Episode Transcript
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0:00
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production
0:02
of My Heart Radio. Welcome
0:08
Everything,
0:14
So don't don't don't, Hey,
0:21
yo, what's up? Welcome back to Worst
0:23
Year Ever. My name is Katy Stole. Oh
0:26
cool man Cody Johnson. Yeah,
0:29
and you and I also have a name.
0:31
Yeah.
0:34
You don't feel the need to like,
0:37
we're a community of equals and I don't need to prove
0:39
anything to you. I just did it. You
0:41
just told everybody's name. I did. I
0:43
got impatient out
0:47
of you on this Now, this,
0:49
this podcast, if I'm not mistaken, is
0:52
called the Worst Year Ever, and it's supposed
0:54
to be about um,
0:56
but right now there's some people in
0:58
a little little corner of the world who
1:00
were having well, actually not the
1:02
worst year ever by their standards, but a pretty bad
1:05
year. Yeah. Yeah,
1:07
So welcome to the
1:09
worst Year currently. That's
1:12
happening time time
1:16
the show. Welcome
1:18
to Bad Times. That was an al title
1:20
pitch, but uh yeah,
1:23
So we figured we'd take a pause from going into
1:25
our deep dies on candidates to talk a
1:27
little bit about what's happening with
1:30
the Kurds and Turkey and over
1:32
in Syria. And Robert of course has a lot
1:34
of background over there, and
1:36
what better person to help us then?
1:41
And Robert's gonna bite his tongue the whole time.
1:44
I've got some notes. He's not gonna let us
1:47
know when we pronounced things wrong. We're just going to
1:49
fumble through it. As
1:54
per agreement before this, I too have notes,
1:56
but I'm just going to light them on fire. Um,
1:58
and then sit quietly through out the rest of the episodes,
2:01
Do every ad break another page of notes?
2:03
Well, it's difficult because all of his notes are on the
2:05
computer, so he won't be connected
2:07
with us anymore. Right, the first page of notes goes
2:10
up in flames, and then so does his
2:12
device. Wait,
2:14
no, Skype does not work on fire,
2:18
So we're going to troubleshoot this on the
2:20
fly. It's going to be fun short
2:23
episode. Yeah, probably so,
2:27
Um yeah, this is this is this
2:30
is our our Rojava episode. I
2:32
guess there's like I have like twenty
2:35
something pages of typed up notes that I took while
2:38
I was there over my like not.
2:41
I spent a week there in August
2:43
of earlier this year in northeast Syria. Um.
2:46
And it's like the news always refers to
2:48
it as the Kurds because I think at a certain
2:50
point in the history of the Syrian Civil War, all
2:52
mainstream foreign journalists just gave up and
2:55
we're like, let's just refer to things by
2:57
the laziest possible term. Um
3:00
So, the SDF is like made
3:03
up a bunch of different militias. Yeah, and
3:05
they're not all Kurdish. Yeah, the
3:07
SDF is the Syrian Democratic Forces
3:09
and they were um So the way, I
3:12
guess a little bit of backstories. Good back. You
3:15
know, there was a Kurdish political party
3:17
in northeast Syria called the p y D that was
3:19
initially like a hard line Marxist
3:22
party, and they were doing ship like killing landlords
3:24
and stuff back in the early odds, and they
3:27
kind of win a little bit more uh,
3:30
a little bit less extreme as time went
3:32
on, and when um the Syrians
3:34
Civil War kicked off. You know,
3:36
in most of the country, the regime was
3:39
battling with different rebel groups,
3:42
but in a lot of Northeast Syria they just kind of
3:44
pulled the hell out because they realized
3:46
they couldn't hold it. And so there's this
3:48
big power vacuum and the p y D,
3:50
which again is this kind of Kurdish leftist
3:52
party, was one of the most organized
3:55
groups in the area, and they kind of wound
3:57
up taking control with a
3:59
group the help of called p KK,
4:01
which is like a Turkish
4:03
militant Kurdish group um
4:06
that are considered to be terrorists by the United
4:08
States and by Turkey, but not by a lot of other
4:11
countries. Didn't they done some big
4:13
thing in the eighties and the terrors.
4:16
Tens of thousands of people have died, and most
4:19
of them have been killed by Turkey. UM.
4:21
But the p k K did a bunch of really awful
4:23
stuff too. Now, what makes the p KK complicated
4:26
is that they're also the ones who saved the z
4:28
d S when ISIS started rampaging like
4:31
it was they were, you know,
4:33
it was the White PG and the Wye p J, which
4:35
is like the Syrian forces, but in the in the
4:38
early days of the Civil war, they were basically
4:40
just p KK. That's no longer true.
4:42
But like see, this is this is really
4:44
complicated. There's a lot of fucking acronyms and a lot
4:46
of different groups. UM. What's
4:48
important to understand is that what started out
4:50
as a group of very very um
4:53
ideological militants, most of
4:55
whom have been fighting for decades against primarily
4:58
Turkey saw the operator the eyes
5:00
of Isis and the collapse of order in their
5:02
chunk of Syria as an opportunity to
5:05
number one finally control a sizeable
5:08
chunk of land of their own and not just be hiding in the
5:10
mountains of Turkey fighting as guerrillas, but
5:12
number two institute some of
5:14
these radical political ideas that
5:16
they had. The guy who founded the pak
5:19
Ak is a dude named up de Lagelon, and
5:21
he was a hard core terrorist and he's been trapped
5:23
alone on an island prison for the last twenty
5:25
years or so um, and he's published
5:28
a bunch of books by sending
5:30
them out as legal briefs to his lawyers,
5:32
who then published them as works of political theory.
5:35
And he basically spent a bunch of
5:37
time in prison reading about history
5:40
and became like like ancient history, like
5:42
like like paleolithic neolithic human
5:44
history, and became convinced that like
5:46
where everything had gone wrong was
5:49
the beginning of agriculture, when men started
5:51
to dominate women and we went from being a matriarchal
5:53
society to a patriarchal society.
5:56
So Ajalon's idea was that, Okay,
5:58
Funckett I was you know, I was I was wrong in the past
6:00
to try to like want to institute a Marxist state
6:02
or whatever we like. That's why all these revolutions
6:05
in the Middle East keep failing, as we just keep putting in
6:07
new strongman leaders who do
6:10
terrible, shitty things, and instead we
6:12
should seek to reform the primary imbalance
6:14
in our society, which is the domination of
6:16
women by men. So that's like the underlying ideology
6:19
that these groups who wind up in charge in Northeast
6:22
Syria have and like two isn't thirteen two fourteen?
6:25
Um, So they just start kind of building
6:28
a government, um, and using
6:30
a lot of principles that they cribbed from an American
6:32
anarchist thinker named Murray book Chin. It's
6:35
like focused around communes, like local communes,
6:37
like every neighborhood will have, you
6:39
know, everyone will get together and vote on issues that
6:41
deal with them immediately, and then the elect representatives
6:44
to represent them for like you know, at the city
6:47
level and so on and so on and so forth.
6:49
Um. In every elected position they elect
6:51
a man and a woman. UM. That's one of like the
6:54
core ideas behind it is you you never have like
6:56
one person elected to do a job like that, because
6:58
that's kind of a it's both the seed of authoritarianism
7:01
and it's sort of guarantees I had. UM. Someone
7:04
explained to me when I was in a
7:06
meeting with a couple of Kurdish military leaders,
7:08
UM, the co presidents of
7:10
security for Rocca, the former capital of Islamic
7:13
State. That UM they're understanding
7:15
was that if you just had it really piste
7:18
off the coalition having to deal with like two
7:20
elected leaders because coalition
7:22
forces used to a very linear sort
7:24
of chain of command and it's not as
7:27
much with the the SDF.
7:29
UM. And they were like, but if you have one leader,
7:32
just because of the history of the region, it's going
7:34
to be a man, and then you're gonna wind up reinforcing
7:36
all of these things. So so within the SDF, you mean,
7:38
there's these two elected positions within
7:41
all aspects of society. So the SDF
7:43
is the military force, UM,
7:46
and it's you know, the Kurds are are who's best
7:48
known, and at one point they were, you know, more
7:50
than seventy percent of the effort UM
7:52
and actually a lot of Rajava. Now it's
7:54
majority Arabic fighters in the WHITEPG
7:57
and the YEPG and again, this is all so
7:59
the SDF is a broad umbrella organization
8:02
and there's a number of different militias within it. The
8:04
WIEPG and the YEPG are the largest, but
8:06
there's you know, a lot of the
8:08
fighters are Arabic. We saw Armenian fighters,
8:10
Assyrian fighters, Syric
8:13
fighters, Turkmen fighters, so
8:15
it's it's a very it's basically a collection.
8:17
What what you had in Rojava was all these different
8:19
minority groups who've been traditionally oppressed
8:21
in Syria and the region. UM
8:24
wound up as the only power in
8:26
the area. And because they were fighting
8:28
Isis, the US started shipping
8:30
them huge amounts of of weaponry and
8:32
military training, and they
8:34
kind of nailed it UM to
8:36
the extent that it's you talked to US
8:39
soldiers about it, Special Forces guys, you
8:41
talked to or you read interviews with some of these guys
8:43
who are like colonel and higher level, and
8:46
they always seem kind of shocked at how well
8:48
the cooperation went. UM.
8:51
There were no insider attacks, which is
8:53
something that you look in Afghanistan, right and it's it's
8:55
a constant series of US
8:57
and other Western military and political officials
8:59
getting murdered. UM as a result
9:01
of somebody sneaking their way into the Afghan
9:04
security apparatus and carrying out an attack.
9:06
Right, that doesn't happen UM
9:08
in ra Java. They're people have obviously died in
9:10
suicide bombings and stuff, but you've never had
9:13
a guy in the SDF pull out
9:15
a gun and start shooting at an American general,
9:17
which has happened so often in Afghanistan.
9:19
It's it's basically a joke. UM.
9:23
So it was a really good cooperation.
9:26
They fought very well, UM. And
9:29
it was one of those things where as I was looking
9:31
reading the stories about this place and about
9:33
the evolution these political ideas in the
9:35
region, you know, from about two fourteen
9:37
on, UM, part of me was
9:39
like, this sounds amazing because I'm
9:42
UM. I'm personally an anarchist.
