It Could Happen Here Weekly 108

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.

You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today!

http://apple.co/coolerzone  

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
every episode of the week that just happened is here
in one convenient and with somewhat less 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

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions. There is America hit
by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest
buildings were destroyed. Thank God for that. There is America
full of fear from its north to its south, from
its west to its east. Thank God for that. What

(00:43):
America is tasting now with something insignificant to what we
have tasted for scores of years. Our nation has been
tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years.
Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries
are attacked, and no one hears and no one heeds.
Those words, written by Osama bin Laden in October seventh,

(01:04):
two thousand and one, were part of his first statement
issued after the nine to eleven attacks. You might notice
a few things about that. One is, of course, the
glorying over the deaths of several thousand people, and another
is that when it comes to his analysis of the
cultural and psychological impact of nine to eleven on the
United States, he was more or less right. This is

(01:27):
it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart
and nothing better embodies the slow, sometimes rapid collapse of
the United States as our reaction to nine to eleven
and our continuing responses to it. And so today I've
got in the studio. We don't actually have a studio.

(01:47):
I've got Mia, I've got James, and I've got Garrison,
and we're going to talk about something you've probably encountered,
which is that a letter to America written by osamaban Lan,
which is a different piece from the one I started
this reading, but written along broadly similar lines, has started
to go viral on TikTok, and if you've seen the
reactions to it, it's a mix of a bunch of
you know, younger people on TikTok reading this letter for

(02:10):
the first time, where bin Laden explains why he did
he believed nine to eleven to be justified, and going wow,
he has a point some of them saying stuff that's
more unhinged than that even and then you've got this
chorus of responses from both kind of centrist you know,
media figures, cultural commentators, pundits, and of course right wing

(02:31):
shitheads who are all making this out to be the
left looves Osama bin Laden. We're going to get into
kind of where the truth lies in this and also
what is in the letter to America. But yeah, welcome,
Welcome to the pod everyone, Thanks Robert, horrible to be here.
How did you how did you all hear about this,
this new fun trend on the internet.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
I returned from spending my evening volunteering the border in
Cucumber to find and a death of messages about an
Issama bin Laden letter or the speech that you just
read that I've a signed for probably a decade to
undergraduates without anyone losing their mind. And yeah, extremely confusing

(03:14):
vibes for me.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:16):
The first time I heard about it was the first
post that I saw was it was only about a
million views. It wasn't even that viral, which I guess
might be true because TikTok is.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
Nuts, But yeah, I think it.

Speaker 4 (03:31):
I don't know, like I first ran into it on Twitter,
and I think by the time it hit Twitter, everyone
was just sort of in about eighteen directions completely losing
their minds, which is just yeahs it is now.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, and I mean probably a couple of videos of
people dying.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Just that seems to pop up every time something discussed
on Twitter.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
Now.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
I think that's an accurate description of kind of the
fallout to and as we're writing the or as we're
recording this. Most of these original TikTok videos people seem
to be reading off of the Guardians copy of a
Letter to America, which was I guess the most easy
to google prior to I think it was just the
easiest to google. When this all started rolling, the Guardian

(04:11):
took that down because they didn't want people reading it
outside of the context of the article it's in. This
was a horrible mistake. I have found a number of
comments being like, this is them. They're trying to stop
you from reading Ben Lawden's words. We're all going to
be on a watch list. They can't arrest all of us.
You can still access the Letter to America.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
It's on the sentiment that you can't arrest one of
us suggested that many of these people were not alive,
and the Maybia off to moth of.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
Fucking try. They did try. Just to be very clear,
you can still read this whole letter to yourself, and
so can everyone else. It's on wiki source. If you
just google Binladen Letter to America, it will bring up
the Wikipedia page that talks about this letter and its context,
and that will also give you a link at somewhere
at the bottom to the wiki source. That's just the

(05:01):
unedited translation of the letter to the American people. So
it is not like the Guardian's move was bad because
of they called the streisand principle right that if you
like try to hide something from people on the internet,
it just it just makes the problem worse. You never
do what the Guardian did. It's very dumb, it was
explain the Guardian.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, yeah, sur I was gonna say, yeah, they could
have blamed trans people.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
I'm surprised he didn't get one of those in there.
They've been everyone's been trying to pivot very quickly to this.
So obviously you know, my like James, my opinions on
this are kind of complex. On one hand, I am
not an Osama bin Laden fan. He was a bad person.
He was a terrible person, and he did a lot
of damage, not just to the United States. That said,

(05:51):
I've also long been an advocate for like, he's probably
going to go down as one of the most effective
and intelligent military rategic minds of the twenty first century.
The September eleventh attacks worked in large part, right because
of how We're rereacted, because of the amount of money
that we spent, the amount of people that we killed,

(06:12):
the amount of anger that we engendered against the West,
and the amount of damage that we did to our
own society. A lot of the fallout that we're seeing
and all these you know, right wing street gangs and shit,
a lot of it traces back to fallout from the
wars that were started by the Bush administration after September eleventh. So,
and that was that was part of the stated goal, right,

(06:33):
that was one of the things he was looking to
provoke a reaction. So I'm both like glad hopefully some
people are going to come away from this with a
more nuanced understanding of the guy. And when I say nuanced,
I don't mean in a moral sense, because it's bad
to kill thousands of random people, but in the sense
of like, oh, this was not I think I need
to play something for you guys, because like as a

(06:55):
nine to eleven, like I was like nine or ten
when it happened, so I remember it all very well,
and I remember the reaction to it, and I remember
the propaganda we encountered. And there's this thing that you
will find written about fascists pretty regularly, which is that
they both need an all powerful enemy, but they also
need an enemy that's like fundamentally free of virtue, and

(07:18):
intelligence and skill are virtues. So both in the wake
of nine to eleven, you got this sort of al
Qaeda and you know, larger sort of Islamist movements were
considered this nefarious force as they are now in the
wake of the attacks by Hamas, right, this nefarious force
that is capable of infiltrating the US border and seeking
terrorist sales into the United States to hit anybody. And

(07:40):
at the same time they're like primitive idiots who are
bigots against who are you know, they hate women and
all this stuff, right, Like you can't you can't see
them as capable or intelligent, because then that would that
would be to give them a virtue that you reserve
for yourself anyway. I think a good example of that
is this parody song by John Valby that I am
countered in a Napster download when I was a child,

(08:02):
and this did not it's bin Laden.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Oh it's the other one.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Okay, Okay, yeah, this one's bad. Folks. You're gonna hear
something offensive. I'm playing it now because number one, I
think it's something people should remember or no, but also
because we're about to place these TikTok responses to this
bin Laden video and read some comments of people who
are very taken by it. And I want to set
up what the pre existing image of ben Laden was

(08:29):
and our culture kind of prior to this reappraisal of him,
because I think that is important. But this is unhinged
so and and it's pretty offensive. So just be aware people,
I'm about to play it now. Can't wait? Oh yeah, no,
you're gonna have all right? Can you see the giant Confederate?
So this is from a John Valby album. I think
it was called Real Woman Do Play in Mud Puddles?

(08:51):
I don't know, maybe not. That may just be a
random image I did not check. There's like describe there's
the general lee as a mudding truck with a giant
Confederate flag behind it, and then with the Confederate flag
like colors the text real women do play in mud
puddles and it's as Southern girls serven girl on the

(09:11):
on the windshield of the truck. So I'm gonna start
playing this song. I'm not gonna play all of it,
but this should set up for you kind of what
the acceptable discourse on bin Laden was right after nine
to eleven.

Speaker 5 (09:29):
Well, we come from Malabama, but we're in Afghanistan, Navy
seamer rays hunting for a man.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
They say he has a beard and a diaper on
his head. I heard we won't be coming home until
that fucker's dead.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
No, don't do.

Speaker 4 (09:49):
I've come to fuck your fanny with some frax.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
So had you guys heard that before?

Speaker 3 (09:58):
No?

Speaker 4 (09:58):
Unfortunately?

Speaker 3 (10:00):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Wow. Yeah, see see.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
The part of America that I midged growing up a
broad and yeah, never fully understand.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
Now we freezed about thirty seconds into that minute and
thirty second song, but it was like playing random clips
of art to go along with the music, and the
one we paused on was Homer Simpson with an American
flag behind him, outlined and read with a pistol in
his hands aimed at a bug eyed Osama Bin Laden
So great nuanced discourse here, so.

Speaker 4 (10:31):
Many memories like I don't know what it was. People
loved that, like bug ey'd Bin Luden thing.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
This is like like, yeah, I know what, No, I
think I know. I'm pretty sure I know why. Which
is that? So One of the most popular pieces of
like media popular media in response in the nine to
eleven attacks was an episode of South Park that came
out literally like a week or two after the attacks,
which basically, up until fairly recently, TV was always made

(10:59):
on a significant delay, so there were no shows on
air that could pivot to comment on something really quickly.
The West Wing managed to kind of, but it was
like a dog shit episode. But the South Park guys
really pivoted and they put out this episode. It was
basically like a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Cartman as Bugs
Bunny and Osama Bin Ladden as Elmer Fudd right, and

(11:20):
there were a bunch of like scenes of him like
bug eyes bugging out when like shit would happen, and
it was It was weird because like the I think
the most people who watched it, including myself, took it
in the same manner of that song as like, yeah,
fuck these guys, these like you know, in ways that
were pretty bigoted. There was also like the episode opened
with an extended bit of kids in Afghanistan with everything

(11:43):
around them and all the adults getting murdered by US
airplanes for no seeming reason, which was like part of
the anyway whatever. I think one of the was like
what we're seeing in some of like why young people
are reacting to this letter by bin Laden so strongly
is they've never really gotten to appraise the guy objectively.

(12:05):
And I'm not saying that that's happening across the board now,
but I don't think the reactions are nearly as unreasonable
as they're being painted.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, he kind of existed an avatar of evil and
like with zero nuance or complexity, just like, yeah, a
satanic sort of totem in American culture.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
Yeah, which is why I've.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Always assigned it just like I think it behooves us
to understand.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah, I agree entirely. So I went through and I
looked at some of the tiktoks being made about this,
And first off, TikTok does seem to have taken some
action to try to stop this. I don't think it's
going to work either. But like when I typed in
letter to America recently, the text I got on TikTok
was this phrase may be associated with behavior or content

(12:48):
that violates our guidelines promoting a safe, positive experience as
TikTok's top priority. Yeah yeah, yah yah yah. You can
still find shit by like typing in bin Laden, but
it's not as much shit as findable right now, so
worth noting. One of the first things I came across
that was interesting is like, so there's this trend on TikTok.
If you're not a TikToker, I'm going to play what

(13:11):
are the people on TikTok. There's a lot of AI
videos where either the text will be read by AI
with like images and video clips on screen, or you'll
some there's some creepy instances of people just generating AI
faces sometimes of like actual murderers and criminals to talk
about the shit they did. It's really weird. But one
of the top videos I found on this from about

(13:34):
a little less than a day ago, is just the
entire text of bin Laden's letter to America being read
by an AI and it it sounds weird. I'm going
to just let everyone get a listen to this.

Speaker 6 (13:46):
In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful,
permission to fight against disbelievers is given to those believers
who are thought against because they have been wronged, and
surely a law is able to give them. Believe Victoria.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
I think it misses some of the some of the
stirring contexts the delivery. No, but you get the responses
of this, and like one of my favorite ones that
I've gotten the screen is is cheeky chicis Fressa saying
y'all are gonna hate me? But he kind of ate
And then the first response is no crumbs, which Garrison
has our gen Z insult. That means, like, I agree, basically,

(14:25):
you know, it's oh you're twenty one, now you're out
of touch.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah yeah, the first feeling old moment live.

