Pod Save the World - Trump endorses a dictator

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Tommy and Ben talk about Trump’s endorsement of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and what it says about the future of democracy, the latest on Biden’s efforts to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine, China and Lithuania, a major election in Chile, and a look ahead at some of the world’s most important elections in 2022. Then Ben talks with author Howard French about his new book “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World.”For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Potsie of the world. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, the pandemic is over. Yeah. Congress has solved all this problem of 2021. Yeah, here we are. Just plowing right ahead, surging into the new year. Feels very same? Well, maybe worse. I don't know. I don't know. I feel worse. Yeah. The aggravation is really just building up into something fun. Although I'm hopeful that this this Omicron thing, it's going to be like a one-month problem. Pandemic-wise, I'm actually, yeah, like, curiously hopeful for someone who has been on like on the crown lockdown and dealing with new school closures and the rest of it. The school stuff.

You can kind of see a light flickering there at the end of a very long dark tunnel. Long dark tunnel. Okay. Here's what we got for you guys today, dear listeners. So we got Donald Trump endorsing Victor Orban of Hungary, Ben's longtime friend, Victor Orban. Talk about how that folds into this broader conversation we're having this week about our democracy. the latest on Russia and Ukraine. There's some news about China and Lithuania that you flagged.

It's very interesting. A little note about Hong Kong. There was a major election in Chile. And then we're going to talk through some of the big elections ahead of us in 2022. Finally, I got some clickbait for you about the Queen of England, the happiest interaction with the bank in history. And then, Ben, you just finished our interview for today. Who did you talk to? What are listeners going to hear?

I talked to Howard French, who was a longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times. and has a really important new book out called Born in Blackness, which is basically about how we don't fully understand the history of the world because we've kind of erased Africa from that history. And the book is extraordinary in its own right. We talk about the argument behind it. But also, you know, there are issues on this show. We talk about like Molly and Haiti where I think the context is important,

why these places are like they are today. So he kind of connects the dots between the history of places like Molly or Haiti. and why they look like they do today. The colonialism and the U.S. role. Yeah, and it goes even deeper than that. I mean, the imperialism is only the latest version of the calamities that have befallen these places. So I thought it's important sometimes to kind of look under the hood of these places that

we talk about that just seem like a mess, right? And then we talk about Africa's future and what it's going to take, what the potential is and what the potential problems are. So good to cover Africa more than we often get a chance to do. There's a big news over the break with Desmond Tutu's passing. There's sort of constant talk about the challenges in Ethiopia and Somalia. So yeah, I'm very glad you guys did that. Ben, if you want to feel better informed about 2022 in 2022,

make sure you subscribe to our daily news podcast, What a Day, which are the biggest events of the day, the stories you don't want to miss in 20 minutes or less. And if you want COVID news without the click base, without the fear porn, without the Twitter fighting, listen to America dissected with Dr. Abdul-El-Said. He is smart, he's reasonable, he's experienced in public health. He'll help you figure out what you need to know, what you need to not freak out about.

Episodes drop every Tuesday. Subscribe where you get your podcasts. Okay. So, Ben, is Insurrection Anniversary Week, so happy. Happy anniversary to you, Tom. Incerction anniversary to you. Of course, what better way for President Trump to kick off the celebrations? Than by endorsing Victor Orban, the autocratic prime minister of Hungary, who brags about slowly strangling Hungary's democratic institutions.

I think the last time we talked about Orban in depth was when Fox News's favorite white nationalist Tucker Carlson was over there for a week broadcasting from Budapest. Over the last decade, you know, you've talked about this extensively. You've written about it. Orban has consolidated power in Hungary by restricting press freedom, packing courts, gerrymandering, rewriting the Constitution. election laws, school textbooks. I was reading today about how he influences the culture of the government there even appoints theater directors to ensure that, I don't know, it's culturally consistent with his government. It's insane. Ben, so I sort of half-joked about this being insurrection anniversary week, but what do you make of this endorsement and how do you think

Trump and the right-wing's embrace of Orban folds into this conversation that we're having constantly about the U.S. democracy and the threats to it. Yeah, and I'm going to try to figure out a new way of attacking this because we've talked about this a bunch. And to me, I think what's so important is, you know, you have to understand, right, that Orban is a guy who has not only kind of turned this democracy into an autocracy, but he's been very clear about the fact that that's what he's doing, you know.

He's proud of it. Yeah, and so the reason, you know, I start my book there, right, in 2014, he gave a speech in which he said that the future for the West is not democracy. It's something he called illiberal democracy. And he said that countries in Europe and the West generally, and that includes the United States, should look to like Russia and China as the model for the future of government and society, right? So the reason I think it really matters is this is the whole ballgame here, right? Like a guy like Orban just comes out and says out loud what he is doing, which is trying to erase liberal democracy and create an ethno-nationalist autocratic model and system that Putin had already created before him.

And Orban did a lot to copy Putin. That Erdogan has done in Turkey, that Netanyahu has tried with varying degrees of success to do in Israel, that Bolsonaro has tried to do in Brazil, that Duterte has tried to do in the Philippines, that Modi is trying to do in India and on and on and on. And when you step back from the day to day, you have to realize that we are entering the kind of decisive question period of whether that will succeed. So Trump is the leader of the Republican Party and now just says out loud, this is who I want to align myself with. This is what we're doing. He's not he's not pretending to be a small D Democrat. He's saying, no, I'm with this crowd. And the entire Republican Party is with this crowd too. Orban has an election this year.

The opposition is doing everything they possibly can to be able to contest that election. We've talked about how they've all gotten behind one candidate. They've chosen the kind of most conservative small seat candidate because that guy's most likely to win. And if they can't win like that because Orban has so sufficiently rigged the system, it's hard to see that they ever will. Right. And the same way here in the United States, though, the Republicans have rigged the system for themselves, right? through gerrymandering, through eviscerating campaign finance, through packing the courts,

all the same things that Orban has done hungry. And if they can succeed in the midterms in 2021st and then creating a pathway to 2024, like, this is the whole ballgame people. So I think that the reason the endorsement matters and Trump saying it out loud matters in the context of our midterm election, Orban's election, some of these other elections we're going to talk about later in the show, is it this is really the future of whether or not Orban is right and Trump is right that it's not about democracy or whether democracy can survive. Yeah. Yeah.

And look, just so people don't think we're overstating it. I mean, Trump endorsed him. He met with Orban in the Oval Office in 2019. Orban had been denied an Oval Office meeting since 1998. Orban endorsed Trump in 2020. So this is sort of a bit of old school politics. But it's not just Trump. Bannon and Steve Bannon called him a hero.