9:44
I'm personally someone who I hold a
9:46
lot of the things that they were saying they were doing
9:48
and trying to like reform about society are
9:51
things I very much believe in. UM. The kind
9:53
of dismantling of hierarchy and sort
9:55
of reducing authoritarian
9:57
impulses in government very
10:00
into the commune aspect of it. It's very interesting
10:02
because it's not what most people I
10:05
think associate with
10:08
you know, what's happening over there. No,
10:11
And but also it's it was impossible for me to
10:13
know like how real is any of this ship? Yeah,
10:16
yeah, yeah you. One
10:18
of the things that in my work in Iraq has
10:20
become very clear to me is that the way things look
10:22
on the surface, or the way they were reported in
10:25
the foreign media often has very little
10:27
to do with the actual reality on the ground. And
10:29
that was something I encountered a lot with the
10:32
Iraqi Kurds. The Iraqi kurdistands much
10:34
better than the rest of Iraq. It's a much more
10:36
effective government, but it's unbelievably
10:39
corrupt and fucked up. And while things
10:41
are better for women there than they are in a
10:43
lot of the country, um, you still
10:45
don't see them doing much like running
10:47
things. You don't see them doing a lot
10:50
of important work in the society,
10:53
and not like really public facing positions. There's
10:55
a few. I have met a couple of women who were in positions
10:57
of like management or government. But
10:59
and like the stuff about the the Kurdish
11:01
female fighters in Iraq, they had a
11:03
few that they would try out for the cameras
11:06
during the worst part of the invasion by Isis. But
11:08
once the fighting died down, those
11:11
women got pushed back and mainly
11:13
we're doing photo ops. That's not
11:15
the case in Rojava. Um. And
11:17
it was obvious as soon as I crossed
11:20
the border, just in terms of how the women carried
11:22
themselves, how they dressed,
11:24
the fact that some of the first
11:26
people I met who were like processing
11:29
our passports and stuff and giving us are
11:31
our passes in order to like travel through the country were
11:33
women who were like just handling administrative
11:36
jobs. Um. And
11:38
then we started crossing. We crossed
11:41
the Tigris in this little pontoon bridge, which
11:43
was the only real way, and it was it was real pain in
11:45
the ask getting in because we had to get approval
11:47
with the Iraqi government everything. But as soon as we crossed
11:49
over, um. You know, there's checkpoints
11:52
all throughout the region and there would just be
11:54
women with machine guns at the checkpoints doing
11:56
jobs like working with men. Um.
11:59
It was so at
12:01
first it was really kind of jarring. And there's
12:03
the suspicious part of me that was like, are
12:06
they putting on a show? Um?
12:09
But you know, the guy I was with, Jake,
12:11
is a former reporter for Vice. You were on the site called
12:14
No No no, yes, yes, Jake Tapper, Jake Tapper.
12:17
We were there mainly to talk about the
12:19
time Monica Lewinsky almost sucked him. Oh
12:23
he did he did this close? This
12:26
this this close? Yeah. Um
12:28
No. Jake Hanrahan who runs a site called Popular
12:31
Front, and then me, who makes
12:33
podcasts for the Internet. Neither of us are
12:35
the kind of people you would get
12:37
hundreds of folks to stage, um
12:40
a series of uh
12:44
like. There was a certain point at which
12:46
we I had to accept this couldn't have been staged.
12:48
The pageantry wouldn't have been for you.
12:51
Yeah, nobody's nobody's
12:53
getting thousands of people to dress up
12:55
and pretend they're treating women right to like impress
12:58
Robert Evans. Yeah,
13:01
of the podcast with a swear word in the name.
13:06
Um, but hey, maybe
13:08
you know, hey man, hey, maybe
13:11
that would be nice. I would like to be important
13:13
enough to be gas lit to
13:16
that extent, and
13:21
that I I hope. So, I
13:24
hope it's Michigan. I would love to be
13:27
by Michigan. Um.
13:29
So yeah. The first city
13:32
we entered when we rolled into Rojava
13:34
was this place called Derek, which there's a lot of
13:36
fighting there right now. Um.
13:38
The Turkish army is like kind of pushing into the outskirts
13:40
of city of the city, and the SDF is
13:43
mounting a pretty furious defense. Um.
13:46
But when we were there, Derek was just like incredibly
13:48
peaceful, very quiet town. The
13:50
first thing I noticed is that the
13:53
way that sort of cities are built in this part of Syria,
13:55
they have you know, you have rows of
13:57
houses and there will be apartment blocks on the top floors,
13:59
and the bottom floors will be shops. And all
14:01
those shops have like little metal
14:04
grates that pulled out in front when it's time
14:06
to like close up for the night, kind
14:08
of like in a mall or something that I've seen those that yeah
14:10
yeah, yeah UM. And during
14:13
the days of the Syrian regime, they would
14:15
all be painted with um Syrian
14:18
like national flags like the flag of Ashar al
14:20
Assad Um. And they've been
14:22
repainted when we were there, UM in
14:24
lavender with green clovers on them
14:26
and um our. Our fixer, this woman named
14:28
Kabat, who showed us around the country UM,
14:31
said that it had been done by the women in town because
14:33
they were like, well, the regime's gone, there's no
14:35
need to have these fucking flags here, Like let's let's
14:37
make it look nice. Um. And so it was a really
14:40
it was a really pretty and calming place
14:42
to drive into, and we met
14:44
a lot of journalists. There's some really neat folks
14:47
who had all been working in the region for a
14:49
while, and they all had really different opinions
14:52
on what was going on in ro Java
14:54
and how revolutionary it actually was. And
14:56
Um I met this um cipherin
14:59
photojournalist named Achilles Um
15:01
who had been in Syria dozens of times. I think,
15:03
like like constantly from the beginning of the war
15:05
on and Achilles
15:08
Um. You know, it had a lot of praise for like the
15:10
fighting prowess of the YPG and the y PGJ,
15:13
but I think kind of this sense of doom about
15:15
what was going to happen to the whole project,
15:18
Like it was this matter of it can't it's
15:20
not going to last, like the Americans
15:22
are going to pull out, and when they do, Turkey
15:25
has planes and tanks. Um
15:28
and I would say when talking to foreigners,
15:30
there were two things they all agreed on. One of
15:32
them was that the changes to women's
15:35
rights in the region in the seven or
15:37
eight years since the establishment of of
15:39
the the Autonomous Region was
15:41
was remarkable, almost unbelievable.
15:44
Um. And the second thing was that they were completely
15:46
fucked and that was that was not
15:48
an uncompos One of my friends in Iraq who
15:51
drove us up to the border, um and helped
15:53
us get in. It's a very good fixture over there. Um
15:56
loves going to Rojava. Would visit every
15:58
Ramadan because they didn't have religious there,
16:00
in his words, and so he could get wasted. And
16:05
he was like, you know, it's great over there. I really
16:07
like it. It's very chill. But you know, they're
16:10
basically like the people in charge were dumb.
16:13
They weren't willing to compromise on any of the things
16:15
they believed, and so they're only friends are the Americans.
16:18
And let me tell you, my American
16:20
friend, Americans are bad friends
16:25
currently seeing all over the world, but especially
16:27
there. Um uh yeah,
16:30
I have a quick question. So
16:32
I know that this week
16:35
there's this power vacuum that sprung up after
16:37
you know, America withdrawing.
16:40
Uh. And so now the STF
16:43
is teamed up with the Charles Sad and
16:45
I'm seeing reports that the
16:48
Syrian forces are like now seizing up territory
16:52
that they haven't had in years, and that would be Rojava.
16:54
Correct, So like this specifically
16:57
hits me a little bit to see I
17:00
say, no, that was coming in
17:03
sooner or later, knowing that America can't stay there forever.
17:05
But like especially this description you're giving
17:07
us of, like the shops painted
17:09
with these peaceful images as opposed to
17:12
the nationalistic baganda.
17:14
And so that's the area that they are now reclaiming
17:16
and taking back for their own, well chunks
17:19
of it. So one of the first areas, Yeah,
17:21
one of the first things that went back to the regime's
17:24
control was Rocca, again, the former capital of the
17:26
Islamic State, which was being managed
17:28
and run by the autonomous government,
17:31
but was not really considered to be a part of
17:33
Rojava. From one thing it was it was Yeah,
17:35
it was a majority um Arab
17:38
city, and again, like what most of what you
17:40
have going on in Rojah was kind of a coalition of different
17:42
these different little like minority groups.
17:44
So Rocca was not a city they wanted
17:46
and it was not a friendly city to that
17:48
extent. That was probably always going to go
17:50
back to the control of
17:53
the Syrian government. Um. But yeah,
17:55
they are taking other areas. It's kind of
17:57
unclear to me, and I think to everyone
18:00
except maybe Bashar al Assad, what
18:02
the exact extent of UM,
18:04
the absorption of Rojava into
18:07
the regime is going to be. I asked
18:09
a lot of people about that. UM that
18:11
was obviously the one of the big questions
18:13
on my mind, because I think but al Assad is one of, if
18:15
not the very worst war criminals
18:17
of our age. And you
18:19
know, one of the things that's really controversial
18:22
within sort of people who are followers
18:24
of the Syrian Civil War, and particularly people who got
18:26
really emotionally uh invested
18:29
in the rebel movement is the fact
18:31
that in Rojava, the forces
18:33
there didn't fight the
18:36
regime. They did a little bit early on, at
18:38
the very start of the civil war, that they fought alongside
18:40
some of the groups like the f s A, but that
18:42
that stopped pretty quickly. And
18:45
there's a lot of reasons for that, some of which are kind
18:47
of beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today.
18:49
But the gist of it is that the international
18:52
community did not provide any support to
18:54
UM, not really to the two And this is one
18:57
thing that leftists get wrong a lot when they argue about,
18:59
like the West giving weapons to Jehtas.
19:01
We didn't give fucking shit to the Syrian
19:03
rebels, like they barely had bullets
19:05
for their guns. You talked to some dudes, um,
19:08
like I taught when I was talking to Achilles, because he was there
19:10
from the beginning of the war. He was friends with
19:13
uh An f s, a leader free
19:15
Syrian army leader who lost I think
19:17
five of his sons um in the fighting
19:19
against the regime and was sending his men in the
19:21
battle with like a dozen bullets each or something
19:23
like that, like barely any ammunition, certainly
19:26
not enough to get into firefights with soldiers
19:28
who were equipped. And he wound
19:30
up. This guy went up joining the Islamic state, and he didn't
19:32
do it because he was a hard line Islamist. He didn't do it
19:35
because he wanted to establish
19:37
a caliphate. He did it because he wanted bullets,
19:39
and he wanted to kill Bashar al Assad's
19:41
men because they killed his sons. And Achilles
19:43
told me, like I was asking, can I come back and in bed
19:46
with you guys again, And he's like, you know, I would love
19:48
to have you back, um, but
19:51
you know, if Myamir says I gotta kill you, I gotta kill
19:53
you. Um. So it was like these
19:55
sort of decisions,
19:57
like hard decisions
19:59
are made by people in hard circumstances.