Speaker 7 (14:35):
I yeah, I think that means he like ate everything
and there's like no crumbs left.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
No, oh, okay, that's that's good. Very literal.

Speaker 7 (14:46):
Yeah, I think I think that's what it means. But again,
this is this is very.

Speaker 4 (14:52):
Very very particular culture here it's the bleeding edge.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
Yeah. The last comment following that is bizarre. Trump isn't
a good person either. The gay people have nothing to
do with me. This does not say book for Trump.
I think you can't read.

Speaker 4 (15:09):
See you know it's it's and that's the.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Op responding to no crumbs. So I don't know what's
missing here.

Speaker 4 (15:17):
It's really it's really hard to tell.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, I think these people may be in a parallel reality.

Speaker 7 (15:24):
I don't think really anyone who's participating in this trend
is very intelligent or has or has very good media literacy,
or has really looked into like American imperialism very much.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
No, but we will, we will.

Speaker 4 (15:41):
We will get to that in a Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
So the next comment is so much truth coming out
this season. And then I appreciated this from Walker. He
lost me at the end, he being bin laden with
the religiously charged homophobia, but that left out he was
right about everything else, justified and well said, see the
Voice of reason, the voice. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:59):
Well, but also.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Also now we'll get through it. There's a few more
problems with the letter than that.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing like you're doing nine to eleven,
but with a pride flag is yeah, perfect, and I
have no notes.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, you can't.

Speaker 7 (16:14):
You can't remove those things from the rest of the
letter and the action. Now, they actually do create a
complete hole. You can't actually pick and choose little parts
that you want. It's it's like trying to pick and
choose parts of qan On. You're like, yeah, well, actually
there are rich people who are pedophiles. You're like, well, yes,
but you can't, like, you can't. Yeah, that's not giving

(16:35):
qan On the benefit here.

Speaker 4 (16:36):
This is these are totally different things.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
And the thing that I think people should be doing,
just so we're clear on like my stands here is
seeing bin Laden as an incisive and intelligent actor who
had a significant degree of understanding of this country and
its culture, and the terrible things that he did were
as effective as they were because he understood things about

(17:00):
us that we should understand about us. Right, otherwise you
are not going to be able to successfully act within
this culture to improve things and reduce harms. You need
to understand why what he did worked as well as
it did, and you need to understand what he knew
about us, because it's pretty useful stuff to understand. That
is different from saying that what he is, Like, you

(17:22):
don't have to view it as the truth, right because
it's it's it's not like the truth in any moral sense,
but it's the truth in that Like if you if
you read some of Hitler's writings on democracy, Hitler accurately
understood the vulnerabilities of a democratic system and how to
exploit them. You should understand that you're not saying, wow,
he was spitting truth. You're just saying, yeah, well some

(17:44):
people are, Robert. That is a problem. Yeah, some people,
in fact are.

Speaker 4 (17:48):
Do you know who else is spitting truth?

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Robert our advertisers, Yes, that is right. We are. Are
we sponsored by the new predition of minkompf at this point? No,
we are sponsored by Albugdati. He's still alive, folks. Yeh
mm hmm, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Here here's the ads. Okay, so we're back. I'm gonna
play another one of these, one of these zoomer Bin
Laden loving videos for you. Well, no you're not, No,
I'm not.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
Lots of these videos have also been taken down recently.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
I go, yeah, they which, yeah. I thought this one
was interesting because it was someone who was like really
pro bin Laden being like, yeah, you know, he was
completely right about everything. What a genius. So I love him.
But all of the comments were people being like, that's
fucking kind of crazy to say. Bro, Like, yeah, let's

(18:44):
take a step back.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
So the thing this reminds me of this, This is
a phenomenon I've run into with American maoists. We're like, Okay,
don't read Mao. They'll read MAO saying something that is,
you know, perfectly reasonable, like you should not talk about
something unless you've researched it first.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:04):
Now, any normal person has heard this when they were
like two, But these people apparently have never heard this,
and they run into it through MAO and they're like,
holy shit, Mao is like the greatest living theorist.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
What's a brilliant thinker? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (19:17):
Man, you guys need bid Launa to tell you the
US sucks, Like really.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yes, people do because they get shit history education because
their education of nine to eleven was the video I
started this episode.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
Yeah, like we failed as a country, like just completely.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
No, seriously, Like I like a fucking like horse that
I will whip till it's dead.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
Is that? Like?

Speaker 2 (19:43):
In twenty sixteen, there was this huge thing about we
need to teach history properly and media literacy. Right after
Donald Trump got elected, because a lot of people didn't
know what the fuck was going on, we just and
then we just stopped, and everyone was like, nah, fuck it,
why not, We'll just keep doing STEM STEM STEM and then,
like like teaching undergraduates often like intro courses for years,
it's become very clear that we are completely failing in

(20:06):
the United States to educate people or equipment with any
understanding of American history, and so they just get propaganda.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
This is a big part of why I focus on
cryptos so much, because James, that is exactly where crypto
comes from, is we learned a lot of stemshit, but
we never learned any humanities or anything. So you get
people saying stuff like, well, the underlying technology buying crypto
is so impressive, and it's like, no, it's you can't
point to a single useful piece of work it's ever done.

(20:34):
You just find it impressive because there's a lot of
complex math problems and that's what you that's what you value, Like, yes,
it's the results of that, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
The yard stick of academic achievement or intelligence.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, it anyway, speaking of people who are less intelligent
than a yardstick. It's not exactly what you said, James,
but I also wanted to play here's a right wing
influencer who's collected a bunch of these videos. I hadn't
run into this guy before. But oh no, did they
drop him too? Are they just purching everything?

Speaker 7 (21:01):
So TikTok has been removing all of this, almost all
of the videos associated with this trend. You can you
can find the compilations on Twitter are really some of
the only ways that these videos are still alive.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, this is a right wing guy. This was the
right wing guy making fun of it. But man, that's
interesting because this was, like I found this five minutes ago.

Speaker 4 (21:18):
So I mean, I think this is the thing that like,
it's really hard to talk about this without it being
in like an insane right wing thing. But TikTok is
really Americans only encounter with the way that Chinese style
censorship works, which is they take a giant hammer and
they just like hit things with it. Yeah, as supposed like,
it's not it's not like targeted. It's like like we

(21:41):
found everyone who said the word been lauded and band
it right. Everything associated with the trend like yeah, you know,
like and this is this is the way that like
censorship stuff tends to work in China because it's kind
of easy to do and it covers your ass, and
so now Americans are like experiencing this.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
I'm sorry, I'm just enjoying seeing what Roberts have suggested
for other TikTok he might like, oh, thank goodness for
the shower's top shelf products.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Yeah, hashtag has talk. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I
think it's because of this person, ear earth Mother, Earth
earth Mother basically who actually I brought her up specifically
because she was an example of like the way this
is getting portrayed in kind of like particularly like Twitter

(22:28):
and more mainstream sort of descriptions of it is like
all of these gen zers are full throat for Osama.
They've all gone crazy, and you can certainly find no
shortage of those videos. I found a bunch of other
videos that are more critical. It is difficult for me
to tell what the preponderance of is because there's not
no one's basing what they're saying on a sentiment analysis.
They're basing it on what their timelines forwarded them based

(22:52):
on their passion when they typed letter to America or
whatever into Twitter or into a TikTok. But like I
ran into this lady video and like so not plenty
of these are and I found others like this. Plenty
of these are like a little more critical but not
but still, yeah, I'll just play it.

Speaker 8 (23:09):
Hey, guys, just coming on here to remind y'all that
Osama bin Laden was still bad personally. Crazy that I'm
even having to get on here and say this, wee hello, obviously,
but I've been seeing a lot of people, you know,
say that they read Osamogan Laden's Letter to America. And
I've read the letter, and I understand that a lot

(23:30):
of people are getting educated and kind of like deconstructing
the propaganda that they've grown up in living in America.
But that does not mean that we should mystify these
terrible people. But are also criticized the West and questions
in the West, and like how we operated over here,
Osam b and LANs doing the same thing. It doesn't
mean that they are necessarily wrong on what they're saying,

(23:52):
but it doesn't take away the fact that they're sexist, fascist,
racist dictators.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Yeah, I like this lady. That's a video.

Speaker 7 (24:02):
Yeah, I think she kind of hits on one point
that I've seen in some of the other like for
lack of a better term, promo Sama bin Laden, people.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
Have been saying how like.

Speaker 7 (24:18):
Well like people have been talking about how like they're
like finally like seeing past US propaganda and they're deconstructing
the lies that media has told them. And this kind
of gets at something that we see a lot and
kind of in like cult spaces, is that you rarely
ever just completely disengage from some form of propaganda.

Speaker 4 (24:39):
You jump to a different form of propaganda, absolutely right.

Speaker 7 (24:42):
It's like reading this letter, you're not getting like disillusioned
from US propaganda. You're now buying into someone else's propaganda.
Like the letter to America is a completely other version
of conspiracy riddled propaganda that was put out for a
political purpose, and to try to engage with it in
good faith is not the way to approach that text.

(25:04):
And I think this is a big part of this
problem is how people's education has worked the past few years,
because they should have learned all of the various motivations
and geopolitical factors that led to the nine to eleven attacks,
and instead having Islam bin Lan be characterized as this,
as this like cartoonish evil that hates America for freedom

(25:26):
and like hates America as a nation for its freedom.
Like that, Yes, that is propaganda. And if that's all
you've had your whole life and you're you're now seeing
this other side, this is probably like this is definitely
like mind blowing, but like you can look into why
these things happen without just falling for someone else's extremist propaganda,
like like yeah, you can. You can get into the

(25:48):
actual reasons for why this happened, how how US imperialism
has caused the geopolitical situation coming out of the nineties,
Like it's it's lots of people have already done this
reading there's there's just plenty of people on line who have
not looked into this because they have life, they're doing whatever,
like right, they've not everyone like us and spends all
of our time reading like political extremist literature.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, not all of us have strong opinions on the
different eras of bin Laden writing.

Speaker 4 (26:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah, it's like Tya Swift in that sense.