Mike Pence went to a conference in Hungary last year. CPAC is doing. their conference in Hungary. Right. I mean, it's the whole right-wing infrastructure and ecosystem that's behind this guy. Interesting thing I read about in preparation for today. So later this year, the European Court of Justice, which is like the EU Supreme Court, is going to decide if the EU has the authority to basically condition funds that they give out to member states on, you know, condition them saying you have to meet these core values. Do you think that will have a meaningful impact on Orban at this point or is like the horse out of the barn here? The horse to

some extent is out of the barn, but this is a step they should have done a long time ago, because they give him billions of dollars a year, because Hungary is a poor member of the EU, they get billions of dollars for things like infrastructure projects. And Orban has just stolen from skimming massive amounts off the top. He gives the contracts to all of his cronies. They skim off the top and use that money, literally, to finance Orban's corruption, Orbons politics, all these things. And so this is the EU final. saying we're going to condition this and kind of use this as a pressure tool against people like Orbán. He's not the only person in the EU that they might have to consider this for.

Poland next door is another country that has undergone serious democratic backsliding. But I mean, I think the point is that if we're not going to take this seriously, we're going to lose. And it's time to start to use every tool at our disposal of those of us who care about democracy to show that this is out of bounds. But again, like it's the same thing here Tommy like it may be too late here the the the extent of gerrymandering the extent of voter suppression laws you know we're playing catch up in all these places it's not like a starting gun went off these people have been playing a certain game for for 10 years and you talk about the republican party i mean one of orban's biggest lobbyists in the u.s connie mack a former

republican office holder they've both both urbond and the republican party trafficked in this kind of anti-Georos conspiracy theorizing. They've got these deep tentacles that all connect. And we have to be as connected as small D Democrats, progressives, center-left, you know, all of us who care about democracy. I mean, frankly, I kind of try to think of this podcast as part of that interconnection. We bring different voices in and it's a forum for that because, you know, that's what they're doing.

Yeah, that is what they're doing. I mean, you hear it all the time on Bannon Show. I mean, here's that, like, I shouldn't look for coherence. in like Trump's policy views and right-wing policy views. But here's one glaring and coherent part of it, which is that the main boogeyman for the right-wing, at least on foreign policy, is China. But Orban has relentlessly pursued closer ties with China.

Hungary was the first European country to join the Belt and Road initiative. Orban told Mike Pompeo to fuck off when he was trying to help them keep a telecom company called Huawei out of Hungary. Hungary-blocked EU efforts to criticize China over, Hong Kong. But is it, do you think that Orban's like anti-immigrant kind of like right wing religiosity just kind of glosses over all of that? Like how do they, how are they okay with both of those things? I think that what it shows is, because you're right, I mean, Orban, the single largest Huawei production facility outside China is in Hungary, right? They closed down George Soros's

university in Hungary and replacing it with a massive Chinese university, which is apparently also like a probably like a giant listening post. Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yes. To spy on NATO and stuff. So it's like a security threat and economic vulnerability on all the rest of it. I think the important thing that it shows is some Republicans may sincerely hold these kind of anti-China views, right? You're kind of Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, wing of the party. But at the end of the day, it's an autocratic party committed to autocratic power on the basis of white Christian ethno-nationalism, just like Orban's party. Yeah.

That part in the pun, trumps everything else. Yeah, transides everything else is secondary to the accumulation of power on behalf of their ethonationalist agenda. And you have to think of the Republican Party in that way, in the same way that you think about some foreign government party, you know, that that, you know, has other interests and other policies that they talk about. But what they're really only about is the accumulation and maintenance of power for their set. And that's where we are in this country.

And we're not accustomed to thinking about political parties like that. We think of them as like a collection of different factions and interests and policy positions. Whereas Republican Party is about, it's really just about one thing. Yeah. It's far easier to unite people in that sort of like tribal, my team, your team way. Okay. So dark stuff there. I'll just transition to Ukraine because unfortunately, tensions are still pretty high between

Russia and Ukraine. There was a flurry of activity over the holidays. Biden and Vladimir Putin talked for about 50 minutes on December 30th. That must have sucked. Biden threatened sanctions. Putin threatened a major response to any sanctions, so no breakthroughs there. On Sunday, Biden called President Zelensky of Ukraine. Jinzaki gave a read out of that call and said President Biden made clear that the United States and its allies and its partners will respond decisively of Russia further invades Ukraine. So again, again, nothing particularly new there. But Ben, there was an interesting report in Reuters about a possible way the U.S. might punish Russia if this invasion happens. It was about certain export control measures that could be part of the response,

along with economic sanctions. What do we know about this new, you know, export control measure response? Well, first of all, I mean, you mentioned this report in Reuters, and it was, you know, you used to do this time. Strategically. Like, yeah, it was, it was clearly like, you know, they weren't, they weren't concealing. It wasn't like somebody learned. Right. It wasn't like, you know, we're hearing that this may be happening.

It was like someone sat us down and walked us through something we're considering, right? And what this is, when you talk about export controls, you know, there are different kinds of sanctions. And some sanctions are like, you're trying to freeze people's assets. Some sanctions are kind of trying to cut off certain companies from the financial system. And export control is like, denou is, like, denou. denying the capacity of a country like Russia to import certain materials, right? And what the very specific proposal in this Rotor story alluded to was denying Russia the capacity to access certain materials that are pretty essential for everything from smartphones to their defense industrial base. We're talking about semiconductors in particular and other inputs into, you know, really key Russian industries, right?

So you try to cut them off through this tool from the capacity to do everything from manufacture aircraft and smartphones to other defense technologies. And so, you know, I think what they're doing here is a few different things. On the sanctions front, they're just trying to get a little more specific in saying, you know, we're considering these types of options that are going to have a big impact potentially if they're multilateral, if other countries play ball with us on not just, the Russian economy, but the Russian capacity to sustain like its military machine, you know, then they're also, you know, trying to shore up the rest of the alliance, particularly European allies, to go along with that, but also on the NATO front to say if Russia moves further into Ukraine, it's actually going to bring about the opposite of what they say they want, which is to get NATO out of Eastern Europe. They'll be kind of a beefing up of NATO presence in Eastern Europe. You even saw Finland, you know,

float potential NATO membership, right? So NATO expansion, which Russia obviously doesn't want either near its borders. So you're going to get you, Vladimir Putin, what you don't want, right? Not just sanctions, but more NATO in your space. And, you know, you see these allusions to the fact that if there's an invasion of Ukraine and some resistance, like we might support that in some fashion. You flag that in one of the stories. I mean, basically, there are suggestions not just in reporting about the U.S. response, but about Ukraine's response about how they're military. has been designed to kind of like divide into smaller parts and sort of morph into an insurgency. I mean, that's some some sobering stuff.