20:02
And it's certainly worth criticizing
20:04
the fact that the
20:06
Rojava didn't really directly fight
20:08
with the regime, but they had a situation
20:11
where the regime didn't have
20:13
any power over them because
20:15
of the US presence in the region, the
20:17
Syrian Arab air force, there
20:19
was there was no chance that assad or Russia
20:22
was going to bomb ro Java. And
20:24
if they were going to bomb Rojava, and they're only
20:26
option for taking back that land would have been ground
20:28
forces. And the Syrian Arab army
20:30
is not a good army, not even today. They only
20:32
ever had air support and artillery um,
20:35
and whereas the forces of the FDS SDF
20:37
are very good fighters. So um,
20:40
it's a situation where because
20:44
um, they were able to have a really
20:46
good holding pattern, they had oil, which Bashard
20:48
needed, so they would sell him oil, and when he made
20:51
demands or did things they didn't like, they would cut off
20:53
the oil. So they had a lot of power. Was actually a pretty
20:55
good situation to be in. And I asked
20:58
everyone i could about bush Are
21:00
all aside and about the Syrian government, like how would
21:02
you feel about it? Taking back over what
21:04
because that's been Assad's line the whole
21:06
time, is that this is going to be reabsorbed into
21:08
the country, And I didn't meet a single person
21:10
who wanted that to happen. Now.
21:12
It was kind of confusing because none of them wanted to
21:14
be separate from Syria either.
21:17
Um A lot of them had family and other series
21:20
cities and stuff like. So it was very complicated.
21:22
People were like, the most common thing I
21:24
heard is people saying, like, I just kind of want things to go
21:26
on the way they have been. This is going
21:28
pretty well because their whole idea
21:31
of how society should be and how community
21:33
should be structured lends itself to that,
21:35
like, well, we want things to be the same they
21:37
are here now, but we also want to be
21:39
a part of Syria and have these uh these
21:42
relationships. Yeah, I want to be able to visit
21:44
my family in Damascus and stuff like
21:46
I don't. Yeah, so it's it's a really it was really
21:49
complicated, but nobody wanted
21:51
to be back under the regime's thumb. Now
21:54
that said, there are factions within Rojava.
21:56
There's like like there are within any organization
21:58
that includes millions of people. Um
22:01
so my, my fixer,
22:03
Habbat. So, whenever you're in a place like this um,
22:07
a lot of how you you interpret the
22:09
place and experience it is very heavily dependent
22:11
upon your fixers, the people who lead you around and interpret
22:14
for you and introduce you to this part
22:16
of the world. That's a very critical thing,
22:19
and it really changes how you experience it. And Habbat
22:22
is she's not an ideologue
22:24
in terms of she she's not unreasonably
22:27
sort of married to the y PG
22:29
or the y p J or or the p k
22:32
K or any of these groups. But she's a fundamentally
22:34
a believer in the Rojavan revolution
22:36
um and very much a believer in
22:39
sort of this women's liberation movement. She identified
22:41
herself as an an anarchist to me and
22:43
kind of our last couple of days together. But she's
22:46
so she's in this interesting position of having
22:49
really good relations with a lot of these people, knowing
22:51
how to work with them and knowing how to get what she
22:53
wanted from them, but also not being
22:55
like blinded um by ideology.
22:57
And one of the things she repeatedly pointed out
22:59
to me is when because I asked a bunch
23:01
of different men um what they
23:04
thought about all the changes to women's rights
23:06
in the region, and I got a lot of different answers,
23:08
and whenever somebody gave a really positive,
23:10
detailed answer, she would tell me
23:13
if she thought they were lying
23:15
or not. What makes you
23:17
think they're lying? She's like, Oh, there's a lot of these guys
23:19
are just fake feminists. A lot of them are just sort
23:21
of yeah,
23:23
yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. We had a lot of conversations
23:26
about that, you say the yeah,
23:29
and one of those it was interesting because one of the
23:31
guys she believed. We were out in front of this UM,
23:33
this Women's Economic Development Headquarters
23:36
UM, which was like this this or
23:39
this building that like women would go to if they're
23:41
like, hey, I want to I want to learn to like do something. I've
23:43
been a you know,
23:45
I was married at the age of like fourteen, and I don't
23:48
have any like job skills, and like I want to live
23:50
independently, and like, okay, well here we'll find you some
23:52
training, like what are your interests like that it
23:54
was a place for that, So we we visit, we
23:56
interview one of the women there, UM a couple
23:58
of the women there, and then we um we're coming
24:00
out and there's a guard station outside
24:02
of it right, because we're in the city where
24:04
in Komischlow is the most dangerous city
24:07
outside of Rocca. Um. It was partly
24:09
controlled still by the Syrian regime, and so
24:11
you'd see like there's would be neighborhoods
24:13
that would be but char al Assad's picture in
24:15
the neighborhoods that's the YPG. So
24:18
it was a little bit of a sketchy place. There were a decent
24:20
number of ISIS attacks there. So there were
24:22
guards out inside in front of this building. Two
24:24
of the guards were young women, UM
24:27
with you know, a K forty seven's and uniforms
24:30
and stuff. And then one of the guards was an older man in his sixties.
24:33
UM. And I went up to him and I asked him a
24:35
couple of questions. UM. I asked
24:37
him how he felt about working,
24:40
you know, as as an older man and a man who like
24:42
wouldn't have grown up with this, how he felt seeing
24:44
women with guns uh and working alongside
24:47
them, And he was like, I feel really good about it. I'm very
24:49
happy to see that. Um. I'm I'm
24:51
happy that they're contributing to
24:53
the fight. Like we wouldn't have been able to do this without the
24:55
women. UM. And I asked him if
24:57
he considered himself a feminist UM,
25:00
And he thought about that for a second, and he
25:02
said, I don't think there's any revolution
25:05
without the women, um, which is a line
25:07
a line from Abdulla Agelan there's no revolution
25:09
without the women, or the women are the center of the revolution,
25:12
and you can translate anything different ways, and
25:14
she believed him. There was this other guy
25:16
we met um in Rocca, one
25:18
of the co presidents of the Defense Counsel, who
25:21
was I thought, very nice and very
25:23
um uh said all of the right
25:25
things, was very eloquent about his things.
25:27
UM. But the way that his
25:30
partner looked at him during a couple of lines, who was
25:32
who was a woman and a very very tough
25:34
lady, UM Like you could just see
25:36
it in her eyes and the way that she directed
25:38
people. And then Kabat afterwards
25:40
was like, oh, yeah, that guy, if
25:42
if things went back to the way they were tomorrow, that
25:44
guy wouldn't have any trouble. And essentially
25:47
yeah, yeah. And so that's
25:49
one of the things that really worries when we talk about
25:51
the regime coming back in and Russia coming back
25:53
in, is there are a lot of true
25:56
believers within the Rojavan project.
25:58
I met a bunch of them, people who were very
26:00
hard to to do something incredible.
26:03
Um. I'm sure there's also people who have
26:05
been kind of frustrated with all
26:08
of those women's ship um,
26:10
and if they get an opportunity to push things
26:12
in the other direction and have the backing of another
26:14
power, they'll do it. Now, I don't
26:17
think that's the majority of people involved,
26:19
particularly in the government, because a lot of these people,
26:21
a lot of the core of the movement are
26:23
former or current members of the p JK who
26:25
were struggling in the mountains for decades
26:28
and very hard, strong believers and a lot of this
26:30
stuff. But there's definitely factions
26:33
that I think would have no issue m
26:35
going back to the way things. It just sounds that it's
26:37
tenuous enough that this kind
26:40
of upset right now is it's
26:42
the whole thing in like great peril, the whole
26:45
idealogical experiment, not experiment,
26:48
but you know what I mean, Like this is relatively
26:50
new and it doesn't have enough
26:52
roots to necessarily sustain this, survive
26:54
this. Um, we
26:57
take a real quick break for
26:59
things. Oh you know, Katie, speaking
27:01
of breaks, Yeah, you know, what will
27:03
heal any broken bones. You have what
27:06
the products and services advertised on their
27:09
show. That's an FDA backed guarantee.
27:11
I should have known that's where you were going with this health
27:14
I've got so many broken bones, so I'm excited
27:17
about these products and health taps, download
27:20
bones, vowels where
27:23
Yeah, bones, you've heard it here,
27:25
folks. Whatever products you buy from a podcast
27:28
heal broken bones. So everything,
27:39
don My
27:42
bones are all healed, and that's great news for
27:44
me. Yeah, and we're back for more
27:46
talking about stuff and
27:49
less talking about bones. Yeah,
27:52
there's probably still some talking of bones to come.
27:54
I'm waiting for about that. Assume
27:57
that there's more bone talk. Yeah, yeah, there
27:59
there's gonna be more owne talk. Welcome to bone
28:01
Talk. Welcome to bone Talk. So
28:04
I want to talk a little bit about the Women's Economic
28:06
Development Headquarters. UM. So, this
28:08
is a place we went to on our second day there, and
28:10
it was really remarkable
28:13
spot. Um. For one thing, it was by
28:16
far the cleanest place that we went into
28:19
up to that point, because we'd mainly been staying in like
28:21
hotels and stuff for journalists. And I don't know
28:23
if you guys know this, but journalists
28:25
are filthy degenerates. Familiar.
28:28
Yeah, I've heard. Actually the hotel we stayed in
28:30
and Durek was lovely, but I I
28:33
it was a very nice room. Yeah,
28:35
filled with filthy degenerates. Um.
28:37
So the walls
28:40
of this place and the walls of most of sort of the administrative
28:43
buildings in Rojava were covered in pictures
28:45
of martyrs um the shahids,
28:47
which is like a word
28:50
from martyr um and
28:52
uh. In this case, it was the picture of a bunch of different
28:54
female martyrs, including um, a
28:56
young woman who blew herself up
28:58
destroying an ISIS tank during the battle for
29:00
Kobani. So you see a
29:02
lot of the same faces UM in
29:04
a lot of these walls. And this was the faces of all
29:07
a lot of the young women who had died fighting. And it
29:09
was it was a really good
29:11
constant reminder of just like among other
29:13
things, like the cost of the fighting against ISIS.
