It Could Happen Here Weekly 108

buildings were destroyed. Thank God for that. There is America full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America is tasting now with something insignificant to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked, and no one hears and no one heeds.

Those words, written by Osama bin Laden in October seventh, two thousand and one, were part of his first statement issued after the nine to eleven attacks. You might notice a few things about that. One is, of course, the glorying over the deaths of several thousand people, and another is that when it comes to his analysis of the cultural and psychological impact of nine to eleven on the

United States, he was more or less right. This is it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart and nothing better embodies the slow, sometimes rapid collapse of the United States as our reaction to nine to eleven and our continuing responses to it. And so today I've got in the studio. We don't actually have a studio.

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

he believed nine to eleven to be justified, and going wow, he has a point some of them saying stuff that's more unhinged than that even and then you've got this chorus of responses from both kind of centrist you know, media figures, cultural commentators, pundits, and of course right wing shitheads who are all making this out to be the left looves Osama bin Laden. We're going to get into kind of where the truth lies in this and also

what is in the letter to America. But yeah, welcome, Welcome to the pod everyone, Thanks Robert, horrible to be here. How did you how did you all hear about this, this new fun trend on the internet.

was a horrible mistake. I have found a number of comments being like, this is them. They're trying to stop you from reading Ben Lawden's words. We're all going to be on a watch list. They can't arrest all of us. You can still access the Letter to America.

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

of damage, not just to the United States. That said, I've also long been an advocate for like, he's probably going to go down as one of the most effective and intelligent military rategic minds of the twenty first century. The September eleventh attacks worked in large part, right because of how We're rereacted, because of the amount of money that we spent, the amount of people that we killed, the amount of anger that we engendered against the West, and the amount of damage that we did to our

own society. A lot of the fallout that we're seeing and all these you know, right wing street gangs and shit, a lot of it traces back to fallout from the wars that were started by the Bush administration after September eleventh. So, and that was that was part of the stated goal, right, that was one of the things he was looking to provoke a reaction. So I'm both like glad hopefully some people are going to come away from this with a

more nuanced understanding of the guy. And when I say nuanced, I don't mean in a moral sense, because it's bad to kill thousands of random people, but in the sense of like, oh, this was not I think I need to play something for you guys, because like as a nine to eleven, like I was like nine or ten when it happened, so I remember it all very well, and I remember the reaction to it, and I remember

the propaganda we encountered. And there's this thing that you will find written about fascists pretty regularly, which is that they both need an all powerful enemy, but they also need an enemy that's like fundamentally free of virtue, and

intelligence and skill are virtues. So both in the wake of nine to eleven, you got this sort of al Qaeda and you know, larger sort of Islamist movements were considered this nefarious force as they are now in the wake of the attacks by Hamas, right, this nefarious force that is capable of infiltrating the US border and seeking

terrorist sales into the United States to hit anybody. And at the same time they're like primitive idiots who are bigots against who are you know, they hate women and all this stuff, right, Like you can't you can't see them as capable or intelligent, because then that would that would be to give them a virtue that you reserve

for yourself anyway. I think a good example of that is this parody song by John Valby that I am countered in a Napster download when I was a child, and this did not it's bin Laden.

so and and it's pretty offensive. So just be aware people, I'm about to play it now. Can't wait? Oh yeah, no, you're gonna have all right? Can you see the giant Confederate? So this is from a John Valby album. I think it was called Real Woman Do Play in Mud Puddles? I don't know, maybe not. That may just be a

random image I did not check. There's like describe there's the general lee as a mudding truck with a giant Confederate flag behind it, and then with the Confederate flag like colors the text real women do play in mud puddles and it's as Southern girls serven girl on the on the windshield of the truck. So I'm gonna start playing this song. I'm not gonna play all of it, but this should set up for you kind of what the acceptable discourse on bin Laden was right after nine to eleven.

The West Wing managed to kind of, but it was like a dog shit episode. But the South Park guys

really pivoted and they put out this episode. It was basically like a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Cartman as Bugs Bunny and Osama Bin Ladden as Elmer Fudd right, and there were a bunch of like scenes of him like bug eyes bugging out when like shit would happen, and it was It was weird because like the I think the most people who watched it, including myself, took it in the same manner of that song as like, yeah, fuck these guys, these like you know, in ways that

were pretty bigoted. There was also like the episode opened with an extended bit of kids in Afghanistan with everything around them and all the adults getting murdered by US airplanes for no seeming reason, which was like part of the anyway whatever. I think one of the was like what we're seeing in some of like why young people are reacting to this letter by bin Laden so strongly is they've never really gotten to appraise the guy objectively.

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

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

are the people on TikTok. There's a lot of AI videos where either the text will be read by AI with like images and video clips on screen, or you'll some there's some creepy instances of people just generating AI faces sometimes of like actual murderers and criminals to talk about the shit they did. It's really weird. But one of the top videos I found on this from about a little less than a day ago, is just the entire text of bin Laden's letter to America being read

by an AI and it it sounds weird. I'm going to just let everyone get a listen to this.

this culture to improve things and reduce harms. You need to understand why what he did worked as well as it did, and you need to understand what he knew

about us, because it's pretty useful stuff to understand. That is different from saying that what he is, Like, you don't have to view it as the truth, right because it's it's it's not like the truth in any moral sense, but it's the truth in that Like if you if you read some of Hitler's writings on democracy, Hitler accurately understood the vulnerabilities of a democratic system and how to exploit them. You should understand that you're not saying, wow,

he was spitting truth. You're just saying, yeah, well some people are, Robert. That is a problem. Yeah, some people, in fact are.

need to teach history properly and media literacy. Right after Donald Trump got elected, because a lot of people didn't know what the fuck was going on, we just and then we just stopped, and everyone was like, nah, fuck it, why not, We'll just keep doing STEM STEM STEM and then, like like teaching undergraduates often like intro courses for years, it's become very clear that we are completely failing in the United States to educate people or equipment with any

understanding of American history, and so they just get propaganda.