Do you think Putin has the same concerns about getting bogged down in a war in Ukraine when he doesn't have to answer to voters, really? I mean, I realize like an insurgency backed by the U.S. drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. So there's some history here. But it does seem like their desire to take back Ukraine is a little deeper, a little more emotional than, I don't know. What do I know that about Putin's? No, I think you're right about that. I think that at his core, right? Like, you know, and I looked at the 20 years of Putin for my book, like, not only is he

a Russian nationalist, but he's a Russian nationalist who really believes Ukraine is a part of Russia. Yeah. And Georgia is, you know, to some extent, a part of Russia. There's a humiliation. Yeah. So it's a humiliation of the Union, but it's also like Ukraine is different than certain other Soviet republics, like Kazakhstan or something, that he's not seeking to bring back

into Russia. I think what this all adds up to is the Biden team trying to signal like you are about to overreach, you know. And Putin does, you know, like Putin doesn't, one of the reasons you know he's concerned about this is that I remember when we're in government, the evidence was that he was covering up the loss of Russian life in Ukraine. Like he didn't want that broadcast in Russian media. There was all kind of hush, right? And that shows a vulnerability. Like he doesn't want body bags coming home. He probably doesn't want enormous expenditures in a war in Ukraine.

And so I think the message that the Biden team is delivering is, hey, if you do what we think you're about to do, you're about to overreach in ways that are really going to hurt you. So therefore, let's talk. And that leads to the diplomacy. And there these meetings coming up led by Wendy Sherman on the U.S. side in a few days where I guess they'll have these conversations about quote unquote European security. So far, the Russian proposals are non-starters. about them, you know, like basically NATO leave Eastern Europe. But the question is, can you direct

that to like, you know, going back to the solution to the unresolved war in the parts of Eastern Ukraine where Russia has been active, which was supposed to be this kind of demilitarization of those two provinces of Ukraine and some autonomy for them that's never been fully implemented. If you can somehow steer all this energy activity towards like trying to resolve the existing conflict in Ukraine, you might forestall the other one. And look, I'm similar on this one, the Biden people are like they're trying to play the best hand they've got, you know, and because at the end of the day, you can't control Vladimir Putin. No, you certainly can't. This export control thing is interesting. It's a little, it's a little ennerving to me. Like, in that Reuter story, there's a mention about how we did sort of a similar action during the Trump administration, uh, by denying a chip or something to China that went into Huawei phones. I just made me think like, what if the Chinese said, okay, Apple, you can't. manufacturer phones in China anymore.

I mean, it seems like we'd be slightly fucked. The two could play at this game in a way that could be really scary. Yeah, no, and Apple, you know, will no longer be a $3 trillion company. No. I mean, the, you know, because Apple doesn't just sell phones in China. Like you said, they manufacture. Yeah, I mean, they're trying to diversify out of it, but I imagine that Foxconn is still doing a lot of work in China.

I bet. I mean, you're right. And, like, what it makes you, it's another proof point that we could be heading towards a kind of complete severing of whatever supply chain, feeds China, Russia, and their autocratic partners and the supply chain, the rest of us depend on. And I don't know, the faster that happens and more disruptive, it'll be economically. Yeah, big time. Sicking with China for a second.

So Ben, you flagged this very odd story. So Lithuania evacuated all of its diplomats from China because they were concerned that the Chinese wouldn't recognize their immunity from prosecution. NPR had a big piece on this. They described the evacuation as so sudden that some diplomats had a least. leave their pets behind, which I'd like to note as monstrous. Yeah, it's horrible. So the background here, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations from the 60s, I think, codified this concept of diplomatic community, which says, if you're a diplomat, you're serving abroad, you can be expelled

from that country, but you can't be susceptible to a lawsuit or prosecution. That immunity can be waived if, like, the U.S. ambassador to Canada murders someone in Toronto, right? Like, you can get, you'll probably get prosecuted. You'll probably want to be. wind up in a Canadian jail, but they're trying to protect them from, you know, intimidation and let diplomats do their jobs. So the Chinese government demanded that Lithuania's diplomats give back their diplomatic credentials after Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open an office in the Lithuanian capital. As we've discussed before, China thinks that Taiwan is their territory and they wildly overreact when anyone suggests otherwise, which in this case also included blocking

Lithuanian exports, recalling their ambassador to Lithuania, and just generally downgrading diplomatic relations. So, Ben, I'm not surprised that China would bully the shit out of like a country or three million people like this. But it did seem, I don't know, do you think they thought through the prospect of potentially unraveling one of the foundational principles of diplomacy? Like, they don't want us arresting a bunch of Chinese diplomats in Washington. You know, this is why I kind of flag this.

I read this story and I kind of did a double take. I was like, what? They basically shut down an embassy, you know, and it didn't get that much attention. But like there's two things that jumped out to me. One is it like Lithuania's got some, can we say? Some stones? Yeah, they got some stones. I mean, because they've also been the safe haven for the Belarus opposition.

And they've had these interactions with Taiwan. And they're clearly a country that is run out of fucks to give. Where do you think that comes from? Three million people. I think it comes from being a former Soviet Republic. And so their identity and their connection to the idea of freedom to use a word that has gone out of favor is really intense. And they're willing to take some hits for it. But man, this is, you know, because like we use these Cold War paradigms.

Like in the Cold War, we had embassies in places. Right. I mean, that's why this stood out to me is like, this is kind of more extreme. This goes back to like the 1700s. when you would arrest like the king's cousin before you've done a war. It just, so to me,

it's this kind of weird bellwether of like, where is this all headed? Like, you know, we're not even going to have like embassies. I mean, it just shows you how intense

the Chinese pressure is. And if you decide to take a stand like Lithuania did, you may just need to leave the pets behind. Yeah. Don't bring your dog to the, you know, Beijing embassy.

Well, and if you look at it, remember, the Chinese arrested, the Chinese Communist Party, I always like, you need to differentiate, arrested like a couple

Canadians when the Huawei official was arrested in Canada. I mean, like, we're, we're entering into like waters that even in the Cold War. Yeah, that's basically kidnapping, right? I mean, that's reciprocal prosecution. Yeah.

And so this is, you know, I just, like underneath the surface of what's happening in the world, there's like some pretty extreme sorting out happening in terms of like, the China block and China Russia block and the rest of the world. Yeah, I should have said hostage taking, not kidnapping, but you get the concept.

Yes. Another just quick update that I noticed over the break, Ben. So it's worth flagging for listeners that press freedom is dying, if not all but dead in Hong Kong. Most recently, a crowdfunded site in Hong Kong called Citizen News announced that they're shutting down after Hong Kong police rated the headquarters of another outlet called Stand News, arrested six staff and board members. So, you know, we talked back in the day about the crackdown on Apple Daily, another major formerly independent news outlet in Hong Kong. This is another series of arrests, another series of, you know, intimidations and threats that are just shutting down the free press,

so it's just very sad. Yeah, I mean, just me, there's what's so striking about it too, again, like it's in keeping with the theme here, but like just a couple of years ago, there was like a very vibrant free press in Hong Kong. You go there and there's a lot of different newspapers and magazines and, you know, different options. You know, there was a growing Chinese Communist Party line. But here we are, fast forward, just a couple years.

