It Could Happen Here Weekly 70

Billy Ford. Billy is a program off SIR for the Burma team at the United States Institute of Peace. And do you want to say hello Billy James. Hi, thanks for tuning it. Yeah, thanks for joining us without a decent introduction. If I summed up right, what you do

get I want to get that wrong. So people will have heard Billy before and heard from Billy when we finished our last series on them, where we spoke about the funding that the pdfc using and how they're using a lot of unique and really innovative methods to continue to support their revolution when they're not getting very much at all in the way of international support, and certainly

nothing compared to countries like Ukraine. But what we wanted to talk a little bit about today was the s A C or the Hunter's attempts at kind of staging a sham election, which they've sort of backed off on. Can you explain a little bit about what they had proposed and then what they maybe what they're doing now, right, yeah, UM.

So the expectation was upon UM instigating the coupe February f that UM the state of emergency would end on UM February first, which was two days ago, UM, giving them six months after that, uh, that period to kind

of undertake an election. And so the expectation was that before August one, there would be this sort of shame UM electoral process UM, and the the Hunter would essentially structure of the process in such way that they they're there, their political party, the U s DP, would prevail UM, and that the Commander in Chief men online who runs the HUNTA would ascend as he had dreamed to become the president of the country and kind of rule in

a military dictatorship model, but under kind of these auspices of civilian governance. So that was the expectation. But things have changed, as you kind of alluded to. Yeah, so they've they've said they got to extend for another six months. Who's that right, that's right. UM, So they said they

would extend for another six months until August first. UM. But then this morning they also announced a new political, Economic, and Social objectives which includes a five point road map UM, which, for those of you who have been following m R for some time, is often the way that they frame there UM kind of sham and circuitous approaches to civilian governance. UM. But UM that articulates a series of reforms, restoring law and order, you know, social development, implementing a peace process,

and then holding elections UM. And this is I think indicates to most people that elections are very unlikely to occur any time in the near future. UM. They did something almost identical in two thousand and four articulating a roadmap to democracy, and that didn't really start until two thousand and ten, UM, where when there were elections and

there weren't really meaningful ones until UM. This is kind of an indication to I think a lot of folks that UM, elections are unlikely this year and that there's

kind of a long road ahead. UH. The interesting element of this will be to see how the the hunter's kind of enablers in the international community, including Thailand, China, and India in particular, how they will respond, in part because they were pushing the SAC very hard to undertake these elections as a potential off ramp to the horrifying violence that is UM that resulted from the coup and um, you know, all the atrocities that the SEC has committed.

Maybe we could talk a little bit about the the international support they have, because it's still quite significant and like especially in terms of propping up their military force through the use of air power they can and they don't have domestic like fighter yet manufacturing, right, So can you talk a little bit about that, Like I think they received a couple more planes very recently, right, Yeah,

from um the Chinese. UM. Yeah. There. It's kind of an interesting dynamic whereby you have a an entire country of fifty three ish million p bowl UM fighting against a tiny military institution of about five thousand or fewer UM if you include their families and all the medics, UM, and that tiny institution is being supported by just a handful of countries UM. As I said, kind of China Russia, UH, to a certain agree, Indian and Thailand UM and a

few others UM. And the vast majority of the world is kind of opposes this military takeover and the subsequent dictatorship and all the her indoc atrocities that they've committed. UM. And so there's quite a lot of international actors who are providing kind of UM rhetorical support to the resistance and some you know, support to civil society and humanitarian

assistance and others. But you know, on balance, the support that the Chinese, Indians, Russians in particular UM have provided in terms of material assistance to the s A c UM, as well as the diplomatic assistance that the Chinese provide at the secure the Council in particular, but also the Ties provide UM with an ascion, is you know for outweighs the rhetorical and small material assistance at the West and UM. You know other supporters of the resistance movement

have provided UM. So Yes, to answer your question, the you know, the Chinese and Indians continue to provide material military assistance to the s A c UM. And you know, my question is kind of what is there theory of change here and how will UM supporting the sac militarily

lead to anything like stabilization. It's just kind of perplexing to me when both countries are very UM interested in in in supporting UH a level of functional stability so they can undertake their economic and geopolitical objectives UM, many

of which go through my Mr UM. I just don't really understand how they see kind of a military victory Bray, the s A c is a pathway to stabilization when you have an entire nation that has risen up against UH the dictatorship and has wholly rejected it and demonstrated that they're willing to make the these incredible sacrifices to UM to ensure that this coup does not succeed. Yeah, it is. It's very perplexing because like it's not in in any sort of conventional sense like a consolidated regime

and no show any chance of being one. Right, Like, it doesn't even have territorial control of a large sways of the country that they claims. Yeah, exactly, and you're you're even hearing this. I mean, there's been quite a bit of research, contested research that that shows the HUNTA has less than fifty control, but even today you are differ.

Yesterday you heard from an online the the Hunter Leader UM that he's now admitting that they um only have sixty percent control, which is a pretty sangular analysis of what they control. Um, it's probably much smaller than that.

But you know, them demonstrating that they do not have UM control over of the country as a pretty staggering proposition and kind of indication to their allies that, UM, you know, they just don't have the capacity to administer a country that's unwilling to be pacified and um so and and you know, on top of that, there's very little I just don't see a pathway in which they will capture more territory. UM. I mean they have, you know, constrained resources. Um they have. I think they had twenty

two entrants into the Defense Service Academy last year. I mean there's when they when there's casualties on the front lines, you just there's not a lot of replacement happening. UM, they're not able to get spare parts for their Russian made helicopters. You know, there's just major material constraints that the s a c. S. Military is facing, and it's just hard to imagine that they will ever regained much

more than you know, what they say is territorial control. Yeah, it's it's very if Then if we look at the PDF by comparison, and I got banned from Twitter last week for posting a picture of them, but it's there. Their equipment compared to even a year ago, is vastly improved. Like I don't know if you saw the one group of guys with it actually international rifle, but I have no idea where that came from, but it it's very

impressive that they have one. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of um. Honestly, the resilience of this movement is partly a testament to the ingenuity and innovation UM. I mean we saw it in the beginning in the non violent action, demonstrating or kind of deploying tactics that we've never seen before that have you know, been lessons to other international non violent movements around the world, just really creative fundraising tactics, as you and I have discussed in the past. But yeah,

now it's the military ingenuity. I mean essentially creating UM facilities for retrofitting drones for aerial attacks. Um. One of the military's helicopters was taken down this morning. I haven't I don't know exactly what weapons were used in that, but you know, it's just kind of a level of innovation given that these you know, the PDFs and most of the eras have have very little access to very few um kind of international um, you know, arms markets.

So the fact that they're able to sustain themselves at all and maintain this, you know, which is probably much more um of the territory is is kind of an

incredible testament to their innovation ingenuity. Yeah, it's this a couple obviously of several PDF fighters who I keep in touch with, and like they they've spoken to me about like first or three D printed guns, which we've spoken about extentively, but also torna CA's night vision goal goals, even process is like like limbs people who have lost legs,

right to land, minds and things. So like, it's amazing that they've set up all these things which normally require like a massive interaction with the state and with an international system, and they've done it using in this case, the Internet and a three hundred dollar printer. They've got

an early Express or something. Yeah, it's incredible, Yeah, it's it's extremely sort of inspiration on that sense, but also very sad like I want to talk a little bit about the s a C seems to have It's not fair to say they've pivoted to war crimes, because it's been kind of integral to what they've done from the outset, but they seem to have given up on trying to make like targeted strikes against the military formations and just

pivoted to dropping bombs on civilians. Could you talk about a couple of those, like maybe we could talk about the Kitchin music cultural festival that they bombed, or well

one of the other examples of that. Yeah, there's definitely been a ship if from UM a strategy of essentially augmenting UM or providing air support to UH kind of exposed frontline light infantry to a tactic of targeted air strikes against civilian targets and against UM armed organization headquarters which had UM under previous UM negotiations been deemed like off limits, but UM it seems as if there's nothing

off limits now. They bombed UM the Chin National Front's headquarters, which is right on the India Chin border, UM on the western part of the mr UM and there's pretty reliable accounts that there were UM, there were bombs that landed in Indian territory. UM. I mean, as you reference, they there was a bombing in um a Chin state

on a on a festival, killing least sixty civilians. They've done something similar on um Uh ethnic armed organization headquarters in the southeastern current territories, including the our acount of

armies facilities in those areas. So there has been a shift in tactic to UM targeting headquarters facilities in that sense, and as you said, kind of civilian targets to I don't know, you know, this is just the modus operandi of an institution that is devoid of humanity and UM so alienated from society that they you know, they're they're willing to go to any ends to kind of protect

themselves and their control of power. I think, particularly now that they've seen that the public is against them, and UM probably quite concerned that if they are unsuccessful in this military endeavor that they will be kind of strung up, you know. So it's UM, I think it's kind of a sign of desperation and as you mentioned, kind of

a tactical shift. Maybe we should explain the sort of four cut strategy which has been a long term strategy even before the coup of the military, and what that means and how that sort of provide I guess, I don't know, like a moral framework, maybe a certain way that you know that it's it's not like they started doing this ship in February one, right like that, this is what this is how they do stuff. I mean, this is an institution that's been at war with its

own people for seventy years. Um. Yeah, I mean the there is an underlying philosophy of the more military that that they essentially are the protectors of national sovereignty and to a certain degree of protectors of the Bomar ethnic group and Bomar Buddhism in particular. And um, this is a deeply in trance philosophy within the UM military establishment.

And UM it's been to a certain degree of fairly compelling narrative for retention and institutional solidarity, which is why in some part I mean, it's one of the reasons there are a number why this the s A C. And the the sit that memory military is has been resilient to UM collapse, despite you know, being extremely incompetent and UM very isolated UM and virtually never having one a war despite being at war for seventy years and

having structural and military a vantages UM. And so this is kind of underlying the justification and the moral philosophy of this institution that is morally UM corrupted. But as you said, their UM tactical strategy is essentially one of social isolation, division UM and ensuring as much human suffering as possible so as to UM pacify a population into

submissi sh in. And so essentially the strategy is to kind of cut communications and food supply and um uh connections between communities and these sorts of things, which is UM. For for a very long time, the military strategy has been one of divide and conquer, in which they've UM attempted to exacerbate divisions between ethnic and religious minority communities to ensure that they would not face a united front.

And so the incredible challenge and opportunity of the current resistance movement is one in which the MIAM or military is no longer at the table in conversations with one another UM, and they are trying to build cohesion with one another and Frankly, this is where there's unbelievable progress that I don't think it's enough attention and appreciation that there's meaningful changes in behavior in terms of the bomar majority of the communities, posture towards ethnic and religious minorities,

and you know, communication and coordination across um institutions that had historically been at odds and happy to go more into that, but yeah, the strategy of divide and conqueror is really front and center. Yeah, and ironically, by pushing that so high that they've they've done the complete opposite, which is forced people to form like a popular front

against them. Yeah, let's talk about that, because I find it really fascinating how like even how like e A O s and PDFs are kind of vaguely underneath a unified command at this point. And again, let's talk about how those barriers which existed for so long a sort of gradually breaking down now yeah, rapidly. I guess one of the ways in which there's been a meaningful shift has been just kind of the individual experiences of the military's atrocities. I mean, um, I think in your previous

episode with Gantomo, he had indicated that ps uh. You know, public perception of Rohenja has shifted somewhat, although it's kind of questionable whether it's a durable shift and whether it's meaningful and all that. But um. He had attributed that shift in part to the fact that the Bomar majority Buddhist population is now experiencing frankly, some of the forms of atrocity that the Rohenja had experienced, you know, in the seventies and the nineties and then in seventeen UM

when things escalated to genocide. So I think this is one of the shifts, is that the in the Burmese heartland, in the area where the military recruits most of its soldiers, um, they are undertaking the most arguably the most um extreme atrocities, burning villages to the ground, um, you know, just horrendous stuff that like I don't even want to say on the air, but just um, you know, just an incredible

campaign of terror. Um. In part because the people's defense forces and the resistance forces are are extremely strong there and only strengthening and respond to these atrocities. So I think that's one of the dynamics is that there's um, there's been a shift in perception because of UM, because of the Hunter's behavior. Another is that, frankly, there's just

a massive political shift at play. I mean, you have, you know, February one, the National League, like Nationally for Democracy Led Government is deposed and they don't necessarily have arms or an experience of military combat, whereas the ethnic armed organizations have been fighting for seventy years against the central government, including the National League for Democracy Led Government.

