are are like a dock worker or you know like if you are working in a factory, right? It makes sense that these people believe this, right? You know, in terms of, you know, if you're looking at something like, you know, workers are building the new world with their hands, right? Or like, you know, we are the only social group that's expanding. We're the only people who are capable of managing the new world according to its own logic. This makes a lot of sense if you are one of the people who live in a world that has effectively disappeared now.

And that is a world where you literally are watching cities be constructed out of like, you know, the tiny shells of villages, right? The only way you can sort of experience that now is if you were one of the people in sort of the late, the 90s and the 2000s in China, you know, like watch Shenzhen turn from a fishing village into one of the largest cities in the world. the other hand like this is what these people are experiencing and this is a group of people who can literally feel in their hands the sort of the power and the value of the labor in what they're producing they can you know they can see commodities appear in the world and they can know that it was you know by their hands that the world was built and this is not you know this is not purely a metaphor right these are these are people who are literally creating the world around them. To quote one of the verses of Solidarity Forever that modern trade unions hilariously notably do not include in the version of the song that they tend to sing at things, the trade union version drops a bunch of verses. The trade union version drops a bunch of verses. And one of those verses is,

in our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies multiplied a thousandfold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, for the union makes us strong. And this is both the positive vision of the workers' movement and its own sort of theoretical self-conception wrapped into one. It is the sort of rosy romantic picture of what the workers' movement and its own sort of theoretical self-conception wrapped into one. It is the sort of rosy romantic picture of what the workers' movement is. However, comma, this is the incredibly romantic version of this. And before we sort of leave the world of pure romance and go into the sort of dirty and grimy worlds of reality where everything kind of sucks

and things are not what they normally seem, we are going to take an ad break. And we're back. Now, there are a lot of things about this workers' movement that if you just sort of look at it theoretically, or if you're looking at one of the sort of incredibly sort of rosy self-caricatures, I guess, if you're purely looking at the kind of propaganda that the movement produces in order to create itself, you are going to get a very distorted picture of sort of what was actually going on on the ground and this also

makes it very very difficult to understand what happened because you know if if you want to understand how this movement was defeated and how the like all of the sort of branches of the workers movement like all of his different ideologies all those different manifestations are essentially destroyed you have to get to the point where you are you start to realize that the ideological conception of productivity right of of the producer of you know like of of what the worker is was never as sort of dry and objective as theorists wanted us and you know you get the sense that they wanted like themselves to believe case in point is the nature of what marx calls the lumpenproletariat so here's some end notes again who were these lumpenproletarians preaching anarchy attempts to spell that out usually took the form not of structural analysis but rather of long lists of shady characters,

lists which collapsed in on themselves in a frenzied incoherence. Here is Marx's paradigmatic discussion of the lumpenproletariat from the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents. These lumpens supposedly consisted of, quote, vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, motten bunks, lazarani, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, Lazzarani, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, litterati, organ grinders, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars, in short, the whole indefinite disintegrating mass, thrown hither and thither, from which the French call la boheme.

Is there any truth in this paranoid fantasy? Do escaped convicts and organ grinders share a common counter-revolutionary interest with beggars, which distinguishes them from the common mass worker who are apparently revolutionary by nature? To think so is insane. The lumpenproletariat was a specter haunting the workers' movement. If that movement constituted itself for the dignity of workers, then the lumpen was the figure of the undignified worker, or miraculously, the lumpen was one of its figurations. All of the movement's efforts to give dignity to the class were supposedly undermined by these dissolute figures, drunk singing in the streets, petty criminals, and prostitutes. References to the lumpenproletariat registered what was a simple truth. It was difficult to convince workers to organize as workers, since mostly

they didn't care about socialism. A great many of the poor, especially the very poor, did not think or behave themselves as proletarians, or find the organizations and modes of actions of the movement as applicable or relevant to them. In their fear time, they'd rather go to the pub than sing workers' songs. In the figure of the lumpen, we discover the dark underside of the affirmation of the working class. It was abiding class hatred. Workers saw themselves as originating out of a stinking morass.

From Kotsky's The Class Struggle, At the time of the beginning of modern industry, the term proletariat implied absolute degeneracy, and there are persons who believe this is still the case. Moreover, capitalism was trying to push them back into the muck. Thus, the crisis tendencies of capitalism could only be resolved in one of two ways, the victory of the working class or in its becoming lumpen. Now, you can see a couple of things very clearly here. One is there's been a lot of attempts to like resuscitate the lumpenproletariat as like a functional class, especially since especially the 70s. And I really, I really would recommend those people go back and read what Marx actually wrote about lumpenproletariat because it makes no sense. It is just like absolute sort of blithering nonsense. And the reason it's this kind of like incredibly bizarre, like paranoid, you know, list of fantasies is that beneath the sort of like faux scientific objectiveness like of the workers movement is this incredibly petty

moralism and a set of sort of Victorian social values with all of the sort of cruelty of the aristocratic masters. And I want to sort of point out here, like this, this kind of thinking, you know, this kind of like we are the movement that is a liberation of the class. But in order to do that, we need to prove that like,

we are like actually sort of like real dignified human beings and that there's another group of people who are just us but we hate them because they don't behave the way that we think they're supposed to this is a very very common thing that you see in basically all social movements especially in their earliest and like shittiest iterations you see this in the early feminist movement i mean you see this still in the feminist movement but there are sections of it that do this too there's a really good piece called some like it hot by sophie lewis about the sort of feminist reaction to marilyn monroe and what i'm going to read a little bit from it one of the things that you get the sense of is that people like gloria steinem

just absolutely hate marilyn monroe um and the the you know the stuff they write about her is stuff that like you just would be like almost incomprehensible to imagine any of these people or even just sort of like you know not even like a like a modern sort of like conservative like writing on purpose about a woman and being allowed to sort of get away with it i mean they write just horrible things about her um i'm gonna read a little bit from the piece perhaps it was monroe's dumping of three husbands two of them were famous and powerful that posed quote no adult challenge to steinem's mind or perhaps steinem's comments closed nothing so much as her own inability to see high femme people as subjects.

Here, in case it might pierce the veil, is Monroe Apogem, written on Waldorf Astoria letter paper in 1955. Quote, everyone has violence in themselves. I am violent. Here is another, spoken to photographer Bruno Bernard in 1956. to photographer Bruno Bernard in 1956. Both the anti-communists on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the movie censors on the production board should be buried alive. Perhaps Steinem, who proudly worked for the CIA in the 50s and 60s, would not appreciate this kind of courage. The courage of one Norma who, when notified by the police at a Los Angeles roadblock in 1949 that a nearby house was being monitored for ties to communists, shouted the officer's ear off and went straight to tip off blacklisted screenwriters

Norma and Ben Bowersman. And so you can sort of see what's happening here, right? It's a very similar thing where there are these sort of like – you have these very sort of like respectable mainstream feminists who look at someone like Marilyn Monroe who – and they just fucking hate her. They absolutely despise her because she is sort of – she is the image of what they sort of think that they're fighting against, right? Like they're – what liberation looks like for them is to like not be this kind of woman. And that's – you know, and this is – that's the sort of unspoken or sometimes just overly spoken core of what a lot of this stuff is. And this is how these people like can justify like working for the fucking CIA, right? And, you know, somehow claiming themselves to be like superior feminist to Marilyn Monroe, who, you know, at like great personal cost and at great danger, like, you know, fought HUAC and shit. So, you know, this kind of like we are the group who is going to free our own group. We're also not like because we're not like those other people who are literally the same as us, but we don't like them because we don't think they're respectable enough.

This is a very, very old sort of trend, but it has real social consequences. And it's a really disastrous strategy because it means that all of these movements have these sort of flanks from which they can be attacked. One of these flanks for the workers' movements, and one that's become increasingly important now, is the kind of producerist conception of what a worker is. This is the man sort of creating the new world with his bare hands. The problem is that this is never what most labor actually was. Here's David Graeber again. In fact, there was never a time when most workers worked in a factory. Even in the days of Karl Marx or Charles Dickens, working class neighborhoods housed far more maids, boot blacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, school teachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills, or iron foundries. Are these former jobs productive? In what sense and for whom?

Who produces the souffle is because of these ambiguities that such issues are typically brushed aside when people are arguing about value but doing so blinds us to the reality that most working class labor whether carried out by men or women actually resembles what we archetypically think of as women's work looking after people seeing to their wants and needs explaining reassuring anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking not to mention caring for monitoring and maintaining plants animals machines and other objects then it involves hammering carving hoisting or harvesting things and you know you can see in this sort of issue, you can see the axis upon which the workers' movement is going to be split in the 80s and 90s. If you can convince a set of workers that what

they're doing is masculine productive labor, and that what those other people are doing is this feminine care labor that doesn't produce anything, you can turn the entire ideology of the workers movement on its head and transform it from a liberatory ideology about the end of the class system to a patriarchal ideology about the necessity of of labor to sort of manhood and masculinity and once that ideological shift is made you can start writing off entire fields of laborers as being insufficiently quote-unquote productive or you know as the right-wing shift renders it you can say productive and mean insufficiently masculine to count as part of like the working class tm this problem is graber argues is a

consequence of the sort of maniacal focus on production that defined the workers movement because it obscures the fact that again most, most of actual labor is care labor. And this is something we've discussed at length on this show in sort of ethnographic, if not theoretical terms, while talking to Starbucks workers. And in these conversations, it becomes almost immediately clear that a huge part of the job has very little to do with making coffee or even sort of classical customer management and like the interpretive and emotional labor of doing service work. What these workers are actually doing is acting as a replacement for the collapsing American social safety net, right?

They are taking care of and literally saving the lives of people who capitalism has spat out and left to die. And this is by any like any any actual you know i'm not gonna say objective standard because i don't think there is an objective standard for what work like what how much work something is but you know in terms of the amount of labor in terms of the difficulty of labor in terms of like what is being expected of expected of these workers this is incredibly intense difficult difficult labor. But because of the sort of patriarchal idea and conception that has sort of consumed

what our sort of collective conception of what a quote unquote real job is, the enormous amount of care labor that baristas do every day. And there's a good argument. Graeber makes a very similar argument to this, that you can look at the entire job, and you can look at, like, most economic production as care labor, right? Because you're producing this coffee in order to care for someone. You make a bridge in order to, like,

like, in order so that people can use it, right? But, you know, there's a good argument that, like, everything a barista does is care labor. But because it's not like making cars or being one of the last 50,000 coal miners left in the US, it's not considered real labor. And this – all of this is just a bomb that is left sitting under the ideological core of the workers' movement. And that bomb probably would have just gone off on its own. Well, I say on its own. That bomb probably would have been set off by something we're going to talk about more tomorrow, which is the shift in the labor force in a lot of countries that sort of deindustrialized towards this kind of labor being the sort of standard – like being just even more obviously the standard form of labor.