And they basically eradicated the free press entirely, you know. Never mind the fact that they're also seating now the quote-unquote patriots-only legislative body there. After having a quote-unquote patriots-only election. And I don't have to go into deep analysis to inform you who kind of makes it. Who counts? The Patriots Assembly. You and I would not be patriots in that thing. So Hong Kong, I mean, the transformation is just extraordinary in just a couple years.

Yeah, Carrie Lamb was asked about this press freedom stuff, and she just did a what aboutism, clapback bullshit thing. I mean, it's just a totally. Well, she's kind of the Vichy government official there, you know. Yeah, it's these people, yeah, yeah, it's really, it's sad because Hong Kong has been this kind of vibrant center of culture. And now, you know, they're just going to try to turn into another Chinese city. Yeah, yeah. Here's some exciting news out of Chile. So Gabriel Borreach, he's a 35-year-old leftist candidate, handily defeated his right-wing opponent named Jose Antonio Caste and will become Chile's youngest modern president. Castes, the conservative here, spent the election arguing that Borreach was a communist stooge, but in a nice show of unity, he immediately conceded on election night when he realized he lost. And he actually personally traveled over to Borich's campaign headquarters to, like, have a meeting that night and, like, show unity.

so that must be nice. Yeah. Remember when that used to happen here. Borreach rose to prominence over the last few years during protests over economic inequality. Actually, I remember talking about this in 2019. It was initially over like the Santiago Metro Fair went up. Yeah. This podcast has been long enough that we've been around for a while.

Students in the streets are not running the country. Literally, literally. So, you know, this guy is, you know, he's young. He's from the left. He represents a firm break from Chile's past as a dictatorship. He has pledged. to tackle climate change. She wants to turn Chile into a basically European-style social democracy, which will be challenging with a divided Congress, but, you know, it's a good agenda. Turnout was high.

56% of the country voted in the runoff. I don't have been your thoughts on Boris this election, what it says. Well, I mean, a few things. First of all, he won by a lot. He won by 11%. It just crushed, right? So this was a decisive win. And it does speak to the kind of culmination of a years-long effort on the left in Chile, right? He pronounced it, you know, Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, right? You know, with Pinochet and a bunch of right-wing economists in New York Chicago. Neo-Liberalism could mean so many different things, depending on who you're talking to. Exactly. It could mean Pinochet. It could mean us and you know, I never know what a neoliberalism. Well, he said it's going to be the death of neoliberalism in Chile, right? So that's his agenda.

I don't like that version. But I mean, it's the bad version. It's definitely the worst version. Pinochet throwing people out of helicopters. Great. But, you know, well, but economics would lead to inequality, right? And so he really wants to tackle inequality, which is great. Significant raises in taxation and dramatic increases in social services. He's going to have to navigate both the fact that they're rewriting Chile's constitution at the same time that he's beginning to govern. And he might have to run again, depending on how that process goes.

Depending on that process, right? But if he succeeds and he can kind of run this gaunt, and I will say he's moderated a bit, you know, over the course of the election from being like at the far end of the left to trying to bring in other people into his coalition, which is good. I mean, a sign of somebody who wants to get things done. I'm not just saying that because I'm not not the Neo-Lib here saying like, no, no, no. The reason I was smiling is because he's young enough to like be pretty online.

And I think it came out that he's like a big Taylor Swift fan. And like there was like impressions he was doing maybe. It was very, very funny. I mean, yeah, I'm for T. Swift. It's great. Yeah. I think that the other thing that we've talked about a bit on this podcast, though, is that like while we, you know, we don't focus that much on Latin American politics in the United States.

It's like, it is moving so fast the left. Well, that's what I want to ask you. Yeah. Because people always talk about, they say Chile, a lot of the coverage is like, oh, Chile is the bellwether in Latin America. They move first, right? They were the first to break from the U.S. during the Cold War. They elected a socialist that ended with a coup and the Pinochet dictatorship and the U.S. had a horrible role in propping them up.

That's conversation for another day. One of Henry Kissinger's finest hours. Yeah, really. Great work there, everybody. But, I mean, do you agree with that take? Like, do you think there's evidence suggests that we are seeing this? broader liberal progressive wave in Latin America? 100%.

I mean, and if you just think about the Argentina moved to the left in their elections, Honduras, we recently talked about moving to the left, right? Now Chile moving to the left. You've got Lula out of prison, poised to take back power in Brazil and move it to the left. Colombia has had a right-wing present increasing protests against things like inequality. They have an election coming up, right? Every election. In Bolivia, right, where Avaoara's party came back.

Every election is sending a message that people in Latin America are absolutely fed up with the extreme inequality there. There's a strong environmental component to these movements. There's been strong movements for abortion rights. Mexico governed by a left-wing post, right? And at the same time, like, what did I see in the news about America's Latin America policy yesterday? The Biden administration is sanctioning Airbnb over its activities in Cuba. What is going on? It's just like Americans visiting Cubans, staying in their homes, paying Cubans directly.

So I'm not here to get on my Cuba holiday because they're just, you know, it's Marco Rubio's policy, right? And like I'm not on my Cuba hobby. What I'm saying is that we, what is our policy? This, I think this is great. I think there's a lot of health in these countries dealing with inequality. Where is the United States in this conversation? We're still playing the kind of ugly neighbor to the north, obsessed with Cuba, you know, and Venezuela. and just totally not meeting this moment, we should be working together with these countries

to borrow the Biden administration's phrase and build back better, you know? There you go. And so to me, there's a real risk that the U.S. is hosting the summit of the Americas, right, which happens every three years this year in 2022, like that we're just going to show up, like, totally out of step with the zeitkeyes down there. Yeah, the key, I saw you tweeting about the Cuban steps. I'm very frustrating. Yeah, quite disappointing.

It's kind of self-defeating. So you kind of previewed this. I mean, we're all fixated on the U.S. midterms in 2022, but there's some big international elections to watch this year. So I will list a few, probably too many. And then let's just like pluck out and talk about whatever you want. So Molly is scheduled to have an election in late February. They just went through two coups in like nine months. So, you know, I think the question is really whether that election will happen or happen in a way that's fair.

South Korea votes on March 9th. We'll see you replace his president, Mujayan. close U.S. ally, North Korea approach will be dictated by that leader. So it's important. The French vote on April 10th, although they'll probably have a runoff. So it'll go later. But you got President Macron, who's like this, you know, intense centrist. Intent centrist is a very good thing.