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

it right. Everything associated with the trend like yeah, you know, like and this is this is the way that like censorship stuff tends to work in China because it's kind of easy to do and it covers your ass, and so now Americans are like experiencing this.

videos that are more critical. It is difficult for me to tell what the preponderance of is because there's not no one's basing what they're saying on a sentiment analysis. They're basing it on what their timelines forwarded them based on their passion when they typed letter to America or whatever into Twitter or into a TikTok. But like I ran into this lady video and like so not plenty

of these are and I found others like this. Plenty of these are like a little more critical but not but still, yeah, I'll just play it.

But that does not mean that we should mystify these terrible people. But are also criticized the West and questions in the West, and like how we operated over here, Osam b and LANs doing the same thing. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong on what they're saying, but it doesn't take away the fact that they're sexist, fascist, racist dictators.

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

Like that, Yes, that is propaganda. And if that's all you've had your whole life and you're you're now seeing this other side, this is probably like this is definitely like mind blowing, but like you can look into why these things happen without just falling for someone else's extremist propaganda,

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

Like you can't just sort of ping pong from one like countries sort of prop media propaganda to another countries because they're all doing it and the stuff that they're saying also isn't true. You have to actually, like you have to actually try to work out the sort of the reality of history. You can't just rely on reading like some other like some other propaganda's version of events.

well at all in schools. But like the lack of understanding of the difference between primary and secondary sources, right, and like people want to get straight to the source, so they'll go and read one historical primary source without the adequate secondary context and suddenly be like oh shit, and yeah, as you say, turned into a maoist or apparently Memora of al Kaieda.

he's looking at a rack, he's looking at Palestine. It's very interesting. But like he's not just interviewing people. There's like a set of basically an algorithm that he runs his different interviews and like the overall sentiments expressed in them through in order to try and determine like here is the aggregate of like what I found as a reaction to this question from like the people that I survey.

It's the same kind of stuff that you do in a survey to attempt to add a little bit more rigor than just saying, well, I talked to ten people and most of them said this, So clearly this is a trend, right, which journalists are often guilty of, and also just goes ab in part because of that. Twitter goes wild with this kind of shit, just like well, I looked through and I listened to twenty videos, and most of them the kids loved Bin Laden. So the kids must love Bin Lodding now, which I don't think

is entirely fair, but I wanted to. I think it's probably a good time for us to go through the Letter to America and talk about what is actually in this thing, right, because you might as well know what's in it. It's a good thing to read. Again, you can find it on wiki source.

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

For he complains about corrupt rulers in the Muslim world, and he is talking about not just guys like Saddam, but like largely the Saudi royal family is a big part of it. He talks a lot about Iran and basically the uh So that's kind of like a bit where a lot of his like grievances start. He does bring up and one of the videos, James that you posted earlier was like in Israeli man responding to this and basically characterizing in a very inaccurate form saying like, uh,

there's no facts in this letter. Like he doesn't like say anything true. Yeah, he's just angry at Israel in Palestine, right, He's just angry at like at that. And he does bring up Palestine multiple times. There's lines like the blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. That's a significant part of his case. But he also lists a lot of other areas right, he is not. It is not just what's happening. It's not just what Israel is

doing in Palestine that he's talking about. There's lines like, you attacked us in Somalia, you supported Therussian atrocities against us in Chechnia, the Indian oppression against US in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against US in Lebanon, and he brings all of those up several times. He also he does drop some facts in here. One of the more salient lines is you have starved the Muslims of Iraq,

where children die every year. It is a wonder that more than one point five million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern yet when three thousand of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet set down. And that's not an inaccurate thing to be That's not

an inaccurate statement or a thing to not be angry about. Now, that's not the full context of it, right, because there is a bunch of stuff that is in here that is like bidden laden culture, warshit that absolutely is not reasonable or a reason to bomb people. Like there's a point in the letter where he's like, what do we want from you? The Americans like, what do we you know? Al Kaida, the people who have attacked you. He's speaking kind of broadly for the Uma here, what are we

asking from you? And the first thing we are is that we are calling you to Islam, which I don't think is likely to happen. The second thing is we are calling on you to stop your repression, lies in immorality and debauchery that has spread among you. We call him for you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity, to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling,

and trading with interest. We call all of you this that you might be freed from what you have already been caught up in. That you might be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation. And you may recognize that as a pretty insane reason to kill three thousand people. I mean there's gambling, Yeah, yeah.

version of his religion. Yeah, like that's the primary thing that this isn't about, like US imperialism in terms of what his end project is.