29:15
They lost about eleven thousand people
29:18
um fight and a lot of them were very
29:20
very young. Um. You
29:22
looked at the age on the gravestones, and I
29:24
think seventeen was a pretty common age
29:27
UM, and some people who were younger. UM.
29:30
So it's another
29:33
picture you'll see. You saw all over the place and I saw
29:35
in the wall this building is the picture of Abdulla
29:37
Alan. They call him Apo, which I think
29:39
means uncle, like a p o is
29:42
kind of the nickname for him. And there
29:45
he's taken very seriously. There's a mix
29:47
some people he's revered, vered almost as like
29:50
identified um, and and
29:52
there are there is some like concerning sort
29:54
of like leader worship that I saw amongst sort
29:56
of segments there and other people just
29:58
what they're doing, yeah, yeah,
30:01
and it it kind of did strike me that
30:04
they're acts. He's accidentally in the best
30:07
situation possible for them,
30:09
because I think it's it's
30:11
arguable that in some situations you do need
30:14
a figurehead like that for people to rally
30:16
behind, and especially just sort of given some
30:18
cultural nuances of that area, that's
30:21
very common. Every movement has their kind of strong
30:23
male figurehead, and they have that.
30:25
But he's also locked in an island prison
30:27
thousands of miles away, so he can't actually do
30:29
anything. It was kind of perfect
30:31
yeah, um, but
30:34
yeah, you would see the pictures of him are
30:36
kind of hilarious because they're all at some point
30:38
before he got arrested. This guy just had thousands
30:40
of pictures taken of him, and in some of them
30:42
it's like the normal militant thing where we have like he'll
30:44
be in fatigues or whatnot, directing troops.
30:47
But most of them he's wearing like Cosby sweaters
30:49
and like he's literally he's
30:51
got his head in his hands like this, and he's smiling
30:53
and it looks like it looks like your your chubby
30:56
uncle in a caussted
31:00
was it was around the term
31:02
of the that makes sense, that kind
31:04
of like small clamor pick.
31:07
Yeah, it was, there's really weird. You would see
31:09
some really strange ones. It
31:12
was a lot to like keep from giggling at a
31:14
couple of points. Anyway, So we
31:16
go into this room and were these pictures all over
31:18
the walls, and I sit there and I talked to this woman who's um.
31:21
She was an older lady, the head of the Economic Development
31:23
Council. And from the mountains
31:26
is the term that everyone used for
31:28
the Kurds who were part of the movement,
31:30
who had clearly been part of the
31:32
p KK before, Like the mountains of Turkey
31:34
is what they're in Iraq or what they're referring to. So like
31:36
that was the term that would be like whispered
31:38
whenever we'd meet somebody, and they were usually the
31:40
people who would be very
31:43
very stern, very hard eyes,
31:46
very taciturn and kind of less
31:48
like friendly and smiley.
31:50
UM, and you know, someone would whisper at some point.
31:52
I think he's from the mountains. I think she's from the
31:54
mountains. It is just kind of a thing over
31:56
there. So we meet this woman, we're sitting were talking
31:58
with her. Um. She explains to us in
32:01
a lot of detail about UM.
32:04
Yeah, I I'm just gonna read from my notes
32:06
actually here. UM. So she's talked
32:08
to us about the struggle against patriarchy,
32:10
which she saw is much more difficult
32:12
and dangerous than the struggle they had fought against
32:14
isis UM. One of
32:16
the lines that really stuck out to me was it
32:19
is always poor women, those with no solution who
32:21
come here. So these are the women who were like coming in
32:23
for help from this place. She told us about a deaf
32:25
woman who had come by it recently, was the widow of a martyr.
32:28
UM and her parents had wanted to take the kids
32:30
she'd had with her dead husband because
32:32
they didn't believe she could take care of them, and she had no income
32:35
to do so. And so one of the things that center
32:37
had done recently was put this woman in training for
32:39
a job as a seamstress, and she had been able to get work
32:41
and like keep her children and like maintain
32:44
her family. So that's like an example of the sort of work they
32:46
were doing. Yeah. Um.
32:49
One of the lines she said that really stuck out to me
32:51
was if you fall into the mentality of capitalism,
32:54
you were already a martyr. She didn't
32:56
bring up Sheryl Sandberg's lean in um,
32:58
but that's when she was referring to is we
33:01
don't Our goal with this place isn't to
33:03
make women into like entrepreneurs
33:05
that they can create giant businesses and get rich.
33:08
Our goal is to help women who
33:10
have been marginalized to the sidelines of our
33:12
society take roles in the
33:14
center of our society. And it's it's not about
33:16
making money. Our goal isn't for her to
33:18
like create a sewing app or it's not
33:21
like more females. It's
33:24
able to be like self sustainable to live
33:26
a life, and yeah, not
33:29
need to be in fear
33:31
and all that. Yeah, she said.
33:33
Another thing she said was Western women, Uh,
33:36
they work but receive less, which
33:38
I think she was referring to the pay gap there because
33:40
they work in the mentality of the men. If
33:43
I am free here, I can only be as free
33:45
as the other women here. Um. So
33:47
is this understanding that like, if our equality
33:49
is based on us acting like men, that's
33:52
not real equality. That was the
33:54
attitude she expressed to me and
33:56
her you know, she's one of the people. I asked if
33:58
she wanted regime can troll of the area
34:01
to to return um, and
34:03
she had a very hard line on that. Um. She
34:05
said that she did not want We
34:08
do not want to be a state, was her line.
34:10
Um. So, she did not want reintegration of the
34:12
Syrian government. She didn't want statehood at all. Um.
34:15
The term she used and that most people would use
34:17
was autonomous. You know, we want
34:19
to remain autonomous. That's what's important to
34:21
us. So, Yeah, that was a really interesting
34:24
interview to me, and I've got more like one of the things.
34:27
Yeah, I have a whole
34:29
long recorded interview with her that I'm in the process
34:31
of getting translated. Unfortunately,
34:34
my translators are all based in Rojava.
34:36
Uh so some of them have
34:38
been getting shelled by the Turks.
34:41
So it it's gonna Part
34:44
of why we're doing some of this today is it's going
34:46
to take a bit longer for me to get this series
34:48
out because that's not the
34:50
ideal situation. So
34:53
another place we went to was
34:55
jin War. Jin is the
34:57
Karmaji Kurdish word for women,
35:00
UM and war means land UM,
35:03
and so women's land. It's a village and
35:05
all women village UM.
35:07
That's located in Rojava, not that
35:09
far from Comische low Um
35:11
and it was it was pretty small when
35:14
we went there. I think there were about a dozen or so families
35:16
UM, but it was only around a year old and
35:19
it was really beautiful. For one thing,
35:21
UM lavender painted walls again,
35:23
which I I I started
35:26
to recognize as a bit of a theme. Very
35:28
orderly, spacious homes built around
35:30
all very eco friendly. So one of the things in the Rojavan
35:33
constitution was UM a focus on ecology
35:36
UM because the the American anarchist
35:38
who is really influential to they're
35:41
thinking, a guy named Murray buck Chin was
35:43
like one of the very first people back in the sixties
35:45
who was like, climate change is going to be a problem.
35:47
So that's a big part of the ideology at
35:49
least UM it's the it's the aspect of their
35:52
constitution that they made the least progress on,
35:54
because when you're fighting a war for
35:56
extermination, recycling isn't
36:00
of their priorities. But this place
36:02
sounds incredibly fascinating, an
36:04
interesting. Yeah, progressive
36:07
in so many ways. Uh yeah,
36:10
this is this is wild to me.
36:12
I mean, to include ecology in your actual
36:14
constitution is when something when
36:16
we're battling for people to even acknowledge
36:19
that climate change is a
36:21
real thing. Yeah, we're
36:23
still having like is it just bad if we kill all the whales?
36:26
I mean, they're kind of dicks, hoard
36:29
the water. Make a quote from
36:31
our constitution. It is a quote the whales
36:33
are dicks. Which, Yeah,
36:36
Thomas Jefferson's anti whale legenda,
36:39
it hasn't
36:42
It does not look good for Thomas Jefferson.
36:45
Yeah, that's the one. The one problem with Thomas Jefferson.
36:48
The one problem otherwise is hatred
36:50
of whales. Yeah. Yeah, nothing
36:53
nothing else. They're nothing else going on with that guy.
36:56
Okay. Um,
36:58
So one of the people I met in jin Are was
37:00
a German woman. Um, very
37:03
German, very heavily tattooed. Um
37:05
seemed to be I think I would guess in her late
37:07
thirties early forties. UM. And
37:09
she spoke what sounded to me at least like fluent
37:12
uh Cormagi Kurdish as well
37:14
as as pretty good English. UM.
37:16
And she had volunteered
37:19
to live there and had been living
37:21
there pretty much since the beginning and was clearly like one
37:23
of the people helping to organize it. And
37:25
yet looking at jin war kind
37:28
of the the cynical asshole and me wanted
37:30
to pick it apart because it was very small. You know, it's
37:32
not a big village. You're talking a couple of dozen people
37:34
with all the kids and stuff in total, and
37:36
that that's the kind of thing that you could look at and
37:38
be like, well, maybe this is just like a tempkin village
37:40
purely for show, and it's
37:42
it certainly doesn't seem that significant
37:44
when you're talking about you know, there's four million people in
37:47
Rojava. We're talking about a war
37:49
that's killed hundreds of thousands, and you know,
37:51
in the context of a global authoritarian resurgence
37:54
that's like still threatening to
37:56
to to kill us all. Um.
37:58
But even kind of with all of that in mind
38:00
and like looking at the small scale of it, it still
38:02
felt um remarkable
38:05
to me. Um. The energing
38:07
there was was something special, and I think
38:09
the audacity of what they were going for their
38:12
um was humbling. Uh.
38:16
It really impressed me.
38:18
We talked to a number of women there. UM.
38:21
One woman who had like
38:24
she had a tattoo on her arm of
38:26
flowers, which struck me because you don't see
38:28
a lot of tattoos in that part of the world. Although as
38:30
I went on through a Java actually encountered there's
38:32
a huge tattoo culture that's taken off there just in
38:35
the last couple of years. But her husband
38:37
was UM. She she noticed
38:39
that her husband was an alcoholic h and
38:41
she reported him to the women's councils through the women's
38:43
houses, which are these buildings that they set up in every
38:46
town and city in Rojava
38:48
where women can come and get help if they need
38:50
it. UM. So she reported him to the women's
38:52
councils, and they suggested that she leave and
38:55
moved to gen War Um, which she
38:57
had done with her kids. UM. And so she was like
38:59
learned they were farming. They grew a significant amount
39:01
of food, really tasty cucumbers. UM.
