It Could Happen Here Weekly 80

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
This is the beginning of the podcast, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, I'm James, and this is it.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Could happen here today. We are going to be talking
about the recent events that have happened in Palestine and
the recent acts of terror that the IDEF has committed
against Palestinians. So yeah, thanks for joining me, James, I
appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Yeah, it's going to be another fun one from us.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
I know. I think that's like our thing. It's just
uplifting podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
If they don't leave depressed, we're not doing our job, right.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah. Yeah, if you're driving, maybe pulevi because we're going
to try make you cry.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah, but no really, I mean, like, in all seriousness,
there has been some shocking footage that has come out
of Palestine this month. On April fifth, in particular, there
was footage that emerged from a luxA mosque, which is
the third holiest site in Islam, and it is within
occupied East Jerusalem. The compound is within that area, and

(01:21):
the videos are showing Israeli security forces mercilessly beating Palestinian
worshippers and that violence left at least twelve Palestinians injured
and obviously just fueled more public anger, and three of
those Palestinians had to go to the hospital.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, and if people haven't seen the videos, like you
don't have to watch them really, but it's pretty horrific.
Like we were just talking before we started about how
monstrous you have to be, like to stand there and
whack someone with a stick again and again and again,
especially when they're not particularly any threat to you other

(01:56):
than you know, you perceive their existence to the threat
to your state project. Yeah, and they're just trying to
go to the mosque.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, they literally just there there, there, there's no weapons,
They're trying to pray. They're praying, and yeah, I feel
like prayer is a very vulnerable state to be in,
you know what I mean, Like it's not it's kind
of like, I don't know's it was just really upsetting.
And and you're right about the dehumanization thing, because we
were because a gun would make it so much easier
to kill someone, right, But to purposely injure someone with

(02:29):
your own hands, I think is us for sure.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
I think maybe it's when a lot of people in
America at least, like it was very formative to me
the first time I saw a cop fucking battering someone
with a stick, you know. And I think if a
lot of people in America maybe had that experience firsthand
a couple of years ago, and it maybe changed their
perspective on things. But yeah, this is what colonialism does everywhere, right,
And it's that what's happening here and in Ramadan as well, right.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Like yeah, and this is kind of like a trend,
like there's no excuse for doing and people always try
to point fingers about like who's the bad guy here?
But on the other side, rockets were fired from Gaza
and Lebanon as a warning sign after this escalation happened.
It was literally a warning like please don't do this,
this is wrong. But Israel didn't listen, and the following

(03:18):
day Israel repeated the violent attack on Hada'maschetif, which is
what Arabs call that compound. It's also called Temple Mount
for the people of Jewish faith. And yeah, they and
then as that was happening, the following day, Israel carried
out air raids on Gaza and Lebanon. So not only
did they not heed the warning, it was like a

(03:39):
slap in the face. And I'm going to talk a
little bit about the experience that some people had in
Gaza from this, but that's a little bit later. But
I just want to like put that out there that
when people are like, oh Hamas or whatever, they fired rockets,
It's like, what do you what do you expect people
push in a corner to do? I just that's what
I always think about.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
I don't know, Well, yeah, and if harmasafis rockets sort of,
you know, does that mean everyone should be collectively punished?
Like you shouldn't be able to practice your faith now?
Like that that's that doesn't make any fucking sense. And like, yeah,
how do you react if you've seen your grandmother beaten
with a fucking stick at church or synagogue, on mask
wherever you go. Especially Yeah, like during Ramadan at a

(04:20):
time when like this particular place on earth has got
like that all the Abrahmic faiths are like looking at
this place and trying to do their religious stuff there,
and like I'm not a particularly religious guy, but surely
there's no religion which way, like the thing you should
be doing at your Holy days is beaten people with
a stick.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Yeah, like even if you're not a Muslim, that that
area is still really sacred to both Christians and Jewish people,
and you would think that Jews wouldn't want to be
horrific on that area in general, you know what I mean.
Like it's yeah, it's just like even even if that
little area is not particular sacred to you, like it's

(05:00):
still all sacred in my opinion, and I feel like
people forget that.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
I don't know, Yeah, it takes a real like it's
an interesting sirrong word. It's the juxtaposition of these sacred
spaces and then it's incredible, like it's somewhere I've been
when I was younger, and like all around that part
of Jerusalem or around Drews, my guess, is juxtaposition of
like sacred spaces, which is supposed to be peaceful and

(05:25):
calm and reflective and then people doing the violence of colonialism,
like right there, and it's just such a profound kind
of whiplash every time you move from one to the other.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
And yeah, because they're the extremes of both. It's like
one of the most sacred and one of the most violent.
It's not there's no like wishy washiness about it. But
let me continue, Okay, So after this happened, the Arab
League held an emergency meeting to discuss these air raids.
And just in case you don't know, the Arab League
is a regional organization in the Arab world. It has

(05:59):
twenty two members, but Syria hasn't been a member since
twenty eleven. That could be another episode another time, but
that's what the Arab League is, in case someone out
there needed a refresher. But the League condemned the attack,
and it said in a statement that quote the extremist
approaches that control the policy of the Israeli government will
lead to widespread confrontations with the Palestinians if they are

(06:21):
not put to an end. And at least four hundred
Palestinians were arrested on Wednesday of April fifth when this happened,
and they remain in Israeli custody. They're being held at
a police station and occupied East Jerusalem for no reason.
It's never really for a reason. It's very rare.

Speaker 5 (06:38):
That's for a reason.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
But yeah, Palestinian witnesses said Israeli forces use excessive force,
including stun grenades and tear gas, causing suffocation injuries to
the worshippers and then beating them with batons and rifles.
There was a twenty four year old student who has
attained beca Oeis and he said, we were conducting Ichtikaf,
which is the really religious Muslim worship that is reserved

(07:02):
for Ramadan, is very sacred, and he said we were
conducting Ictigaf at the Aluxa because it's Ramadan. The army
broke the upper windows of the mosque and began throwing
stunt grenades at us. They made us slide down on
the ground and they handcuffed us one by one and
took us all out. They kept swearing at us during
this time. It was very barbaric. And then an elderly

(07:23):
woman said, according to this reporter, she was like catching
her breath outside and in tears and she said, I
was sitting on a chair reciting in the Quran. They
hurled stun grenades and one of them hit my chest.
And this is like, there's no discrimination, you know what
I mean. It's not there's no discrimination to their hate.
Everyone and is under the same umbrella. If they're Palestinians,

(07:44):
if they're Muslims, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yeah, you can't be like using taar gas selectively in
a place of worship. But that's not how that worked.
You kind of break windows and throwing ta gas. By definition,
you're targeting every single person there for the crime of
being there.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, there's no excuse of like we we were shooting
back at shooters, you know what I mean, that's not
an excuse or they could use. It's like you're infiltrating
a place where people are literally trying to pray, Like
there's no there's no.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
Excuse, like old ladies, you haven't eaten all day, Yeah,
I had a drink of water. They're not like and
you shouldn't be threatened by those people, like yeah, but
if their existence as Muslims in the place that you
don't think they should be allowed to exist, it's threatening
to you then because you're doing a colonialism.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, and you're I mean, you're the bad guid in
the situation in this case. And the Palestinian Red Cross
said that Israeli forces prevented medics from reaching the mosque.
And this has happened before. As James mentioned to me
before the podcast, it's like a very typical characteristic thing
of the IDF to block paramedics or aid to come

(08:56):
help people.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah, people want to look more at like a podcast alumni.
Tarik has done a lot of first aid working Gaza
and he's written about it on his medium page. I'll
find a link and we'll put it in our sources. Yes, please,
you can see some first hand accounts of how difficult
it is to like again, right that I don't really

(09:17):
see how you could find it objectionable to help someone
who's been hurt. Yeah, but yeah, it seems to be
a recurrent thing. Yeah, it's it is.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
And what I always find amusing is Israel's statements after
things like this happen. They're always so comical and so stupid.
And this time they said when the police entered, stones
were thrown at them and fireworks were fired from inside
the mosque by a large group of agitators. It also
said that a police officer was wounded in the leg,

(09:49):
like womp, womp, are you kidding me? Like, I don't
care about his fucking leg. I don't like they always
mentioned stones. I'm so tired of them mentioning stones and rocks,
like shut up, no, it's time for army at the
Middle East. And it's like they hurled stones at us,
like fuck off.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, you have the fucking iron dome and a kid
has thrown us a rock at you, like and like
that's the stone thing in particular. I don't know why that.
It's something the Border patrol use a lot when they
kill people at the border right through a stone, Like
it's this is a commonality of training between these two organizations, right,
but like, yeah, what you also like when we entered

(10:29):
the mosques and people threw stones at us, like what
were you fucking doing in the masque? Like why were
you there?

Speaker 2 (10:35):
Like and I'll get into the rules later, but there
are very specific times because this place is sacred to
so many people, there are specific times for each faith
to enter and use the compound, and so they weren't
supposed to be there and they were beating people to
make way for Jewish people to enter and have their time.
But that's not the way to do it. And I'm

(10:56):
pretty sure they weren't supposed to be there at that time.
But I mentioned this in a previous episode. The government
is more far right than ever, and so the nationalists
that are like encouraging violence are usually the ones that
are succeeding. In response to this, Jordan, and Jordan acts
as a custodian of Jerusalem's Christian and Muslim holy sites.

(11:19):
This is under a status quot agreement that has been
in place since the nineteen sixty seven war. They condemned
the flagrant storming of the compound and then Egypt they
called for an immediate halt to Israel's blatant assault on
XA Worshipper's But other than that, there hasn't been much.
Like the US said was like, I think I don't

(11:39):
know the exact quote that anyone in the US said,
but I'm sure they were like, oh no, this shouldn't happen,
and then they move on. It's never really any kind
of helpful action or reprimand or anything.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah. One from Koreine Jean Pierre, which is we urge
all sides to avoid further escalation, which why was this
Why do you even bother saying shit when you like,
don't escalate when they come into your moscue and tea?
I guess you would throw stung grenades at you, Like
what are they supposed to do?

Speaker 6 (12:10):
Like sincombay a, Yeah, well so why it's like, it's
like the same situation we had a couple of years
ago where you have the police that are in swat
gear and fully armed with people that aren't and you're
saying like this both sides thing like both sides shouldn't
do violence.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Or escalate or whatever. And I think it's so stupid
when that happens, because there's a clear aggressor and a
clear victim in that situation. But as I mentioned earlier,
Palestinians see a luxamosque as one of the few national
symbols over which they retain some element of control. They are, however,

(12:48):
fearful of a slow encroachment by Jewish groups, and this
is what happened at the Ibrahimi Mosque, which is also
called the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and in
nineteen sixty seven half of them was turned into a synagogue.
So Palestinians are worried about that happening again. And they
are also worried about far right Israeli movements that want

(13:08):
to demolish the Islamic structures in elkximosqu and build a
Jewish temple in their place.

Speaker 4 (13:13):
So it's not just.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Like rumors of this happening. There are nationalists in the
far right government and the people that they follow that
want that to happen. And by now it is quite
clear that American efforts to prevent another escalation in Palestine
is failing, and it's not the Palestinian side that's responsible.
Prime Minister and Yahoo, his desperate bid to cling to

(13:35):
power is not conducive to any de escalation that anyone
can ever encourage. All he's doing is accelerating the process
of violence and triggering instability, not just in East Jerusalem
but like all over the state of Palestine. And Okay,
before we move on, let's take our first break before
I forget BRB. We are back. I ended the last

(13:59):
segment talking about how the US diplomacy is failing an
understatement of the century. But for more than a year now,
the tensions and occupied Palestine territories have been very high.
The arned Palestinian resistance has been active, especially in Jenin
and Nablus, and Israeli security forces have carried out incessant
violent raids of Palestinian towns and villages. I said it's

(14:23):
in a previous episode, but the UN called twenty twenty
two the deadliest year for the occupied West Bank in
the past sixteen years, and these rarely Army killed at
least one hundred and seventy Palestinians, including thirty children, and
injured at least nine thousand people. The first two months
of this year have been the most violent since the
year two thousand, with sixty five Palestinians killed, including thirteen children.

(14:46):
This year, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan coincides with
the Jewish holiday of Passover. Hadamashadif Aka Temple Mount is significant,
as I said, for both Muslims and Jews. Muslims believe
it's the place where Muhammad ascended to heaven, and the
Jewish people believe that it's the site of two biblical temples. Regardless,

(15:06):
it contains the Aluxamos currently and it's been there since
ten thirty five a d. And it's again the third
holyest site for Muslims and an incredibly sacred place for
prayer and worship. It's I'm sure there's like an energy there.
Like I'm not religious, but I kind of feel that
energy sometimes where like everyone thinks or believes in a

(15:27):
place and it becomes important just as a place. It
doesn't even need to be explained, I think in general.
And maybe I'm biased because I was raised Muslim, but
still I think it's silly to pretend that this is
at this current point in time, like there's a reason
for them not to be there, or there's a reason

(15:48):
for like a synagogue to be built instead.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
Like I think it's just so stupid.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
My vocabulary isn't expansive enough to actually describe how you feel,
but you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
Yeah, it's yeah, And it's such a barbarous thing to
do to take this thing and like to destroy it
that's so special to literally.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
More than a billion people.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, and be like now fuck you, like we have
more guns, so we're doing our thing now.

Speaker 4 (16:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
And it was correctly speculated because of this coincision of
Ramadan and Passover that it would be a potential flashpoint
for violence, and two regional meetings were held under United
States supervision to hope to preclude any major escalations from
this time, and it didn't work obviously. On February twenty sixth, Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian,

(16:36):
Egyptian and American officials met in the Georganian city of Akaba.
They emphasize a commitment to a quote de escalation on
the ground to prevent further violence, and Israel pledged to
stop authorizing new illegal settlements in Palestinian territories for six months.
On March nineteenth, the second regional meeting happened and it

(16:58):
was held in Charmelchech, where the Palestinian and Israeli officials
committed to uphold the status quo of the Holy sites
in Jerusalem quote, both in words and in practice, and
they emphasize the quote necessity of both Israelis and Palestinians
to actively prevent any actions that would disrupt the sanctity
of these sites in general, but especially during the upcoming

(17:18):
holy month of Ramadan. I feel like every time Israel
says anything, you can't actually believe anything they say. There's
pledges don't matter, the UNS labeling them as the partment
APARTI you say doesn't matter, nothing really matters, because it's
all empty words. And nhen Yahu's government hasn't been upholding
the status quo in words or in practice. He is

(17:39):
allied with far right and alter religious forces that have
openly stated that the Israeli recognition of these Urginian gardenship
of the holy sites was a historic mistake that they
are bound on rectifying. So not only are they meeting
just like to say face, I think they've openly said
that we don't respect this group that is being held together.

(18:00):
We want we want to we want to change it.

Speaker 4 (18:03):
We don't.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Like, I don't understand how anyone can believe anything this
country says.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
Even within Israel, right like people who can recognize that
this current like Nenyaku coalition, it is opposed to the
basics of their constitution and their democracy. And like when
when you have people within the IDF being like, now, dog,
you've gone too far like that, I think that that
says a lot. But like they're not saying you've gone

(18:28):
too far in yet throwing stung grenades into a mosque, right, like, yeah,
he will get away with pushing that ship further and
further and.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
He has gone away with it.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
It's it's atrocious and will continue to when he gets
domestic pushback, right like, because like aggressive Zionism is the
kind of unifying like the grand unifying policy that brings
people together for him, his coalition. So he's going to

(18:59):
hell keep doing this, and like it would be irrational
to expect people in Palestine not to respond. I know
there are lots of new groups that are like popping
up to fight back, which you know, you'd have to
be incredibly naive to expect that not to happen.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yeah, it's just what happens when you push people in
a corner. And then I think what they actually like
is an excuse to fight back too. So like when
these when these groups do attack, that's always their excuse
as to why they're attacking. So it's almost like they're
provoking an attack on purpose to give them a reason

(19:38):
to attack, which is stupid. Again, that word is the
only word in my head right now.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
Okay, yeah, yeah, I was thinking about this thing that
they do again, which seems to be like sticking a
middle finger up. It's like that they like to withhold
the bodies of people they've killed. Uh huh, yes, quite often,
and like I just don't, like, what do you expect
to gain by doing that other than just being unfathomably cruel.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
And the burial process for Muslims is very sacred, it's
a very sacred ritual, and so they're purposely denying them
of that.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
It's like, I mean, did you Neva convention. It's it's
like a pretend thing. It doesn't matter, but it's still
in humane, right, doesn't matter if some some people, so
some old white dudes a long time ago, decided it
was in humane or not, because I think anyone with
Ed Sgudon could be like, man, that's so that's fucked up.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, And speaking of the Zionist movement
and the far right movement, twenty twenty three started with
the far right Minister of National Security at Tamara Berg Gavid.
He entered Al Haramashadif and this provoked public anger across Palestine.
Under his watch, the raids by Israeli settlers on the

(20:51):
Muslim holy site of Alaxamosque. They were under the protection
of the Israeli security forces and they've only intestified Bengavie.
In other extremists in the government are in Yaho's only
chance to stay in power and to avoid going to
jail for corruption. And they know that, and they're taking
advantage of the situation to support by all means possible

(21:12):
the violence that the Jewish settlers have unleashed onto the
Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank and continue to
erode the status quo at the Holy sites. All of
this is an aim to establish new facts on the
ground aka full Israeli control. All of this is with
the aim of establishing full Israeli control. And Yahoo does

(21:34):
not mind this violence. He encourages and likes it for
his own means. For him, violence is a useful distraction
from the anti government protests which have played his sixth
term in office because I did an election episode about
Israel that you can always listen to. But net and
Yahoo being in power wasn't supposed to happen again is

(21:56):
the main thing. And him being in power and bringing
in this terrible government. There's a reason why it's all
happening so intensely. Yeah, it's just years of Zionist encouragement
finally coming to a head, especially now that a lot
of Zionists are in power and war is not really

(22:16):
in Israel's interest. It's currently preoccupied with the Palestinian resistance
in the West Bank. It's worried about Iran's military presence
and diplomatic successes in the region. It's been striking Syria regularly,
even just days after the devastating earthquakes that happened this year.
They bomb Syria and they want to curb Iranian influence.
And they're also concerned about Hezbollah's role in a recent

(22:40):
roadside bomb explosion near the border with Lebanon. So starting
a religious war quote unquote does not suit their I
don't understand the motivation there, other than to further a
certain dominance and to scare the Palestinians. On the other side,
Hamas and Gaza has tried to take a measured response. Again,

(23:02):
it warned Israel against further raids all in Alxa, and
it is reluctant to escalate this because it would take
attention from the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank. Because
Hamas sees the main area of conflict with Israel as
the conflict in the West Bank, armed attacks in the
occupied territories cause much more anxiety to the Israeli authorities
than a confrontation with Gaza. Hamas's strategy now is to

(23:25):
encourage a popular Palestinian mombilization in the West Bank, Jerusalem
and Israel in order to serve as a barrier to
further encroachment on the Aluxa Mosque. And that said, Hamas
may find itself under pressure to act decisively, especially if
Israel's brutal violence against worshippers continues. The Palestinian people I
mentioned this in previous episode, but they have reacted angrily

(23:48):
at the weak response from the PA, the Palatine authority,
and it's inaction. They're frustrated that the supposed protectors or
liaisons that they have to negotiate or protect them, they're
not doing anything. So that anger becomes this pressure on
someone to act, and it's usually Hamas because they're the

(24:10):
longest standing and most powerful group in that area. The
Hamas leadership would not want to be perceived as passive,
and they may feel compelled to abide by popular demand
to take a tougher stance and intensify rocket fire towards Israel.
And this would repeat, as I mentioned earlier, the twenty
twenty one war on Gaza, which was also triggered by

(24:31):
Israel's raids on Al al Samosque, and this would only
further escalate the violence. Well after Ramadan, it's not going
to just be contained in this month. And let's take
our last break, really right back, and we're back talking
about the escalation of violence. And there have been repeated

(24:55):
warnings that Israel's actions in the Holy sites could trigger
a quote unquote religious war. In January, Jordinian Ambassador Mahammud
Daifa Lahmoud told the UN Security Council that Israeli attacks
on Alfaramashadif are provoking quote the feelings of nearly two
billion Muslims and this could spark a religious conflict. So

(25:16):
the people that are saying it's religious may actually have
a point if this actually comes to a head, because
it's actually not the whole. The whole Israel Palestine quote
unquote conflict is not about religion. It's about occupation and colonialism.
But in this particular instance, when it comes to the mosque,
the anger is very rooted in faith and a direct

(25:37):
like slap in the face of their faith.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
So it takes a yeah, you can make it a
religious conflict. I think that's like other colonial powers have
been very good at doing by like desecrating holy sites
of a religion. Yeah, right, Like it's kind of yeah,
you risk alienating like it's a billion people, or you know,
uniting a billion people in opposition when you just flagrantly

(26:02):
do this shit like this. Like I don't think anyone
who I'm not a religious person either, And like I
watched that video of the cops or soldiers, I guess
kind of the same thing and like beaten people with
chairs and shit, and like that made me furious. That
made me want to hurt someone, like and that's not
something that's specially special to me. Maybe it was, I

(26:24):
can imagine it even more furious.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
It should make anyone mad to see someone treated like that,
you know what I mean. It shouldn't make anyone furious
to see that kind of terror taking place.