this country has been complicit in within our lifetimes. Absolutely a fucking nightmare. He devotes as much time to the to that as he does to this next paragraph I'm going to which is another one of his grievances. Who can forget your President Clinton's imral acts committed in the official oval office. After that, you did not even bring him to account other than that he made a mistake, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go

down in history and be remembered by nations? He was, like, it's fucked up that you killed a million people. The worst thing you did was let your president get a blowjob, Like that is part of this letter, And that's a crazy person thing to think. Yeah, Like that's just him being an asshole, because not really a problem, right, there's personal problems, right, but on the scale of like American crimes, the fact that we didn't forcepend or forced Clinton out

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

you attribute to it. And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man that you brought aids as a satanic American invention.

political project is. This is the exact same thing. It is exactly this is the this is the thing reactionaries do. This is like they will take a few of these points talking about imperialism, talking about capitalism, and then wrap it in a fascistic package like that. That is their entire political goal. It's it's it's the entire way they recruit, it's how they spread their propaganda. It's how they get people to believe conspiracy theories.

the validity of his points. Yeah, this is not a This is not a guy you need to agree with.

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

of Democracy. And like, yeah, there's some valid stuff in that paragraph, right, there's some there's some points he's making there that people who have started to get people who have just gotten out of like their parents' bubble and who are starting to become aware of the world and

history in the US's place in it. I see why, especially if they encounter stuff like that out of context, they will find that intriguing, because that's a fairly lucid and reasonable sentiment of a horrible thing that this country has been involved in.

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

But in a lot of parts of the world there is right wing anti colonialism, and you know, The core difference here is there are people who hate colonialism because of their sort of deep and abiding, principled opposition to oppression and exploitation, and there are people who hate colonialism because their empire lost a war and they want to go back to being.

bin Laden's own description of his motivation. And the thing that's important here right is that you know, assamo'm bin Laden is not some Palestinian k who picked up an ak after the Israelis murdered his family. Assamo'm bin Laden is one of the heirs to Saudi bin Laden group.

And this is a second I need this style. We need to stop for a little bit and talk about the differences between American and Saudi capitalism, because they don't they're not structured the same way And one of the sort of big differences here is that the Saudi bin Laden group isn't like it's not like a company, right,

it's a conglomerate. And what this means is that you know, is that bin Laden's family, like the people who own the bin Laden Group, which is outed by his dad, they don't own one company, they own five hundred companies.

The American equivalent to who bin Laden is is like it's it's it's imagine if one off Jeff Bezos' kids went to like a church, like an Orthodox church of Ukraine's seminary school, and then god his dad to like go like pay for him to go do war tourism in Ukraine and then got a group together to like fly a plane into the Kremlin.

Right that that that's the thing that allowed him and not you know, like that kid in like that that that that kid in Gazo picked up an ak Like that's the that allowed him to declare war in the US. And I want to read his account of what he actually thinks happened to the US. This is this is, this is from that same uh this this, this is from that same letter. You are the nation that permits usury, which has been forbidden by all religions, yet you build

your economy and investments on usury. As a result of this in all its different forms, and guys, is the Jews have taken over your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media and now control all aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense, precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against. So I want to like, like like think for it. Like I wanted people to sort of stop

and look at what he's actually saying here. His argument for why the US is an imperialist power is that it is controlled by Jews who control the economy in the media and has enslaved the rest of the US to do their will. And this is and I cannot emphasize this enough word for word, a Nazi yes analysis what happened to the US? And this is this is what right wing anti colonialism is.

effectively usury. It's just okay. So if you know anything about like orthodox Judaism, right, you are not supposed to do anything on the Sabbath, and so some people do keep that You're not even supposed to turn on a light, right, like One of the old ways this was expressed is like you would light candles the night before the Sabbath so that you could have some burning on the Sabbath. Today there are ways around it that are like you get lights that are scheduled to go on and off

at certain hours, and it's it's always. It's kind of funny. There's a lot of jokes about this you get from the Jewish comedians being like, do you think God is like tricked by your rule slowering and stuff? But there are banks in the Muslim world that are the banking equivalent of that. Well, what they're doing isn't technically taking interest, but like it works out to be the same thing for them. They're just they're just getting around anyway. I think that's an important piece.

you cut you crafty bastards. Got me again, guys. I didn't think you need those, guys, They're so gross.

a different like school of Islamic jurisprudence. Then al Kaida is even though they sort of they kind of work together sometimes, but like, you know, but the thing, like the sort of hobbyist school that like bin Laden is from right, like he's the reason he has a right wing anticlonial critique is he's absorbed this sort of like social mores and he's absorbed you know, the like the the like involved in the slave trade, level of anti blackness that you get from the Souds, like from you know,

like the the he's absorbed their anti Semitism. He's absorbed all of these things. And this is what he sort of like has constructed as the reason you know, and filtered through his sort of cobbling together of like different sort of like like of like so how you could up and of sort of like different sort of Islamic thinkers, Like this is what he's assembled together. And it's this thing that it's not a stable, coherent critique of the US.