Violently centrist. Neolib. Definitely a new one. Yeah, very neelib. So he'll have two right wing opponents now. He was Marine Le Pen and this newcomer who we should do a whole segment on him at some point. This guy, Eric Zamoire, who was basically like. Zutalur. French white supremacist. Like, it's basically like Tucker Carlson running for president,

but he's like gaining a lot of support. Hungary goes to the polls in April or May. We talked about Victor Orban already. Australia has parliamentary elections sometime before May 21st. It would be great to get Scott Morrison the fuck out of there, get some labor candidates in. Somebody won't shit the McDonald's, yeah. Yeah, Philippines on May 9th. We figured out who succeeds Duterte, Colombia on the 29th of May. Colombia on the 29th of May. Kenya picks a successor to President Kenyatta on August 9th. That's a big deal. Brazil, as you mentioned, votes on October 2nd. Hopefully they get rid of Bolsonaro. Lula could come in. Bosnia, October 2nd, Tunisia, December 17th. That's okay. That's officially too much listing.

Yeah. I was listening to my boy Steve Bannon show today. He and his crew. What's he watching? They're very focused on Hungary, France, Brazil, right? The axis of assholes, Trump, Orban. Bolsonaro. Which ones you want to talk about? Which are the biggies you want to flag? Well, actually, I'm glad you hit up your boy, Bannon here, because I think you can bucket a couple of these, right? So one is that they're the elections to watch for this kind of trend that we started. And to me, Bannon usefully, you know, assignment editor for this, because France, you know, basically can the center hold there with Macron or somehow some center left kind of gets in. But basically, the outcome you want there is just that you don't want the far right to win. That would be very, very bad, right?

Hungary, we have obviously talked about this kind of huge opportunity to try to dislodge Orban. Brazil essential that Bolsonaro not win. I mean, who we should add is like got his 29th case of COVID and he's back in the hospital. He's a testinal surgery. Well, I think that's because he got stabbed, right? Yeah, so that's his intestinal blockages. But to me, those elections, right? France, Hungary, Brazil.

The Philippines feels pretty greased for it to be the, like, not Duterte dynasty, but Duterte's daughter as like vice president to like Marcos's kid. And that doesn't seem to do. Yeah. So, so those are, but those are the elections to watch for this kind of autocracy question, right? Then you look at like, you know, Kenya is interesting. And actually, I'm going to make a correction here. I made a mistake.

I was listening to the earlier pod. and I had the wrong tribal, you know, I was listing the kind of key tribal backgrounds of the election candidates have led to violence in the past. And I missed the name of Obama's family's tribe. That's not the one you want to mess up, which is the Luo. Oh, is that Odinka's? Yeah, that's Odinga. Riala Odinga, who's run the Luo and the Kikuyu of the two tribes. Yeah.

But the thing to watch in Kenya is basically whether or not there's a reprise of the ethnic, violence we've seen in the past between the two big, you know. Dhinga is going to run again, it sounds like. He runs every time, you know, he always kind of gets real close, you know, and it's close enough to be contested. And he may, he may, frankly, won in the past two. But can you want to watch because you just don't want some further ethnic violence? So that's, it's such an important African country that deserves more attention. So you watch that one for that reason, you know. And probably Bosnia-Herzegovina for the, for similar reasons, right? And so, So those ones you want to watch for just, you know, are there going to be attention?

Molly, too. Molly, the question I have in Molly is it's one of these countries where there's all this instability. And we've talked about this in Haiti context. And the international community, such as there is one, the answer is always to, like, to hold an election as fast as possible. And I'm just wondering, like, is that the right approach? You know, because is that going to lead to more violence? Right. And then just drone strike the shit out of the Northern part of Molly.

Yeah. Yeah. So to me, like, those are the things to watch in all these elections. Oh, and then lastly, Colombia, in line with the conversation we've been having, if Colombia moves to the left, right? Because that's traditionally been a more right-wing country in line American politics. That signals that the whole region is going to be literally governed by center-left to left-wing candidates. Maybe not the entirety of it, but it's hard for me to think of a big country that wouldn't be after,

if Colombia and Brazil go that way. Yeah, the other big one worth noting that I didn't include is that Uttar Pradesh was the biggest state in India. Imagine like a state with nearly 250 million people are going to vote. They vote to elect a new legislative assembly in March 22. That has big implications for Prime Minister Modi and the BJP Hindu nationalist government. By the way, did you see that these psychopaths in India are putting bunch of, like these female Muslim journalists on some website where they say they're being auctioned? Yeah, yeah. I mean, just. really horrific, ugly stuff. I saw Rana, Ayub, friend of the pod, tweeting about this.

So, you know, if you don't follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her substack, like support her. Yeah, you know, check out her substack. It's really good. It's really good reporting. There's also some speculation that Turkey could call early elections in 2022, but who knows? Well, as we talked about Erdogan's like, his experimenting with inflation is, is, if Joe Manchin was in the Turkish legislature, he'd be having a connection to it, man. You have a hard time for a lot of reasons. All right. So that's a really motley selection of elections to watch.

The key takeaways on this question of autocracy, democracy, there's a bunch of bellwethered elections this year more than usual. Yeah, yeah. One other thing before we get sort of the lighter stuff at the end. So I saw that Haiti's prime minister, Ariel Henri, survives an assassination attempt Saturday as he was attending an event at a church, by the way, marking the anniversary of Haiti's independence. as we've discussed before, the Jovenile Moist, the former president of Haiti, was assassinated.

Last July, Honor's office had bandits and terrorists were behind the coup attempt, or the assassination attempt, rather. Who knows, one person was killed. Two were injured. So horrible.

Yeah, no, I mean, just shows the complete lack of security. And it also raises a question of, like, who's exactly raising their hand to run for office in Haiti? Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, just someone who has some built-in protection,

right? Like a gang. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Not good. Okay. A few quick things where we get the interview. So, Ben, there were some sort of click-baby headlines over the New Year about the bizarre, quote-unquote, game. The Queen of England likes to play on New Year's Eve. I don't know if you saw these. I was hoping you could put on your royal hat to confirm or deny them. So the game is reportedly called Lucky Dip, a footman. I love that term. Yeah.

Brings Her Majesty to like a tub full of sawdust and some folded pieces of paper. I'm not sure why you need the sawdust. The paper of, they have messages on them and predictions for the year ahead. Everyone, I assume, like, Philip and like, whatever, all the king's, queen's friends, picks out a piece of paper. Well, Philip's dead. Yeah, you know. I'm sure he was good at it back in the day.

Harry, whatever. They pick out a piece of paper. And I guess if the particular forecast is not very favorable, the poor footman gets the blames in some book. Here's my problem with this anecdote in this game. What do they do the footman? I don't know. beat them up. It sounds really boring.

They put them in the Tower of London or something. It's like magic eight ball with sawdust. I would think that Her Majesty is having a little more fun than that. Order some Chinese and have some fortune cookies, you know? That's what this sounds like. Yeah, you could just update the game a little bit. I don't know. I didn't like this. It doesn't sound very fun to me.