Speaker 7 (26:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
I think a lot of people have trouble putting themselves
and someone else's shoes maybe, or like they have trouble
caring about something that doesn't affect them, And I think
that is a very dangerous path to go on. It's
just very self centered and main charactery and heartless.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
In my opinion, it's very odd that as humans, Like
we've normalized the existence and to an extent, people will
like simp for the existence of like this state, right,
which is like an abstraction of capital, And like then
the state exists as an a protraction of capital, and
it has boundaries and rules, and if you transgressed us,

(27:15):
even if you don't, if you're just like like antithetical
to its vision for a piece of land, then then
people can come and beat the shit into you while
you're praying. Now, like that's just a thing that's going
to happen. And like, I don't know if I feel
like sometimes if we if we sort of re round
the past two or three hundred years and we're like, hey,
peasant in the seventeen hundred six, do you want to
be in a place where like someone could walk into

(27:37):
this mosque anytime thirty stom grades beat the shit out
of old ladies, and like no one would go from
like A to B. Right, But we're at B now
and people don't seem to want to like investigate how
we got here and what we can do to change it.

Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, yeah, they regard it as like just a thing
that happens in order for like humanity or like civilization
to progress. Yeah, so backwards. It doesn't have to be
like that.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
No, people can read the door of everything they want to. Yes,
they want to know about that, but yeah, oh you
can just you know, not in sim for cops.

Speaker 4 (28:11):
If you don't, I can help.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
That's a good first step, because to fuck cops. But
there is a growing concern that with its aggressive actions
in Aluxa, Nanyahu's government is seeking to impose restrictions on
the access that Palestinians have to the holy site, the
way that it was done with the Abrahemi Mosque and
Hebron that I mentioned earlier. This mosque was divided by

(28:33):
the Israeli authorities into sections that Muslims and Jews can
visit to supposedly prevent further violence because a masker happened
there in nineteen ninety four, when a Jewish settler opened
fire on Muslim worshippers and killed twenty nine people who
were there to pray. So it's We've talked about how
history repeats itself a lot, and being afraid of that

(28:56):
happening is not illogical, it's not irrational because it's happened before,
it could happen again.

Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah, the IDF always backs up these settlers, right like
they did it yesterday. I think, like a kid was
killed in a refugee camp in an incident. I think
we'd started when, if I'm not wrong, there was a march,
like a bunch of settlers were marching into into an
area and claiming that you know, it's legalizing it and
normalize it, do another colonial conquest. And yeah, they're willing

(29:27):
to shoot a kid like you know, they seem to
be willing to back these people, especially when they form,
if I understand correctly, like an important part of the
coalition that Nenya who's relying on right now.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
Oh, it's a huge part. And also those marches by
settlers are usually protected by cops, like they're shielded by
the IDF. It's not like they're there to stop any
kind of conflict. They're there to protect the settlers. It's
just backwards history repeating itself. And if these measures are
imposed on Alexa, it would be a clear violation of

(29:59):
the status quo, under which non Muslims are allowed to
visit only at certain hours of the day and they're
not allowed to pray inside. But this is obviously not
what's happening and so far there have only been condemnations
issued by Arab states and the EU and the US.
What Arab and Western capitals do not understand is that

(30:19):
unless there is a harsh response to Israeli actions now,
Natanyahuo's far right allies will only be emboldened to go
even further in their efforts to take over Muslim and
Christian holy sites and settle there. Israeli aggression and Elhadamashdif
is turning Israel into a detonator that will sooner or
later blow up the whole region. It's really felt like

(30:41):
that for me for a long time, and for a
lot of people. It's like this metaphorical ticking time bomb
and Israel themselves is provoking it to detonate. And I
think this pressure cooker of a situation is bound to
have an apex. It's not going to be boiling forever.
And the violence isn't just contained at Alexa. Israel didn't

(31:02):
take a break from all their other terrorist activities to
focus on just one, because their other terrors activities are
still happening. As you mentioned, on April tenth, a Palestinian
child was killed by Israeli forces in the akabeta Jabar
refugee camp in Jericho. Mohammed Fayez Bahan was fifteen years
old and he was shot in the head, chest and stomach.

(31:24):
Make it make sense. On April eighth, the Gaza Strip
endured a night of bombardment as Israeli fighter jets conducted
air raids on several sites in the territory. The first
Israeli air strike that hit was near Eldora Children's Hospital
in the besieged Gaza Strip. Some reporters talked to people
that experienced this event in this active terror and some

(31:47):
going to read some of their quotes. Samar al Juan
talked to Al Jazeera about her terrified experience when she
rushed to her two year old daughter's bed to pick
her up. Moments later, the glass from the window next
to her on the bed shattered and crashed onto the cot.
She said, my daughter miraculously survived. Last night, we were

(32:07):
sleeping in the ward. Suddenly we woke up to the
sound of terrifying air strikes. There were moments of massive fear.
The glass was falling. I immediately rushed to take my
child out of her bed. Moments later, the window fell
on her bed. I was so close to losing her
Jesus Christ. She continues to say. All the sick children
were frightened and screaming. A state of tension prevailed among

(32:31):
all the mothers and the medical staff because of the
intensity of the bombing, glass from the windows was falling
and shattering. There were some windows that fell onto the
beds of sick children just moments after they had been
picked up, and this could have caused a catastrophe and
a large number of injuries. The Godz's Ministry of Health
said this is not the first time that health facilities

(32:51):
have been targeted and it is unacceptable. These attacks not
only put patience lives at risk, but they also create
a sense of fear among healthcare workersats in their families.
The same mother from earlier went on to say, several
children have spent the night trembling in fear. Our children
are poor in Gaza. They do not enjoy Ramadan or

(33:12):
d or any other occasion. They are always threatened with
fear and destruction that may come their way at any moment.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Yeah, that's We did an interview a few months ago
with some young men from Gaza that we haven't put
out yet, but we will, But I've spoken to them
quite a few times, and I remember one of the
things that they would say to me that really sort
of like was very affecting for me was that like
they they got they had very young boys who would

(33:40):
come and stay and they would do parkour together, and
that these eight year old boys would routinely wake up
in the middle of the night screaming like like with
horrible PTSD, and they think, yeah, the fucking their children,
Like they shouldn't be anywhere near that stuff. And like
people will talk about precision air strikes in Gaza and
like it's not like even even if you manage to

(34:03):
somehow not kill any people, then you're still going to
fundamentally alter the course of someone's life in a terrible way.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
There was there was a study done. I'm paraphrasing it,
but it basically showed that the children in Gaza are
in a perpetual state of trauma like they had. They
they never get over the phase where they're out of
that fireflight mentality. Yeah, there's they're stunted in this the
fear part of PTSD. And it's so sad because that's there,

(34:35):
that's their reality. They've never known anything different other than
fear and violence and the loss of life at any moment.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yeah, and they can't leave right, like, it's extremely difficult,
Like our friends who have tried to leave that it's
taken them years of trying to leave. They can't go
anywhere else. They're trapped in the most bombed place on earth,
and that's the whole reality.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Gaza has been referred to an open air, constant camp,
like it's not just a place where people live.

Speaker 5 (35:03):
It's been.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Just the main target of Israel for a really long time.
And I always recommend this movie, but Gaza Fights for
Freedom is a great movie by Abbi Martin. It's free
on YouTube. I would watch it if you want some
more examples of what's happening in Gaza, because it's horrific.
It's a hard watch, but it's important if you want
more information. In the Altafa district of Gaza City, raids

(35:30):
were also taking place. Meshdi Abu Nima and his family
woke up at three am first hold, which is the
pre sunrise meal right before you fast the whole day,
so they woke up at three am and then suddenly
Israeli warplanes were attacking the empty land. Next to their
house and this caused severe destruction to their home. Abu
Nima is the father of seven children, and he told

(35:51):
Al Jazeira it was like an earthquake. We were terrified.
Immediately I rushed to my three daughter's bedroom to find
my two year old daughter covered shattered window glass. I
can't forget her shock, fear and her heartbeat. Everyone in
the house was screaming until now. I don't understand why
they bombed our area. How could an empty land be

(36:12):
bombed without any justification. There are no resistance fighters or
any military sites here. It is just an empty land
between residential buildings. And there was a lot of detruction
that happened. As I said, there's no excuse for it.
The oldest son in this family his car was obliterated
and it was his only source of income, and he

(36:34):
told al Jazeira conditions in the Gaza Strip are unbearably difficult.
The bombing came and destroyed whatever we have left. Life
here has truly become hell.

Speaker 4 (36:45):
Jesus Christ, do you.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Want to spell to any differently people? But I don't
want to end this episode completely on a terrible note.
I was really happy today when I woke up and
my mom sent me this video of Bernie Sanders calling
Israel or racist government like in those words on television,
which is very very important, especially as a Jewish ally

(37:08):
because I've said this before, but Jewish people that defend
Palestine are some of the most important allies we can have,
because there's no excuse for anyone to be like, you're
anti Semitic, because it's not about that, it's not about
religion or anything. If you're anti Zionist, you're not anti Semitic.
It's very different. And so having Bernie Sanders be the
one to call out Israel is very important. So I

(37:32):
want to play that clip because he'll say it better
than I can, And yeah, that's the episode.

Speaker 8 (37:38):
Do you think that democracy is in peril in Israel
right now?

Speaker 9 (37:43):
I do. I am very worried about what Nyahu is
doing and some of his allies in government and what
may happen to the Palestinian people.

Speaker 10 (37:52):
And let me tell you something.

Speaker 9 (37:53):
I mean I haven't said this publicly, but I think
the United States gives billions of dollars in aid to Israel,
and I think we've to put some strings attached to
that and say you cannot run a racist government. You
cannot turn your back on the Two States solutions. You
cannot demean the Palestinian people there. You just can't do
it and then come to America and ask for money.

Speaker 8 (38:13):
Has the administration Have you talked to the administration about it?
They've been very careful in criticism of the Nat Yahoo government.

Speaker 9 (38:20):
Well, I am not careful about it. I'm embarrassed that
in Israel you have a government of that nature right now.

Speaker 8 (38:28):
And are you going to introduce something we may well yes,
to try to attack strings to.

Speaker 11 (38:33):
Us they cannot give if you have a you know,
whether it's Saudi Arabia or other authoritarian societies. If a
government is acting in a racist way and they want
billions of dollars from the taxpayers of the United States,
I think you say, sorry, but it's not acceptable.

Speaker 9 (38:46):
You want our money. Fine, this is what you got
to do to get it.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Welcome back to what could happen here. It's still Cherene
and I'm still joined with the one and only James Stout.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Thank you for joining me, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Yeah, anytime the listeners they get what they want, you know,
they demanded it, and here.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
We are delivery log onto the subreddit.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
I was interested in having someone else receive the information
I had because it's really hard to do it with myself.
And it's also hard not to like sound like a
bored professor or something, because I just sound.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
Like this something I have experienced.

Speaker 4 (39:40):
Hear, Yeah, like a pro professor.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
But it's also very emotionally challenging to just be like,
here some terrible fucking things that have happened again and exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, when you buy yourself, it's like it feels a
lot heavier for some reason. Uh, And so I'm glad
to have someone else on anyway, Thank you. Today I
wanted to talk about something that happened seventy five years
ago this month, So there's going to be some history here,
but I think it's really important history, so please stay

(40:10):
tuned if you want to learn some stuff. But seventy
five years ago this month, before Israel was officially established,
the Dairya scene massacre happened. This massacre was part of
the Nekba, or the catastrophe, and it matters even seventy
five years later, and it should always serve as a
reminder of the atrocities and massacres that took place in

(40:33):
order for a country that was already there to be stolen, renamed, terrorized,
have people killed and forcibly removed from their homes, and
the indigenous people were expelled from their homes and the
ownership of their own land was granted someone else. And
I think reminding everybody of what happened to make that
happen is extremely important because we're not that far removed

(40:57):
from that brutalization. We can say, like, oh, that was
medieval times, people were different. It's like, no, that was
like less than one hundred years ago.

Speaker 5 (41:05):
Shut up.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
The nakba aka the catastrophe in Arabic. It refers to
the violent expulsion of approximately three quarters of all Palestinians
from their homes and homeland by Zionist militias in the
New Israeli Army during the State of Israel's establishment between
nineteen forty seven and nineteen forty eight. The Nekabo was
a deliberate and systematic act intended to establish a Jewish

(41:29):
majority state in Palestine. Amongst themselves. Zionist leaders use the
euphemism quote unquote transfer when discussing plans for what today
would be called ethnic cleansing. The roots of the Nakba
and the ongoing problems in Palestine and Israel today. They
lie in the emergence of the political Zionism from the
late eighteen hundreds, when some European Jews, influenced by the

(41:52):
nationalism that was sweeping the continent, they decided that the
solution to anti Semitism in Europe and Russia was the
establishment of a state for Jews and Palestine. They began
immigrating to Palestine as colonizers, where they started depossessing indigenous
Muslim and Christian Palestinians. In November of nineteen forty seven,
following World War II and the Holocaust, the newly created

(42:15):
United Nations approved of a plan to divide Palestine into
Jewish and Arab states against the will of the majority
indigenous Palestinian Arab population. Again, this was not their decision
or choice to make. Regardless, the UN approved of a
plant divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab states against the

(42:36):
will of Palestinian people. It gave fifty six percent of
that land to the proposed Jewish state, despite the fact
that Jews only owned about seven percent of the private
land of Palestine and made up only thirty three percent
of the population, and a very large percentage of this
percentage of thirty three percent were recent immigrants from Europe.

(42:56):
So handing over more than half of someone else's land
truly does it make sense. I don't care what religious
text or citing, it was wrong at this point in
time to take that land.

Speaker 4 (43:07):
It was just wrong.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
The Palestinian Arab state was to be created on just
forty two percent of Palestine, even though Muslim and Christian
Palestinians made up a large majority of the population and
were indigenous to all of the land. Jerusalem was to
be governed by a special international administration. Almost immediately after
the partition plan was passed. The expulsion of Palestinians by

(43:31):
Zionists militias began months before the arming of neighboring Arab
states began to be involved. So there was no other
person to say, don't do this, or like there was
no one else to fight to hold them back. I
guess is what I'm trying to say. And by the
time these Zionist militias and the new Israeli Army finished,
the new State of Israel covered seventy eight percent of Palestine.

(43:56):
So they did even follow the rules either. They just
kept on swallowing up the land that wasn't even there
to begin with, with this violent Nekba that it's just
it's it's a terrible, horrific thing they did. There is
a film on Netflix called Farha. It's the first film
that depicts any kind of story about the Nekba, and

(44:18):
it's by a Palestinian filmmaker. It's really powerful. I would
recommend seeing that if you want an example of what happened,
because it's all factual as far as like the terror
that they did, so I'd recommend that film. Give it
five stars for the haters, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Oh, guy, I can imagine. There were reviews just like yeah, death, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
That was the film that the Israeli government tried to
to ban, and they were a lot of Zionists were
commenting like terrible things about it and giving it one
star or whatever. They want Netflix to take it off Netflix,
but no, we fuck the haters. Help us out. Five stars.
Put it on the background of your TV. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (44:56):
Just keep streaming it, keep streaming it exactly strike a
blow against colonialism.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
But that's just an example of how important and scared
they are of the truth. Because it's a movie. It's
a fucking movie.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
Yeah. The control of the narrative is so important in
these things, exactly. Yes, And even the way you refer
to it, right, not not calling it the knock, like
calling it a transfer, not a cleansing, exactly, calling it,
like not referring to it in the same terms as
we would do like the genocidal set of colonialism that

(45:33):
settled this country, or you know, the way that Britain
and France and Germany behaved in Africa, like trying to
not like specifically opposing calling it an apartheid state, right
when when that's what it is, is what it does. Like,
all of those things are so important, and they might
seem like petty battles, but they really control how we

(45:54):
see things. I think when you control language, you can
control how people perceive things.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
And I think controlling the narrative is so parallel to
like controlling the history books, because that's what gets remembered
by the people that want to the narrative to have
a certain thing. Not all history books obviously, but a
lot of the times the things that are considered facts
are biased. You know, I don't know if that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (46:21):
Yeah, Oh, you're only getting half of the things, right,
or like, yeah, I mean, as a historian, we are
all biased, and so we should declare our biases and
sort of go forward that way, rather than presenting our
biases as unbiased and neutral and then obviously creating a
biased thing, which is what we tend to get in
the US, especially when we look at this stuff.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
Yeah, no, totally.

Speaker 5 (46:44):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
I Like, I didn't bash historians, but I criticized them.
But you're like, I'm an historian.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
Yeah, I will not jump to the defense of science
historians I've worked with. Like, there's a chapter in my
book about volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, and like
about thirty percent of volunteers were Jewish people, right, and
many of them had been like couldn't go back to

(47:11):
Like there are some of them who like fought in
the Spanish Civil War, were gorillas in the Second World War,
survived the Holocaust in some cases, and they were anti Zionists,
and so like they didn't have a place, like you know,
there wasn't a place for them as people who had
had stuck to their very decent principles of like you
shouldn't impose shit on force for people who don't want it,

(47:33):
and we're opposed to fascism or opposed to colonialism. There
wasn't a place for them in that sort of post
World War two Jewish movement, that Zionist movement. There were
in other places, but yeah, it's very sad that their
stories aren't like like if a friend of mine was
the person who first wrote articles about them, but like

(47:53):
their memory is completely erased, right, or at least it's
not present, And then they should be people that, like
any recentall person would be very proud of, right, they
were willing to die for someone else's battle, and then yeah,
they were kind of that they're they stuck to the
same principles the whole way through it, and the world
kind of moved around them.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yeah, And I mean I think as time goes on,
those things won't even be existing in people's reality, you
know what I mean, Like if no one remembers that
that happened, if no one is part of what that happened,
like it's just going to go away. It's going to disappear.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
Yeah, that's why it's so important to do history and
to do like to use different sources, right, and to
do history from a people's perspective, not from a perspective
of people who are in power.

Speaker 4 (48:39):
Exact history from below, that's what we call it.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
Say that sounds on more time if people call it
history from below, but like and to look at other sources, right,
like without like riding my hobby horse too much. Like
I was primarily a historian of sport and anti fascism,
and like specifically sport.