Speaker 4 (26:18):
Yeah, yeah, I think there's a there's another there's a
thing That's also important here too, which is I think
you see this a lot in Americans, which is that
Americans will have this moment where they realize that they've
been being lied to by the American media. And then
the thing this convinces them of is that everyone else

(26:39):
is telling the truth. Yes, and it's like, no, every
country is doing propaganda. All of their media is doing propaganda.
Like you can't just sort of ping pong from one
like countries sort of prop media propaganda to another countries
because they're all doing it and the stuff that they're

(27:01):
saying also isn't true. You have to actually, like you
have to actually try to work out the sort of
the reality of history. You can't just rely on reading
like some other like some other propaganda's version of events.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
But this comes down to like a lack of basic
understanding of how we do history, which I think is
not anyone's fault. It's because we don't teach you very
well at all in schools. But like the lack of
understanding of the difference between primary and secondary sources, right,
and like people want to get straight to the source,
so they'll go and read one historical primary source without
the adequate secondary context and suddenly be like oh shit,

(27:39):
and yeah, as you say, turned into a maoist or
apparently Memora of al Kaieda.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
This is why, like you know, journalists do a lot
of gathering, you know, what they can in the moment
from a scene, from interviews and stuff. But academics there's
always going to be if it's like a good academic,
Like I'm reading a great book right now on trust
in unstable societies. Society is like racked by war. So
it's like the concept of it's written by a Gosen

(28:04):
and it's about like how concepts of public trust fluctuate
during conflicts. And he's looking at Lebanon, he's looking at Syria,
he's looking at a rack, he's looking at Palestine. It's
very interesting. But like he's not just interviewing people. There's
like a set of basically an algorithm that he runs
his different interviews and like the overall sentiments expressed in

(28:25):
them through in order to try and determine like here
is the aggregate of like what I found as a
reaction to this question from like the people that I survey.
It's the same kind of stuff that you do in
a survey to attempt to add a little bit more
rigor than just saying, well, I talked to ten people
and most of them said this, So clearly this is
a trend, right, which journalists are often guilty of, and
also just goes ab in part because of that. Twitter

(28:48):
goes wild with this kind of shit, just like well,
I looked through and I listened to twenty videos, and
most of them the kids loved Bin Laden. So the
kids must love Bin Lodding now, which I don't think
is entirely fair, but I wanted to. I think it's
probably a good time for us to go through the
Letter to America and talk about what is actually in

(29:09):
this thing, right, because you might as well know what's
in it. It's a good thing to read. Again, you
can find it on wiki source.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
So it starts with him kind of providing just some
kind of churonic justifications for the concept of fighting against
an aggressor fighting against like, you know, someone who is
actively attacking you, which is more essentially how he positions
like the relationship between the US and the Muslim world.
And he is a big you know, a big thing

(29:36):
that comes up over and over in this piece is
him talking about how the Caliphate is being sort of
like squashed and stopped from you know, existing in the
form that it should exist by this kind of constant
both attacks on not just Arab democracy but on like
sovereign Arab states as well as like support by the US.

(29:58):
For he complains about corrupt rulers in the Muslim world,
and he is talking about not just guys like Saddam,
but like largely the Saudi royal family is a big
part of it. He talks a lot about Iran and
basically the uh So that's kind of like a bit
where a lot of his like grievances start. He does
bring up and one of the videos, James that you

(30:20):
posted earlier was like in Israeli man responding to this
and basically characterizing in a very inaccurate form saying like, uh,
there's no facts in this letter. Like he doesn't like
say anything true. Yeah, he's just angry at Israel in Palestine, right,
He's just angry at like at that. And he does

(30:42):
bring up Palestine multiple times. There's lines like the blood
pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. That's a
significant part of his case. But he also lists a
lot of other areas right, he is not. It is
not just what's happening. It's not just what Israel is
doing in Palestine that he's talking about. There's lines like,
you attacked us in Somalia, you supported Therussian atrocities against
us in Chechnia, the Indian oppression against US in Kashmir,

(31:04):
and the Jewish aggression against US in Lebanon, and he
brings all of those up several times. He also he
does drop some facts in here. One of the more
salient lines is you have starved the Muslims of Iraq,
where children die every year. It is a wonder that
more than one point five million Iraqi children have died
as a result of your sanctions, and you did not
show concern yet when three thousand of your people died,

(31:24):
the entire world rises and has not yet set down.
And that's not an inaccurate thing to be That's not
an inaccurate statement or a thing to not be angry about. Now,
that's not the full context of it, right, because there
is a bunch of stuff that is in here that
is like bidden laden culture, warshit that absolutely is not

(31:47):
reasonable or a reason to bomb people. Like there's a
point in the letter where he's like, what do we
want from you? The Americans like, what do we you know?
Al Kaida, the people who have attacked you. He's speaking
kind of broadly for the Uma here, what are we
asking from you? And the first thing we are is
that we are calling you to Islam, which I don't
think is likely to happen. The second thing is we

(32:08):
are calling on you to stop your repression, lies in
immorality and debauchery that has spread among you. We call
him for you to be a people of manners, principles, honor,
and purity, to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling,
and trading with interest. We call all of you this
that you might be freed from what you have already
been caught up in. That you might be freed from

(32:29):
the deceptive lies that you are a great nation. And
you may recognize that as a pretty insane reason to
kill three thousand people. I mean there's gambling, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 (32:40):
I think a big part of the framing of this
entire thing is like people are taking this as being like, oh,
look at all these justified reasons. Because the US was
complicent and active in mass violence in the Middle East.
But like he's not actually critiquing violence or political violence
because he is pro political violence. He is like that,

(33:02):
he look, what he is critiquing is Western degeneracy. Like
that is that is his actual thing. The first to
ask is to is to convert over to a fascistic
version of his religion. Yeah, like that's the primary thing
that this isn't about, like US imperialism in terms of

(33:23):
what his end project is.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
And he's also when he's angry about violence, it is
specifically violence against Muslims, right, because again bin Laden is
fine with doing violence to and having the state potentially
do violence to non Muslims in his ideal state. He
also we read he is very right when he says
that the United States is complicit in the depths of
over a million Iraqis because of our sanctions. This is

(33:47):
in the pre invasion period. One of the worst crimes
this country has been complicit in within our lifetimes. Absolutely
a fucking nightmare. He devotes as much time to the
to that as he does to this next paragraph I'm
going to which is another one of his grievances. Who
can forget your President Clinton's imral acts committed in the
official oval office. After that, you did not even bring

(34:08):
him to account other than that he made a mistake,
after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a
worse kind of event for which your name will go
down in history and be remembered by nations? He was, like,
it's fucked up that you killed a million people. The
worst thing you did was let your president get a blowjob,
Like that is part of this letter, And that's a

(34:28):
crazy person thing to think. Yeah, Like that's just him
being an asshole, because not really a problem, right, there's
personal problems, right, but on the scale of like American crimes,
the fact that we didn't forcepend or forced Clinton out
of office not really on the list. Yeah, does not

(34:48):
really make the cut. Yeah, there is a long list,
and that does not make it. Yeah, then of course
he's got He also spends actually more time on the
sex trade than he does on what the US did
to Iraq. You are a nation that practices the trade
of sex and all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant
corporations and establishments are established on this under the name

(35:09):
of art, entertainment, tourism, and freedom, and other deceptive names
you attribute to it. And because of all this, you
have been described in history as a nation that spreads
diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go
ahead and boast to the nations of man that you
brought aids as a satanic American invention.

Speaker 7 (35:24):
It's a very basic reactionary screen. It's like, yes, you
can do the same thing with like sections of Hitler
speeches talking about like working conditions and factories. Right, you
could take little sections, put them on TikTok, make it,
make it be read by an ai voice and be like,
oh wow, this is a really good critique of capitalism.
Like you're missing the entire point of what Hitler's actual

(35:46):
political project is. This is the exact same thing. It
is exactly this is the this is the thing reactionaries do.
This is like they will take a few of these
points talking about imperialism, talking about capitalism, and then wrap
it in a fascistic package like that. That is their
entire political goal. It's it's it's the entire way they recruit,

(36:07):
it's how they spread their propaganda. It's how they get
people to believe conspiracy theories.

Speaker 3 (36:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, and we American people especially will be incredibly vulnerable
to it because they'll look at the critiques, which are
in some cases reasonable, right, or if somebody's not wrong
about every critique he has, but the fact that he
is valuing the murder through starvation of a million or
more people, which Bill Clinton getting the blow shop some

(36:35):
it's not something you should miss in your interpretation of
the validity of his points. Yeah, this is not a
This is not a guy you need to agree with.

Speaker 4 (36:42):
No, under no circumstances, have to.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Once again drill.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Yeah, it's uh, it's certainly a weird one. The reaction
to it has been equally weird and equally misleading.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
And yeah, the reaction to the reaction like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
It shouldn't be that fucking hard for us to be,
Like America shouldn't have three sanctions, killed millions of children
and done then two war crimes out of the world
Asama bin Lad and bad dude. We can take that
middle path.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
I do want to get into a little more before
we finish our talking about this, some of the lines
that I think are really igniting some of these people
who are now pro bin laden TikTokers, because it makes
sense to me that there are bits of this that
really grab people and I'm going to read a couple
of them. One of them is this line here. The
freedom of democracy that you call to is for yourselves

(37:38):
and for white race only. As for the West of
the world, you impose on them your monstrous, destructive policies
and governments, which you call the American friends. You prevent
them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic Party in Algeria
wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you
unleashed your agents in the Algerian Army onto them and
to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them
and torture them. A new lesson from the America Book

(38:00):
of Democracy. And like, yeah, there's some valid stuff in
that paragraph, right, there's some there's some points he's making
there that people who have started to get people who
have just gotten out of like their parents' bubble and
who are starting to become aware of the world and
history in the US's place in it. I see why,
especially if they encounter stuff like that out of context,

(38:23):
they will find that intriguing, because that's a fairly lucid
and reasonable sentiment of a horrible thing that this country
has been involved in.

Speaker 7 (38:33):
It's also nothing that hasn't been said better by it.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
You can find it.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
You can find it being said well ahead of bin
Laden saying it by people who did not kill thousands.

Speaker 4 (38:43):
I want to sort of, you know, maybe this is
too late in this episode for anyone to still be
listening to this, but I want to sort of make
an appeal to people who are discovering anti colonialism for
the first time. Yeah, sort of in the wake of
this and in the wake of Israel community and genocide
and the thing that's the something very important to understand
about anti colonialism, which is that anti colonialism is not

(39:04):
a single coherent set of politics. There are many, many
different types of anti colonial politics, and those different versions
of anti colonialism wind up with completely different politics. And
this is something you know internationally, there was a very
important distinction between made between left and right wing anti colonialisms.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
In the US.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
I mean, we don't have this right like. This is
sort of the problem with Americans encountering this for the
first time, is we don't have left and right wing
anti colonialism because the US is the world's tremere colonial power.
But in a lot of parts of the world there
is right wing anti colonialism, and you know, The core
difference here is there are people who hate colonialism because

(39:45):
of their sort of deep and abiding, principled opposition to
oppression and exploitation, and there are people who hate colonialism
because their empire lost a war and they want to
go back to being.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
An empire again.

Speaker 4 (39:56):
And what kinds like which version of this politics people
take up often has a lot to do with their
class position, and they're you know, they're they're sort of
like ethnic, racial, or position in the pre existing society's hierarchy.
And that's something very important about bin Lauden that you
can't get from either the American nationalists they hate us

(40:17):
for our freedom shit, and you also can't get from
bin Laden's own description of his motivation. And the thing
that's important here right is that you know, assamo'm bin
Laden is not some Palestinian k who picked up an
ak after the Israelis murdered his family. Assamo'm bin Laden
is one of the heirs to Saudi bin Laden group.
And this is a second I need this style. We
need to stop for a little bit and talk about

(40:38):
the differences between American and Saudi capitalism, because they don't
they're not structured the same way And one of the
sort of big differences here is that the Saudi bin
Laden group isn't like it's not like a company, right,
it's a conglomerate. And what this means is that you know,
is that bin Laden's family, like the people who own

(40:59):
the bin Laden Group, which is outed by his dad,
they don't own one company, they own five hundred companies.
The American equivalent to who bin Laden is is like
it's it's it's imagine if one off Jeff Bezos' kids
went to like a church, like an Orthodox church of
Ukraine's seminary school, and then god his dad to like

(41:20):
go like pay for him to go do war tourism
in Ukraine and then got a group together to like
fly a plane into the Kremlin.

Speaker 7 (41:26):
Yeah, and became like a weird like trad cat.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
That would be kind of cool, it would be funny,
but like, but that's the thing. Like, he's not like
London is not a sort of moral authority on like
Islamic reticizance to American imperialism. He's a rich, failed son
who had this combination of like regurgitated say you'd cut up,
and a bunch of his dad's money and like money
from Pakistani intelligence, and that allowed him to sort of
you know, that allowed him to do everything that he did.

