The Good Side of the Second American Civil War

Most of what we've talked about in this podcast has been distinctly dark and depressing, but on this episode we talk about how violent war might make life better.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
One day the state was there, and the next it wasn't.
The cops and soldiers those who were left all pulled
out in the night. Even now, months later, you weren't
really sure why they left. The rumor mill called it
a strategic retreat, brought on by heavy losses from insurgent
attacks in the hills and the fighting in the capital.
For whatever reason, the government considered your city dispensable. You

(00:25):
heard their trucks that night, armored vehicles and tanks rolling
out towards the highway. Most of the police evacuated with
their families, scared of reprisals. You assume they'll be rehomed
somewhere in regime controlled territory. The first morning after the
government left was weird and kind of scary. You and
your surviving neighbors all gathered together on the roof of
your building to see if anything was burning down. You
expected looting, mass of violence, some form of chaos. But

(00:48):
that first day was quiet, and so was the second
day and the third. It wasn't until the fourth day
that representatives from the separatist side of town made it
to your neighborhood. Some of them looked like the private military. Contrast,
actors that the government had hired before, burly bearded dudes
with huge black rifles and tattooed arms, but most of
them just looked like regular civilians. They brought food with them,

(01:09):
the first fresh produce you'd seen in months. Someone told
you they'd converted a couple of the old bank buildings
downtown into urban farms. You also heard they'd struck a
deal with some of the separatists out in the country,
sending them manufactured drone parts in exchange for eggs and potatoes.
The food did a lot to buy your goodwill, but
it came with strings attached. You were told, rather matter
of factly that your neighborhood was now part of their

(01:29):
municipal alliance, and you'd be expected to take part in
a weekly local council. You figured it'd be boring as hell,
like a forced PTA meeting, but now a few weeks in,
you kind of like it. Most of you had been
technically unemployed for a while, but now everyone had something
to do, preparing food, keeping the lights on, scavenging equipment
from abandoned office buildings. For the first time since the
fighting started, some semblance of normal life returned. The power

(01:52):
was more regular. Some of the cafes and restaurants reopened.
A few people with projectors set up regular movie and
TV nits. Now folks gather to watch old episodes of
the Office or Marvel movies, rather than doing it alone
in their apartments. There's less food than there was before
the war, of course, but no one's starving anymore. Coffee
is still a distant memory, but a few of your
neighbors busted into an old energy drink factory and liberated

(02:13):
several crates of the stuff, so at least you have
caffeine again, And right as you start to feel optimistic
about the world, once more, mortars start landing just a
few blocks from your door. You and your neighbors take
to the rooftops again. As the angry chatter of gunfire
pops up once more, you're able to spot the culprits,
not the government forces as you'd expected. It appears to
be another militia driving up armored pickup trucks and captured

(02:35):
police vehicles. You don't know who they are, but they're
pushing into your town from the suburbs. With your neighbor's telescope,
you could just barely make out the logo and blastomed
on their vehicles, a single fiery cross war as health.
That's obvious, right. We've all seen horrifying videos of air
strikes and street to street fighting in places like Syria,

(02:55):
Leveled cities and hollow wide refugees. It's undeniably terrible. Here's
the thing, though, War doesn't always make everything worse, or
at least it doesn't make everything worse for everybody. Do
you struggle with depression, anxiety, overwhelming and almost crippling self loading,
there is a shockingly good chance that war might actually
come as a relief. In the years before World War Two,

(03:17):
military planners all around the world realized that the bombing
of cities by airplanes was going to be a major
feature of the next war. As the British government watched
Nazi Germany rise and rise and boil over its borders
into Western Europe, they knew the Luftwaffa would soon fly
over their shores, and that meant that war was coming
to London. Aside from a few blimp attacks in the

(03:38):
last war, no modern state had ever dealt with the
problem of a dense civilian population being suddenly exposed to
the inferno of total war. Most planners instantly assumed it
would be a nightmarish disaster. People would be driven instantly
mad from the bombing. They expected four million people at
least would suffer from complete psychiatric breakdown in the face
of the horrors of war. Instead, literally the opposite happened.