Speaker 4 (49:00):
I got a ton of pushback on when I started.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
Because it's not important, right, and it's not you know,
it's not like fucking I don't have any charts or whatever,
and like, it's actually very important to where people were
able to express who they were and who was on
the team and who was not on their team, right,
And that's where you find these people who are very
impactful lots of other areas. And I think, like if

(49:22):
I was a younger person and I was trying to
find my way from my identity and be like, hey,
the signism seems wrong, like in the same way that
other things seem wrong, to have those people to be like, yeah,
these people also saw that, right, Like they didn't want
a boot on anyone's neck, not just not I didn't
want it to be their boot on someone else's neck
and that was fine. You know, they like having seen
the Holocausts, having seen what happened in to Spain, the like,

(49:44):
now this shit is wrong. It's still wrong. Doesn't matter
if we're doing it.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, their humanity prevailed.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
Yeah, and it's important for people like to have those
those stories to be like, Okay, well I'm not fucking
crazy or it's not that I just don't understand what
it was like back then because a lot of people
could see it and we're like, no, we shouldn't be
doing this.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yes, well, historian James, thank.

Speaker 4 (50:08):
You for jordaning me today. Sorry, no, why are you apologizing?

Speaker 5 (50:11):
I love that shit? Fuck No, I love it history
from below.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
That you said, yeah's quite no theme.

Speaker 9 (50:18):
Now.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
I think it's a good thing to abide by. So
I'm glad that there's a little catchy phrase for.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
It, Stewart Hale and things like that. Yeah, we'll do
another episode on this one day.

Speaker 5 (50:29):
Yes please.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
So, as we mentioned before, Israel stole about seventy eight
percent of Palestine and then this left twenty two percent,
and the twenty two percent was compromised of the West Bank,
East Jerusalem and Gaza and these regions fell under the
control of Jordan Egypt, respectively. In the nineteen sixty seven war,
the Israeli military occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza,

(50:52):
and Israel began colonizing them shortly afterwards. And just to
give you some numbers, I think they're important sometimes just
to get the context of the scale of something. But
the Nekaba, by the numbers, is what I'm about to continue.
Between seven hundred and fifty thousand and one million Palestinians
were expelled from their homeland and they were made refugees

(51:15):
by Zionist militias, amounting to approximately seventy five percent of
all Palestinians. Between two hundred and fifty thousand and three
hundred fifty thousand Palestinians were driven out from their homes
by Zionist militias between the passage of the UN Partition
Plan on November twenty ninth of nineteen forty seven and
the establishment of Israel on May fifteenth of nineteen forty eight.
Prior to the outbreak of war with the neighboring Arab States,

(51:38):
several dozen massacres of Palestinians were carried out by Zionist
militias and the Israeli Army, which played a critical role
in prompting the flight of many Palestinians from their homes.
More than one hundred Palestinians, including dozens of children, women,
and elderly people, were massacred in the Palestinian town of
Dariusne near Jerusalem on April ninth of nineteen forty eight

(52:00):
by Zionist militia. This is the main massacre I want
to talk about today because it's been exactly seventy five
years on April ninth. But it was one of many massacres,
and it was the one that is cited as igniting
a lot of the Codomino effect. The massacre at Daria
Scene was one of the worst atrocities committed during the
Nakba and a pivotal moment in Israel's establishment as a

(52:22):
Jewish majority state, and again it triggered the flight of
Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem and beyond. The Dariacene
massacre is commemorated annually by Palestinians around the world. Approximately
one hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians remained inside what became
Israel's borders in nineteen forty eight, a quarter of them
internally displaced. These Palestinians, who are sometimes referred to as

(52:46):
Israeli Arabs, were granted Israeli citizenship, but stripped of most
of their land and governed by violent, undemocratic military rule
as of nineteen sixty six. As of twenty twenty three,
there are more than two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship,
comprising more than twenty percent of Israel's population, and they
are forced to live as second class citizens in their

(53:09):
own homeland, subject to dozens of laws that discriminate against
them in almost every aspect of life because they're not Jewish.
Let's take our first break here, and I'll come back
and tell you more terrible things. So herepe, Okay, we're back.
I'm going to finish up a little bit more of
these numbers, and then I'm going to talk about Daryasin.

(53:29):
More than four hundred Palestinian cities and towns were systematically
destroyed by Zionist militias and the New Israeli Army, or
they are repopulated with Jews. Between nineteen forty eight and
nineteen fifty, most Palestinian communities, including homes businesses, houses of worship,
vi urban centers. They were destroyed to prevent the return
of their Palestinian owners, who are now refugees outside of

(53:52):
Israel's borders, or they were internally displaced inside them. Today
there are more than seven point two million Elstinian refugees,
including Neckbus survivors and their descendants. They're located mostly in
the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and neighboring
Arab countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, and they're

(54:12):
denied their internationally recognized legal right to return to their homeland.
This is the last big number I want to say,
just because I think it's it's so big I had
to say it. Approximately four million, two hundred and forty
four thousand, seven hundred and seventy six acres of Palestinian
land was stolen by Israel during and immediately after the

(54:33):
establishment of the state in nineteen forty eight. Millions of acres.
Like it's not just a tiny little place that no
one was in before, like noe, millions of acres of
land were forcibly stolen.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Yeah, so yeah, and all of them like land that
people have had for generations, that they've farmed Like this
is like it's not the oldest settlement on earth, but
people have been living here for tenth thousands of years.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
I said, Aluxey Yesterday was built in ten thirty five.

Speaker 3 (55:04):
Like yeah, this shit is very old and like sometimes
the same people or people's sort of family. It's not
just a like loss of property, so lots of everything
that's sacred and like the Aluxa Mosque or these things
that are sacred and important to you, you.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Know, yeah, and so more it's what you said earlier.
It's like we have to remember these things because otherwise
they'll get forgotten the in whoever's recording the history, you
know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Like it's yeah, I mean they have been here. Right
when we look at how America sees itself, it sees
the land that it expanded into, it's like terrannualius, like
like empty land that was unoccupied, which it was not.
There was not a wilderness to tame. Like there were
people living here and they were living very happily, and
they were living they weren't like I don't want to

(55:53):
do the whole like like in commune with nature thing,
but like this wasn't a wild and savage place, right,
there were people existing here and taking from the land
and living on the land, and like we that just
doesn't get fucking like Ruth Bader Ginsburg was citing the
doctrine of discovery, you know, like you all the Libs
love Ruth Bada Ginswick, but like it's so subsumed into

(56:14):
what America is that Like like Obama did a fucking
tweet like this nation was built on peaceful protest. It
was built on fucking genocide, Like fuck off, yeah, but
we've allowed that to just go completely forgotten, right, Like
you don't go to school in California and be like, oh,
there is a fucking unit they just changed. Actually there

(56:35):
was a Unipero Hessea High School, and like this is
a person who did genocide. Like we wouldn't have a
fucking Gerbels High School in Germany, you know.

Speaker 4 (56:46):
And then Britain does a shit too.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
I'm not not like, yeah, I'm in a glasshouse, so
I don't say that, but yeah, we we this wasn't
an empty place.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
And it's really important to remember that because that is
so often the talking twenty of fucking stupid people that
try to defend what Israel is doing. Let's go to
now the main massacre or topic I want to talk
about today, which happened on April ninth in nineteen forty eight,
just weeks before the creation of the State of Israel,
when members of the Urgun and stern Gang Zionist militias

(57:18):
attacked the village of Dryasin and they killed at least
one hundred and seven Palestinians. Zionist militias tore through Palestinian villages,
massacring villagers and expelling those who remained alive to clear
the way for the creation of the State of Israel.
And this was one of the many massacres that happened
during the Nekba, where again an estimated fifteen thousand Palestinians

(57:41):
were killed and some seven hundred and fifty thousand fled
their homes as refugees, ignited a very terrifying domino effect.
This year, the UN will host its first ever high
level event to commemorate this forced displacement that resulted in
the establishment of the State of Israel in May nineteen
forty So this is the first time ever that the
U one has recognized that the Nekba even happened, or

(58:04):
like is it happened enough to mention it and commemorate it.
But Palestinians have never ceased to commemorate the loss of
each village that was once part of their homeland. Among
them was Daria Scene, and it was a village perched
on a hill west of Jerusalem. And this massacre has
become emblematic of the suffering that Israel would inflict on

(58:25):
the Palestinians. Many of the people slaughtered, from those who
were tied to trees and burned to death to those
lined up against a wall and shot by submachine guns.
Many of these people were women, children, and the elderly,
and Fudaw does a really good job of showing this
lack of discrimination of life in general in that movie

(58:47):
that I mentioned earlier. As the news of these atrocities spread,
thousands fled their villages in fear. So again on April
ninth and nineteen forty eight, the Israeli militia struck Daria Scene,
where about seven hundred Palestinian lived. According to the Israeli narrative,
operation Nashon and Ahhson apologies if I mispronounce that, but

(59:09):
this operation aimed to break through the blockaded road to
Jerusalem and the fighters encountered stiff resistance from the villagers
that forced them to advance slowly from house to house.
It's kind of silly and strange how the same excuse
is being used, like a century later to justify acts
of terror. They're saying that villagers resisted them and that's

(59:31):
why they butchered them.

Speaker 4 (59:33):
It's yeah, it's it's it's pathetic. It's stupid and pathetic.

Speaker 3 (59:38):
And like, yeah, for having the I don't know, temerity
to be like no, you can't take my home. Yeah,
they carried out a collective punishment on Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
And that's the Israeli narrative. That's what their history books say,
is that this was the aim of this operation. They
were simply encountering the stiff resistance and they had to
go from house to house like that's it's just a
fucked up narrative. But Palestinians and some Israeli historians say
that the villagers had signed a non aggression agreement with
the Haganah, which was the pre Israeli state Zionist army.

(01:00:11):
They were nevertheless murdered in cold blood and buried in
mass graves. According to a nineteen forty eight report, filed
by the British Delegation to the UN. The killing of
quote some two hundred and fifty Arabs men, women and
children took place in circumstances of great savagery. Women and
children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by

(01:00:34):
automatic firing. Those who were taken prisoners were treated with
degrading brutality. This is from a nineteen forty eight report
filed by the British delegation.

Speaker 5 (01:00:44):
Like it's in the.

Speaker 3 (01:00:45):
Record, weren't they both like the stern going and the
whatever the militia was called the begin was in It's
like I said, l I think were like they hadn't
really done any military operations before, right that they'd just
been just like bomb like they did car bombs and
shit favious to this, Like the British had already like

(01:01:06):
like that. They were like they were killing British people
and I guess Arab people in Palestine before this.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
Yes, yeah, I mean the escalation in violence was like
pretty severe, right, but I think they would have gone
there eventually, you know, there's kind of hit forward.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
I think they'd already like established an intention or like
a willingness to kill just about anyone who got in
their way, right, and they wanted to show that they
were like unlike the like I guess, like the labor
aligned Zionist movement, that they were like more hardcore than that,
and they exactly like. That's why they made a spectacle
of violence like this.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
They're establishing their their power and dominance right. Israeli historian
Benny Morris said that the militias quote ransacked unscrupulously, stole
money and jewels from the survivors, and earned the bodies.
Even dismemberment and rape occurred. I mean, there's nothing to
say to that. The number of dead is disputed, but

(01:02:09):
it ranges from one hundred to two hundred and fifty.
A representative of the Red Cross who entered Darya scene
on April eleventh. Two days later, they reported seeing the
bodies of some one hundred and fifty people heaped haphazardly
in a cave, while around fifty were amassed in a
separate location. Prominent Jewish intellectual Martin Buber wrote at the

(01:02:31):
time that such events had been quote unquote infamous. In
Darya scene, hundreds of innocent men, women and children were massacred.
He said, let the village remain uninhabited for the time being.
Let its desolation be a terrible and tragic symbol of
war and a warning to our people that no practical
military needs may ever justify such acts of murder. He

(01:02:54):
also noted that Darya scene had a profound demographic and
political effect. He's referring to the fact that the news
of his masacre spread and it prompted hundreds of Palestinians
to flee their homes. Four nearby villages were next Pilunia, Cyrus,
bit Saruk and Bidu. Daria scene was no mistake, according

(01:03:16):
to Israeli historian Elain Pape. Iline Pape has been called
a Israeli quote unquote revisionist historian because he tells the truth,
the actual truth of what happened in their history.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
Yeah, the concept of Vision's history is nonsense. Like it
suggests that like there is a settled history at some point,
which that's not right. Like we're always looking at sources again,
but was looking for new sources, different perspectives. It's not
like there is like this monolith of history and then
some meddling bussard comes and chops it down. It's fundamentally
like misunderstanding how history is done. Yes, why shouldn't pay

(01:03:52):
attention to Malcolm Gladwell for that and many other reasons,
But yeah, it's a ridiculous idea. He's not Like it's
not like everyone was like, oh yeah, this wasn't a
bad thing, and then he came along and like injected
some kind of political animists in his history. He came
along and looked at maybe news sources, maybe the same
sources of people. How I don't know, And it was like, now,

(01:04:13):
you guys, have you got this wrong? You called this wrong?
But that's what historians do. Like you can't fucking write
your PhD without disagreeing with someone and doing some new history.
Like that's what takes you from a master's to a doctorate.
And like you're supposed to do three articles in a
book to get tenure. Like your articles can't just be like, yeah,
we pretty much called this one right the first time,
you know, Like the process of doing history is to

(01:04:36):
revise and hope to better understand things from different perspectives. Totally.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
I like that that's the point of history is to revise,
Because you're right, and I just think it's it's so
discrediting of his work.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
To call him a.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Revisionist historian, Yeah, it's condescending, you know, and as someone
that interviewed him called him this.

Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
Yeah, I mean hopefully he gave them both barrels because
it's it's kind of a ridiculous. Yeah, it shows that
they fundamentally unqualified to be discussing the topic.

Speaker 4 (01:05:03):
I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
Yeah, I want to talk about what he said, but
I realized that I didn't take the last break, and
I want to right now, and that.

Speaker 4 (01:05:12):
Is my choice. So Okay, Satan, proud of you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Thank you, and we're back. We're talking about Ellen Pepe
a revisionist quoe unquote historian, but not really. You know,
he was called that because he was talking about Israel
the way it should be talked about, with actual historical facts.
In one of his writings, Pape wrote depopulating Palestine was

(01:05:36):
not a consequential war event, but a carefully planned strategy
otherwise known as Plan Dalette, which was authorized by the
Israeli leader Ben Gurion in March of nineteen forty eight.
Operation Nashan was in fact the first step in the plan,
and as I said, the massacre unleashed a cycle of

(01:05:56):
violence and counter violence that has been the pattern of
since this happened, Jewish forces have regarded any Palestinian village
as an enemy state or a military base, and this
has paved the way for this blurred distinction between massacring
civilians and killing combatants. According to the historian, so what
does all of this say about Israel's vision today? This

(01:06:20):
is why I want to talk about this is because
this started this whole cycle of violence that we still
see perpetuated today. And it's why Palestinians refuse to forget
it and forget what happened, and they'll always talk about
Palestine because they don't want to be erased from history books.
Dariasne has become a powerful symbol of Palestinian dispossession as

(01:06:42):
well as a historical fact Israel must confront when retelling
its national narrative. According to Pepe, given that terrorism is
a mode of behavior that Israeli's attribute solely to the
Palestinian resistance movement, it could not be a part of
any analysis or description of chapters in Israel's pace, asked.
One way out of this conundrum, he says, was to

(01:07:03):
accredit a particular political group, preferably an extremist one with
the same attributes of the enemy, thus exonerating mainstream national behavior.
Israeli historians as well as Israeli society. They've only been
able to admit to the massacre and Daria scene by
attributing it to the right wing group Irgun, but have
covered up or denied the other massacres, notably the one

(01:07:26):
in Tantura in nineteen forty eight. This was carried out
by the Huganah, the main Jewish militia from which the
current day Israeli military has evolved from. And despite this
shift of blame, leading human rights organizations like Human Rights
Watch and Amnesty International have labeled Israel itself in a
part heid state.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
I've just seen the worst ever op ed in the
Jerusalem Post about now what tell me it's about this,
but it's about like the Knakba, Like it contains like
this kind of narrative that like, oh, well, the Knackbo
was who was coined by by like historians to like
explain the failure of the Palestinians to defend themselves, which

(01:08:06):
is like a what does that fucking matter? And be
like what are you saying? Like well, like that contains
within it the nonation that they would have to defend
themselves from someone who was that how and then like
like going back and forth on the number of people killed,
like which you know, the low estimates are as low

(01:08:27):
as like one hundred and seven highest winths in the
two hundred and fifties based on claims that the militias
themselves made. Right, So like again, what it is it
cool to kill like one hundred people but two hundred
and fifty people's like, you know, we should step in there,
And just like I was just checking the author's affiliation

(01:08:48):
because that's always fun, and he's a research for the
Menachen Beigine Heritage Center. I may have pronounced that incorrectly,
But when the organization you work for is is a
memorializing heritage of one of the dudes who led the massacre,
you might want to like to step aside from I

(01:09:09):
mean or not right or just shut up, just dive
the fuck in. But like you are flying your flag
as a fairly part. It's like I said, right, all
historians are bias. But yes, when like you know, if
if I work at the Colonel Custer Heritage Center, like
please take my account of the United States, like violent
assault on the Lakota people with a pinch of salt,

(01:09:30):
because like, I'm coming at this from a certain perspective,
and yeah, here we are at twenty twenty three, still
still doing the doing the thing where we were, rather
than just like taking the l and just being like oo,
like it's bad actually to rape and mutilate and murder
people trying to trying to equivocate.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
It's funny you mentioned articles though, because I just saw
one when I was researching for Aloxa yesterday of this
Israeli car that admitted that the videos he saw was
a bad.

Speaker 5 (01:10:03):
Look like that's what he said.

Speaker 3 (01:10:04):
It was just like good Cup, Yeah, And the course
of solution site is to not allow people to take
videos of you brutal.

Speaker 4 (01:10:12):
Yeah, yeah that's the yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:15):
Tim Apple known anti cup, Yeah, anarchist.

Speaker 4 (01:10:22):
So.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
Human Rights Watch and Amiasty International have labeled Israel as
an apartheid state, and Human Rights Watch said in twenty
twenty one, we reached this determination based on our documentation
of an overarching government policy to maintain the domination by
Jewish Israeli's over Palestinians. As recognition grows that these crimes

(01:10:42):
are being committed, the failure to recognize that reality requires
burying your head deeper and deeper into the sand.

Speaker 3 (01:10:50):
Today.

Speaker 2 (01:10:50):
Apartheid is not a hypothetical or future scenario, and I
apartheid is a very light word to use, but I
did want to just mention that they an organization, so
that not just like I don't know, there's it's officially
on paper that Israel sucks, Like why are we still
defending it? I'm just like, go rewatch the Bernie Sanders
video from yesterday, like or audio, because there's no reason

(01:11:14):
we should be funneling any kind of support into that country.

Speaker 3 (01:11:18):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it. It's mad. We still made
a lot of money selling weapons to Israel, but it
used against like and a Robert and I pursued a
public records request for going on two years for like
these batteries that launch hundreds and hundreds of smoke grenades
and flash bangs that a US company is selling to Israel, Right, yeah,

(01:11:44):
like it's great they can fire them into a masque.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
I mean not surprising.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
No, it's just annoying. Annoying the wrong word. But like, yeah,
there are people who make a lot of money every
time things get more violent there, right, And people who
are very invested in that.

Speaker 4 (01:12:00):
Yeah, and yeah, that's gooulish as fuck.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
It is, And that's actually all I have. That's a
good good place to end if any But I hope
you learned something if you didn't know something in this episode,
and I hope you go watch Futterha or God's Fights
for Freedom. I don't think this is history that should
ever be understated or forgotten, so I'm always more than

(01:12:26):
happy to talk about it, even if it's depressing. So
thank you for joining me today, James.

Speaker 4 (01:12:31):
It's okay, it's been very uplifting.

Speaker 3 (01:12:32):
I don't be all right. It's important. It's it's very important.
Hopefully one day we'll have the PK Gaza episode.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Yes, that'll be great.

Speaker 4 (01:12:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:41):
I guess if you're in the UK and have old
copies of Men's Health, you can read about young people
doing parkering Gaza. It's pretty heavy. I will have another
story about that soon.

Speaker 4 (01:12:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:52):
Where should people? I think a good thing. Maybe if
we could end on like where, where is a good
place to find new about Palestine?