(41:51):
Right that that that's the thing that allowed him and
not you know, like that kid in like that that
that that kid in Gazo picked up an ak Like
that's the that allowed him to declare war in the US.
And I want to read his account of what he
actually thinks happened to the US. This is this is,
this is from that same uh this this, this is

(42:13):
from that same letter. You are the nation that permits usury,
which has been forbidden by all religions, yet you build
your economy and investments on usury. As a result of
this in all its different forms, and guys, is the
Jews have taken over your economy, through which they have
then taken control of your media and now control all
aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving

(42:35):
their aims at your expense, precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned
you against. So I want to like, like like think
for it. Like I wanted people to sort of stop
and look at what he's actually saying here. His argument
for why the US is an imperialist power is that
it is controlled by Jews who control the economy in
the media and has enslaved the rest of the US

(42:56):
to do their will. And this is and I cannot
emphasize this enough word for word, a Nazi yes analysis
what happened to the US? And this is this is
what right wing anti colonialism is.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
Right.

Speaker 4 (43:07):
You look at like the sort of horrors of colonialism,
go oh, this is bad, and then when someone asks you, okay,
why is this happening, you unload this like utterly half
assed pile of anti Semitic conspiracy theories instead of like
an analysis of capitalism, like he thinks the source of
like American like imperialism and capitalism is interest bearing loans. Yeah, yeah,

(43:28):
this is nonsense.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
And that's what he means whenever he talks about usury, which, like,
by the way, is a heads up. Every Muslim country
that I am aware of has banks that do what
it fan does it. Yeah, and they do what is
effectively usury. It's just okay. So if you know anything
about like orthodox Judaism, right, you are not supposed to
do anything on the Sabbath, and so some people do

(43:51):
keep that You're not even supposed to turn on a light, right,
like One of the old ways this was expressed is
like you would light candles the night before the Sabbath
so that you could have some burning on the Sabbath.
Today there are ways around it that are like you
get lights that are scheduled to go on and off
at certain hours, and it's it's always. It's kind of funny.
There's a lot of jokes about this you get from
the Jewish comedians being like, do you think God is

(44:13):
like tricked by your rule slowering and stuff? But there
are banks in the Muslim world that are the banking
equivalent of that. Well, what they're doing isn't technically taking interest,
but like it works out to be the same thing
for them. They're just they're just getting around anyway. I
think that's an important piece.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
Of Catholic Church deciding that uh, fish and chicken on
meat so you could eat right.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Right right yeah, where it's like really God, Yeah, yeah,
do you think you think God is like, oh yeah, no,
I never meant for those things to be meat? Damn
they got me with that chicken shit. That ain't a
cow God seeing it? Yeah, I do. Actually, you have
to credit Chick fil A for being closed on Sunday
a little, I guess. But I love the idea of

(44:56):
like God going to like watch a Catholic congregation go
to breakfast and get their fucking like chicken sandwiches and going, ah,
you cut you crafty bastards. Got me again, guys. I
didn't think you need those, guys, They're so gross.

Speaker 7 (45:12):
That is kind of how the Catholic God works far removed.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, he's like set up a little sudoku for you.
He's just thrilled that you're getting.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
That to press a button to get its food.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah, yeah, I want to.

Speaker 4 (45:29):
I want I want to bring it back to bin
Laden for a second, because I think part of what's
going on here is something that.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
Isn't I don't know.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
Bin Laden is a product of his specific context, right,
And his specific context is that he grew up in
one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, and you know,
and his you know, And I guess this is the
thing we should actually I should actually mention I'm being
slightly unfair to the Taliban when I when I talk
about them having loans because of the Taliban are from
a different like school of Islamic jurisprudence. Then al Kaida

(46:02):
is even though they sort of they kind of work
together sometimes, but like, you know, but the thing, like
the sort of hobbyist school that like bin Laden is
from right, like he's the reason he has a right
wing anticlonial critique is he's absorbed this sort of like
social mores and he's absorbed you know, the like the
the like involved in the slave trade, level of anti

(46:24):
blackness that you get from the Souds, like from you know,
like the the he's absorbed their anti Semitism. He's absorbed
all of these things. And this is what he sort
of like has constructed as the reason you know, and
filtered through his sort of cobbling together of like different
sort of like like of like so how you could

(46:44):
up and of sort of like different sort of Islamic thinkers,
Like this is what he's assembled together. And it's this
thing that it's not a stable, coherent critique of the US.
It's it's it's it's this like it's all of his
sort of like weird prejudices and hang ups like grafted
onto anti colonialism and being able to tell the difference

(47:06):
between someone who is a genuine anti colonialist and someone
who is doing this stuff or like who wants their
empire back, or who is like, you know, like pissed
off that gay people exist like that. That is something
that is genuinely very important, and it's something that's made
enormously harder to do by the way that people like,

(47:26):
you know, by by the American education system, by the
way people are raised to think about media. Yeah, yeah,
this is this is, this is, this is, this is
this has the bin Loden rant.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
I we can always stand to do more ban Laden rants.
Maybe I'll do another episode on him on Bastards one
of these days. But yeah, I uh, good stuff. I
do want to kind of close by reading another bit
from from obl you know, our our friend of the pod.
This one's from two thousand and four October twenty ninth,
and I think it's relevant as we look at the

(48:01):
different ways the current president of the United States, the
former and possibly future president of the United States are
talking about dealing with problems like Islamic extremism. Because I
think Bin Laden's words here are pretty salient and this
comes from a common team made. It wound up airing
on Al Jazeera criticizing George Bush ahead of the two

(48:22):
thousand and four election. Your security is not in the
hands of Democratic candidate John Kerry or President George Bush
or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands.
We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush in his
administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half
of which are ruled by the military and the other
half by the sons of kings. They have a lot
of pride, arrogance, greed, and thievery, and again not wrong,

(48:46):
not wrong about most Muslim majority nations, and not wrong
about most Western nations.

Speaker 4 (48:52):
And it's a good And also is the Bushes too,
because yes, the Bushes were friends with the bin Laden family.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
Yes, yes they are you and they are also as
close as the US has to royalty as is Trump.
Maybe the kend maybe the Kennedy's. Kennedy's, but another presidential
candidate man, you know, complete with the insane, inbred guys
who anyway, anyone else got anything? I'm just baffled. Yeah,

(49:21):
well I'm happy. I'm having a good time, you know.
Get on TikTok. Let people know that you love terrorism.
Yeah it got wrong for you. Yeah, alternatively, get on
Twitter or wherever YouTube and film an angry video in
your car about how all of gen z I ironically

(49:43):
and supports the mass killing of civilians. Do either. Those
seem to be the two primary things people are doing
right now. So get out and join the herd. Everybody.
It's fun. What a great place. Ah, welcome back to

(50:12):
it could happen here, a podcast that is now happening here.
I could have done something with ear but we'll do
that next time. Just forget that I said that, and
welcome Mia to the program. Mia, how are you doing today?

Speaker 4 (50:28):
Not bad?

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Not bad? I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1 (50:31):
Yeah. Yeah, We're going to be talking about a subject
that's near and dear to all of our hearts, by
which I mean the Roman Empire with a guest who
is near and dear to our hearts, Mike Duncan. Mike,
how are you doing?

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Hello? Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
It is wonderful to have you.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Mike.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
You're a podcaster. You are kind of like the history
podcaster as far as a lot of folks are concerned,
including me and you. Also, you've had some interesting interactions
online with people as regards the Roman Empire recently.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (51:08):
Well, anytime the Roman Empire shows up on the cultural radar.
I am tagged into it by roughly ten thousand people. Yeah,
and then I come in and I do my bits,
or if you know, if something comes through, you know,
it gets shared at me, you know, not shared with me,
but shared it at me. And then and then I
take a look at it, and I get aggravated, and then,

(51:29):
you know, fire off a few salvos and retreat back
out of the social media ecosystem, which is kind of
the strategy these days.

Speaker 3 (51:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
Yeah, we all have to like fight like an insurgent
when it comes to that sort of thing, because the
alternative is to just get constantly stuck in this escalating
world of beats with strangers on the internet who are
making money off of the beef.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (51:54):
But yeah, but there are certain things that will get
me to come out of my little hibernation, which I
think we're about to talk about.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Yeah, yeah, me, do you want to do you wanna
take it away?

Speaker 3 (52:04):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (52:04):
So one of the things that's been happening recently is
that so on October twenty fifth, the Republicans finally, after
an enormous amount of time, finally managed to electic Speaker
of the House, and they picked this fairly unknown rep
named Mike Johnson, who's the guy from Louisiana, And they
picked him effectively because nobody knew who he was. Yeah,

(52:25):
and so they picked this guy and they're like okay,
and Mike Johnson gets elected and immediately everyone starts trying
to figure out who this guy is, and they very
quickly realize this guy is just a absolute incredible Christian
fundamentalist weirdo. He he doesn't have a bank account.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Which is like, why, that's classic fundamentalism too, that's some
of that old school stuff. Yeah, to see.

Speaker 4 (52:52):
It, it's really sort I mean, he's really sort of
like he's like he's he's really a.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Blast in the past with the Christian fundamentalist I.

Speaker 4 (52:58):
Mean he he he was a lawyer that represented like
a bunch of Young Earth creationist museums.

Speaker 3 (53:04):
He's really going into that old school stuff.

Speaker 4 (53:06):
And one of the other things that some people dug
up is a podcast interview where he is talking about
how gay people cause the fall of Rome. So, Mike Duncan,
I want to ask you the question that I think
all of our listeners are wondering. Can we as queer
people take responsibility? Can we take any credit for the

(53:26):
fall of Rome, or are we stealing visigof Valor?

Speaker 3 (53:28):
If we do that, you're stealing valor here.

Speaker 5 (53:32):
But but I do I do agree that several of
the gays in my life are like, don't take this
from us. It's one of our proudest accomplishments. We brought
down the Roman Empire. And I was like, but unfortunately,
it's just it's not the case. It's not even close
to the case. It's you know, you could you could
draw random words out of a hat and produce a

(53:54):
sentence that was literally nonsensical, and that would be a
better read of the end of the Roman Empire and
saying gay people or homosexuality like, because it's all wrapped
up in this sort of like it was decadence that
caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They were too like,
you know, they were just too life sensious, and they
just throw up some some vocabulary words.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
And it just it just doesn't land at all.

Speaker 5 (54:17):
It doesn't land on the specifics, it doesn't land on
the general it doesn't land chronologically, it doesn't land in
any way, shape or form. It's just something they've decided
is true and repeat to each other and that's the whole.
That's the long and short of it.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (54:31):
Yeah, I think there's some interesting stuff there too, of
like the stuff people talk about why when they like
I remember I was reading someone like writing about this
and they started talking about Nero, and I was like,
do you know, like in what century the Roman Empire
like collapse? Like why are you talking about Nero? I
don't know, it seems like there's this real I don't know,

(54:54):
it seems like, you know, the the fall of Rome
is one of these things that's become central to a
lot of very weird in politics. And I remember, like
a few years ago, the big thing was like the
Rome was called the fall of Rome was caused by immigration, Yeah, which.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
And that's also current as well.

Speaker 4 (55:08):
Yeah yeah, And so I don't know, what is it
about like Rome with these people? The fall of Rome,
these people are like so drawn to in a way
that causes them not to think about what actually happened
at all.

