It Could Happen Here Weekly 161

between Argentina and Brazil. Speaking of course, about Paraguay, known for its fraud history of warfare, politically volatile landscape, series of dictatorships, and indigenously intertwined cultural and social fabric, anarchism took root in this rather unique setting, and downs to the work of Anhill Capelletti and a few other scattered sources, I've been able to piece together the history of anarchism

in Paraguay without further ado nos comencemos. For much of its early history, Paraguay's identity was distinct within South America, from its time as a Guarani settlement to its formation as a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century. Spanish Jesuit missionaries wielded significant influence, and for over a century Paraguay was a self sustained colony with a rigidly hierarchical system

based on the Spanish castor system. Paraguay's economy primarily revolved around agriculture and cattlehooded unlike the mining economies and other Spanish territories. The Guarani people had a significant cultural impact throughout Paraguay's history, and their language and traditions rained central even as Paraguay evolved through the centuries. Even today, most of the population speaks some variety of Guarani alongside Spanish.

Fast forward to the early nineteenth century, as South American nations began de clearing independence from Spain, Paraguay took a unique approach. Rather than aligning with the neighboring revolutionary movements, Paraguay, under the leadership of Jose Gasparrodriguez dev Definancia, declared independence in eighteen eleven and adopted an isolationist authoritarian path. Francia ruled as the country's spreme dictator for nearly three decades,

envisioning a self sufficient, cometic society. He strictly controlled foreign influences, banned European migration, and restricted trade. By the mid nineteenth century, Paraguay had built up a significancy infrastructure under Francia's successor, Carlos Antonio Lopez. However, this era of economic development was short lived, as Paraguay entered the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance between eighteen sixty four and eighteen seventy against Brazil.

Argentina and Uruguay over territorial disputes. This conflict proved disastrous for Paraguay as they suffered staggering losses. Nearly seventy percent of its population died, its economy was shattered, and its territory was significantly reduced. And yes, you heard me right, nearly seventy percent of its population perished, including most of its male population, in the wars. Aftermath, paragua I was plunged into political chaos, economic ruin, and a period of

foreign interventions. Due to the economic devastation of the war, the country became indebted to British creditors. With that leverage, Britain pushed for the development of a free market economy and privatization, which brought Paraguay into closer contact with the global economy and eventually led to a more pronounced class

divide and establishment of an exploitive agricultural exports system. Land that had once been communitly managed was swiftly privatized, driving indigenous communities and small farmers off their lands and into the workforce of larger estates. On those estates, workers would find themselves in debt bondage tied to the estates as small debts at workers over to landowners, with spiral into

insurmountable debts that would become nearly impossible to repay. Laborers called pionees, were typically paid in voltures or script that could only be redeemed at the estate's store, where prices were exorbitantly inflated. Any attempt to leave or challenge the condition was met with violent repercussions from estate managers, creating a cycle of economic entrapment that was essentially slavery by

another name. Paraguay became a country of ever more wealthy and powerful landowners with a struggle in rural working class. As twentieth century approached, the labour struggles and social divisions then Paraguay and society were clearing. Cron inequality. Explosive working conditions, and the dislocation of addious communities created footire ground for

radical ideas among rural campusinos and urban workers. European immigrants flee in political oppression brought with them some rather radical ideas that began to resonate with paragund workers who were desperate for a way out of their circumstances. For people who had survived centuries of oppression, and authoritarian rule. Anarchism

had a unique appeal. By the eighteen eighties, workers in Paraguay had become organized in mutual aid societies, and one such society of typographers would organize themselves into a union, the first in the country's history. By eighteen eighty six. That same year, so the rise of construction workers, carpenters, tailors, postal workers.

is a basic cause of all these afflictors. It is on that basis that the dregs of humanity, government, clerics, lawyers, militaries, entrepreneurs maintain themselves in power, live as parasites, and they continued enjoyment to their funder of finances large armies with the products.

In eighteen ninety two, thanks in part to the growing Spanish and Argentine immigrant populations, there was a wave of the Berterian union formation throughout Paraguay. The anarchists was quite successful among the peasantry, as they helped organize armed resistance

societies to aid in their struggles against the landowners. Anarchists also managed to establish Raphael Barrett Cultural Center in the early nineties hosting an impressed collection of books by fellow Paraguayan and foreign writers, and embolding in the formation and even more trade unions. Raphael Barrett, by the way, is one of the most significant figures in Paraguay and anarchist history,

according to every account I've read. Born in Toda Vega, Spain, in eighteen seventy six, but Thatt's early life was typical of a well to do intellectual. He studied languages, piano, and eventually engineering. By his late twenties, he was drawn to Latin America, partly by adventure and partly to make

a difference. Driven by a growing commitment to justice and solidarity, he arrived in Budas Airis in nineteen oh three, where he found work as a journalist, soon making ways with an article that condemned the stock inequality he observed in Argentina's capital. This critique cost him his job, yet had deepened his dedication to speak for those who were voiceless.

But as experiences of CEA and European Americrant workers toiling in the brutal conditions fueled his indignation against unchecked wealth and poverty's vicious hold on the working class. In nineteen oh four, but I made a way to Paraguay. He essentially welcomed as a correspondent for LTMBO and even held government positions, including as a director of the Department of Engineers and the Railroad Agency. But his comitments, exposed in the country's political and social rot soon put him at

odds with Paraguay's new liberal government. He saw that simply swapping our conservative leaders for liberals did little to improve conditions for ordinary Paraguayans, as demonstrated by the continuous labor struggles that arose and response to the industrialization undertaken by the liberal government. Workers were fighting to abolished child label, improve

their conditions, increase wages, and so on. He couldn't stand by in silence, so he resigned from government service, now fully committed to social justice, even as his grown radicalism began to alienate the political elite. Brett's personal experiences sharpened his perspective, transformed him from a sympathetic observer to a

dedicated anarchist. His writings in Criminal became essential reading for workers and peasants alike, urging them to see beyond two professional reforms and to child the entire structure of pressure, Barrett condemned the government's abuses and spoke out against exploitive

systems that kept the majority of Paraguayan's martialized. He was a fiery advocate for social justice, and one write in particular, Acasto Roa Bastos, called him the discoverer of Paraguayan's social reality, because Burrett didn't just observe these injustices, he threw himself into exposing and condemned them with fuvor. His impact was so significant that even when he was forced to flee Paraguay in nineteen oh eight under government pressure, his ideas endured.

His health was deteriorating from tibergulosis, where he continued to write, receiving support from intellectual comrades in Uruguay and Brazil. His final years were just a continuation if his relentless dedication, even as his health continued to decline. In nineteen ten, he went to Paris to seek treatment, but his health failed and he passed away in December of that year.

But just before Barret's exile and passing in nineteen oh six, the anarchists would form the first and for some time only workers Federation in the country by joining together the illustrators, carpenters and drivers unions. Rafaelberad actually became something of a thought leader for this group, and this was the Federacion Opreia Astricanal Paraguay or four, partially inspired by the Federacion Obrera Reginal Argentina or FURA, where they borrowed many of

their programmatic ideas. If you recall the episodes I did on Argentina, you know that the reasoning for the name was ideological. By adding the adjective regional, it made plain that the country in question, whether Paraguay or Argentina, was not being considered a state or political unit, but a region of the world in which workers struggled for their liberation. Soon after its founding, on the first of May nineteen oh six, the Fourth held the country's first international Workers