(04:01):
Roughly two Londoners per week showed up in hospitals with
cases of bomb neuroses. The people they had worried about
the most, the chronically ill, and the fragile often reported
feeling better than ever. According to Sebastian Younger's Tribe quote,
psychiatrists watched and puzzlement as long standing patients saw their
symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids. Voluntary

(04:22):
admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined, and even epileptics reported
having fewer seizures. Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,
one doctor remarked. Another ventured to suggest that some people
actually did better during wartime. The positive effects of war
on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist
Emil Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war,
suicide rates dropped. Psychiatric wards in Paris were strangely empty

(04:46):
during both World Wars, and that remained true even as
the German army rolled into the city. In nineteen forty.
Researchers documented a similar phenomenon during the Civil Wars in Spain, Algeria, Lebanon,
and Northern Ireland. In Germany, where millions of teachers, in
patricians and bakers and waitresses and children suddenly found themselves
subjected to the burning hell of daily Allied bombardment, the
same phenomenon rang true. Normal people with no military experience

(05:10):
held up incredibly well under the horrors of conflict. Charles fitz,
a captain with the United States Army Air Corps, was
posted in England during the war. He saw a lot
of this first hand, and it inspired him to put
together a massive study after the war. By nineteen fifty nine,
fits in a team of n o RC researchers had
collected testimonies for more than nine thousand people and studied

(05:30):
every piece of data they could find on the mental
health impacts of other large scale disasters. He used this
data to put together a paper in nineteen sixty one,
Disasters and Mental Health Therapeutic Principles drawn from disaster research.
It opened with the line why do large scale disasters
produce such mentally healthy conditions? Fits His conclusions, all rooted
in hard data and impeccable science, found that disasters created

(05:53):
what he called a community of sufferers. Rather than being
made worse by the rigors of war, the violence and
starvation and suffer ring people banded together with their neighbors
to find food, dig survivors from rubble, and make sure
everyone had a place to sleep at night. He concluded,
quote as social animals, people perhaps come closer to fulfilling
their basic human needs and the aftermath of a disaster

(06:14):
than at any other time, because they develop a form
of life highly compatible with these needs. This conception of
the fulfillment of the utopian prototypic image of society helps
to explain many otherwise inexplicable phenomena of disaster behavior. Time
and time again over the decades, sociologists and disaster researchers
have come to the same conclusions as Charles fitz In

(06:35):
his book Tribe, which I can't recommend enough. Sebastian Younger
quotes from a nineteen seventy nine paper by an Irish
psychologist named Lands. He found that during the Belfast riots
in nineteen sixty nine and seventy suicide rates fell by
and the paper Lions published on his research. He noted, quote,
when people are actively engaged in a cause, their lives
have more meaning with resulting improvement in mental health. It

(06:56):
would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of
improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people
will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement in
their community. Now, this is something you have to talk
carefully about. The last thing I want to do is
suggest second Civil War as treatment for all of our
ongoing mental health issues. But there is a good chance
that many people would find life during that conflict to

(07:17):
be more meaningful than their current day to day existence.
On May tenth, two thousand eighteen, NBC published an article
based on Blue Cross Blue Shield data on the reach
of major depression nationwide. The title pretty accurately sums up
the information major depression on their rise among everyone. NBC
interviewed doctor Laurel Williams, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital.

(07:39):
Williams explained, quote, many people are worried about how busy
they are. There's a lack of community there's the amount
of time that we spend in front of screens and
not in front of other people. If you don't have
a community to reach out to, then your hopelessness doesn't
have any place to go. Now. I've asked you all
to imagine quite a lot over the course of this podcast,
but I don't think it will be a struggle for
many of you to imagine working at a job you
don't really love, living alone in a small apartment and

(08:01):
feeling disconnected from many of the people around you. If
you've ever gone a few weeks without seeing your friends
or family socially because you just had so much ship
to do, you get how easily that can contribute to depression.
If that's your life, too much time alone at work,
in a pervasive feeling that an awful lot of what
you do doesn't matter, well, then our hypothetical civil war
might present you with an opportunity for some meaning. You

(08:22):
don't have to be a fanatic on one side or
the other out of strong political beliefs you're willing to
die for and Kiev, the Maidan protest camp was kept
alive by a network of activists who provided food, medical supplies,
and other perishables to the activists in the camp. I've
mentioned this before, but I'd like you to imagine what
it would feel like to be involved in something like that.
You wouldn't need to support one side or the other
in the civil war. You just need to have friends