Speaker 5 (55:20):
I mean, well, I mean, just to go back a second,
it's like Rome in general, in their heads, is not
a sort of temporarily dependent series of events that unfolded
over a thousand years. It's just this kind of like
one eternal place that's like a pastiche in their minds,

(55:41):
so like Nero can exist alongside Attila, can exist alongside
you know, Scipio Africanus, and all of these people and
events like just sort of are near each other in time,
the same way that they believe that, like you know,
dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the earth like it. It's that
kind of same thing. And so if they think about
somebody like Caligula or Nero running this like running these

(56:05):
courts of decadence, like, it doesn't click to them that
this is like in the first century, and that the
Roman Empire doesn't fall for four hundred years, five hundred years,
and then the East keeps going for another thousand years.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
That's a huge part of it. It is interesting to me.
You you kind of made the statement there about in
these guys' heads, Rome being this kind of eternal like
continuing thing, And that's interesting to me because it that
that conception of Rome goes back so far, I mean
very famously, Like when Russia became like an organized political entity,

(56:38):
there was this widespread attitude that it was the third Rome, right,
that still plays into a lot of Russian imperial politics
to this day, So it is. It is kind of
fascinating how far that idea goes back, Like it says
something about the success of Roman propaganda, that it still
has this place in so many people's minds.

Speaker 5 (57:01):
Yeah, and I mean it has a place in my mind.
I don't I don't think of that. Yeah, so do
I so to many of us. And I don't think
that the crime here is thinking about the fall of
the Roman Empire or the trand or as you know,
we would more properly call it the transition from late

(57:21):
Antiquity to the eartal Medieval period, which is, you know,
unfolded and that didn't have a cataclysm, and you shouldn't
necessarily be thought of as as an inherently negative thing,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But organizing your worldview
around utterly historically illiterate version of the Roman Empire that

(57:43):
is really just a vehicle for your own special bigotry.
That's where they're really running a foul of me and
my temper.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
Yeah, And there's there's a lot that's really interesting about
how they sort of choose to interpret like the causes
of the fall. I think probably the least the least
sensible argument they have is this idea that it had
something to do with like degeneracy. But yeah, it's like
you can find Romans in like the the Middle Republic

(58:18):
period saying the same thing, that, like, we've become too degenerate,
too lazy, because of like all of the you know,
slaves automating, you know, the ruling classes tasks people have.
You know, Romans are not like the Romans of our
forefathers and stuff anymore. And like, you know, the empire
continued or the Republic and then the Empire still had

(58:38):
centuries in the tank at that.

Speaker 5 (58:39):
Yeah, very very famously, the Romans started complaining about how
it's not like the good old days round about the
second century b c. Which is like three hundred years
before they hit what we all acknowledged to be the
peak of Roman civilization. And this is like, this is
when Cato the Elder gets into it. And the thing

(59:00):
that those guys were griping about at the time, and
there are there are little, you know, little connections here,
just doesn't none of it shapes up. Is that what
Cato the Elder and people like him were complaining about
way back in the second century was this is when
the Romans come in contact with the Greeks, and there
was there was a kind of like a split between
traditional Latin Romanness and then this like new Eastern Greaceness,

(59:25):
which like they've got new ideas and like they sounds
like they have sex with each other all the time.
You know, they don't care if they're men or women,
and so that's what they were pushing back against, and
so that kind of language does that.

Speaker 3 (59:39):
This is where it kind of distills.

Speaker 5 (59:41):
Over the centuries and then over the millennia into this
idea that the Roman Empire collapsed and was ruined by
this kind of degeneracy without being able to really define
what degeneracy means or how it could possibly impact the
long term health of a of a large empire.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
You know.

Speaker 5 (01:00:00):
The fact that very bluntly right when you're saying this
in one eighty six BC, you can't say that contact
with Greek ideas brought the Roman Empire down. It just can't,
because it just didn't get crushed by this, It didn't
fall apart.

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
I mean, my if I have to make an argument
as to like what thing that I can connect to
modernity killed the modern Empire, I tend to claim that
it's the concept of a reboot, right, because no sooner
than did Augustus have Virgil reboot the story of the
Trojan War, than the inevitable path to the collapse of
the Roman Empire began. Right that the real sign that

(01:00:38):
we're heading towards collapse is all these movie reboots.

Speaker 3 (01:00:42):
Okay, great, well, the.

Speaker 5 (01:00:44):
Rule is, whatever your modern preoccupation is, that's what you
use to explain the fall of the Roman Empire. So
of course I have my preoccupations, and that's what I
say caused the fall of the Roman Empire, which is
that the Roman Empire and never found.

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
We're all living in a hologram.

Speaker 5 (01:01:04):
And we know and we know this because if a
woman visits me and brings me and brings me groceries
and she's wearing a Jesus fish necklace, it can pop
into my brain and I can know that we're.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
Living in We're still We're still in the Roman Empire. Yeah,
the empire never ended, folks, Yeah, yeah, every politician is
still Cato.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:23):
I mean, look, they you could also tell this because
you know, it's like, in the same way that everything
tastes like chicken. They haven't invented a new moral panic
in two thousand years, So pretty clearly we're just we're
just we're just recycling through exactly the same content over
and over again.

Speaker 1 (01:01:38):
It does all of the the kind of similarities you
can find, or at least seeming similarities you can find
between stuff that different Roman politicians were complaining about, you know,
two thousand years ago, and stuff that's in our media today.
I think does suggest part of why it's almost impossible
to not keep bringing Rome up, which is that like

(01:02:01):
there are and I think that it's a mix of
like there are some legitimate similarities between our cultures, and
also our concept of Rome, which is often a historical
but is based on generations of misconceptions, makes it seem
even closer.

Speaker 5 (01:02:18):
Yeah, and we are a post Roman society and they
are our forebears, whether we like it or not. Like
any civilization that exists today that went through the Mediterranean world,
you know, it had a Roman period, and the Romans
made a strong imprint on all of us in terms
of like our laws and how we think about money,

(01:02:39):
and how we think about family relationships, like all of
these things are you know, we're living in a post
Roman world, and that's why it's important to study the
Roman Empire as an entity, but do it with some
degree of rigor rather than just using it as a
prop in the culture wars. Yeah, that was a great

(01:03:00):
That was a great point I just made in so No,
that was absolutely brought the conversation to a complete stance.
So as everybody said, just chewed on this nugget wisdom
that I have fruped at the table.

Speaker 1 (01:03:13):
I do kind of think it behooves people. Part of
why it's valuable to do things like listen to the
Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan is that you're this Rome
isn't going to stop being brought up by these people
and increasingly unhinged and inaccurate ways. And it's it's just like,
it's helpful to have an actual understanding of who the

(01:03:33):
Spartans were and what they did and did not do
for the sake of these arguments. It's helpful to have
a meaningful understanding of the Roman Empire. And I'm kind
of wondering, like when you when you come into misconceptions
about Rome, what are some of like the top ones
on your list that uh that that your brain just
forces you to go in and.

Speaker 5 (01:03:52):
Correct, well, I mean this is a big one that
because this one I feel like is deeply homophobic and
principally used to attack the queer community rather than anything else.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Is.

Speaker 5 (01:04:07):
And just to give your listeners, like some specifics here,
it's like, you know, sexuality in the Roman world was
very different than it was today, and there weren't even
you know, the kind of binary conceptions of gender sexual
relations that we have today. A lot of these things
are very modern inventions. I'm sure a lot of people
know this, but we can also point very specifically to like,

(01:04:28):
you know, Hadrian, who is broadly considered and cited to
be one of the greatest of the emperors who lived
at the height of the Golden.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
Age, was gay.

Speaker 5 (01:04:37):
Like that's like, that's a full stop thing. And so
it's just like there's no compatibility between these two ideas
or really anyway, if you ask them to take this
argument more than twenty five words deep, they're not going
to have a way to explain how it is that
somebody engaged in gay sex in the four hundreds could

(01:04:58):
have possibly been the reason why the Goths won a
certain battle, or why Attila the Hunt was able to
do what he did. All of it is just complete
and utter ahistorical nonsense, and so I consider it, I
consider it my duty as some kind of voice of
authority on Roman history to not let people get away
with this. The last, the last time I saw this

(01:05:20):
pop up was actually uh Ben Carson, which is a
little bit of a blast from the past at this point,
but he he he wrote a book at one point
where he dropped this stuff in there. And and the way
they always couch it too is like as we all know,
you know, it was homosexuality that really led to the
generacy of.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
The lay like I'm so sick of you people.

Speaker 5 (01:05:41):
But the other, the other big one that really grinds
my gears that really emerged. This this was not a
preconception that I had going into doing the history of Rome,
but something that I came away from after doing it
and studying, you know, the year by year history of
the Empire, is that this notion that like sort of
the Romans were this uh like like a like a

(01:06:03):
like a nationality that then went forth and conquered the Mediterranean,
that Romans were Romans as like an ethnic stock thing,
and that it was when these other ethnicities started sort
of pressing at the empire's borders, or as we said
a little bit earlier, that it was immigration right that
destroys the Roman Empire. That there was this kind of
like pure noble Roman thing. This is essentially functioning as

(01:06:28):
the white person in the ancient world, Like this is
how we're connecting these things. The British did this, the
French did this, Americans now do this today, that like
the Romans are our stand in as sort of the
white people, and the white people are civilized and all
of these other like mongrel races are are uncivilized, and
they were either civilized by the Romans that they were
killed by the Romans or enslaved by the Romans. But

(01:06:48):
this is all for the good because the Romans themselves
were were like this this this superior stock of DNA somehow.
And really, when you go through the empire, the h
history of the Roman Empire, you find that there is
that kind of conservative strain inside of like the patrician
class and inside of the senatorial class that they're like,

(01:07:09):
we want this to be a closely held thing, Like
the original Republic was a closely held oligarchy of Latin
families who lived on the Palatine Hill, and that's what
they wanted for themselves. And so when other people tried
to push into the Republic, they tried to resist it.
And so that is a running conflict that happens in
Roman history. But any time that that tendency is overcome

(01:07:32):
and a second prevailing force that says like, actually, Romanness
is just an idea. Romanness is just a set of
beliefs and practices and sort of daily habits of life
and ideology that can really be held by anybody at
any time. And if we let in say non Roman Italians,
which is the first people who were considered non Roman
who then came into the Empire, which then we look

(01:07:54):
back and we're like, there was a time that Romans
didn't think that people from what is today like Florin
or Milan were not Italian or not Roman. Yeah, yeah,
they were not considered Roman until you know, the very
late stages of the Republic. I mean, I wrote a
book about the later stage of the Republic, and the
Social War is when this gets wrapped up. After hundreds
of years being treated as second class citizens, there was

(01:08:17):
a civil war that nearly destroyed the Republic before Caesar
even came along. It was resolved by giving citizenship to
the Italians, making them full members of the polity, and
then having that just be a boon to Rome's fortunes.
This happens in Gaul, this happens in Spain, this happens
in Illyria, this happens in the Far East. That these
people who the Romans encounter and yes, do conquer, because

(01:08:40):
it's a very violent world of conquest and mutual conquest.
That Romans in Gaul were as much Romans as Romans
in Rome. And anytime I find Roman leaders resisting that idea,
I find the empire starting to falter and commit miss steps.

(01:09:00):
And anytime they're like, nah, let's just throw it open.
You know, if you're good, if you're dedicated, if you're loyal,
you can be a part of this project that we have.
Then I find the Romans doing very very well. And
I'm about to start not to just monologue here, but
I'm about to start working on another book that is
about the crisis of the third century. And by this time,
we have emperors who are coming from North Africa. We

(01:09:23):
have emperors who are tagged as being Arabian. We have
the set of emperors who really help Rome emerge from
this thing that is called the Crisis of the third
century when the empire very nearly collapsed in the mid
two hundreds. Is a bunch of guys from Alyria, which
is today the Balkans. I mean, we're talking about guys
who are coming from like Serbia and Croatia, or the

(01:09:44):
emperors who are continuing the Roman legacy and keeping the
empire intact. So this notion that like the Rome wasn't
a multicultural empire, or that the arrival of new peoples
was somehow bad for them is just disproven over and
over and over again by the realities of Roman history.
So that's the other one is this immigration caused the

(01:10:04):
fall of the Roman Empire is just flat out incorrect.