But the ruling class figured out a way to sort of set this bomb off and ensure that – and ensure that it would like just detonate the workers' movement immediately. And the thing that they figured out to set this bomb off is racism. And that is what I'm going to talk about tomorrow. The story of how the fusion of racism and sexism that may well be remembered by historians is the force that burned the entire world, consumed what was left of the workers' movement, and turned this country into neoliberal Reagan hell. The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

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as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that

actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hi, everyone. It's me, James, and I'm coming at you today sweaty, smelly, and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the desert where I have been spending the weekend trying my best to help along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States southern border. People are being held

in the open desert in Hukumba where it gets hot in the day, gets very cold at night. And there are children, there are old people, there are young people. All the support they're getting is from mutual aid workers, then maybe get some water from Border Patrol, from federal government and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast to ask you if you can to help. We've all spent all of our time and most of our money the last few days, week trying to help. And we're all pretty broke and we're all pretty tired, but I could really do with your support. And I'm going to give the Venmo's and cash apps and PayPal information for two organizations who I dearly love and whose work I have seen is extremely effective and is the only thing

keeping the situation from being a lot worse. And please don't think that if you don't have much money that you shouldn't give. We can work, do a lot with little. So if you only have five bucks, that is great. Five bucks is a tarp for someone to sleep under or a few hot meals. And what we're going to buy is food, blankets, tarps, water. The things that stop people dying in the desert. Those two organizations, Border Kindness and Free Shit Collective,

can be found online at borderkindness and at freeshitpb on Twitter. For Border Kindness, the Venmo is at border-kindness. The Cash App is $borderkindnesscash. And the Zelle and PayPal information is info at borderkindness.org. Free Shit Collective are at freeshitcollective on Cash App and PayPal and at fre at borderkindness.org. Free Shit Collective are at Free Shit Collective on Cash App and PayPal and at Free Shit PBE on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about why everything absolutely sucks. I'm your host, Neil Wong. I'm back again. And last episode, we talked about

the problems with conceiving of all of labor as production from a sort of macrofeminist perspective of thinking about how thinking of all labor as production doesn't actually capture what most labor is. And we looked at how this allowed patriarchy to become a wedge to pry the workers' movement apart. But there's another sort of more micro problem with thinking about productive labor. And that micro problem is that people are just absolutely unable to think about productivity in anything other than moral terms as to you know why this is the case i'm not going to put forward an answer um i've seen every theory from like it's christianity to like it's a structural feature of capitalism to its human nature or whatever um i'm i i don't know did pick pick pick your pick your theory about why everyone is incapable of being normal about productivity. But this turns out to be a real problem for anyone who is trying to use productive versus

unproductive labor in a purely technical sense. Now, the most famous person to do this is, as some of you probably know, one Karl Marx. And, you know, I was hard on Marx last last episode but this one and the stuff that's going to follow isn't really his fault Marks here is actually doing one of the times where he's being very reasonable and he's being very specific about what productive labor is and everyone else is being extremely unreasonable and you know given the incredibly dark places this is going to go uh maybe this is one of those things where like i don't know you need to pick different words that aren't as emotionally charged as like productive and unproductive labor but all in all like this

the catastrophe that's about to unfold is not mar's fault. There was really no way that he could have known how nuts everyone was going to go over this. So what actually is the distinction between productive and unproductive labor for Marx? So first off, and this is very important, productive versus unproductive labor is a technical term. It has no moral content at all. All it means is that some labor produces capital for the capital-owning class, and some labor doesn't. That's literally it. Here's Marx. The commodities the capitalist buys for his own private consumption are not consumed productively. They do not become factors of capital. Just as little do the services he buys for his consumption, voluntarily or through compulsion from the state, etc., for the sake of their use value. They do not become a factor of capital. They are not,

therefore, productive kinds of labor, and those who perform them are not productive workers. As you can see, this has literally nothing to do with the contents of the labor itself or morality whatsoever. If a dancer works for a production company and gives a performance, you know, working for the company, that's productive labor because the company has turned their capital into more capital by using the dancer to produce a commodity, which is, you know, the performance, and then selling it, right? If that same dancer puts on the same performance in the same place for a crowd of, you know, just like their friends, or even the same people,

but who aren't paying a production company for it, suddenly the dancer, who again is doing the same thing in the same place, like even could be on the same day, is doing non-productive labor because no capital is being created from it. Or as you know, here's how Marx puts it, labor with the same content can therefore be both productive and unproductive. Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hack work for his publisher

was a productive worker. Later on, Milton sold the product for $5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendium political economy, at the instruction of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker. Insofar as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter's valorization this is a valorization of capital which is like having capital make more capital a singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker if she sells her singing for money she is to that extent a wage laborer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when she is engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. as a wage laborer in an institution along with others, in order through his labor to valorize the money of the entrepreneur of the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker.

Now, okay, I'm reading a lot of Marx here. I'm focusing on Marx because whether or not someone in the 1800s is a Marxist or not, and if you pick just like a random worker in the period when this is being written, the odds are really bad that they're going to is a Marxist or not. And if you pick just like a random worker in the period when this is being written, the odds are really bad that they're going to be a Marxist. Marx was enormously influential, particularly in Europe,

as sort of social democracy swept through the Germanys and then communism sort of swept back through Europe and the US. And Marx is also, and this is something that Marx himself like takes great pains to conceal a lot of the time marx is a kind of medium through which the broad cultural consensus on labor was transformed into

like capital t theory and in this capital t theory productive versus unproductive labor is not a moral claim at all it's a measure of whether any given labor produces capital for the bourgeoisie. Now, part of what Marx is trying to do here is to intervene in existing discourse about productive and unproductive labor to turn it into useful theory instead of people just yelling stuff at each other. And Marx, I feel you, buddy. Oh, boy. I'm taking this as a validation of what I'm doing. Here's an example I'm just going to put in here of Marx being very mad about this. The self-employed laborer, for example, is his own wage laborer, and his own means of production confront him in his own mind as capital. As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage laborer. Anomalies of this type then offer a favorable field for outpourings of drivel

about productive and unproductive labor. So, you know, even in the 1800s, people are being incredibly normal about this. They're saying things that are great and good and only that. They're being exceptionally good. Marx isn't slowly being driven mad by reading it all. But, you know, when it's being used as a technical category, the sort of productive versus unproductive distinction, you know, it can tell you a lot of stuff about how a capitalist economy functions. about how a capitalist economy functions. But when it inevitably becomes a moral category, things get very bad very quickly. And so we're going to go into two times that this has gone very badly.

The Nazis and Ronald Reagan. Now, the Nazis and Reagan aren't quite doing the same thing, although there's a lot of similarities, which is to be expected from a band who went to a nazi cemetery that included a bunch of ss dudes and then gave a speech defending his actions where he said and i quote they which is referring to nazi soldiers quote they were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps which i i i what the what what are you even supposed to do with that like i just this guy was

the president of the united states i mean i like i don't know it makes sense but like it never even crossed my mind that it was like it would even be possible to have a take that is people in the nazi army are actually just as much victims as the people in the concentration camps like i i i don't know baffling stuff by reagan i mean i guess not baffling considering how closely his administration is tied to a bunch of sort of nazis who became like anti-communists well who were always anti-communists but who became part of sort of like institutional anti-communism and like the post-war era. But God, what a terrible thing.

I'm getting my shots in at Reagan now because this is about to get so incredibly bleak. So, yay. So, okay. So the right is able to sort of, you successful, in fact, in transforming this distinction between productive and nonproductive labor into a moral category. And then they infuse it with anti-Semitism. this sort of, I don't know, the horror of anti-Semitism, productive labor is transformed into productive and unproductive members of society. And this is one of the origins of Nazi race science and race craft. They have their attempt to, quote unquote, purify their race, which relies on a distinction between productive and non-productive members of society, whose, quote unquote, value and productive capacity come to be seen as like genetically heritable which you know from the nazi perspective

they are like oh this is stuff this is heritable uh we need to do eugenics and mass exterminations of you know increasing numbers of disabled queer communists and especially jewish and roma people to ensure that only the quote- like productive members decide to remain and like pass down their traits and this is fucking horrible but this is also too simple of an explanation for what actually happens in order to actually fully grasp the depths of what's happening here and how this stuff functions we need to go deeper into specifically looking at anti-semitism and in order to do this i'm going to turn to the great sort of the great social theorist moish pistone uh rest in peace died a few years ago apparently a great

guy uh i don't know but yeah yeah, Pistone and his essay, antisemitism and national socialism. This is something I recommend people read it in full. It's a bit theoretically intense. It's also like one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read, but I think it's important to understand what national socialism actually was and what it's, what it's sort of ideological basis was because it – oh, boy.

Not only has it not gone away, it's doing a lot of the sort of work that we've been sort of discussing. Okay, so what is P pistone actually talking about so pistone sees nazi anti-semitism not just as you know the sort of socialism of fools where like jewish people get substituted for capitalists to deceive the worker and okay like yeah it's like it serves this function to some extent but for pistone like nazi anti anti-Semitism is its own horrific, incomplete anti-capitalist system. It's this ghastly Aryan mirror of Marxism. And, you know, okay, so to get an understanding of what he means by this, because this is something that is, you know, like, it's deeply, it's kind of theoretically intense, but it's worth it. So in Marxism, the central mystery of the commodity is that a commodity is a, well, I mean, central mystery isn't the right word, but this is one of the opening things in Capital is that, you know, this is this thing called the commodity fetish. You have a commodity.

A commodity is simultaneously a concrete physical object that nonetheless contains within it an abstract social relation. It has at the same time a use value, which is like, you know, the thing that makes it useful, right? Like take a pencil, right? Pencil, it has a use value. The use value is that you can like use it to write things right and you can use it to erase things but the pencil also has an exchange value and the exchange value you know is the value quote-unquote that you use to compare it

to other commodities right it's like how much is this thing how much is this thing worth how much is this compared to other commodities? That's kind of a simplification of it, but what's happening here is that the exchange value that lets you compare how much a pencil is worth to how much a bracelet is worth,

that's not an actual characteristic of the pencil or the bracelet. That is a serious, that's an embedded social relation. It's an embedded capitalist social relation that is a serious, you know, that that's an embedded social relation, right? It's an embedded, it's an embedded capitalist social relation that allows a commodity to be compared to all of the commodities by again, like embedding this capitalist social relation into it. The important part for our purposes is that the commodity has at the same time, a concrete component, which is the physical object, and an abstract component, which is the sort of capitalist social relation embedded in the pencil that makes it appear to have value. Here's Pistone.

The quote, double character allows the commodity to appear as a purely material entity rather than as an objectification of mediated social relations. So this is a more complicated way of saying what I've sort of been trying to get at, which is that the commodity, because it's a physical object, right? The commodity fetish allows the commodity to appear as if it's just a pure physical object instead of something that is produced by capitalism and contains within it capitalist social relations that give it value. So, back to Pistone. Relatedly, it allows concrete labor to appear as a purely material creative process separate from capitalist social relations. On the logical level of capital, the double character, labor process and valorization process, and by valorization process, he means the process that turns capital into more capital. So the fact that there's both a labor process and a valorization process allows industrial production to appear as a purely material creative process, separable from capital. The manifest form of the concrete is now more

organic. Industrial capital can then appear as linear descendant of quote natural artisanal labor as quote organically rooted in opposition to rootless, quote, parasitic finance capital. You can see here where the whole sort of productive versus unproductive labor distinction has ended up, right? It's been transformed into the sort of organic concrete rooted like productive national worker and like entrepreneur versus like rootless parasitic finance capital. versus like rootless parasitic finance capital this is unbelievably dangerous because now having set the concrete against the abstract the fascist proceeds to turn the abstract into a people which is jewish people the result of this is that in the fascist mind the sort of concrete

productive worker and the entrepreneur stand against the abstract anti-national finance capital, personified in the figure of the Jew. Here's Pistone again at what happened next. The extermination of European Jewry is the indication that it is far too simple to deal with Nazism as a mass movement with anti-capitalist overtones would shed that husk in the 1934 Rome push. At the latest, once it had served its purpose and state power had been seized. In the first place, ideological forms of thought are not simply conscious manipulations. In the second place, this view misunderstands the nature of Nazi anti-capitalism, the extent to which it was intrinsically bound to the anti-Semitic worldview. Auschwitz indicates that connection.