(08:44):
over there, hungry and scared and fighting against the state
that feels less worth supporting every single day. Sometimes it
would be terrifying, but it might be fun too. My
friend Alexander, a young Ukrainian man whose prior relevant experience
included volunteering to help set up burning Man at night
after night delivering hot soup to activists manning barricades meant
to block police from directly assaulting the main camp. He

(09:06):
described it as immensely satisfying work, a clear and moral
choice he could make in the midst of a confusing
and frightening conflict. Alexander didn't set out to be a revolutionary,
but on one of those visits out to provide soup
to the troops, he wound up fighting against a line
of heavily armored riot police. A decision to cook soup
for his hungry friends led to him taking up arms
against the state and ultimately helping to overthrow his nation's

(09:28):
head of state. We don't imagine finding yourself gradually, through
bits and pieces of minor activism, drawn into an armed
and fortified camp of activists resisting the government. You may

(09:49):
believe wholeheartedly in their demands, or you might just think
the violence the police and soldiers have deployed against protesters
is unconscionable. Regardless of why you'd do it, you probably
would find it more fulfilling than another day at the office.
But what if you're further from the action, in a
town or city that doesn't wind up an open rebellion
against the state. For a while, your life might not change,
at least not for the better. Food would grow more expensive,

(10:11):
of course, law enforcement would become more authoritarian. But if
this thing keeps going, if separatist succeed in choking the
food supply, if the economy collapses, if the state is
pushed to the brink, you might actually see the government
retreat from your life. There are only so many cops
and soldiers, and only so much money in the government
store box. After two or three years of escalating conflict,
perhaps even less, you and your neighbors might find yourselves

(10:33):
sitting outside the state's protection. That probably sounds terrifying to you.
During the Blitz, Londoners still had the government functioning, trying
its best to protect them. What would happen without that?
We have relatively few examples that might tell us how
a large group of modern day Americans would react to
the temporary collapse of organized government. One of the few
clear case studies would have to be Hurricane Katrina. If

(10:55):
you just followed the mainstream news during that whole mess,
you probably know it wasn't exactly the state's finest hour.
Most reports at the time described the city after the
hurricane as a lawless waste land. On September one, two five,
the Associated Press wrote, quote, storm victims were raped and beaten,
fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open,
and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at.

(11:16):
As flooded out New Orleans descended into anarchy. Today, news
anchors described hotels is overrun with gangs. New Orleans police
chief at a compass, stood before the cameras and told
lurid stories of desperate gunfights between overwhelmed cops, dangerous gangsters,
and mad snipers. For a very long time, it was
taken as a given that Hurricane Katrina had brought anarchy
in its wake, and actually that is sort of true,

(11:39):
But the reality of the situation is that anarchy isn't
always terrible. Louisiana National Guard Colonel Thomas Barron showed up
at the Superdome five days after Katrina made landfall. He'd
been primed by dozens of horrifying headlines to expect piles
and piles of corpses. His convoy included a refrigerated eighteen
wheeler and three doctors to work as a makeshift Morgan
process the dead. He arrived expecting at least two hundred bodies.

(12:04):
He found six. Four had died of natural causes, one
from an overdose and the other from a suicide. No
one had been killed inside the Superdome. There was very
little evidence of any violence there at all. I found
this in a great rite up by NOLA dot com.
They interviewed a National Guard sergeant who commented on the
stories of nightmarish violence in the wake of Katrina. Quote,
I think it is bullshit. Don't get me wrong. Bad

(12:25):
things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping
and cutting of throats or anything of the people in
the dome were very well behaved. Orleans Parish d a
Eddie Jordan confirmed four murders in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
This meant that nightmarish week was no more violent than
normal week in the city. Those stories the police chief
told about cops getting into multiple gunfights with gangsters that

(12:46):
never happened either. Quote. Security was non existent at the
convention Center, which was never designated as a shelter. Authorities
provided no food, water, or medical care until troops secured
the building a Friday after the storm. While the convention
Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive loot in an
isolated gunfire, and many inside coward and fear, the hordes
of evacuees, for the most part, did not resort to
violence as legend has it. There was quite a lot

(13:08):
of looting, of course, both of food and alcohol, but
Jimmy four, one of the few government employees who stayed
in the Superdome, did not see a single violent crime committed.
There was one report of a man trying to sexually
assault a young girl one report, but he was beaten
up by civilians and turned into the police. There were
a number of gangsters at the Superdome, of course, but
according to Major David Baldwin, they tended to help rather