And so there is a shift in power at that moment um that you know, shift power from the BAMAR Center to ethnic minority communities in a in a particular way. So UM, that kind of open space for greater humility and greater dialogue and UM, you know, willingness to make concessions to ethnic and religious mi arty communities. UM. And

that isn't there's actually been tremendous progress there. So there's the National Unity Consultative Council, which is you know, probably the most important dialogue platform, but one one that is very focused on big picture governance challenges UM and long term kind of national dialogue processes. But UM, there's been some good progress there. But frankly, the most progress has

been made in UM military and governance coordination platforms. So this includes the C three C, which is essentially a command of control platform that's between the National Unity government and ethnic armed organization leadership where they're coordinating military strategy and tactics. So that and there's been considerable trust building

through those sorts of operations. And similarly, there's been trust building in you know, basic things like coordinating humanitarian assistance or UM local administration or policing these sorts of things. UM where there's UM, you know, there's a problem that's needs to be solved in the near term, and we can come together to solve it collaboratively and in that process sort of build understanding and trust with one another. So UM, there's been really meaningful differences I've seen in

terms of cohesion across traditional lines of intercommunal division. UM. Obviously a long way to go, but this is a lot of what what we're working on at the U S and stitutent piece and UM that the U S Government is supporting is trying to support the resistance capacity to chart a viable pathway to stabilization, and a lot

of that relies upon building cohesion and trust among resistance groups. Yeah, everyone I spoke to maybe not everyone I spoke to is Mama, some people Karen UM, and some of them were some of the people we've spoken to that remotely or ranger. UM. All of them said that what has to come out of this is like a federalized democracy. Do you think that that's that's likely? And what does that look like in the country it's been a war

with itself for most of the century. Yeah, I mean, clearly this is a question that needs to be answered by them people. UM. And I think the National Unity Consultative Council is a good platform for having this discussion. But there is a number of free requisits for for having that discussion is and one of them is kind of new norms of dialogue based on trust and mutual

um respect. But yeah, I think that, um, the only viable pathway to stability is you know, is one that results in a federal democratic system in which subnational federal units have a degree of autonomy UM, and in which there is a baseline of equality. UM. There's rule of law, independent judiciary, UM. You know, just the basic fundamentals that

ensure protections of minority populations. Uh. UM. You know. Another challenge being that even you know, within states like Kachin State, where you know, the Kachin at the community is an ethnic minority at the national level, but there are also subminorities that you know, like the Shawnee population, and and there's concerns that you know, there may um there needs to be productions for the minorities within the minority state. So you know, all of these things need to be

sort of worked out. And this is of course like a maybe a decade long national dialogue process that will ultimately culminate in a new federal governance structure, a new security structure that you know, maybe doesn't have a federal you know, a union level military with the level of autonomy or political involvement that you know has played this country for so long. But this is really like the key to long term peace and stability in the country. And frankly, like it felt a long way off under

the NLD administration. I mean, they were making a lot of progress in a lot of ways, but you know, building a just and inequitable governance structure in which ethnic and religious minorities had a voice and didn't feel oppressed

by the dominant but mor Budhist population. Um. Frankfully, it was it was quite a ways off, and this, you know, as horrible as the coup has been, it is definitely a shock to the system that may open up new pathways for dialogue, um, new opportunities for trust building, and you know, the opportunity to you know, think about a new model of governance that is you know, more just

more equitable and more inclusive. Yeah, it's definitely bought in a whole generation of younger people who like aren't sort of why didn't come through the institutions that created the old regime and just came at this. It's like I'm seventeen and I'm bucking angry and like, I'm going to make this better sort of however I can. And yeah, they're they're really, i mean obviously very inspirational and then fascinated to talk to I wonder, like, how do you

see the end to this conflict? Because we're still a long way from either side having a definitive military victory. Right, Certainly, all these big cities are still more or less controlled by the Hunter, and that's there's not an immediate way that I can foresee them not being that way. So if I could ask you to like speculate a little bit or look at the way things are going. How do we get out of the situation where the hunters bombing schools and music concerts and right, um m hmm,

it's yeah. This is honestly like I think everyone is kind of lost, um in our attempts to make predictions of where this is going. Um. Honestly, I don't know that there is a path to a military victory for either side here. UM. I mean it seems pretty unlikely that you'll SEEPDS marching on nepied on capturing the Ministry of Defense anytime soon. Um. But equally unlikely that the s a C will consolidate, you know, control of the country.

I mean, that's just that's just not going to happen. UM. So I mean the the a lot of our work is thinking through the best postile outcomes and increasing the probably trying doing the work to try to increase the probability of those outcomes. And I think the um, this is where it's just like I have questions for a lot of the international actors that are supporting the s a C because I I just don't know of any possible pathway to peace and stabilization that goes through a

stronger s a C. It just seems unfathomable. Um, But you know, there are pathways to stabilization that go through a stronger resistance movement that either yields some radical transformation of the SACS composition and then some sort of dialogue process UM or you know, just a very very extended uh um conflict in which you know, the resistance holds territory UM in some parts of the country, the SAC

controls some other areas UM. Over an extended period, the ethnic armed organizations contain kind of UM act more and more autonomously. And you have areas in you know, Kachin and Wa Ho Kong and the Chinese border re kind state that kind of gained a bit more autonomy and sort of act more independently of one another. So like this sort of fragmentation process. And honestly, if if there is an election, you know, a sham election by the s a C, it seems to increase the probability of

this fragmentation scenario. Um. You know, it increases the probability that the s a C just maintains its presence in the in the urban areas and then rekind state Kachin State Waw State, these kind of become more autonomous regions, Chin State, UM, and they start to operate as some independent states. So honestly, that's that's part of why I

feel like support to the SAC. Not only is it sec for the elections, I should say, not only does it almost definitely increase violence because you know the elections are a target, but also it increases the probability of national fragmentation UM. And it doesn't do anything to increase the probability of stability. So I just don't I don't really see that that being a pathway to any form

of stability or ending the SACS bombings of schools. Yeah, I think it gives them this way talking point bit at the Russian shamow elections in the dom Bass, like like because we saw like I think it was a mobi a PDFU. I don't know if you saw this, but they did a drive by and shot some people who were polling for it out doing some kind of election stuff, and obviously that gives them this kind of oh, look,

our election workers are being attacked with terrible people. The PDFs a kind of but you know, if you've spent more than ten minutes your entire life reading about Miama, then you're realized that that's the false claim. The international community just just doesn't seem to care to a large degree about the trustees in Miama, about the revolution in Miama, about the cou and miam A certainly doesn't care in

the same way that it cares about what's happening in Ukraine. Right, it doesn't care with man pads and tanks and guns and training and all the things that could bring this water an end much more quickly. Do you think that that will change or it's just going to be Burmese people liberating Burmese people because the world doesn't care about them or it doesn't care in a material fashion. Yeah, I think there's like, yeah, I think there's um sort

of like two dynamics that player. One is that, yeah, people care a lot less than Ukraine or Tiwan or other geopolitical interest. They see this to a certain level as a domestic issue that doesn't have regional implications, something that we're very focused on demonstrating is totally untrue. Um. And the other thing is that people don't know what

to do. And like I mean, even um, the US Congress just past the Burma Act, which is a piece of legislation that essentially signals congressional interest in Burma and more to be done UM, alongside appropriations and resources to support it. UM. The challenge now is figuring out what is the best use of resources. And I think that UM countries like Japan and UM, honestly some U states,

you know, Ascan states. It's more they are very uncomfortable with the engaging with revolutionary actors and there's just not a lot of certainty as to how to help because there's like, okay, military assistance UM to the end eu G. It's like there's a lot of concern that you know, you know, significant expansion of arms access in the countries. You know, you have this mass proliferation of weapons. You have you know, concerns about post conflict warlordism or weapons

and resources getting into the hands of narco traffickers. UM. You know, there's just a lot of uncertainty, and so there's not an adequate given what the first point that this is really a kind of peripheral regional matter in the eyes of some UM. It yields a very low risk tolerance and uncertainty as to what to do. And so this kind of has resulted in a couple of things, one being that the buck is just passed to multilateral

institutions like ACON. I mean, I think China has done a very effective job of ensuring nothing happens in the international realm UM by pushing it to ascon which it knows is incapable of doing anything meaning well. UM, and so it's just relegated to multilateral platforms where nothing will happen. You always have a veto from UM Highland Cambodia or Russia and China at the n S, at the Security Council UM, and so you know, it's these combinations of

factors that really challenge this thing. And even within the U S. Government there's like a very robust inter agency debate about exactly what is the best form of assistance, what is the most ethical way of engaging and UM what are risks associated with different forms of assistance to

the resistance movement UM. So I think that uncertainty plays a lot into it, and so UM a lot of what I think there's a lot of value that could be added if UM the resistance movement can come together, essentially around a common set of requests from the international community. Essentially saying this is what we need, um to be effective. And you know you, based on your risk tolerance, help

us as you can. But we're demonstrating to you that we have we're unified in these ways, we have these needs, and um, you know, help us however you feel is most appropriate given your risk tolerance. So I don't know, it's incredibly complicated. I think them having China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Laos as your neighbors also makes this just incredibly challenging. You can't access the country in the way that you can um for Ukraine. Um, so just logistically,

it's incredibly challenging. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it does seem still like like you said, like it's like in Ukraine, we also have deeply problematic groups who we are, who we are arming, And yeah, it's it's ironic that their concern is spreading the preventing the proliferation in arms, and what they've done is helped like a giant leap forward in I don't artisanal homemade weapons technology, like we're probably only seeing the very tip of and like our reporting, like,

I'm sure that's more stuff that we'll see as time goes on. And but I wonder what can people do? People often ask like if where they can donate, how they can help, right, because obviously it is extremely difficult to see little kids getting shot in schools and want to do something. And I wonder what you would suggest for people who are looking to help. We've both spoken to people who are collecting money through click to donate,

which is one thing people can do. But um, do you want to explain that, actually explain how people can and can participate in click to donate? I think that's cool. Yeah, I mean there's been a number of really fascinating fundraising models. Um. Yeah, the click to notating model is essentially the resistance leveraging what it has um a comparative advantage in which is

huge numbers of people on their side. And essentially, um, the resistance creates creates web pages or YouTube content or anything, and you know, just engages the advertisements on those pages, which create increases the value of those that ad space and then they can kind of generate revenue that way. Um. The National Unity government has also done some really fascinating stuff issuing bonds, uh, conducting a lottery, um, selling off

you know s a c military properties. I think they just sold the mini on a lines house and yangon for a considerable amount UM. So it's kind of a an incredible fundraising model and requiring tremendous innovation. They also created uh a financial technology called and u g pay and a digital current currency d mmk um. So yeah,

it's it's kind of a remarkable um innovation there. Um. In terms of what kind of a uh your listeners could do, I think, UM, you know, I think engaging in UH so of the international kind of advocacy and

awareness raising is really valuable. I think some of these things like if you know, if you're a congress person acknowledges demand for this, then that can increase that the pressure that they put on the State Department, d D, National Security Council UM and potentially increase the risk tolerance of the US government if if there's just more pressure there.

So those sorts of things I think, UM. Honestly engaging with some of the content that's being that's being created by the resistance, learning about my mr um, you know,

just just following the story. I mean it's like, I don't know, you've probably experienced this doing your reporting, but it's just like the most unbelievable stories of human resilience and just like, I don't know, it's it's such like an honor to be nearby these people who are just risking so much for such a for such an honorable pos that they truly believe in. It's just like the quintessential example of integrity and um, yeah, goodness, Yeah, it's amazing.

It's stuff you couldn't make up, and like it's stories you can sell as fiction almost like yeah, their integrity, like even they're like and one thing I find absolutely amazing, Like you said, perspectives on ethnic groups have changed on so many things that people they're willingness to be like, I've examined my stance on this and it was the

wrong stance, and I'm changing my stance on this. It's like we spoke to so many young people who were like, yeah, I was fairly misogynist, like a February first one, and since then, like I fought alongside women. I've you know, I've seen them do things that I didn't. I've been told that they weren't capable of and I've changed I was wrong, and like we need to not be a

misogynist country going forward. Yeah, no, there was I was maybe you know this group, but I was engaging with organization and that was it's led by kind of an activist, former activist um and he was kind of saying that they've essentially tried to eliminate all of the sort of misogyny in their in their training protocols, like even just

using terms like man up or something. It's like wiped it from their approach because it's like that's a misogynistic kind of you know, approach to thinking about strength and power. And so it's like what you're saying is I'm here, I'm feeling the same hearing the same things. It's which is incredibly powerful given particularly given the pressures and what they're all going through, just having the wherewithal to kind of like their head ups and think about, you know,

be reflective of themselves. Like imagine in the American political discourse, people actually changing their minds for once. It's remarkable. Yeah, yeah, the genuine is. And it's it's refreshing in that sense to see people like wanting the right thing and not letting tiny differences like blow them into seven thousand different pieces, right, the broad date ring on one thing, yeah, exactly, And that's kind of the remarkable. I mean the Nationally Unity

Consultative Council for example. You know, it's how its challenges UM as a dialogue platform, but it's still going and that is like people are still coming to the table. And frankly, it's remarkable because repeatedly, in quote unquote peace processes in MR history, they've collapsed because you know, someone said something and you know another party left the table

um and didn't return. So the fact that these dialogues are continuing on is an incredible testament to people's willingness to kind of open up and be more humble and kind of consider the other's opinion and question their own, which is you know, a lesson we could all learn. Yeah, yeah, definitely, Billy, where can people like, where can people find you online? And where can they find more good information about my

mba UM I am. You know, if you search Billy Ford at us I P dot org, you and find the stuff I've written recently, and then I'm on Twitter at b I L L E. The number four, the letter d UM and good sources of information. I mean there's great UM investigative work by Myanmar witness UM which is just an incredible group of researchers. Um, there's been a couple of good reports recently by Global Witness and Earth Rights related to sanctions that just came out. Um U s I P. You can check out some of

our writing. My colleagues Jason Tower in Brasilo Coop just published something related to how the conflict has regional consequences that could be of interest. Um and UM there's I don't know, there's innumerable great um meam R think Tanks, the Chin Human Rights Organization has done some incredible research and reporting about military atrocities and Chin state. Um. You could go on and on, but um. Yeah, if you

don't know, check out my Twitter. I've I tend to repost stuff that I find fascinating and there's there's a lot out there. Yeah. Great, Well, thank you so much for giving us some of your time this afternoon. I really appreciate it. It's good to catch up. Yeah, thanks for having me. James has been great, no worries, Hello and welcome to It could happen here once again hosted by myself and Drew. As you know, we talked about whatever.

We've entered a new year, so you know, Happy New Year by the way, James, I don't think I told you. Oh yeah, Happy New Year, Andrew. Yeah. What I've in question this time is carrying over from some of the discussions we had in the previous year, because you know,

time moves forward. Uh, And with time moving forward, hopefully to know it, it becomes excreasingly necessary, very very necessary to interrogate into uproot a lot of the classical capitleists I ideas embedded in a world, an ideology, for example, it just won't die, that idea of development, despite as many critics over the past few decades, despite the colonizing and post clear nations, people of those nations you know, rallying against such projects of development due to the harms

they've caused socially environments and otherwise, this ideology, this idea of development, just won't die. Um. But here we are, and I think at least here in this podcast, among the audience of this podcast, we can agree that the

time has come for some kind of alternative. Maybe some kind of alternative can happen here, you know, a different view, a new path you all frecurrently have and stage right when vere are you familiar with the concept, I'm not actually no, we fun to learn about all right, well, fantastic, So you could ask anything any questions you have about

it as I go along. So a lot of the early concepts related to this idea of when Vivie arose in reaction to the classical economic development strategies that have ripped through communities in their environments. I'm talking of course about acts of inclosure, prioritization, new life, new liberalization, economic

imperialisms and so forth. Capitalism and its element basically government projects that lyne the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats, development banks, quote and quote that really never seemed to fund the people directly. When Revere draws from this heritage, a heritage of indigenous communities, uh, particularly in South America, in some cultures, they have no concepts analogous to the modern western capitalist

concept of development. Of course, modernis and coots. There's no concept of a linear life, a linear time, even with a foreman subsequent state. And so the idea of underdevelopment and development of primitive and advance just does not mesh with that ontology. And all these and these concepts of wealth and poverty, no are they are necessarily concepts of wealth and poverty as we understand them based on the accumulational lack of material good I've said when revere probably

a dozen times by now. The question is what is when revere? In Latin America, the concept of gen vivere or good life or good living provides new alternatives to development. UM, and it's very nstitute. I feel like, I feel like it's something that we should have been working on for a really long time. UM. You know, like me personally, I don't know what you James, but I really care about GDP growth or increase in return on investment. You know, I care about living a good life. I care about

gen vivere. And so I think the name of the philosophy itself and the name of the concept itself automatically gets you to ask the question what is a good life? And the answer, the beauty of the answer is that you decide that, I decide, that we decide that our communities decide that collaboratively. The good life is not some sort of policy proposal or government project or development initiative.