It is true that the somewhat too concrete and plebeian quote-unquote anti-capitalism of the SA was dispensed with by 1934. Not, however, the anti-Semitic thrust, the knowledge, quote-unquote, that the source of evil is abstract, the Jew. A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced, which, unfortunately, has to take the form of the production of goods, of use values. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract.

The extermination camps were not a terrible version of such a factory, but rather should be seen as its grotesque, Aryan, quote, anti-capitalist negation. Auschwitz was a factory to, quote, unquote, destroy value, that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to liberate the concrete from the abstract. The first step was to dehumanize, that is to rip away the quote-unquote mask of humanity, of qualitative specificity, and reveal the Jews for quote, what they really are, shadowsiphers numbered abstractions the second step was to then eradicate that abstractness to transform it into smoke trying in the process to rest away the last

remains of the concrete material use value clothes gold hair soap Auschwitz, not the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, was the real German revolution, the attempted overthrow, not merely of a political order, but of the existing social formation. By this one deed, the world was to be made safe from the tyranny of the abstract. In the process, the Nazis, quote-unquote, liberated themselves from humanity. In the process, the Nazis, quote unquote, liberated themselves from humanity. The Nazis lost the war against the Soviet Union, America, and Britain. They won their war, their revolution, against the European Jews. And this ideology, this pitting of the abstract against the concrete, is so powerful that it was never defeated. By the time the Nazis were

defeated militarily, they had, by the combined might of five of the largest empires in human history, they had already won. And their ideology never went away. If you look closely, you can still see it moving throughout the world. You can see it in the left making exactly the same mistakes it made before, waging war against the abstract in the name of an anti-capitalism that can never end with the actual destruction of capitalism in that specific form. You can see it in a right that openly espouses these exact same ideas in the form of pitting their nationalists and patriots against the globalists in the way it pits national American or Russian or Hungarian workers against George Soros. It is the basis of all modern right-wing thought.

And when we come back from ads, we are going to talk about right-wing thought's other basis, Ronald Reagan's rampant racism. We've now seen one way that the productive and unproductive worker distinction can be turned into unfathomable right-wing violence. And now we're going to take a look at another one, which is the myth of the welfare queen. So one of the ways that Reagan eventually took power was by, I mean, literally, he was doing this for like a decade. He does it for like 20 fucking years. It's insufferable. He's screaming about the myth of the welfare queen. So the welfare queen for people who like, I don't know, we're too young to like remember what I mean.

I wasn't around for the original height of it, but like i fucking remember it from when i was a kid it's this sort of like mythical racist caricature of like a black woman who lives off of scamming the welfare system and you can see what's happening here pretty clearly right this is this is not like a particularly subtle political maneuver the plan is to pit you know sort of so-called like productive workers and entrepreneurs versus people on welfare. And through the sort of incredible power of racism and specifically misogynoir, which is, you know, through the power of America's just like specific abiding hatred of black women, the identity of the worker is transformed into a racial category. So what you're actually dealing with is this opposition Reagan is trying to create between, quote unquote, like productive white people who like work for a living or whatever.

And, you know, black welfare queens, quote unquote, who are dependent on the state and don't work. And this is this is this is sort of Reagan's framing of it. Now, if you go back to the sort of older Marxist conception of class, right? Like unemployed black people are like unambiguously part of the working class. And this is something that Reagan understood. Now, part of what was going on here actually was Reagan attempting to sort of crack down on black welfare activists who were doing a lot of really incredible organizing, ranging from sort of crack down on black welfare activists who were doing a lot of, you know, really incredible organizing, ranging from sort of like, you know, organizing mass protests to like doing squats to doing like full on building occupations. And Reagan and more so the people sort of around Reagan by the end, because, you know, by like, by like term two, Reagan has like

basically checked out, you know, but the people around Reagan can see which way the wind is blowing. And, you know, they are busy sort of like lining up every fan they can find to make the wind blow a bit stronger. And the way that the winds are blowing is that a bunch of people are about to be spat out of the capitalist system into increasingly precarious service jobs or just no jobs at all. increasingly precarious service jobs or just no jobs at all. And as the sort of crisis dynamics emerged and intensified, and people tend to forget this, but Reagan's term started with him nuking the economy, setting off a recession and jacking employment up to 10%. But, you know, as this unfolds, Reagan sees a perfect opportunity to sever what Marx would call the industrial reserve army, who are all the people who've been spat out of the capitalist system and forced to face sort of precarity and unemployment.

He sees an opportunity to split these people from workers who held onto their jobs. And the way you do this is by talking about class in a way that's really about race. This new sort of moral division of productive and non-productive worker is incredibly racialized, which is to say that, like, I mean, it's just really racist. There's no sort of, I don't know,

there's no, I'm not going to do the circumlocution on that shit. It is really racist, and it's specifically designed to pit white workers against black workers. And it's also, this is something we white workers against black workers and it's also this is something we should point out here like reality has no effect on on the sort of like the actual propaganda value but like the people who are on welfare who are working like they're

off they're working a lot they're working really shit jobs they're working more than the people who aren't on welfare in a lot of cases what's happening here right is this is this this entire thing is very specifically designed to pit white workers against black workers by invoking racial prejudice and slightly more subtly it's designed to remove black workers from the category of labor altogether through you, the sort of means of America's like deep and abiding hatred of black women. Now, back in sort of reality, and again, bearing in mind, reality has no effect on this bullshit. But, you know, back in reality, like the actual biggest welfare cheat of the modern era is Brett Favre, former quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings. Please send all complaints to at I write OK on Twitter. Favre managed to spend seventy seven million dollars of welfare money on a bunch of bullshit that includes like trying to get a multimillion dollar volleyball facility built at his daughter's school.

The actual woman who was like the model for the first like welfare queen thing, like may have stolen $8,000. But, you know, this, this doesn't matter at all because again, like reality's ability to combat propaganda is incredibly weak. And, you know, and the other, the other thing that's, that's important to understand about this, right. Is this was never actually about the money. And this is something that people use to try to understand about this, right, is this was never actually about the money. And this is something that people use to try to combat this stuff, right, which people will point out. And they're right that like, yeah, like, you know, in order to like, quote unquote, combat welfare fraud, like you spend more money trying to combat the fraud that you save on the fraud. But that's not the point. That's not the point at all.

The point is, again, like turning white workers against black workers who happen to be unemployed. And it works incredibly well because they tap into two just really powerful wells of emotion, racism. And they tap into a second one, which is people hating work. right the way they tap into people hating work was they transform it into the seething hatred and resentment at the possibility of someone not having to have the suffering that you have and doing the thing that you always want to do which is not work and then tying that to oh these people don't have to suffer the way that i do because they're living off of like the product of my labor and you know you you can you can see the sort of ghosts right of like an anti-capitalist critique of labor which is like yeah there are a bunch of people who like don't work a fucking day in their lives off the process

proceeds of our labor it's they wear a bunch of suits and they they you know they they're like 17th generation like descendants of the walton family or whatever but you know this is this is the sort of right-wing version of it and so through the sort of lens of racism and through the sort of transformation of of class in of and productivity like into into sort of like pure race discourse they've managed to sort of like pure race discourse, they've managed to sort of, you know, they've managed to completely transform the way people think about class. And this is a big part of the reason

why the way Americans think about class is so incredibly messed up. And it's a big part of the reason why, you know, the United states has spent i mean spent the next 50 years doing this unbelievably merciless like ruthless purge and just like mass infliction of suffering on the poorest people in the u.s it's because of this shit and this is also the reason that no one you know if you're fucking reading the new york times right you will never hear anybody talk about black

workers they will only ever talk about white workers and this is because that ideological project the ideological project that reagan was attempting to do was a big part of it was again about an attempt to expel black workers from the popular collective imagination of the working class and it fucking worked if you're a white pundit you can do this thing you can make an entire career off of studying quote-unquote the working class only ever talk to white people because that's the only part of the working class that like exists to these people that they even will pretend matters and then you know never mentioned black workers even existing at all much less like engage with black workers is like core of the workers movements and no one outside of like actual

leftist circles were even bad and i know no one even thinks this is fucking weird right and you can get away with this shit because you know% of all discourse about class is really about race or gender, and 80% of all discourse about race is fucking white people talking to other white people. And that's where we're going to end for today. We will come back to the sort

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Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. The episode you're about to hear was recorded late last night at like two in the morning due to the time difference between me and Joe, who is based in Armenia. As you may have heard, Azerbaijan launched another attack on the independent Armenian-majority region of Artsakh, which is in territory that Azerbaijan claims. Since we recorded this a couple hours after, the Artsakh Defense Forces have surrendered. There's currently negotiations and something that's being called a ceasefire, although there continue to be reports of shelling and other violent acts by the Azeri military. happen. Tens of thousands of frightened Armenians have crowded the airport out of Artsakh. The pictures are pretty stunning and sobering out of fears that a genocide will be instituted against the Armenian populace in that area. The episode you're about to hear is Joe and I kind of talking earlier in the invasion, pretty soon after it happened, going over some of the history,

evasion pretty soon after it happened, going over some of the history, what's going on now, fears for the future. So I thought it was still valuable stuff, but I wanted to let you know the situation has advanced since we recorded this, as is often the case when you're talking about, you know, unfolding events. So thank you. Hey everyone, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. And unfortunately for our guest today, it is, again, this is not the first time that it has been happening where this person happens to live. Joe Kasabian. Joe, hey, how you doing, buddy? Hey, Robert. I would like to say it's good to be back,

but this tends to happen a lot. We did, in between the first time you were on, or the last time you were on this show, and now we had a surprise meeting in Dublin. That was a lovely time. That is true. That is true. That is true. Yeah. And now, Joe, you are a podcaster, a genocide expert and academic studying that.

And also, you know, the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, which is a lovely podcast. Donkeys podcast, which is a lovely podcast. And you are based out of Yerevan, which is the capital of Armenia, which is a country that is not yet being invaded, but is also in another way is being invaded right now, right? Like it's a complicated situation. Basically, the gist of it is, folks, if you're kind of tuning in, there are a number of different, like, little republics in the Caucasus region. And one of the, like, over the course of the last, like, I don't know, couple of thousand years, there have been a lot of Armenian people in this

area that we call the Caucasus, right? And, you know, you have your, you know, a couple of thousand years of history, you know, around the 11th century, you get, you know, some claims start being made to this area in what is now called Karbak, Artsakh. And yeah, now you've got this kind of area that is an Armenian majority region where the surrounding Azeri people argue that it is their land, their territory, that they should be allowed to take it. And there have been a series of wars that have been fighting, that have been going on over this area since the fall of the Soviet Union. And now, as we are talking right now, Joe, you and I, the Azeri military has just launched a new invasion with the presumed goal, with the stated goal, really, of retaking this entire region, and potentially the goal of engaging the Armenian military in a wider formal way, right?