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
I really like El Jazeera, especially their opinion pieces are
pretty good because a lot of the times they're written
by people that are really passionate about what they're writing.
I think following actual Palestinians on social media is always
a good call. Like hummedal Kurd is one of the
most prominent voices recently that has been uplifted, and I

(01:13:25):
would follow his social media as his sister has one
as well. His family's house was basically we had the
threat of being demolished last year. His house was in
Schech if you remembered any of that stuff from last
year with the violence going on there. I also really
like Sobhitaha. He's on Instagram mostly and he has a

(01:13:46):
podcast now. I would highly recommend following his stuff. He
is so informed and so uh just easy to understand too,
So I would watch that And yeah, hummedal Kurt actually
was on some news program like like Face the Nation
or no, maybe not that, but he was on recently

(01:14:08):
like basically handing the asses of the people that were
talking to him about Israel and Palestine. Is that the
right way to say that.

Speaker 4 (01:14:17):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:17):
He was just saying he was he was not willing
to be talked over and whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:14:23):
Yeah, which I like, Yeah, he shouldn't be. My friend
Hossam is a photographer in Palestine. Most of those Alda
Zerra pieces you'll see are his photographs. Actually, well Sam
Salem g He's photograph we've worked together before. But yeah,
if you if you're a person who'd like to see pictures,
his pictures are very good.

Speaker 2 (01:14:44):
Yeah, that's a good point too. Also, there are a
lot of accounts that are solely about Palestine, and a
lot of these Palestine activists follow them and share them,
so you will find more organizations by following them. There
is I for Palestine, there's I think it's like land Palestine.
Like I think there's a lot of really trusted accounts

(01:15:06):
on the Internet. You have to find the ones that
are trusted, and a lot of times it's stuff from
the ground and that's the stuff that needs to be
seen and shared. Because if there's going to be any
upside to fucking internet and social media, it has to
be to spread stuff like this around and make sure

(01:15:28):
people know about it.

Speaker 10 (01:15:29):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
Yeah, I think it gives us a way to like
get underneath that like hegemonic narrative and see what happens
to real people every day.

Speaker 4 (01:15:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
So yeah, that's that's all, okay, whatever, that's the episode by.

Speaker 10 (01:16:02):
Hey and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen
here with me Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrews and
I'm joined today by It's me.

Speaker 3 (01:16:12):
It's just James today, Just James. That's like a cringe
from the nineties.

Speaker 10 (01:16:19):
Really, I was not aware, just sort of curiosity. James,
do you play any Paradox Games?

Speaker 4 (01:16:28):
I don't. I don't know what that is.

Speaker 3 (01:16:30):
I don't think a type of computer game.

Speaker 10 (01:16:34):
Yeah, yeah, that was well, it's like a game development company,
and also they also distribute games as well.

Speaker 3 (01:16:40):
Okay, you've hit an area about which I have very
little knowledge in.

Speaker 10 (01:16:46):
Yeah, and by the way, this isn't sponsored, it's just uh,
it's how I ended up stumbling upon this topic. Right, Okay,
so just you know, hearing me for a second year.
So where the Paradox Games is Crusader Kings three?

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
Right?

Speaker 5 (01:17:02):
Right, Yeah, it's okay.

Speaker 3 (01:17:06):
You know, I'm already infitted to see where this goes.

Speaker 10 (01:17:09):
So, yes, it's a medieval grand strategy game. It's sort
of like it's it's a combination of like those classic
sort of well grand strategy games I know, also a
bit of sims flail. You're playing as a character and
you're also playing as that character's dynasty, so you'll be fit.

(01:17:32):
You play as the grandfather, and then the father, and
then the son, and then the grandson, and so on
and so forth, and so I actually, if you can't tell,
I play the game sometimes a little bit too much,
but I appreciate the role playing. The setting a set
between either eight sixty seven or ten sixty six and

(01:17:54):
fourteen fifty three, which is considered the end of the
medieval era due to fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. Yeah,
so you know, at a certain point and playing the game,
after I've played in pretty much every corner of the map,
I was looking for a new religious movement to spread
across the map for fun. Of course, this is something

(01:18:16):
I do with my free time. And I started reading
about all these different strands of Islam that they have
in the game, like the Commasians and the Ebadis and
the Sufreez. Yeah, and that led me to stumble across
the move Tasialism and the Naja Dad. And please bailed
me with the pronunciations of everything about to pronouncing this episode,

(01:18:39):
but move Tassilism and the Naja Dad. I started digging
into this stuff and that led me to make the
decision to talk about what I've been learning before I begin.
I know, even the idea of religious anarchisms is somewhat controversial,
particularly they describe and see between the anarchist slogan of

(01:19:02):
no gods, no masters, and of course the history of
various faith based class struggles. MY stance on it is complicated,
But whatever my stances, I don't think we could deny
the reality that religious anarchisms have existed in the past
and still exists today.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
Now I'm really interested in this, I'm I'm just I'm
working on a book at the minute about anarchists at
war or I guess how anarchism meets war, and people
variously sort of defining out anarchism narrowly and widely. I
grew up in the early two thousands, I guess, with

(01:19:41):
like the kind of new anarchists, as Greber called it,
and they were always amongst that broader movement opposed to
like neoliberal globalization. There were always religious people, and I'm
not a religious person, And I went to a school
where there was a priest, and the priest had been

(01:20:02):
a member of the anti apartheid movement in South Africa
and was wanted there and had left for doing violence
to get which, like it's pretty based and so like
I have a lot of time for a lot of
religious people, it's always been kind of an area of
I guess interest to me this like religious anarchisms.

Speaker 10 (01:20:23):
Yeah, it certainly it has a very eventful history. Yeah,
so I wanted to talk a bit about the rather
interesting history of just one tradition. Although the whole thing
about the anarchism and I'm going to be discussing is
that I wouldn't really call it anarchism, not at least

(01:20:44):
not by our standards. Yeah, it's more of a distinct
and notable resistance to centralized authority or a minimization and
decentralization of that authority. I think it's morek into like
a mini archism than an actual anarchism. Sure, right, but
it's still interesting to see I guess, the seeds of

(01:21:08):
anti authoritarianism through history.

Speaker 4 (01:21:10):
Right.

Speaker 10 (01:21:12):
So these particular movements, they have a sort of an
anti Khalif, Khalif being the religious leader in Islam, they
have a kind of an anti Khalif action that expanded
into a broader philosophical and political conclusions. So we can
start in the city of Basra in Iraq in the
eight hundreds, where a discussion was taking place recording how

(01:21:35):
the Uma or Islamic community should respond to a leader
of the Abbasid Caliphate would become corrupt and tyrannical. Now,
the two me and stream opinions were that of the
activists who believed in stage in a violent revolution to
install a new legitimate leader, and the quietists who believed
impatiently perseverant under tyranny or passively resistant. It's funny how

(01:22:03):
we see these kind of ideas about change rearing their
heads again and again and again throughout history, despite various
different contexts. The other people who were like, yeah, let's
go get it, and the other people who are like, yeah,
let's rock back a little bit and take things with
more passively. So that's interesting right now. Abubaka, the guy

(01:22:29):
who was the first caliph, he made it clear in
his inauguration that obedience is not incumbent upon his followers
if he contradicts the will of Allah. And for those
who don't know, Allah is God in the Islamic religion.
And yet the dominant position in Islam has been the

(01:22:50):
quietest position even to this day, the activist position is
less popular. Some would say some people have this idea
that the only manifestation of Islam can be the unseen
in the autocracies of Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.
But even back in Islam's Heidi, there were Muslims willing
to resist the tyrannical control of even religiously or ordained rulers.

(01:23:14):
So back to Bastra in the eight hundreds, there was
also a third category of solutions proposed, which we can
call anarchists in the general sense, but not really in
the actual sense. Most of the Muslim anarchists believe that
society could function without the caliph. They proposed a kind
of evolutionary anarchism where private property was not abolished per se,

(01:23:38):
but because the ruler was considered illegitimate, the titles of
property the ruler granted would also be considered illegitimate. They
also argue that the caliph must be agreed upon by
the entire community, which is no easy task considering how
Islam divided between Sunnis and Shia's almost immediately after the

(01:23:58):
prophet Muhammad died. However, without this consensus, no logismate clief
could exist, and it was widely accepted that a lot
did not impose obligations that were impossible to fulfill. So
then it was reason that then there was really no
obligation to establish legitimate clief if no consensus could be found,

(01:24:18):
there's a little loopool. Basically, we need full consensus. We're
never gonna get full consensus. Oh well, shrug, you.

Speaker 3 (01:24:25):
Know, yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:24:27):
And then in the time, in the contextbe this is,
you know, medieval times, you're seeing a lot more. You're
seeing several different political configurations and formations and ways of
organizing society. So some of them at the time, we
were seeing their neighbors, the Bedwinds, and the bed Winds
were living without rulers like normal. So they were like, well,

(01:24:50):
why can't we live without rulers like normal? And so
they use that as a justification as well. And so
they also had many proposed ranging from a radical decentralization
of public authority to a complete disillusion of public authority.
One particular genre proposals involved replacing the calief with elected officials,

(01:25:13):
either completely independent of each other or join together in
a federation, and these elected officials would be temporary and
only remain in office when legal disputes arose or when
an enemy invaded. When the problem was resolved, they would
lose their position and society would return to quote unquote anarchy.

(01:25:33):
There was even a minority sect which calls for the
complete abolition of the state, called it Nashda, and they
argue that if there wasn't sufficient agreement establish this in
a clief, there can never be enough to establish law
at all. They wanted not just political independence, but intellectual independence,
because according to them, individuals should be able to reason

(01:25:54):
for themselves and have no one above them but Allah.
Basically the religious anarchist slogan one God, no masters.

Speaker 12 (01:26:05):
Yeah, right, but we'll get a twisted of course, all
this radical stuff apply to them within their group alone,
So if you weren't part of their group, you could
still be enslaved or killed.

Speaker 10 (01:26:18):
So it's kind of a selective, yeah, it's a bit
selective in their freedom mindedness. Then in eight seventeen, so
a couple of years later, the center of religious power
and the Muslim world collapsed with the fall of Baghdad.
The chaos of civil war ensued, but in the absence

(01:26:42):
of public authority, they would naturally emerge an order out
of the chaos without central planet. As we've seen it
again and again and again throughout history, people self organized
to protect themselves and their positions collectively in times of
natural disaster, in times of crisis, people come together without
having a state, having without a state having to organize

(01:27:04):
them and tell them what to do and how to
do it. Yeah, such has been the case for centuries.
And speaking of centuries, we're going to jump ahead a
little bit to the twelfth century where we could see
a sort of a pseudo nihilist anarchist movement called the Kalandaria,
a movement of wandering ascetic Sufi dervishes from Andalusia and

(01:27:25):
Spain to Iran, Central Asia, India, and Pakistan. Many of
the Khalandaria had body persons and tattoos, in explicit defiance
of Islamic traditions that regarded such practices as haram. Here's
a bit of an interesting story. One of the earlier
divisions of the Malatimir was once being followed by a

(01:27:47):
crowd of admirers, and in reaction to their praise, he paused,
pulled out his pep and urinated on the ground. Is
a sort of a ratic It's almost like what seems
like Greek guy.

Speaker 3 (01:28:05):
Oh, the one who like dies because of the d diogenies, right,
so he kind kind kind of like a Muslim.

Speaker 10 (01:28:15):
Dirogenis a sort of a rejection of society and rejection
of its values. As a lot of people, a lot
of these divisies, they choose voluntary poverty and nudism as
a lifestyle. They were reject civilization. They would have a
sort of an active nihilism and director of society. One

(01:28:37):
of them has been quoted in saying an effect that
money is well. I don't know if I could say
that before he crossed that out. I think we I
think we get, we get the get the idea of course,
again not really anarchism in the classical sense, so in

(01:28:59):
an actual sense, but manifestation of one trend within or
one streak within an anarchist movement. Steak jumphead against the
nineteenth century. Now with perhaps the first anarchist to convert

(01:29:21):
to Islam, Ivan Aguelli born in Sweden in eighteen sixty nine.
Aguilli was interested in philosophy, spirituality, ideology and literature, and
he explored new ideas ravenously. He joined the Theosophical Society
in France and he met anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in

(01:29:42):
London in eighteen ninety one. He also began reading the
Quran around in eighteen ninety two and invited Islam in
eighteen ninety seven. And GWELLI wrote about Islam and anarchism
fairly frequently, but he didn't really connect them together. However,
there was another one, another anarchist to convinced Islam, Isabelle Everhart.

(01:30:08):
She Grubb in Geneva and converted to Islam around eighteen
ninety six or ninety seven, and she challenged both Eastern
and Western norms through her writings and practice practice, pursuing
a nomadic lifestyle in Nigeria, joining a Sufi order and
expressing her unconventional spirit by dressing as a male when
she felt like, taking on a male name, and pursuing

(01:30:30):
a lifestyle of purported promiscuity, journalism, smoking kief, and journeying
across the North African desert by horse. I think she
would also be considered a figure of queer anarchist history.
I wasn't able to find anything about how she identified personally,

(01:30:50):
but apparently so. I don't know if she was a
cross dresser or if she was tramps or something else entirely.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
Right, Like you get especially in that period, like like
misogyny is is so rampant that like it could be
necessary to like, I guess, to present as male even
if you weren't like trans in you and gender identity,
just to have access to things that were constrained I
don't know, like delimited as mets.

Speaker 4 (01:31:21):
Rightly, Yeah, exactly makes sense.

Speaker 3 (01:31:25):
Yeah, it's I think it's why it's to just be like,
we don't know, rather than to necessarily like like claim
to someone's identity stuff when what we know is their
presentation stuff.

Speaker 10 (01:31:35):
Agreed. Also, during this time in the Ottoman Empire, there
was a not insignificant population of European anarchists, mostly Italians,
you know. Alexandria alone, there were approximately twelve thousand Italians
living and working, often in the building sector. By eighteen
seventy six anarchists they had organized a branch of the

(01:31:57):
Cyndicalist International Workers Association, and in the early eighteen hundreds
at Coomara, Testa and other Italian anarchists joined the Urabia
Prize in against the British, and this was perhaps the
first time that Muslims anarchists fought a military campaign side
by side other uprising was squashed. Anarchists were less harassed
in the Ottoman Empire than in many other parts of Europe.

(01:32:22):
Later on, in nineteen oh one, anarchists co founded a
free popular university, the University Popularity Libre or UPL, in Alexandria.
It provided free courses on subjects like tool stories and
Cunan's ideas, the arts, pragmatic topics like working negotiation strategies,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. However, common if you

(01:32:46):
were indigenous to the region, tough luck indigenous muslim and
indigenous Muslims and Arabic speakers went really part of the
upls program went't really included pretty much marginalized from the
education entirely, and the UPL crash became more and more
aimed toward and controlled by upper class interests. So that sucks.

Speaker 3 (01:33:14):
Yeah, that's a fair yeah, lame.

Speaker 10 (01:33:17):
Very lame. Yeah, a lot of disappointments in this episode,
people who are like nearly there and then kind of
there of course. Yeah, but that's that's that's part of history, right,
jumping head even more in the twentieth century. We got
to see the fall of the Caliphate in nineteen twenty

(01:33:38):
four and the two new influential currents of Salafiism or Slafism,
the Muslim Brotherhood which is known for their social democratic lenans,
and the Saudis, who are known for their monarchic venus.

Speaker 4 (01:33:54):
To put it likely, Yeah, that's even so.

Speaker 10 (01:33:58):
Yeah, they as possible yea, yeah, I mean we even
so late on a sort of an Islamic liberation theology
developing that dismissed bin Ladin and senseless and lifted up
the examples of the revolutionary Barbie movement of the eighteen hundreds,
Malcolm X and Ali Shariati's quest for a just and

(01:34:19):
classless society. Then there's also a neo Sufi group known
as the Murabhutin, the Mura Bhutun and the Inclusive Mosque
Initiative in London as other examples of you know, how
Islam could be used to resist some Islamic traditions. And
there are also several individuals today who have explicitly and

(01:34:42):
publicly self identified as Muslim anarchists, not Muslim and anarchists,
but specifically Muslim anarchists, including Ab dinner Pradu and Mohammad
jan Venus.

Speaker 4 (01:34:56):
That's cool.

Speaker 10 (01:35:00):
That's a sort of a basic rundown. But I think
inevitably with these sort of topics you sort of fraught ideas,
something like an Islamic anarchism, they're going to be some
challenges and criticisms, right, Yeah, I'd like for one, you know,
it's a fairly new concept, the idea of Islamic anarchism.

(01:35:24):
Like I went over, there were certain trends that can
be described as an archic, iphibian, generous, but the idea
of Islamic anarchism as the something going out of after
development of anarchism and through anarchism as a political philosophy,
it's fairly new and it challenges a lot of the

(01:35:45):
traditional Islamic teachings on authority and governance. So some scholars
practitioners have pointed out that with the emphasis of social order,
the emphasis of authority of the state in the role
of law, this idea of rejecting hierarchy and authority as
advocated by Islamic anarchists is you know, heretical practically. There's

(01:36:09):
also some criticism that with Islamic anarchisms rejection of all
forms of authority in hierarchy, it undermines the concept of tweed,
which is the belief in the oneness of God, and
by you know, rejecting that by undermining that concept and
promoting individualism and self rule, it sort of goes against

(01:36:32):
that teaching. Of course, like I mentioned earlier, there's also
this challenge to the idea that Islamic anarchism or Islamic
anarchism could be compatible because of the slogan and no cause,
no masters right. Of course, Islamic anarchists and other Islamic
socialists would argue that Islam should be seen as a

(01:36:53):
liberating force that can help individuals achieve freedom from a
Prussian exploitation. The same argument is made with a lot
of other strands of religious anarchisms as well, and so
to bring things to a sort of a close, I'd
say that, you know, like every religious anarchism, like every
political philosophy, like every religion, like everything, Honestly, people pick

(01:37:20):
and choose, you know, in Islam you can find elements
of quietism as well as activism detached to mysticism, as
well as pragmatic daily concerns, traditions of violence, and traditions
of non violence, moderation, and extremism. In anarchism, tensions exist

(01:37:40):
between pacifism and insurrectionism, cyndicalism and individualism, nationalism and anti nationalism,
collectivism and individualism. Again, and I'm not a Muslim, I'm
not a religious anarchist of any variety.

Speaker 4 (01:37:58):
But.

Speaker 10 (01:38:00):
I think that there is room for even if I
may not agree with it in all cases the conclusions
some people draw. I think there's room for these sorts
of dialogues to be had. I think there's room for
exploration to the history of all sorts of historical movements

(01:38:25):
and ideologies and religions and ideas, because I mean, there's
a whole legacy of billions of people who have lived
and died long before us, and I think I find
it interesting, at least as a thought exercise, to see
how they came to their conclusions as well. So I

(01:38:45):
hope this episode was thought provoking, enlightening and interesting to
those who tuned in.

Speaker 4 (01:38:54):
Yeah, it was good.

Speaker 3 (01:38:55):
It's always interesting to see these Yeah, like, we don't
have to agree with all of it, but it's interesting
to see where people come at these things from. It
was I was wondering if you were going to get
to or not. But like one of the things that
you saw in the Spanish like not really the Civil
War as much, but in the Second Republic was the
socialists and like left liberals explicitly selling out like Moroccan

(01:39:21):
Muslim people and North African people more generally whatever their faith,
and anarchists being like, no, we should express solidarity with
these people, like even if we if they are aren't
and some of them were part of like they were
anarchists in Spanish North Africa of course, but like even
if they weren't, being like, we should oppose colonialism, and

(01:39:43):
when every other kind of left stripe didn't, it's kind
of one of the failing sort of public not to So, yeah,
they've been these conversations, I guess for a long time.
Like it was interesting to hear about those Sufi's in
Spain and think about how long those conversations have been
going back and forth, you.

Speaker 10 (01:39:58):
Know, exactly exactly. I think the whole Iberian Peninsula's really
interesting reachion in terms of the confluence of cultures. I
did miss that particular historical instance in my research with
also pointing it out.

Speaker 4 (01:40:12):
Yeah, no worries big Nerd for that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:40:17):
Is there anything you'd like to plug before we get Andrew.