Data demonstration, despite police attempts to shut it down. For also launched their official publication, El Espertade in the same year, and the paper carried articles what the anarchist movements in Europe and Latin America. Printed works by authors such as Peter Kopotkin and Selmo Ronzo published reports of the Forbes activities named and shamed and known strike breakers and encouraged

its members to pay their union dues promptly. Subsequent years would introduce other libertarian newspapers such as Ladra Billion, La Tribuna and Acil Futuro. After the nineteen oh eight coup by Emiliano Gonsalves Naverro, they stabilized the economy and restricted Assuncion's labor movement. Anarchism still found strength among rural and tanan industry workers, despite increasing hostility from figures like Presidents Condre and Jarre. Labor strikes continued, which were met by

fierce repression, arrests, and forced deportations. With the outbreak of the Paraguay and Civil War from nineteen eleven to nineteen twelve, anarchists and other labor organizations faced a government crackdown. Groups like the Four became inactive temporarily, at least by nineteen thirteen. In the wake of the war, a schism was emergent as some unions move move toward reformist ideologies, influencing part

by the populist Colorado Party. Meanwhile, Four reaffirmed anarchosynicalist routes, forming a federal council that included both workers and intellectuals aimant rekondelte union activities. Amidst a wave of reorganization post World War One, a new surgeon demand for Paraguay and exports revitalized labor activism. In nineteen sixteen, the Corps or Centro Obero Regionale de Paraguay to call the role of

championing anarchosyndicalism and labor rights. This one gained support from a wide network, launching influential publications like El Combat and Renovasion. Other groups like Comedie and the Revolutionary Nationalists Alliance, which sought a federalist union Other People's Latin America also took part in the resurgions of anarchist ideas. In nineteen twenty two, the Paraguay and Anarchists were able to finally establish links with the International Workers Association.

and had. Arakuyu and his friends made their way through over one thousand, three hundred kilometers of mountain jungle, surviving on roots, fruits, and game, to make their way back to their hometown of Incarnacion and speaking of Incarnacion both to our day and Arakuyu took part in the little known attempt at an anarchist uprising in Paraguay, which was

actually centered in Incarnacion. On the twentieth of February nineteen thirty one, a group of one hundred and fifty workers and students organized in a couple of popular assemblies, took control of the city of Incarnacion with the goal of establishing a libertarian commune, part of a plan to spark a wider anarchist cynicalist revolution in Paraguay. This was the culmination of a series of strikes and widespread lya Latin

by anarchists and students in support of revolution. It wasn't meant to be centered in the Karnacion, as there was a planned construction worker at Donald striking and student Zion, and similar action in Villarica and Concepcion, but key organizers in those struggles in those cities were deported in the days leading up to the action, so those planned actions

ended up failing. After sixteen hours when their efforts to have reinforced by workers in the rest of the nation, the interactionists of Encarnacion took over two steamboats and made their way along the river to Brazil, but not before they attacked the Yuromatic companies and burned the records related to indentured laborers in two ports. Their solidarity never died, even after they went through everything they went through, they

didn't lose their sight and what really mattered. Sadly, the seventeen students and workers who remained in Incarnacion were arrested. Duarte found himself jailed and interned and Marcurita Ireland. After Liberal Party president josse P Gugiari outlawded tree unions, other revolutionaries were dropped off from the jungle to die at a random point along the Parana River. Seven of the captured seventeen met this fate and the other ten spent a few months in prison before being deported to Argentina.

Movement then faced distinct challenges during the Chako War from nineteen thirty two to nineteen thirty five between Paraguay and Bolivia, which halted much of the anarchist activism. Many anarchists joined the war effort reluctantly, including Duarte, who performed duties in the Rear Guard were working as a type settle for various presses, including anarchist pressors the Paraguay and Victory. Following the war, the return to domestic concerns saw a resurgence

of anarchists and labor activities. The government's crackdown of lefterc ideologies in the late nineteen thirties nineteen forties under President Morignigo's rule led to severe repression of anarchists and cynicalist groups. Douart has spent some time as a worker representative at the National Labor Department or DNT, who was under considerable fire from the communists were taken hold of the Treading

movement after anarchism waned in popularity. He finally resigned from his post in nineteen forty one after a Worker's Coordinating committee of seamen, tram workers, bakers, print workers, and other trades issued a protest note to President Morinigo, threatening to withdraw from the Workers Delegate for the infringements of their rights of assembly, to unionize and to strike. Of course, their protest note was completely ignored. The president's authoritarian tenure

pushed several anarchists and socialist organizers into exile. Duarte himself ended up in exile in Argentina by nineteen forty two, but eventually was able to retain and reclaim his appointment as a worker representative. Then, not long after, he became a victim of a police crackdown during the nineteen forty four general strike, after labor movement was hijacked by the

Republican Workers Organization. After nineteen forty seven, Duerte dropped out of trade union activity entirely and refocused to publishing articles and trade union publications abroad and urgent research into Paraguay and trade union history. He faced repeated arrests and took part in strikes anyway, advocating for workers' rights across various industries.

He continued his activism against fascism and authoritarianism, operating from Argentina at times, while still supporting strikes and anarchist literature. In Paraguay, the nineteen fifty four ascension to power of General Alfredo Storoister marked a significant period of intensified authoritarianism. Streuisner's regime violently suppressed opposition, including anarchists, for over three decades, even in his seventy years. During the nineteen seventy years,

Duarte was harassed by Strausner's secret police. Many other artists were imprisoned, exiled, or dissip by Stuisner, who imposed tight control of unions and labor organizers. The nineteen fifty four to nineteen eighty nine dictatorship of Storisner stifled anarchist activities severely and forced them underground, where they would have to preserve anarchist literature and ideas through secret print publications and

solidarity movements. The result of this dictatorship was that anarchism in Paraguay experienced resurgence much later than other Latin American nations, with the spark rekindled only in the early two thousands. This rebooth of anarchist sentiment emerged largely within the punk counterculture and youth led social movements often interconnected with struggles

for condigious rights, economic justice, and environmental causes. The establishment of spaces like Laterraza and Anarchist Squad provided platforms for activists and community engagement, while publications such as Autonomia Zene and Grito Fanzine disseminated anarchist ideals despite Paraguay's history of

anarchist repression. These newer movements, however, small, signified some small for a renewed interest in the material ideas within Paraguay, one that can be seen even more violently in other parts of Latin America. Paraguay and anarchists have shown us the drive for freedom and equality is a daily equipment to defy attorney and resist exploitation. That's by facing decades of silence and the destroyerst dictatorship. Anarchism did not disappear.

The seeds of resistance late dormant, but they are ready to bloom again as new generations can take up the struggle. As we conclude, let's remember the words of Raphael Barre, who fought tirelesslie for the people. He came to call his own justice, justice above all things, justice, even if it costs blood or power to old the people.

little more introduction to what's happening there. There's been a lot of like jubilation about what's happening in Syria, and things have been very far from universally positive. Massive displacement of civilians, ethnic cleansing of areas that have been captured by the Turkish Baksterian National Army and genuine like peril for the self administration project, the like of which we

haven't seen for a long time. So perhaps if listeners aren't familiar, would you like give them the real basics of the self administration of the AA ANDES and what it means and what's going on there.

Obviously they didn't they didn't know this was going to happen, but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades, and in particular since around two thousand, they've been working on this concept of democratic con federalism, which is moving away from a sort of what they call an old paradigm of Marxist Leninist thought to this system they've now quite effectively built up there where democracy is bottom up.

It's structured around small communes and self organizing units, cooperatives. There's a market economy, but it's not a catalyst economy where there's sort of radical emancipation of oppressed to people's particular women who are really centered in the revolutionary process and organizing there. And I think because they maybe you can't call them conflict.

it's not a state in the northeast of Syria. Whilst the worst of the fighting was between the Aussid regime and the FSA and groups that came out of the FSA in the west and south of the country.

but we have a functioning democracy. An example of like, it's not just Kurdish people, right, it's lots of communities living together in northern East Syria, and because of democratic confederalism they're able to coexist and still feel that they have enough sovereignty to be safe.

language because it is the majority language. That the north and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area, and this is despite the fact that they've been pretty horrendously oppressed by the Arab population through the Bath Party and its oppressive systems for decades. So it has been a pretty hard ongoing process to negotiate and to put aside pretty serious conflicts between quite.

difference is profound in like everyday life. It's not just a kind of rhetorical commitment, right, Like, at least my impression as a man is that, like, this is a revolution by women, not a revolution and it's about women. It's not a revolution by men that like seeks to liberate women, says it's going to liberate women, you know, with the US in Verde Afghanistan saying it's going to liberate women, and look what we got, And like the difference in just the way people are able to look,

like every aspect of everyday life is completely different. But that's in danger right now. The narrative I guess that people will be familiar with from Syria is that the state has been defeated, the A Sad regime has been defeated, and that therefore the revolution has succeeded. But the A Sad regime is not the only state in play in Syria, right, So, can you explain the Turkish antipathy to the project in northern East Syria and how that's manifesting itself currently.