It sounds like it was probably the first time they did it, you were probably drunk. You know, it's like, hey, I got an idea. Let's fill a tub with some sawdust and have the footman put a bunch of, Back in 1964 or something. Exactly. It's like a lot of things in the world family. It just needs some updating. You know, like it was probably cool at the beginning.

Yeah, you just play heads up instead or something. Back when, like, you know, Prince Margaret was like a man-eater, you know. And now it just needs... Yeah, George Harrison was the first one. Yeah, exactly. It needs to get into the 21st century. Have you watched that Beals doc, by the way? Oh, just fucking crushed it.

I watched the first... I tore through it. Two episodes, which is like four hours of programming. I've not finished it yet. I finished it in like a week. It's really good. It was like just... It was just like engaging with like creative genius for eight hours.

Yeah, you just watch them kind of like bring these songs into being. Final story is also from the UK. So a British bank called Santander said that about 2,000 customers mistakenly received double payments on Christmas Day. So I mean they paid out a total of $175 million accidentally to like their clients. The great. The bank said this was a yeah, great Christmas. There's a due to a technical issue. Some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicates.

blah, blah, blah. None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result, and we will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days. So I read this and I was like, it's kind of interesting. I'm sure that I'll get it all back. But then this CNN story I was reading mentioned that there was a similar incident by Citibank. Citibank meant to send $8 million to lenders to Revlon, the cosmetics company. They accidentally wired out closer to $900 million to these lenders. And here's the best part. Some of them just said, no, we're not returning it.

It was essentially a repayment of a loan too early. They were just like, fuck it, no, we're not going to give you your money back. And I just thought that was incredible. They've been in court for years now, trying to get like $500 million of this bank's money back. Can you imagine me and the guy? Look, if a bunch of money showed up in my bank account and then someone came to me a few weeks later and was like, hey, can I get that back? I'd be like.

Yeah, make me. Yeah, come on. No, you gave it to me. Yeah, like, I will never forget standing outside. It's all just numbers on a computer screen, right? Yeah, it's a little fraud here and there. I'll never forget, like, oh, it must have been 2007. I was standing, I had this, like, image in my mind because it's a freezing cold day.

I was at the Iowa office in Des Moines, and I was in the parking lot. Happy anniversary, by the way. Oh, thank you. Was the Iowa University last night? That's a good one. 14th. You don't really celebrate that. Not a big one.

Is that paper or, you know. Yeah. It's a democracy. to keep it. So I remember like calling Bank of America because they had let me buy like seven coffees and then charged increasing fees on top like overdraft fees like $25, $35.

And I was just like all of a sudden I'm down like 300 bucks and I don't I didn't have a savings account to like cover the overdraft. And they just fucked me and I never got that back. That's like my biggest fear because I don't watch this stuff nearly as close as I should. and I'm prone to like the the reverse, you know, bank thing where they're just, I mean, what did the bank did to you what they did in office space? Remember an office space at the end?

Where they're just like stealing little bits of money? Yeah. Or they're trying to end up to, yeah. Like they could do that to me. I mean, what would suck here is if you got the money on Christmas and then they just like, you think it's like this kind of nice. Yeah, what you spent it? Yeah. And then they just take it back, you know?

That's not cool. It feels wrong. It feels like this bank could afford to take the hit and let people keep the money. Yeah, let them keep the money. Well, we're going to learn that they're like... The Chilean guy would make sure that the NioLibs didn't take the money back. Meanwhile, Buckele, the other millennial in Latin America would buy the dip. Well, because as Matt Damon reminds us, the future belongs to the brave.

Like Bikale... Oh, that commercial. I love that commercial. Incredible. Okay, that's it for the news section. When we come back, you will hear Ben's interview with Howard French about his new book on Africa. Stick around for that. I'm very pleased to be joined by Howard French, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia

University and a former New York Times Bureau Chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan, and the Koreas, and China. So cover the world there. But his latest book is Born in Blackness, Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World War, 1471 to the Second World War. Thanks so much for joining us, Howard. That's great to be with you, Ben. So we're going to take a quick tour through what is an extraordinary book and then up to some current events that have some very deep roots in it.

But I wanted to start by asking you, you know, I first encountered your work, I don't know, I think about 20 years ago when I moved to D.C. And you were really one of the people through your reporting and your books who helped me understand Africa better. but what made you make this turn from covering things as a journalist, current events, to wanting to look at the history you deal with in the book? Well, I think my work has taken a sort of long, slow turn toward history. This is my fifth book. And with each book I've gone further and further along this trajectory from pure journalism toward pure history.

And my last book was a book about the history and politics of East Asia and was sort of a rough hybrid of the two genres, journalism and history. And, you know, I felt a little bit self-conscious about delving into centuries of East Asian history, not having a formal training as a historian and everything and waiting sort of very nervously to see how many pot shots would be taken at me. But I worked with great care in the research, and I talked to lots of people, and I did. enormous amounts of reading and the book was pretty well received by serious historians and this gave me more confidence to sort of undertake this, to continue this transition. And I love history and I love working the archives. I love reading materials from written in a contemporaneous way in other ages. And so that's what this present book is based upon in research terms.

It also brings together a lot of sort of things that have been close to of my experience of life, both ancestrally and in terms of my life as a journalist. I worked by coincidence, professional accident really almost all the way around the Atlantic Rim, and this is really a book about the Atlantic world from the late Middle Ages up until modern times, and I'm an African American on both sides of my family, and my family history is bound up in slavery as most African Americans family histories are, and in particular on my mother's side with this extraordinary story about ancestry, including a friend of Thomas Jefferson's who, like Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Virginia elite and an early governor of the state

had children by a slave that he owned. And so I descend from those people. And all of this sort of came together to incline me toward this story. And so why don't you, if you can, sum up for folks who should definitely check out this book if you want to understand not just history of Africa, but the history of the world we live in, what your basic argument is here and how you discovered it? Sure. The basic arguments are several. I'm going to sort of focus on a couple of key things.

One of them is that the story of the history of the modern world that we tend to tell ourselves, what we tend to learn in school, is that the so-called modern world, the modern era begins with one of two events. either Columbus's quote unquote discovery of the new world or the Portuguese breakthrough of via the maritime exploration to Asia, usually the former. Usually it's a Columbus-centered story. And this story says that, you know, it's by virtue of these historic achievements, Europeans sort of went out into the world and began to do things that changed everything else.

And my narrative, my counter-narrative, I actually think it's an inarguable narrative, is that these breakthroughs actually predate Columbus and predate people like Vasco da Gama. And they don't involve Africa. The conventional narrative says the Europeans were trying to get around Africa, that they saw Africa as being inherently uninteresting in and of itself. And that's essentially how my profession and how much of American learning still treats Africa, that Africa was uninteresting in and of itself and merely needed to be circumnavigated. The real story turns out to be very different and much more interesting.