For imposition, the good life is a pluralistic concept. Is when nos contrivers it's a different ways of living well together it's not a single homogeneous or unrealizable good life. It's not like this single homogeneous pursuit of profit that our entire system is built around. Now now the good life when revere, it's more about people living well together in a community, in different communities living well together, and

individuals and communities living well with nature. And that these concepts sound familiar, it's because you know, they must have heard it from other places. It's a it's a trend we're starting to see around the world in this twenty centery and even prior to then. Uh, these ideas are

solely gained one more esteem as time goes on. Um. You know, the ideas presence in social ecology, The idea is present in various animals, tomtologies, and they're really being brought to the forefront in this time because we need them now more than ever. Despite efforts of Western forces primarily to erase and to redact and to confine these ideas and these contexts of the realm of irrelevance or backwardsness or superstition, they endure in sometimes new forms, as

with gen Revere. What Reviere is about quality of life, but also molso the idea that quality of life I will well be in as individuals. It's only possible within a community. The community, which as I mentioned includes the floor and flour that's surround us and in many ways that can be interpreted, which is the real beauty of it. So as a concept, you kind of look at wend Revere. It's two word phrase and it's also a double barrel

of a concept. It's a two for one package of both criticism of the classical western capitalist notion of development and an alternative to that Eurocentric tradition but onto indigenous traditions plural and so that two for one package within that and you can really unpack that package and see that you know, you see the idea of the same sort of basis that the growth is getting its critique

from the same sort of ideas being shared. And in terms of alternatives, when you look into wend review, you sort of see the anarchic bent that has become ever more present in a new political imaginations over the past few years. At least it feels that way to me. That's um, that sort of community oriented, autonomy oriented, liberatory, decoding oriented mindset is becoming more and more prevalent. Of course, I could be you know, my own Internet biases and

algorithms present to me what I want to see. But I would like to think that more and more people are exploring these ideas. Yeah, it is hard to say his because I feel the same way, Like am I am I seeing whatever? It's like, Oh that these new institutes and initiatives and programs and movements, it's so amazing all these things are developing. And then like you talk to somebody who is not like in this fair and

they haven't heard of any of it. Yeah, you know, it's like they still think anarchism means, like I don't know, throwing a breakthrough a window like that is the whole ideology. And yeah, I don't know. We can hope, we can hope, we can hope. I would like to think it's getting more prominence, but we can only hope. And so like so like anarkis are too keen on, you know, necessarily submitting to earn and I gus some sense that's like

Google Vlee and sense or some kind um. But I would like to think that anarchic ideas UM, I mean, and all the exploration that I've done of um various parts of the world however, you know, shallow my expliration has been so far, Um, I just I see it could be my anarchist tinted glasses seeing anarchic principles and everything. But I see it in certain practices, in sign ideologies and sign ideas and you know, ways of living. And I think gen Vere is a sort of a recognition

of that in one sense. So there is no single gen Vivere, right, there is no single good life, you know, I might want. For example, my ben view might look like, uh, sailing the Caribbean Sea, um, you know, touching down in various islands and exploring the ecology therein. Or my good life it looked like a more settled sort of homestead existence um, or sort of a fusion of urban and

rural living. Uh, sort of a good ending for the suburbs, where you're able to live in a walkable sort of environment and community that is both not too far from you know, the goings on of human social interaction, but also very much rooted and connected with, um, what's happening in the natural world. But I mean, what might your good life, your ben revie look like. James, Yeah, that's interesting,

isn't it. I think, Uh, you know, I grew up in the countryside, so with light the idea of living in a rural area and still having community and having like that, being like to nature, and still also being close to people who I care about and being able to look after each other. I think it's interesting how often, like at least the sort of set like colonial concept

of rural life or the construct of real life. I guess in America it's like, oh, rugged individualism, being on your own one in fact, like living in the countryside, people have to look after one another. Yeah, exactly, exactly. We maintain this kind of this this false idea that it's you against thee against the elements and crushing nature

and subjecting it to your will and all this stuff. Yeah, And I think that's there's something interesting about at least the people have spoken to um in various circles and stuff. When I asked them, you know, what is your ideal life? What is your good life? I don't necessarily say when viewed. I just asked them, you know what do you want? Um?

And you dig into it? You asked him a couple of problem questions, and people, despite ben vvie being a pluralistic concept, people tend to generally want similar things, and so it sort of begs the question, like, why are we in this situation in the first please, you know, because like everyone says, well, you know, I want like an involved community, and I want like I want to be able to grow my plans, and I also want to be able to do my arts and uh, you know,

enjoy my time of people and do a bit of travel and not work my whole life and that kind of thing. People of course phrase it and frame it in certain ways. And so that's why I asked the proving questions because what might initially say, oh, well, like I want to retire early. I want to really dig into that means it's like I don't want to spend my whole life working, you know. Or they might say something like, um, you know, I want to I want to travel a lot, so I want to like start

a business. When you ask them what kind of business they want to start, why they want to start a business, it really comes down to I want autonomy. I want flexibility in my labor. I want to control of my own le book kind of thing. Like yes, of course they are people who have they couldn't qute entrepreneur spirit who want to just be at the top of the

food chain. But then I think mostly entrepreneurs they couldn't qute entrepreneurs that I've met up in people who just like, oh, well, you know, I started selling candles because I really like making candles and I wanted to share them with people, and I also need to make a living and I'm just passionate about it or whatever that kind of thing. It's undernecessarily wanted to grow it or whatever. They just want to be able to sustain themselves doing something that

they enjoy. Yeah, it's interesting because we're always sold like every new advancing technology and in production that comes along, like these concepts you're talking about, like like working less, having community, all these things like always sold as what that's going to do, right, like, but instead we end up working more or the same amount and instead just generating more income for a certain group of people. Like

we don't get any of these good things. But yeah, there's there's always a carrot in whatever this kind of neoliberal capitalism that we have is, but we never get there exactly. That's the tragedy of it. Another aspect of you know, the idea of the good life is that it's not a static concept, right, It's not like we come up with this good life that's when we here where we want for ourselves. Now we etch it into stone tablets and piously here to them forever like the

Ten Commandments. Like nah, you know, the good life is supposed to be flexible when the video is what responding to your conditions, the conditions of the community or ecology, etcetera, and really redefineing what it means to go to live a good life continuously, you know, in response to change and circumstances, because you know changes life. Um, of course not is this idea to good life quote unquote backward

concept so problematic fram in and of itself. But um sometimes you have to use problematic shortcuts to community kids effectively. But the yea when revideo is not like an invitation to return to some idea like past or ide like non past, you like nonexistent world that people are sort of mentally constructed, as in the case of a lot of these romanticizations you see on social media. Um, be in video is not like some kind of religion with

its own rules and functions. But it's and it's not Also it's not imposing that you must become a home insteader or a forager, you must live in a rural community to live a good life. There's more possibilities yet unrealized. UM. And it should be something that is, it should be considered something that is undergoing a constant construction and reproduction process. And that's I think way of the global potential that when review a lize UM. You know, that's why I

think there's viral potential for it. I mean, of course, when you look at a lot of the things that end up dominating the social media news cycle, it's a lot of negativity UM dominating current discourse right now, I think is the topic of masculinity and UM, particularly the prevalence of ah Andrew teats and you know, UM, you also have the constantly bubbling under the surface existence of in cells UM and so and then you go on TikTok. I don't know if you go on TikTok, James, I

don't know. That's the point I would just like anymore. Yeah, I should have made that decision, But I mean I kind of like TikTok because UM, I don't know how other people are curiats in there their fo you pages, but by four you pages. Um a place I enjoy being out a bit too much, which is why I have like limits on my phone to prevent me from staying on TikTok for too long. But yeah, it's a place that I enjoy way and um. You see a lot of trends come and go on TikTok right now.

The big thing is like Niche stock and core core um, which I know is is probably Greek to you, yes, um, but in that general v and if you were to see what those trends were, I think you get a sense of when I'm talking about Niche shock and Corko and then as well, so it seems to be an attempt to um rebrand the idea of Sigma um and

the Sigma male. It started off as a very you know, patriarchal thing, and then I've seen a couple of different creators who who didn't a sort of an ironic or a post ironic sense um as a sort of a meme, because it became a meme to make fun of people

who take it seriously. Um. And then from that that sort of mumification of it, people said reclaimed the tomb um and then it became a sort of you see, um, you see like a video where I, um does something polite or something, you know, shiver us something kind and the comments are like, um, typical sigma, true sigma, this

is what true signal looks like. Kind of um. So I think it's just a national aspect that they fluid it to you the Internet, the fickles of the interne because I'm sure they're still they have the misogynistic Sigma people, they still exist. But then there's also people who memes themselves into a brand of Sigma that's kind of a way pseudo positive masculinity. It's kind of interesting. Um. I'll continue to do my TikTok anthropological research and and you know,

discuss my findings as this situation develops. But in that vein of in that vein of comunification, and those are developments, I think there is a potential of wend Vera to become a global phenomenon, to have that Google potential, to have a global reach because and then there's something in

it for the people. The there's also an anti work current present in a lot of TikTok trends, so you know, it's it's something too and again again, I see there's an anti currency or the TikTok trends, but those are the TikTok trends. I ain't being presented with the post ironic rebrandification or whatever. Sigma is something my for you pee has given me. It's not necessarily reflective of the

entirety of reality. And that's the scary part of the Internet, right, Like you're not seeing the full reality, You're seeing algorithmically produced version and skewed version of reality. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting to me, how like, like most people I encounter on a daily basis will not know what will where me and marras and like if I look at my Twitter page right now, it's just all like half of it. It's in Burmese, you know, and there's lots of people

I follow and that that's like my reality. But yeah, sort of. Then I get really frustrated when when people don't have a clue what's going on there exactly exactly,

it's it's it's it's can't tricky. It's kind tricky because you really in terms that they really get a sense of, how you know, in moments like those where you confront that in real life, it's like okay, So like my my possession of reality is like slightly skewed by the Internet, you know, yeah, in ways that I am aware and not aware of, in ways that other people are aware not aware of. So that's interesting. We're back to when review,

right when we view. I think it is also like a path for decolonization, you know, sort of a way to let go of a lot of the Western norms and impositions and speech and dress and labor and lifestyle and knowledge and social norms and relationships and ceteral and adopting ways of life that are count for our cultures and conditions free of those mental I think that it's the power of when reviere. So I guess another question arises, who or where, oh when did when review come from?

And so the radical questioning that birthedpen Revere was made possible within several indigenous traditions in South America, which, as I said, culturally lack tic concepts of developmental progress. And so the contribution of indigenous knowledge brend Revere continues to

be the sort of critical threat. Associated values and experiences and practices and worldviews of interview already existed in some form before the arrival of um European conquistadors, but they were of the process of qualization, silence, and marginalized and

even openly opposed. Brendeverea is part of a long leg you see, long quest along pursuits of alternative lifestyles forged from the passionate battles of indigenous peoples and nations seeking new ways of life, seeking freedom from the Latin America and the quintessential American oliga called nation state. Brutish is of course rooted in clunialism and new liberalism, and so we are seeing through renvivere within renvie outside of and review.

Adjacent to ren review um utopias in the making, the imagination, the imagining of utopias of the Andes and of the Amazon that are shaping discourses, shaping political projects, that are shaping social and cultural and economic practice. The good life been revere is not something that is unique to Latin America. Of course, it has been practiced in many different epochs and regions of this Earth. It's been known by many different names. The concept has been known by many different names.

In Ecuador, it's known as suma um, which is a Quechua wording for a fullness of life and community together to the persons in nature and believia The iyemarra concept for it is called suma kamana in the Mapuche in Chile, and the Guarani in Paraguay, and the Kuda and Panama, and the chu Aqua and Ecuadorian Amazon, the Maya and Guatemala and Chiapas Mexico, and of course the African to Ubuntu and the Indian concept of saraje. They are all these sorts of threads of what a good life, good

life and community, radical ecological democracy and community. All of these sort of concepts sort of threaded within developing diffront in different forms in different contexts. However, UM the concept has also been adopted in some sense by certain states, most notably Bolivia and Ecuador. Recently, Bolivia, you know, rewrote its constitution um establishing itself as a flury national state, and they've taken it to what they quality the orban um.