Speaker 4 (01:10:08):
Well, yeah, one of the arguments that I've heard sort
of against that, and I want to ask how true
this is. But one of the things that I hear
people sort of responding to this with is this argument
that like part of what causes like the sack of
Rome is that the Romans get into one of these
nphobic streaks and they don't want to sort of try
to observe the visigoths. Okay, so that that is, that's

(01:10:30):
a that's essentially my position.

Speaker 3 (01:10:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:33):
I was just going to bring up a guy who
a historian, who has to come up anytime you talk
about the way the right likes to use the image
of Rome, particularly the collapse of Rome. Victor Davis Hansen. Yeah, yeah,
he is. He is a guy you're going I mean,
he was. He's my dad's favorite historian. I come from
a very conservative family. And he wrote a book not

(01:10:56):
all that long ago. No, actually it was twenty ten. Sorry,
that still like five years ago to me. But it's
not five years ago. It's much further away called Why
did Rome Fall? And Why does It Matter Now? And
there's a quote I found from a little article he
wrote plugging it that I want to bring up here
so we can chew over in short, what ruined Rome

(01:11:18):
in the West. Lots of things, but clearly the pernicious
effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created
a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues
or the creation of actual commensurate wealth, and the resulting debits, inflation,
debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more
vulnerable Western Empire far less margin when the barbarians arrived.

Speaker 3 (01:11:39):
It's all bullshit, I know, it's.

Speaker 5 (01:11:42):
It's so it's so frustrating because this culture of dependence
that can I swear on this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
Oh, absucking lutely for sure.

Speaker 5 (01:11:50):
This fucking these motherfuckers, this entitle this entitlement thing that
they have because they don't like welfare because they're pricks,
you know. And you know Victor Davis Hansen, you know,
this is a guy who wrote a book called Like Mexifornia,
which is like, oh my god, yeah, absolutely, this is
where it comes from the nineties where he's like he's
like California is going to be destroyed by all these

(01:12:12):
Hispanic people. Like it's just loathsome shit that he writes. Anyway,
this culture of entitlement, right, like oh, it was just
bread and circuses and like the empire had to give
all this money to like how many Like okay, great,
the Roman Rome the city was like a million people, yeah, right,
And there were a couple of large urban hubs that

(01:12:33):
did have like grain doles because you needed to be
able to feed the people in these cities. And this
is you know, smart policy by the emperors. It's actually
not bad on a humanitarian level. And then they also
through games because this is what people do. Rich people
throw parties to make themselves love like this is a
very This happens today, This happens all the time, This
happened during the medieval period, happens all the time. The

(01:12:55):
number of people who are like benefiting from this like
imperial largess, who have this like entitlement mentality is such
a fraction, such a fraction of the total number of
people who live in this empire, where we're talking about
sixty sixty five million people maybe maybe give or take
a little bit. Not that many people were on the

(01:13:16):
dole in Rome. It was usually just the male head
of the household got some grain. It was like it
was it was a little bit of supplemental It's basically
the equivalent of like supplemental income. It was absolutely not
just they're rolling out banquets for these people every single day.
Nor is it the case that that entitlement of Romans

(01:13:39):
living in Rome in the two hundred's AD or something
is like the reason why they couldn't sustain their border defenses. Right,
This is the same arguments we get when it's like,
you know, we can't afford social security because the you know,
the National Endowment for the Sciences paid somebody two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars to uh to look into the

(01:14:02):
you know, be keeping habits.

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (01:14:05):
Like it's like people just don't have a way to
compare a million dollars to a billion dollars to a
trillion dollars because it's just a lot of money in
our heads.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
So like this none of none of that is true.
None of that that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:14:21):
It's it's it's fascinating to me, especially when you hear like, uh,
this is like really popular amongst the Joe Rogan set,
this idea that like, oh, you know, when an empire
is at the end, that's when you get all the
Britain circuses to distract people. And man, when the empire,
like the Roman Empire, the entire period during which it
was expanding like wildfire, was doing nothing but throwing giant

(01:14:45):
fucking parties in the caps. All they did, Like that's
all they did. You couldn't be in politics without going broke.
Throwing parties like that was the That's why a lot
of the conquest happened is because you have to throw
these parties when you were earlier up on the on
the curses and rum and then you would have to
like go conquer someplace to pay for it, yep.

Speaker 5 (01:15:03):
And that was why Actually, when you get right down
to it, you know, one of my you know, side
opinions is that if you were a provincial inside of
these conquests, you know, conquered lands, life was much better
under the Empire than it was under the Republic because
there actually was some tightening and normalization of the bureaucratic

(01:15:25):
regime under the Empire, like after Augustus comes along, rather
than what was going on in the Republic, which is
every single year a province was getting a new governor
who was there to extract as much money for himself
as possible because he had taken out tons and tons
of loans to throw the biggest games that he possibly could,
to build the biggest act, to build the biggest thing. Now,
when you get into the later Empire, like are their

(01:15:47):
financial difficulties of course, right, you don't get the kind
of monument building and even aqueduct building and infrastructure projects
you get in the later Empire, But like there are
larger economic and structural reasons why they were suffering financial
difficulties at the end of the empire that have nothing
to do with these couple of grain doles that were

(01:16:08):
going to a few major urban areas. Most of the
population is rural subsistence peasants, like those people were not
feeling entitled to.

Speaker 4 (01:16:14):
Shit, which I think is really funny because if you
look at like, I am very confident if you actually
did the math, US spends more money agricultural subsidies every
year than like than the Romans did, like on the
entire grain dole.

Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
I mean, there's a way the math is true. Like yeah,
like we I mean, but in part not just like
because who knows what the Romans would have done with
a higher level of technology. Just wasn't possible to do
that kind of thing outside of the major urban hubs,
Like you can't.

Speaker 3 (01:16:42):
Also, you can't you couldn't do it, That's the thing.

Speaker 5 (01:16:45):
Yeah, this is the same thing where you get into
like when people like to slip in the whole, like oh,
there was lead in the in the in the pipes,
and like there was lead in the pipes, and you know,
maybe some of the leadership was a bit over led
exposed like who knows, like maybe maybe, maybe, but like
the vast majority of the population is not living in
downtown Rome where this might be a problem, or in

(01:17:07):
you know, one of the other you know, regional capitals
that's just not where any of this is taking place.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
Well, people love to talk about stuff like that. It
is like, you know, the fact that they're one of
their major sweeteners included a lot of letters is always
like interesting to bring up. But the thing that I mean,
and this was this is also pure speculation, but that
I always wonder more about, not just with Rome, but
with like most postmodern societies and even like early modern societies,

(01:17:35):
is like, what about like mild head injuries, because we
know so much more now about how a bunch of
little head injuries can permanently alter your behavior, and like,
like that's a big thing when I think about when
I think about like the World War one generation, is
you've got millions of men who wind up becoming very
influential in politics who are under artillery barrages and who
are there's almost no way they're not walking away with

(01:17:57):
some kind of cte based on what we know now
about what being near artillery does to your brain. You
know what does that do to Yeah, the ancient world
was full of trauma and that's and that's a real thing.
All of these guys were deeply, deeply traumatized. But like
one of the other points about the whole like bread
doll thing is this gets back to this is sneaky

(01:18:18):
backdoor racism because the argument, the argument is that Rome
was great when it was the Romans doing it like
these actual like Latins who were coming from the environs
of Rome in particular, and that it all started to
go bad ones non Romans were in charge of things
because the Romans themselves had had decayed into this like,
oh well, we just want our bread and circuses and

(01:18:40):
we're not going to join the legions. We'll just have
Germans do our fighting for us, or Goths do our
fighting for us. Which that is That is simply sneaky
backdoor racism, because it's a way of saying that it
was the reason why the Roman Empire was successful was
because of this small population group and once they go away,
other groups, these mongrel digs, will never be able to

(01:19:03):
live up to or sustain civilization in the way that
Romans did. The pure Romans did and so that's also
a big reason why we need to push back on
these things is because the Roman Empire was not just
sustained but thrived and expanded by people who were not Romans.
And the idea that you know, their civilization required this
like little tiny speck of a DNA spark to keep

(01:19:26):
it going is just you know, this is the kind
of person who finishes writing that book and then immediately
turns their attention to modern California politics and says, the
big problem here is Hispanics.

Speaker 3 (01:19:35):
Yeah, which is also not true, by the way, I
need to cut that up.

Speaker 1 (01:19:40):
Yeah, the big problem with California politics is California politicians.

Speaker 3 (01:19:46):
Right, It's not Latinos.

Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
You know, it's certainly not Latinos. You know.

Speaker 4 (01:19:50):
I wanted to kind of circle back around to the
sort of degeneracy stuff because I think there's an interesting
through line there too, with with not just sort of
modern politics, but the politics of the period of the
original rise of fascism, because you know, you look at
these arguments and they're like, well, okay, it was like
cultural decadence, and then they start talking about degeneracy and

(01:20:11):
how homosexuality was this like degenerate thing. That brought down
the empire, and like you go back and you like
read the Nazis and they are also absolutely obsessed with,
like you know, with this notion of like degenerate art
and like cultural degeneracy is this force that's this internal
force of subverting the empire. And you know, and like
this is also I think another like reason to be

(01:20:36):
reason to be interested in a better way about Rome
was also the way that like the original Italian fascists art.
I mean, like the word fascism is like derived you know,
like from from Roman symbol symbols, right, and like you know,
this is like Mussolini's entire thing is about turning the
Vediterranean into the Roman lake. Blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:55):
So the fascist is great. Not to get you know,
to derail your point, keep.

Speaker 1 (01:21:01):
Talking, Just gonna cut that line out of the podcast.
Mike Duncan says, fascist, it's great. The fascist is great.
It's a great symbol. Go go, Like a lot of
people don't actually even notice this. Maybe they do at
this point this is no longer a fun fact.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
But you go. You go to the link.

Speaker 5 (01:21:18):
No, well, I mean not just Congress, but go to
Lincoln Memorial look at the Lincoln Memorial. What are his
hands resting on to a couple of fascists. It just
is because you know what, a bundle of sticks is
stronger together and that is a symbol of solidarity, and
it is a symbol of group action being superior to
individual attempts to do anything, and that the one, the
one boo is going to break, but all of them
together is good. Like none of this is like inherently bad.

(01:21:39):
It's just a bunch of fascists claimed it for their own.

Speaker 3 (01:21:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:21:43):
Well, and my memory of this is that I'm pretty
sure there was a group of people who were like
calling themselves fascis, like in in early like late eighteen hundreds,
early nineteen hundred Italy, who weren't fascists, who were like,
it's like basically left wingers. And then and then like, well, sorry, Notazis.

Speaker 5 (01:22:00):
Well I don't know if you know this, but Nazis
are actually socialists. They're national socialists. And so a lot
of people think that their right wing, but actually their
left wing. And that's what it is. Hitler was. It
was an Oberlin grad.

Speaker 1 (01:22:14):
This is where we q my thirty minute digression about
stress rism.