(13:29):
than hinder the rescue work. He noted that once the
convoy arrived and started treating people and handing out supplies, quote,
some of these guys look like thugs with pants hanging
down around their asses, but they were working their asses off,
grabbing litters, and running with people to the New Orleans Arena.
That reality is very much out of line with what
the mainstream media might lead you to expect. But the
simple fact of the matter is that most people in

(13:50):
most situations want things to be nice and reasonable. Even
when resources are strained, when danger lurks at every corner,
and when all familiar forms of order collapse, the majority
of human beings are more likely to work together than
turn into shrieking, violent madmen raping their way through post
apocalyptic ruins. There is an extraordinary amount of data on
this phenomenon. I found a study published by the International

(14:11):
Institute for Environment and Development back in two thousand seventeen.
It gathered data from disasters all around the world and
showed Fitz's findings have not gotten any less relevant over
the years. Most current research suggests that if you find
yourself in the wake of a calamity, spontaneously organized civilian
groups won't be more likely to help you out than
the state, local, or federal government. Here's a quote from
that two thousand seventeen report quote. In Kathmandu, after the

(14:35):
April two thousand fifteen earthquake, local residents were the first responders,
rescuing family members and neighbors from collapsed buildings, erecting temporary
tent shelters for those who had lost their homes, providing
food to survivors, distributing relief packages when these arrived, and
raising funds online. In the first days after the nineteen
Marmor earthquake in Turkey, which killed more than seventeen thousand
people and caused widespread damage and disruption, state and other

(14:57):
official agencies were initially unable to deliver or core innate
humanitarian assistance. Relief and rescue activities were carried out mainly
by neighbors, relatives, spontaneously formed volunteer groups, and some NGOs.
In one survey, thirty four percent of earthquake victims interviewed
said that they received most help immediately after the earthquake
from family members and neighbors, as well as through their
own efforts. Only ten point three percent mentioned help from

(15:19):
state authorities. There is also evidence of such emergent activity
in several countries after the two thousand four Indian Ocean tsunami,
Surveys in Indonesia and Sri Lanka showed the predominant influence
of private citizens and local communities and relief assistants such
as rescue, burying of the dead, and provision of food, water,
and clothing. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, almost all life
saving and immediate relief activity in the first one two

(15:41):
days after the tsunami was by local people from neighboring areas. Now.
This report also noted that while media tends to focus
on panic and looting in the wake of disasters, and
emergency planners generally assumed that's how folks will react, that
kind of behavior, while not unknown, is not typical. Quote
groups and individuals typically become more unified, cohesive, and ultru
whist dick in such events. It is also a myth

(16:01):
that affected communities essentially are passive in disasters, waiting for
help from emergency organizations and are unwilling to become involved
in response work. Disasters put enormous strain on societies and organizations,
but they also stimulate civilians to halt their everyday activities
and take on new roles and responsibilities in relief and recovery.
The desire to help any crisis is very strong. It
is often a compelling need to do something. When do

(16:25):
you think you'd feel compelled to do something? The answer
to that question is different for everyone listening. Some of
you would take to the streets as soon as the
protests started. Others would be like my friend Alexander, sympathetic
to one side or the other at the beginning, but
only gradually dragged from providing moral support to actively resisting
the state. It's hard to predict when any given individual
will do when chaos and war up into the routines

(16:46):
of daily life. I'm going to guess that most of
you would not choose to take up arms, one way
or the other. Most people in most countries during most
civil wars do not take it upon themselves to fight,
But past a certain point, there would be no staying
truly neutral either, especially if you happen to reside in
a part of the country where government control collapsed and
or a rebel group took control. Millions of Syrians have

(17:07):
already found themselves in that exact situation. Some group, like
the Free Syrian Army or job At al Nusra would
wind up in control of their neighborhood. Generally, constellations of
loosely allied and often conflicting groups wound up running a
city or a province, roughly equivalent to a state. Being
militant groups, the rebels sort of had their hands full
fighting against their dictator and against each other. In many
parts of Syria, this left the responsibility for governing in

(17:30):
the hands of the area's civilians. Enter the local councils
next time. Going to quote from an International Review article
on this phenomenon, quote, individuals have sought to provide basic
needs and stability to their communities by creating local councils.
Local councils mostly exist in rural towns, but have also
formed around neighborhoods, in cities and at the governorate level.
Estimates for the number of local councils in Syria vary