39:03
And you hear about cumbers
39:06
that often. I'll say that interjection. Tasty
39:09
cucumber is not something I associate anyway,
39:12
they actually did. Like then I went to a
39:14
couple of farms the agriculture. There's really good,
39:16
really like better tasting cucumbers
39:18
than I've ever had. And I don't I don't like cantaloupe,
39:20
It's garbage fruit. But their cantaloupe
39:23
was fucking delicious. It was like nothing
39:25
I'd ever eaten before. And they had these one
39:27
of the things they were doing with these farms,
39:29
you know, one of which was small and one of which was medium
39:32
sized, I would say, like capable of growing you know,
39:34
truck fulls of food um
39:37
acres and six big hoop houses um.
39:39
And it was they were trying to do like all
39:42
organic um uh,
39:44
fertilizers and stuff. Because the
39:47
Rojava is traditionally it's like the Kansas of Syria.
39:49
It's like the breadbasket. It grows a shipload of
39:51
food um and the
39:53
regime had just been pumping in fertilizers
39:56
and pesticides for years to try to maximize
39:58
production. And people
40:00
there would say that like it really decreased the
40:02
quality of the food and the flavor of the food
40:05
UM and was also bad for the soil, so a big part
40:07
of what they were doing over there was soil reclamation. That was
40:09
part of what they were doing in gen War, part of where they were
40:11
doing at this um. I went to another, a woman's
40:13
farming commune um that was a separate thing.
40:15
So there there are a few things like this
40:18
where it's all or majority women
40:21
engaging in some large undertaking.
40:23
It was really interesting to see and
40:25
uh jim War itself like consisted
40:28
of there were a couple of Kurdish women, There was obviously
40:30
that German lady. There were Arabs, there were Yazd's.
40:33
It was really a very polyglot
40:35
sort of culture. And that was really impressive
40:38
to see, especially since, like one of the criticisms
40:40
that I repeatedly heard about Rajava before going
40:42
there was that it was really just like a Kurdish
40:45
supremacist project. And I could say pretty
40:47
conclusively I didn't see any fucking
40:49
evidence of that. And I talked to a lot of
40:51
Arabs and Assyrians and Turkmen.
40:54
Yeah, that was gonna be my question. So it's not just
40:56
I mean, it's not just Kurdish
40:59
people that are living there. This is
41:02
a mixture, but I
41:04
mean, primarily the
41:07
Curds were the like start of
41:09
it, the core of it, and part of that just because the Curds
41:11
are really fucking good fighters, um,
41:14
and they've been working, they've been wanting a place that
41:17
can be I mean, they're a land list. They don't have
41:19
any place there. Yeah
41:23
there, and they're they're they're um
41:25
they've been organized politically for a long
41:27
time. So yeah,
41:30
Um. It was really uh,
41:32
it was really interesting. One of the things as I was leaving
41:35
Um, I looked back at the gate to gen War
41:37
and so that it had the name jin War printed
41:39
in um in in English characters
41:42
on the on the gate, and
41:44
one side of it said gin and
41:46
one side of it said war. Um.
41:49
And I expressed
41:51
to Kabbat that
41:54
that struck me particularly because it's kind of like
41:56
a bit of a like
41:59
obviously the literal translation is women's
42:01
land, but kind of reading it in English
42:04
a mix of English and Kurdish is women's war. Um.
42:07
Is what a lot of the women they were talking to me about
42:09
is that like, we see this as a we see
42:12
this struggle for equalities essentially kind of a military
42:14
undertaking, um. And that's the way we're
42:16
proceeding with it. Yeah, it was really interesting
42:18
to me. Um, you know, I
42:20
could go through a
42:23
bunch of stuff. I it's one of
42:25
those things that's like when the full series
42:27
comes out, it will be um, probably
42:29
like six to eight episodes. This
42:32
is fascinating to me. And
42:34
it's just like such a you know, I've ever said
42:36
this expresses a few times. It's just really
42:39
challenging my conceptions
42:41
of what life is like
42:43
over there. And you know, we get just
42:45
these broad stroke images
42:48
and pictures of of
42:50
of who these people are and
42:52
it's nothing nothing to do with this
42:54
note. It's an important portrait too,
42:57
right. Do you have a lot of contact with people
42:59
over there? Yeah, yeah, I've been in contact
43:01
with a few of my friends over there. It's a little bit
43:03
um erratic, shall we say, just
43:06
because there's a lot going on. Um,
43:09
But what I hear is
43:11
very worrying. Now, it's
43:14
not like a lot of people
43:16
have died. Um, it's not a situation
43:18
where at this point the SDF
43:21
isn't helpless against the Turkish advance.
43:24
Um. So one of the things we saw when we were there, I was sometimes
43:26
just within a couple hundred feet of the Turkish border. There's
43:28
this gigantic wall, huge Stone
43:30
Wall looming over you through huge sections
43:32
of the trip there, so it was always in everyone's mind.
43:35
And there were while we were there, are to when the President
43:38
of Turkey made numerous statements about wanting to destroy
43:40
the hPG, wanting to kill all the terrorists
43:42
over there. So they were like numerous days
43:44
where like suddenly security would be heightened and
43:47
like we'd all walk around knowing, well, okay, the
43:49
Turks might invade today. I have
43:51
a question, maybe it's a dumb one, but we
43:54
mold over it a little bit last week on even
43:56
more News, What our nations, What our nations
43:58
go? Uh No, So I understand
44:00
Air Towan having issues
44:03
with Kurdish within Turkey
44:05
and what's been going on with terrorist organizations
44:08
there which they consider to be but versus
44:10
going into Syria right now? Is
44:13
it because Rojava and the organization
44:15
feels like a threat to him? I am
44:17
just curious if you could talk a little bit about that.
44:20
This is a very complicated um
44:23
so I'm going to do my best to explain it.
44:25
The the surfaced and simplest answer is
44:27
that the p k K are
44:30
seen as and not entirely
44:32
without right, a terrorist group in Turkey, and it definitely
44:34
carried out attacks like that. I would say one
44:37
of one of the issues that we haven't discussing this
44:39
is like people here terrorists now and they think ISIS are
44:41
all kind of where like their only goal is to kill innocent
44:43
people. They're more like the I Rara was
44:46
back in the day, where there's individual
44:48
actions they take that you that are deplorable and
44:50
horrible, and targeting of civilians is never justified.
44:52
But they're not just trying to kill people. They're
44:54
fighting a struggle for independence and they have
44:57
there's a lot of logical arguments, and they can
44:59
point to a tross Citi's by the other side.
45:01
It's that sort of struggled. So the p k
45:04
K is a group that has carried out and continues
45:06
to carry out attacks on Turkey when
45:08
we were there, like the day that we landed
45:11
in Iraq because we had to cross over into
45:13
Syria from Iraq, um the Turkish
45:15
ambassador to Kurdistan was
45:17
murdered uh in our Bill,
45:20
which is normally a pretty safe city, by a
45:22
couple of p k K guys, And it was a kind of thing
45:24
like nobody knew who did it, but also everybody knew
45:26
who had it. Like there was not not a doubt in anyone's
45:28
head that it was the PK separate from
45:30
STF. It's
45:33
but there, I know there's ties, but there
45:36
were ties. It was much more tied earlier
45:38
on. So earlier on the hPG and the y pg
45:41
J. We're basically just rebranded
45:43
p KK. That's certainly no longer
45:45
the case. And for one thing, most of the people
45:47
making up those organizations have never been
45:50
to Turkey, were not alive to take part
45:52
in any of the PKK's main struggles. Um.
45:55
They were Syrian civilians until the revolution
45:57
happened when they were fourteen or fifteen, and then they
46:00
wind up to fight Isis or whatever. Um.
46:03
So that's uh,
46:06
there's it's there's not a zero connection
46:08
to them. But also, like you know, one of the things
46:10
you can point out, while the PKK has continued their
46:12
guerrilla war against the Turks, it's not
46:15
like they're firing Javelin missiles on Turkish
46:17
Leopold tanks inside southern Turkey.
46:19
Like they've been smart about it. They haven't
46:21
been just like, well, let's take all of our U S guns
46:23
and immediately use them to go attack Turks and Turkey.
46:26
Um, like they're not idiots. UM.
46:29
So Radwin's justification for the invasion
46:32
is that UM. And I think it's one that a
46:34
lot of people who don't know much about the situation
46:36
can see as understandable because it's like, oh, they're terrorists,
46:38
like isis isis bad, so Turkey
46:40
should get to funk with these guys. It
46:42
goes back much deeper than that. One of the bigger
46:44
issues is that Turkey has a long
46:47
and horrific history of repressing
46:49
the Kurdish people, including banning the speaking
46:51
of the language and the teaching of it in school. I guess
46:53
this is yeah,
46:57
and there's there's a saying in Turkey
47:00
that there's no such thing as Kurds. They're just mountain
47:02
Turks who lost their language. Um, I think
47:04
is one of the phrases used.
47:07
UM. And there was I think in UM.