That's at least the way the Azeris have discussed it. The Armenian military, the Armenian government has said like, this is not, you know, Artsakh is not Armenia. This is not like our troops and stuff on the ground here. But the azeris have basically just said like we are disabling armenian military equipment yeah it's it's you know it goes back to december of last year i mean obviously this goes back even before then but if you start talking about you know history people's eyes are going to glaze over um yeah this the the war that was fought in 2020, obviously, Azerbaijan won. And ever since then, Karabakh or Artsakh has been cut off from the Republic of Armenia through this area called the Lashin Corridor. And according to the treaty, it was supposed to be maintained by Russian peacekeepers, but it never was. and specifically since december of 2022 karabakh has been completely cut off by the azarian russian military and is effectively being starved out so it's been you know uh quite a long time and we

knew like everybody knew the war was going to come again um but we kind of assumed it was going to be in like 2025 when the russians are mandated. But it started yesterday, you know, it started yesterday. It seems like, I think it's like the Azeris invaded right after about 23 tons, something like that of essentially like bread was brought into like across the Lachin corridor, right? Like literally the next day. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

This tiny amount of food makes it into this starving populace and then the next day invasion starts since december they've done as much as they possibly could to turn karabakh into what is effectively an open air concentration camp and their military operation now what it is it it to me is it's a continuation of the 2020 war because they couldn't conquer Stepanakert in 2020, which is the capital of Karabakh. Yeah. 2020 the republic of armenia despite not you know legally directly uh fighting the war was of course helping karabakh with volunteers soldiers military supplies everything sure um this time they can't it's completely cut off and this is not a war of any kind of near peer powers the the local karabakh defense force called the art sock defense army is a self-defense group

they have some heavy equipment but the vast majority of it was destroyed 2020 so this is you know effectively like a local gun yeah trying to trying to fight the u.s army this is more or less a militia going up against i mean like the azeris one of their major suppliers of arms is israel israel and turkey yeah as well as russia russia as well too yeah um and russia is selling obviously to our media as well they actually aren't uh we've we found out i believe last year we've uh the government isn't the best at transparency i feel like okay is the best way to word that. And we have been paying Russia for weapons since 2020. They have not delivered a single bullet since the last war.

Sorry, I should have said Armenia is paying Russia for weapons. Yeah. Yeah. Once again, we are being fucked by Russia. But yeah, it's as far as the stated Azeri goals are, they're very different. In 2020, when the war ended, they could frame it as a victory because they took over all these areas that they lost during the first war, minus an area where about 120,000 people live in Stepanakert and the general outskirts there. different um it is you know the government must collapse uh you know they only gonna like this is going quote unquote until the end until they see a white flag from stepanakert so this is because now if they don't do that they can't spin it as a victory right right and you know since

december the lashing corridor has been shut for everybody. People couldn't leave. People who live in Karabakh, who are in Armenia for school or whatever, couldn't go back. And now suddenly yesterday when the war started again, they are saying there's a humanitarian corridor through Lashin. So the goals are very, very clear here. And we know from their conduct in 2020, government propaganda, just the general attitude of the Azeri government towards Armenians, which is they can't exist here. This is a liquidation of the open air concentration camp that they've created. So, I mean, Joe, first off, I guess what I want to ask is like, what is it like in Yerevan right now? Because, you know, you are not far from where the fighting is continuing at the moment, but obviously you are, Armenia is not technically involved at this point, right? Like that's at least according to the claims of the Armenian government, the Azeris allege that they are striking Armenian military targets right now. What is it like in Yerevan right now? I think everybody is, I mean, you can see it on everybody's

faces. Like they're just, they want information. They want to know what's going to happen next. There's a lot of protests yesterday and into the night because the prime minister came out and said, like, you know, we're not going to get involved. And he's not exactly very popular, despite the fact he kind of is our best option at the moment. So there's a lot of, you know, rightful anger towards him, towards Russia, towards the EU. You know, you name it. Everybody's mad at everybody. So there's different protests. Yesterday, there was Fuck Russia protest. There was Fuck Nikol Pashinyan,

who's our prime minister protest. There was a combination of the two protests. They all kind of met in the middle. There was some fighting with the police. I heard reports that quite a few people tried to break into government buildings that all seemed to have cooled off by that because I went down to the area where there was protesting and I didn't see any of that but it seemed to have also started up again after I left but again it's only day one people's anger is only going to get worse as the situation in karabakh gets worse um yeah you know the fall of karabakh when stepanakert if and when that occurs i have a hard time believing that the current government here in armenia will survive um they'll either resign be forced out you know an unfortunate

third option might happen especially with with the messaging coming from Russia, where they're blaming Armenia and specifically the prime minister for all of this. Because since September of last year, Armenia has been doing decent diplomacy in turning towards the West. There's American soldiers in the Republic of Armenia right now for training. We've sent supplies to Ukraine. We've all but left the CSTO, which is like Russia's shitty version of NATO. Yeah. So this is clearly not very functional, right? Like, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a fact. I mean, this is a green lit punitive expedition on Russia's behalf, effectively yeah and this is um you know a couple of things so like obviously the way in which the the paper on paper alliances here kind of like

chart out is is not um friendly to the sort of like soundbite media of our current day right because um armenia on paper on paper, Armenia's big supporter has been Russia recently, right? As well as Azerbaijan. The day before Russia invaded Ukraine, they cemented an alliance. But because Azerbaijan's been very overt, I guess you could say,

and their support for Ukraine, giving them money and supplies here and there, non-military supplies, but humanitarian supplies. This gets spun in the brain-dead infosphere as it being another Russian ally, that being Armenia, is being invaded. Or people equate Karabakh to Crimea and Ukraine's war goals. and ukraine's war goals and since azerbaijan is you know a pr ally of ukraine and supplying the eu with gas and supplying you with russian gas as well it gets spun as like people are cheering for azerbaijan which is is absolutely baffling to me like it i wish i could say i'm confused or surprised but like when you treat war like it's a team sport,

you want to put on your favorite football jersey or whatever, this is how it goes. When Karabakh declared independence from Azerbaijan during the Azeri Soviet Socialist Republic, when that was legal to do, and the state that they have created is one of the most free in the region, whereas Azerbaijan, according to the Freedom Index, is one point above the Taliban-controlled

Afghan state at the moment. So this is not a liberation. A dictator cannot be a liberator. No. And a lot of what is happening and why Azerbaijan is engaging in aggression right now is due to what's been happening to like the price of oil and like what that's done to the Azeri economy. Right. Like this is a like I mean, it's a pretty standard page in the authoritarian playbook. Right. Of course. right of course i mean they're classic fascist dictatorship and so far as you know every problem in the state that they have of which they have many because it's effectively a kleptocracy built around a petro petro dictatorship is caused by armenians they're you know every single anti-azari

piece that gets published in any media and you can use the term anti-Azeri to mean literally anything, is funded by the Armenian lobbying group. I mean, any Jewish conspiracy theory that we all know and hear about constantly, in Azerbaijan, you just replace Jewish people with Armenians, and it's functionally the same thing. So we're this global superpower with our tendrils and everything, but also we're weak and pitiful and need to be destroyed. It's the same kind of messaging that we're used to hearing for classic fascist propaganda. And, you know, as far as like why they're doing it now is because they've so ensconced themselves in the European good good graces in the over the last little bit they know nobody nobody's going to stop them the eu literally can't and the united states i mean

they're an outside player when it comes to european politics at least internal politics and they are only loosely connected to azure by john They do some military funding, but it's mostly to do with these weird ghosts of the early global war on terror where they're looking for friendly Muslim powers that would act as counter-terror forces. But Azerbaijan is secular. This war has nothing to do with us being Christian or them being Muslim.

Yeah. Though it does tend to be framed that way by the worst people imaginable. Yeah. It slots conveniently for a lot of people into those. But like this is, I mean, again, as I tried and, you know, this is, we're kind of like throwing this together in media res, but like this is, we're talking about like this is the result of a very long period of of conflict and movement of peoples in a region where they have been for thousands and thousands of years right like that's like it's not i would say the current uh conflict is mostly rooted in

about the last 30 35 years um i mean mean, the ancient history gets thrown around a lot by like propagandists, but this is a direct result of the Soviet Union's policies. It has nothing to do with like, you know, the 1300s. Would you take it back though to like World War I, right? Where you've got this like very brief period where like Azerbaijan and Armenia and Georgia all attempt to have this almost little Caucasus UN or EU of their own, right? And then they all get gobbled up over the course of the end of the war by Turkey and then by Russia.

That's kind of where it all results from, right? At least that's my understanding of it. If you want to go back that far, it has more of a result of early Soviet policy and specifically Joseph Stalin before he took over the Soviet Union. He was the head of like the the office of like minorities effectively. Yeah. He he is a Georgian. Yeah. He's it's so is barrier yes and he

would he'd redrew the borders to include what is today Karabakh within the borders of what effectively would become the Azeri Soviet Socialist Republic and during the entire period of the Soviet Union which you know a lot of people like to frame as this there's no problems of the Soviet Union, which a lot of people like to frame as this, there's no problems when the Soviet Union controlled these areas, which is magical thinking. There were protests by the Armenian populace, right? wanted either A, Karabakh to become its own Soviet Socialist Republic, or B, to be given to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and away from the Azeris. And failing that, they declared independence, which was within their rights under the Soviet constitution, which did exist. I mean, it was largely fluid and completely ignored as we see today. And that's what, that triggered a lot of different pogroms

between Azeris against the Armenian population within Azerbaijan. And Armenians did the same thing here as well. But that started the first war, which ended with Armenia winning and Artsakh becoming a de facto independent republic, not recognized by anybody to include Armenia. And it's, I mean mean it becomes at that point kind of one of a series of sort of little frozen wars during this this kind

of like early 90s period where the u.s was there was this there was some belief that the u.s would act if like these conflicts got out of hand that was like off often proved wrong. Right. Like the best comparison is effectively Kosovo. Yes. Yes. The only difference is that because of geopolitics,

you're getting involved in this war, whether it be in the nineties in 2020 or today is it's not geopolitically advantageous, today is it's not geopolitically advantageous like telling azerbaijan to go fuck themselves by supporting uh art soccer medians doesn't help anybody geopolitically um if if it was russia invading us it would be raining weapons from the west but geopolitically doesn't benefit anybody to support us. And there's this concept of ethics and morals from superpowers, whether it be the bastion of democracy in the United States or this concept of European ethics and morals in the EU. That's all propaganda vaporware. It's not real. If your country is being helped

by any of these countries, it's because it benefits the countries that are helping you geopolitically it's not because of they they support whatever it is that you're doing you know and because the republic of armenia itself is kind of in the situation as well but the people of artsak are certainly in this situation. And so, like, right now, I mean, honestly, like, what is there to do but watch, right? Like, is there – do you have any kind of, like, hope for sort of positive productive action at this point? Or are we kind of stuck in this, we're going to see what the next chapter of this conflict looks like as it kind of rolls out here? Well, there's two options, really. Stop it through military force, or let the largest genocide of the 21st century go unimpeded. Because the reason why our prime minister said that the Republic of Armenia is not going to get involved is because it literally cannot.