They're trying to basically propose economic model that accommodates various diverse cultural origins. In Ecuador, UM that conceptual freework is a bit different. They take one vera and they use it as a sort of described as a set of rights, rights to shelter, to health, to education, to foods, the environment. So it's less of an ethical principle, more of a complex set of rights that are also found in Western traditions but also include, uh, you know, the the right

to freedom, participation, communities, to protection, and to nature. Part of that recognition of the right to nature and the fundamental rights of water has led to the banning of any form of privatization of water um, and also the

promotion of leaving crude oil in Ecuadorian Amazon blew the ground. Um. However, I feel like I need to point out that I don't believe the state is compatible with the essence of when vere with the practice of when vere um, and so the use of those concepts and state propaganda uh in state rebranding efforts unnecessarily encouraging to me, doesn't necessarily make such states the power corn so they would paint themselves to be because to me, when vie can only

really be grassroots concepts. So I think we must be careful of fall into that trap of accepting uh you know, state propaganda on the good life um, you know, compromising the concept and allowing it to be co opted or

water down. As I previously noted, I think there's a major overlap between concept of de growth and the idea of when Revere and both agree that one of the fundamental problems is, you know, this idea, this constant commercialization of societal fabric and of nature of criticism of capitalism, this criticism of the way that progress felt an economic

growth understood and implemented um. And so they almost they sort of complement each other, right, because I think a criticism people who have of the growth is that as this destructive thing, as it's negative thing, as negative freemen. And so in a sense, when Vere and the growth can sort of be coupled, the growth as the couldn't quote missile wood destructive. Well, Gwen Vivere is you know, presenting a constructive alternative. As you know, we attempt to progress,

to move away from capitalism, transitions and new systems. There's a lot to learn with have a lot we can learn from various non capitalist practices around the world. And I think gen vivie um is a concept that really tries to look at the way is a way of harmoniously quite sisted as humans in our environment Um and the way is that you know, a good life can

be combined with the growth efforts. There's also a measure of fluidity present in green vivere Um that seeks balance socially, ecologically, politically, economically. UM encompasses and encompasses within that balance people, plans, and animals.

There's not separate nature from society as found in classical Western dualism, and that sort of perspective is necessary if we were to move beyond the exploitation of nature for the propos of accumulating capital cell that has really placed us in this mess and even in that and recognized and that we need to move beyond exploitation of nature baked into that because we are part of nature. It's

a recognition that we need to stuff exploiting humans. They need to recognize human beings as part of a community, that we are not just as my individuals, that we are in communities, that we must be part of community used that our community is the people within them and the lands we are part of must cooperate in harmony. I think there's a challenge to one review. Of course what the video is not restricted to the countryside, but

it did it did originate there. UM. I think the challenge one review is to confront today's urban spaces where much of humanity's population lives UM, to find ways to deal with environment respectively and solidarity in an urban setting, to find to conceptualize a good life for and in cities. We can't exactly expect everybody to move to the countryside, nor should everybody, UM, and so we need to find ways that city life, urban I life UM can be reconstructed.

And so one potential sort of way that that has manifested is through the Transition Towns movement, which you can look more and to have something that interests you where people are basically attempting to taking truth of their communities and to survive the challenge that is climate change and to create you know, sustainable economies and ecologies. Wherefore they find themselves movements. It can be found in many different countries. You know, you might even find it in your area

and your country. Look it up, UM, and it has a lot in common with the concept of Ween Revere. Like I said, like I feel that they're selling different movements and ideas and philosophies, you know, sort of with the same ideas that seemed to be feel like they're on the rise. Ultimately, I believe wend Revere is highly h subversive. I believe it looks not to return to the past or to you know, get caught up in any kind of strict rules or positions. It seeks a

good life. It seeks to oppose cleanism and its consequences, to encourage new, more sustainable ways of living drawn from old examples and models, and to really create horizontal society, a cooperative society, to develop self management instead of new forms of top down governance. UM the one that rejects both the market and the state as solutions to our issues and looks to ourselves. One that looks one that rejects the markets in the state, has potential solutions, and

looks to ourselves. The idea of development is an almost a zombie category, as some writers have described it. It's supposed to be dead and yet it lives. And so gwen Vivere provides an opportunity to move away from development and look towards when it recognizes that all may never create a perfect life, we can create a good life.

That's it thanks here, and that's really interesting. I like that you can find me on YouTube at Andrewidsum on to dot com slash and is called saying Drew, and if you're so inclined, you can support me on picture dot com slash saying Drew. This has been Andrew at happen here with James signing off, Hello and welcome to it could happen here. This is Sharne and today I will be talking to you about the series of devastating earthquakes that have happened in Turkey and Syria this week.

I am recording this the afternoon of Tuesday, February seven. I am giving you that disclaimer because the numbers keep changing as far as the casualties and the death toll goes. So if the numbers are different by the time this comes out, which they probably will be, that is why. Unfortunately, that is the nature of disasters like this. So there's nothing much that we can do. But let's talk about

the earthquakes themselves. First. The initial earthquake was a magnitude of seven point eight and it happened in southeastern Turkey early on Monday morning their local time, and it was followed by magnitude seven point five earthquake only nine hours later. Amidst several aftershocks. All aftershocks are individual earthquakes, but as long as they are not stronger than the original quake,

they are considered after shocks. But the seven point five magnitude tremor that happened after the seven point eight one only point three of a difference. It was an unusually strong aftershock. According to seismologists, aftershocks are typically about one point to magnitude units lower than the original earthquake, so if there was a magnitude eight earthquake, the aftershock would be in magnitude seven. So this was all a very rare,

disastrous occurrence. The second earthquake was a shock notable all on its own, as well as in relation to the primary earthquake. As of Tuesday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey, at least one and twenty five aftershocks measuring four point zero or greater have occurred since the initial seven point eight one. The frequency in magnitude of the aftershocks are decreasing, as is expected as we get

further out from the time of the original earthquake. However, five point zero and six point zero aftershocks are still possible, and they bring a risk of additional damage to structures that are compromised from the original earthquake. This brings a continued threat to rescue teams and survivors. The aftershocks stretched for more than four d kilometers or about two fifty miles along the fault zone that ruptured in southern Turkey. It stretches from the Mediterranean Sea off the northern coast

of Syria up to the province of Malatia. The initial tremor was centered about twenty miles from a major city and provincial capital, Gauziantep and seismologists said that this first earthquake was one of the largest ever recorded in Turkey's history. It was also the region's strongest earthquake. In nearly a century nine, an earthquake of the same magnitude killed thirty

thousand people. Earthquakes of this magnitude are rare, with fewer than five occurring each year on average anywhere in the world. Seven earthquakes with magnitude seven point zero or greater have struck Turkey in the past twenty five years, but the one that occurred on Monday it's the most powerful. The effects were also felt in the neighboring countries of Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt, to name a few. But there's a reason

why earthquakes are so frequent in Turkey. Turkey sits on fault lines, and these earthquakes in the region have caused deadly landslides in the past. Turkey is situated on two massive tectonic plates, the Arabian and the Eurasian, and these meat underneath Turkey's southeastern provinces. Along this fault line, about hundred miles from one side or the other, the earth slipped. Seismologists refer to this event as a strike slip, where the plates are touching and all of a sudden they

slide sideways. In a strike slip, the plates are moving horizontally rather than vertically. This matters because the buildings don't want to go back and forth, and then the secondary waves begin to go back and forth as well. Because of the nature of this seismic event, the aftershocks could last for weeks and months. I have had to update the death toll many many times in preparing this episode.

I am probably going to have to update it many many more times before this comes out, but as of now, when I am recording this, the evening of Tuesday, February seven, the death toll is over seven thousand and nine hundred deaths in Turkey and Syria combined, and it's expected to rise significantly more in Syria as these days go by. The exact number that is being reported is seven thousand,

nine hundred and twenty six people. The Syrian Civil Defense a k a. The White Helmets said that the number of fatalities and rebel held areas in northwest Syria rose to a thousand, two hundred and twenty and the number of injured people rose to two thousand, six hundred, and these figures are expected to rise significantly due to the

presence of hundreds of families under the rubble. The White Helmets said quote, our teams continue search and rescue operations in difficult circumstances, and they described a tally of more than four hundred collapsed buildings and more than one thousand, three hundred partially collapsed buildings and thousands of others that were damaged. Additionally, at least eight hundred and twelve deaths

have been confirmed in government controlled parts of Syria. In Turkey, at least five thousand, eight hundred and ninety four people are dead and thirty four thousand, eight hundred and ten are injured, and this number is only going to continue to rise. I don't know when it will stop. Maybe a week from now, maybe a month. I don't know how many more people will be unaccounted for and not reported about. But this is what we have for now.

You've probably seen pictures or videos of the devastation that is happening. In all the destruction. There have been really disturbing images of the ground literally just opening up in two and as if you can see the core of the earth, and other videos show the collapsed buildings and the rubble that rescuers are trying to dig underneath to find survivors. This is one story out of many, but a newborn baby was reportedly rescued from the rubble in Syria, and there is a video of this. A baby girl

was rescued from the rubble of her home. Her umbilical cord was still attached to her mother when she was found, and her mother is believed to have died after giving birth. One of the men that found her said, we heard a voice while we were digging. We cleared the dust and found the baby with the umbilical cord intact, so we cut it and my cousin took her to the hospital.

The girl is receiving treatment at a children's hospital and as of now, she is stable, but arrived with bruises, lacerations, and hypothermia, and she's the sole survivor of her immediate family. They lived in a five story apartment building that was leveled by the quake. And again, this is one example of the stories of thousands of people. And I think what's important to remember is that even after someone is rescued,

they're not exactly home free. They can have many injuries or hypothermia because it's very cold over there right now, and their recovery is going to be brutal. And I feel like that's a good thing to keep in mind when you hear the word rescue, because the trauma doesn't

stop there. Almost six thousand buildings have been destroyed by this earthquake, and this includes residential buildings, hospitals, schools, and the damage is even more severe in northwestern Syria because it had been in the process of attempting to reconstruct itself since the Syrian War started in Thankfully, members of the international community have stepped up to coordinate relief efforts

to Turkey and Syria after the powerful earthquakes. However, sending aid to Syria is going to be difficult because there's no central guf are meant to take care of the multisectorial response. The Turkish government said quote, we do not know where the number of dead and injured can go. In Syria, rescue workers used headlamps and floodlights to work throughout the night. Many Syrian war refugees are also in

the quick stricken area of Turkey. Turkey has taken in three point six million Syrian refugees, more than any other country, and this is according to the u N Refugee Agency, which runs one of its largest operations in Gaussian Tepe, where the first earthquake happened and again. Videos shared on social media from Turkey and across the border in Syria have showed destroyed buildings and rescue crews searching through piles

of rebel for survivors. Some people fled their homes in the rain and took shelter in their cars, and governments around the world quickly responded to Turkey's request for international assistance, many of them deploying rescue teams and offers of aid, which I will get into in a bit. The World Health Organization warned that the number of casualties are likely to increase as much as eight times as rescuers are

finding more victims in the rubble. Rescuers have been combing through mountains of rubble and freezing and snowy conditions to find survivors, and these freezing conditions will leave many people without shelter, adding to the dangers. It is freezing over there, and that obviously only makes things more difficult and more

painful and more complicated. And we always see the same thing with earthquakes unfortunately, which is that the initial reports of the numbers of people who have died or have been injured will increase quite significantly in the week that follows. The situation on the ground seems to be more disastrous in Syria, and this is according to the country director in Ghazian Tep for the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation. He said it's a disaster stiss situation in both Turkey

and Syria, although Syria is more disastrous. Over a decade of conflict in Northern Syria has fostered a poor economic situation, to say the least, making it very difficult to respond to the current crisis. In contrast, the situation in Turkey is coordinated through a very well settled government and Northern Syria unfortunately has no government that gives a shit about it.

In Northern Syria, most of the services and help are provided by n g o s and this is due to a long term lack of investments in early recovery and infrastructure. One of these groups again is the White Helmets. They were one of the main saviors or helpers ever since the Syrians Civil war started in eleven They have been on the ground helping and they are made up

of Syrian volunteers. And I think that's important to keep in mind because many Syrians have relied on each other and each other alone because they didn't receive help in the past. And I'm going to get into later how much the country's civil war has made things exponentially worse. Several parts in northwestern Syria, including the city of Islab,

are still controlled by anti government rebels. This representative added that they evacuated to maturity hospitals because of the physical impact of the earthquake on the infrastructure and so the question is where are these people going to go. There's no shelter, it is freezing, and there's not enough aid

to go around. And I'm hoping the countries that have said they will help are in the process of actually doing so, and I'm going to get into some of them in a moment, because I'm grateful that there's help coming from somewhere. And amongst all this, there have been calls to ease the Syrian border restrictions and controls for countries to offer their aid. And again, the rebel held on clave in northwest Syria, across the border from Turkey, is among the areas that have been hit the worst

by this disaster. International pledges, as I said, of emergency aid have poured in for Turkey and Syria, leading to calls for the international community to relax some of the political restrictions on aid entering northwest Syria. The Turkish President Aragon, who was facing an election only a few months, said the offers of aid to Turkey had come from forty five countries, ranging from Kuwait to Israel, Russia and the UK. Syria said it had received offers of help from China, Russia,

Lebanon Algeria and the United Arab Immirance. Aid from around the world is thankfully heading towards Turkey and Syria, and some seventy countries and fourteen international organizations have offered their assistance. Here's a roundup of some of the latest pledges. There is a Hungarian rescue team of fifty people, including five

military doctors and to search dogs. South Korea plans to offer humanitarian aid worth five million to Turkey and sent about a hundred and ten disaster relief workers a military

personnel to support its search and rescue work. You may notice that I'm only saying they're sending aid to Turkey and a couple of these, and I will get into why in a little bit, But to continue, the Palestinian International Corporation Agency will deploy seventy experts to the quake later this week, sending two crews comprised of the Civil Defense, Ministry of Health and the Palestinian Red Cross, as well

as doctors and engineers. There are also teams from the Palestinian Red Crescent and they are carrying out earthquake rescue and relief operations in the Palestinian refugee camps and the surrounding areas in Syria. At least three Palestinian refugee camps in Syria were struck by the earthquake. Pakistan deployed two

contingents of emergency services to Turkey. China said it will send about five point nine million dollars worth of aid to Turkey, while also coordinating with Syria for emergency supplies and accelerating ongoing food aid projects. Two Israeli aid groups chartered a special flight to Gauzi and tep on Tuesday to bring personnel and equipment to victims. Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief is sending a team of fifty recovery

experts to Turkey. The Dalai Lama committed to sending rescue and relief efforts early today, and Taiwan increased its donation to Turkey from two hundred thousand to two million dollars and it dispatched about a hundred and thirty rescue teams.