47:10
There was an uprising in southern Turkey
47:12
by the Kurdish population, specifically
47:14
by a bunch of young Kurdish
47:17
uh militants UM
47:19
with an organization called the y d g h yet
47:21
a gahash Um and they got massacred
47:24
in the cities they were in, got pounded into
47:26
fucking concrete and huge. Almost
47:28
no one reported on. There were almost no reporters
47:31
there, but it was catastrophic
47:34
crime. And so Urdawan
47:36
sees not just the p KK as
47:38
a threat, but he sees the idea of an organized
47:41
Kurdish state based along revolutionary
47:43
militant lines as a threat that he can deal
47:46
with the Iraqi Kurds because they're fundamentally
47:48
more mainstream, more capitalists, they're not
47:51
they're willing to work with him. The Syrian
47:54
Kurds are not well, and they've got
47:56
this ideology and they're building something
47:58
there and it's to their land
48:01
border, and so that right here feels
48:03
like a threat, and here's this opportunity
48:05
to go in um and
48:09
Dan racism, but also the political project is
48:12
m yeah. Yeah. And also the
48:14
fact that you know, Turkey controlled Syria
48:17
up until about a century or so ago, so
48:19
Arede is definitely I think in kind of the same way
48:21
that Vladimir Putin there's some desire in his
48:23
part to like reconstitute the geographical
48:26
like scope of the Soviet Union. I think
48:29
there's some of that with are to one as well. I wanted
48:31
to talk about about Russia. So we also
48:33
have been seeing reports that now
48:36
uh Vladimir Putin Russia has deploying
48:38
troops to help keep the
48:40
advancing the Syrian government and the turk Ships
48:42
forces Turkish forces that keep
48:45
them keep the peace. I guess kind of feeling
48:47
the vacuum again left by America one
48:50
of the uh yeah, yeah, sorry,
48:53
no, No, I was just kind
48:55
of generally lobbing that out there to hear
48:57
your thoughts, because, like, I understand that on the service level,
48:59
but I'm sure you've had a lot more information that can
49:01
help us understand it a bit more. No,
49:04
I mean, that's essentially accurate, and I think
49:06
it's like a mark of what a clusterfuck
49:09
this decision has been, outside of its immoral
49:11
like connotations, outside just what a bad idea
49:13
it was. You had a situation where there
49:16
was not war in Rojaba, there
49:18
was not fighting. There were occasional ISIS sleeper
49:20
cell attacks, but it was very safe. I never felt,
49:23
um, you know, like I was in serious danger
49:25
walking around in the cities at night or whatever. So
49:28
many places where you have felt that, Yeah,
49:31
it was. It was a very safe place. There
49:33
was not active fighting, um
49:35
And the only thing that was required to maintain
49:37
that situation was two d U S
49:39
Sports Special Forces guys chilling out
49:41
on basis and the knowledge that if anyone
49:43
bombed them, it would be a thing. And
49:46
now that that's been removed, this
49:48
situation where there was not active fighting
49:50
has turned into what is essentially a war
49:52
between Russia, Turkey, the
49:54
Syrian government in this autonomous region,
49:57
like within a week. It's an un
50:00
speakable cluster fuck with huge
50:02
implications. Um. And
50:04
it's just so dumb that none
50:06
of this needed to happen. And it creates
50:08
a situation where like now
50:11
any any solution or
50:13
anything that we do will make it
50:15
even worse. Like as
50:18
opposed to staying there, now
50:20
that we've left, it's created all these other tensions
50:23
that getting involved and is even more
50:25
complicated. I don't
50:28
know what could even be done
50:30
at this point. Like I guess I'm always
50:32
in support of like a no fly zone being established,
50:35
but like now that's so much messier of an ever
50:38
we had one over ro Java, Um
50:40
and it worked. Um yeah,
50:42
it's it's well, I mean, now we're traders,
50:45
we can't be trusted, I mean, and his implications
50:47
around the world. Uh, it
50:50
just speaks to who we are and who President
50:52
Trump is and where how reliable
50:54
we are. Um. But even if we
50:56
were to undo this, like right now, they
50:59
hate us, like like
51:01
they can't trust us. I'm
51:04
not sure they never trusted
51:06
us individually. I
51:08
will say they're individual Americans, individual
51:10
soldiers that um, they absolutely
51:12
trusted UM, the American government.
51:15
They're not dumb people. They read history
51:17
books. They know what anybody actually right
51:21
now nothing that we do. UM. I
51:23
don't know that I agree with that. I do think if we could
51:25
now obviously because Russia is moving
51:27
in, because the Syrian government's moving in, because
51:29
there's Turkish troops, like, I don't know
51:32
how you would that it would be very
51:34
a dicey maneuver to try to reinsert
51:36
American troops. That said, I
51:38
know for a fact they would prefer to be working
51:41
with US than the Russians in the Syrian government.
51:43
And there was a widespread
51:46
nobody I met who I felt like had a really
51:49
nuanced understanding of the international situation.
51:51
None of them thought the US was going to stay.
51:53
Everyone thought Turkey was going to invade.
51:56
And we watched them building thousands of
51:58
miles of tunnels all are round
52:00
the entirety of Rajaba, twenty four
52:02
meters down into the ground. Um,
52:05
these these incredibly deep and complicated
52:07
tunnel systems where they were storing munitions and
52:10
so that they could transfer populations
52:12
and fighters all around the region without
52:14
the Turks being able to bomb them, and a
52:17
lot of that, a lot of those defenses they had to
52:19
give up because one of the things that was really fucking
52:21
shitty that Trump did is um,
52:23
he got the curt here, he got
52:26
the the SDF to agree to a
52:29
uh A withdrawal from some sections
52:31
of their line with Turkey, UM as
52:33
part of an agreement for like a safety
52:35
zone, and they did with the understanding that the U
52:37
S would be staying. And then once they'd
52:40
given up their first front line defenses
52:42
were like, as, wasn't
52:45
that like a month ago or something like
52:47
very recently. Yeah. Also, I've been reading
52:49
a lot that there are like approximately
52:51
fifty nuclear weapons that
52:54
we had stored in the area and now Turkey
52:56
just has them. Uh well
52:59
we're oh no, no, no, we I think
53:01
it's more that we have bases in Turkey,
53:04
yeah, basically everywhere. But yeah,
53:07
well I just from a couple of people of
53:09
a couple of people a couple of places describing
53:11
them now as at Wan's hostages. Well
53:15
that's sort of okay, So this is one of the big
53:17
reasons why, you know, one of the one of the one
53:19
of the questions that um
53:22
I found myself asking a lot and asking
53:24
with my colleagues over there, was like,
53:26
why the fund does Turkey get to get away with all this
53:29
ship? And the answer is the
53:31
air base and in Serlik is a huge part
53:33
of it. Um. Now that's an American
53:35
air base, UM, and it is critical
53:38
to our operations in the Middle East. UM.
53:40
Another reason for this is that, of course Turkey
53:43
is a NATO nation and they're kind of holding
53:45
down NATO's flank. So
53:47
it's uh, I'm not
53:49
saying there's nothing that could be done. I think there's a shipload
53:51
that could be done against air to one, but nothing
53:54
is being done because everyone is scared
53:56
of the implications and scared of upsetting
53:58
the apple cart. Even more, well,
54:01
I guess all the EU
54:04
Union members are now
54:06
not going to sell arms to Turkey or
54:09
whatever, even though that's great. They've got
54:11
plenty of fucking guns. Yeah, I mean,
54:13
like, yeah, that's that's what's being done,
54:16
right, all the all the sanctions and stuff. It's like
54:18
they want to do this, so you knew
54:20
what they were going to do this. Everybody
54:23
knew that this was going to happen. I don't
54:25
know. Like it's frustrating because I think
54:28
one possible. Everyone's worried about the genocide.
54:30
Obviously, I'm where like a lot of people have died, um,
54:32
and that's terrible. UM. But
54:35
I worry even more
54:37
because I think it's more likely. UM. I
54:39
don't think. I don't think Turkey
54:41
could possibly take the whole region,
54:44
or even a sizeable chunk of what
54:46
they've claimed that they want to take.
54:48
For a number of reasons. Well, the Turks have a powerful airport
54:51
force and good artillery. UM. They don't
54:53
have a very good military. It's
54:55
well equipped, but it's not good fighters,
54:58
um. Whereas the STF
55:00
is filled with like veteran guerillas who are particularly
55:03
expert at using a kind of weapon system called an a
55:05
g t m UM, a wire guided missile
55:08
UM which uh turns
55:11
advanced tanks into fireworks.
55:14
So I especially when
55:16
you consider like the fact that the Russians
55:18
and the Syrian Arab army and its air force
55:20
are moving in to support them, I
55:22
don't think Turkey is going to
55:24
be able to actually take most of what
55:27
they want to take. Maybe I'll be wrong about that, but
55:29
I do think that the fact that the
55:32
forces of the Autonomous Region have had to call in
55:34
back up from that particular side
55:36
means there's a good chance it's the end
55:39
of this revolutionary experiment and
55:41
the start of their absorption back into
55:43
the most brutal dictatorship on the planet. Um
55:46
And I understand some of the people
55:48
I've talked to will say, like, look, assad's terrible,
55:51
we know that, but are to One's worse
55:53
for us. You know, are too one may not have killed
55:55
as many people, but as occurred, he's worse
55:57
for us. And so because we
56:00
still are one of the dominant powers
56:02
in this group, that's who we're going
56:04
to worry about the most. Um And
56:06
I can't say they're wrong. I've never
56:09
had to make a decision like that. Um
56:11
It breaks my heart that the decision is being made
56:13
because it's so fucking unnecessary. It is
56:15
really heartbreaking. This whole thing is just so
56:19
It's going to be the worst year ever for
56:22
a lot of vulnerable people in
56:24
a region of the world where things seem to be
56:26
getting better as recently as this August,
56:29
but you know where it's not going to be the worst year ever,
56:31
Katie, And where tell me in
56:34
the products and services that support this program?
56:36
Once again, I should have seen that coming. It's gonna
56:39
be the best year ever for them. It's going to be the yeah,
56:41
Harry, because we
56:43
are going to move a lot of
56:45
whatever it is we sell products and products
56:50
services. Yeah, yeah, some
56:52
of those, uh, some of those
56:55
I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't. I don't have a good joke.
56:57
I was gonna I was gonna make a condom
57:00
cooke or something, but then I couldn't think of
57:02
one in time, have come
57:04
up with one. There it is, Cody.
57:06
There we go, all right, well
57:12
together everything,
57:19
Oh my gosh, I've bought them all.
57:22
He sure did snap them up. I'm
57:24
excited about having bought them. Yeah, I bet
57:27
you, I bet you are put
57:29
in them excited. I received the
57:31
I received the gifts. See how fast
57:33
our products and services ship? You
57:35
know what? You know what I'm excited about most is
57:39
when we inevitably get to the point
57:41
where the entire episode is just one
57:43
long ad plug but with no ads,
57:45
we just never get there. We're trying to. We're constantly
57:48
like, yeah, we're building to it. Yeah,
57:52
that's what the people want. The PIV is an ad
57:55
plug that never starts. Welcome to the
57:57
ad transition, the show that is constantly
57:59
transitioning to an ad that never comes.
58:03
But first day,
58:08
let's talk a little bit about the Republicans
58:10
here in America and what they're
58:13
like. Republicans, the Republicans.
58:15
Yeah, I think I solved the political what
58:18
was? What was yours? Cody? I
58:22
didn't want to steal your joke that the
58:24
Republicans
58:28
um they're pissed. Yeah, they are.
58:31
It's the first time in
58:33
recent memory where they've actually stood
58:36
up kind of a
58:39
little a little bit, a little bit to the president,
58:42
although still managing to
58:44
not say his name. It's
58:46
very fascinating standing up to what's happening,
58:49
but not to him specific Right, They're like, oh,
58:51
there's a you know
58:53
a lot of tweets of like, oh there's you know, this is cleansing.