and it's continued that way. There have been reforms, for sure, but that's still a founding principle. And even now sort of speaking a non Turkish language in the Turkish Parliament is a pretty serious violation. And the size of Turkey, the size of its economy, the size of its military, the regional power stages they have in the Middle East, means that they have an enormous gravity.

for oppressed people's minorities is something that's an issue. The fact that it's Kurdish led, and in particular it's emancipat for Kurdish people threatens this ethno nationalist aspect of their state, and they kind of they see it something that needs to be nicked in the Bud right, and they've sort of done that with Northern Iraq, that the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq by essentially vassalizing the KDP, the main party there, and they know they can't do the same

in North Eastyria, and the military option is their best chance, their best hope of nipping Kurdish emancipation in Kurdish sub determination in the Bud and preventing it from sort of snowboarding across the region.

votes ignored or changed or their elected officials removed. Like this is within the last year, I'm not talking about back in the eighties and nineties, and like Turkey has been aggressively attacking any attempts at like self determination within the country and then as you say, like militarily attacking

the Kurdish Freedom movement within northern Eassyria. Do you want to talk about the Syrian National Army or the Turkish back Free Syrian Army, whatever you want to call them, an explain Like, I think part of what we're dealing with is like that Turkey has a very well established state media project and they seem to do very well and like creating vire all social media content. So people might not be fully familiar with who the SNA are

and specifically like Turkey's role in creating them. Do you want to explain that a bit to people?

important one and they are their group. Together with this concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria, yeah, despite the fact that they're not actually part of higher than the liberation movement as it calls itself, that that have taken over the Syria. Yeah, the Syrian National Army, it's it's kind of like a loose collection of various some of them called themselves brigades or groups. It's essentially a millionary proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent

political framework. They're not revolutionary groups. They're not liberatory or mantif patrit They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the

same way that maybe HTS would. I mean, the Kurds in North Eastyria describe them as gangs, which kind of sounds like a propaganda term, but when you actually look at what they do, they really are like a sort of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as a convenient proxy for force by Turkey because oltimately Turkey has like a massive military Then maybe it is quite underfunded and not particularly astafter the air force has suffered

pretty seriously from the fallout of the coup in twenty sixteen, but the army is massive, it's relatively well funded, and

their drone program is huge. The thing that they struggle with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups, particularly the PKK, in the mountains between ark and Turkey, and they need to they need to control that because they realize that they've been fighting military as as you say, since the early nineteen eighties, and they can't have a Vietnam situation right of a mass movement against their military

occupation and against their military efforts. And Syria, they can't afford financially or politically to get into a quadmire there, and so by funding this sort of collection of groups called the SNA, that's their way of being able to incurb pretty massive losses without having to report on it, without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population of Turkey.

But Turkey doesn't have to be held accountable for that because, like you said, it's not Turkish, it's not the Turkish army. Do you want to explain how the situation in North Syria has changed since what was it like two weeks ago? A week ago? I guess that they moved south from Aleppo and start the HTS, largely with some support from SNA, moved towards Damascus and then the SNA launched its own

assault on the Self Administration. Can you explain a little bit of what's happened there in terms of displacement and in terms of the terrain that's the SNA have captured.

Armenian units within the SDF. They held this sort of salient pushing out into northwest Aria towards Afrin, which was captured by the SNA and Turkey in twenty eighteen. That was on one side founded by HTS and on the

other by the SNA. When things really kicked off, the SNA started a pretty concerned campaign to capture this area and own as Shedpa, and because of its position and it's relatively difficult terrain and difficult logitical position to resupply, they pulled back from that towards Aleppo and man Beach, which is the only major city that the SDS still held on the west of the Euphrates, and it's the area closest to Aleppo.

are horrific. But like, because you're not seeing when the SDF is making movements or making advances until a bit later, until you get something from like an official press channel, it can give the impression that the SNA is just romping around, which is not the case.

have been considering this weekend. So let's talk about like right now, certainly the focus is on Kabani, right, but there's also well there's a lot of the self administration that could potentially be under threat if Turkey decides to go as hard as it can against the self administration against the existence of I guess any form of democratic project in northern Easteria of attempts to kind of bring

the whole thing under one government from Damascus. Can you explain like what might happen, what people can do, and like we should talk about what's at stake as well, especially with the prisoner our whole, which maybe we can come to after those two things, because I think that's a lot to ask you one question, but maybe people

aren't familiar with our whole we'll leave that one. But can you explain at first, like what could potentially happen if Turkey decides to go as hard as it wants to you here?

pretty shameless about it. There are some pretty disturbing videos that they're mutilating the bodies of fallen YPJ soldiers, of coming some re executions, of wiping out whole towns.

were ready to build up these structures. They already had self organized militias, they had the economy planned out that they set to work immediately.

eighteen and nineteen. And even if the worst happens, even if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the end of this project, right, It's not going to be the end of this emancipation. There's now an entire generation of young people in North Eassyria who have grown up entirely living amongst a liberated and anti hated region and

people that's not something you can militarily defeat. So I you know, I'm not completely hopeless, and obviously I'll be like devastated if the worst does happen there, But like, I don't think it means the end of this incredible political And it feels wrong to call it a project because it's not.

And I guess that kind of brings us on to I wanted to talk a little bit about the situation in the parts of Syria that are controlled by HTS and and in so much as they really are control controller perhaps around word like they haven't fully established their state project yet, but they're certainly moving towards that they've sort of captured the institutions of the state rather than destroyed them. You'd spoken about, like there's this very I

don't I think. I guess maybe i'll use an examples or I'm phrasing this question in a very meandering way. I sort of see ann clip where they're they're like, oh, we found a guy who's liberally who's like in this prison and he was stuck here. And then second part of this was not broadcast on CNN, as this person turns out to be like an Air Force lieutenant who was in fact himself someone who tortured and killed civilians, And like, there's this very liberatory, very excited messaging coming

from media in the West. I guess some of which is good, right, Like, it's good that the Assabe regime is good. A sab was fucking terrible and tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. But that doesn't mean that things are all perfect in Damascus. So do you want to talk a little bit about like some of the worrying stuff we've see in the last few days from those areas.

that he's probably not going to see justice. Yeah, But it's also really hard to see stuff which is really reminiscent of like nineteen seventy nine Tehran, two thousand and three Baghdad, of a sort of jubilation, whilst at the same time there are videos of sort of programs being carried out against minorities, minorities like the Allies who were in control, and you don't know if the person being executed in the street were as a torture an intelligence agent and.

in charge versus what it seems like we're now seeing for Damascus is like, hey, can the police from the cyber regime police stay at work? Which is concerning Talking of police, the last thing I wanted to address was that our whole camp. I've spoken about it before on the show, and people can look back on other episodes, but if you've not heard about it, can you explain briefly what our whole is and then the massive risk that this Turkish backed invasion poses to our whole and

other camps. I guess the whole is not the only camp, just the biggest one.

rehabilitate and deradicalize as many people as possible. They have shrunk the camp massively, but they're still yeah, forty thousand or something left there and thinse of a like really a lot of them are really radical, Like I think I don't know what an exact number is but something in the order of ten thousand. Them are still like professed being members of ices, and they have a lot

of children. And this was something that shocked me when I was at the end of the caliphate and backwards and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out, and I could not have imagined how many children that were.

They have bombed the entrances to prisons multiple times. They provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are trying to break them out, and they provide a safe passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape.

So it's massively in their favor, But of course it's a Pandora's box because you know, if that does break open, and if these people aren't youpatriated or aren't you radicalized, then that's a lot of people who have pretty much only known their whole lives a extremely radical fascist Islamist ideology.

these people alive, but it's it's pretty awful conditions. Yeah, and this could have been sold if the international community, if the coalition, the United States had helped with these repatriations, so put political pressure on European country some particular to take back their citizens and had just provided the funding, you know, for they have provided funding. I'm not saying they haven't pay much, but like it's a drop in

the ocean compared to the Department Defense budget. You know, we're talking a few tens of millions here and there as opposed to a concerted effort to deradicalize and repatriate people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and the US.

the people who did horrific things right there. And Yeah, at some point, this population will continue to grow if we don't keep removing people from it, and that's going to be a problem for the whole world, even if the whole world wants to pretend it's not happening right now. And it is just endlessly frustrating to see it not even be covered, let alone kind of addressed in the West.