Speaker 5 (01:22:18):
Oh god, but I think to you, I think to
the point that you were trying to make or that
you were making there though, is that they were you know,
the Nazis did. And then we hear this repeated today
that like that degeneracy is like a thing that is
a force, like a physical force that can maybe even
be measured, and if you don't have enough of it,

(01:22:39):
or if you have too much of it, then your
society is going to start to break apart or decay.
Like it's just an idea, that's it. It's just sort
of a way of thinking about something or a way
of describing something. It's not actually a really real thing
that is out there in the world. Like if you
have a society that suddenly can't grow grain and you
have a famine, like that's a real thing that will

(01:23:01):
actually affect your society and bring it down. You have
this other thing that is just like moral degeneracy. This
is just like you listing things you don't like and
saying that this is the reason why things are falling apart,
because degeneracy can be anything to anybody. But really, you know,
like people smoking cigarettes at four o'clock in the morning
because they've been up all night, you know, doing drugs,

(01:23:23):
like that's what kids do, what people have that people
are always going to do this, This is always on
the backgrounds and margins of any society. So like and
rich people like they've always partied, they always will party.
Like those kinds of things. You can't really then say like, oh,
well we've accumulated too much degeneracy. Now our society is
going to start to break apart, and this, you know,

(01:23:45):
the things that we see today in terms of our
own sort of faltering democratic republic. This is not because
of degeneracy. This isn't because the kids are doing too
many drugs, or like we legalize gay marriage, Like that's
not That's not why any of this is happening. It's
happening for other reasons. It's happening because of greed. It's
happening because of sociopathic indifference to other people's lives. Those

(01:24:07):
are the things that actually matter, not whether you stayed
up all night drinking and partying.

Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
No, No, it's yeah, it's it's it's the kind like
I tend to think, like talking about the Lata fundia
is a lot more relevant to talking about like what
happened to the elites under Rome and what's happened in
our own society than bringing up like the parties and.

Speaker 3 (01:24:28):
Shit like yeah, it's this exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:24:30):
The centralization of wealth and power in a tinier and
tinier number of men was responsible for a number of
the problems that Rome encountered, as it aged.

Speaker 5 (01:24:38):
And they don't want to have that conversation out, so
they want us to have this other conversation which flatters
their bigotry.

Speaker 4 (01:24:46):
Well, and this I think comes back to the thing
you were, you know, the joke you're making about like
all of these these are all the same people who
are like, oh, well, the Nazis were socialists.

Speaker 1 (01:24:54):
It's like yeah, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:24:56):
Like the point of like these arguments is so they
you don't go back into the historical record and realize
how much all the things are saying are wrong and
how much they're making precisely the same arguments that you know,
the Nazis were making, or that all of these sort
of like you know, all all of the sort of
past people who broadly is acknowledged did a bunch of

(01:25:18):
terrible stuff, had the same opinions that they do.

Speaker 1 (01:25:21):
Mm hmm, yeah, well I don't know. I think that's
what I've got to talk about today. I mean, this
is like we could go on to the way in
which like Sparta gets remembered and stuff and the cultural

(01:25:41):
like right wing, but I think that's kind of moving
sort of far afield. Although there's similarities, right, there's always
this idea that like at this certain point when everybody
looked the same, like that's when this historic empire was
at their best. And when you know, degeneracy got entered
into it, when immigrants got into into it, that's when
it sort of fell apart. I guess some of that's

(01:26:05):
mixed in with sort of like Frank Miller as opposed
to any sort of real history. But that's always the case, right,
I think a lot.

Speaker 7 (01:26:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:26:13):
I mean in Frank Miller's working in a tradition that
is very standard. You know, the you know, the kind
of racist orioleentizing, orientalizing of you know, of anybody from
the east, like that was all current, like you know,
the Romans had those ideas. I mean that we get
the word barb like the word like one of the
points that I'm going to make probably in my book
is that like so the word barbarian just means non Greek,

(01:26:36):
like that's it, because the Greeks had a you know,
a very sort of self centered.

Speaker 3 (01:26:40):
View of the world, as we all do. But that
meant that the Romans are barbarians, you know, and that
word is coined, and we're thinking about who the Romans are,
like they were the civilized ones and then and then
there are all these barbarians who are bad.

Speaker 5 (01:26:53):
But like from the Greek perspective, the Romans were as
barbaric as you know, the Scythians were, and you know,
probably and certainly less civilized than the Persians were when
the Romans. When the Romans first appeared on the scene
in Greece, they were like, who are they? These are
just a bunch of guys who are obsessed with war
and they have no culture, they have no ideas of
their own. They just march around in squares and kill

(01:27:13):
people like That's that was their interpretation of what the
Romans were originally, which is not a you know, terrible
interpretation of e really Roman history. But yeah, this just
this sort of dividing between civilized peoples and barbaric peoples
is something that then has been around for thousands of
years and we're still doing it today. Like everything that

(01:27:35):
we're seeing, you know, and I look at Israel and Palestine,
there's a lot of this mapping of civilized versus uncivilized
people onto this conflict that I see is rooted in
a lot in these sort of Western traditions that informed
nineteenth century racist ideas about how things you know, about
how societies organize themselves, all of which needs to be

(01:27:59):
deconstructed and thrown away.

Speaker 1 (01:28:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always love it when people
try to bring up like these sort of racial theories
within the context of the Roman Empire, who had absolutely
nothing that would be considered like a modern understanding of
whiteness or race like was was completely absent.

Speaker 3 (01:28:18):
No, they they all had they all had group identity.

Speaker 1 (01:28:22):
No, they wets but yeah, different era, Yeah, exactly right.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):
It was there's us and then there's everybody else.

Speaker 5 (01:28:29):
Yeah, and you know, the Romans differentiated a little bit
between like there were Egyptians, and you know, they they
were kind of you know, they were they were curious
about how how the Jews worked, because the Jews were
very old civilization, and so the Romans kind of took
special note of that, and they really admired the Greeks,
and so there are these like sort of like groupings

(01:28:49):
that they all understood, but it's all just sort of
that very self centered. You know, if you go through
anthropological history of any group of people, their word for
themselves is just the word for person.

Speaker 3 (01:29:00):
You know.

Speaker 5 (01:29:00):
We find this a lot, and the Romans were that
way too, but not not in this way, not not
sitting down and making like hierarchies of you know, who can, uh,
you know, who can do what, and who should be
on top and who should be on bottom, because you know,
if you're a traditional ancient Chowvinus, you're like, well, my
people should be on top, and that, you know, is
self explanatory, and then we will we will fight for
that that it's not because of yeah, these these racial hierarchies.

Speaker 1 (01:29:25):
Yeah. Well, I think that's about all I had to
get into, Mia. You have anything else you wanted to
sort of touch on today?

Speaker 4 (01:29:35):
I I think I think I think we've about we
think we've about covered it.

Speaker 1 (01:29:38):
Well, we got it.

Speaker 5 (01:29:40):
We have we've established that it's wrong to think that
gays made the Roman Empire fall.

Speaker 1 (01:29:45):
No, No, although you can, yeah, there's a million more
things to say about that, but but yeah, I think
we've we've hit on the basics. Mike. You are a podcaster.
Your Revolution podcast is one of the best things on
the internet. You are also an author. Think of a
whole bunch of books, The Storm Before the Storm, which

(01:30:08):
is about a lot of the stuff we've been talking
about today, Hero of Two Worlds, the History of Rome. Yeah, Mike,
you have anything else you want to plug?

Speaker 5 (01:30:18):
Well, I am just about, as I said earlier, about
to start work on a third book, which will be
the Crisis of the Third Century. So if anybody out
there who's listening to this has been like I wonder
if Mike's ever going to write a book about the
Crisis of the third Century, I will, and I am excellent.

Speaker 1 (01:30:34):
Well, thank you for being on the show, Mike, and
yeah listeners until next time. If somebody brings up the
Roman Empire in an attempt to attack various special interests
in our modern political system by a Gladias, you know
that still works the same way it did in the past,
Just start swinging a Gladias. Remember it's God but blade

(01:30:56):
on both sides, so you got to be careful when
you swing a Gladias. Satire satire that's not actionable satire.

Speaker 9 (01:31:20):
Hello, everybody, Welcome to it could happen here. My name
is Scharene, and today, as usual, I have a very
serious topic to talk about. Today, I wanted to talk
about corn. Yes, corn, the food. I think corn gets
a really bad wrap these days, a starchy carb. Oh no, hi,

(01:31:42):
fructose corn syrup, get away from me. But like, actually
that shit is not good for you, so do eat
it in moderation, if at all. But corn itself shouldn't
be made into a death syrup in the first place.
Corn isn't supposed to be eaten this way. It's meant
to be eaten just as it is, or rather how
it has come to be because of human intervention, which

(01:32:04):
is delicious. I am obsessed with corn. My entire family
is obsessed with corn. Corn boiled sweet corn in particular,
is one of the most popular street foods in the
Middle East and Syria. Street vendors have handfuls dozens of
corn cobs boiling in these giant cauldrons at the side

(01:32:26):
of the road, and the smell is intoxicating. Every time
my family and I were in Syria, my uncle would
stop by a vendor and grab bags full of corn
for us, like it was right after getting picked up
from the airport, our first stop always. Then we'd usually
put the corn in the biggest pot my grandmother had

(01:32:46):
and boil them fresh. And again the smell, you guys,
it would fill up the entire apartment and it smelled
so good. The corn would be steaming hot, and we'd
move the couch in the living room in order to
make room for the table that we can all eat
on and gather around, and we would devour the corn.
We would go to town, and in my thoughts about

(01:33:08):
corn that I have quite often, I started wondering about
how exactly did corn become a street food, because it's
a street food in many cultures. Elote is one that
comes to mind that is the most popular, I believe,
But I wanted to know why and how how did
it become so popular as street food. That's what I

(01:33:30):
wanted to find out, and I did kind of. I
ended up learning a lot about the history of corn
and how exactly it ended up being in practically everything
we eat, and that was fascinating to me, so maybe
you'll find it fascinating too. Today corn is one of
the world's most important crops. That is not news. Obviously,

(01:33:53):
we eat corn, and it can also be turned into
flour and syrup. It's fed to livestock, it's transformed to ethanol,
and it can even be used to make plastic. More
than one billion tons of corn are produced around the
globe every year, and corn yields more than six percent
of all food calories for humans, which is a big

(01:34:15):
percent even though six is a small number. Let's talk
about the history of corn. Corn as we know it
today would not exist if it weren't for the humans
that cultivated and developed it. It is a human invention,
a plant that does not exist naturally in the wild.
It can only survive if planted and protected by humans.

(01:34:37):
Relatable scientists believe that people living in central Mexico developed
corn about ten thousand years ago. Apparently, civilization got off
to a slow start in Mexico, flagging about five thousand
years behind civilization in what historians call the quote fertile
Crescent of the Middle East. Hughitlas, a University of Wisconsin,

(01:35:00):
the professor of botany, thinks this delay can be blamed
on the differences in plants. He said, the New World
civilization developed slowly because the basic food crop first cultivated
in Mexico was corn. He said the process of deriving
corn from wild plants was maybe fifty times more complex
than the development of wheat and other crops in the

(01:35:22):
Middle East. Las said agriculture in the Old World started
ten thousand years ago with the sowing of wild plant seeds.
With time, farmers selected grains with seed pods that didn't
shatter as easily and that could be easily gathered and stored,
And humans got plenty of lessons from animals too. He said.