We have Turkey on one border that will almost certainly be involved if we do. The Azeris also have guns pointed at our southern border, which they have said for years now they want to conquer. The Armenian military is not a superpower by any stretch of the imagination. And since we are not connected to Artsakh in any feasible way, it would require a massive counteroffensive to just relieve Stepanakert from the current siege, right? There's a reason why it didn't happen when they were being starved. So Armenia lacks the ability to stop this. However, there's multiple countries in the world, mostly France and the United States, that could end this in five seconds if they truly wanted to. Yeah. You mentioned at the start that there are. troops who are in Armenia right now. And my thoughts are drawn back to in 2019 when Turkey carried out an expanded invasion of some of the regions in northeast Syria that composed Rojava.

And U.S. peacekeepers pulled out previous to that. Now, the U.S. troops who were in Armenia were training. They were not there as peacekeepers. Right. They have no mandate to do anything. And there's only like 200 of them from some national guard unit it's not like it's a you know brigade combat team and pressures whatever you want to call them are simply not going to happen the european union is not going to sanction azerbaijan they rely on their oil and azerbaijan has only become more powerful in this petro diplomacy since russia invaded

ukraine um the united states has no functional sanctioning powers over azerbaijan that could really affect them and not to mention as we've seen since the russian invasion of ukraine the sanctions don't stop wars yeah i mean they never had like again this is something the left is supposed to know right after like what happened with ira Iraq in the 90s. But like, they don't, they don't do anything. No, of course not. I mean, the only thing that stops a genocide is military force. And there's never been a genocide that has not ended from military force from one actor or another. I might push even a little bit to say that like one thing that in this case, I think could potentially at least reduce the risk of certain kinds of genocide is like keeping US troops in the area, not even as like a viable combat force, but as a like, all right, Azerbaijan, if you are going to like disrupt the territorial integrity of the actual armenian state um then you know

we've got people who are in country and and so you'll have to you'll have to kill them you know and that's that's something that people have been arguing for a long time now not necessarily americans exactly but some kind of international peacekeeping mission because we all knew that what russia was doing like right this war benefits them as the the previous instability in the region benefits them because it allows them to have their hooks into armenia which is why we're kind of worried of what happens next year because if azerbaijan does complete the conquest of stepanakert which unless someone gets involved they will they will i need to be like i need to be practical about these things um and once that happens

russia won't have the sword of damocles hanging over the republic of armenia's head anymore so it does make it does make us wonder like and everybody is very very stupid if they think azerbaijan stops with artsak right in september of last year when i was on your show they were invading the republic of armenia they were not invading karabakh or artsak they were invading the republic of armenia and their stated goals have not changed the only thing that would happen is that this thorn in their side over the last 30 years would not be there anymore. They would have no impediments at all within what is considered their own borders. They could focus everything on the Republic of Armenia. like you only have to go back to this time last year to see that is not the case the only thing that's going to happen is maybe they'll take a little bit of time the war is coming to armenia this massacre will come across our borders it's only a matter of is it one year two years three years that that's the only thing so without some kind of immediate intervention, the slaughter will continue until they're defeated.

You don't negotiate with people who want to murder you. It's impossible. No, you can't. And it's also – this is a very dangerous situation in part because like the reason why Armenia is acting now, right, in part is because they have been watching and I think like keying and like sort of editing their behavior as a result of how the Russian campaign in Ukraine has gone, right? Yeah, they definitely see it as a way to get away from Russia. I mean like any small state in Russia's sphere is doing right now with with the exception of Georgia, who's kind of doing the opposite. Yeah. And there is this, I mean, one of the things that is really unsettling right now is there is this, there has been kind of a freeze in a number of conflicts around the world that we have seen thawing out for the last, really the last five, six years. It's been particularly

like accelerating this kind of like thaw in a bunch of these old frozen conflicts. And part of why is that there's this understanding by a lot of these regional powers that like, well, if I kick the fucking door in, nobody's coming after me. Right. And Azerbaijan understands that to a certain extent, which is why they acted the way they acted last year in September. I mean, the CSTO is a joke, but it does have a mutual defense clause just like NATO does. So an invasion of our borders should have triggered it. And that was if people had some kind of not sure if Russia could commit to other things, that cemented it for a lot of people. It cemented it for Armenia specifically. I mean, we're,

we're still technically legal members of that Alliance, but we have no representation in anymore. We don't take part in trainings. We don't go to meetings. We're functionally out of it. Um, and we certainly will be after this, I believe,

but I mean, the, the, the, as an example of how you can't really negotiate with someone with this kind of ideology in so far as from this position like i'm not saying that like this only ends with international peacekeepers hoisting a flag over baku yeah with this kind of power discrepancy the the azaria government has said that they will negotiate with the government in Stepanakert,

in Karabakh, once they dissolve and lay down all their weapons. So once you completely disarm and get rid of all of the ways you can defend yourself from the obvious slaughter that's coming your way, then we'll talk. Is that really a way of any negotiations could ever happen? Being realistic, of course it's not. The government of Karabakh is the only thing, Is that a way of any negotiations could ever happen? Like being realistic? Of course it's not. The government of Karabakh is the only thing. The government of Karabakh and the small local self-defense force is the only negotiating little crumb that they have. Because it's stopping them from being murdered and for people who think i'm being like i'm overreacting or something look at how they treated that any armenian civilians that

fell into their hands into the 2020 war they cut off their ears they cut off their fingers they cut off their noses they fucking beheaded them it was like watching isis videos but they're wearing multicam and wearing fast helmets yeah and. And they publish them proudly on the internet. They're not ashamed of this. You can only imagine what happens when a city of 100,000 people falls into their hands. Yeah. And that is, I mean, we're looking at... It'll be Warsaw in the 1940s.

Something around, like, yeah, about 100,000, 120,000 people who are still there. Our media cannot solve this problem. No. We do not have the power to force them to the negotiation table to guarantee the rights of existence for people where they live. The countries that do are now friends with the country that is doing it. So it requires some actual diplomatic spine. And the thing is, you is, the joke is every time

someone is deeply concerned about something, you take a drink and then you die of fucking alcoholism. But you can't say, we call for an immediate cease of the military offensive without an or.

Or what? Or fucking what? What are you doing? You can't use strong words to stop a fucking ballistic missile. Yeah. There needs to be an or. We're staring at about a century. Since we had a series of conflicts, many of which were based around different sort of, like, regional powers scapegoating and then carrying out acts of tremendous violence against groups

of people, including specifically the Armenians. Every time, like a tale as old as time, it's being treated as an anti-terror operation. And you can go back to 1915 during the first genocide, and it's the same exact excuse the Ottoman Empire used. Well, and it's being treated, you know, that's how the Azeris are excusing it. But over here, when you're talking about US politics, you're talking about Western politics, it's a thing that's happening over there, right? It's a couple of countries that most people don't know very much about. And what is our – why are we involved in this? Why are we involved in this?

And it's like, well, because this is the thing that we said, like, after a hundred something million people died, the idea that we all kind of came together with was, well, we should probably stop folks from doing some of the things that led to all of those terrible wars. And you often hear people frame it as, oh, those people have just been fighting forever. Yeah. No. We. No. We haven't. It's been within my lifetime. Like, I'm 35 years old. This war is not older than I am. Yeah.

There was not always mass violence between the people in this region, right? Like, Azeris and Armenians have not been killing each other over Artsakh for thousands of years, right? No, of course not. There's Armenians and Azeris that were neighbors. They used to live next to one another. We're not this intractable millennia-long

enemy. This isn't one of those conflicts that... I mean, you shouldn't do that with any conflict, because it's a scapegoat to get you to stop caring and educating yourself about it. But specifically in the context of this episode, certainly not this conflict. This conflict involves very recent events. Yeah. And it's, it's tied to major geopolitical events happening in the world right now that whatever country that you're living in and listening to your country is involved in.

in the world right now that whatever country that you're living in and listening to your country is involved in and it's i mean like the the the actual as far as i can see the actual like realistic solution here because this is not a case right i don't think like shipping a bunch of fucking weapons is a realistic thing to hope for like the actual realistic case for stopping this is putting people in the country that uh provide some sort of like barrier to azeri aggression right like that's like it's taking action we need the same thing that we did for kosovo yes yes that's exactly what we need without uh without any kind of negotiations or debates like, that is the only thing that'll stop what is coming. It's not an if. Like, this is coming.

And hey, online left people, you know, the Azeris are buying Israeli arms. Like, this is a situation in which, like, we're not talking about, we don't need guys kicking in doors. We literally need dudes standing around to create a barrier by the sheer political fact of their existence. Right. That's all it takes.

And not to mention, if you're trying to frame this in like an anti-imperialist context or whatever, Azerbaijan is literally a fascist fucking dictatorship. Yeah. Like, yeah, Armenia, we have our problems. Karabakh, they have their problems, you know. azhmashan is literally a fascist fucking dictatorship like the yeah i and armenia we have our problems karabakh they have their problems you know but they're functioning representative democracies and with with people in land that they've lived on it's i mean there are other people who are indigenous to that land as well but it's it's all also theirs it's if you want to think of it in that way which i don't really like to do because it's it's all also theirs it's if you want to think of it in that way which i don't really like to do because it's it's dirt but the the real issue here is the people the people's lives

are like it doesn't fucking matter who controls the panikert at the end of the day if people are allowed to live there and live their lives in dignity in the way that they choose to live them yeah but that's not going to happen if the fascist dictatorships genocidal armies come storming through right it's it's simply impossible and that's one of the main reasons why karabakh uh karabakh armenians and the armenian state as well has continuously said that karabakh can't exist within the frameworks of the Azeri Republic because the Azeri Republic is demonstrously, uh, uh, anti Armenian.

Like for instance, if you have an Armenian surname, like I do, you can't even go there. It doesn't even matter if you've even been to this country or not. Simply existing is enough to be denied entry. Like it's, it's not a place. I i mean if you want to see

how they'll be treated look how they treat their own fucking people yeah it's like asking anyone to be liberated by the fucking forces of north korea or saudi arabia or something it's obscene it's absurd the the only thing that like and i'm not saying i support the government in Armenia. As anybody who knows me, I don't support any government. But the only constant track they've had is we support their right for self-determination, as anybody should. And they voted in the 80s to be on their own. Not to be part of Armenia, not to be part of Azerbaijan, but to be the Republic of Artsakh. Because they're the only people who care about their own rights, their own dignity and their own right to existence. That's all anybody should ever defend is people's rights to do that.

Yeah. And ever since they've made a functioning state with free and fair elections, ministries that handle these things, ministries of health, ministries of defense, ministries of education. It's a functioning republic. It's not some statelet that barely functions. And the powers invading it don't only mean to destroy the separatist power. They mean to destroy the people that live there. There's no room for them to exist in this country. So, Joe, what do you expect us to see coming in the next couple of days here?