It had something like ten million inhabitants. It committed multiple genocides, you know, and this is just you know, people in the regions saying, oh, they're committing just these are like Western highly studied, highly understood, accepted by Western states as genocide against like the Uzds.

it's got very little support or recognition. And they've been calling for for tribunals.

That was really nice. But what can people do to you know, it's one thing to like be in solidarity or post or whatever, but like, what concrete actions can they take to help.

And yeah, anything from raising awareness to actually going there and lending support anything on that spectrum. It's not just like, it's not just the material contribution that you can make. It's the people that do really feel left doubt, they feel betrayed, they feel let down by the international community, by the rest of the world, and any act of solidarity goes out incredibly well. Like the first year I was there, I was basically useless because I didn't speak

the language, I didn't know my way around. I was like a burden on society more or less. And for people just like happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity, And it's not about being useful, it's about that act. It's about more than that. That's what I'm trying to say. And if you can show solidarity in any way you can, like, this is incredibly incredibly important to time to do it.

time before. But like I would never have imagined that I would see thousands of people in the streets for the Palestinian cause, and like that the only thing that has materially held back the genocide of the Palestinian people has been the solidarity that they've experienced, And like that shows the power that people have, though obviously it's been able to do comparatively little in Israel, still seems to be killing their children every day, but like it shows

that we can build solidarity really quickly and really meaningfully, and like you don't have to go, but you can go. You get It's much harder to get to Palestine than it is to get to northern Essyria last year. And I think people who are already organizing can bring that into their organizing too. These things don't have to compete like they can be. There's a lot of solidarity to

go around. But I would say a lot of the news we see, unfortunately from Turkey, and that will unfortunately give you information of the extremely biased when it comes to Naughti Syria. So being conscious of your media consumption is very important.

posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm pisiting updates from friends, people I know there and my take on the situation based on my experiences being there from its five years.

from their positions on the front line. So obviously those notes will be a little bit they'll be like twenty four hours old by the time you hear them. But I still think it's very important to hear from people who are there what we can not from, like someone who's supposed to be an expert but hasn't set for in Syria in fifteen years and hasn't really talked to

anyone who's Syrian either. So we'll drop those in after the advertising break here and with that I will say thank you very much, Danny, thanks for giving us your time, and he'll we really appreciate all you're insight today.

and establishing this autonomous administration. So let's go shortly to the which conflict this offensive of each theater the faith of reaction, but it's Islamige group direct heritage of Anatra that was the Syrian branch of the GUIDO that has been learning having somewhat government destructs in the region of Uglype in the north west of Syria and was under heavisage from the region forces in Syria Army and the twenty seven of Nananda bay unch is bit offensive that

led to the collapse of the region.

of the refugees from a friend we're living a frine was a region that was a ray occupied by thirty in twenty eighteen and a lot of the people from the city was displaced and living in refuge amants in the origin of Hinda and the civil tech effect, and these Turkish pretty forces attacked and conquered that vision, forcing all these people that already had to leave their homes more than five years ago to translating, yeah, so forcing

them to flee once again. A lot of these people was trapped in a caroline that suffered brutal grades attacks, kidnapping, ransoms.

they can to support all these people that is arriving on these areas.

intensively bonding the areas and their surroundings. And there have been quiet widespread rumors of the Zamie Hope togethering forces to continue their reports on the self administration of Nordestria and the ward of the Cylind Democratic Forces. We from the kasinosas we have been working in the medical capacity, the providing materials for the medical points in the in the fundance and being.

offracy has been political campus of the revolution here. Building autonomy in the different regions has been also a very important element to develop the project, and especially during the war and in one state, as soon as the different territories were liberated, there was a big emphasis on creating local councils civilian and military councils.

and this is something that today is happening here. Courdistant has been for a long time living resistance against the logic of national states, especially in Turkey, but we saw how it has been funding in Syria where that this movement found the space to put in practice these ideas and to develop the revolutionary society that has been theorized

for a long time. So even if we cannot save vergialwas an anarchist, that we can say how the principles inspired the project and that it's been developed here and implemented. This is a really an important school and it brings a lot of lections of the big challenges of reorganizing

a society with principles of euer Italian socialism. It is especially complicated here because of external reasms like the situation of the Marble, the constant threat of the Tutis army, and this is something that for sure we can point out.

communities building this revelifering process. But nowadays that so many people have been like taking inspiration from, So yeah, probably this is a bit confusing and maybe.

in Madison, Wisconsin. The article has pictures and hyperlinks which might help explain some of the stuff I'm talking about, but I'll do my best to relay it here to you on the podcast feed. Another Monday in America and another school shooting. On the morning of December sixteenth, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin shot and killed a teacher and fellow student, and injured

six others before killing herself. Initially, police falsely reported the shooter was seventeen years old, but late Monday night they correctly identified the deceased shooter as fifteen year old Natalie ruppnow who went by Samantha or sam. In the aftermath of this horrific event, right wing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged

transgender terrorists. But what really happened here, had nothing to do with trans people, and is sadly ordinary for the United States. In August of twenty twenty four, the father of the future school shooter took his to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of a band KMFDM. In another photo of the shooter, we can see the front of the shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris,

who is a fan of the band. The bulk of this new shooter's online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the TCC or True Crime Community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates Samantha's tumbler, which last posted in May of twenty twenty four. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she quote posted about school shooters all the time quote end quote had school shooter leanings unquote.

Samantha is hardly alone in this. There have been over one hundred copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since nineteen ninety nine. A Twitter account believes to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of twenty twenty four, and the profile picture featured a young man

in camo pants and a tactical backpack. The male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers cannot agree on whether she was female to male or male to female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her Twitter profile picture.

This is a ridiculous diagram with about seven images overlaid at different opacities, trying to layer the faces and body shapes of these two people on top of each other. This post is only proof that most of what gets passed off as quote unquote ocant online today's just completely

incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with his diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat, a school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was only fifteen years old when he carried out his shooting. Hours after the shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, while right wing accounts were still arguing about what sort of transgender the

shooter had been. A neo Nazi Twitter account named Nitro claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her our quote unquote biological woman. An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged Twitter account posted a link to a Google doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public, so you couldn't access.

Discord group chat. Nitro is based out of the UK, and so if this is legitimate, and that is a big if, this message would have been sent about an hour and a half before the shooting, per the Discord timestamp. I'm going to read a bit of this alleged writing from the shooter quote. Women are the only hope for this wretched world. But even women have been brainwashed by moids for too long. They've internalized the patriarchy and turned on each other, always begging for male approval and validation.

It's disgusting. I realize the truth. Men are irredeemable. Radfem Hitler was is fucking vindicated. Now they can't be reformed or redeemed. They are a fucking scourge upon the earth. The only solution is to total exterminate them and every foid who worships these fucking parasites. Every single male must be wiped out, from babies to the elderly. Only then can women be free to create a new world. All be the pioneer. I'll be the first one to take

the first step. I don't care if their fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, teachers, police, and especially n words or politicians. I've been craving to kill them all. This is my mission. Only when their parasitic sludge has been expunged from the earth is when then the world will be clean and women can start over. It's the only way. In approximately ten minutes, I should

be dead. It's strange, but it feels good. Hopefully to most people, this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary quote unquote feminist screed about initiating a wave of male targeted violence to cleanse the earth with pepperings of and foids, which is Internet in cell slang for male and female respectively. Also included are racial slurs and something called quote unquote

radfem Hitler. That last part is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle hollow earth Turf, whose content is a mix of trad influenced right wing feminism with anti trans flourishes, advocating for a mass purge of mooids. This includes trans women. This account is derided by those both on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem and

anti trans women with trad or often occult interests. The discord nazi Nitro claimed that the shooter was quote unquote a fan of radfem Hitler and talked about the account frequently on Discord. Though Nitro previously believed her interest in the account was merely ironic, now obviously an anonymous Twitter nazi is certainly not the most reliable source, but Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos

of the shooter. Though they could be utilizing this newfound clout to troll a widely disliked Twitter user, but the fact that he's been right about all other details inclines me to not discount his claims just altogether, but instead just hold them with a billion pounds of salt. Allegations that the shooter was a neo Nazi Radfem certainly sent

Radfem Hitler into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been quote unquote e dating, with the apparent intention of disproving any ties the shooter had to the Twitter Radfem orbit. Through this alleged online boyfriend, the right wing turf Ecosystem claimed to have acquired a copy of the quote unquote

full manifesto. This purported manifesto lacks the anti male, anti moid ramblings of the discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times evocative of Pecca Eric Auvinen's manifesto, a Finnish school shooter from two US and seven who killed eight people. Auvinen considered himself a quote unquote natural selector who had evolved

beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha's purported manifesto, he is mentioned by name as a quote unquote true inspiration. Over the course of eight hours, a radfem Twitter account released six pages of what they claimed to be Samantha's writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being quote unquote scum. The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists.