Indonesia also supplied aid for Turkey. The Vice President of Indonesia highlighted the urgency of dispatching humanitarian aid to Turkey to return the support granted by the country to Indonesia during their times of need over natural disasters in the past. Canada also pledged seven point five million dollars to earthquake relief. Egypt offered relief assistance to Syria in the wake of this earthquake. Ukraine will send eighty seven emergency staff workers

to Turkey to assist with the relief efforts. And not just countries, but also companies and nonprofits have offered their help this week. For example, Amazon announced that it will help the victims of the Turkey earthquake by donating food, medicine,

and equipment from its Istanbul warehouse. Amazon has about two thousand employees in Turkey, and in a statement on Monday, it said that it activated its quote disaster relief capabilities and was preparing to donate relief items including blankets, tense food, baby food, and medicines. Even here in the US, the Virginia Task Force one is sending a crew of seventy nine members and six dogs to Turkey, and there are seventy eight members of the l A County Fire Department

who left Monday evening to Turkey. And then there's Greece, who set aside tensions with Turkey to send aid but helping Syria. They said is more complicated. Despite its tensions with Turkey. Greece was among the countries that have dispatched help to the country, but conflict torn northwest Syria makes the same efforts more complicated, the Prime Minister said. Grace and Turkey, he said, are quote neighbors who need to help each other through difficult times. This is not the

first time earthquakes have struck our countries. This is a time to temporarily set aside er differences and try to address what is a very, very urgent situation. He continued to explain that in Syria, however, there is no official person or official from the government to have a dialogue with, and no assurance that aid will make it to the impacted area and people, and that makes relief efforts hard to pull off. No country on its own has the

ability to actually make these sort of arrangements. That's why I think it is important that these negotiations could take place either through the u N or through the European Union by pulling resources. I would not feel confident having these sort of discussions at a bilateral level. He also added that he has not directly communicated with Damascus. He went on to say that quote. I want to stress this, this is not about geopolitics, This is not about recognizing

any sort of regime. This is about saving people and horrible conditions who desperately need our assistance. So the scale of aid being offered is going to require a large coordination effort as well as delicate diplomatic maneuvers to supply aid to Syria, where the leadership of Charla said is not recognized in the West. It's not recognized for me either,

and many Syrians feel the same way. But that is the monster that we are currently dealing with and there's not much we can do about that at this certain point in time. And so, as I mentioned, the Syrian side of the border is going to be a challenge since the worst affected areas contain hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees that are locked in a war zone and

still facing attacks from Syrian government forces. Aid agencies reported that some of the roads from Turkey into Syria were blocked, including the main cross border crossing used by international aid agencies. The White Helmets said hundreds of families were still trapped in the aftermath of the earthquake. They also added that terrible weather conditions, including freezing temperatures, had compounded the crisis, and they're continuing rescue operations in Syria despite great difficulties

and aftershocks, they said. The White Helmets also urged the Assad regime and Russia to refrain from military activity, and they affected areas in order to allow international groups to unify and help the people affected. A spokesperson from the White Helmets said, our teams responded and until now many families are under the rubble. Our teams are trying hard to find all the casualties. Northwest Syria is now a disaster area. We need help from everyone to save our people.

I think this would be a moment to take a little break. I don't have the capacity or emotional bandwidth to think of a clever segue. So here are some ads and are back. We're talking about the difficulty sending aid to Syria along the Turkey Syrian border. Last month, actually the U N. Security Council agreed to allow aid into northwest Syria from Turkey across one border crossing Bablahella,

surprising no one. The Syrian regime has been resistant to allowing aid into a region serving more than four million of its people because it regards the AID as undermining Syrian sovereignty and reducing its chances of winning back control of the region. Yes, that is correct. The Syrian government doesn't want to help more than four million of its own people because one day it wants to control them again.

Are you fucking kidding me? I? I don't understand that malignant desire to rule over a land that you have destroyed, in a people that you have murdered. I don't get the fucking point. But regardless, that is one of the many reasons why getting aid into Syria is going to

be much more complicated than getting aid into Turkey. Additionally, Mark Locock, the former head of UN Humanitarian Affairs, said the area's worst affected by the earthquake inside Syria look to be run by the Turkish controlled opposition and not by the Syrian government. It is going to require Turkish acquiescence to aid in these areas. It is unlikely the Syrian government will do much to help. Yes, Mark, I think you're right. The Syrian government isn't gonna do shit,

if anything. Charles said, is probably happy seeing all these people dying, because that's his whole mma, just to kill the Syrian people anyway. A video from a hospital posted by the Syrian American Medical Society showed that it was immensely crowded. They said, our hospitals are overwhelmed with patients filling the hallways. There is an mediate need for trauma supplies and a comprehensive emergency response to save lives and

treat the injured. Initial needs are for tens of thousands of tents, heaters for the tents, tens of thousands of blankets, thermal clothes, ready to eat food, and basic first aid kits. A UNICEF representative in Aleppo said that the hospitals in

Syria are absolutely overloaded. Hospitals are full of patients with trauma, broken bones and lacerations, and some people are going to the hospital to seek help for the mental trauma they endured after the earthquake struck, The UNISEF representative Angela Kearney said, while hospitals are functioning, the task has been overwhelming. Describing the scene in Aleppo when the earthquake struck on Monday, Kearnie said children who have already been traumatized by war

were bewildered. They didn't know what was happening. Kearnie said that on Monday morning, when UNISEEF began its work in the area, there were seven schools and a bow that are being used as shelters. By Tuesday morning, that number grew to sixty seven and currently it is nearly two hundred and all of those schools that are partially damaged. There are families there who left their apartments, left their

houses with just their pajamas, she said. She also added that while aid is starting to go into the affected areas, there is still a desperate need for blankets, food, clean water, medical care and nutritional care. She said that water, sanitation and nutrition needs are the most urgent. The aid is starting to go in, but it is overwhelming. The needs are very great. There are discussions under way to open aid corridors from the government controlled parts of Syria to

the rebel held areas. Hammad Hammoud, Syria Country manager at the Norwegian Red Cross, said that he hopes with the help and efforts from humanitarian communities, this would happen in the coming days, and he said currently nothing has moved there, but there are discussions about moving aid and access to these areas. He continued to say after being asked if the Syrian government in Damascus has been helpful to these areas,

he said. They have stated that they are open to cross line intervention, meaning from government held areas to these non government held areas. They are open to it. They'reout doing ship though obviously earlier today, the head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which described itself as an independent and volunteer based humanitarian organization, said that the organization is ready to immediately send aid convoys to rebel held areas, including Islib through the u N. Hammoud added that the

humanitarian situation is worsening. He said, we are in a race against time. In describing the rescue and search operations, Hammoud said that due to the lack of machinery, most of the work on clearing the rubble is done by hand and the cold weather conditions are not helping. He also added that the buildings are already weakened because of

eleven years of war. In addition to the thousands of people that have been lost to this tragedy, there are also some cultural sites that have been permanently damaged in both Turkey and Syria. UNESCO, the United Nations Cultural organization, said it's going to provide assistance following the cultural site damage, UNESCO said that it is particularly concerned about the situation in the ancient city of Aleppo, which is on the

list of World Heritage and Danger. It added that the citadel had significant damage, the old city wall has collapsed, and several buildings and the sux have been weakened. In the Turkish city of the yad Beka, UNESCO lamented the collapse of several buildings. The city is home to the World Heritage Site, the Yabukat of Fortress and the he cl Gardens cultural landscape, which is an important center of

the Roman, sun Acid, Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman periods. The organization says it is mobilizing experts to establish a precise inventory of the damage with the aim of rapidly securing and stabilizing these sites. Aleppo was also one of the city's worst damaged by the Syrian regime. It is a beautiful, beautiful place. Everything that the regime has destroyed was a beautiful,

beautiful place. Aleppo had a lot of history, though, and that region is just home to so much history, and it's just really heartbreaking to know the extent of the loss that doesn't just include lives. In talking to my mom and my family about this, the sentiment seems like it's the same that it's been for the past decade. Essentially, Syrians don't have a government. There is no government. Assad in his regime doesn't care about the Syrian people. My

mom literally said, we have no one. We've known this for years, no one helped us. Syrians are the ones supporting each other. The White Helmets is a great example of this. One of our family's friends on the ground in the city of Hamma, which is where my mom is from, was saying that it was absolute chaos. Everyone is in the streets and no one is daring to go back inside their homes. Another person was telling us about his experience, and he said, I was asleep and

felt the earthquake start in my bed. My son was terrified, and I went to hug my son. I kept telling him it'll be over soon, It'll be over soon, and then the roof started crumbling on top of us. So then he ran outside and he saw many people doing the same, just running outside their homes if they were able to make it out, and watching their homes just

crumble in front of them. Let's take a break, and when we come back, I want to set the scene of what Syrians have been going through even before this earthquake been happened, and how sanctions in particular have made the impact of this disaster exponentially worse. So we're back and we're going to talk about how sanctions have only

aided in the suffering of the Syrian people. Twelve years after the eruption of the Syrian Uprising and the eleven subsequent conflict, the us IS Syria policy has constrained political pressure on the Assad regime to broad economic sanctions, but despite an expansive approach that targets entire economic sectors, these sanctions have had little to no effect in pushing the regime to offer political concessions, engage meaningfully in a peaceful

settlement of the conflict, or improve its human rights record. All the while, conditions in Syria have steadily worsened as sanctions along with the destructive effects of twelve years of conflict, the economic crisis and neighboring Lebanon, and the COVID nineteen pandemic. All of this has fueled an economic collapse that has left more than i d percent of the population in

Syria living in poverty. In nineteen seventy nine, the United States listed Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism, and since then it has pursued sanctions as a primary tool in its policy towards Syria. The George W. Bush administration issued a series of sanctions under executive orders aiming to

limit serious destabilizing influence in Iraq. However, after the uprising, the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations sanctioned the Assad regime on an unprecedented scale for its gross human rights violations against his people. These sanctions ultimately accumulated in the passing of the Caesar Act in twenty nineteen, and this allows primary and secondary sanctions targeting both those who commit

the sanctionable offenses and those who enable them. Just three months ago, in November two, a u when appointed independent human rights expert urge the United States to lift the unilateral sanctions against Syria, warning that they are perpetrating and exacerbating the destruction and trauma suffered by ordinary citizens since the brutal war began in This expert's name is Alana Dohan, and she said, I am struck by the pervasiveness of

the human rights and humanitarian impact of the unilateral coercive measures imposed on Syria, and the total economic and financial isolation of a country whose people are struggling to rebuild a life with dignity. In a statement that followed her twelve day visit to Syria, Dohan presented detailed information on the catastrophic effects that sanctions have had on all aspects

of Syrian life. Currently, serious population is living below the poverty line, she said, pointing to their limited access to food, water, electricity, shelter, cooking and heating, fuel, transportation, and healthcare. Moreover, growing economic hards ship threatens to trigger a massive brain drain in the country, she said, with more than half of the

vital infrastructure either completely destroyed or severely damaged. The imposition of unilateral sanctions on key economic sectors, including oil, gas, electricity, trade, construction, and engineering, have quashed national income and they undermine efforts towards economic recovery and reconstruction. These sanctions have committed various human rights violations in their existence, including these serious shortages

and medicines and specialized medical equipment. My family and I have direct experience with these repercussions of the lack of medicines and medical equipment. My cousin, a child, had brain cancer and it got worse and worse, and the city they were in did not offer the treatment necessary or even key mo to help his condition. So his mother would drive to Damascus, where at least some of the

treatment options were available. But the road to Damascus, even though it shouldn't take more than a few hours, can sometimes take all day because there are so many checkpoints and road closures and just the regime making it so difficult to do anything. Ultimately, my cousin was suffering for the remainder of his very young life, and he didn't

get the treatment that he needed. And I really think these sanctions have a lot to do with the lack of access that my family and many families have in Syria. And that experience that my family went through is one of many that many Syrian families have endured because of these sanctions. So I want you guys to keep that in mind. That numbers also contain individual lives, and each one is devastating all on its own. And I know I say that often, but I think it bears repeating

every time. I don't want us to be numb to statistics and numbers when it comes to casualties and suffering and loss. And maybe it sounds obvious, but I just think we need to remember the value of human life and what it means to take it away. So that's

what I'm going to say about that for now. Let's get back to the reports that Ms Dohan was showing the US back in November two about the effect of the sanctions, so including the impact that sanctions have had on these serious shortages and medicines and specialized medical equipment due to the unavailability of equipment and spare parts. She warned that the rehabilitation and development of water distribution networks for drinking and irrigation has stalled, with serious implications for

public health and food security. Twelve million Syrians are experiencing food and security. This is pre earthquake. The number is probably much higher now. Dohan urged for the immediate lifting of all unilateral sanctions that severely harm human rights and prevent any efforts for early recovery, rebuilding and reconstruction. She said, no reference to good objectives of unilateral sanctions justifies the violation of fundamental human rights. The international community has an

obligation of solidarity and assistance to the Syrian people. I want to add something that UNICEF said about the children in Syria. Children in Syria continue to face one of the most complex humanitarian situations in the world. A worsening economic crisis. Continued localized hostilities after more than a decade of grinding, con liked mass displacement, and devastated public infrastructure have left two thirds of the population in need of assistance.

Water Borne diseases pose another deadly threat to children and families affected. And all of this is again pre earthquake. This is the life that Syrians have known for years now without any assistance. Sanctions have done nothing but contribute to the increase in the suffering of Assyrian people, and now countries and organizations might have a hard time providing aid because of these sanctions. Sanctions have done nothing but contribute to the suffering and pain of Assyrian people. They

didn't do anything they were supposedly meant to do. The assad regime isn't going to change anything. It hasn't changed anything. It's still killing its people. I also want to mention that last year on MATEO, the EU extended its sanctions against the Syrian government for another year. Who knows if this will change, but for now that's the reality. So I'm really hoping these sanctions get eventually lifted or else.

Helping the Syrian people is going to be extremely difficult, and right now rescuers are still digging through thousands and thousands of flattened buildings in near freezing temperatures. The death toll is only going to continue to rise, and everyone there needs all the help they can get. And I know, at least for me, it feels really helpless. I've felt pretty helpless for a long time when it comes to Syria.