We're about 24 hours in right now to the renewed Azeri attack on Artsakh. What is your kind of expectation for what happens next? Well, the Artsakh Defense Army is doing their best. Obviously, they're fighting as hard as they possibly can. However, without immediate international intervention in some capacity, I mean

physical intervention, a you-will-stop-or-this-will-occur type situation, it's only a matter of time until it ends yeah yeah i think that's um and to quote the former head of doctors without borders you cannot stop a genocide with doctors yeah there's only one way to stop it and you know like i've said a million times before i believe before on your show yep the only thing that's allowing this to go on is the unwillingness

of literally anybody to get involved there's a couple of quotes about that yeah exactly it's not a new concept yeah and genocide studies as someone who studies war studies genocide and has fought in war

war is fucking awful and i don't want it for anybody i don't want a zary kids to conscripts to be fucking dying for this i don't want armenians to be dying for this but the only thing that's going to stop it is someone who is not armenian not a zary and certainly not fucking russian to say stop or we will fucking stop it. Yep. Yeah, I think that's I think that's as good a point to close on as there is as we're going to find at least. Joe, do you have anything

else you wanted to kind of like bring up before we roll out here? I would. This is normally where I would say you could support the people involved in this in this way but unfortunately there's it they're under siege they're surrounded nothing can get to them there's i got nothing man yeah i mean that that is the reality right it's like there's nowhere to send money there's nothing to like and to be quite frank, I mean, I think people should be harassing their their representatives over this. But, you know, I'm not overly optimistic. The Biden administration has been making noises, you know, but but I you know, I have not seen

evidence that they're going to do more than that yet. So I hope they do. The United States gets involved and they really want to turn Armenia to the West, which they absolutely should, there's no better time like now, this is the chance to do it. You want to show that the West is the way for Armenians and pull them completely away from Russia because everybody wants to get the fuck away from Russia. There's thousands of people marching down the street literally saying, fuck Russia russia yesterday but you need to give them a path to do so and this is the way to do it yeah well shit thanks joe sorry sorry we keep having you on the show in this uh this situation i uh we'll we'll we'll come on and talk about something. I don't know. We probably won't.

Um, neither of our shows ever talking about anything. Neither of our shows talk about anything lighthearted. Um, check out Joe's show. Lions led by donkeys. The lions lit by donkeys podcast. Great military history podcast.

Joe, uh, thank you for, for being on. And, uh, please. I don't know. Uh, good luck. Thanks for being on and, uh, please, I don't know.

Uh, good luck. Thanks for having me on Rob. Yeah. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Hi everyone, it's me James. And just before you hear the episode, I want to warn you that you can hear our telephones going absolutely mental

for much of this episode. That's because as we were recording, people found out that SDG&E, San Diego Gas and Electric were restricting access to one of the sites where migrants were in need of aid. People were very concerned about that. So they were reaching out to James and Jacqueline and Pedro to ask for assistance and to me to let me know if i could get the word out and that's why you can hear our phones going crazy and i think it it's it's good that it's in there in a sense because perhaps you can get a sense of how mad the last few uh weeks have been for for everyone like our phones have constantly been going off I'm sure mine a lot less than James and Jacqueline's and Pedro's because people are overwhelmed and they need more help than we're

able to give. So consider that background noise a blessing and I hope you enjoy the episode. Thanks. Hi everyone, it's me, James, today and I'm here again to talk about the border. Today, I'm joined by some guests. I'm joined by James and Jacqueline from Border Kindness, who we've heard from before. And I'm also joined by Pedro Rios from the American Friends Service Committee. If you guys would like to introduce yourselves and explain the kind of role you play along the border, that'd be wonderful. If we start with Pedro, because folks haven't heard from him before, that would be great. Great. Thank you, James. And it's such an honor to be on the show together with folks from Border Kindness, James and Jacqueline. It's great to see you. Again, my name is Pedro Rios. I'm director of the American Friends Service Committee's U.S.-Mexico Border Program, which is a Quaker-based

human rights organization. I've been on staff now for 20 years working in San Diego on border issues, and it's been a whirlwind of two decades of work being able to follow this topic. which is documenting civil and human rights abuses that occur when contact goes awry between primarily federal immigration authorities with members of civil society, including migrants and border community residents. Documentation could be cases involving abusive practices, abusive policies, cases involving abuse of authority, and so on and so forth. We also do a lot of policy analysis and advocacy at the local level, at the state level, and at the federal level, trying to hold agencies accountable, making them more transparent, ensuring that there are oversight mechanisms and how they operate. And that's done in conjunction with several coalitions at the county-wide level in San Diego,

but also at the national level with the Southern Border Communities Coalition and other organizations as well. And then we obviously work in allyship with a lot of other organizations that have campaigns of mutual interest, some of which have been going on for a long time, such as the Friendship Park and trying to gain access, public access to Friendship Park, which currently is being impacted by the construction of two 30-foot border walls. And we also work directly with community members in providing information about what the rights are, how they can become and are leaders in their own communities, and how they can be active in straightening their communities and providing guidance to other people who might be in the same circumstances.

So in a nutshell, that's the work that we do. Yeah, great. It's very important work. And then James and Jacqueline, do you want to explain? Folks are familiar, I think, with Border Kindness from the previous episode, but maybe what have you been doing in the last, I can't remember, two weeks since people started being held out in the open again? So in our organization, it's kind of always evolving with like the evolving needs at the border. And over the last, I want to say like year in particular, we've really started to emphasize our services being present in the rural border.

to emphasize our services being present in the rural border. We're based in Mexicali primarily. Our water drops are generally in the Imperial Valley region. And we started to extend our services to the rural community in San Diego County with regards to like day labor, providing aid to the migrant community that's living in rural communities. laborer um providing aid to migrant community that's living in rural communities so all that to say when the border appeared to be having one of its episodes of chaos that's happened in the last couple weeks um with folks being detained between the walls um down in san isidro and then folks being you know just dumped out into the street at the transit centers that we've been seeing all over San Diego County we sort of held off because we

knew this was going to happen in Hakuma it was kind of one of those sixth sense kind of things like when you see the writing on the wall and it was like only a matter of time before people ended up pushed into rural San Diego County and unfortunately that has been the case so we were actually out in the desert doing a water drop and heard that that in fact had occurred and there were hundreds of people in Hukumba so we've been out there providing aid ever since yeah so perhaps we could describe these so there are like three things i think people would benefit from knowing about one is the detention of people between the walls in san isidro which i think pedro has seen a lot of i've seen we've seen each other down there several days the detention of folks in the open desert in Hukumba and this dumping of

migrants at various transit centers across the county. Those are the three things that we've seen in massive numbers this last couple of weeks. So perhaps we could start with explaining Hukumba and then Pedro can take on explaining the other two, because I know he's been responding to those. So can you just tell us what you saw, the number of people, the conditions in which they're being held, that kind of stuff? Yeah. Usually what we're seeing now, I mean, now it's currently what today?

What is today? Wednesday? Wednesday, man. I know. It is, yeah. I woke up this morning and asked Jacqueline what day it was because it it, it just seems like a broken blur, you know, the day in and day out. But, uh, we are on Wednesday and us that's Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, every day so far, we have noticed a revolving door of roughly 200 to 250 spread out between one to three camps every day. There's a camp on the

east side in Hukumba. There's a camp that's on the west side of Hukumba. And then there's a camp that's just outside Hukumba and Boulevard. That seems to be the biggest camp right now. there's a camp that's just outside hakumba and boulevard that seems to be the biggest camp right now uh that camp is the largest one because it's kind of hidden uh you gotta drive down from the the main highway you have to drive you know at least 15 minutes you know down some dirt roads back roads you know past ranches and stuff like that to get to that yeah open air camp where the other ones and especially like we saw in may were more like wide open closer to the towns closer to visibility closer to highway access and so what we've noticed is that speaking with the locals and seeing for ourselves that every day the camps that are more visible are having less people

coming in and they're being taken out faster and so that part i think is you know could be done for for a multitude of reasons but the camp that's hidden and out of view is the one that seems kind of strategic and seems calculated on a greater level that as people are being loaded up on vans or buses to be taken out for processing, almost the same amount of people gets walked in to that camp from the actual border by border patrol. So it is definitely an odd situation that's going on there it seems definitely calculated orchestrated and something that um you know we feel that will be going on for quite a while yeah let's um when we talk about that right so like people are crossing uh and then being being transported like you say on foot by Border Patrol to the camp. That's your understanding, right?

To that camp near Boulevard, I'll say. I don't want to give the exact location. Correct, yes. We witnessed that as well. We witnessed on Monday night that we were there to help distribute food and warm supplies. And I think a total of five or six Border patrol vans um had you know about a hundred people or so uh lined up and and loaded up onto those vans and then right as they were getting ready to have the last two vans leave we saw in the distance in the opposite direction, Border Patrol, their truck driving behind a group of roughly 80, 85,

you know, new migrants coming in on foot. Yeah. Right around the corner, there's a gap in the fence. Yeah, I saw people walking in. I was there the day before you guys, so I was there early. Actually, I was there only Monday morning, and I saw the same thing, like, you know, sort of just after dawn. I couldn't make out who was walking whom just because it was only Monday morning and I saw the same thing just after dawn. I couldn't make out who was walking whom

just because it was dark. Can you explain briefly, and then we'll move to Pedro's situation, can you explain the services that are provided for them by Border Patrol and then what is provided for them by volunteers? By Border Patrol it's essentially nothing.

When this occurred in may we heard that at most people were receiving an eight ounce bottle of water daily um not really organ distributed in an organized manner currently we're observing that people are when they arrive they're at times provided with a 16 ounce bottle of water and potentially a little toddler size pack of goldfish crackers. Border Patrol is not providing any other continued services, food, shelter, sanitation, anything like that. Those things have all been organized at a community level by a variety of organizations such as ours that's comprised of just regular people. So it's the government's task of managing a humanitarian crisis. They have really outsourced it to the general community of supporters. So they have taken not just the role of not having any responsibility towards

caring for migrants in like the most basic manner, but it also seems like they have come to expect the general community to come in and fill the gaps that they're not meeting. So border patrol is not providing them with anything it's everyday regular people that are showing up with blankets food water hygiene items it's getting really cold so people are distributing warm clothing diapers formula anything that people need is being provided by the community. Yeah, yeah, that's a good summary, I think. So Pedro, could you explain how the situation is in San Isidro and then also at the transit centers?