It's it's it's it's this like it's all of his sort of like weird prejudices and hang ups like grafted onto anti colonialism and being able to tell the difference between someone who is a genuine anti colonialist and someone who is doing this stuff or like who wants their empire back, or who is like, you know, like pissed

off that gay people exist like that. That is something that is genuinely very important, and it's something that's made enormously harder to do by the way that people like, you know, by by the American education system, by the way people are raised to think about media. Yeah, yeah, this is this is, this is, this is, this is this has the bin Loden rant.

talking about dealing with problems like Islamic extremism. Because I think Bin Laden's words here are pretty salient and this comes from a common team made. It wound up airing on Al Jazeera criticizing George Bush ahead of the two thousand and four election. Your security is not in the hands of Democratic candidate John Kerry or President George Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands.

We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush in his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings. They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed, and thievery, and again not wrong, not wrong about most Muslim majority nations, and not wrong about most Western nations.

Yeah it got wrong for you. Yeah, alternatively, get on Twitter or wherever YouTube and film an angry video in your car about how all of gen z I ironically and supports the mass killing of civilians. Do either. Those seem to be the two primary things people are doing right now. So get out and join the herd. Everybody. It's fun. What a great place. Ah, welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast that is now happening here. I could have done something with ear but we'll do

that next time. Just forget that I said that, and welcome Mia to the program. Mia, how are you doing today?

picked him effectively because nobody knew who he was. Yeah, and so they picked this guy and they're like okay, and Mike Johnson gets elected and immediately everyone starts trying to figure out who this guy is, and they very quickly realize this guy is just a absolute incredible Christian fundamentalist weirdo. He he doesn't have a bank account.

to the case. It's you know, you could you could draw random words out of a hat and produce a sentence that was literally nonsensical, and that would be a better read of the end of the Roman Empire and saying gay people or homosexuality like, because it's all wrapped up in this sort of like it was decadence that caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They were too like, you know, they were just too life sensious, and they just throw up some some vocabulary words.

lot of very weird in politics. And I remember, like a few years ago, the big thing was like the Rome was called the fall of Rome was caused by immigration, Yeah, which.

dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the earth like it. It's that kind of same thing. And so if they think about somebody like Caligula or Nero running this like running these courts of decadence, like, it doesn't click to them that this is like in the first century, and that the Roman Empire doesn't fall for four hundred years, five hundred years, and then the East keeps going for another thousand years.

to this day, So it is. It is kind of fascinating how far that idea goes back, Like it says something about the success of Roman propaganda, that it still has this place in so many people's minds.

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But organizing your worldview around utterly historically illiterate version of the Roman Empire that is really just a vehicle for your own special bigotry. That's where they're really running a foul of me and my temper.

something to do with like degeneracy. But yeah, it's like you can find Romans in like the the Middle Republic period saying the same thing, that, like, we've become too degenerate, too lazy, because of like all of the you know, slaves automating, you know, the ruling classes tasks people have. You know, Romans are not like the Romans of our forefathers and stuff anymore. And like, you know, the empire continued or the Republic and then the Empire still had centuries in the tank at that.

just doesn't none of it shapes up. Is that what Cato the Elder and people like him were complaining about way back in the second century was this is when the Romans come in contact with the Greeks, and there was there was a kind of like a split between traditional Latin Romanness and then this like new Eastern Greaceness, which like they've got new ideas and like they sounds like they have sex with each other all the time.

You know, they don't care if they're men or women, and so that's what they were pushing back against, and so that kind of language does that.

I think does suggest part of why it's almost impossible to not keep bringing Rome up, which is that like there are and I think that it's a mix of like there are some legitimate similarities between our cultures, and also our concept of Rome, which is often a historical but is based on generations of misconceptions, makes it seem even closer.

are our forebears, whether we like it or not. Like any civilization that exists today that went through the Mediterranean world, you know, it had a Roman period, and the Romans made a strong imprint on all of us in terms of like our laws and how we think about money, and how we think about family relationships, like all of these things are you know, we're living in a post Roman world, and that's why it's important to study the Roman Empire as an entity, but do it with some

degree of rigor rather than just using it as a prop in the culture wars. Yeah, that was a great That was a great point I just made in so No, that was absolutely brought the conversation to a complete stance. So as everybody said, just chewed on this nugget wisdom that I have fruped at the table.

a meaningful understanding of the Roman Empire. And I'm kind of wondering, like when you when you come into misconceptions about Rome, what are some of like the top ones on your list that uh that that your brain just forces you to go in and.

are very modern inventions. I'm sure a lot of people know this, but we can also point very specifically to like, you know, Hadrian, who is broadly considered and cited to be one of the greatest of the emperors who lived at the height of the Golden.

do what he did. All of it is just complete and utter ahistorical nonsense, and so I consider it, I consider it my duty as some kind of voice of authority on Roman history to not let people get away with this. The last, the last time I saw this pop up was actually uh Ben Carson, which is a little bit of a blast from the past at this point, but he he he wrote a book at one point

where he dropped this stuff in there. And and the way they always couch it too is like as we all know, you know, it was homosexuality that really led to the generacy of.

my gears that really emerged. This this was not a preconception that I had going into doing the history of Rome, but something that I came away from after doing it and studying, you know, the year by year history of the Empire, is that this notion that like sort of the Romans were this uh like like a like a like a nationality that then went forth and conquered the Mediterranean, that Romans were Romans as like an ethnic stock thing, and that it was when these other ethnicities started sort

of pressing at the empire's borders, or as we said a little bit earlier, that it was immigration right that destroys the Roman Empire. That there was this kind of like pure noble Roman thing. This is essentially functioning as the white person in the ancient world, Like this is

how we're connecting these things. The British did this, the French did this, Americans now do this today, that like the Romans are our stand in as sort of the white people, and the white people are civilized and all of these other like mongrel races are are uncivilized, and they were either civilized by the Romans that they were killed by the Romans or enslaved by the Romans. But this is all for the good because the Romans themselves were were like this this this superior stock of DNA somehow.