Though it briefly references the accelerationist terror gram saints, the whole of this piece of writing is much more reminiscent of old school columnbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu. The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters and includes a paragraph on Vladyskov Rosleyakhov, another Columbine copycat, but from Crimea, who also cause played as one of the

Columbine shooters during his own mass shooting. Though the discord Nazi and the reactionary rad femmes question the authenticity of the others alleged manifesto, what both sides of the in cell war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. We're going to go on a quick ad break and come back to discuss transvestigation and the trans terror panic.

in particular school shooters. Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout previously reported on this trend back in twenty twenty three, right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant School shooting, which police say was committed by a transman, we theorized that the online right was testing out a new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and

plane disinformation that fear has come to pass. The modicum of believability provided by the Nashville shooting, as it's the only legitimate transrelated incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass shooting databases, was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for the next two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted to link nearly every viral mass slash school shooting to trans people to create a false trend. The strategy operates

as follows. During the first few chaotic hours after a shooting, a small group of right wing content creators weaponized the lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the use of out of context social media posts, doctrine photographs, photos of other people, or simply pictures of long or dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter

is really transgender. For more context on this, you can listen to an episode of It Could Happen here. I wrote earlier this year covering the rise of fake trans terrorists. The goal is to get as many of their followers to see and spread these claims as fast as possible. Even if it's widely debunked the next day, many who heard the false claim won't be aware of the verified correction. All these anti trans influencers in need is a brief window of time to plant the idea into people's minds,

and then that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is repeated every few months whenever there's a new mass shooting, then it's pretty easy to create the false perception of a growing trend.

really turning out to be a terrorist movement unquote. Just minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer Matt Wallace posted that an unknown quote unquote witness said

that the shooter quote looked to be transgender unquote. Wallace, who has over two point two million followers on Twitter, provided no source or citation and has since deleted this post, but others in the online mega orbit parroted this language before any identifying information was released, with the user just Jeff from Cali writing a transperson targeted and opened fire on students at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin twelve hit.

The right wing content creator Ryan Mada baselessly claimed that the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter quote another mentally unstable psychopath who has prescribed puberty blocker and hormones unquote. Mata hosts a show on the right wing YouTube alternative Rumble and has over one hundred and

twenty three thousand followers on Twitter. His tweet claiming the shooter was on HRT racked up one point six million quote unquote views and seventeen thousand likes in just twelve hours. Larger accounts like Tya write Check's libs of TikTok fueled undue speculation about the gender identity of the shooter, seeding confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for political gain, quoting the police chief saying, quote, I don't

know if the shooter is male or female unquote. A small group of conservative influencers have just so successfully created in alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter is transgender that they don't even have to outright say it anymore. Accounts like libs of TikTok and Malaysian blog ugger Ian Miles Chung can merely gesture to this reality tunnel they've intentionally created, and now thousands of people will affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth, backed up

by historical precedent of fabricated memory. Matt Wallace posted a photo of the shooter and the male profile picture, saying what do you notice about the shooter again? Ian miles Chung posted quote, police are unable to identify if the school shooter in Madison, Wisconsin is male or female, but they do know who did it and identified them as a student. Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Unquote?

This speculation fueled conspiracy theories, which spread claiming that police were intentionally withholding information about the shooter's gender identity in service of some hidden agenda, and actually they were just waiting to like let the family know that their daughter was dead and making sure they had the correct identification. Very basic stuff. Police all do this, but no, it's all part of some secret agenda and some hidden narrative.

As early as one pm EST on Monday, which is just like an hour after the shooting would have taken place, the neo Nazi Twitter account Nitro correctly identified the shooter

as his online friend Sam Samantha. As this name spread online, the multi gendered nature of the name added to the speculation that the shooter was trans. Scarlett Johnson, an activist with the ultra conservative parents' rights group Moms for Liberty Shared self admitted unconfirmed reports that the shooter was quote unquote a transgender teen who went by Sam or Samantha.

As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified. An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter's given name matches the ancient Sam Hide meme, in which extremely online people try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a new mass shooting was the American comedian Sam Hyde. In recent years, the meme has turned into the Samantha Hide meme,

used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One hide post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey raked up over six hundred thousand views, four point five thousand likes, and one and a half thousand retweets. Massi posted quote, when you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually mutilate them, you're not curing them. You're creating potential school

shooters unquote. Now it should go without saying, but the use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence. We're going to go on one last break and return to conclude our discussion of transvestigating school shooters. Okay, we are back. Time to talk about the potential double flipper. So as this transvestigation continued, the quote unquote, we can

always tell. Crowd ended up transvestigating in both directions, seemingly unsure of what a signed gender at birth the shooter must have had. Some believe the shooter was transferm while others concluded they were trans mask with one reply to an end wokeness tweet reading quote those do not look like female hands, and another transvestigation post saying the shooter is a trans kid, a female pretending to be a male. Exactly why we keep our Second Amendment rights to protect

our children from this mental health crisis. Zoom in close on her shirt and hand gesture unquote. A now deleted post from a URF account also attempted to pass off the shooter as a transgirl, saying, quote, the Wsconsin school shooter was a seventeen year old transidentified male. It just

keeps happening now quote unquote. Trans identified male was usually a transphobadogu whistle to refer to a trans woman as a male who identifies as a trans woman, but sometimes transfoms get confused by words and use the phrase to refer to trans people who quote unquote identify as men, like this other transvestigation post saying quote shooter was a

seventeen year old trans but identified male now. One of the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans guy came from an anti Semitic doctor in Denmark with one point four million followers. She falsely claimed with no evidence, that the shooter was taking testosterone, writing quote the Wisconsin school shooter has been identified as a seventeen year old trans identified male another mentally ill girl on testosterone unquote.

As of Tuesday morning, this post has over three million views, twenty two two thousand likes, and eight point three thousand retweets. In a following post, this doctor blamed quote unquote the Jews for inventing transgenderism as a note extremism. Researchers have argued that transphobia is structurally similar to anti semitism. Now. A common piece of anti trans memetic propaganda deployed in

the wake of mass shootings is the transshooter collage. This format spread after the Nashville school shooting in twenty twenty three, and this week Matt Wallace provided us with a brand new version. This post is an ugly mishmash of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people's faces with a variety of backgrounds, a purposeless red circle in the middle of the image, and text that reads quote, almost every child killed in a mass shooting in the last few years was killed by a

transgender shooter. Now, out of all those pictures in this clash, only one person in this clash has actually reported to be transgender. The Nashville shooter in the upper left. The rest of the people pictured are not trans and have never claimed to be trans. The person with long hair in the lower half the image is cult Gray, who is falsely labeled as trans by far right influencers like end Wokeness and Mike Cernovich. Cult Gray's discord posts reveal

he actually held transphobic beliefs. A more classic version of the trans shooter collage format is just five pictures with texts next to each of them, reading the X shooter identified as trans, the X shooter identified as trans right, just a big list of five of these names is saying that they all identified as trans. The version I'm using here is courtesy of Limbs of TikTok admin Chaya Reichek,

who posted this earlier this year. But just as before, the majority of the subjects in this meme aren't actually trans and it's just full of disinformation. The Colorado Springs shooter who targeted a queer club is not actually non binary and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as the Denver shooter is not trans, has never claimed to

be trans. He just has dyed hair. This individual pictured did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is not pictured. Now, Lastly, though the person pictured as the Euvaldi shooter is trans, this is not the actual Euvaldi shooter. It's a random trans girl who was one of two trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the shooter as transgender. The other two people in this image is the Nashville shooter who does appear to be trans,

and the perpetrator of the Aberdeen workplace shooting. But back to Madison, Wisconsin. So after all of that transvestigating, what do we have just another columnbiner with neo Nazi ties. The right has gotten so good at deploying the trans shooter as a smoke bomb it obscures the reality of the ov availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization, and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth.