And it's a pretty similar situation, I think. Yeah, sure. I'll start with San Isidro. And the location where community members and organizations have set up is known as Whiskey 8. There are at least three other locations that we know where encampments have formed. One is Whiskey 4, which is close to the Las Americas Shopping Mall. It's an outlet mall closer to the port of entry. And then about a mile west of Whiskey 8, there's Spooner's Mesa. And then close to that, there's Spooners Mesa and then close to that there's 91X. The Spooners Mesa is primarily where the men's encampment is has been arranged and and this happened back in May there was an incident

where Border Patrol decided to move all the single adult men and walk and marched them essentially about a mile up a hill and then up another hill to get to Spooner's Mesa. After some advocacy last week, we convinced Border Patrol to allow two of us to go up there to feed about anywhere between 380 and 400 men. And it took us over an hour about an hour 15 minutes to feed all of the men fortunately we just barely had enough food for all of them this was in the evening and as we were driving in and driving out all we could see was mylar blankets strewn about and that's all that was up there and these were the men that were these mylar blankets down in whiskey eight how community members and organizations have arranged the solidarity support stations have been in in four sets so you have the charging station you have the medical

supplies and other items station then you have the food station and then the water station. And so we try to maintain the medical supplies. The food station is available only when we have enough food to provide sustenance to everyone there. We don't want to create a situation where we only serve half of the people or a quarter of the people

and then the other people go hungry. And mind you, it's important to point out that when people arrive there, they are hungry, they are thirsty. Some of them have scrapes because they scale the primary border barrier and injure themselves. Others are wet because they've walked through the canal to get to that location. We've also witnessed on several occasions where Border Patrol will tell people who are injured to are supposed to transport, escort, detain and search people under their custody. They are obligated to feed, to provide water, to provide shelter, to treat medical urgencies anytime that individuals are under their custody. that individuals are under their custody. There is some back and forth. Border Patrol locally will say that individuals are not under their custody until they are being transported, even though

they will provide them with a wristband or a bracelet. In some cases, tell them to remove their shoelaces. Direct them to where they should be walking. Yell at them when they're not forming in lines in order to be picked up sometimes throw a fit and will not pick people up even though they're supposed to be there to do that because people are not in lines as quickly as they should be all of this to uh several of our organizations indicate that border patrol at some to some degree uh has people under their custody and as such um isn't is violating the these national standards because it's not meeting their needs at at any level besides maybe the bottle of water might provide and the one or two granola bars they provide per day if even that yeah i think it's a the national border patrol pio also claimed to me that they were not detaining people and that people were free to

quote return to mexico which like these people aren't from mexico and in many cases uh and like i think the first day i maybe i saw you speaking to one family who had come from Mexico, but the vast majority of people weren't. They'd also be entering Mexico between ports of entry because they're in the United States at this time. So yeah, it's just not... Those people are... There's lots of evidence that they're being detained, even if they say they're not.

What then happens to those people? We've all seen it, right? These vans pull up. They generally process people in a certain order, which is to take unaccompanied minors and women who are alone with children and then families and then single adults. What happens to them once they get on that van?

Do we have a clear sense of that and where they end up? They will be taken to any one of several Border Patrol stations for processing. And it's at that processing stage where most of them who are in these locations are there because they want to present themselves to the authority and begin an asylum claim. And so it's how they answer the questions while being processed that they get tracked mostly for asylum. There are some that will be quickly removed from the country expeditiously, but most of them will be tracked for asylum. They will be given a court date when they should show up,

and that court date, the court location depends on where the final destination will be. Technically Mexicans can only be detained for 48 hours. Non-Mexicans can only be detained no more than 72 hours. So within that detention period they then are being transported to one of four locations in San Diego County, two of which are in San Diego, the San Ysidro Transit Center and the Iris Transit Center, one in Oceanside and the other in El Cajon. And so we're seeing the majority of the people being transported to San Ysidro and to Iris. And that's where colleagues with other sister organizations are leading the charge to try to support them with assisting in charging phones, providing food, clothing, getting them to the airport, getting them transportation, getting them housing. And as much as limited as that's possible, trying to connect them with lost family members because families have been separated.

There are adult children, 18, 19, who also are trying to figure out where their family members, because families have been separated. There are adult children, 18, 19, who also are trying to figure out where their family members are. And then in some cases, as a conversation I had with a man from Venezuela, he had no idea what city he was at, even though he was in San Diego. And so trying to make that type of arrangement and clarification is always challenging as well. Yeah, and obviously also expensive, right? Like these things all place burdens on your donation network

and both in sort of the community in general. And perhaps we can talk about, because the scale of support that's been provided by the community is extremely impressive, given how many people have already come through this sort of not detention detention system um but perhaps both of you could talk about like the support you've been able to provide and how people who are not in san diego can help you continue to provide that support

so the first day that we heard uh folks coming in, because obviously it's interesting because Border Patrol, like Pedro says, like they're claiming that these people are not under their care, but they're very much acting as if they are under their detained care. They're telling people that if they call an ambulance to seek medical care, as we observed, they say, well, that's going to affect your case if you leave. And so people are very much under the deliberate impression that they are being detained, but they're not being cared for in the most basic way. And so we first responded on Saturday. By Sunday, we were there with 500 meals. sunday we um were there with 500 meals that went very very quickly um providing shelter items for people so tarps um hakumba is a very rugged desert terrain um there is no shade in these areas so people are making sort of like makeshift shelters um but there is nothing shielding them from the sun, which is really unrelenting all day, and it gets up to the 90s. So we've been providing tarps, pop ups, that sort of thing. So people are not becoming sick from overexposure. We're providing hygiene items, we're providing

just basic needs. And that gets incredibly expensive because if it was a static situation, such as in May when there was 1,800 to 2,000 people, that was a huge undertaking that also took a lot of community collaboration to meet the needs of so many people. But this time around, as James says, it's like a revolving door of hundreds and hundreds of people so it's taking hundreds and hundreds while at any given time there may be only and I say only two to three hundred people it doesn't mean that two only two to three hundred people needed to be fed that day

it's that you know that is who is there at that time. And when people arrive, as Pedro said, like they haven't eaten in days. We talked to people that said that they took two days to walk to Hakumba. So if they arrive to Tijuana without much food in their belly, and then they're having to walk for two days, they're arriving starving and begging for food and not being provided with absolutely anything. and not being provided with absolutely anything. So if it wasn't for all of the organizations that are showing up and taking sort of shifts to feed people, there would be nothing for them.

And we have absolutely no idea how long this is going to go on. It could be over today. It can go on for months, year. I mean, we really don't know what to expect. And organizations are being relied on to provide, you know, life sustaining care for people. But we're not being communicated with from Border Patrol as to basically anything. What the outlook is, what the numbers are are what the updates of how the situation is going

to evolve so every day is a surprise and we need to have resources to be able to meet the needs of that day it's incredibly like consuming of every resource including time and gas is six dollars a gallon yeah yeah now and you need to drive your right? Because like you can't get to some of the locations. Like I know I have a bigger truck and lots of my friends about to catch a ride with me because their cars can't make it there. Exactly. Like we have people that have gas efficient low Priuses and stuff and they're going to bottom out out there. So we have our huge lifted Jeep that, you know, doesn't get as much gas mileage as something but it's also going to be able to get the supplies out there so every aspect of it is incredibly consuming of

resources um and we don't know what to expect it's not it's hard to budget you don't know what to expect so the community has obviously come together in support but then it's like well how do we manage this when we don't we can't forecast what's going on um so it's tough it's definitely tough we need sustained support if i may add on that as jacqueline said the people are showing up hungry haven't eaten for days uh you know we get reports that you know people are showing up just begging for food and the federal government more specifically dhs more specifically cbp border patrol know this they're trying to stall people out whatever the end game is it may be just another arm of

you know prevention through deterrence it's cruel it's on purpose people you know are are the pawns in whatever you know game is being played and it's cruel and that's you know we're doing what we can to try to offset that as much as possible but cruelty is definitely there all across the border just to kind of build on what james said like i think it's very easy for this construct of migrants to like always be like this sort of demonized other um fox news and kusi and all these outlets do that very well uh but i think it's really important to like the people who we're being cruel to like i saw a lady breastfeeding in the desert on sunday night

i've seen grandparents i've seen people who are eight months pregnant little children uh like these aren't like people who have done anything wrong uh and they just uh for whatever reason they're coming here doesn't really matter they don't deserve to be treated like that and like james said like it's something of an induced like i've been to natural disasters all over the world and reported on those and seen those and i've been to refugee camps all over the world but like it's something of a unique to the u.s problem that our federal government can click its fingers and induce a humanitarian crisis and then hold its hands up in the air and say, we can't help you. Aside from dictatorial regimes in places I've reported in, governments don't do that very often.

And like James said, it's these people who pay the price. It's not us for the most part. And like James said, it's these people who pay the price. It's not us for the most part. Pedro, could you maybe explain a little bit of how American French Service Committee has been able to respond and the resources you've used and how you can help make this a little bit less painful for the people who are being held in between the fences? Sure. Learning from the experience that we had back in March, April, and May, we heard a few weeks ago that there were people lined up in an area that we could not see from the US side, but could be seen from the Mexican side, just west of the San Ysidro port of

entry with people wearing and using Mylar blankets. And so the Mylar blankets were an indication to us that people were there for probably longer than four hours. And so we kept monitoring that, asking colleagues in Tijuana to inform us if they had seen any other groups like that. And off and on over the past month, there were reports of that. And it wasn't until about two weeks ago that someone said that they were there for a long period of time. So last week, we set up what we called an observation post at Whiskey 8 so that we could determine for ourselves how long people were there, what sort of needs they might have, and how to respond, whether to set up the solidarity support stations again. And quickly quickly we determined that that's what we needed

to do so we called our colleagues from other organizations universidad popular for instance has been extremely helpful in leading the charge in different places um the uh appreciate collective some mutual group also has been extremely important in in having their people out there and friends of friendship park also has been important so all these organizations that been extremely important in having their people out there. And Friends of Friendship Park also has been important. So all these organizations that responded quickly and started to build from the experience that we had back in late spring, setting up these stations to charge phones. Phones are a lifeline for people. back in may border patrol threatened us and they said if you want to keep feeding people you can't be charging their phones and so we said well we're

going to have to keep charging phones because people need them and unfortunately border patrol backed off then and and now it's part of what we do right we charge phones and and it's how people are able to communicate with their loved ones, especially if they've been separated. Eating people is just as much as we're able to, even if it's just a sandwich, even if it's a warm meal that we're able to get through the bars or the secondary border barrier. That could mean the difference between someone staying healthy or someone becoming seriously ill. Bandaging up small cuts could relieve someone from getting an infection. Identifying when medical emergencies pop up. So an eight-month pregnant person who is suddenly having labor pains and having and needing to call 9-1-1, for instance, or insisting with Border Patrol that the one month old child cannot remain overnight in between border walls and just

insisting and insisting and insisting, insisting that the two port-a-potties that they have there need to be serviced, for instance. And so all of this advocacy is happening at the same time that our colleagues and allies are also feeding people and the constant communication with different elected officials, pushing on them to take charge and to respond has been one of the different aspects of our response to what is a humanitarian disaster that has been slowly evolving, I would say over years and years, because human migration isn't centered around humanitarian needs and human rights. It's been centered around enforcement, around militarization, around cruel deterrence, as James was talking about, which creates conditions where people are led to suffer. And that's what we're seeing right now, people

suffering because of how this has been manufactured, how immigration has been dealt with, regardless of who's in the White House, over and over and over. And so now we're challenged to respond to these humanitarian needs in ways that are stretching our limits. But we're able to do it and hopefully lifting up the dignity of people that are placed under these terrible, inhumane conditions. Yeah, I think it's very important to give people a little bit of dignity as much as we can. One thing that you mentioned that we haven't spoken about and we should is elected officials and local, federal, state governments. How much support, if any, have either of these from Senator Steve Padilla's office.