And really, when you go through the empire, the h history of the Roman Empire, you find that there is that kind of conservative strain inside of like the patrician class and inside of the senatorial class that they're like, we want this to be a closely held thing, Like the original Republic was a closely held oligarchy of Latin families who lived on the Palatine Hill, and that's what they wanted for themselves. And so when other people tried to push into the Republic, they tried to resist it.

And so that is a running conflict that happens in Roman history. But any time that that tendency is overcome and a second prevailing force that says like, actually, Romanness is just an idea. Romanness is just a set of beliefs and practices and sort of daily habits of life and ideology that can really be held by anybody at

any time. And if we let in say non Roman Italians, which is the first people who were considered non Roman who then came into the Empire, which then we look back and we're like, there was a time that Romans didn't think that people from what is today like Florin or Milan were not Italian or not Roman. Yeah, yeah, they were not considered Roman until you know, the very late stages of the Republic. I mean, I wrote a book about the later stage of the Republic, and the

Social War is when this gets wrapped up. After hundreds of years being treated as second class citizens, there was a civil war that nearly destroyed the Republic before Caesar even came along. It was resolved by giving citizenship to the Italians, making them full members of the polity, and then having that just be a boon to Rome's fortunes. This happens in Gaul, this happens in Spain, this happens

in Illyria, this happens in the Far East. That these people who the Romans encounter and yes, do conquer, because it's a very violent world of conquest and mutual conquest. That Romans in Gaul were as much Romans as Romans in Rome. And anytime I find Roman leaders resisting that idea, I find the empire starting to falter and commit miss steps. And anytime they're like, nah, let's just throw it open.

You know, if you're good, if you're dedicated, if you're loyal, you can be a part of this project that we have. Then I find the Romans doing very very well. And I'm about to start not to just monologue here, but I'm about to start working on another book that is about the crisis of the third century. And by this time, we have emperors who are coming from North Africa. We

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

empire intact. So this notion that like the Rome wasn't a multicultural empire, or that the arrival of new peoples was somehow bad for them is just disproven over and over and over again by the realities of Roman history. So that's the other one is this immigration caused the fall of the Roman Empire is just flat out incorrect.

not five years ago. It's much further away called Why did Rome Fall? And Why does It Matter Now? And there's a quote I found from a little article he wrote plugging it that I want to bring up here so we can chew over in short, what ruined Rome

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

Hispanic people. Like it's just loathsome shit that he writes. Anyway, this culture of entitlement, right, like oh, it was just bread and circuses and like the empire had to give all this money to like how many Like okay, great, the Roman Rome the city was like a million people, yeah, right, And there were a couple of large urban hubs that did have like grain doles because you needed to be able to feed the people in these cities. And this is you know, smart policy by the emperors. It's actually

not bad on a humanitarian level. And then they also through games because this is what people do. Rich people throw parties to make themselves love like this is a very This happens today, This happens all the time, This

happened during the medieval period, happens all the time. The number of people who are like benefiting from this like imperial largess, who have this like entitlement mentality is such a fraction, such a fraction of the total number of people who live in this empire, where we're talking about sixty sixty five million people maybe maybe give or take a little bit. Not that many people were on the dole in Rome. It was usually just the male head

of the household got some grain. It was like it was it was a little bit of supplemental It's basically the equivalent of like supplemental income. It was absolutely not just they're rolling out banquets for these people every single day. Nor is it the case that that entitlement of Romans living in Rome in the two hundred's AD or something

is like the reason why they couldn't sustain their border defenses. Right, This is the same arguments we get when it's like, you know, we can't afford social security because the you know, the National Endowment for the Sciences paid somebody two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to uh to look into the you know, be keeping habits.

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

every single year a province was getting a new governor who was there to extract as much money for himself as possible because he had taken out tons and tons of loans to throw the biggest games that he possibly could,

to build the biggest act, to build the biggest thing. Now, when you get into the later Empire, like are their financial difficulties of course, right, you don't get the kind of monument building and even aqueduct building and infrastructure projects you get in the later Empire, But like there are larger economic and structural reasons why they were suffering financial difficulties at the end of the empire that have nothing to do with these couple of grain doles that were

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

that's just not where any of this is taking place.

like interesting to bring up. But the thing that I mean, and this was this is also pure speculation, but that I always wonder more about, not just with Rome, but with like most postmodern societies and even like early modern societies, is like, what about like mild head injuries, because we know so much more now about how a bunch of little head injuries can permanently alter your behavior, and like, like that's a big thing when I think about when

I think about like the World War one generation, is you've got millions of men who wind up becoming very influential in politics who are under artillery barrages and who are there's almost no way they're not walking away with some kind of cte based on what we know now about what being near artillery does to your brain. You know what does that do to Yeah, the ancient world was full of trauma and that's and that's a real thing.