But if you're able to donate any money at all, I would really urge you to donate to a charity that you trust. I really like the White Helmets because they're just on the ground and they've been doing the work for years. So if you're able to, I think help can go a long way. I want to end with something that Atlanta Dohan, the UN appointed independent human rights expert that gave the US this report about the sanctions in November. She quoted one view that she heard

expressed many times. She said, I saw much suffering, but now I see the hope die. So that's where the Syrian people started, that's where they've been. Nearly seventy of the Syrian population was already in need of humanitarian aid before the earthquake even happened, and it's an issue that's only been compounded by the tragedy today. The UN said, quote, this tragedy will have a devastating impact on many vulnerable families who struggle to provide for their loved ones on

a daily basis. The statement outlined the impact of serious twelve year war, describing a country as grappling with economic collapse, severe water, electricity and fuel shortages. They issued an appeal to all donor partners to provide assistance necessary to alleviate suffering. The U N and humanitarian partners say they are currently focusing on immediate needs including food, shelter and non food items and medicine. And the devastation of this earthquake because

of this is truly devastating. I cannot emphasize that enough. So again, if you're able to donate, I really urge you too, And if you can't, just keep raising awareness because someone else might be able to donate. And that's all we really have for now. So that's the episode. I hope it was informative or eye opening in any way. Thank you for listening. I will talk to you later.

It seems like hardly a month goes by where we are not bombarded with horrific images of far ride Islands, mass shootings, the target synagogues, black churches and queer nightclubs, death threats to hospitals spurred by post from online trolls. In a barrage of fascist groups attempting to intimidate everyone and everything, from children's events, black Lives Matter protests, pride celebrations, and abortion clinics. Wooden resistance is mobilized and people do

push back. The media often frames these confrontations the clash simply between two sets of extremists. On today's shows, the It's Going Down crew once again takes over. It could happen. Here we look at how far from being just confined to small sets of antifast super soldiers, mass community self defense is part and parcels to the DNA of grassroots movements for liberation in the so called United States. We can see this throughout the ongoing history of indigenous resistance

to colonization. In the fight against slavery and racial apartheid. Radical labor unions such as the i w W organized against Ku Klux Klan attention that even led to running gun battles, while militant organizers like Robert F. Williams and groups such as the Deacons for Defense, who helped inspire

the Black Panthers, fought back against white racist mobs. In the book This Non Violent Stuff Will Get You Killed, author Charles E. Cobb documents this history, discussing the wide use of arms and defending civil rights organizers from white supremacists. Groups like Anti Racist Action or a r A carried on this trajectory, working to set up chapters of organized anti racists that confronted neo Nazi groups the Clan, and participated in defense of abortion clinics. Once again, I'm Mike Andrews.

Let's get into it. In two thousand five, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the levy surrounding New Orleans broke, flooding working class communities and homes. Those that could evacuate fled, while many, often poor and black, were stuck behind to fend for themselves. Stepping into this setting was a group of Black Liberation and anarchist activists who worked to set up mutual aid hubs and free clinics, dubbed Common Ground.

But as these volunteers worked to feed people, restore people's homes, and provide free medical care, they quickly found that they weren't the only organized force on the streets of New Orleans. In this following interview, Sunseri Ali Shakur discusses how the group came up against and defended themselves from a formation of armed racist white vigilantees who worked directly with local police and our suspected of carrying out multiple murders of

unarmed black men a warning. However, this interview was graphic in details death, racist violence, and anti black racism. My name is s I'm organized out of Wasson and d C. I went to New Orleans UH doing Kataka add the mass and I helped um co co found Common Ground Relief and Common Ground was formed as a response to the calamity of Katrina and um Common Ground was also the brainchild of the Angola Three, so a lot of the base organizers of Common Ground were already in New Orleans.

UH organized and the help the Angola Three. So the Angle of Three was basically the god fathers of common ground ground relief. We lost a few of the of the elders, Alfred wood Fox as such, and we still got King, Uh King, Wos and everything. A note to our listeners. The Angola Three referred to here is a group of formally incarcerated black political prisoners and members of the Black Parther Party in the ninet seventies were imprisoned

in the notorious Angola Facility in Louisiana. This included Robert Hillary King, Albert wood Fox, and Hermann Wallace. King was released in two thousand one, and, along with another former Black Panther, Malik Raheem, became involved in mutual aid and disaster relief efforts in New Orleans following Katrina in two thousand five under the banner of common Ground. Wallace was released from prison in October one, only to pass away sadly three days later, a day after being reindited by

the state. Albert Wood Fox was finally released in February of two thousand sixteen and passed on six years later due to complications from COVID nineteen tireless activists on both sides of the prison walls together the angal of three endured a combined total of one fourteen years in solitary confinement. Yeah, my job when I when I touched down the common ground was basically I was a relief scout UM. I wore many hats, I was a mediation person, head of

security UM. And I also organized about seven UM makesuret hurricane distribution UH centers from New Orleans to the Bayou and I spent eighteen months there and children's free breakfast program, anything that the community needed, you know, I provided UM. I used to drive like fourteen hundred miles a week taking supplies from New Orleans UH into different bious and different surrounding areas in New Orleans. That was my my job.

When I first got there, I ran into Malink Rahim, a former black pather in New Orleans, thus Minister of Defense, and when I touched down, he had told me that there were a group of white vigilantees, up to eighteen of them, riding around and murdering black people as they walked through these white communities and Algiers and alger Point. Algiers wasn't affected by water, but it did have a

great deal of wind damage. Most of the houses wasn'ttact It just wasn't no electricity and the water was also a problem. Well, what they would do they would tie uh cans from one fence to another beginning of the neighborhood of the street. And if they were in their homes and uh you bumped in, you know you you tried to get up under the cans, and the cans started ringing. They would open up windows and and and begin uh fire at you. And they were jumping their

pickup trucks and chase you down. And some uh you know, some are murdered, you know, point blank. And those whom they wounded, they were throwing the back of the truck. Take to a garage and pour gasoline over your wounds, put cigarettes out on you, and uh some didn't make it out. That's such suation. They like I said, they

dropped about court and information. When we got they dropped nineteen and some black men and the brothers in the community got tired of of of these guys, and they broke into a pawn shop and stole all the guns out the powd shop. And there was about to be a major race war. And um, you gotta understand too, how tight the situation was because their base, their house. The day they hung out at their backyard connected with

our backyard, so it was extremely tense. So when the brothers broke into the pond shop got the weapons out, just so happened. The next day the National Guards showed up. But if the national Guard didn't show up the next day, it would have been extremely ugly out there. Uh and everything. And yeah, they used to patrol the streets and the pickup trucks. We would see them all the time. I would see them all the time. And they were cowards man,

you know. They would tender one. It's always tender one, you know, ten vigilantis the on black man, unharmed black man. But we noticed one they would drive by. We would come out with our weapons on our hips and let them know that this ain't no place to mess with. Keep driving. You know what I'm saying. You will be fired upon you come here with that business. And I

would have to set up patrols for our house. At night. UM, I would sleep uh in the hallway and malnks home with a nominal of me to car being rifle strapped across my chest and the radio colm so I could keep in contact with the others who were unarmed and doing patrols, you know, watching the house while the other thirty six volunteers have slept intense in the backyard. You know, we're asleep, Lucky for us. They were a bunch of

cowards and they kept it moving. I would see them all the time, and they were they were afraid of me because they knew that I was not afraid of them, and I was armed, and we all when we had a few people back at the house that was armed as well. You could ride down certain streets and there will be uh dead bodies that were bloated, uh from being left out in the sun. And uh those bodies were left by the vigilantees. The rumor was that the

do on the police department told the vigilantees. We gave the vigilantees a green light to do what they needed to do and as far as the bodies, just leave them near the gutter and they will come and collect them later, which they didn't. The body stayed out there, I would say up to two months, you know you, I mean, they were like you can see them all the time, and um, there a lot of people had left.

There wasn't a lot of people there because people had evacuated, a lot of stray dogs running around uh in pacts of thirty and what we would have to do is get up early in the morning when the curfew was over, take bids she's from malnks mother's room, and go out and wrap up the bodies with these sheets. Keep the

dogs from ripping them open for fluid and food. Reporting in the nation in Republica, investigative journalists A. C. Thompson spent months speaking with survivors of Katrina about a racist militia that formed in the predominantly white neighborhood of Algierst Point, who carried out a series of deadly shootings and even

worked directly with local law enforcement. White residents told investigators the police had given them a green light to shoot anyone quote breaking into their property and to quote leave the bodies on the side of the road. Others spoke of a free for all of white against black where whites condulged in violence with impunity. Years later, several white vigilanties were found guilty were sentenced to prison time for shootings and murder, and like many modern conspiracy theories pushed

by the far Ride about x FI and BLM. During the George Foyd Uprising, the vigilantes and algiers point were largely animated by widespread racist rumors that were nutfounded about leaders. Um. We were harassed a lot by the and OPD. You know a lot of times at gunpoint. They would come to our house sometimes you know, ten cars deep in op D wood and looking for Malink. One night they came through looking for Malink and what we had heard that they were out to assassinate him and anybody with him.

They came out looking for Malink one night, about ten cars dep and they had went through the house looking for him, and they couldn't find them. And they pulled out this fourteen year old young man that we had befriended to live on the backstreet for mLink and they started beating him, saying that he had stole the cooler out somebody's yard and minds you, you know, no one's there, so no one's really missing that cool And the young man thought, you know, because we didn't have refrigeration and

we hadn't put everything on ice. You know, ice was very important at that time, and the water was very important, you know, along with gasoline. But the young brother brought us a cooler, and the police put shot guards and everybody's stomachs, and they beat them in front of us and dared us to do anything. As far as like what the environment looked like, it was not and I

say this, it was not a rescue mission. This was seemed like they were running a drill, a military drill, you know, like the same hour, I mean, like the albat project. You will look at the bridge and you will see continue with military cars going across the cresta city bridge at nighttime. In four corners of the community. You would have black Hawk helicopters patrolling. You know, they will follow you through the yard with spotlights. Also, we

had homeland security, which included mercenaries. They were sometimes up to cars and if you were to violate, uh, the curfew, they were ride up on you. And they had these little and I used to have to interact with them because we had some some some young people there. They thought they had privileged from up north would translate in New Orleans, which it did not. Um they've seen any white person outside of New Orleans as a bunch of quote unquote nigga levels. So I would have the negotiate

with these homeless security people. UM, you had to be very calm, very still, because you could see the pupils. Their pupils were dilated with small anybody that's been in war like Vietnam and such an Uh, there's a storm they know when these people when the pupils are dilated like that, that means these people have killed several times. And my huncle used to call it a hundred miles there.

And you had to be very calm with these people because if you flinched, if you did anything that they didn't like or they felt threatened in any type of way, they will open up fire on you. Um. They were they had a R fifteens. All of them had a R fifteens and not milling me distrapped to their legs. So it was more you know, it's seemed more like a military takeover, like I said before, then ar rescue

and further down the line. For in the months, you had National guardsmen that opened fire on people, uh into busy traffic. Um. You will find bodies in the seventh ward, in the eighth ward in different houses, UH with bullets in the back of their head, you know, execution style. And um our investigating team will go out and witness this firsthand, and I was a part of that investigating team. They would do a walk through the house where the

body was at. It was shot in the back of the head, and the rumor was, you know, we had some rogue National guardsmen executing you know, people who didn't have homes. We're home some homeless people, you know that were left behind. Number one lesson I learned uma trainer was you may be a pacifist, but you might need to passive fists. You may need to go out and get you firearms. Of course, we want you to get proper training. Of course, we don't want you to do

anything illegal. Get your legal firearms and get some training. The second lesson was that human beings are incredible. We saw a lot of destruction, but we also saw a lot of beauty and a lot of love. In my experience too, we were common ground. People came together in days, and we fell in love with each other within days. Because of the pressure of the situation. If we didn't love each other, if we didn't get along with one another,

we had to, you know, in order for survival. Things were so bad that if your car had broken down on the side of the highway on the road you had to call us and five different vehicles will be speeding to your low cases. Um, you know to see who we'll get there first before Homeland Security or a vigilante group will roll up on you. You can't rely on the state. Can't rely on the state. Stay with us as it could happen. Here returns after the short

break and a word from our sponsors. The same year that Sinceria was facing down armed racist vigilantes in New Orleans, the stage was also set for an uprising to kick off in Toledo, Ohio. In our next interview, Tom tells us how a largely black community an archists affiliated with anti racist action hit the streets against the National Socialist Movement for the NSM and participated in uprising that exploded not just against the neo Nazis, but the police that

were protecting them as well. The Toledo anti racism protests really began when a National Socialist Movement member who was living in a black neighborhood in Toledo pulled a gun on two black children that were playing in the alley behind his house. Um. Those kids then went home and told their parents. Their parents then showed up to his house with weapons. The guy pulled a gun on them and then called the National Socialist Movement, who then showed up.

And so they had been This is back when Bill White was still the head of ns M and NSM was actually starting to make some headway, like they were growing really quickly. They targeted Ohio as a recruiting ground UM because they thought that they could gain a lot of membership there, and so Toledo was kind of their first foray into trying to do stuff in Ohio. And so they announced a date and the organizers on the

ground and Toledo did something really interesting. Then instead of organizing activists, they went and organized in the community directly UM that they were going around the streets talking to people. Street gangs were calling truces for the day, right, and so when October fifteenth rolled around, like everybody showed up, like there were anarchists there, but there were like tons of people from the neighborhood there. The whole protest didn't

last very long. It was this is October fifteenth and five. They sort of n s M was there and they had their shields and people were hooking stuff at them, but they were kind of too far away to really like hit. So the cops started surrounding them and allowing them to mark and as they were marching, they got within projectile range of people and then started pelting them

with everything that they could think of. The cops and got them to run, got the Nazis to run so they could kind of try and get them out of the area. A group of people sort of cut back behind the school trying and cut them off. I got tear gased, and when the tear gas flew, everything just got set off. There was rioting on and off for like three days in this neighborhood. After this, a bar owned by a cop got burned, got looted, and then burned to the ground. People trying to burn this Nazi's

house down. They had to declare state of emergency over this. And so there are a number of things that were really important about that day. I think for for us, one was it really did point to the effectiveness of

community anti fascist work. People that neighborhood were already mad, but it was this sort of like mobilization work which was down by people in the neighborhood and also done by kind of anarchists that were down in the neighborhood working with people to really make that what it was right, And it really showed what a community can do when Nazis show up in their name, and how much a community can reassert its ownership over their space when the

police decided to protect the Nazis that are attacking their neighborhood. But the other thing that really demonstrated that it really kind of created was it created a dynamic in Ohio which had been sort of building for a little while, but you can kind of still feel the ramifications of it.