Speaker 10 (01:40:20):
Sure, sure, so. You can find me on YouTube at andrewism,
on patreon dot com slash Saint Drew, and I've logged
off of Twitter, but if you want to get updates
when I do decide to log in to post updates
here and there, you could follow me on Twitter at underscore.

(01:40:44):
Thank you, Andrew, Take care everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:40:47):
Peace, Oh boy, Welcome to It could happen here a

(01:41:07):
podcast about things falling apart and sometimes stuff that's less
depressing than that. This is gonna be a mix of
both of those things. I'm Robert Evans. My co hosts
for today are James Stout and Mia Wong. How are
we both? How are we all? How's everybody? How's everybody feeling?

Speaker 3 (01:41:28):
I'm anticipating eagerly the topic of today's episode, so I'm
excited like a kid Christmas. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:41:36):
So, James, that answers my question for you. But Mia,
have you ever heard of Lord Miles Rutledge.

Speaker 5 (01:41:42):
I have seen him on Twitter and I cannot express
how excited I am for this.

Speaker 1 (01:41:48):
So we are talking about a real piece of shit today.
This is kind of relevant to our I try to
always justify you know, our purview is broadly speaking, collapse,
you know, what we call the crumbles, and Miles Rutledge
is a perfect example of the kind of grifters and
conmen who sort of sort of seep in at the

(01:42:10):
edges of war and disaster and calamity and have for forever,
you know, they're in behind the bastards. We've done a
couple episodes on like different white people who tried at
various points to like conquer Latin American nations, and like
the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, just kind of during these
periods of there would be a bunch of rebellions going on,

(01:42:31):
and so like some group of mercenaries would be like,
I bet we can like steal Nicaragua, right, let's Goways
wear the shot. You know, you get these kind of
like these kind of people, and Lord Myles Rutledge is
sort of the lower body count end of that, but
in some ways a lot more frustrating because at least, look,
there's there's something respectable about trying to violently conquer another

(01:42:56):
country and then getting murdered yourself. There's at least like
a a degree of honesty there. This guy, Miles Rutledge
is like purely but like doing war tourism in order
to like pump his his TikTok and his Instagram and
his YouTube. And I find that worse than like, I
don't know those guys who tried to overthrow Venezuela and

(01:43:17):
got captured by fishermen. So they were great, yeah, and
then laid in their own piss on camera. Beautiful story,
perfect story, took a b begun with them, Such a
good story. And this one has a similar this story, thankfully,
Miles the story has has a is an ending almost

(01:43:39):
that satisfying. So Miles Rutledge was born on James. Actually,
I'm gonna I'm gonna bring you in for a second.
How do I spell this last name? R o U
T l E d g E. He's British age.

Speaker 3 (01:43:50):
Routledge believe if it's the same as the academic publisher,
which which is spelled the same, and then it's Routledge.
And look, I don't give a fuck about scary field.
Sad to say, have we won?

Speaker 1 (01:44:02):
Yeah? Okay, So Miles Routledge was born on September fourteenth,
nineteen ninety nine, probably somewhere near Birmingham. I don't think
we have, like like it's just kind of based on shit,
he said. But yeah, I don't see why he'd probably
he'd lie about that. I don't think people brag about
coming from Birmingham.

Speaker 3 (01:44:21):
Yeah, it's like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:44:28):
So unfortunately, thanks to generations of medical advancements, he survived
to adulthood. Because he does strike me as the kind
of person who wouldn't have done that in like the
eighteen hundreds, he got into the University of I'm gonna
need your help here again, James.

Speaker 4 (01:44:42):
Lowborough, Luffborough, Luffbrough.

Speaker 5 (01:44:45):
Unbelievable. That sounds like an incredibly obscure World War two
German aerial division or something.

Speaker 1 (01:44:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like the very Broie section
of the So he gets into the University of luft
bro as a fucking physics student, or so he says,
and sometime within the last two years he got an
internship at an investment banking firm.

Speaker 3 (01:45:16):
So the guy a kind of guy.

Speaker 1 (01:45:19):
He's laser targeted on a career as a giant piece
of shit. But I haven't found much in my casual
research about his financial situation or how much money he
was born into. But I think he was like, I'm
gonna guess his parents were at least comfortable because, as
a young man still in college, he had the funds
to travel pretty extensively, starting in twenty nineteen when he

(01:45:41):
visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Now, this is one of
the most popular destinations in the world for what is
called dark tourism, and this is largely this is people
who live kind of boring lives otherwise traveling to places
that sound scary in order to impress people on like
the TikTok or whatever. Now I just said that, but
I don't think there's anything wrong. Now, there's like a

(01:46:03):
lot of problems with getting to Chernobyle because of the war,
but like prior to the expand innovation, I don't think
there's anything wrong with wanting to like see Chernobyle. My
thinking on like the ethics of going somewhere dangerous or
whatever is like, are you increasing the odds of like
causing a problem that diverts medical resources or other resources

(01:46:24):
in a way that like harms people who have no
choice in being there? Right, and visiting Chernobyl whatever, You're
not really putting anyone at risk, So that's fine. But
in may of twenty twenty one, though Miles Rutledge made
the decision to plan a trip to somewhere that it
was distinctly not fine to visit as a tourist, Afghanistan. Now,

(01:46:46):
he decided to head over there during kind of the
end stages of the war. Although if you guys can
remember back that far, the collapse of the Afghan government
that the United States had backed happened more rapidly than
most people had predicted, so it was kind of like
less clear I think when he booked his trip that
thinks we're going to fall apart quite that quickly.

Speaker 3 (01:47:08):
Yeah, humor to feel the same way about that.

Speaker 1 (01:47:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So yeah, it's one of those things
where like Miles, you know, his plan to go there
was again not as like he's not heading there as
a journalist. There's not like a story he wants to tell.
He's not traveling there for kind of a practical purpose,
Like he really does frame this as just he wanted
to go on vacation, and he wanted to go on

(01:47:32):
vacation specifically for what I think is probably like the
dumbest reason I've ever heard of anyone choosing of a
vacation location, especially choosing fucking Afghanistan as a vacation location.
I'm going to play a clip from one of his
YouTube videos.

Speaker 5 (01:47:48):
Now, why am I in Afghanistan?

Speaker 4 (01:47:51):
Well, that's a really good question.

Speaker 5 (01:47:52):
During COVID lockdowns. Afghanistan's only open without a vaccine man date,
So I just think.

Speaker 3 (01:47:58):
I've never heard his voice before. I'm more angry now.

Speaker 1 (01:48:04):
To Afghanistan because they don't have a fucking vaccine mandate.

Speaker 4 (01:48:09):
Oh my fucking real warrior for freedom.

Speaker 1 (01:48:15):
Yeah, just the just the dumbest idiot. I hate him.
So anyway, as a result of wanting to avoid the
vaccine mandate, Miles joined the long and historic line of
young British Men who have gone out to Afghanistan on
a lark. Unfortunately, unlike many of them, Miles would survive

(01:48:36):
his adventure. He does not seem to have a regular
Wikipedia yet, but he does have an entry on something
called everybody Wiki, which yeah, yeah, which I hadn't heard
it that one before, but it's it very hilariously lists
his occupation as quote, posting online during the twenty twenty
one Siege of Kabul.

Speaker 3 (01:49:01):
That's great, that's that's actually Tim Kennedy.

Speaker 4 (01:49:04):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:49:07):
So for obvious reasons. He encountered difficulties. He wound up
sleeping by the side of the road one night, he
was taken into Taliban custody. While he makes a big
deal out of this, I actually don't think he was
ever in serious danger, particularly not compared to, for example,
the people fighting and dying or the civilians and said
he's taken by the Taliban, who had to endure an

(01:49:28):
often violent change of regime when the Taliban was taking
over here. And lets you know, obviously there's the danger
of like accidents on the road, which is always a
significant danger in a place called like Afghanistan. There's the
danger of you know, being caught up in a fight
or something potentially, But the Taliban in this kind of
late stage of their takeover, had no desire to harm

(01:49:48):
a British citizen like Miles, or to harm like, you know,
Americans who were in the country. And in fact, we're
working kind of in the later stages of the US
evacuation to try to make sure it happened peacefully, not
because the Taliban is so good guys, but because like
there's no geopolitical benefit to them from like a random
British traveler dying. It's just gonna cause problems for them.

Speaker 4 (01:50:08):
Yeah, it's just stress and a.

Speaker 1 (01:50:11):
Yeah, like they didn't have like, I don't believe they were.
The Taliban was, ever, like threatened his life in any way. Miles, though,
posted through it, reporting that he was stuck in a
pickle and giving details of his experience to fans on
four Chan and Twitch. He started using the name James.
You had asked about this, he started using the name
Lord Miles due to the fact that he had purchased

(01:50:33):
a fifteen pound lordship certificate as a bit I knew,
I knew. Yeah, yeah, yeah, not that surprising.

Speaker 4 (01:50:41):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (01:50:41):
What can't say that?

Speaker 1 (01:50:44):
Sorry, no you can You're you're you're British.

Speaker 3 (01:50:47):
It's fine, okay, Daniel, Yeah, I leave that one in.
That is my conviction. I what a twat, Sorry, what
an absolute prick because he's what's really fucking frustrated. Everything
about his existence is for frustrating right now. So it's
what's so annoying is he's playing this fucking twee parochial
version of Britishness for an exclusively in American audience. Right,

(01:51:09):
if you're born near fucking Birmingham, we're not all. Look,
we are not all pride and prejudice people. And if
you've moved to another country, you will constantly encounter people
thinking you grew up in Harry Potterland. But like, we're
not all turfs either. But like he's fucking doing it,
like and he's doing it like a naive America. Like
there are like the Scottish Parliament has made statements about

(01:51:32):
not buying these stupid Scottish titles. Yeah, here's a pray.

Speaker 1 (01:51:38):
Yeah, it's it's very silly. He justified this by saying,
because I think he buys it while he's in Afghanistan,
he explained to his followers, the Taliban may see that
as a reason to keep me alive, some negotiating powder powers.
They'll think I'm important. They don't care. They don't want
any fucking Westerners dying in the country because it'll fuck

(01:51:58):
up their chances of like you know, they want to
get integrated to the like fucking global economy. They want
to qualify for like loans and ship like they don't
want to They don't want the problems that you dying bring,
Like you being a lord has not going to impact
this in any way.

Speaker 4 (01:52:13):
Yeah, and they don't.

Speaker 5 (01:52:14):
They don't want like the British government deciding like, oh, ship,
they killed someone, now we need to just bomb like
cobble for eight months or whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:52:22):
Now. I don't want to say in his defense because
I would not like to speak in his defense. But
I will say that the one person who might be
conned by a lordship you bought online is Boris Johnson.

Speaker 1 (01:52:32):
Yeah, have an impact on Bojo.

Speaker 3 (01:52:38):
Yeah, but it is.

Speaker 5 (01:52:39):
It is not defense. It's not like Bojo's gonna be
sticking around for very long.

Speaker 10 (01:52:43):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:52:43):
You have like you every every every like seven weeks,
you are rolling a dice as to whether the Conservative
PM is someone you can con with the lordship title.

Speaker 3 (01:52:51):
Yeah. Well, none of them in the last few years
have been what I would call intellectual titans.

Speaker 4 (01:52:58):
That's true.

Speaker 5 (01:52:59):
But but but Hope springs a turtle, Rishi sud acts
in trouble too, so they might I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:53:07):
A brave shot. You just really go down the fast road.

Speaker 1 (01:53:13):
I really I feel sorry for you all across the pond.
I can't imagine what it would be like to have
your politicians be national laughing stocks. I mean, that's just
gotta be that's just got to be hard. No American,
we we'll ever know what that's like. We are ruled
by the hero of Ireland. Oh I I was gonna
talk about, you know, my hero, the governor of Florida

(01:53:34):
and his best friend, the pedophile who just committed suicide.

Speaker 5 (01:53:39):
This a different pedophile.

Speaker 1 (01:53:41):
No, this is the pedophile who like backed Santus's like
early political rise and now just killed himself after he
got exposed.

Speaker 5 (01:53:47):
Oh so it's this isn't all Alexander. Okay, never mind,
this is a different pedophile. I'm every day there's a
new one.

Speaker 4 (01:53:57):
I can't.

Speaker 5 (01:53:57):
I can't.

Speaker 3 (01:53:58):
It's not Mike Gates's a friend who's also aphile.

Speaker 1 (01:54:04):
Now you know who I cannot prove at this point
as a pedophile, Miles Rutledge. So let's get back to
his story please. So he also claimed during this period
where he's kind of like quote unquote on the run,
that the four Chan users he was posting with kept
him alive by giving him updates on Taliban progress through

(01:54:26):
ocent as they advanced through Kabul. That's broadly speaking, not impossible.
So the idea that Miles, again, I don't believe he
was ever threatened by the Taliban. They're again not nice people,
but they're not like unhinten, They're not isis you know.
They they are a government. They don't have a benefit
in something bad happening to someone like him. So Miles, though,

(01:54:48):
played up the idea that he was something between a tourist,
a journalist, and a philanthropist building his trip to Afghanistan
is a quote little charity thing. At the same time
as he said that he was prepared for dea when
he couldn't immediately secure a way out of the country,
Eventually a United Nations safe house took him in and
he was given a seat on one of the last
planes out of the country. Now this is an actual actor. Yeah,

(01:55:14):
that's frustrating because like there are people in danger from
the Taliban who had no couldn't leave, right, Like he
took one of their spaces. Somebody didn't get out who
is in danger because of him.

Speaker 3 (01:55:27):
Yeah, Like very good friends of mine, like I spent
much of that time, Like I've written about Afghanistan, I've
worked with translators and like good friends of mine. Sometimes
them left Afghanistan, but many of them still have their
families there right, and every single day they have anxiety
about whether their families are okay if something terrible has
happened to them. Yeah, and this twat is just like

(01:55:48):
sitting on a plane posting on four Chaney Like that
makes me properly angry.

Speaker 1 (01:55:52):
Yeah, it's it's And that's again what I was talking about, Like,
if you're going to if you're gonna go to a
place that is that is beset conflict, you know, by
civil war, by violence or anything like that. Number one,
you have responsibility to like have a reason to go
beyond I wonder what it's like. And you have a
responsibility to not make things worse for people who don't

(01:56:14):
have a choice about being there. And he did. You know,
that's like fundamentally why I hate this guy is he
absolutely took an opportunity to escape from I don't know,
some woman's rights activist or something, you know, some somebody
who was some turp or something, somebody who didn't have
a choice about fucking being stuck in Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 (01:56:32):
Yeah, just some fuck you wanted a fair cracket life.
And and yeah there's a prick. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah.
And he could have stayed. I have friends who stayed
through that time and covered it. Like your concern is
for your sources, not yourself.

Speaker 5 (01:56:48):
Yeah yeah, or you could have done the thing that
his ancestors didn't, just walk across the border Pakistan like
your ancestors did this. This is the one thing like
Hell's look.

Speaker 1 (01:57:01):
Like through the Kyber Pass and then become Sherlock Holmes
his best friend. You know, that's a proud tradition, which I.

Speaker 3 (01:57:09):
Thought you were gonna go with dying man, which would
have also been a very That's another proud tradition.

Speaker 1 (01:57:14):
Getting sniped by a jizil in the fucking uh Kaiber Pass.
Absolutely so. He had a marvelous time in Afghanistan and
immediately pivoted because he built up a big social media
following around his posts there, pivoted to a career as
a dark tourist influencer. He traveled next to an ireland,

(01:57:34):
not an Ireland. He traveled next to an island in Brazil.
There's this island off the coast of Brazil that like,
like you're not allowed to go to because there's so
many fucking snakes.

Speaker 4 (01:57:43):
Like it's just it's.

Speaker 1 (01:57:44):
Extremely dangerous to go there because it's covered in fucking snakes.
And he like went there wearing armor, but he didn't
actually run into any snakes, because snakes don't, like you know,
they're not generally aggressive, most of them. He got arrested
in Kenya for as best as I can and tell,
being a prick nearer refugee camp, and then he traveled

(01:58:05):
to Ukraine right after the expanded invasion to Ukraine to
try to make the suffering of hundreds of thousands of
people about him. The highlight of that trip was he
claims that he drove a woman and her kid out
of the country and rescued them, and also brought people
snacks whatever. Miles has always been two things. He's deeply

(01:58:27):
enmeshed in right wing meme culture, and he is at
least superficially committed to Christian extremism. He is like kind
of a at least it like signals as a fundamentalist Christian.
He's super fashy right. This is not like a hidden
thing within his videos and stuff. I found one write
up of him on a right wing religious news website

(01:58:48):
that gives you an idea of how he builds himself
to his ideal audience. Miles Wroteledge is a self described Catholic,
independent war journalist and charity on the ground at just
twenty one. He had to do Afghanistan with the Taliban
seized control, and now he's in Ukraine giving refreshing updates
that are peppered with humor, reality and a little naivete.
In the past, Routledge went to war torn countries and

(01:59:09):
into areas no NGO or charity dared to go, according
to his GoFundMe paigde, so he can hand out bibles, food,
medicine and money.

Speaker 3 (01:59:17):
Well, there's a special place in hell for some time
giving a stopping person a Bible.

Speaker 7 (01:59:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:59:21):
And also like he never went to places other people
wouldn't dare to go. I will guarantee you everywhere he
went there were already like people like the Freeburmer rangers
or even medicine sands, frontiers uh or journalists without borders,
like there were there were people there. Because he's not
He's not like I've seen his videos, He's not going
anywhere special.

Speaker 5 (01:59:42):
There's how many people are in Callable like ten million people?

Speaker 1 (01:59:45):
Yes, these are big cities, he's four million people sure,
Playing off of kind of these the provincialism of his
audience and the fact that most people in the West
when they hear Afghanistan or now Ukraine when they hear it,
or like even like a place like Kenya, which is
like a massive country with major cities and all sorts
of stuff like that, like, oh, these places are just

(02:00:06):
death traps and you don't go there, and like, no, man,
even like I would get this when i'd go to
I've spent a lot, visited Arax seven or eight times,
and it's like, no, man, it's like most of it's
just a country. Like, yeah, there's specific things you have
to keep in mind that are dangerous, but like it's
just a place, like millions of people live there and
don't die every day.

Speaker 3 (02:00:25):
Yeah, this is ludicrous to suggest that he was in
any day. Yeah, like you could go to all these
places and stay in a five star hotel and yeah,
like you're not in any danger, especially as a.

Speaker 4 (02:00:35):
Rich white British guy.

Speaker 1 (02:00:36):
Brady ground by, Yeah, to the extent that he's like
in Ukraine and traveling near the front where there's like
random missiles and shelling, Yeah there's some danger, but again
it's danger that he is exposing himself to unnecessarily and
then creating a situation whereby if he is injured, that's
a bunch of morphine and antibiotics that can't go to

(02:00:58):
a fucking civilian who had no choice because they were
raised in constantiniva or whatever. You know, Like, yeah, fucking yeah,
he's a praise Yeah, yeah, so I mentioned a little earlier,
he's definitely a fascist. And you know when I say that,
sometimes people do the whole ou lefties will call anything

(02:01:19):
a fascist. Don't worry, I have some receipts on this one.
So shortly after his famous trip to Afghanistan, he published
a book about his very brief time in the country.
This book included some interesting claims, like that he was
the last person to enter the country on a tourist
visa before the fall of Kabul, and that his visa
had required a personal statement explaining his reasons for visiting.

(02:01:42):
He wrote, quote, my response was simply an a four
sheet of paper with only the word fun written on it.
It was accepted without question. I was ready for my
very own white boy summer. He also notes that the
last right, which was at the time kind of like
a meme in you know, fashy online Nazi circles, it

(02:02:02):
was all over telegram. He also known to very pragmatic
child yeah, although not problematic in this sense. Chet did
not I think mean for that to happen. He's just
problematic in other ways. So he also notes that the
last thing he did before leaving was rewatch American Psycho,

(02:02:23):
which he described as a sacred male experience. I will
remind you all that that is a movie directed by
a woman. He also writes about the fact that he
ordered a meal at the airport before leaving, but decided
not to eat it because it was likely filled with soy.
He goes on like a whole diatribe about how Afghanistan
is probably safer for him because there's no soy in the.