All of these guys were deeply, deeply traumatized. But like one of the other points about the whole like bread doll thing is this gets back to this is sneaky backdoor racism because the argument, the argument is that Rome was great when it was the Romans doing it like these actual like Latins who were coming from the environs of Rome in particular, and that it all started to go bad ones non Romans were in charge of things because the Romans themselves had had decayed into this like,

oh well, we just want our bread and circuses and we're not going to join the legions. We'll just have Germans do our fighting for us, or Goths do our fighting for us. Which that is That is simply sneaky backdoor racism, because it's a way of saying that it was the reason why the Roman Empire was successful was because of this small population group and once they go away, other groups, these mongrel digs, will never be able to live up to or sustain civilization in the way that

Romans did. The pure Romans did and so that's also a big reason why we need to push back on these things is because the Roman Empire was not just sustained but thrived and expanded by people who were not Romans.

And the idea that you know, their civilization required this like little tiny speck of a DNA spark to keep it going is just you know, this is the kind of person who finishes writing that book and then immediately turns their attention to modern California politics and says, the big problem here is Hispanics.

how homosexuality was this like degenerate thing. That brought down the empire, and like you go back and you like read the Nazis and they are also absolutely obsessed with, like you know, with this notion of like degenerate art and like cultural degeneracy is this force that's this internal

force of subverting the empire. And you know, and like this is also I think another like reason to be reason to be interested in a better way about Rome was also the way that like the original Italian fascists art. I mean, like the word fascism is like derived you know, like from from Roman symbol symbols, right, and like you know, this is like Mussolini's entire thing is about turning the Vediterranean into the Roman lake. Blah blah blah blah.

It's just a bunch of fascists claimed it for their own.

Like it's just an idea, that's it. It's just sort of a way of thinking about something or a way of describing something. It's not actually a really real thing that is out there in the world. Like if you have a society that suddenly can't grow grain and you have a famine, like that's a real thing that will actually affect your society and bring it down. You have

this other thing that is just like moral degeneracy. This is just like you listing things you don't like and saying that this is the reason why things are falling apart, because degeneracy can be anything to anybody. But really, you know, like people smoking cigarettes at four o'clock in the morning because they've been up all night, you know, doing drugs, like that's what kids do, what people have that people are always going to do this, This is always on

the backgrounds and margins of any society. So like and rich people like they've always partied, they always will party. Like those kinds of things. You can't really then say like, oh, well we've accumulated too much degeneracy. Now our society is going to start to break apart, and this, you know, the things that we see today in terms of our own sort of faltering democratic republic. This is not because

of degeneracy. This isn't because the kids are doing too many drugs, or like we legalize gay marriage, Like that's not That's not why any of this is happening. It's happening for other reasons. It's happening because of greed. It's happening because of sociopathic indifference to other people's lives. Those are the things that actually matter, not whether you stayed up all night drinking and partying.

at their best. And when you know, degeneracy got entered into it, when immigrants got into into it, that's when it sort of fell apart. I guess some of that's mixed in with sort of like Frank Miller as opposed to any sort of real history. But that's always the case, right, I think a lot.

the Romans had those ideas. I mean that we get the word barb like the word like one of the points that I'm going to make probably in my book is that like so the word barbarian just means non Greek, like that's it, because the Greeks had a you know, a very sort of self centered.

their own. They just march around in squares and kill people like That's that was their interpretation of what the Romans were originally, which is not a you know, terrible interpretation of e really Roman history. But yeah, this just this sort of dividing between civilized peoples and barbaric peoples is something that then has been around for thousands of

years and we're still doing it today. Like everything that we're seeing, you know, and I look at Israel and Palestine, there's a lot of this mapping of civilized versus uncivilized people onto this conflict that I see is rooted in a lot in these sort of Western traditions that informed nineteenth century racist ideas about how things you know, about how societies organize themselves, all of which needs to be deconstructed and thrown away.

that very self centered. You know, if you go through anthropological history of any group of people, their word for themselves is just the word for person.

Corn isn't supposed to be eaten this way. It's meant to be eaten just as it is, or rather how it has come to be because of human intervention, which is delicious. I am obsessed with corn. My entire family is obsessed with corn. Corn boiled sweet corn in particular, is one of the most popular street foods in the Middle East and Syria. Street vendors have handfuls dozens of corn cobs boiling in these giant cauldrons at the side

of the road, and the smell is intoxicating. Every time my family and I were in Syria, my uncle would stop by a vendor and grab bags full of corn for us, like it was right after getting picked up from the airport, our first stop always. Then we'd usually put the corn in the biggest pot my grandmother had and boil them fresh. And again the smell, you guys, it would fill up the entire apartment and it smelled

so good. The corn would be steaming hot, and we'd move the couch in the living room in order to make room for the table that we can all eat on and gather around, and we would devour the corn. We would go to town, and in my thoughts about corn that I have quite often, I started wondering about how exactly did corn become a street food, because it's a street food in many cultures. Elote is one that comes to mind that is the most popular, I believe, But I wanted to know why and how how did

it become so popular as street food. That's what I wanted to find out, and I did kind of. I ended up learning a lot about the history of corn and how exactly it ended up being in practically everything we eat, and that was fascinating to me, so maybe you'll find it fascinating too. Today corn is one of the world's most important crops. That is not news. Obviously, we eat corn, and it can also be turned into flour and syrup. It's fed to livestock, it's transformed to ethanol,

and it can even be used to make plastic. More than one billion tons of corn are produced around the globe every year, and corn yields more than six percent of all food calories for humans, which is a big percent even though six is a small number. Let's talk about the history of corn. Corn as we know it today would not exist if it weren't for the humans that cultivated and developed it. It is a human invention, a plant that does not exist naturally in the wild.