So starting with the over the Rhine riots, which I think we're in two thousand three or two thousand one, when the Cincinnati police killed Timothy Thomas, there had kind of been this escalating series of you know, tensions with with the state around this period of time. It's also the period of time that a lot of Ohio cities were sort of beginning. They're the really cute period of their decline that they had been sort of declining for a while, but this is really when things got bad.

It was starting really like the early two thousands, mid two thousand's um the financial collapse in Cleveland, for example, was in two thousand six, um. But it had already been sort of going for a couple of years before that, and so there were these political conditions that were in place that facilitated this. But this also kind of created a dynamic of confrontation with the state and created a mentality within anarchist communities about being really realistic about what

those confrontations look like. UM that instead of being idealistic sort of like people were in the anti war movement and um, sort of approaching police from a perspective of ideas and discourse, what we learned during those days is that we should probably approach the police as a logistical force and understand them as such. Um. It was after that point that people really started researching police tactics in this area of the country, and that has had really

profound impacts over the last fifteen years. Right. It really did create an entire culture of really digging into those kinds of things very carefully and doing it in a way which wasn't bombastic, but was focused on actual research. The reason that that could happen was what went down

on those days was so intense. UM. It was the first time a lot of people had experienced like full blown major rioting before and like major large scale urban writing before, and it definitely changed a lot about the way that anarchists in this area of the country approached things um and you can still feel the the ramifications the ripple effects of that today. Stay with us. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back

after these words from our sponsors. In our last segment, we're going to speak to anti fascist researcher and author Spencer Sunshine. But first, let's rewind the clock to when Trump first came in as president in two thousand seventeen, kicking off riots, walkouts, and protests around the country, and grey protests soon spilled into airports. His people in the tens of thousands took action to defeat the Muslim band Um.

February second, a massive riot kicked off at you see Berkeley against the far right troll Milo Napolis, shutting down his scheduled talk. The far right responded by holding a series of free speech rallies throughout the summer, and anti fascists soon found themselves out flanked in the streets by a loose coalition of militia members, Proud Boys, Neo Nazis, and Alt right groups seeking to seize on this moment.

The White Nashal swing of the movement called for another free speech rally in Charlesville, Virginia, and the scene was set for historic and deadly showdown. It was pretty clear, especially as the run up to it happened, about how big it was going to be, how many different kinds of groups were going to be involved, and that for the first time, although there had been increasing mobilizations throughout the year especially, it was the first one that was

gonna be led by open fascists. Some of the other ones fascists participated in them, but there were more a pan far right. We were like pan far right events like what happened in Berkeley, but this one was going to be led by fascists, and they were all those many different kinds of groups, and they were coming out

of the woodwork. We had old activists who had been around in the eighties um who stated they were going to come, and there was clearly a lot of energy behind it, and it seemed like it was the big bid, and there were some of the participants were openly saying this it was gonna be the big bid for power and legitimacy of the ault right. I believe it was

Richard Spencer who said, or Matthew Hibeck. I forget which one actually said, there's gonna be before Charlotte's Ville and after Charlotte's Bille, which was true, but not in the way that they hoped for. I think it was a success for anti fascists and other people who wanted the ault right to wanted that inertia to stop and eventually end um. But it was not a success I think in the way that people wanted it to be or think about it um as a success. It could have

it was. It could have been a failure very easily after the event. The event itself was fairly neutral. I mean, there was all the fighting that is in people's minds that all happened before the rally was supposed to start. That was kind of a draw, which certainly was not a success that anti fascists stopped the rally. They did not. It did not stop people from entering into the rally grounds. The police dispersed it before the rally itself actually started,

so that can be seen as a success. And then the car attack, of course was well in some ways a failure for us, and I think at the very beginning, many of the fascists, you know, were excited about it, like it really did add to their inertia, and the whole thing could have been forgotten about very quickly, in which case I think it then would have been seen as a success for the fascists. If people remember the first when it happened, Trump immediately was like, nazis bad.

And then the next day he made his very fine people on both sides comment, and this is what energized liberals essentially to condemn him and to jump on the bandwagon against him. If he had and said that, this could have just sort of passed out of the public eye very easily, and it be seen, at least by fascists that anti fascists were unable to mobilize enough people to stop them, you know, and the only stopping of

them only happened because the police did it. So I think it could have easily been a draw or neutral or a failure without Trump's comments. It did end up being success because of this backlash against them. It did, for whatever reason, did finally bring it to the consciousness of people that um this huge rising in the far right that Trump had engendered. What it really meant how violent it was really going to be, what a threat it really was, and it did motivate people two and

the and the aftermath in particular. Unfortunately, this sort of went away fairly quickly to take the streets and come out in big numbers and condemned. The alt right, and the fascist wing of the right did collapse fairly soon afterwards, by spring of the next year. Charlottesvill was real interesting because people had been killed by the ult right before it, but not in such a dramatic manner, not in public

and not on video. And it was sort of like, I think for people, and I've said this before, I kind of you remember the first murders, you remember the first blood, and in that sense, because afterwards a lot of people were killed during the Trump administration and car attacks. I mean, I think a few dozen people during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. It became almost wrote where you're like, oh,

someone was killed at a demonstration again. But it was the shock of this at first, because this had not been seen for a very long time in the United States, that someone would be murdered at a demonstration, um, and that really sort of stuck with people and in that way it became a symbol. Um you can even today still say Charlottesville unless people are you know, teenagers or something, don't remember, people know what you're talking about. Biden invoked

it when he was running for president. So it's good it remains as a symbol of how big the really really far right, you know, the fascists can become quite quickly, and how violent and murderers they are, and so that remains is as symbol to people, I think, and frankly that there can be resistance to it. Like people also saw there was real resistance and people were willing to fight them, and especially after one six like there's no

more of this idiotic discourse. Bet if it's okay to punch and nazi, I really think most people do think it's okay now, you know, after they've seen what unfolded under the entire arc of Trump from Charlotte'sville to the capital takeover. If people had stayed at home, if there wasn't the allart the mobile zathent that did occur, it would have been a total victory for them. They would have taken it as a total victory and then moved

on to the next thing. And tried something bigger. Absolutely, if you held a demonstration and a thousand people came, you know, wouldn't you be and you did your thing, wouldn't you be like cool? Like, let's move on to

the next thing that was successful. Over the years and I've done more and more activism, I come to realize what nothing succeeds as success means, Like once you start going, when something succeeds, more people come to it, and you can move on and move on as a bigger thing and be able to do things you weren't able to do before. So this is why I always say we need to confront people. We have to break their movement. We can't let it jump from either success to success

or just simply not a failure. Because if you're already moving and you hit something that's not a failure, you'll just go on to the next thing. Nothing will stop you. And we need to need these things to stop. The night of Heather Higher was murdered, thousands hit the streets and cities across the United States, tearing down Confederate statues and marching in solidarity. A few weeks later, when far right activists tried to hold a rally in Boston, over

forty hit the streets to shut it down. A week later, in San Francisco and Berkeley, tens of thousands of march to shut down more alright rallies. In Berkeley, a black block of several hundred strong march information as part of a wider anti racist coalition, pushing both far right activists and heavily armed riot police out of a downtown park. Were only months before far right activists had driven out

anti fascists. The events of the first eight months of the Trump administration showed that there was mass militant opposition on the streets of the US against the far right, which destabilized the Trump regime and made it back pedal. But more importantly, it showed millions of people across the country the resistance was possible. That is going to do it for us today follow i g D at It's going Down dot org and on masodon at i g

D Underscore News. Thanks so much for tuning in and be sure to come back next time as it could happen here returns. We will continue to tread where we please into the fascist No passan Hi have one, It's meet James and just before we start today we're going to discuss in quite some detail the being to death

of Tyry Nichols by the police in Memphis. And if you don't want to hear that detail, that's totally fine, But we wanted to let you know now so that you didn't get surprised by it and your money commute or whatever. So if you want to skip this one, if you don't listen to that one, then we are trying to give you that warning ahead of time. Discourse discourse. Discourse is about podcast. I don't know it could happen.

Here is the podcast that you're listening to. Uh. If you came here list looking for another podcast, then you fucked up, But you sucked up in a good way because that podcast was trash. Thank you for being here with us today. Who all? Who all? Who? Who? Who's here? Who are you people? We're a little unsure. Yeah, I'm the along, I'm here. Wow, I'm I'm James. I'm a little unsure about who I am beyond that, but that's who I am. It's okay. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm

here to engage in discourse. I there's nothing I love more than discourse. Um. Speaking of discourse. Today we're gonna be talking about, well, I don't know, it's not really discourse, but today we're gonna be talking about the reaction to

the video of the Memphis police murdering Tyrene Nichols. In particularly, we're gonna be talking about the way in which kind of the left responded to this, both online and kind of public channels and actually in the streets, because I think there's some interesting stuff here, um, and I think it's kind of worth analyzing outside of uh, you know, the broader conversation about police violence and you know, uh that sort of thing, because I think there's some interesting,

sort of tactical stuff to kind of talk about here. UM. And yeah, that's that's that's what we're going to be doing today. UM. In case you've been kind of stuck under a rock, uh, you should probably be aware that on January seven, police from the Memphis p D Scorpion Unit, which was a unit with a very sinister name that existed to effectively over police UM a chunk of the city of Memphis. Uh yeah, UM, pulled over Tyree Nichols, a twenty nine year old black man. Uh. Tyree was

an amateur photographer. UM. He liked skating, he had Crohn's disease. UM, he was just driving around that night. UH. And the encounter, as we would later see on the video, went pretty much immediately violent on behalf of the police. Nichols was beaten very badly. UH. And he died in the hospital

three days later. And for the first few days after the killing, obviously, you know this happened, the police did this, and then rumors started kind of spreading in the immediate wake of the beating, but very little was known for certain about like what had happened, UM, about you know what,

why this had had gotten escalated so quickly. UM. One of the first kind of signs that this was going to become a thing on the national uh in terms of like the national attention span, was when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in the U. S. Department of Justice independently opened investigations into the beating. UM after reviewing body camera footage from multiple officers on scene. Five Memphis p

D officers were dismissed on January. Three days later, an autopsy commissioned by Tyrese family found extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating outrage around the killing grew rapidly, and it was announced by the Memphis Police that body camera footage of the stop and of the beating would be released to the public. Uh. This started the rumor mill really churning up. UM. There was kind of a couple of leaks from people who had seen the footage, I think who were close to the case, and they all

sort of described it as uniquely bad. The term that I heard a lot was that it's worse than the Rodney King beating. UM. This is just the way in which people started talking about it. And as more details filtered out, there were conversations around the country, particularly folks on the activists left, who started talking about the need to prepare for what they suspected would be the aftermath

of the video's release. UM. And one of the things that was kind of kind of worth discussing here is that in the immediate like immediately before the video came out, a lot of the conversations that people on the left we're having and that people in law enforcement we're having, kind of focused around the same expectations, which was that there would be widespread protests and rioting as a result of the release of this video. UM. Police departments around

the country entered high alert. Riot squads were prepped. Um, and then kind of on the other side of things and sort of open channels on Twitter and massed on and in person, and a number of of of different cases leftists and people you know who claimed to be that online talked about their expectations too. I heard variations of the phrase, you know, it's going to be a

really hot year. This is going to like lead into a particularly aggressive Some are on the ground, people are going to make the burning of that precinct in Minneapolis look tame. You know, get your gear together, check in

with your friends. Everything's about to go off. Um. There was a lot of chatter kind of along those lines, and I don't know, I didn't really speak up too much about this, but my kind of thinking, as folks were sort of anticipating the reaction to this was I suspected that the actual reaction on a mass scale to the video's release was going to be more muted and law abiding than than people were expecting at the time.

And I guess the primary reason that I felt this way was simply that kind of the vibes were off. It just didn't feel like folks were ready for that kind of a response. Um, but I do kind of have a fact based reason for why I was anticipating that as well. UM. On January, two days before the video's release, five Memphis p D officers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, assault, a bevy of very serious charges.