58:56
We've betrayed our allies a
58:58
lot of the language, and they never arrive
59:01
at And it was that decision
59:03
was made by yeah, why is
59:05
that happening? Likely by
59:07
somebody after a phone call without
59:10
consulting anybody like
59:13
margat Rubio and Lindsay Graham. Obviously come to mind
59:15
specifically, but just so many of like,
59:17
Oh, I can't believe we've done this? Who who did
59:19
it? What are you talking about? Why don't you just say
59:23
his name? Just say his name once? But they don't
59:25
want to because they know that he's gonna attack
59:27
them, hit them on Twitter. They'll
59:29
like, he'll he'll drag He'll drag him on Twitter,
59:32
so they don't they don't want to do it. But
59:34
it is that this is like the
59:37
one time they're they're actually
59:40
not happy about something he's done
59:42
and vocal about it, because I can't imagine they're
59:45
happy all the time. I mean, they're in a real dicey
59:47
situation now what with impeachment stuff
59:49
going on obviously not related to this, but
59:51
like, well
59:53
they're they're constantly because I think they're like
59:56
several different factions of this where
59:59
you have like the Republican
1:00:01
reaction, um,
1:00:03
but then you also have the conservative pundit
1:00:05
reaction, and then you have
1:00:08
I guess what I would call like the
1:00:10
grifter proto fascist reaction,
1:00:14
like like a Jack Possobic type,
1:00:17
like Jack Possobic who has attacked the
1:00:19
Kurds as supporting Antifa exactly
1:00:22
mainly on the strength of literally two
1:00:24
guys who like spray painted some some ANTIFA
1:00:27
signs and Antiva flag or something like
1:00:29
that. And it's like, first of all,
1:00:31
Jack, you know the fuh and that is isis
1:00:34
right, Like that's
1:00:36
the fa that they're they're anti and
1:00:39
this is weird, like like
1:00:42
supporting isis to own the Libs mentality.
1:00:44
Um. But juxtaposed with before
1:00:46
this happened, where he
1:00:49
was very supportive of the Kurds and has
1:00:51
all these all these tweets mentioned like oh the Curds
1:00:53
are so brave and X and y, But as
1:00:55
soon as dear Leader does
1:00:58
this reversal, they switch gear. So
1:01:00
fascinating. It's very fascinating how that works out
1:01:03
every single time. It's fucking
1:01:05
shocking to me that the bravest
1:01:08
reaction from the right wing uh
1:01:10
and most direct attack on the president as a result
1:01:12
of this came from Pat fucking Robertson.
1:01:15
Oh man, yeah
1:01:18
he named the president. Yeah I didn't
1:01:20
see that. Yeah, yeah, he said President
1:01:22
Trump is has lost or is
1:01:24
in danger of losing the Mandate of Heaven.
1:01:29
Was distracted by the Mandate of Heaven part.
1:01:31
It's it's fucking wild because
1:01:33
Alex Jones seized on that as evidence
1:01:35
that Pat Robertson is part of a Chinese communist
1:01:37
conspiracy. So
1:01:40
good, that is delicious.
1:01:42
It's one little little bit of brightness.
1:01:45
They can't help themselves. That's amazing. Yeah,
1:01:48
it's incredible. Alex Jones triggered,
1:01:51
Um, Yeah, side note, I saw Info
1:01:53
Wars sticker in a random
1:01:56
remote road in Maui yea greater
1:01:59
mind. They're
1:02:02
in Paradise and there it was smacked up
1:02:04
on a no no, remember actually what's
1:02:06
going on with this beautiful vista behind
1:02:08
it was like, damn it, try
1:02:10
to escape that. But it's just interesting, um
1:02:13
that there is this it's this weird spectrum where,
1:02:15
yeah, you got these Grift proto fascists,
1:02:18
and then you've got the Republicans actually speaking out, and then
1:02:20
you have like a lot of the Fox News
1:02:22
figures not really taking
1:02:24
a stance other than these
1:02:26
Republicans are caring too much
1:02:29
about what's happening in Syria and on the Syrian
1:02:31
border and not enough about our own border
1:02:34
where we need the wall. Like they keep like
1:02:36
bringing it back to this like America first,
1:02:39
build the wall talking point,
1:02:41
which is weird. Oh yeah, what
1:02:43
did the president tweet like
1:02:46
today? Tweet something today, or maybe
1:02:48
it wasn't today, but it was. I'm
1:02:51
sure he tweeted something today. He
1:02:53
is he a tweeted? Did he do that? Uh?
1:02:56
Some people want the United States to protect
1:02:58
the seven thousand mile away border Syria,
1:03:00
presided over by Bischl Assad,
1:03:03
our enemy. At the same time, Syria
1:03:05
and whoever they chose to help, want naturally
1:03:07
to protect the Kurds. I would much rather focus
1:03:09
on our southern border, which a
1:03:12
butt's either
1:03:14
that's my typeo or his, and is part of the
1:03:16
United States of America, and by the way, numbers
1:03:18
are way down in the wall is being built.
1:03:20
It is ironic
1:03:23
about that statement. Is the
1:03:25
chunk of the Syrian border that
1:03:28
touched Iraq and large pieces of
1:03:30
Turkey was not run by a Bishar up
1:03:33
until a couple of days ago, right as
1:03:35
we just discussed. Yeah,
1:03:37
yeah, I did not run into any Syrian
1:03:40
Arab Army soldiers on the border, suggesting
1:03:42
he doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm suggesting
1:03:45
that because of his actions, Bashar al Assad
1:03:47
now controls way more border than
1:03:49
he did before. You're asking that earlier
1:03:51
he tweeted, Uh, he tried to tweet impeach
1:03:53
the press, but he forgot the extra
1:03:56
s, so it says impeached the press. That
1:03:59
was good. That was that that that's that's one.
1:04:01
A little bits of levity we get careening
1:04:04
flaming dumpster truck. Um.
1:04:07
I think it's
1:04:09
uh yeah, it's just this
1:04:13
mentality of you've seen the
1:04:15
seventh seven thousand miles away thing. Uh,
1:04:17
it's the earlier last
1:04:20
week he was talking about how they
1:04:22
didn't help us in the Civil War.
1:04:26
They didn't.
1:04:28
That's that's fair, the right,
1:04:31
they weren't. They weren't normandy with
1:04:33
us. Um, even though like, yeah,
1:04:36
if they were involved in World War two, guy,
1:04:38
yeah there were there were tons of Kurdish soldiers
1:04:41
who fought belongs unbelievable, but like, yeah,
1:04:44
just this idea of
1:04:46
like, no, we're not going to do that, We're not going to
1:04:48
do this. It's America first, We're not going to get
1:04:50
involved. We can't do endless wars. In
1:04:53
the same breath as saying that, by the way, and
1:04:55
get this, we're gonna sell all of
1:04:57
our mercenary army to Saudi
1:04:59
A and anyone else who
1:05:01
wants to be the highest bidder. He's like proudly
1:05:04
announcing this um
1:05:06
while also saying we don't do we don't want
1:05:08
to do wars anymore. It's wild. We
1:05:11
don't want to do wars that aren't profit
1:05:13
making in depth, right this and
1:05:15
this is one of the things that's like frustrating to be
1:05:17
about, like how how the Iraq War gets spun
1:05:19
with like its focus on the oil and stuff. And it's
1:05:21
like there was a profit motive in
1:05:23
the Iraq War, but it was on behalf of a lot of private
1:05:25
corporations. The US government
1:05:28
didn't didn't get a lot of money out
1:05:30
of that, Like we we fucking
1:05:32
spent all of our money on that ship. Um.
1:05:35
And that's the issue a guy like Trump has. Trump
1:05:37
would actually be totally down with a war for
1:05:39
oil because he specifically said
1:05:42
he thinks that Irac should have to give us their oil, Like
1:05:44
that was literally what it was about, was just going
1:05:47
in there and stealing the oil and leaving. He would
1:05:49
have been on board. Well, there's literally there's
1:05:52
a there. He used to have a vlog where
1:05:54
he would vlog from his office, real
1:05:57
beautiful stuff. They've since
1:05:59
been deleted. I think they got deleted right before the election.
1:06:03
Oh I got them all. But there are a
1:06:05
few videos where he talks about this and uh
1:06:08
in regards to Libya specifically, where
1:06:10
he says, we should go into Libya,
1:06:12
we should help these people for humanitarian
1:06:14
reasons, and then when we're done, we
1:06:17
go to them and then we say, give us
1:06:19
half of your oil. So, like he's literally said
1:06:21
before, like years ago, just like, yeah,
1:06:23
we're gonna do humanitarian things
1:06:25
with our military if we can get
1:06:27
paid in oil. He's like laid
1:06:30
it out like that, right,
1:06:33
I like humanitarian things that require
1:06:37
being paid with oil afterwards. But
1:06:39
he and he's like maybe they'll give us the
1:06:42
oil whatever. Um. But he's like literally laid
1:06:44
out like this is how he thinks. He would absolutely
1:06:47
of course do a war for oil. Um.
1:06:50
And he just doesn't want to do a war for
1:06:52
protecting four million people, right, But
1:06:56
if they're willing to give us all
1:06:59
the stuff when after we've saved them,
1:07:01
then he would then then maybe he would. Maybe
1:07:04
he definitely would until their stuff runs
1:07:06
out then Yeah. So just like all the all the surprise,
1:07:09
uh that you see from all these people, even
1:07:11
like Trump fans who are like I can't believe he's
1:07:13
doing this this. Yeah, he's talked about this
1:07:15
for years, um. And like obviously
1:07:17
the Republicans are craven
1:07:21
ghouls who know better, and
1:07:23
they're just playing the game of being surprised by
1:07:25
his actions. So what is it that we are
1:07:27
doing. We've been out there because we all know when
1:07:29
this all started. A week
1:07:31
ago, a week and a half ago, he sent that
1:07:34
Banana's tweet about his
1:07:37
great and unmatched wisdom, blah blah
1:07:39
blah. If they do anything that I
1:07:42
disagree with, I will
1:07:46
be like he has before, so
1:07:49
many questions about that. But
1:07:51
has he decimated their economy? Have they
1:07:54
done something that in his
1:07:56
mind has crossed a line so
1:07:59
that he would be I
1:08:01
mean, there's some pretty shocking videos coming
1:08:04
out of it, are I mean,
1:08:06
did you see I'm sure you did. Sure if uncle
1:08:08
will get very upset and talk to her out about it. Yeah.