Instead of focusing on all that on the victims of this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to spend a whole day debunking the late shooters pronouns. And that's the point, that's what they want us talking about. Those who delete their quote unquote trans terrorist posts after being conclusively proven wrong, will try the exact same shtick in a few months after the next mass shooting goes viral.

Others won't even care that much. They'll just leave up their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel they helped to create. I'm going to close with a quote from Sartra. Never believe that fascists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their ada visari who was obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words. This post

has been deleted. Welcome to It could Happen Here, a

podcast about the worst coups in all of history. I'm your host, Via Wong, and we are returning to one of the worst coups I have ever seen, because a whole bunch more stuff has happened in our most recent, unbelievably dogshit coup in South Korea, the six hour coup at which President Yun declared martial law and tried to shut down the National Assembly, and then the National Assembly got together and voted to end the martial law, and then it stopped extremely.

The reason we're coming back to this, though, is that the aftermath of all of this has been absolutely baffling, and I think this has all been lost in the news cycle because about a trillion things are happening right now, but the situation in South Korea has been unbelievably weird, and so we're now going to take a look at the actual impeachments of President Yun and the unbelievably bizarre path that led to it, because oh my god, the more I talk to people, the more I realize that

people don't know how unbelievably unhinged everything has been since since the military coup, because everyone has moved on. So we're going back. So immediately after the coup, there is this whole wave of military guys going like we didn't know we were taking part in the coup, We're totally innocent, like, oh, they just let us out of the trucks and suddenly we were at the National Assembly.

So you like vanished for the entire time this coup was going on, and like nobody knew where he was and no one had seen him and things were kind of fiasco e.

affairs and disturb social order. Now this, this is going back to the thing you know he did at the time. Right, he has this thing where he keeps calling the Parliament, which is controlled by the Democratic Party, which is like the liberal opposition party. He kept calling the parliaments like opposition anti state forces, and like, my brother in Christ,

what the fuck is a legislative dictatorship? I mean, like, you know, you could be really strictly anarchist about it and be like, well, yeah, all legislative dictatorships, but my dude, you are not living under a dictatorship because the parliament that your country elected hates you and refuses to pass your dogship budget because no one likes you. That is

simply not what the word dictatorship means. It reminds me of this thing where like, you know, if if you go back and you read like people in the eighteen hundreds talking about or like eight like seventeen hundreds too, you'll read them talking about monarchies, right, and they'll be like, Ah, if the king can like overrule the will of the nobles, we would be living in a peer dictatorship. It's like,

what the fuck are you talking about? Like Surri, you live under a monarchy, like you are already in a dictatorship. You are also like part of the authoritary and aprahas of the dictatorship, and this is just like the inverse of that where it's like, ah, the legislature won't let me do whatever the fuck I want, so this is now a dictatorship. And so like you know, that's simply

not what the word dictatorship means. And you can't get away with that shit as much in a country where people like in living memory have lived through an actual military dictatorship and understand what that's like. The parliament refusing to pass your terrible budget, that's not an excuse to institute martial law and try to shut down the legislature. So this was not received well as you would expect

from whatever unhinged speech that was. He did apologize for imposing martial law, which is a very funny place to end up, is like you try to do a coup and then you have to go on TV and apologize for trying to do the coup and also try to argue you didn't just try to do a coup. So this is received very poorly, as we sort of predicted, immediately,

the opposition Democratic Party immediately tries to impeach you. And from the way the headlines kind of work in the West, and from the way this is being talked about, and even from the way this episode sort of opened, you'd think that this impeachment vote was how we got impeached. But no, no, the first impeachment vote is not how

Un gets impeached. Everything is way weirder than that. Now Yun's party, the People's Power Party, which is henceforth going to be called the PPP because I am not going to say the words People Power Party over and over again.

for voting against martial law. And also like most of them weren't there, and I kind of got shipped for this, And I have been absolutely one hundred percent vindicated because the piece are vote, the first one rolls around, The first one happens very quickly after the first coup, right, well, the first QUP hopefully the only coup, hopefully is not a second cue, but it happens very quickly, and Okay, so the vote rolls around, and the entire PPP, the

entire party except maybe like two people just walk out of the chambers, and because they walk out of the chambers, the vote fails because they don't they don't have quorum. If you don't have quorum, is like there's like a minimum number of members that has to be in attendance for whatever you're doing to be legal to stop like two people from showing up in the middle of the night and being like, aha, i am the Parliament. We've just passed this like order that makes me dictator or whatever.

And again the entire PPP just walks out and they leave, and the vote fails because the PPP managed to whip basically its entire membership into trying to keep Uni in power. And here begins the what the fuck is going on part of this episode because A all reports we have suggest that Yun was planning to have the leadership, but the PPP arrested, and B he just literally tried to

do a coup and they're still backing him. And see we stumble into a very very thorty question that I saw from people in Korea, like the moment after all this stuff happens, but didn't really hit the western press until later, if at all, didn't really hit like the mainstream consciousness. And this question will become a parent in a second. So here's from the Guardian. Senior PPP politicians have claimed you can continue as president while delegating his

powers to the Prime Minister. An arrangement Park. That's Park Schoon Day, who's a very powerful Democratic Party politician. An arrangement Park described as quote a blatant constitutional violation.

we don't want to impeach our presidents. But also he just tried to do a coup, so is said, we're going to take his powers away and give it to the Prime minister so he can still serve without us impeaching him. Like, that's not a thing. You can't do this, there's no mechanism for this. The Democratic Party people are

just completely correct here. But because for some reason the Guardian feels it, I mean, it's the Guardian right, like, but they feel it necessary to sort of both sides again, a fucking coup.

whether whether whether your impeachment should go through it or not. Right, So, like there's a mechanism for this, but the PvP doesn't want to like impeach union, but they also don't want him seemingly running the country because he appears to be like absolutely unhinged and just again declared martial law and tried to knock off the legislature.

large step behind the coup, like is true. But I mean, this is a cooperative effort between un the Defense minister and a bunch of the people in the army, and the defense minister who resigned in disgrace like got thrown in jail. So that's fucking wild, Like you just got

like arrested by the police. A bunch of testimony also has come out from the National Assembly investigation, which I'm not covering much of the testimony from the National Assembly investigation because it's really unclear exactly how reputable all this stuff is because a lot of people are just saying shit, right, and some of it may be real. Some of it maybe some of that people have you know, obtained their sources,

but some of it's probably not. But like to get a sense of like the kind of stuff that is coming out in this investigation, one of the big claims was from I think it's from like a TV host who claimed he got texted it by a guy in the army, but apparently he was saying that the plan by union in the army, the plan was to have the head of the PPP called and then drop a North Korean uniform nearby to like do a false flag

and implicate North Korean special forces. Now this is unbelievably unhinged, right, what the fuck? And it probably isn't true, but you know, the source isn't great, But like who knows, right, Like, we don't actually know if they're playing to do this and fucked it up, or if they weren't playing to do this, or if this person is this person just lying, this person did get this text, but the person was misinformed. We don't know if this is just like misinformation that's

being spread around. This is a good demonstration of what the sort of chaos of this moment has been. And you know, and there's been a lot of other stuff that I think in any other time and place probably

would have been like front page news. So one of the things that happens in this whole process is that the South Korean police tried to raid the house of the president, and you know, like as as part of their investigation, there's a whole thing where Union's been ordered by like the investigatorial services to not leave the country because he's just actively under investigation for this military coup

being illegal by just like the regular ass police. And so South Korean police like try to raid his house and they can't do it because the South Korean equivalent of the Secret Service stops them from doing the raid.