(17:51):
from four hundred sixteen in late two thousand fifteen to
four d twenty seven in early two thousand sixteen to
four hundred four following the fall of Aleppo. According to
a two thousand sixteen survey by the Omran Center for
Strategic Studies of a hundred and five local councils and
opposition held territory, fifty seven percent of local councils were
formed through consensus and thirty eight percent were formed through elections,
with lack of security and legal expertise cited as the

(18:13):
major reasons why more elections were not held. This claim
is supported by other surveys as well. The majority of
these councils were created in two thousand, twelve and thirteen
and go through restructuring on average once a year now.
These local councils handled most of the day to day
work necessary for keeping an area livable. Big of US
an idea of how American communities might handle the retreat
of the state. In some cases, councils and their work

(18:34):
were funded by wealthy expats and foreign aid organizations. In
other areas, councils became dominated or heavily influenced by elected
officials who represented various rebel groups, from extremest Islamist organizations
like r R al Sham to more secular groups like
the f s A. Obviously Islamist Shura councils aren't the
sort of thing we'd likely see in the United States,
but in many communities, the most powerful non governmental organizations

(18:57):
are churches. In urban areas, churches are often own the largest,
most solid legal real estate in the area. They also
tend to be the sort of buildings that military forces
and extremists would be less likely to target from an
optics point of view. On the benevolent end of things,
it's not hard to imagine many churches and local religious
organizations taking the responsibility for helping to feed and provide
basic medical care to people in their area of influence.

(19:19):
I can picture churches, particularly large networks of cash rich churches,
as able to provide potential islands of sanity and compassion
through the food shortages, electrical outages, and people hit are
made homeless in the crossfire. But I can also picture
things getting darker in some parts of the country we don't.

(19:46):
Christian dominionists believe that the entire nation should be run
by and according to the rules of a very specific
subset of Christian Pentecostalism. Raphael Cruz, father of Ted Cruz,
is one prominent American dominionist, according to a political research
Associal Each report on the dominionist movement. Quote during a
sermon at the New Beginnings Church in Bedford, Texas in
two thousand twelve, Rafael had described his son senate campaign

(20:08):
as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy that God would anoint
Christian kings to preside over an in time transfer of
wealth from the wicked to the righteous. According to his father,
New Beginnings pastor Larry hutch Ted Cruz is anointed by
God to help Christians and their efforts to go to
the market place and occupy the land and take dominion
over it. Rafael continued, this in time transfer of wealth

(20:29):
will relieve Christians of all financial woes, allowing true believers
to ascend to a position of political and cultural power
in which they can build a Christian civilization. When this
Christian nation is in place or back in place, Jesus
will return. Now, it's hard to say how large the
dominionist movement is precisely right now, they mostly focus on
gaining power in legitimate ways by election. But if legitimate

(20:51):
power collapses in large areas, what then? I can't imagine
Ted cruze taking up arms and ruling as some sort
of bearded warlord. Although I will admit that premise would
make a great graphic novel. But dominionists are heavily represented
among the American militia movement. Power hungry adherence to that
belief system would try to build their violent fiefdoms. Some
of them would succeed. Now, if Sirious experiences any kind

(21:13):
of guide, these extremist groups would probably have trouble exercising
total control over a very large area, especially if they're
engaged in regular struggle with the state. Many Americans would
find themselves forced into the kind of devil's bargain. Millions
of Syrians know all too well co operating with violent
extremists in order to protect themselves from an even worse fate.
This often means working with people who you know are

(21:34):
doing something terrible just not to you, or it can
just be sort of awkward and weird. I found an
article on pbs dot com that included interviews with a
bunch of Syrians living and participating in these local councils.
One of these subjects, a fellow identified as Yasin Kasam,
said this, there are members who are liberals and Democrats,
and then the more moderate sort of Islamist as well
has been involved, and then nationalists and ex bothists and

(21:56):
so on, but in a way it's not been so important.
In general, they're non ideal, logical bodies, particularly at the
local level, which in a way looks like a way forward.
It doesn't matter if one guy is a leftist and
the guy next to him as an Islamist. They're there
because one of them knows something about how to get
the water system working, and another knows something about education,
and they're working about practical things for the sake of
the community. Now, the best case scenario, and the event