Speaker 3 (02:02:43):
Food, just.

Speaker 1 (02:02:47):
So. The weird right wing memes and signaling, all of
which are like he's always like a year or two
out of date on his like far right signaling and
stuff too, which is weird. All of it makes a
little more sense when you realize that the book that
he wrote about Afghanistan was published with Antelope Hill Publishing.
Oh yeah, yeah, James, he recognized that, didn't you. Yeah yeah,

(02:03:12):
It is an explicitly fascist publisher. So on the Antelope
Pill page for his stupid book, the recommended books beneath It,
you know you've got the main book and is like
this is if you like this book, read these books
are a collection of One of the books is a
collection of speech speeches from Kai Murros, who is a
Finnish right wing activist who was formerly a maoist but
is now a white nationalist revolutionary advocate who suppose supports

(02:03:36):
total racial war against asylum seekers and immigrants. He advocates
for an uprising in the UK in which all university
staff will be executed by death squads.

Speaker 5 (02:03:46):
So he hasn't gone.

Speaker 4 (02:03:47):
That far from the malm So.

Speaker 1 (02:03:49):
Not that far there, Like, look, there's still pieces of it.
So the next book that's recommended if you're interested in
Miles's book is The Death Company, which is a first
hand account of the Italian in World War One that
was very influential among early fascists. And then there's Let
Them Look West by Marty Phillips. I found a review
of this book on a website called the White Art Collective,

(02:04:11):
and I'm going to read a quote from that now.
So this is a Nazi reviewing this book by a Nazi.

Speaker 3 (02:04:18):
Right, good stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:04:20):
Yeah, here's him describing the book. Rob Cohen is a
big city writer sent on assignment to interview James Alexander,
the governor of Wyoming, a fundamentalist Christian who has revived
his state with, among other things, a Christian themed public
works program and Mount Calvary, an artificial mountain which villagers
climb up and pass the stations of the Cross, then
view a live action recreation of the Crucifixion with music

(02:04:40):
by a live choir. The first few chapters until Rob
meets Alexander, feel like a dead pan satire of apocalypse.

Speaker 10 (02:04:46):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:04:47):
Rob didn't want a mission, but for his sins, he
was given one. He's a fish out of water who
has to navigate and improvise his way to the goal.
There's a magical realism vibe of the book despite nothing
overly supernatural occurring, and maybe this is why Phillips calls
it a mundane phantom. But it's also a mundane fantasy
for the simple reason that the America and Wyoming described
in the book are so far beyond what is possible
that suspension of disbelief is required. Even the Nazi seems

(02:05:11):
like to think it's kind of a shit book, which
is very funny to me. So again, if you publish
your book with Antelope Pill, Like you are comfortable, at
the very least comfortable with having your book advertised next
to explicitly Nazi power fantasies.

Speaker 3 (02:05:27):
Yeah, you know, going to Antler, you know we've both
published books, Like, Yeah, it wouldn't have occurred to me
to even try.

Speaker 1 (02:05:35):
Yeah, they are the Nazi one of the Nazist publishers
out there. In April of twenty twenty two, Miles attempted
to re enter Afghanistan. He claimed in videos that his
goal was to rescue a tour guide and his family
who were threatened by the Taliban, but he wound up
stuck in Pakistan, claiming that this guide had lied to

(02:05:56):
him and claimed that the border was closed to British people.
He he's like, to be fair, I have no issues
with this. No, that would be fine. He gets like
he starts like freaking out in the video, he's like
a near tears and stuff. He claims that he'd spent
fifteen thousand pounds on the trip and now he was broke,
so obviously he uses that he has to beg for
money from his followers, which I kind of wonder if

(02:06:18):
that was just the whole point of the trip. He
also pointed, posted whiney status updates, claiming his life had
been ruined by the failed trip. Quote, this means I
can't go on a date with a girl I really liked.
It means I can't sponsor a joint adventure with my friend.
I will go home to an empty room. I am
at my end, but I know, big baby.

Speaker 4 (02:06:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:06:38):
Despite his failure, he did not give up on his
dreams of stumbling through Afghanistan again. For the sake of content,
he put together another trip for the start of twenty
twenty three. In late February, as he geared up to go,
he made some tweets to his followers that give us
more unfortunate context as to the sort of person he is.
From February twenty seventh, flat mate saw my Bible and

(02:07:01):
said that book is a fairy tale. So I threw
my empty mug at his head, broke on the wall
behind him. This isn't the first instance. And after a
while you have to stop playing nis and to fend
your faith.

Speaker 3 (02:07:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:07:13):
Great, this tweet that I remember seeing.

Speaker 3 (02:07:15):
Yeah, that was a great one. Now people used to
send me his shit so often.

Speaker 1 (02:07:20):
He's infuriating. Yeah, there's a worse one. The most infuriating
tweet I found from this guy came a bit further
down and it's it's a picture of him. I thinking
it might be Dubai. I think it's Dubai. So he's
like got his back to the skyline and he's just
kind of like looking off into the distance pensively, and
it says, friends say, I space out all the time.

(02:07:43):
My mind is having visions of North Sentinel Island. Now,
if you don't remember, Sentinel Island is the Forbidden Island
and the Andamans which is part of India where in
twenty eighteen, an idiot Christian missionary broke quarantine and endangered
the lives of an entire so he could satisfy his
narcissistic evangelical fetish. He was thankfully shot to death by

(02:08:05):
them via arrow before he could get too close, and
hopefully did not spread any diseases to them. I wish
mild success in reaching the island and meeting his similar fate,
But if he gets anywhere close to them, there's just
such a high chance that he will spread deadly disease
to the people there that I hope the Indian government
keeps him away, even though it would be very funny
if he got shot to death by that would be

(02:08:29):
quite a laugh.

Speaker 3 (02:08:30):
Yeah, truly living out the dreams of being a British lord.

Speaker 1 (02:08:34):
Yeah yeah, continue a real time on our tradition getting
fucking murked by the natives on an island. So the
good news is that friends of the pod, the Taliban
may have taken care of you know, this guy for us.
Shortly after making those posts, he re entered Afghanistan and
a video posted several days later he bragged about entering.

(02:08:57):
While he's in Afghanistan, he brags that he made a
fake visa in order to get himself into the country.
So he breaks Taliban law entering the country in a
fake video and then posts a video while he's in
Kabul bragging about it. So, first off, genius brain, unbelievable

(02:09:18):
smarts there. So this the first video that he posts
back is it's titled something like Shooting Guns with the Taliban,
and it's all about him just like going to Jalalabad
to see what kind of guns are available. He talks
a lot about how all these US guns and gear
are available, but he doesn't actually really show any of it.
Like most of the video, he's in like this fucking

(02:09:38):
I'll show you he's in like this fucking gun bazaar
and he's like really awed by this giant ar style
Turkish shotgun, which we've seen some of them. We have
seen some of those, James. They're terrible weapons. They are
definitely obviously the Taliban got a hold of a shitload
of US gear. Nobody's questioning that these shitty Turkish shotguns

(02:09:59):
are not American weapon.

Speaker 5 (02:10:00):
Yeah, well that that's that's probably why it's in the
bizarre and not like in someone's like or something.

Speaker 3 (02:10:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:10:09):
Yeah, the Taliban have access to a lot of American gear.
He is kind of just like looking at i don't know,
like a mix of like old Soviet weapons and like
trash guns. So I'm gonna show you a first clip
from this video.

Speaker 7 (02:10:23):
Here is sometimes a little bit dangerous, so there's a
lot of diesta. If you don't know who diesh is
it's basically isis.

Speaker 4 (02:10:32):
Now isis?

Speaker 7 (02:10:33):
You know, I'll number be Taliban. However, the weapons market
and maybe in some areas would be quite bad at
for me, so I'll have to be a little bit careful.
But if you've seen this footage ended up, Okay, I'm
gonna take a moment to tell you, guys about my
sponsor tend.

Speaker 5 (02:10:44):
What the fuck.

Speaker 3 (02:10:50):
This is not official medium, but.

Speaker 5 (02:10:53):
Gesus, that.

Speaker 3 (02:10:57):
Is one of the most jarring address.

Speaker 1 (02:10:59):
Like if you're not watching this, he's like standing in
the desert and like talking. There's that brief clip of
like a picture of some isis guys, but then he's
like back in the desert talking and then suddenly a
shot like it cuts very harshly to him in his
hotel room doing like a fucking ad for an investment
banking app. It's so fucking or like a stock trading app.

(02:11:21):
It's so funny.

Speaker 3 (02:11:22):
And then yes, yeah, don't see uh have you got
the shahata written on it? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:11:31):
Yeah, yeah, it sure does.

Speaker 13 (02:11:33):
Oh yeah, I was gonna say people she was this,
but to spare yourself, like god, yeah, he's he's wearing
his white headband.

Speaker 3 (02:11:45):
Who's I can't see it anymore, but you can see
something you're in and Arabic on it, I guess, and
doing it as much for something called ten.

Speaker 1 (02:11:52):
D's yeah, something which is like yeah, some sort of
like stock trading app for I'm going to guess people
to get their life saving scammed from them. Yeah, yeah,
that's my apologies tendis if I'm getting you wrong, but
you're spider.

Speaker 5 (02:12:11):
Yeah, ah damn.

Speaker 1 (02:12:13):
It's okay. We've got enough sports betting companies to that. Well,
we'll be okay. Run regular us, right, yeah, run Reagan
gold coins or silver coins will take care of us.
So again, one of the things that's very funny about
this is the amount of time he spends flipping out
over this dog shit AR style shotgun. For those of
you who aren't gun people, the Turks make a number

(02:12:36):
of different shotguns that kind of look like AR fifteen's.
They're all very impressive looking to people who don't know
anything about guns. They're terrible weapons. One of the reasons
they're terrible is that shotgun shells do not work well
in magazines. The reason most shotguns are tube fed because like,
shot shells are plastic and they have a weird shape
to them, and if you stick them in a magazine

(02:12:56):
like a normal bullet, they just tend to like jam
and misfeed a lot. It's just we're not a good
way for it. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (02:13:04):
Yeah, it's the one gun, the one actually like produced
in a factory gun that I'm aware of that the
folks in ME and R are like, now, fuck it.

Speaker 1 (02:13:12):
Will just three, like we are desperate, but these are
just and he like he spends a lot of time
like talking about how cheap guns are. You can get
guns here cheaper than you can anywhere else, because like
this ar shotgun is two hundred bucks, Like, man, I
can get an ar shotgun for two hundred bucks in Portland, Oregon.
They're terrible, nobody wants them. So he does eventually go

(02:13:37):
out with what he claims is the Taliban. As far
as I can tell, it's a guy who has an
M sixteen that he probably paid like a hundred bucks
to go shooting with. Right, maybe the guy, like a
lot of people in Afghanistan are technically the Taliban, but
that doesn't mean like much, right, Like at this point,
they're the government, like you know, you get like your uncle,

(02:13:59):
you know, gets you a fucking gig or something watching
a road or whatever. I don't know. I don't know
anything about this guy. He claims he's the Taliban. So
I'm gonna play you a clip of him shooting this
guy's sixteen.

Speaker 4 (02:14:12):
Oh yeah, another one.

Speaker 1 (02:14:17):
No hearing protection sweeping people.

Speaker 5 (02:14:22):
Just sweeps him again, the.

Speaker 7 (02:14:28):
Move, thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:14:34):
The Taliban guy is visibly nervous about him using the gun.

Speaker 3 (02:14:41):
He's mad he got that vacuum one.

Speaker 5 (02:14:43):
Yeah, he's backing away.

Speaker 3 (02:14:53):
He's just like.

Speaker 1 (02:14:55):
Shooting into the air. I love how like visibly nervous.
The Taliban guy is his legs with the gun, like
points the barrel at that guy's legs like three different times,
shoots up into the air. He's just an incompetent asshole
with it.

Speaker 4 (02:15:14):
He's doing all of these like like eighties action movie poses.

Speaker 1 (02:15:18):
Yeah, touch, It's It's very stupid. He has no hearing
protection and so he like hurts his ears like yeah,
it's it's It's just comprehensively stupid and sad. So this
video was dumb. Shortly after filming it, Miles met up
with two other UK citizens who were in the country,

(02:15:38):
one of whom was he's described in most of the
news articles I read it is just a charity medic
and it's this is all a little unclear. It seems
like this guy was in possession of a firearm without
a proper permit. He claims that he has a permit,
but that was lost or something whatever. At any rate,
Miles goes missing in early March, and after several days

(02:15:59):
that Taliban announces that they've taken him and these two
other British guys and also two Polish guys into custody.
And it's a little unclear why, but it seems to
be due to like them breaking some laws with guns.
It also may have something to do with the fact
that Miles broke the law entering the country. He seems
to be being treated reasonably well at present, it's unclear

(02:16:21):
what's going to happen to him. I hope, I mean honestly, like,
of all the people who deserve to be in a
Taliban prison, Miles Rutledge is the one that's amazing, Like yeah,
keep that go ahead and keep that guy Taliban, like.

Speaker 5 (02:16:39):
Solid very excited for whoever is in the Prime Minister's
chair next week to like maybe get around to start.

Speaker 14 (02:16:46):
Negotiating with the Taliban. They don't the British, the British
Far and Office just don't give a fuck anymore. Like
I've had to contact them with when colleagues have been detained,
et cetera, and like they'll literally be a now computer
says no and just like tight fuck off.

Speaker 4 (02:17:04):
Like so hopefully they do the same for him.

Speaker 1 (02:17:06):
Yeah, it doesn't. I haven't seen anything like the late
most recent news stories about him were like more than
a week ago. It looks like, uh, yeah, I'm not
saying anything recently, so it doesn't look like I'm guessing
we would have there'd be some coverage if he'd been freed.
The Daily Mail talked to his mom, who apparently was like, yeah,
he was. He was there to try to find himself. Yeah,

(02:17:31):
it's very funny, he says. He claims at one point,
like yo, guy has been taken by the by Afghan
intelligence for taking like a thousand dollars out of Western
Union suss amount, no internet, no idea when this will end.
Everything is good, but please excuse my lack of communication.
That was like March eighth, something like that. And he

(02:17:53):
hasn't really been back on in a while, Like he's
kind of been dark for quite a spell, So I
don't know. Maybe something terrible has happened to him or
what's happened to him at which point or in which
case like that would be kind of funny fuck him. Yeah,
that's where I am officially. Yeah, I mean he fucked
around and found out. Yeah, like you keep again man,

(02:18:16):
you want to like, yeah, you keep fucking around. You
like go to a place with like a famously like
dangerous authoritarian government who are actively hurting people and are like,
I'm going to brag about breaking the law for a
YouTube video. Yeah, man, maybe they'll get pissed. It's like
the same shit with like, obviously the Romanian government is

(02:18:37):
not the Taliban, but like it's the same kind of
shit with like Andrew Tate, where you're like, I'm gonna
go to this other country and brag about the fact
that they're not stopping me from breaking their laws. That's
a pretty good way to get them to fucking problems
for you.

Speaker 5 (02:18:51):
Like, anyway, my favorite Miles post, if I'm remembering this right,
I'm pretty sure like two weeks before he like got arrested.
He he he posted a tweet about how like he's
safer in he's safer in Afghanistan and he is in US.

Speaker 15 (02:19:09):
That he would be in San Francisco, in na in Brooklyn. Yeah,
he spent no two days, he spent forty eight hours
quote unquote homeless in Brooklyn for again for content, And yeah,
it is it is funny that like he is in

(02:19:30):
a lot of trouble.

Speaker 3 (02:19:30):
Now he tried to go to Mission Texas as well.
I don't know if he ever went, but he was
going to do so I missed that. Yeah, he was
gonna do something fucking horrific with people crossing the Rio Grande.

Speaker 1 (02:19:43):
Oh god, oh see the look. You're not gonna hear
this often from me, but critical support to the Taliban,
like they're they're they're really fighting the good fight for
all of us.

Speaker 16 (02:19:59):
By caving this guy behind bars, I was it initially
seemed like he had he had fallen into the hands
of like the Islamic State Chorussan Province, and yeah, I'm
gonna have to Yeah, you.

Speaker 3 (02:20:12):
Rarely have to hand it to Islamic State, but we
may have had that one occasion.

Speaker 1 (02:20:16):
That don't give ices a lot of credit, but that
it is, like you know what, I'll just I'm gonna
go ahead and say this on behalf of the rest
of the world, Taliban, if you keep him locked up,
you know, we will erase one of those big Buddha
statues from like the list of Taliban crimes. We'll all
agree to forget one of the Buddhas. Like, hold, I
feel like I'm not signing on to this. I'm so

(02:20:40):
bad about the Buddhas. I just come on, we need
all the Buddhas. Anyway, Fuck this guy.

Speaker 5 (02:20:53):
Yea.

Speaker 3 (02:20:55):
Side, I hope they're feeding him tofu.

Speaker 1 (02:20:57):
Yeah, I hope they're feeding him all of the soy
and after anastea like fucking park a soy truck up
to that guy's cell. Anyway, that's a story, Like there's
these guys are like, especially in the social media. I mean,
they've always been a part of war and of conflict.
You know, there's a degree to which like this is

(02:21:18):
a not a news story like this is actually kind
of a one of the older stories in human history.
Is like dudes kind of stumbling into war zones in
order to write about it or otherwise like make it
about them. So, you know, uh, fuck these people and

(02:21:38):
fuck Miles Rutledge in specific. I hope we I hope
he winds up like those Venezuelan merks or not there.

Speaker 4 (02:21:46):
I mean they weren't.

Speaker 1 (02:21:47):
They were in Venezuela who are caught on video pissing
themselves and then lying in the piss. That's that's my
dream for Miles Rutledge spending some time lying in piss
before he's sent back to the UK. Yeah, that's what
I got.

Speaker 3 (02:22:04):
Nice. Hopefully they revoke his fucking citizenship like that they
did to the British.

Speaker 1 (02:22:10):
He did make a bunch of posts about how cool
the Taliban were, So I don't know, like, yeah, we
can drink. Look, man, you said you wanted to live there. Uh,
here you go. Yeah, I don't know. I think he's
a dick, and I think this is funny. That's my
official stance.

Speaker 3 (02:22:45):
Happy Earth Day.

Speaker 5 (02:22:46):
And by Happy Earth's Day, I mean the Earth is
dying and people are killing it. Yeah, welcome, welcome. Did
it happened here the Earth Day episode?

Speaker 16 (02:22:55):
Now?

Speaker 1 (02:22:56):
Now, now, quick question me? What is Earth?

Speaker 5 (02:23:00):
So? The Earth is one of many, many, many planets
in the universe. It was, it's cagealed rock. There's some
like melty shit in the middle of it, but on
the outside, there's a part of it that's nice to
live on, and it'd be nice to continue to have.

Speaker 10 (02:23:18):
It be that.

Speaker 4 (02:23:19):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (02:23:20):
Okay, this is different than what I had been raised
to believe. But I'll humor you here. Please continue.

Speaker 5 (02:23:27):
Yes, And so okay, we are we going to be
talking today about one of the many attempts to destroy
the Earth and also Garrison this year too.

Speaker 4 (02:23:36):
Hello, yes hi, I'm here also for the Earth for
the Earth.

Speaker 5 (02:23:41):
Yeah yeah, and this is a special episode featuring a bombing.

Speaker 1 (02:23:47):
So it is ah, I love a good bombing.

Speaker 5 (02:23:49):
Yeah, this is very exciting. Actually, tally speaking, it's two bombs.
So it is near midnight on July tenth, nineteen eighty five.
The crew of the Green Peace boat Rainbow Warrior Year,
which is docked in the harbor of Auckland, which is
New Zealand's largest city. A thing that I learned rob
researching this episode.

Speaker 4 (02:24:06):
Wait, really, that's New Zealand's largest city. Yeah, yeah, there's not.