1:08:10
Those those um, those mercenaries
1:08:13
gunning down a bunch of medical workers. Yeah
1:08:15
yeah, they pulled out a bunch of
1:08:18
people from the cars and one of them was
1:08:20
a female Kurdish politician
1:08:23
and they murdered them. Made
1:08:25
videos. Yeah. Anyway,
1:08:29
Um, so we we've got some sanctions
1:08:31
coming in, right. I will whisper
1:08:34
that to those corpses. I'm sure they'll be happy
1:08:37
they're being sanctioned. Well, the one thing
1:08:40
like when regimes
1:08:42
are uh doing
1:08:44
a genocide that they've been wanting to do for a
1:08:46
long time, thing, the thing
1:08:48
that stops them is steel tariffs. That
1:08:51
makes them, that gives them. Oh
1:08:54
no, it's just like a weird like approach
1:08:56
where you you basically give them the green light to do
1:08:58
this thing, and then you're like, it'll cost you little
1:09:00
more, the price tag up a little
1:09:02
more. But like that's not that stop you
1:09:04
know, that's guys, scraper, it's gore
1:09:07
expensive. You still get to do the genocide,
1:09:09
but it's gonna be price
1:09:13
here. And like some of the sanctions are
1:09:15
about the leadership
1:09:17
specifically because normally, like normally
1:09:19
sanctions are like they hurt
1:09:21
the people of the nation and
1:09:23
not the people who were in charge of the nation. No,
1:09:27
but so they're they're targeting air
1:09:30
to one and some of his folks
1:09:32
a little bit. But it's just
1:09:34
like yeah,
1:09:37
you're you're letting them do it. And then
1:09:39
you're like, well, but well,
1:09:41
and this is a part of a lot
1:09:43
of this all boils down to, like
1:09:46
we've been very harsh on Trump um
1:09:48
justifiably so, because he
1:09:50
took a situation that was not
1:09:54
great but I had some hope
1:09:56
in it and turned it into one that's just a
1:09:58
complete cluster fuck. But the reason
1:10:00
all of this got this bad, um
1:10:03
was years of liberal politicians
1:10:05
who did not want
1:10:08
to get involved in something complicated
1:10:11
because, for among other things, they didn't think they could sell
1:10:13
it to the American people. You can trace a lot of us back to
1:10:15
Libya. Um, a lot
1:10:17
of people, and uh,
1:10:20
it's so complicated. So with
1:10:23
Libya, the Obama administration attempted
1:10:26
to do something very humanitarian
1:10:28
and brave and decent and necessary,
1:10:31
and they succeeded. And if you look at the amount of people
1:10:33
who have died fighting in Libya since two thousand elevens
1:10:35
about fifty or so. Compared that to the more
1:10:37
than half a million you've died fighting the Syrians civil
1:10:39
war, even if you are quite for like the population
1:10:41
differences, A lot less people
1:10:43
have died in Libya just because we stopped
1:10:45
Kadapi from bombing the ship out of Benghazi.
1:10:48
Um. But you know the four
1:10:50
people, the four Americans who died in Benghazi that
1:10:53
has been was turned to a multiple years long
1:10:55
political issue to try to kill Hillary Clinton.
1:10:57
And the fact that things didn't work out perfically
1:11:00
in Libya, and it didn't They didn't instantly go like, all right,
1:11:02
I guess we're a functioning democracy like
1:11:05
slaves now. Well,
1:11:08
but they were before. That's another one of like you fucking
1:11:10
like there's plenty evidence of it under Condafi in the
1:11:12
nineties, um and in fact that it peaked in
1:11:14
the mid nineties. But like this, it's
1:11:16
very people
1:11:19
who are misinformed and who and
1:11:21
it's a mix of sides because there's a lot of people on the
1:11:23
left who will like to cry Libya as this like
1:11:25
tragedy because we got rid of Kadafi, a man who
1:11:27
kept at stable and it's like, you don't know shit about Kadafi.
1:11:29
He killed like five thousand people in a stadium
1:11:32
one time, just sucking because he's a piece of shit,
1:11:34
Like you don't fucking know what you're talking about.
1:11:36
You don't know anything about the region. You read one
1:11:38
bullshit lefty blog that claimed Kadafi was
1:11:40
a socialist, and so you think that it was US
1:11:42
imperialism, like and so because
1:11:45
of this, because you've got this mix of like assholes
1:11:47
on the right who just won't let
1:11:49
a democratic president have done anything
1:11:52
good. If they do something good, you've got to attack
1:11:54
them for it, and then that thing, humanitarian
1:11:57
intervention, becomes terrible. And then you have
1:11:59
other people who are well, if the US did it,
1:12:01
it has to be bad because we're always
1:12:03
evil. So I have to find reasons
1:12:05
why this is bad. And so that one of the
1:12:07
things that results in because guys like Barack
1:12:10
Obama and most of his his ideological
1:12:13
sympaticos and kind of the center left
1:12:15
are fundamentally not brave. Um,
1:12:18
so they just stopped doing ships. So when
1:12:21
air to one makes a massive power grab in
1:12:23
Turkey and starts imprisoning his enemies after
1:12:25
a very suspicious coup, nobody does
1:12:27
anything about this happening in a NATO nation.
1:12:30
So when Bashar al Assad starts firing
1:12:32
chemical weapons on his own people, nobody
1:12:34
grounds his fucking planes. So when Russia
1:12:37
invades Ukraine, nobody does
1:12:39
anything but slaps a couple of sanctions on
1:12:41
them, because they're scared about what
1:12:43
might happen if they actually take any
1:12:45
kind of effective stances. And because people
1:12:47
keep not doing anything, the situation
1:12:50
keeps getting worse. The authoritarians
1:12:52
keep grabbing more, and the
1:12:54
liberty of people's around the globe is
1:12:56
squeezed and squeezed and choked a
1:12:59
little bit more every day. And
1:13:01
there's a lot of individual authoritarian assholes
1:13:04
like President Trump you can blame for aspects
1:13:06
of it, but the fundamental reason that was allowed
1:13:08
to happen is a failure of courage
1:13:10
from the educated liberal sections
1:13:12
of our society who just didn't
1:13:15
have the fucking gorm to do
1:13:17
what needed to be done because it was scary.
1:13:19
Well yeah, well said, never
1:13:22
heard the word gorn before, but I picked it up.
1:13:25
That's a good one. Residual effects of like
1:13:27
Iraq, where you know, we
1:13:29
know that absolutely absolutely
1:13:31
a bunch of lies got us into a
1:13:35
disaster. And it's there's a little
1:13:37
i mean afraid of the backlash year of
1:13:39
people getting involved, of us getting
1:13:41
involved in situations and
1:13:44
not knowing how it's going to play out. But there's
1:13:46
this also and know what's
1:13:48
our responsibility? Yeah, knowing just
1:13:50
the relationship of of America
1:13:54
and war in the middle military industrial complex
1:13:56
and people that make money from it. So
1:13:58
intentions are always going to be questioned.
1:14:01
Yeah, and and you know, the
1:14:03
fucking what what did? The what did a lot of like the
1:14:05
liberal mainstay politicians who are still active
1:14:08
and we're active in two thousands three do. When
1:14:10
the Iraq War came around, they
1:14:13
voted for it. Yeah,
1:14:16
then some of them wished they hadn't a few
1:14:19
years later, a few few years
1:14:21
later. Um,
1:14:23
yeah, so boomo
1:14:29
universal bill fixed
1:14:31
it. Um, I don't
1:14:33
know. By bolt cutters,
1:14:35
um, boat
1:14:38
cutters buy food and stuff by food
1:14:40
and stuff by water, because we have to buy
1:14:42
water. We have to buy water for water.
1:14:45
Yeah, you gotta pay money for water, you
1:14:48
know, and buy the products and services
1:14:50
that's you
1:14:52
know, like the one we look for in
1:14:55
the in the universe. Uh, to look
1:14:57
for life. What if
1:14:59
we charge everybody for it? Sounds
1:15:01
like I can make a lot of money. Yeah, it does. And
1:15:04
you know that sounds like a flawless
1:15:06
situation, good for people. But
1:15:08
if we package huge amounts
1:15:10
of that water in tiny
1:15:13
bottles made out of a substance that kills
1:15:15
the ocean. Oh, I love
1:15:17
that you've taken. That's a brilliant
1:15:19
idea, and you've made it even better. This
1:15:22
is how we do it. Spitballen
1:15:24
ideas well. This has been the
1:15:26
last episode of the worst year ever. We're off
1:15:29
to make billions of dollars the
1:15:33
year every year. Republican
1:15:38
all the time. Yeah, my opinion on the
1:15:40
capital gains checks tax has changed
1:15:42
instantly. You
1:15:44
know, I didn't see it before, but now
1:15:46
I do. I'm gonna go hang
1:15:49
out with Georgia W. Bush and a baseball.
1:15:51
Yeah that sounds fun. He is a good guy,
1:15:55
he's sweet. He paints now before
1:15:59
you know, murder, but now
1:16:01
painting? What pain? He pay change
1:16:04
coding? Okay, Um,
1:16:08
this has been really fascinating. I'm really
1:16:10
glad that we did this. Yeah, thank you for sharing, Robert.
1:16:12
Yeah, yeah, thanks for
1:16:15
listening, you know, thank all of you for listening.
1:16:17
Yeah, guys, thank you so much. We're welcome. Mm
1:16:20
hmm. Well that's
1:16:22
going to do it for all of us here at the worst
1:16:24
year ever until next week when we talk
1:16:27
about probably Andrew Yang probably
1:16:30
will be more upbeat. That's actually episode
1:16:32
we recorded before this one. So I'm very
1:16:34
bummed out in it because my friends were getting
1:16:37
bombed. Now you've
1:16:39
got context when you hear it. We
1:16:41
report that last week, we pushed it for
1:16:43
next week. It's fine, it'll keep it's
1:16:45
fine, it'll keep you not Andrew
1:16:47
Yang ain't going nowhere. We
1:16:50
got a debate tonight or
1:16:54
like the butt all right, it is,
1:16:58
but I'm now
1:17:00
we've gotten our political commentary in good
1:17:03
all right, guys, thanks for listening. Thanks
1:17:06
Robert again, and I guess thanks
1:17:08
Cody, Oh,
1:17:10
you're welcome. I guess see you next week.
1:17:12
And you know who else we should thank the
1:17:16
products and Products. I should
1:17:18
have known that, I should have seen where you were going
1:17:20
with that. Thanks Products and Services.
1:17:23
Thanks Products and Services
1:17:26
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