It can only survive if planted and protected by humans. Relatable scientists believe that people living in central Mexico developed corn about ten thousand years ago. Apparently, civilization got off to a slow start in Mexico, flagging about five thousand years behind civilization in what historians call the quote fertile Crescent of the Middle East. Hughitlas, a University of Wisconsin, the professor of botany, thinks this delay can be blamed

on the differences in plants. He said, the New World civilization developed slowly because the basic food crop first cultivated in Mexico was corn. He said the process of deriving corn from wild plants was maybe fifty times more complex than the development of wheat and other crops in the Middle East. Las said agriculture in the Old World started ten thousand years ago with the sowing of wild plant seeds.

With time, farmers selected grains with seed pods that didn't shatter as easily and that could be easily gathered and stored, And humans got plenty of lessons from animals too. He said. The early Old World farmers probably learned from golden hamsters and other little seed gathering mammals that lived in the area, and they learned this way to hoard seeds over the winter.

What's kind of fucked up about that, though, is that Itlas said these humans may have even dug out some of the hamsters seeds stashes and taken those seeds from the hamsters route. But in comparison, the New World farmers did not have it so easy. There were no plants well suited to agriculture and no seed hoarding mammals to learn from. The only potential grain the New World people had to work with was an unpromising mutant plant derived

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

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

tiny ear. It was said that the first step in the development of corn as we know it today involved a quote catastrophic sexual transmutation his words that converted the tip of some male tassels into the uniquely monstrous many ranked ears. Also his words that are now the edible female ears of corn. I did not know I've been eating female corn this whole time. But this is what

researching a podcast can do. After this complex transformation, farmers then had to select mutant tiocente plants that were more edible and easier to cultivate. These changes were much more complex than the changes that made old world plants useful. Modern agriculture continues to tinker with corn and ti ucentae. It Liss said that plant breeders today are crossing the two plants together to derive perennial or enduring, long lasting corn that would not have to be planted each year

and that would be resistant to viruses. Steve Price is a biotechnology researcher for the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, and he said that with genetic engineering techniques, it might take five years rather than five thousand years for contemporary humans to make a better corn plant. This time, from Mexico, corn spread north into the southwestern United States and then

south down the coast to Peru. In Mexico, squash cultivation began ten thousand years ago, but corn had to wait for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its wild ancestor, teocente. Wild corn like plants derived from theo cente appear to have been cultivated at least nine one thousand years ago. The first directly dated corn cob dates to only around five thousand and five hundred years ago.

As corn reached North America, it cultivated sunflowers, and this is also when potato started growing in the Andes region of South America about one thousand years ago. As indigenous people migrated north to the eastern woodlands of present day North America, they brought corn with them. So when Europeans like Columbus, friend of the Show, made contact with people living in North and South America, corn was a major

part of the diet of most native people. When Columbus quote unquote discovered or just like bumped into America, he also discovered corn for his people, because up to this time, people living in Europe did not know anything about corn. In fourteen ninety three, Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with apparently a pocket full of corn seeds, among other things. He learned a lot during his travels to the New World,

killed and his people and stolar land, et cetera. But being exposed to this new grain he was unfamiliar with, seemed promising agriculturally for Europe. It was unfamiliar it was delicious. It was us Columbus romanticized at the time quote affixed by nature in a wondrous manner, and inform in size like garden peas. And it could, to corn's credit, if Europeans learned to farm it properly help feed a lot

of people. The only problem was that Columbus had left behind a fairly important bit of information about said corn. He didn't take back the knowledge of how to process it. Betty Fusell is the author of Quote the Story of Corn, which chronicles corn's several thousand year history. She says it might sound innocuous, but the history of corn probably changed the course of humanity. According to her, the old world is a wheat culture. You know what else is a

wheak culture. Ads, and we're back, okay. So, over the next few hundred years, most of Europe grew to misunderstand corn rather than embrace it. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, corn endured a different fate. It thrived and eventually found its way into the very center of the American diet. Until the eighteen hundreds, corn was eaten mostly by the poor. It was a cheap and prolific crop consumed by farmers and fed to prisoners, and used also as a commodity.

As Michael Pollan wrote in his two thousand and six book The Omnivores Dilemma, corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted on during their passage to America. But then came the Industrial Revolution and with it three essential technologies that helped corn thrive from being just the grain for poor people to being the grain for all people,

consumed by everyone. The first invention was an iron plow, which allowed farmers to sow deep into the soil on much larger scales. The Midwest was planted with corn on a commercial basis precisely because of the iron plow, which, although it seems pretty simple, was a revolutionary tool. Two other advancements had an equally large effect, even though they

touched corn production more tangentially. Fuselle said that one of the most important boons for corn might have been that the commercial farms in the Midwest grew up at the same time as the canneries and railroads. Until then, corn was mainly distributed locally, but trains helped move the grain far beyond just county limits, and along with the advent of canning, it meant that corn could keep for much longer. This allowed farmers to grow corn and other crops with