That's been, to me, impressive to see how much interest there is, how much advocacy there is from staff from that office. We have not necessarily had much support from congressional or federal senators. We have not seen them really on the ground. There is a responsibility, I believe, that the County of San Diego has to meet some of these challenging circumstances at the transit centers. They're balking, I feel, and to the detriment of people who need these services and need the support. I believe the San Diego Police Department has been suggesting where people should be dropped off and not listening to folks on the ground about how the Iris station should be central and not

dividing the drop-offs between Iris and San Ysidro cedar for instance so there's a lot of uh a lot of um necessity for local governments to be coordinating with state and federal governments and and that's lacking um again to the detriment of people who are caught in the middle how about uh james and jack and have you seen any sort of government support no no not at all i've you know heard through channels of uh you know sources that work for the county and they claim that they're handcuffed or that it's border patrol's responsibility and the border patrol is saying it's the county's responsibility and it just it seems like uh pointing fingers no one's trying to take you know responsibility for it and maybe that's

because it's going to be something that's going to go on for a while it's not something that either wants to you know take on the the responsibility of and you know you've seen county supervisors speak out against it pushing the blame people are here this is san diego county this is the united states someone needs to take care of you know the people here that's that's the role of the government that's why people pay taxes for you know for services and services need to be provided for you know we pay taxes so other people can get services as well. Citizens, non-citizens, like that

to me it seems so easy. In theory. In theory. Yeah. I mean, that's everything that you've been told, but everything that you're not seeing in practice. So, I mean, this whole thing is, to us on the ground, it seems so simple of how it should be done but

like you know anytime and we spoke on i think on the last episode as well like money's big issues they're going to spend all this money they need to make sure that their money is going in the right pockets that they want it to yeah like i was sitting out in uh in hakumba with a with a colleague and uh we got overflown by a uh-60 black hawk like a border patrol helicopter and it just hovered around checking us out and like it's just so i don't know it's just so depressing to see this helicopter which costs millions of dollars which are thousands of dollars just to take off next to the border wall which costs 12 million million a mile. And like on the same day that the San Diego city council filed an amicus brief in this

case of the Supreme court to allow it to further criminalize and house people. We have all these resources and we're just throwing them as Pedro said, enforcement and criminalization of the most marginalized people in our communities, rather than giving a thirsty person a bottle of water or like a little baby, a blanket. And yeah, it's really hard. It's one of those agents over time of the day could literally feed everybody there. We're all like, you know, calculating calories per dollar of like the meal and trying to get like every single dollar to stretch because we don't know how long this is going to go on because we know that um public

perception and interest is something that is not um sustained and that's on purpose too because for instance border patrol is claiming um and they were on what outlet was it? CBS, CBS, a local San Diego said, you need to report that the Hukuma camps are cleared. There's no one's there. I just you know, I had to step away from this. This recording for a few to get an update that there are people still showing up. There's getting trying to get cleared out as quick as possible as people show up. There's getting, trying to get cleared out as quick as possible as people show up because it's in the public eye,

but also now the power company is threatening a legal action and criminal action against any aid orgs or people that show up. Oh, great. Cool. That'll be fun. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

The reporting on this has been poor, even more poor than it was in May. I'll say like out in Huk fun. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the reporting on this has been poor, even more poor than it was in May, I'll say. Like out in Hukumba, yeah, it's hard to get to. James and I both spent a decent chunk of yesterday morning trying to direct people how to not get lost out there. But like, I think more pertinently when there is not an election or like a narrative that migration fits in, it gets certainly by national outlets forgotten

um with the end of title 42 in may i think everyone had their like uh sort of doomsday op-eds in in the weeks beforehand uh and then that that that didn't actually happen in the way that that it had been sort of like quote-unquote experts uh who don't come to the border very often had predicted it it would and and so folks turned up as especially at whiskey eight and did this did this sort of crisis story but we haven't seen that this time and you know now it's it's appearing really different because like you see sort of the management by border patrol of the situation in order to sort of shield the public from like the true level of the crisis.

So in claiming that the Goomba has been cleared, I suppose that's technically correct. If they referring to the, you know, they're, they're relying on the reality in order to, so people, the average everyday person that's not immersed in this is going to read that and be like oh good

it's been cleared because like my family back home knows a lot of like really conservative folks out in the imperial valley and like even the most conservative people i knew back in may were like oh my gosh how could they have babies out there in the desert that's so horrible and people had you know a lot of really strong emotions to seeing families huddled in the desert that's so horrible and people had you know a lot of really strong emotions to seeing families huddled in the desert for a week um now it seems like there's a really deliberate um management of like the pr with respect to this situation so yeah like relying on the technicality of hakumba being cleared because the main camp in town has been cleared, but 10, 15 minutes away, there's still hundreds of people. And we're the ones that are out on social media screaming into the void and to each other, Hey, this is still happening.

People are, you know, there's an amputee out here whose leg is bleeding. There is someone out here who hasn't had his heart medication for a week. Like those kinds of situations are occurring still while the report and the public perception is like oh hakuma's been cleared it's all good so unless somebody's like already involved they're generally not hearing about it and i think that's on purpose too yeah yeah yeah i think it's yeah that's a very that's a very niche technicality it might not be within the boundaries of the town of akumba but like people are still being corralled in the desert with no services and that that's what we should care about not not which district they're in or what have you so i think people have probably heard by now that things are bad and we don't know how bad they will be and then maybe they'll get worse maybe they'll get worse. Maybe they'll get better. And hopefully they'll want to support.

So how can people do that? Like what resource, like what, I guess, like concrete actions can they take? Where can they give you money? How can they send you supplies? If they want to volunteer and they're in the county, how can they do that?

And what kind of volunteers are most needed? Yeah, for Border Kindness, monetary donations are the biggest help that allows us to meet current needs, daily needs. We're on Venmo at Border-Kindness, Cash App at BorderKindnessCash, VellInfo at BorderKindness.org. With respect to volunteering, volunteering is pretty sensitive. We're not, we understand that our team is already incredibly taxed.

So we do need support in terms of like food preparation and getting supplies out there, transporting supplies, but it is a very sensitive situation. So we do want to um i don't know if vet or we want to be able to um talk to the people that want to volunteer so certain expectations um that they may have or certain needs that we may have are all communicated really clearly so the organization alrolado very amazingly agreed to help us with that task of screening volunteers. So people,

if they are wanting to do so and come out to Hakumba to email volunteer at alotrolado.org. Perfect. Yeah, that's really good because i'll send you that info and they can just say like what are they interested in doing where are they located and that sort of thing and then we'll be in touch primarily i mean more than anything like 20 is a tarp to cover a family and keep somebody shielded from the wind. Yeah. We can feed a lot of people with $100. So financial support is the most direct way,

even though it's not necessarily always feasible for people. It is the most efficient way for us to be able to buy items in bulk. Yeah. And like even five bucks, right? Like maybe that's two people and it really makes a day to have a hot meal. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Anything helps.

So yeah, people can definitely do this. How about for American French Service Committee, Pedro, how can people donate, volunteer, help? Yeah. I mean, I would also stress what Jacqueline said in terms of vetting people and volunteers. It's, you know, It's not easy work. And we want to make sure that when people are volunteering, that there's a certain level of emotional strength that people are able to have. It's very tough work. And at the same time, make sure that what we're doing does not negatively impact those that we are presuming to want to help.

And so that's important. I think going through those channels, if you, you know, the folks that are leading the work at the transit centers, check in with them first. But then there are other things that could be done. The other day, someone showed up with 20 boxes of pizza. You know, very useful, easy way to support connecting with people and finding out what the needs are. That's another way. If you would rather purchase the tarps yourselves, for instance, do that. And then we can pick them up.

We can find out how to meet and pick up those items. If you want to donate, there are multiple organizations doing this work. I believe someone was working on a list to produce. For us, going on the website, afse.org, and being sure that you find our location San Diego so that our program then receives that donation directly if the program goes to the overall AFSC we won't see it so just be very mindful of

when you're donating to AFSC AFSC dot org first locate the San Diego program office and then find the donate page on there so that we can be assured that you are sending it to our program. Or you can definitely contact me and I could also assist you with that. Yeah, I think that's great. I think it's important that both of you sort of

centered with regard to volunteering that like there are organizations that exist to serve volunteers through facilitating like a service experience to them and that that's not what is happening here like this is about serving people who are very vulnerable so like there has to be some kind of vetting process and and uh people have to understand that like that's part of keeping those people safe and uh that that's why that's happening so yeah thank thank you very much for this we'll keep covering it obviously um and i really hope people can find uh some some resources to donate because it's been very taxing uh financially in all these groups and and in our community generally is there anything else you guys would like to share before we finish

up um the only thing i would add is that um you know, pressing the authorities, that's the other way. If you are able to connect with the county or your county supervisor in San Diego, press on them that they have a responsibility and an obligation to respond to this in a way that supports people who need to support. And that's where I would push towards. Yeah, I'll add to that, that having spoken to people in the county and in state office, like if you call, that makes more difference than if you email. So if you have the time to make a phone call,

that could help a lot. Anything else from you, James and Jacqueline? That's what I can think of. I mean, everything changes daily. So if we were to record an episode every single day, I'm sure I could come with something new. Yeah, yeah. For to to stay clued in with channels of communication such as this podcast that are actually with people on the ground um and share that with their community is

really important like we're already getting like some social media kind of comments i mean it happens every time about how we're aiding and abetting people breaking the law but it's the government breaking the law they're breaking international asylum law and it's really important for people who aren't um as versed in all of this to to stay aware of that that everybody who is presenting for asylum has a legal right to do so not that it matters i mean they have like it's a humanitarian right yeah but for people who are very concerned with legality or at least they um lean heavily on legality um presenting for asylum is a is a legally protected right and that's something something that is actually being um cut short by the government in violation of that yeah i think you're right it doesn't really matter like i really don't give a shit about like no but it

come back people that really are about it you know yeah yeah yeah it's good to it's good to remind them that they are wrong both morally and legally exactly yeah so what would your social medias be if people wanted to keep up to date with what's happening border kindness on instagram tends to have the most up-to-date comment i mean shares of like what we're doing and that will have updates like in our stories and our posts of how to help what's going on. How about you, Pedro? We're terrible with our social media, but you can definitely find some of our work there.

AFC San Diego. Just look for AFC San Diego. Mine is Pedro Conzafos. Pedro Conzafos, mostly on Twitter, some IG, and I'll be updating some items later today. Perfect, yeah. One more question, because people contacted me in May to ask if they could donate air miles to facilitate travel for folks after they've been paroled into the US.

Is that something that AFSC can do? There is another organization. I'm not sure if that's what you just mentioned. Now the miles for migrants. Yeah, miles for migrants. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Wonderful organization and that we've used through some of our other sister organizations and getting people to their final destinations. I would say that might be the best way right now. Okay. Yeah. So that's the thing people can do if they happen to have a surplus of those. Great. Thank you so much for your time.

I know you're all extremely busy. I appreciate it. And yeah, hopefully people listening will find a way to support if they can. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Great, thank you. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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