(22:18):
that the state falls where you happen to live probably
looks something like Rohava in northern Syria. Roughly three million
people live in the region, and they manage their affairs
with a system called democratic confederalism. At the local level,
it looks sort of like the best case scenario with
local councils. Their word for these structures translates roughly to
commune or municipality. Three thousand issue of these councils handle

(22:39):
basic services and security for most of the three million
people in Rohava. These bodies do a lot of the
basic grunt level work of what we rely on the
government for here, but they cannot legislate. Higher level administrative
functions are performed by the Northern Democratic Federation of Syria
or in DFS, an umbrella organization created by the p
y D or the Democratic Union Party of Syria. The

(23:00):
p y D was originally a political party, although it
was essentially formed out of aspects of a very old
Kurdish separatist and militant tradition that existed in the region,
just not in Syria. You're not here for Syrian politics,
and I'm not an expert in them. The important thing
is there are aspects of the Rahavan phenomenon that are
inherently rooted in Kurdish culture and local history, and there
are big aspects of it that could potentially be replicated

(23:20):
in the United States Democratic confederalism. The ideology behind the
ind f S and Rohava was cooked up by a
guy named Abdola Oshlon Ashlan is by most descriptions, a terrorist,
although he's one of those terrorists that an awful lot
of people would rather call a freedom fighter. You can
make a strong case for both. He's been in a
Turkish prison for a while now, but he's been able
to keep writing books. Ashlon did not dream up democratic

(23:43):
confederalism entirely on his own, though his work was based
partly on the ideas of an American anarchist philosopher, Murray
book Chin. Now. Extreme participatory local government is the idea
that undergirds Rohava. These communes contribute council members to coordinate
functions on a higher level and manage the lives of
millions alongside the region's military force, the YPG. The YPG

(24:04):
or People's Protection Units, are the largest chunk of the
Syrian democratic forces, who are the folks the US has
thrown most of its recent military aid and Syria towards.
One reason I find Rohava fascinating is that for the
most of the Syrian Civil War, they haven't directly opposed
the government, and in fact, they've received a lot of
criticism from other groups in the area for working with
the Assad regime at times. But I think Rohava represents

(24:25):
the kind of movement that would have better odds of
capturing the sentiments of millions of Americans than a hardcore
communist or religious extremist movement. In fact, Rohava first came
to world prominence and established itself as a power in
the region when it carried out a desperate and ultimately
successful battle against its local religious extremists. Isis most people
listening to this would probably be more likely to find

(24:46):
themselves swept up in a movement like this as opposed
to something more extreme and initially ideological. If it started
in America, it would start with a lot of people
volunteering to keep their local communities safe. Not taking up
arms against the state, but manning barricades and chef points
to ensure bad actors don't enter the area and people's
safety is respected. Coordinating with other neighborhoods to grow and

(25:06):
transport food, pooling medical knowledge, and defensive resources in order
to keep things as nice as possible while the government
retreats and the extremists make their bids for power. It's
probably not a huge stretch to imagine yourself taking part
in something like this, at least is a short term thing.
If you watched footage of the flooding in Houston in
two thousand seventeen, you saw lots of examples of community
members organizing search parties and gathering food and supplies for

(25:28):
each other spontaneously. As I stated earlier, overwhelming evidence says
this is normal human behavior in the face of any
kind of calamity. Organization on a larger than neighborhood scale
is just sort of a given if things last long
enough that the state loses enough power. Most people don't
live in areas where it's possible to grow enough food
to sustain the population, at least not in the immediate term,

(25:48):
although a number of urban planners have noted that the
increasingly vacant big box stores that litter America's urban and
suburban spaces could be turned into giant indoor farms with
a sufficient amount of elbow grease. But in the immediate term,
America's urban and suburban areas where most of us live,
would be unable to feed themselves without extensive, wide ranging
cooperation with their neighbors, including the rural communities that provide
most of our food In the North and Northeast United States,

(26:12):
roughly eighty percent of food is important areas like the
rural Midwest in the Pacific Northwest would be less vulnerable
to starvation, But any kind of conflict, particularly one that
saw Central California's water supply throttled, even temporarily, would lead
to soaring food prices. Urban and rural America currently have
pretty extreme political divides, but both also have a lot
of things that the other wants and needs. The benefit