And this in and of itself is something that like again would be a giant news headline at any other point in time, and it's just been completely lost, and it's like it's not sort of clear right now how this is all sort of going to play out, and whether the police are going to be able to do this, and you know, what's actually gonna happen to you un

after he presumably leaves office. I mean, I guess the Streme Court could save him, but like, you know, there's a real chance that he and we're going to get into this morning a second, there's a real chance that he just like fucking goes to prison, right and unlike the last president who was going to move from office, like I can't imagine him getting pardoned by the next administration because that was merely an unhinged corruption scandal involving

the president of South Korea being under the influence of a shaman and doing.

military personnel to the parliament. Former chief of the Defense Counterintelligence Command Yo En Hung has been accused of orchestrating the implementation of martial law, and Army Chief Park Ensiu has been s suspended from his role. Yun's former Defense Minister Kim Yung hyun, who stepped down immediately following the boarded martial law declaration, and former Interior Minister Lee Song

Men also face investigations. So what we're seeing here effectively, right, is the house cleaning of the ranks of the Korean military who've been involved with this whole thing, right, and they're going through a lot of different people. Part of this is also clearing out some of like the clicks in the military who've been sort of backing Yun and who people have suspected have been a bunch of people behind a lot.

what happens in Bolivia. It looks like where the oblivion qu was a product of, you know, people trying to do house cleaning and get rid of military guys before they did a coup, and so that this makes them go off half cocked, and like, you know, that's a bad situation for I mean, it's bad situation for everyone that says that there's a coup happening, but it's a bad situation, especially for the military, because they don't have their coup preparations in place, so it's easier to knock

them off. But what's interesting about this too is that to a large extent, we're seeing other parts of the Korean state like really go after the military, right, And this I don't know, I mean, like I'm hoping this kind of like has a precedent inside of the sort of Korean like liberal democratic societal norms that like, you can't let this just unhinged military do all of this stuff. That the precedent of this sort of like military house cleaning, I think is a good one, Right, this is.

fucking stop them from doing that. And ideally you just fucking acts as much of it as you possibly can, right, And I mean I think you should act. You acts the entire political system to make sure this doesn't happen. But you know, this is a this is hopefully a

good first step. I also want to mention that the specific charge of insurrection is being thrown at a lot of these people and also at Un himself, and like he absolutely did it, right, Like, there's not much of a dispute that he did in fact do an insurrection under under sort of Korean law, and this technically like carries the death penalty, but I.

you know. And this is like one of the really depressing things about this, right, even after everything, right, and this is something that we can trace back to sort of the roots of the conservatism of the PPP even after all of this shit, right, Like, these people still backed him. And that's a really really grim and depressing thing.

And part of the reaction to this has been from the South Korean trade Union Movement, which has been calling for just to straight up the disbanding of the PPP as a political party, right, And that's something that I think is extremely reasonable. Again, if your party's president tries to do a military coup, I think I think you shouldn't be allowed to have a party anymore.

either like approve the impeachment or not. And that's kind of where things stand now after an unbelievably unhinged week at a half of just everything being extremely unboud two weeks, I guess everything being just unbelievably extremely weird. And yeah, but I think I think there is a mild hopeful note, which is that like, if if you fight back against these people, they can be defeated. It sucks, but you

can eventually get them to crumble. And all I can really say for this is I hope the South Korean people prevail over the shitty military dictators, and I hope that we too are able to sort of prevail in the US against our sort of equivalents of these forces. Welcome to It could happen here a podcast that I introduced the same way almost every time.

of crows flying past. And if you there's different spots in Portland where you can just go see all of the all all all the crows hanging out and you know, doing doing doing whatever the things crows do. When literally an entire cities where the crows gathered together every night.

it really hard for these animals. And so the City of Vancouver for fifty years from nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty gave free range to the Vancouver gun people to go into the park and shoot crows every day, Oh my god. And when I see like the amount of crows that are still alive, it's just some metaphor for indigenous resilience, you know, like it's just so powerful. So it's another reason why I'm like interested in terms of where I was like living.

You know, I have a newsletter, Surely has a Patreon, Kyla has a newsletter, Danny has has also has like

an email list. There's just all these different projects, and we realize that, like for all of our talk about mutual aid and working collectively, when it comes to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured and so alienated and sort of so turned into like everyone has an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another, you know, even though they don't want to be like they want

to be. But that's sort of ultimately what's happening is that there's limited sort of customers and there's also this other trend going on right now of this really exciting kind of worker owned journals. A lot of them local journalisms. There's some in New York and Chicago, and there's one in Ashville and all over the country as well as like on special topics, so like Aftermath, which like does I think the other video games, and there's four or

four media, it does tech. There's just like all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing, and I think in some ways all of us are sort of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know, in a big way.

To make it sustainable for us and for anyone else who wants to share in this project, who we can sort of expand towards, but also to make it easier for people who are reading to have access to these things like in one place, instead of having to you know, decide who they care for and who they like in order to sort of you know, do that mac of like who can I afford to subscribe to, like I personally, I don't know if it's true for everyone else, but

personally I usually have about two or three people I can afford to subscribe to a month, and I switch it out, just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know, or something like that that was very technical and financially focused. But what we're really excited to do mostly is support each other's work, because I think we all really love and admire each other's work and have for a long time,

and this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of my writing just being for me, it's for Shuley and Carla and Danny No, And that just makes it feel more inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.

being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. Yeah, and if you're trying to get paid for that, you have to sell it to people, right, And so it's very hard to get paid at all for writing, and it's very hard to place your writing in venues that publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle because people do not really want to publish things that come to anarchist conclusions, Like they want you to do all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you

to think about like what an action is like, so like, you know, you could write for some of the lefty so called lefty socialist whatever rags, but they don't.

second to the racing anicism exists. This is why the one that makes me always lose my mind is Like I'm specifically going to name Jocobin here because I don't like them, but like, one of the things that jacumum will do is though covering a strike that is organized by the IWW it is an IWW union, that they will have pictures of the strike where there are a bunch of people holding IWW banners, and they will never mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike.

So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy of silence I guess about our politics and the stuff that.

like podcasts, and like are people who I like, really respect, whose names I think are big and important in the world of theory and activism and like in the Anglophone world especially, and none of us can sustain ourselves as writers as such because of the way that just you know, both politically but also just like the way the market has come down and it just feels like something we could apply our politics to solving as a workplace issue rather than just sort of as like a you know,

are you committed enough to sacrifice all your time issue? And so hopefully like that will also function to make more work available to produce and to platform and to yeah to to sort of work as an example simultaneously.

the time. This quote goes roughly like struggle illuminates the divisions of a society like lightning illuminates the sky.

when you're eludinated by it to act. And so I'm really excited that you are talking to him, And yeah, because you talked to Pet a bit more about what's been going on and what's to come.

really truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality or autonomy that we don't actually enact in our day to day lives. And so I really started to reflect

on my own life that way. And not so much Vicky at this point yet, but like Huli and Danny, both of them, like we just were blurbing each other's books and like supporting each other to connecting to publishers or trying to connect each other to publishers, and just like trying to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath even when we're all really committed to not being competitive, but there's like it is, like there's a you know.

So all is to say that for me, like collaboration is at the heart of what we're doing here in a deep, deep way. And for me, collaboration just means that when something is created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration. So I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes up individually, but also like with each other and even like through collaborations like this show

with Raoul and like how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah, so like for myself, I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way. I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for the for call, I think it will always be in conversation with others and just trying to double down on on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.

or sustain me. And all I needed was a push from a few other people to be like, wait, what if we like actually tried to do it collectively, to be like, oh, yeah, like I could actually try that, Like I don't have to just accept that, Like I'll always have like a full time job plus whatever writing, like in whatever hours I can steal, you know, and like you know, with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting

out enough to like sustain myself, like that whole process. I think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle, you know, of having gigs and work and lots of other important things to do and and you know, sort of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like, what's so inspiring about? You know, because Carlin and as Carlo was just mentioning, they sort of brought I'm the last one on the on the crew, and I was

sort of the closer, you know or whatever. But I think, like, I don't know what that means genuinely, but but I was brought in. And I think just having them propose it already just as a project that we've been thinking of has like changed the way I've been thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing. And so I think, like, just to underline that point and go on and on, collaborations really really like important and supporting one another.