hundreds of thousands of mauths in mind. In the coming decades, the amount of land dedicated to corn grew incredibly quickly, but it wouldn't be for another fifty years until corn actually made its way to the center of the American diet. Corn is what fu Cell calls a genetic monster because it's highly adaptable and easily manipulated, and there is perhaps no better example of its mutant like qualities than what

happened shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, scientists discovered a way to boost corn production to a level that was previously unthinkable. They bred hybrid strains that had larger ears and could be grown closer together, which allowed farmers to produce a

lot more corn without needing more land. This discovery, along with the introduction of new industrial fertilizers and more efficient farm tools like tractors, led to a huge increase of corn output. Paul Roberts wrote in his two thousand and nine book The End of Food that in the following decades the number of bushels of corn per acre doubled,

and then it continued to rise each year. Corn yields have risen ever since then, with only brief interruptions due to sporadic droughts, but these interruptions are easily countered with further engineered corn. Advancements in farming, technology and science paved the way for corn's ascent into the American food system. But the main reason that corn has made its way into just about everything we eat and every food that Americans eat today is that, above all, it is inexpensive.

Corn has and always will be cheap because it grows everywhere in the world. The most incredible thing about the corn grown in America today is how little of it we actually eat. This does not include people like me and my family who are obsessed with corn and eat it regularly, and also Sophie, who I know shares this corn obsession. But less than ten percent of the corn used in the United States is directly ingested by humans.

The bulk is either turned into ethanol for use as fuel or fed to the hundreds of millions of animals that we subject to the factory system. Corn is fed to cows, chickens, pigs, and even fish. I had no idea. Apparently fish are given these little pellets that are largely

made of corn, so it's everywhere. The relative cheapness of corn and general usefulness of it as a form of energy, both for living animals and living more generally, have proved important enough that the government subsidizes its production to the tune of some four point five billion dollars each year. The result is perpetuation of ambitious growing goals, farmers realizing the more efficient they are, the more money they will get,

grow more and more corn. The more corn there is, the lower its price, and the greater the incentive is to use it in as many ways as possible. I want to talk now about the different varieties of corn, But first, do you know what else has variety? All the ways you can spend your money like these. Let's talk about the different varieties of corn. There are many types, but the most commonly eaten forms can be divided into

three general categories. The first is sweet corn. Sweet corn is what Americans usually eat when they eat corn on the cob, or when they throw corn on the grill at a barbecue that you didn't want to go to. And this sweet corn accounts for only about one percent of the corn grown in America. Then there is flint corn. Flint corn has a soft center and harder outer shell,

which most people know as popcorn. It became popular in the nineteen sixties after a Jiffy pop which cooked the kernels in aluminum foil on the stovetop, was introduced, and its popularity rose further in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, shortly after the introduction of the microwave. Today, much like sweet corn, flint corn accounts for a steady but comparatively

insignificant portion of the US corn crop. And then there's dent corn aka field corn, the most important kind of corn when it comes to production of it, not when it comes to me eating it, because I cannot do that. But dent corn accounts for the vast majority of corn grown in America today, as well as the vast majority

of the corn Americans eat, just not on purpose. It's in most of the beverages we drink Surprise Surprise because of high frycto's corn syrup, and this is derived from flint corn and is the most commonly used commercial sweetener aka death syrup. It's in most animals people eat because it's fed to most animals that are raised for slaughter. It's even in our cheese because many cows are fed

corn instead of being able to graze on grain. All of this makes corn virtually inseparable from the American diet. Reddy Fouseel says that people have this kind of nostalgic understanding of corn. They think of corn on the cob and popcorn. But the truth is that field corn is what we are really talking about when we talk about the dominance of corn in the United States. It's in almost every product in the supermarket today. That's no exaggeration.

But obviously corn cannot be contained. American style processed food, which almost always relies on corn, has unpopularized in countries all around the world. Let's go back to Mexico, the birthplace of corn as we know it. How exactly did corn become such a popular street food. Mexican food is quite often literally built upon the tortilla, which is a lot of the times made of corn. The tortilla is a vehicle by which the country's most popular foods are

eaten in chiladas, caesadillas, taos, tomalies. I can list food forever. Although wheat flour has grown in popularity here in the United States, which is actually the technical home of the burrito, Apparently, in Mexico, it's all about the corn. Mexico City is frequently praised as one of the most significant cities on Earth in terms of street food. Street food is referred to as antohitos in Spanish, which means little cravings, which

I find very cute. Street dishes count corn as a near universal ingredient and sometimes, of course, it doesn't have to be processed to achieve its highest potential. Elote is perhaps the most recognized example, which is, for those not in the know, a full ear of corn that is grilled and slathered with a variety of toppings like butter, chili powder or taheen mayonnaise and cotiha cheese, among many other things. The final product, elote is served on a stick,

providing an easy means for mobile consumption. Another common corn street food is asquitas, a Mexican sweet corn salad, although its true origin is not known. According to Nawadl stories, asquitas are credited by being created by a god, a deity with a name I cannot say or pronounce what It is long and looks cool, but I won't try to say it. But this god is also credited with creating Mexican corn, jelly corn. It's from the gods. Literally. As for me, there isn't some magical history of corn

in the Middle East. I looked, I searched, I tried to find something, and I couldn't find one. No magical mystical history of my beloved corn. Like most things I have questions about, I asked my mom, and my mom said that when it's in season, street vendors sell corn.

So that's it. Goodbye.