The other big idea of the book I can dispense with really, really quickly, and that is that a byproduct of all of this activity was a discovery that you can plant sugar using regimented slave labor in plantations. And this was first tried in Sao Tomé off the coast by the Portuguese off the coast of Central Africa and then transits the Atlantic Ocean with the discovery of Brazil and finally makes its way all the way up the chain of the Caribbean as sugar migrates throughout the Caribbean and then in the ultimate step, these same techniques were used to grow cotton. It was the production of these commodities by African slave labor under the institution of chattel slavery that transformed Western society, that made the West rich, that earned more

money by far for Portugal and subsequently than England than all of the gold and silver that the Spanish carted off in their galleons back to Spain from the New World. Yeah, I mean, there was definitely a big takeaway for me was, you know, they went in search of gold and then they found that slave labor was far more lucrative even than gold. So I wanted to, there's some African issues that we cover on this podcast that I always feel bad that they lack the context because they can kind of fuel the narrative of a continent incapable of self-government in certain areas. And so I wanted to start in Mali, right? Because your book very, very vividly begins with, you know, this really one of the richest kingdoms in the world in the 1300s. We've talked

about successive coups in Mali on this podcast. We've talked about, you know, terrorist insurgencies. How do you, you know, I know this is a long line, but How do you get from that kingdom to the state of Mali today? How should we think about that when we're watching these events from the outside? Well, there's no straight line to be drawn across centuries of history, as I think you can appreciate. But I would sort of make two points. One of them is a deep historical point, and one is a relatively recent historical point. The deep historical point is about the profound importance of historical accidents and coincidences.

So Monsa Musa makes it to Cairo and to Mecca with 18 tons of gold and an enormous procession of cortege, of courtly aides and associates and slaves. No one had ever seen so much wealth in one place under the control of a single person ever in human history. If Monsa Moussa had done that, only two or three decades later, he would have arrived in the Middle East after the arrival in the Middle East of firearm technology. Firearms were just about to arrive in the Middle East, and Monsa Mousa missed it. Had Monsa Moussa arrived in the Middle East 10 or 20 years later, he would have witnessed firearms. And here's the world's richest man, from a society,

by the way, that had exquisite metalworking techniques of its own, it's very hard to imagine that the Malians would not have become gunmakers. And that this already very robust and important empire that controlled vast swaths of West Africa would not have become something much more grand and longer lasting than even what it already had been. So that's the sort of very deep history here. So what happens subsequently because of this accident

of arriving just before firearms in the Middle East is that firearms did arrive in the Middle East and the Arab explosion, meaning the migration of Islam all across North Africa and into Spain proceeds, and North Africans get their hands on gun-making technology before the Malians. And then an empire from North Africa attacks Mali in the 1400s and bumps off the Malian Empire. And so this begins a period of incredible. decline for West Africa. You have this very large empire with very elaborate political institutions and control over very extensive geography that gets knocked off right on the cusp yet again,

another accident of the arrival of the Portuguese and of other Europeans in their wake, seeking the purchase of slaves. And so it is this sequence of coincidences that made for weakness in West Africa at a critical time when it was being penetrated. or colliding with either parts of the world, and this sort of sets in motion or sets it up to be vulnerable for an era of mass slavery. So that's one background. Mass slavery, as you know from the book, is not something that you can just, you can sort of dismiss by saying, oh, yes, we know that was terrible.

What an awful thing. It's important to think about what this meant. Africa lost 12.5 million people who were landed to the new world. That means those were the survivors. About a third of that number probably died at sea, meaning so you've got another 4 million people to that number. Probably half of that number, meaning this is the hardest of the figures to understand. Six, eight, 10 million people died in the chaos and warfare that the slave trade fed within Africa. So add these numbers up and you're talking almost 20 million people, perhaps even more than 20 million people.

And this isn't an era when current experts, historians and demographers, estimate that Africa's taught the entire continent's population was 100 million people. You've lost 20 million people out of 100 million people and factor in all the chaos that this involved. And you begin to get an idea of how big a hit this represented in terms of social cohesion, social trust, political institutions, learning, family stability, what have you, throughout all of West and Central Africa, and even into parts of East Africa. So that's one thing.

The next thing you have to understand, I'm sorry to give you a two-part answer, though, is that, you know, why could Mali have such a great past and be so weak today as part of a much bigger history? And the much bigger history of it in modern terms is the history of imperialism. Africa was taken over in a very brief period of time by Europeans who decided after the American Revolution that they wanted to experiment with forms of, in the early industrial era, with forms of political control over other parts of the world that did not involve direct employment of slavery, but involved the extraction of resources and the sale of manufacturers. And so Africa becomes coveted by the Europeans in the late 1800s, and the Europeans take over the entire continent, historically speaking, in a very compressed period of time. Between the 1890s and, say, 1950, all of Africa becomes controlled, at least nominally in some places quite effectively by the Europeans. And then by 1957, 1960, almost all of Africa is vacated by the European.

In other words, everything that... was innate to Africa in terms of political institutions, in terms of traditions of governance, in terms of civil society, in terms of social cohesion, was erased. And the Europeans occupied Africa, politically speaking, the blink of an eye and then departed, not even having really invested very much in creating substitutes in terms of those institutions. And so when you look at Mali and you say, how could it such a great place be so, week today, you have to ask that, that same question is true of almost the entire continent. And the answer to that question is the same for almost the entire continent.

Because it was the target and victim of disruption on such an immense scale and such an incredibly concentrated period of time that has never been counterbalanced by any sort of investment by outsiders in productive activities or political society. stability and institution building. Yeah. No, well, that's a great answer for, unfortunately, you're right, a lot of countries. And then the other one I wanted to ask you what was Haiti. You know, you write also about the kind of resiliency of the people who are enslaved and the

resistance, which obviously reaches its culmination in the first successful slave revolt in the world, which leads to the independence of Haiti. We've talked a lot on this podcast about, obviously, the chaos and violence that continues to grip Haiti. Why did that moment of resilience and resistance and ultimately triumph in Haiti, how do you look at the trajectory to where we are today? Is that a similar story? How does it differ from Mali in the sense that this is a self-governed entity, but I know also an entity that since it became independent has been the target of various forms of either neglect or interference from the United States and other powers? Well, so neglect is a good word for much of Haiti's recent international relations. But interference is the more important term for the broader swath of history, Haitian history in its own post-independence era.

So the Haitian revolution begins in 1791. By 1804, Haiti becomes, it has thrown off European rule. It has eliminated slavery entirely. it is the first nation in the world, not only to have become a nation state by virtue of a successful slave revolt, but also do have fully and constitutionally and universally fulfilled the most fundamental ideals of the Enlightenment, which say that all people are equal and that no one can be slave of another person. The United States didn't fully fulfill these ideals until late in the 20th century. What happened after Haiti won this great independence, though, after it defeated the three greatest imperialist powers of that era, namely Spain, France and England or Britain, all of which, well, two of which France and Spain, I'm sorry, France and Britain sent the largest fleets ever sent across the Atlantic for purposes of conquest in order to subdue the Haitian slave revolt, and the slaves defeated both of them?