(26:33):
of a system like the one in Rohava is that
it would allow local areas to handle their own ship
and live their own way, while still cooperating on a
larger scale to make sure food and goods get where
they need to go. In Syria, where this system actually
does work, albeit imperfectly, local communities there have still have
massive religious and cultural differences. Political radicals who evangelize a
shared far left, radically egalitarian ideology are able to coexist

(26:57):
and mostly cooperate with deeply religious tribal communities of different
races and religions. According to an Atlantic Council report on
Rohava and the in d f S quote, the structure
allows for some local autonomy, but within the confines of
INDIFS control and SDF command. Essentially, the p y D
and its affiliates have introduced an entirely new political system
to ensure the security of areas they have taken from Isis,

(27:18):
While the underlying socio political dimensions of these localities remain
unchanged for now. The best chance for Arabs to gain
political access within the Kurdish dominated structure appears to be
to run for local councils at the commune level, join
municipal civilian protection units, or join the SDF, which is
increasingly recruiting Arabs. Revolutionary politics, particularly of the far left valariety,

(27:38):
often rely too much on pie in the sky visions
of complete social reorganization, the kind of thing that can
only be achieved by a mass revolution an enormous top
down state control see the U S s R. The
reason I think the Rohavan model might be popular in
parts of the United States is that it allows for
substantial local autonomy will still getting shipped done on a
larger scale. This model of economic organization doesn't require are

(28:00):
everyone to read a lot of political theory. It's what
we call a municipalized economy. Janet Beale, a political theorist
who wrote a book on libertarian municipalism, explained it this way.
Libertarian municipalism advances a form of public ownership that is
truly public. The political economy it proposes is one that
is neither privately owned, nor broken up into small collectives,

(28:20):
nor nationalized. Rather, it is one that is municipalized, placed
under community ownership and control. Could you organize the economic
lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people this way?
Nobody really knows, but it's worked for a couple of
million people for several years so far, And in my opinion,
the impulses that lead people to organize such as system
are instinctive and basic enough that I could see big

(28:40):
chunks of this country that are more inherently able to
sustain themselves, like the Northwest and Midwest, and chunks of
the South and Southeast embracing similar situations in order to
make up for the retreat or collapse of federal power.
There are people in the United States right now who
are preparing for this world too. While there are dominionist
militiamen preparing to fight for what they believe in, groups
like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief have started building national networks

(29:03):
dedicated to community self defense, making sure people have the
things they need in the wake of hurricanes and tornadoes.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief has its genesis in a group
called the Common Ground Clinic, which provided necessary medical care.
In the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina. Common Ground was
a complex organization. There were stories of FBI infiltration and
things got kind of messy. But as I talked about

(29:23):
in the first episode, the more than ten years since
this have led to a lot of growth and evolution
in America's protest and resistance infrastructure. Mutual aid disaster relief
is just one outgrowth of that. There are hundreds of
people around the country right now who are learning to
coordinate and communicate to make sure at risk communities have
the supplies they need. It's a seed like the DOMINIONUS
preppers loading a rs and carving crosses in the butt

(29:45):
stocks of their rifles. It's possible neither of those seeds
will sprout. It's also possible that both will rain but
sto like a streak Anywhere match like a Streak Anywhere match,
Like a streak Anywhere match, waiting for the sparker started

(30:07):
like a strike anywhere match. They building condors while you sleep, Mama,
up goes another as we speed my man and by
them time you out. If she's my man. They ever
placed every dead building on your street, Mama, Every single
look the same to me. Mit sdiocrity, class, concrete and

(30:27):
strong and happens privately. Better get in now before they
price you at your privately or reinforcing doors, lay and teuble,
love that lock and key. What's starting to light? Luxury?
What's starting this taste like God? Really justus? Love ugly?
Or he never just listened to you? How long in
the street term lady, absolutely come from you. Women in

(30:48):
Roy just came coming in. Then the voling play for you,
get the violing stay in tune? What's strong gonna break
your back? Boy? You turn your ass into something new?
What's your thing gonna act? Boy? Until they take it
all right back? I remember that, and I'm just exhausted
from reading all of that. You can find me on
Twitter at I right okay. You can find this show
on Twitter at happen here pod, and you can find

(31:09):
this show online at it could happen here pod dot com.
Our music, as always, is from Four Fists