Speaker 1 (02:24:09):
There's not a lot in New Zealand other than Hobbits
and that one show about vampires.

Speaker 5 (02:24:15):
A lot of cheese too that they make, make make
a lot of make a lot of milk.

Speaker 4 (02:24:19):
So they did.

Speaker 5 (02:24:20):
Yeah, the greepiest boat is. It is docked in this harbor.
Most of the crew is asleep or some of them
are playing cards, and they are they are relaxing after
having celebrated the birthday.

Speaker 4 (02:24:28):
Of one of their crews.

Speaker 5 (02:24:29):
Suddenly a massive shock rips through the boat. Water starts
flooding into the ship. Lights go out, and the crew
thinks they've been hit by a tug boat by accident.
That lasts a couple of minutes until a second explosion
hits the boat.

Speaker 4 (02:24:44):
Mister President, a second explosion has hit the boat.

Speaker 3 (02:24:47):
Nine to eleven.

Speaker 1 (02:24:47):
Joke, Yes, very excellent, good work.

Speaker 5 (02:24:51):
So the crew the light like the people fleeing nine
to eleven. The crew flees the boat, but they realize
that their photographer, a guy named Fernando Perieira, is missing.
Peri Era like it hasn't quite realized that the boat
is like under attack, and so he runs back to
his cabin to grab his camera, and then the second
explosion hits in the boat sinks so fast that he
never has a chance to get back up.

Speaker 4 (02:25:12):
And he drowns to death.

Speaker 5 (02:25:14):
And the crew very quickly realizes that this is not
an accident, and rescue divers discovered there are massive there's
like massive holes in the ship from where I've been
blown up from the outside, and they eventually determined that
this boat, which is again a green piece boat that
is doing non violence of with disobedience, has been sunk
by limpet mines.

Speaker 1 (02:25:34):
Oh boy, oh, I love a good limp at mine.
I'm so happy that we're we're getting limpet mines in
this episode.

Speaker 5 (02:25:41):
Yeah, yea, we're getting we're getting limp at mines. We're
getting there'll be some special Forces boats later or I
say boats is one boat, but yeah, we're gonna we're
going through all of the sort of naval combat bits here. Excellent,
But this raises the question who would commit such an
act of terrorism on the I can't actually say on
the soil of news Land because it's technically in the

(02:26:01):
water of New Zealand.

Speaker 4 (02:26:03):
In the waters of New Zealand.

Speaker 1 (02:26:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, off the coast of New Zealand. Sure, yeah,
we get it.

Speaker 5 (02:26:08):
Yeah, But okay, So to answer this question, we need
to talk about the anti nuclear movements. And you know,
there's been a kind of rewriting of history about what
the anti nuclear movement was actually about to basically like
sort of purely focused on the anti nuclear movement as
something it's just about nuclear.

Speaker 4 (02:26:25):
Power, but that was never true.

Speaker 5 (02:26:26):
The movement was always way more larger than that, and
a huge part of it was about opposing nuclear weapons,
both in terms of like opposing nuclear tests and in
terms of fighting for nuclear disarmament. On the fairly simple
principle that having weapons that can kill everyone on Earth
around is a bad idea.

Speaker 4 (02:26:43):
Well, I mean the bad idea if you don't want
to destroy the entire earth. But yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (02:26:48):
Yeah, if you want to destroy the Earth, that's a
pretty good idea.

Speaker 5 (02:26:51):
Actually, unfortunately, I'm on a living kick right now, so
I'm not anti destroying everything on Earth.

Speaker 3 (02:26:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:26:58):
It's good that you can admit your bio upfront though,
that's yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:27:01):
Yeah, this is a very important thing in journalism. Yeah,
so you know, Okay, so when we were talking a
bit about nuclear testing, because it doesn't it doesn't happen
anymore nuclear testing. Okay, so we used to just like
detonate nuclear bombs like in the.

Speaker 1 (02:27:17):
Addamn right, you're goddamn right, we did.

Speaker 5 (02:27:20):
Yeah, And it turns out this this kills enormous numbers
of people. But the problem is that it kills them
very slowly with increased cancer rates, which is very difficult
to sort of track or like prove direct causality. And
you know, this is aided by the fact that when
countries are nuclear testing, they are almost always killing people.
Well they're almost always dropping this the nukes on indigenous land,

(02:27:41):
which means that they're killing people who are the government
and most of the countries just like does not care
about and you know, you can you can literally map
colonialism and sort of the value that a given like
a given state placed on people's lives by you know,
where they test the nuclear weapons. So, for example, the
US tests the nuclear bombs in places like the Bikinia Toll,
the Marshall Islands, a former tribal land in Nevada, in

(02:28:03):
New Mexico, and in Hatesburg, Mississippi.

Speaker 4 (02:28:07):
Okay, so Jesus Christ, all those are bad except except Mississippi.

Speaker 5 (02:28:14):
No, that was also bad because guess get guess get
guess what race the population of Hatesville.

Speaker 4 (02:28:20):
Mississippi was.

Speaker 5 (02:28:21):
Okay, all right, yeah, they got paid ten dollars to
get relocated quote unquote, yeah this is this is this
is not a white it's not a white city.

Speaker 4 (02:28:31):
They are blowing up with a nuclear bomp. Not like
it's not like a gated community for white men in
their fifties or something.

Speaker 5 (02:28:37):
No, no, no, The only.

Speaker 1 (02:28:41):
Good nuclear testing we did was back in the day
when they used to set off nukes right outside of Vegas,
and so all of the Vegas people would watch the
nukes go off and then get irradiated. That was that
was kind of funny.

Speaker 5 (02:28:53):
Yeah. They also they also were radiated the area fifty
one people one time, and that was also extremely funny.

Speaker 1 (02:28:59):
They shared did and there was that like guy I
think it was uranium. There was like one of the
dudes who was on the Manhattan Project. There was this
like dude who there was like an accident and he
just sucked down a bunch of nuclear fuel and they
had to like he could never work in a lab
again after that, and he every for like decades afterwards.

(02:29:20):
His breath tested positive for like radioactivity, but he loved
to be like eighty something like. It didn't him doesn't
seem to have heard him. He says it tasted kind
of like like sour candy. Well, okay, so he's tasted
there forbidden nuclear water. Yeah, no one else has to.
Now we know what it tastes like. Yeah, oh yeah,
Donald Mastic was he was sprayed in the face with

(02:29:43):
liquid plutonium chloride and swallowed some. But apparently that's fine.
So there you go. Everybody drinks some plutonium, you'll live
a long life.

Speaker 5 (02:29:55):
So the US, I guess, I guess also tests it
on their nuclear scientists. But yeah, so that those are
the US. The USSR testa nukes in Kazakhstan, which there's
an amazing story about.

Speaker 4 (02:30:06):
Barria going when there's nobody.

Speaker 5 (02:30:08):
Nobody lives in this part and nobody lives in Kazakstan,
so we'll be fine.

Speaker 10 (02:30:11):
Mm hmm. It's like, okay, Baria people, in fact, you
live there.

Speaker 5 (02:30:15):
China tests this nukes in a site called lop Nor,
which is in shing John because of course it is.
And the French do their test in the Sahara in
Algeria until the Algerian revolution forces them out, which good
for them, death of betrayers, the Algerian Workers councils et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. But this means that the French

(02:30:36):
now no longer being able to bomb like their conorizsessions
in Algeria. Yeah, they they they start testing the nuclear
weapons on particularly the Moreau.

Speaker 4 (02:30:50):
I don't know how to pronounce this. I'm really sorry.
What is a toll in the in the south the
South Pacific?

Speaker 1 (02:30:57):
Yeah, I mean that sounds close enough. Yeah, sure, yeah, And.

Speaker 5 (02:31:00):
So they they start these tests like in secret. So
there are there are people on islands nearby who don't
know what those nukes going off, like, the don't even
a bomb shelters. Right, it's really loud these days.

Speaker 1 (02:31:13):
Anybody notice how loud it's gotten here.

Speaker 4 (02:31:16):
Yeah, it's like, you know, you could see the fucking
mushroom cloud. Right.

Speaker 5 (02:31:19):
But like these people, you know, the French military sciences
are like, oh, it's fine, they're not going to be
in the fall out They're unbelievably in the fallout radius.

Speaker 1 (02:31:27):
If anyone ever tells you you're not in a fallout radius,
that's your first sign that you are, in fact in
a fallout radius.

Speaker 5 (02:31:34):
Yeah, it's never it's never a great it's never a
great sign. I don't think that's happening.

Speaker 1 (02:31:39):
I don't think anyone has ever assured a group of
people that they're not going to be exposed to radiation
and been telling the truth.

Speaker 4 (02:31:46):
Here's the thing. Here's the thing.

Speaker 5 (02:31:47):
If if they had merely gone to these people and
said you're not going to be exposed to radiation, it
would have been better, because then then at least it
would have had a chance. They just didn't tell these
people at all. They were testing a news sure, they
just blew it up great, and so they detonate like
they detonate.

Speaker 4 (02:32:02):
Nukes all over Polynesia.

Speaker 5 (02:32:06):
In Actually a few years ago there was a there
was a thing called the Moreau Files, which was a
bunch of investigative journalist goot together. They got a bunch
of classified French military documents. They did, they got some
scientists together, and they did a whole thing about the
you know, the sort of influence that the effects of
this nuclear testing has. And I'm just going to read

(02:32:28):
from that quote. According to our calculations, based on a
scientific reassessment of the doses received, approximately one hundred and
ten thousand people were infected, almost the entire Polynesian population
at the time.

Speaker 3 (02:32:41):
Good god, So they radiated.

Speaker 4 (02:32:43):
Like the entire population of Polynesia. This is this is great.

Speaker 1 (02:32:48):
So I mean that's not ideal. That's not ideal. I'll
give them that.

Speaker 5 (02:32:53):
And Okay, so I obviously nuclear testing has negative effects
on humans. I feel like I don't need to explain
how nuclear testing has Dropping a nuclear bomb on a
place has a negative effect on the environment, that seems sure,
Are you sure?

Speaker 1 (02:33:09):
Pretty obvious? I think we're all more or less caught
up on nuking things being bad for them, except well,
except for underwater aquatic lizards, which seem to do really
well when exposed to nuclear tests.

Speaker 5 (02:33:24):
Yeah, they look, they can. They have atomic breath. Now
they've got absolutely yeah, big big.

Speaker 1 (02:33:31):
They get to star in a movie with a surprising
number of members of the cast of Simpsons. Yeah, it's
it's all. It's all upsides. Oh and that Ferris Bueller
I think was in it. So that's pretty good. Yeah.
Did these people get to star in a movie with
Ferris Bueller.

Speaker 5 (02:33:49):
No, they died of.

Speaker 1 (02:33:54):
Yeah, that's unfortunate. That's unfortunate.

Speaker 4 (02:33:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:33:57):
And so these tests and some other tests the US
are doing, the Marshall Islands or the Origin of Green piece.
So there have been environmental groups like the Sierra Club
have been involved in anty nuclear activism because again, bad,
bad for the environment, dropping dukes. But okay, so the
activism that the Sierra Club people are doing is based

(02:34:18):
on bearing witness, and the green Peace people rightly are like,
fuck bury witness. They are dropping nuclear bombs. We are
going to try to stop these bastards.

Speaker 4 (02:34:29):
The way you can beat a bad guy with the
nuclear bomb is a good guy with the nuclear bomb.
I'm introducing a new initiative to arm all green Peace members. Okay,
the personal, personal tactical nuke, David Crocket.

Speaker 5 (02:34:46):
This is this is I am not kidding France's rationale
for why they have nukes, which is that the thing
is literally called like this, like the weak deterring the
strong or something. And it's like, ma'am, you are France,
Like come on, okay, yeah, sure, France is acting for
the protection of the weak against the straw.

Speaker 1 (02:35:07):
It's like, oh my, I mean, look, I would if
I had the option, I would keep a nuke in
my basement, you know, just in case, yeah, someone someone
comes to my house. You know, we've got I've got
the option then, right, like what if because like right now, okay,
say Pakistan decides to try to rob my house. I

(02:35:30):
don't have a counter to their nuclear arsenal.

Speaker 3 (02:35:32):
But if I.

Speaker 1 (02:35:33):
Keep you know, and I'm not even talking to like
six to ten megatons in my basement, that's enough, I
think to discourage aggression, right or if like my neighbor
decides to call the city on me, you know, I've
got an option.

Speaker 5 (02:35:47):
There's a problem with this plan, which how are you
getting the nuke from your apartment to Pakistan?

Speaker 1 (02:35:52):
Well, I mean it's if they come to my house. Right,
that way I can I can nuke all of my
stuff so that they won't want it, and that way
they won't rob me in the first place.

Speaker 5 (02:36:02):
Right, this makes about as much sense as actual nuclear
actual nuclear doctrine. Yeah, it's it's.

Speaker 1 (02:36:10):
Worked for decades, Mia, Like, I don't know what your
problem is here. If it if it's worked for for
all of these great powers, you know, it can work
for me. Or I could do what the British do
and send you know, some of my some of my
people out. I could send James or Garrison out underwater
with a nuclear weapon and just have them always waiting

(02:36:30):
in the sea to nuke my adversaries if somebody takes
me out, much like the British nuclear fleet. See, we we.

Speaker 5 (02:36:39):
As a human race are really good at coming up
with good ideas. Yeah, we have our ideas. Our das
are amazing, they rock. We never have any bad ones.

Speaker 1 (02:36:48):
It is funny that there's just like some guys who
are expected to like follow a dead man's orders at
the end of the world, uh, for for unclear reasons.
Like there's just a letter and it's like, if all
of your loved ones die, open this letter. And do
whatever it says. You are really funny when you think
about him.

Speaker 4 (02:37:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:37:08):
So, okay, So in the late sixties and early seventy
there's people who are like, this is a terrible idea,
we should not in fact drop nuclear bombs. And these
groups in the late sixties become green Peace in nineteen
nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 3 (02:37:21):
Okay, great for them, good for them.

Speaker 5 (02:37:24):
Yeah, all right, So we've talked about like the French
having to move the nuclear program into the Pacific after
being read out of Algeria. Green Peace starts doing direct
actions against French nuclear testing, and so in nineteen seventy two,
Dave mctagger's one of the founders of Greenpeace, sails his

(02:37:45):
boat into a French nuclear testing area. Now, okay, I
have my issues sort of in principle with like nonviolence
as you're like pure organizing political principle. But if you
are willing to sail your boat under a new your
bomb to stop it from going off, that is that
is pretty based.

Speaker 1 (02:38:03):
Yeah, man, I have trouble. I have trouble like coming
up with any any any critiques of that.

Speaker 5 (02:38:08):
No, this rips, and like the other thing is like
you know this isn't this isn't a stunt, right like
they are they are actually prepared to get nuked.

Speaker 1 (02:38:15):
Yeah no, that's that seems like a pretty commitment.

Speaker 5 (02:38:19):
Yeah that it's it's sick. And so they refuse to
leave and the French, the French Navy eventually gets so
pissed off that a French Navy ship rams their boat
like a fucking try rem in where to get them.
So they're they're forced out because they're rammed by a
tr ream.

Speaker 3 (02:38:41):
Us.

Speaker 5 (02:38:42):
We've all been there, so sometimes sometimes.

Speaker 10 (02:38:44):
You just get you just get rammed.

Speaker 4 (02:38:45):
I don't know, it happens so true.

Speaker 5 (02:38:50):
So they they green Peace tries to go to the
International Court of Justice to get a ruling to force
France to stop the testing, and the French government steaks
out what I I I claim is like the primary
status political principle, which is that what is justice to
a man holding a gun? And they just absolutely ignore
the International Court of Justice. So they in ninety seventy four,

(02:39:14):
they're trying to do another set of nuclear tests and
this time, you know, so green Piece is like, okay,
well we're gonna we're gonna send like a flotilla of
boats out this time.

Speaker 4 (02:39:24):
Did you just say a flotilla?

Speaker 3 (02:39:26):
Yeah? Is that a word?

Speaker 10 (02:39:28):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:39:28):
Yeah, yeah, that's a group of boats.

Speaker 4 (02:39:30):
Scarce, that's like a that's like a murder of crows thing.

Speaker 5 (02:39:34):
No, yeah, yeah, but it's a very common name for
a bunch of boats.

Speaker 4 (02:39:38):
I've never I've never heard that before.

Speaker 3 (02:39:40):
Now you have flotilla. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:39:42):
L Ron Hubbard had a flotilla of boats that he
made teenagers pilot and jump off of when he was
angry at them.

Speaker 4 (02:39:50):
You know, I was thinking about this.

Speaker 5 (02:39:51):
I think this is actually the first flotilla of boats
that we've had on any of our shows.

Speaker 10 (02:39:55):
That is good.

Speaker 1 (02:39:56):
That's not that's not commanded by l Ron Hubbard.

Speaker 4 (02:40:00):
Yeah, or like the Moodies, it's it's a whole it's
a whole sort of line of bad. But this is this is
a good flotilla.

Speaker 5 (02:40:06):
But the Navy this time is like, Okay, we're not
going to mess around with these people, like and you know,
let them get inside the testing zone. Uh. They so
they just bored mctabart ship and just beat the shit
out of him and his crew. And so the the
the French Navy claims that like, oh, the green Peace
people just like turned around on their own and uh, McTaggert,
you know, my tiger's like very badly visibly hurt. So

(02:40:29):
he like shows up to the press and the French
Navy goes, oh, I mean he's like mctigerant is like
he is he he is like blind in one eye
for several months, like he is very very badly beaten.
And the French Navy claims that was actually the result
of a fall, which I I I will allow you
to draw your own conclusions are yeah, I'll I'll let

(02:40:50):
you draw your own conclusions. But parallels between the state
and domestic abusers. But yeah, Unfortunately for the French Navy,
the Green Peace crew have managed to like get the
beatings on camera, and they're able to smuggle like the
film canister off the boat and get it to the newspapers,
and so the newspapers the next day just have a
bunch of like pictures showing the French Navy just beating
the shit out of these like random Green Piece people,

(02:41:14):
and this eventually actually works.

Speaker 8 (02:41:16):
Right.

Speaker 5 (02:41:17):
There's there's there's sort of there's I mean, there's there's
a sort of political pressure campaign that Green Pieces waging.
There are these there are these campaigns in the French
courts to get the government to stop, and eventually, in
nineteen seventy four, the French government agrees to stop conducting
atmospheric tests and nuclear weapons. Now, Robert, do you know
who else stopped conducting atmospheric testing after years of public

(02:41:38):
pressure campaigns? The US and the USSR. Yes, but also
the products and services that's.

Speaker 1 (02:41:45):
Oh, that supports this podcast. Yeah, No, I mean most
most of them. Most of them. Ah, we're back, and
you know that I'm hearing now that we we did
have an ad from Blue Apron in there, who does
continue like low earth orbit atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. But

(02:42:06):
you know, it's the only way to get your food
boxes to you in a timely manner. They have to
use the Orion drive, which is a special spacecraft engine
that relies on popping nuclear weapons out of the back
of a spaceship and using them to accelerate it to
near light speed. It's actually that's a you can look

(02:42:29):
that up. It's a pretty cool idea. I think we
should do it.

Speaker 5 (02:42:31):
It is very funny to me that it's like, Okay,
we have this incredibly convoluted drive that's powered by nuclear
weapons and it gets you to around the speed of light.

Speaker 1 (02:42:40):
Maybe it's it's not even convoluted. It's literally just the
spaceship poops out a nuke and it makes it go faster.
It's a fun idea. I'm gonna be honest with you.
I think it's a fun idea, is.

Speaker 5 (02:42:54):
But like it can't even get you to like the
next solar system very fast.

Speaker 1 (02:43:00):
Well, nothing probably ever can, which is why we're all
doomed to die alone in the dark.

Speaker 5 (02:43:05):
Yeah, very sad. Other thing that's sad. Okay, So the
French government agrees to stop doing tests in the atmosphere, right, however,
this is just atmospheric tests.

Speaker 4 (02:43:14):
I never agreed to stop doing like non atmospheric tests.