So how could Haiti be a society so capable be so weak and so unstable today? Well, think about the response of the imperial powers to their defeat at the hands of these black people. What did they do? They quarantined Haiti for the next half century. The United States refused to extend diplomatic recognition to Haiti. France imposed a sort of a ransom, so to speak, in terms of the terms that it sought

in order for it to extend recognition to the Haitian Empire, the American society, remember, this is 1804, this is more than a half century before the United States eliminates slavery. The American political class

was terrified by what happened in Haiti. They thought that if slaves could rise up in Haiti and defeat white people, then perhaps the same thing could happen on American soil. This sets in motion the wholesale migration, sail toward the West and migration of slaves into the Mississippi Valley from Virginia and the Old South by the old plantation societies

of that part of the United States, largely out of terror. They feared that they would also become the victims of a Haitian-like slave uprising. And this sets in motion, the rise. economically speaking of the United States, as cotton becomes king, according to the cliché over that same next half century. Well, as cotton was becoming king in the Mississippi Valley, the United States, France, and most of the rest of the Western world, was placing Haiti in an economic quarantine. And so Haiti, which had proven itself so capable of organizing for military purposes to liberate itself and to end slavery was absolutely asphyxiated economically. And a half century of being asphyxiated economically is not something that one easily drags oneself out of. And I'm afraid Haiti has never been able to get back on its feet completely ever since then.

It's had a few relatively short periods, good periods, but it has had lots of subsequent political interference by outside powers, including the United States, which occupied Haiti from 1910 to 1945. Yeah. Yeah. Last question I wanted to just ask you is, you know, we also are in an error, though, where you start to see some rapid development in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. There's been talk for some time now, you know, Africa rising. By 2050, I think a huge chunk, if not half the world's young people will be in Africa. Do you think the combination of a recognition of this kind of history, together with that kind of growth, could lead us to a period where, you know, the African continent in African nations and African peoples kind of reclaim the central role that you write about in this book?

Well, I think Africa is bound to occupy a central role in the century ahead, and most people in this country, in fact, most people in the world are totally unprepared, mentally speaking, for that idea. The question is, how will Africa occupy a central role in the century ahead? It can be in a positive sense or it can be in a negative sense. The power of African demography is unstoppable. Africa is 1.4 billion people today. It'll probably be 2.5 billion people by the middle of this century. Toward the end of this century, the further you project outwards, it becomes harder and harder

to give precise numbers. But perhaps four to five billion people will live in Africa. That will be more than China and India combined. easily. And so the future of humanity is bound up in what happens in Africa. The question is, will the rest of the world come to its senses and figure out that it has to change the way it engages with Africa in a timely way such that Africa can be brought online in terms of the international economy to become much more productive, to have much more widespread industry and employment, to have much better educational institutions, more broadly speaking, to have basic

amenities like electricity and other sorts of utilities. And if the answer is no to those questions, if the rest of the world cannot be sort of come to its senses about this, then something else will happen. Africa will not be, largely speaking, let me just pause to say, I'm making a big, broad general statement about Africa, which I hate to do. I know, I know. But for the sake of economy here in terms of time, I'm going to plow ahead. Yeah. One, if the world doesn't come to its senses and figure out completely revolutionize, and I don't use that word lightly, it's means of engaging with Africa, then Africa will become in a negative sense, the center of world affairs as 4.5 billion people, 4 to 5 billion people, a great portion of them, that they simply won't stay put in Africa.

And there will be no stopping. Europeans are living under an illusion today that through maintaining client states here and there and offering economic incentives and positing armies in Sahelian countries or building walls in North Africa or intercepting boats in the Mediterranean or any combination of those sorts of things that they can control African migration,

they haven't even begun to see what African migration can look like if in fact Africa is not engaged in a much, much deeper and more constructive way. Well, that's a very powerful and succinct argument. I want to thank you for coming on. And again, the book is Born in Blackness, Howard French. Thanks so much for writing this book and for all the reporting and writing you do and for talking to us here today. Great to talk to you, Ben. Thanks again to Howard French for doing the show. What else? I got a, I got a, website open in front of me that's an archive from GW about the CIA's covert activities following the 73 military coup in Chile, and it is extensive. I mean, I would encourage people if you haven't,

you know, if in your lefty college days, you didn't go down the rabbit hole of the CIA's coup of Salvador Allende, it's just like, it's a pretty gross story. I would like to know what united those, what convinced those people that they were the good guy? You know what I mean? At what point are you like working with death squads to the point where you realize like, oh, I'm not the good guy? Was it just anti-communist fervor? Was it like right-wingness?

Was it fear that, I don't know, some sort of like post-World War II hangover, you know, where you just fear the greatest evil possible in the world? I don't know. I mean, I think, right, like in that, case, the communism was the pretext, right? So Salvador Yende gets elected, democratically elected president of Chile. He's a communist. Then there's this, and I got in this because of my Cuba, there's this kind of like weird outsized fear of Cuba, which I think, here's my theory of this, is that the CIA and by extension, the kind of U.S. national security establishment that

like people like Kissinger were at the center of never got over the fact that they, they, they, They got punked. They got punked, yeah. They got punked, right? They, they, they, they, they, they, quote, unquote, lost Cuba. Then they couldn't assassinate Castro, the Bay of Pigs failed. And they just, like, stuck in their craw. And if you look at the U.S., like, we don't, like these countries that we lose our, quote, unquote, grip over, right, like Iran, Cuba, are the ones that we had the longest term problems with, right? Yeah, and there's the overlapping corporate interests, you know, like the Bidanda Republic. Well, that, yeah, that's right. That stuff was huge down there, right? And, but they basically, like, they assassinate.

they shoot the guy, kill the guy in the presidential palace. I mean, it was an unsettled coup. And then Pinochet goes in and then it, you know, it turns into the great oppressive neoliberal experiment, right? Brutal, brutal. Tough reading. Worth it, though. But here we are, and we've got like a 36-year-old lefty in charge of Chile.

Yeah, man. History can change. It can. Yeah. What did that guy we used to work for say? Arc of the moral universe is long. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes.

Sometimes it does. Takes an effort. Yeah, it takes the effort. It's not really bending at the moment. Yeah, it's just kind of drifting up in the wrong direction, right? We're just going to reach up and grab it. Floating off to Mars or something. You need a bunch of world those to get their hands on that arm.

Hurry up, everybody. Or else Steve Bann's going to do it for us in that one direction. Okay, talk to you guys next week. See it. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale, Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episode. episodes as videos each week.