(01:35:42):
The early Old World farmers probably learned from golden hamsters
and other little seed gathering mammals that lived in the area,
and they learned this way to hoard seeds over the winter.
What's kind of fucked up about that, though, is that
Itlas said these humans may have even dug out some
of the hamsters seeds stashes and taken those seeds from

(01:36:02):
the hamsters route. But in comparison, the New World farmers
did not have it so easy. There were no plants
well suited to agriculture and no seed hoarding mammals to
learn from. The only potential grain the New World people
had to work with was an unpromising mutant plant derived
from the plant called Teosinte. It took five, six, maybe

(01:36:26):
seven thousand years for this plant to evolve into an
integrated food producing plant. Taocinte is a wild grass and
it looked very different from our corn today. The kernels
were small and they were not placed together like the
kernels we see on a modern ear of corn. Honestly,
I found it kind of unsettling and disturbing if you

(01:36:48):
wanted to look that up to each their own. And surprisingly,
the original tiocente plant can still be found today, but
only in one three acre area of the Hellisco region
of Mexico. It said the plant is absolutely useless. Teocente
seeds have a steel hard outer covering, and these seeds
were virtually inedible except when they were green. Also, the

(01:37:11):
Teocente plant only had six or twelve kernels on each
tiny ear. It was said that the first step in
the development of corn as we know it today involved
a quote catastrophic sexual transmutation his words that converted the
tip of some male tassels into the uniquely monstrous many
ranked ears. Also his words that are now the edible

(01:37:34):
female ears of corn. I did not know I've been
eating female corn this whole time. But this is what
researching a podcast can do. After this complex transformation, farmers
then had to select mutant tiocente plants that were more
edible and easier to cultivate. These changes were much more

(01:37:56):
complex than the changes that made old world plants useful.
Modern agriculture continues to tinker with corn and ti ucentae.
It Liss said that plant breeders today are crossing the
two plants together to derive perennial or enduring, long lasting
corn that would not have to be planted each year

(01:38:16):
and that would be resistant to viruses. Steve Price is
a biotechnology researcher for the Standard Oil Company of Ohio,
and he said that with genetic engineering techniques, it might
take five years rather than five thousand years for contemporary
humans to make a better corn plant. This time, from Mexico,

(01:38:36):
corn spread north into the southwestern United States and then
south down the coast to Peru. In Mexico, squash cultivation
began ten thousand years ago, but corn had to wait
for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its
wild ancestor, teocente. Wild corn like plants derived from theo

(01:38:57):
cente appear to have been cultivated at least nine one
thousand years ago. The first directly dated corn cob dates
to only around five thousand and five hundred years ago.
As corn reached North America, it cultivated sunflowers, and this
is also when potato started growing in the Andes region
of South America about one thousand years ago. As indigenous

(01:39:19):
people migrated north to the eastern woodlands of present day
North America, they brought corn with them. So when Europeans
like Columbus, friend of the Show, made contact with people
living in North and South America, corn was a major
part of the diet of most native people. When Columbus
quote unquote discovered or just like bumped into America, he

(01:39:41):
also discovered corn for his people, because up to this time,
people living in Europe did not know anything about corn.
In fourteen ninety three, Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with
apparently a pocket full of corn seeds, among other things.
He learned a lot during his travels to the New World,
killed and his people and stolar land, et cetera. But

(01:40:03):
being exposed to this new grain he was unfamiliar with,
seemed promising agriculturally for Europe. It was unfamiliar it was delicious.
It was us Columbus romanticized at the time quote affixed
by nature in a wondrous manner, and inform in size
like garden peas. And it could, to corn's credit, if

(01:40:24):
Europeans learned to farm it properly help feed a lot
of people. The only problem was that Columbus had left
behind a fairly important bit of information about said corn.
He didn't take back the knowledge of how to process it.
Betty Fusell is the author of Quote the Story of Corn,

(01:40:45):
which chronicles corn's several thousand year history. She says it
might sound innocuous, but the history of corn probably changed
the course of humanity. According to her, the old world
is a wheat culture. You know what else is a
wheak culture. Ads, and we're back, okay. So, over the

(01:41:07):
next few hundred years, most of Europe grew to misunderstand
corn rather than embrace it. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, corn
endured a different fate. It thrived and eventually found its
way into the very center of the American diet. Until
the eighteen hundreds, corn was eaten mostly by the poor.

(01:41:28):
It was a cheap and prolific crop consumed by farmers
and fed to prisoners, and used also as a commodity.
As Michael Pollan wrote in his two thousand and six
book The Omnivores Dilemma, corn was both the currency traders
used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food
upon which slaves subsisted on during their passage to America.

(01:41:51):
But then came the Industrial Revolution and with it three
essential technologies that helped corn thrive from being just the
grain for poor people to being the grain for all people,
consumed by everyone. The first invention was an iron plow,
which allowed farmers to sow deep into the soil on

(01:42:11):
much larger scales. The Midwest was planted with corn on
a commercial basis precisely because of the iron plow, which,
although it seems pretty simple, was a revolutionary tool. Two
other advancements had an equally large effect, even though they
touched corn production more tangentially. Fuselle said that one of

(01:42:32):
the most important boons for corn might have been that
the commercial farms in the Midwest grew up at the
same time as the canneries and railroads. Until then, corn
was mainly distributed locally, but trains helped move the grain
far beyond just county limits, and along with the advent
of canning, it meant that corn could keep for much longer.

(01:42:55):
This allowed farmers to grow corn and other crops with
hundreds of thousands of mauths in mind. In the coming decades,
the amount of land dedicated to corn grew incredibly quickly,
but it wouldn't be for another fifty years until corn
actually made its way to the center of the American diet.
Corn is what fu Cell calls a genetic monster because

(01:43:18):
it's highly adaptable and easily manipulated, and there is perhaps
no better example of its mutant like qualities than what
happened shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. In
the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, scientists discovered a way
to boost corn production to a level that was previously unthinkable.
They bred hybrid strains that had larger ears and could

(01:43:41):
be grown closer together, which allowed farmers to produce a
lot more corn without needing more land. This discovery, along
with the introduction of new industrial fertilizers and more efficient
farm tools like tractors, led to a huge increase of
corn output. Paul Roberts wrote in his two thousand and
nine book The End of Food that in the following

(01:44:04):
decades the number of bushels of corn per acre doubled,
and then it continued to rise each year. Corn yields
have risen ever since then, with only brief interruptions due
to sporadic droughts, but these interruptions are easily countered with
further engineered corn. Advancements in farming, technology and science paved

(01:44:25):
the way for corn's ascent into the American food system.
But the main reason that corn has made its way
into just about everything we eat and every food that
Americans eat today is that, above all, it is inexpensive.
Corn has and always will be cheap because it grows
everywhere in the world. The most incredible thing about the

(01:44:47):
corn grown in America today is how little of it
we actually eat. This does not include people like me
and my family who are obsessed with corn and eat
it regularly, and also Sophie, who I know shares this
corn obsession. But less than ten percent of the corn
used in the United States is directly ingested by humans.

(01:45:07):
The bulk is either turned into ethanol for use as
fuel or fed to the hundreds of millions of animals
that we subject to the factory system. Corn is fed
to cows, chickens, pigs, and even fish. I had no idea.
Apparently fish are given these little pellets that are largely
made of corn, so it's everywhere. The relative cheapness of

(01:45:30):
corn and general usefulness of it as a form of energy,
both for living animals and living more generally, have proved
important enough that the government subsidizes its production to the
tune of some four point five billion dollars each year.
The result is perpetuation of ambitious growing goals, farmers realizing

(01:45:50):
the more efficient they are, the more money they will get,
grow more and more corn. The more corn there is,
the lower its price, and the greater the incentive is
to use it in as many ways as possible. I
want to talk now about the different varieties of corn,
But first, do you know what else has variety? All
the ways you can spend your money like these. Let's

(01:46:14):
talk about the different varieties of corn. There are many types,
but the most commonly eaten forms can be divided into
three general categories. The first is sweet corn. Sweet corn
is what Americans usually eat when they eat corn on
the cob, or when they throw corn on the grill
at a barbecue that you didn't want to go to.
And this sweet corn accounts for only about one percent

(01:46:38):
of the corn grown in America. Then there is flint corn.
Flint corn has a soft center and harder outer shell,
which most people know as popcorn. It became popular in
the nineteen sixties after a Jiffy pop which cooked the
kernels in aluminum foil on the stovetop, was introduced, and
its popularity rose further in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties,

(01:47:01):
shortly after the introduction of the microwave. Today, much like
sweet corn, flint corn accounts for a steady but comparatively
insignificant portion of the US corn crop. And then there's
dent corn aka field corn, the most important kind of
corn when it comes to production of it, not when

(01:47:23):
it comes to me eating it, because I cannot do that.
But dent corn accounts for the vast majority of corn
grown in America today, as well as the vast majority
of the corn Americans eat, just not on purpose. It's
in most of the beverages we drink Surprise Surprise because
of high frycto's corn syrup, and this is derived from
flint corn and is the most commonly used commercial sweetener

(01:47:46):
aka death syrup. It's in most animals people eat because
it's fed to most animals that are raised for slaughter.
It's even in our cheese because many cows are fed
corn instead of being able to graze on grain. All
of this makes corn virtually inseparable from the American diet.
Reddy Fouseel says that people have this kind of nostalgic

(01:48:10):
understanding of corn. They think of corn on the cob
and popcorn. But the truth is that field corn is
what we are really talking about when we talk about
the dominance of corn in the United States. It's in
almost every product in the supermarket today. That's no exaggeration.
But obviously corn cannot be contained. American style processed food,

(01:48:32):
which almost always relies on corn, has unpopularized in countries
all around the world. Let's go back to Mexico, the
birthplace of corn as we know it. How exactly did
corn become such a popular street food. Mexican food is
quite often literally built upon the tortilla, which is a
lot of the times made of corn. The tortilla is

(01:48:54):
a vehicle by which the country's most popular foods are
eaten in chiladas, caesadillas, taos, tomalies. I can list food forever.
Although wheat flour has grown in popularity here in the
United States, which is actually the technical home of the burrito, Apparently,
in Mexico, it's all about the corn. Mexico City is

(01:49:15):
frequently praised as one of the most significant cities on
Earth in terms of street food. Street food is referred
to as antohitos in Spanish, which means little cravings, which
I find very cute. Street dishes count corn as a
near universal ingredient and sometimes, of course, it doesn't have
to be processed to achieve its highest potential. Elote is

(01:49:37):
perhaps the most recognized example, which is, for those not
in the know, a full ear of corn that is
grilled and slathered with a variety of toppings like butter,
chili powder or taheen mayonnaise and cotiha cheese, among many
other things. The final product, elote is served on a stick,
providing an easy means for mobile consumption. Another common corn

(01:50:00):
street food is asquitas, a Mexican sweet corn salad, although
its true origin is not known. According to Nawadl stories,
asquitas are credited by being created by a god, a
deity with a name I cannot say or pronounce what
It is long and looks cool, but I won't try
to say it. But this god is also credited with

(01:50:22):
creating Mexican corn, jelly corn. It's from the gods. Literally.
As for me, there isn't some magical history of corn
in the Middle East. I looked, I searched, I tried
to find something, and I couldn't find one. No magical

(01:50:42):
mystical history of my beloved corn. Like most things I
have questions about, I asked my mom, and my mom
said that when it's in season, street vendors sell corn.

Speaker 1 (01:50:54):
That's it.

Speaker 9 (01:50:56):
The same goes for other street foods that are popular
in the Middle East, which you might find interesting, which
is cactus fruit or the prickly pair. But no corn
is magical. But it's only magical to me. And just
because it's magical to me doesn't mean it is actually magical.
And through researching for this episode, I have learned that.

(01:51:19):
So what I'm saying is this episode has shattered my
naive childhood dreams about a magical land of corn. But
the job's a job, and someone has to do it.
So that's it. Goodbye.

Speaker 1 (01:51:37):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 9 (01:51:42):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.