don't know, create more time for ourselves to write. And then, like going back to something Vicky said earlier about like reinventing the newspaper, there was a time in anarchism where I think we talked about this amongst ourselves, like where

like every block had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper. Right, It wasn't like, yeah, you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists, but to think it was like it was hyper local in a way, and there was so many voices, and so I think that's another thing that we want to do is like help for that proliferation, because in the sort of spirit of collaboration, like the reason to write as an anarchist for me is to have conversations to produce the possibility for people to like receive it

and then contact me into and I get into conversations with people and learn things from them.

splintered off and all these kind of sectarian movements in the That's my take anyway, I think.

did that. Was you know when I finally did, it was after that movement had largely crusted. But I think there was a lot of focus on culture and also a critique of clture was also pretty central to how people were thinking and moving. And I think the explosion of social media and like posting and like the sort of quote unquote democratization and leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more real in the early twenty

tens than it is certainly than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made up narrative, but there was also it was also over relied on. I think people sort of reached for a kind of like, well, we anyone who can use these tools to communicate, like that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media in general, or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort of beside the point because

we can go around it. We can sort of go we can you know, go on Twitter and subvert it, and we can like do all these you know, go sideways around it. So I was, you know, a participant in to Occupy Wall Street twenty eleven, which people also don't know anything about because that's just being older. But Occupy Wall Street was started by a magazine called Adbusters, which came out of the WTO movement and sort of

managed to stick around. And by two thousand eleven, when they did that, we thought it was like a joke. It was like, oh, these culture jammers who like make fun of advertisements, like they started the movement. Like that's ridiculous, right, Like that's silly, and like this is not to defend Adbusters, I think.

lost a tremendous amount of ground. So I think it's actually really important to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't just news, but that are like really talking about art and beauty and like excitement and joy and fiction and all these things that we find really important because you know, I think a lot of people sort of think, well, it's a crisis moment, you know, the

world's ending, why would you do that? But like the world has been ending since fourteen ninety two, Like the world worth defending has been ending since then, and it hasn't ended yet. And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by indigenous and black and other marginalized cultures and stories and narratives and works of art has been an important mode of history and resistance just as much as organizing and struggle, And yeah, I think we can

move some struggle into that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot of craving for it now because I think also for a while things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years, the Internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No, everything feels like streaming is a mess. Like everything's a mess. There's no access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates

what they're doing. They know it's exploiting the artists. They know, you know, Spotify is giving people pennies, and that you know, Hbo and all those you know, all the all the streaming services you know, support Amazon, and they're they're just miserable, right, And I think there's there's a real opening and a real desire for something else at this moment, at the same time that things are indeed quite on fire, literally ecocidally, but also also sort of politically, yeah.

like in graffiti has a huge impact in it. It's overlooked often, I think, as like something that's effective, but we can see that there has been a giant cultural shift after October seventh in terms of people's awareness of the Israeli Gino side against the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think that it has to do really, you know, post October seventh, with the fact that this was like kind of plastered everywhere, and so it's easy

to kind of think that that isn't action. But to me, in a way, doing something like that is more effective than the kind of marching in circles that we can do that we call protest, and you know, like going back to punk, I think also punk has gets a bad rap sometimes because you know, in that line of like the kind of bookschin lifestyleism. But I don't think we should downplay like punk created its own culture of people doing everything themselves to make it happen. It's where

I got radicalized too. And they were like it was anarchists, right, It was like explicitly anarchist, and you were living in an anarchist way and like creating things in an anarchist.

And I think probably on a systemic thinking systemically is really about disrupting individualism or liberalism or empire, whatever you want of colonialism to really like live it in the everyday.

So that's partly that. And then on just a super practical level, like you know, all of us don't have wealth, don't have generational wealth, are working all the time to try to meet and meet and some of us are have housing insecurity and other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff and so like actually showing up for each of us is at the core of it. For me, like I it feels so good in my body to know that I'm not just showing up to think about

what to do for cow. For me, it's like in the act of collectivism for each other, and so I'm just open to what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have an agenda except for to disrupt and

intervene belief systems that are ideologically driven by empire. And I also came of age in the early eighties in the punk scene and had a venue space and to me, punk is and I would say hip hop is well underground hip hop stuff is like always The way to disrupt being captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low to the ground.

I think I've spent a lot of my in the meantimes in trying to sort of organ stuff that sort of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just feels often feels like wheel spinning, you know, like I'm building, I'm trying to build mass movement organizing like you know,

like whatever that means. And in the twenty tens, like one of the things that happens from like twenty eleven, are you by two thousand nine, but definitely twenty eleven to twenty twenty was that wherever you were, it was never more than probably eighteen months before there was like

something else going off in the streets. And so although those could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult, you still had a lot of periods where you know, you could just sort of be waiting and it would just sort of happened.

really disrupted those things in that space. It has felt very clear to me personally. And I'm older, you know whatever. I'm like, you know, a movement elder at this point, just because our movements are so you focused now, because I'm actually old. Like the decade before twenty eleven, from like two thousand and one, you know, from from nine to eleven until it sort of occupies sort of how I periodize it a bit. There wasn't a ton of

street movement. You had the Iraq War stuff that was really, really big, and there were important exceptions to that in the US. I'm doing a potted history here. Obviously there's exceptions to this, but you definitely had all this time, and the stuff that was sustained and remembered were largely like sort of cultural projects, and so like I think like now as we're moving into this era here in North America on Turtle Island of extreme repressive danger, right, like,

we shouldn't like joke about it or downplay it. Like we were facing a lot of extreme repression and fascists back in the streets in a big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where people did a lot of marching in circles, but there were targets for the pressure, you know, like they don't feel as relevant now, but

now I'm really off, way off. But no, but no, I think so, I think like I think like we're in this moment where the fascists both are quite empowered and very unfocused. They're confused, they don't really have us in their sights, like they think Liz Cheney is just as much a revolutionary as Assadashikur or whatever, right, and like that leaves us some space to move and to build things that can maintain the spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance that can also organize.

And another thing that has really been important for me recently with Kaw is that I've been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about the details of, but that the skills have largely come from punk music that I did in the twenties twenty is being in a touring punk band, and those skills have made this organizing really easy. And that's been a huge thing for me because I'm working with other people who are younger who don't have that experientially.

for doing really important work. And I think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world building.

not like don't look there, let's look over here. And that can mean of multiple things, which is often when people think politically, they're looking at these big moments or big actions or like top down solutions, which means that we take our attention away from these other places where we're doing all this stuff like carloisting, like we're already doing a lot of important kind of like life making work.

And then also there's moments in in our movements where we have to be like you all look over here while we do stuff over right, Like you don't want to be seen all the time, so we have to be able to direct our attention to the things that we do and then also keep some of that stuff under wraps, and that means it's hard sometimes to see and because it's so decentralized, and anarchism really functions through decentralization, like we're not always aware of how much power we

actually have and what's going on at.

it's not about kind of imposing itself. And so I think like that kind of in between of seeing what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then keeping under wrap so that we can keep chugging along, and then just also being aware of when our work is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes against what we want.

And you can't necessarily just like add fuel to it and be like, ah, it's gonna.

spread this thing to a larger group of people. That's also very very dangerous in the sense that like it's very easy to sort of just lose yourself in the kind of mire of like the field you've walked into.

of what this whole thing becomes. And the more the more of these media projects we get and the more that people are able to sustain themselves doing this, the more that we're sort of able to break, like I don't know, just like the model maniacal substack control of like taking your money and giving it the transphobes kind of thing.

everything will be subscribed. But we really want to have three months worth of living wage for all of us to do two days a week on it, right, So we're not even you know, we're not talking full salaries. That's forty five thousand dollars because four people for three months, it's not even a tremendous amount of money because we're including solidarity funds in that and like paying any writers

who contribute, like lots of other stuff. So yeah, if you have a few bucks and you know, maybe you're thinking about, you know, getting off of one of those substacks or something, and you want to throw our way, we would be absolutely honored. I'm very excited to accept anything in this launch. And if you don't have that money, which is i know true for a lot of us, which is why we feel bad asking for the money because there are so many people who need it right now.

You can subscribe online. You can find us on social media and keep in touch until we do launch, and then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also a really great way to support us. But if you have a few bucks you want to throw, if you want to give someone a present of a year's membership, you can get that for one hundred dollars for the holidays, you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with our work, we'd really really appreciate it.