Speaker 5 (02:43:19):
So in nineteen eighty five, the French government is gearing
up to do another round of nuclear testing and green
Peace is once again bringing a flotilla to try to
stop them. Now green Peace are already in nineteen eighty five,
they've been involved in another anti nuclear well okay, really
is it's all the same anti nuclear campaign. But so

(02:43:39):
the other people who are dropping nukes in the Pacific
are the US, and when they nuke the Marshall Islands,
the people of this island called Runga Lap began suffering
from radiation exposure, even though they were also once again
told by the American government that they were fine, and
so that the US is going to drop another nuke

(02:44:00):
and they refuse to evacuate these people, and so green
Peace like brings their boats, like brings the Rainbow Warrior,
and so these people ask like green Peace for help.
But so green Peace like evacuates them all to another
island and like brings like construction materials and supply so
they can like set up on a new island. And

(02:44:20):
it's this really I don't know, it's it's a really
sort of grim look into what, you know, like what
this new Coro testing actually means, which is that a
bunch of people who've been living in a place for
hundreds of years are forced to flee for their lives,
like you know, the state won't the state won't even
like ethnically cleanse them right like they they are they

(02:44:42):
are forcibly relocated from their homes, but the state won't
even do it because the state's like, no, it's fine,
where's You're just gonna die radiation poisoning, And so they
have to get someone else to like move them and
it's I don't know, it's it's really bleak.

Speaker 15 (02:44:55):
Uh.

Speaker 5 (02:44:57):
These people survive, which is good, but the US doing
necrotesting in the Marshall Islands, which I'm betting at least
forty percent of you don't know of the US control.

Speaker 4 (02:45:10):
Yeah, it sucks.

Speaker 5 (02:45:14):
So okay, So they get done with this evacuation, they're
back in Auckland and then their flagship, they're Able Warrior,
gets bombed and Greenpeace talks later about how they actually
got really lucky because you know, I remember when I
said earlier there are people who were still awake like
playing cards. If those people had been in their cabins,
a bunch of them basically would have drowned immediately because

(02:45:35):
the cabins got flooded instantly by the first bomb. So
they got very lucky. Only one person died. I to
this day, I do not understand why the people who
did this thought they could do this without killing anyone.

Speaker 4 (02:45:49):
It's baffling to me. I don't know.

Speaker 5 (02:45:52):
I at least they claimed they weren't trying to kill anyone.
So New Zealand police start investigating. You know, hey, there's
been a a like a terrorist attack on a boat
in our harbor.

Speaker 1 (02:46:03):
Sure, and that seems like a thing you'd look into.

Speaker 3 (02:46:05):
Yeah, I get that.

Speaker 5 (02:46:07):
They get very, very lucky. And they get lucky because
there are two people in this boating club who are
like watching the harbor trying to see if it's like
trying to catch someone who's been stealing diving equipment. And
in the middle of the night they see a man
in a black wetsuit carrying a Zodiac inflatable speedboat ashore
and get into a van. Now, okay, so it's in

(02:46:27):
goodna be wish bottle of Zodiac. This is for people
not familiar with boats. Zodiac makes something called the mill Pro,
which is a a like it's an inflatable speedboat that
is used by like most of the world's special forces units.

Speaker 4 (02:46:40):
And so these two.

Speaker 5 (02:46:41):
Guys are like, this is really sketchy. They and and
so they they're you know, they put two and two
together when they realize that a boat's been blown up
and they're like, oh my god, it was probably these guys.
So they go to the police and they're able to
get the license plate of the van, and so the
staff at this like van depot have to like sit

(02:47:01):
there and like stall the two people in the van
and keep them from leaving long enough for the cops
to show up, which something I really really desperately want
a video of. That just sounds really funny.

Speaker 1 (02:47:12):
I do love the idea of like the average people
who work at like a car rental company being asked like, hey,
could you do like a little bit of counter terrorism
for us today? Just like a SCOSHIVI it in between
denying people rentals because they don't have a credit card.

Speaker 5 (02:47:29):
Amazing and Okay. So then the cops show up and
they arrest these this couple who are claiming to be
newly weds, but the New Zealand government quickly discovers that
both these people have forged passports from Sweden, and so
they discover their real names. And by god, is that

(02:47:50):
the mercy? Is that is a man with the benguet.
It is the French CIA. They have planted this bomb
and there's the French CIA.

Speaker 4 (02:48:00):
Hold on, because we can't just say the French c
i A.

Speaker 5 (02:48:06):
It's the Directorate General for External Security or g s E.
That's a much worse, much less Definitely.

Speaker 4 (02:48:14):
We're gonna we're gonna go back to calling it the French.

Speaker 1 (02:48:17):
Yeah, I'm gonna read the Secret Police. I think we
can all agree. Secret police need to have three letter
acrons C I, A, G, R, U, F B I Like,
it just doesn't work with four. You need to have
one kind of sinister sounding name, like the macabat, but
like the d G S E. Oh my god, I'm

(02:48:37):
sorry that sounds like a bank.

Speaker 5 (02:48:42):
It's a direction general.

Speaker 3 (02:48:48):
Trash.

Speaker 1 (02:48:49):
You have been You have been suppressing people for so long,
and you don't have a better secret police name than that.

Speaker 3 (02:48:55):
That's shameful.

Speaker 4 (02:48:57):
By the way.

Speaker 1 (02:48:57):
Their address, that's a wait, fucking name. The name good,
incredible or am I five whatever the real one is.

Speaker 4 (02:49:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:49:05):
Anyways, if you if you ever want to go, like
take a visit to these people, they're at Their headquarters
is on one forty one Boulevard Bartier, Paris, France. It's
at forty eight dot eighty seven forty four north two
four oh six seven YaST latitude. Right.

Speaker 1 (02:49:23):
I don't need to go back to France. Yeah, I
go fuck with the dgsese. I'm not that big a
wine guy. It's fine.

Speaker 5 (02:49:34):
So they catch these agents whose names are I shit
you not Gene Camas and Jean Luke Castaire.

Speaker 1 (02:49:41):
No, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 5 (02:49:45):
No, so the police catch these two, there's like ten
to other well, there's like eight other people involved. Two
of them get I think like maybe two one or
two of them get caught in Australia, but the Australian
police aren't able to hold them long enough for the
forensic evidence to come in, so they have to release
them and they flee. And there's this whole thing where
like they flee at a yacht and then they get

(02:50:06):
on a submarine and the submarine shoots the yacht to
sink it.

Speaker 4 (02:50:09):
As it's a whole thing.

Speaker 5 (02:50:11):
And I actually, okay, it probably is worth mentioning here
that as as silly as the French CIA's name sound,
name sounds like, they have one of the most extensive
networks of surveillance and sabotage of any intelligence agency in
the world. It never gets talked about, but they have
people everywhere.

Speaker 4 (02:50:30):
They are lethal. They absolutely suck.

Speaker 5 (02:50:36):
But yeah, so they get caught and the French order
an investigation, and their first investigation concludes that like, well,
we asked, well, okay, so these people are our spies, right,
but we just asked the spy on green Peace. We
didn't ask them to do a bombing, and everyone's like, okay, yeah, sure,

(02:50:56):
French government.

Speaker 3 (02:50:57):
So the French we have been there.

Speaker 5 (02:51:00):
Yeah, it's like, well, no, okay, so you you you
may have caught two of our spies dragging a Zodiac
boat well with a guy a guya a website, dragged
a Zodiac boat into a van, but doesn't mean he
did the bombing.

Speaker 4 (02:51:11):
And the French.

Speaker 5 (02:51:12):
Media does her own investigation and like quickly concludes that
like not, not only did the French order the bombing,
the bombing was personally signed off on by French Defense
Minister Charles Herdu and also quite possibly French President Frenchois Mitterrand.

Speaker 1 (02:51:29):
And well, okay, at least Mita Arran's got a good
name for an evil president.

Speaker 5 (02:51:34):
Yeah, well this is interesting, right because if you know
your French history, for tho, those of you who know
your French history, you will note that Midran is a
man to the French left. He's he's he's the prime minister,
he's the president from the Francis Socialist Party. Right, he
has like, okay, he has a program of amnesty for
Italian communist terrorists. Were like, if you're able to make
it to France, they won't extradut you.

Speaker 1 (02:51:55):
That's pretty cool.

Speaker 4 (02:51:56):
The Communists would never have a nuclear bomb.

Speaker 5 (02:52:00):
So it's very famously Ontonio Negri, who's the guy who
writes a bunch of books that are very famous in
the early two thousands, he's like, he's one of the
founders of the Autonomists. He flees to He uses this
to flee to France after the Italian government accused him
of being the mastermind of the Red Brigades who had
just kidnapped and killed for Prime Minister Alden Morrow. So
Negrid gets himself parliamentary immunity by getting elected as an

(02:52:22):
MP and then flees to France, which is just very funny.
And then Metiran refuses the extra d item. So okay.
So on the one that you would think that Midrand
is like, I don't know, kind of cool.

Speaker 4 (02:52:33):
I don't. I don't think so I don't. Yeah, so Midiirrand. Okay.

Speaker 5 (02:52:40):
So in terms of sort of being sympathetic, Midran is
like a is a kind of different kind of neoliberal
than the kind that we that we sort of know.
So I would classify in terms of sort of neoliberal
like neoliberal politicians, right, like neoliberal heads of countures. I
think there's sort of like three kinds of them. There
are sort of the right wing hardliners who people like Thatcher,

(02:53:00):
like Pinochet and Reagan, the Reagan's Weirdly, Reagan is slightly
less hardline than like Thatcher is, but yeah, so okay,
So there's those people. There's the sort of like third
way neoliberals like Clinton and Tony Blair, who are like
I guess like liberals in the American sense, but are
still sort of like real hardliners on economics. And then

(02:53:21):
there's a group of people I would call like the
quote unquote socialist neoliberals like Midterrans and Italy's longtime Socialist
Party prime minister Bettino Croxy, Like I don't know if
I can actually call him the most corrupt man in
Italian politics, but like he's like at least in the
top five, but he's prime minister for like twenty years, and.

Speaker 4 (02:53:41):
He's also like this.

Speaker 5 (02:53:42):
So these are these are people who are nominally socialists
and we'll talk about like doing socialism, but then are
also like implementing neoliberalism.

Speaker 4 (02:53:50):
And you know, I think.

Speaker 5 (02:53:52):
The closest thing to this in the US is like
if Carter had beaten Reagan, we still would have gotten neoliberalism,
but it would have been sort of like softer than
it was under Reagan. So you know, you have your
sort of kinder, gentular form of neoliberalism. And do you
know who else advocates for a kinder ingentular form of neoliberalism?

Speaker 1 (02:54:11):
Oh not Blue Apron. No, they support going going right
back to the old days. We're talking like East India
Trading Company. In fact, as we speak, Blue Aprons flotilla
is on the coast of India right now, ready ready
to try their hand at making another raj in Calcutta.

Speaker 5 (02:54:31):
I wish you could all see Garrison's face. It's amazing, It's.

Speaker 4 (02:54:34):
Fine, it's fine.

Speaker 5 (02:54:37):
Ah, we're back.

Speaker 3 (02:54:38):
So all right.

Speaker 5 (02:54:39):
The consequence of this is that, you know, despite the
fact that Midarin is like nominally a socialist, he is
completely committed to nuclear testing as part of his nuclear
deterrence program.

Speaker 4 (02:54:49):
Money funny, How that funny? How that always happens? Huh yeah, yeah,
you know.

Speaker 5 (02:54:57):
Now, supporting colonialism is not out of care Fromiteran, who,
as part of a previous coalition government in the fifties,
had presided over the guillotining of Algerian rebels, but his
reaction to his government and possibly also him personally bombing
the Rainbow Warrior is not good.

Speaker 4 (02:55:16):
Yeah, so that's nice to hear, at least not a
great look, buddy.

Speaker 5 (02:55:21):
Yeah so so, because French people are extremely normal, the
reaction in the French public about their government carrying out
a terrorist attack is that there's a giant nationalist upswell,
and people get really angry because they're demanding that the
two French intelligence agents who again are serving ten year
manslaughter sentences in New Zealand for bombing a ship involved

(02:55:43):
in non violent civil disobedience in the harbor of a
country that France is not at war with. People are
mad that they are like being held in prison and
they're demanding they be released.

Speaker 4 (02:55:56):
That makes sense from like the.

Speaker 1 (02:55:59):
French national sides. It's the French fire right. They're pretty pretty.

Speaker 5 (02:56:03):
Amazing, right like like again, like they lots like lots
of just like non far right people in France get
involved in this, and they had this whole thing about
the way they talk about it is amazing that they
talk about it in terms of liberating them. It's like
they just murdered a guy with a bob like multiple
but they use two mines.

Speaker 4 (02:56:22):
To blow this ship up.

Speaker 5 (02:56:24):
It's like and and so the Minigan's government's response is
they start putting sanctions on New Zealand's exports.

Speaker 4 (02:56:33):
That's funny, that's funny.

Speaker 5 (02:56:34):
And this is this is a huge deal for New
Zealand because they're they have a you know, New Zealand's
economy is like in large part agricultural based export economy,
and they export just an enormous amount of cheese to France.

Speaker 4 (02:56:47):
I did not know that.

Speaker 5 (02:56:48):
Yeah, well, so I New Zealand is like one of
the words leading dairy producers.

Speaker 3 (02:56:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:56:53):
I thought they mostly just made those like elfin Dwarf
and Wizard movies, but.

Speaker 1 (02:56:58):
Oh yeah, I mean they do make a lot of
money producing limbus cakes, which which can keep you going
for an entire week.

Speaker 5 (02:57:05):
You know, I'm realizing, I'm realizing now I'm not gared.
Do you know a story of how of how New
Zealand was was like dragged into supporting the Iraq war
and sending troops to a rock No, okay, okay, I
need to tell the story. So I'm realizing there's some
of our listeners who might not have heard this. The
last time I told the story. Okay, So in the
Wiki leaks papers, it comes out that New Zealand, New

(02:57:26):
Zealand sent troops to a rock because so New Zealand
had had a milk for oil program where they would
trade milk to a rock for oil. And the US
threatened that after the after they invaded a Rock, they
were going to cut off the milk for oil deal.
And this was this was like Fonterra. They're like the
giant like milk Cooperative in in New Zealand was so powerful.

(02:57:50):
And the New Zealand government was like, fine, don't don't
cut off our dairy, our milk for oil program. We
will go to war. So yet New zeal Zealand. New
Zealand did not go to war from oil. And New
Zealand went to war for the milk market.

Speaker 1 (02:58:04):
And and that's why we called it a coalition of
the willing yep.

Speaker 4 (02:58:12):
New Zealand is a truly a cursive place.

Speaker 1 (02:58:14):
And and you know, and the it is I don't think
New Zealand's the cursed one, and that it's true.

Speaker 5 (02:58:20):
But they also like this is the this is the
second time. But New Zealand is going to capitulate to
like through the demands of a violating perialists in order
to save their cheese market.

Speaker 1 (02:58:30):
I mean, that's that's like a fair criticism of New Zealand.
But as an American, I do feel like I don't
really have much room to like talk shit on this
particular ship.

Speaker 4 (02:58:41):
It is, it is our fault, this is happening.

Speaker 3 (02:58:45):
Yeah, I just I'm not gonna blame New Zealand for this.

Speaker 5 (02:58:47):
Okay, that's fair, that's fair.

Speaker 4 (02:58:49):
I will kind of blame them for this one. This
is also France's fault.

Speaker 5 (02:58:53):
So what what they're able to do is they're able
to well, okay, partially also so like eight of the
other people who are involved in this bobbing like are
just got out free, and so New Zealand is like, hey,
will you guys like send us these people so we
can try them in fact, is like no, absolutely not.
In fact, we will impost sanctions on you. And what
they're able to do is they're able to force New

(02:59:14):
Zealand to like enter un arbitration, even though again they've
already arrested and convicted these two guys right because they
obviously did it, and the un and typical un fashion
goes okay, so France is powerful and New Zealand isn't,
so fuck them, and they negotiate a deal where like
these two French officers are going to be like released
and stationed in this like tiny island at the French

(02:59:35):
control for three years. And so the French doesn't. They
don't even do that. They pull these guys out in
less than two years. So New Zealand isn't. It doesn't
go great.

Speaker 4 (02:59:52):
I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 5 (02:59:53):
I say it doesn't go great for them in the
short term. They suffer a series of catastrophic defeats. In
the midterm. French eventually get ordered to pay eight point
one million dollars to Greenpeace, who use the money to
make another boat called the Rable Warrior two and continue
to like sale fleets to stop French nuclear testing. And

(03:00:14):
I'm gonna I'm gonna reads with green Peace's website quote.
In nineteen ninety five, the Rainbow Warrior two was bordered
by French commandos as it led further protests against nuclear
testing a Moorea toll. When green Peace activists were asked
for their names, they only gave one, Fernando Perieira, which is.

Speaker 4 (03:00:30):
The name of the guy who the French had.

Speaker 5 (03:00:31):
Killed earlier, so they have their I'm Spartacus moments, and
you know, eventually it takes a very very long time,
but they win. In nineteen ninety six, France and China
do like one last nuclear test and then signed the
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty. Indian and Pakistan do a

(03:00:52):
pair test each in nineteen eighty nine. But since then
no country has tested a nuclear weapon except North Korea,
who does it all the time. But you know, I
don't know what green Peace is supposed to do testing
nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1 (03:01:07):
Yeah, I mean, look, you can't and it is I
will say this, like from a real politique point of view,
you know, there's an argument to be made that like, yeah,
the the kind of balance of nuclear power certainly provides
a degree of protection to some countries. But my argument
would be not having tested your weapons makes them more frightening.

(03:01:29):
If you're France and you're like, look, man, anyone who
tests us. We don't know what's going to happen when
we fire these things. We don't know if they're going
to go to the right place. We have no idea
what will happen when we fire our nukes. So come
on and fuck with us, but literally anything could happen.
That just seems like a better threat to me.

Speaker 5 (03:01:46):
I'm not going to advocate that one, but I think
that's the stance.

Speaker 1 (03:01:51):
I think that's the stance. You know, build increasingly large
weapons and never test them so that we just know
if shit goes down, we could all die.

Speaker 13 (03:02:01):
You know.

Speaker 4 (03:02:01):
Okay, well it doesn't, it doesn't.

Speaker 5 (03:02:03):
It doesn't involve nuclear testing. So I got I'm coming
around to this position.

Speaker 1 (03:02:07):
Never never test them. Just build increasingly large doomsday devices
and be like, no one knows what'll happen if we
have a war. Why not maybe none of them work,
and we all get to really think about what we've
been doing, you.

Speaker 5 (03:02:25):
Know, I I in all seriously though, this is a
massive victory. There are there are millions upon millions of
people across the world, and millions of people who have
yet to be born who are going to live their
lives free of the effect of radiation poisoning because people
stood up and fought nuclear testing.

Speaker 1 (03:02:39):
Yeah, and you.

Speaker 5 (03:02:41):
Know, this is the message that I want to sort
of end Earth Day with with, which is the people
who are destroying this world are incredibly powerful, and they
are willing to kill protesters in order to keep their
power and keep making the world further. But if you
just keep fighting them no matter what they throw you,
if you just every every single time they hit you,
if you just come back and keep fighting again, you
can win. And this is this is the way that

(03:03:03):
it happens.

Speaker 4 (03:03:05):
All right.

Speaker 1 (03:03:06):
Well, that's that's so good. That's a nice that's a
nice note to end on. So everybody get out there and.

Speaker 4 (03:03:13):
Get nuked once and then everything's fine.

Speaker 1 (03:03:16):
Yeah, Yeah, get nuked once and you'll be okay. Like
that scientist to drink the plutonium. It's surprisingly easy to
not die when you get exposed to unbelievable quantities of radiation.
That seems like a responsible note to end on. Hey,
we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from

(03:03:39):
now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 4 (03:03:41):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 8 (03:03:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:03:52):
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com.

Speaker 4 (03:03:57):
Slash sources, thanks for listening.