Immediately after that, three firefighters to E. M. Tease and a police lieutenant who had been on scene after the beating were fired for failing to assess and provide emergency care to Nichols on scene. And there's a couple of ways to view what happened here. I think the less optimistic one is that the state simply made a pragmatic decision to throw these guys onto the bus. That's definitely

what happened. The more optimistic way to look at this is that because people had rioted so hard for so long in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the state felt like it had to throw these guys under the bus rather than, you know, risk another year of rage. And this is also correct. I think both of these things are are pretty accurate ways to look at what happened. The idea that the release of the footage of Tyree's

murder would lead to massive protests. Was not quite universal, but I didn't notice that a lot of the people who felt similarly to me expressed the belief that if people didn't riot over what had happened to Tyree, that was due to a mix of liberal cowardice and racism, since most of the officers who beat Tyree to death were themselves black. And I think this is kind of a short sighted and unfair take, and I'll talk about

why shortly. On January Friday, the Tyree Nichols videos were released by the Memphis Police Department UM, along with a lot of you. I watched them all immediately, UM, and you can find there's a description on my Twitter page. It's turned currently pinned to my profile of the video if you haven't seen it but want to know what happened there. UM To kind of summarize it in brief, it's it's very ugly. Uh. Tyree is immediately calm as he's pulled over and taken from his car. The police

are not calm. He attempts to de escalate them. They accuse him falsely of resisting, then they mace him and themselves. I think in general that The inciting incident for the beating was the incompetent use of mace by these officers. They hurt themselves, they got pissed, and then they beat Tyree because they were angry at themselves for macing themselves. UM. It's also kind of worth noting that a white officer who has since been fired as well, also deployed his

taser on the young man. There's been some kind of this was kind of left out of a lot of the initial summaries of what had happened. Uh, that guy has now been fired. UM, and yeah, it's it's bad. The video is is very unpleasant and very brutal. UM. Watching it, though, I think kind of the thing that struck me most was how much like a normal traffic

stop a lot of this was. UM. I think that if you know, they had gone a little bit less hard and beating him a little less badly and he had survived, they probably would have charged him with resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. UM. And who knows how the case would have gone. You can hear

the police preparing for this eventuality in the footage. One officer claims that Tyree went for his gun there's no evidence of this in the footage, uh, And you can kind of hear them all working to get their stories straight after they beat tyree Um for the inevitable court case, more officers an emergency personnel arrive on scene as he's just kind of laying there, and none of them seemed to find what's happened peculiar or noteworthy, which is interesting

because immediately prior to the video's release, police departments around the country all shoot statements that were basically identical, condemning the officers who had beaten nichols Um, saying basically, this behavior is unacceptable. These men are bad apples. This is like an extreme example that does not represent policing values. And there's a couple of things that are are interesting

about this. One of them is that the actual way in which emergency responders on scene treated the beating kind of puts the lie to that, because nobody acts as if anything outside of the normal has occurred. And the other thing that is noteworthy is the uniformity of these these messages by police departments around the country. I have not actually seen that happen before. There was kind of a version of this that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd video, but it was much more cohesive

prior to the release of the Tyree Nichols video. UM. That said, there were no widespread riots or acts of property destruction. After the video was released. There were protests in a number of cities, most notably in Memphis, UM, but compared to things were very subdued. There was not kind of widespread property destruction or rioting in Portland, which was obviously the site of intense radical street actions. In

there were two fairly small marches. UM. I'm not gonna delve into this in tremendous detail, but there were kind of allegations from one of the marches that the larger and less radical of the two was an op designed to take numbers and energy away from the radical march. There were confrontations between members of both groups, and while the overall story, again is not worth spending time on, the gist of it is that very little happened. Now

this is not kind of limited to Portland. Atlanta, Georgia is probably the city in the US today that's been the center of the most effective radical protests against law enforcement and the history of attempts to stop and sabotage. The construction of Cops City, which is obviously a massive police training compound in Atlanta's largest urban forest, has been well documented by by Garrison Davis UM as well as

a number of other reporters. UM. I do think it's worth noting that days before the Nichols video was released, Atlanta police shot and killed the forest defender Tortuguia, and a moderately large protest followed, where protesters smashing windows and lighting one cop car on fire. This was the kind of action that I think most of the activists I observed expected in the wake of the Nichols video as well,

but we simply didn't see that. I'm just going to butt in here for a little bit and you'll you'll you'll hear more about that riot slash protest in Atlanta next week. UM. I'm putting together a series on it that'll that'll be out soon. But definitely one of the things that was talked about a lot in Atlanta was the upcoming release of this video and the potentiality of this video getting released shortly after the death of Tortuguita at the hands of police. Kind of both of these

things feeding off each other. Into a into a similar like level UH uprising, and this was like no one was like for sure about this, Like no one was like saying, this is absolutely definitely gonna happen, But it was something that was definitely thought about. UM, it was

something that was definitely considered. I think, honestly, if the the video was set to come out originally on like the Monday or Tuesday following the big downtown protest in Atlanta, UM, it was supposed to come out just a few days later, and that that didn't happen. It was delayed once again for further further into the week. UM. I think if it came out sooner, I think that could have fed

off momentum in a pretty considerable way. I think a few things happened both in Atlanta that in the in the next few days that kind of stunted possible possible

for their protest. UM National Guard was deployed, UM police and Savannah were ordered to start arresting people and shutting down gatherings of over teen UH specifically for like including vigils, and in Atlanta, obviously there was people getting really pretty pretty inflated, UH high level felonies and domestic and domestic terrorism charges simply for being simply for being present at

a protest UM. So I think those those things kind of all in all impacted people's ability to like prepare for you know, a sequence of protests which there was someone there was someone in l a for for like a day or two. The ones in Memphis were pretty big, but I think they the the timeline in which they released the video is definitely should be considered in terms of when they chose to release it um to like in terms of like the state's goal of preventing you know,

large large scale protests. But that was definitely something that was talked about a lot, uh during during like the little over a week that I was that I was in Atlantis, because everyone was getting ready for this. Like everyone heard that this is going to be like the worst of video that we've seen since Rodney King. Like

that that that that was the way it was. It was thought up of like on the ground, you know, just like word of mouth being being passed um, and people were definitely like preparing for like preparing themselves for it, like like like thinking like thinking about like what's going to happen if this is like if this really is the most horrific thing. What is the appropriate response to that?

And and this is kind of a lot of what I wanted to talk around, because you have sort of Georgia law enforcement, there's this this riot, and the response to that as well as the response to the tree

set is a series of domestic terrorism charges. Um. And then this video comes out and there's not a mass, like radical street response to it, and it it seems to me and Garrison you can correct me if I'm wrong that a big part of that is people in Atlanta were kind of not willing to throw more lives and bodies at the police without kind of more of a cohesive plan of what to do given the severity

of the repression that that was being engaged in. I mean, obviously can't comment on people's yeah, the motivations or like plans for for for stuff, because that's not something that I would be would be privy privy to. Yeah. Um, so I I don't know, there's there's there's a lot of stuff. I mean, like, I think a big part of why I heard a lot about it in Atlanta was one because of a friend of a lot of people who were involved in the force in the force

events got killed by police a few days earlier. And two. Memphis is only a few hours away from Atlanta, but like, it's it's it's not it's it's it's not that far, and it's a big part of the stuff in Atlanta is like solidarity with struggles that are not just in your immediate vicinity. And you could argue that Memphis really is in the immediate vicinity of Georgia. Um, but like that that type of cross cross state solidarity is is

a big part um. But yeah, I can I I could not comment on on on why why people did or did not choose to do specific things. I think that that's that's up for people themselves. Yeah, I wouldn't

want to put words into anyone's mouth. But it was kind of interesting because I I paid attention a lot to the reaction, and there were a lot of folks talking about how disheartening it was that there were not more of the kind of radical actions that they wanted to see in the wake of the video coming out, And I'm that's kind of the thing I wanted sort of to talk most around because I feel very mixed

around this. But broadly speaking, I guess I'm glad that we didn't see a repeat of the part of that was folks standing up in front of cops shops until riot police came in and getting charges against them, because I just don't think that that works right now. I don't think it works is functional anymore. Um, I don't think it actually hurts the state because the reaction, like there was a period of time early in those first couple of months in particular, where you could see the

police were off balance. Obviously in like Minneapolis with the burning of the Third Precinct was was this kind of sea change moment um, but you could see it in a number of cities that like they didn't really know what was going on, and they were themselves concerned with

how out of control the situation had gotten. And then it kind of morphed later in the year to I think a situation they could control very well where there were these acts of fairly minor property destruction and then a bunch of people would get picked up and charged.

And I I think that while I understand like the desire to react that way and to do something um kind of very firm and uh and radical in response to state violence like this, I'm also like deeply concerned about people not throwing away months and years of their lives fighting charges. Yeah. I mean a big part of it is is people learning that treating protesters as disposable meat bags to throw against the wall of the state

is kind of a bad idea. Um. And there's I think this is something that that that was talked about in conversations just just like regarding like, hey, this video is going to come out, what do you think it's going to happen. Like there's just a lot of the casual, casual conversations, but like there was a lot to make happened. A lot of things contributed to the intensity and the length of those protests. I think, uh, COVID being a pretty big part. This was a few months into the pandemic.

People have been stuck in their homes now for a few months and not really like prepared for that. Like at this at this point, we're kind of we're all kind of used to being in our house a lot more now, but back then it was it was new

for a lot of people. So I think the opportity, the opportunity to get out of the house for what seemed like an important reason I think was a really big part of people being out of a lot of work was a really big part of because a lot of people did did not have the types of jobs that they might have now, did not have the jobs they had like in like the months before. It's maybe because I can't really think of another example like this

from history. Obviously a lot of uprisings occur when people are suddenly out of work, but this was a mix of people are suddenly out of work and they suddenly they all have cash like that, that which contributed in a lot of ways because like that, that was I think what funded a lot of you know, people bringing in food and people bringing in like pallets of water

and getting gas mask and stuff. Is they had these sort of checks for you know, as a result of like COVID relief, which was an interesting situation as well that hasn't been replicated since. I think there's there's another very important factor of this that doesn't get talked about

that much, which is just the weather. Like if if if you if you, if you go back and look at when the largest police like largest anti police protests in the US have happened, right, they either start like late spring, early fall, or just the middle of the summer,

and there's reason. Yeah, like then this is I think another this is this is the thing up in Chicago right was it was just really fucking cold, and I mean this this affects actually circles too, but it's like you can't get the critical mass of just regular people in the streets when it's like twenty degrees. I think the other side of that is, um, just summer vacation of a lot of a lot of the people who

go the hardest at these protests are people in high school. Um. And during winter, fall, spring, kids are in school during during summer, uh, people have People under the age of eighteen have a lot more free time on their hands.

So I think that is another contributing factor. UM. And I think there's there's there's one other aspect which is very sinister um and but I think is worth talking about in terms of how of how the state may have been trying to frame this to like to to frame the release of this video too kind of like curtail the the the the the intensity of any type

of like um of a protest revolt uprising. Now obviously that there was like the fucked up nature of like making this feel like a world premiere of like a snuff film. It was like it was it was it was like a weird a weird aspect, which I think it encouraged the video to be to be something that is consumed versus something that's actually like watched and like, oh, this is a fucked up thing that we that we

need to do something about. Instead, it turned it into this like element of consumption and the other aspect for this in terms of a lot of hardcore activists like like like people who have thrown down in the streets before, people who have who have who have seen fucked up ship is that the intensity, what was the violence depicted on this video was framed as being extremely horrific, being being a very very unusual, a very um like uncommon

but but but but horrifying display of violence and display of brutality by the police. This is this, This is what police departments were faring it as. This is what the President of the United States was framing this as like this, this is a case of a few of a few bad actors who who did an egregious, um

but you know, uncommon thing. And I think when a lot of people who have thrown down watched this video, it just reminded you of stuff that you've seen before, Like, yeah, they saw a thing they had seen it was it was not shocking in the same way that it was

getting framed as. Because what separates this from most of the arrests that happened in Portland during is very little Like one or two punches that were that were thrown just a little bit too hard is all that separates this from most like violent police arrests, Like this was not an uncommon display of violence. This was an ordinary, an ordinary encounter that just a few things were pushed

just barely over the edge. And I think a lot of people watched, Like my first reaction was like, oh, like this, this is not as bad as what I thought like this and that that that should be like

a condemnation of the police's actions. Like That's why I think one of the most important things to watch is how the other cops who were not present for the beating, but who show up immediately after or at the end of it, because some of them did watch the others beat him, how they react because they're just kind of even the MTA, right who turned up, Oh yeah, this has happened where we we we do a stand back

when this happens. Right, the people on the ground were not concerned, Like it was not you could you could slowly watch because like a lot of this video was not of the actual beating. It was it was of the aftermath. And you you you could you could watch these cops slowly start to realize that maybe they went a little too hard, just very slowly over the course of thirty minutes. But for most of the time they're

on the ground, they're like making jokes. They are talking about how fun, like how fun it was to beat up this person and there each other. That is most of the video. I think it's worth noting like a couple of things. One like it's extremely long, Like I'm not in the in the way that the George Floyd video like fits into the attention span of stuff we consume on our telephones at a time minute versus minutes

versus like an hour of footage. Right, Yeah, if Tyree Nichols had just been seriously disabled, had life altering injuries, been charged with disting rest all the things that very plausibly could have happened if a couple of punches had handed in different place. This body camera footage would have been denied under the investigative exemption right then have said, no, we're investigating his resistance of arrest. You can't you can't see it, and none of this ship would have happened.

And like, yeah, the normalcy of so much other than the outcome. I don't know that that stritched some of the rage away, but it's important context. I think a few things I mean, and this is again one of the things that I think you can see from this that is evidence of sort of a positive long term result to and it's it's a very mixed bag when I say it's positive, but that is kind of a positive sign. Is that they acted so quickly to throw all of these guys. They are firing and charging a

lot of city employees over this. It's going to be between all of the people fired and all of the people charged, more than a dozen people by the time this is all done, which I can't think of another time when that has happened this quickly over an incident of police violence. And they did that not because it's the right thing to do, but because they were scared. And again I do I want to emphasize here the thing that they're scared of is not that like radical

left wing protesters will take to the street. It's that liberals and moral they know that the consequence of the cops beating someone to death is that like someone sucker, mom will fucking abandon how many vans wing a snehammer into your cop shop? If you don't do this, do like give a scapegoat? Right, like do the fair the bare minimum? And so the positive the thing that I can say that is probably positive about this is that it does show there's still some fear there on their behalf.

The thing that's negative is that, like, well, it it worked because I will say, on a moral level, I think a why variety of radical actions are morally justified

by what was done to Tyrene Nichols. Now that said, like back to the sort of the point we were making the start of this, I don't particularly urge or encourage that just because, like I don't like seeing people get arrested and charged and spend years of their life fighting ship in court, um for the chance to like, let's say, carry out minor acts of property destruction on

a cop shop. Um, I don't think like that sort of activism works right now, um, it certainly doesn't work without them, without the critical mass of like liberals sort of behind it, without enough people saying like we like again you look at like the fact that the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis is still one of

the most popular things in modern American politics. But that was the product of a fairly unique moment, And I just don't I see some positives in like the lingering fear of that moment, but I also don't see the material conditions that make me think it's something like that is coming again in the immediate future. And especially because this this situation around this video demonstrates how much more effort the state's putting into trying to prevent things from

happening before they start. Like there was a lot of like inter agency work put into having all of these local police departments and release statements, having the FBI release statements, having uh, the president, yea, like having having the president release statements, and it's it is all made slightly more bizarre considering that the contents of the video are not the on on the level of like uncommon or like rare rare displays of violence that the police do, like

this is this is this is relatively standard, um and that that kind of one thing I've been thinking about is like why did they choose this video? Like why did they why did they make this one? Like what were they afraid of, like for this video, because like other other other videos have come out in the past few years, like other like other police killings have happened, like this police killing is all the fucking time. But they they did a lot of work on this one specifically, um.

And it's kind of it's kind of interesting that, like why why they chose this specific video to to dedicate all of this work into Because not not only did they like you know, denying stuff, but they also they like they like hyped it up. They're like you using this as like an example, Yeah, like like using this as an example, like here, this is what bad cops look like. Watch us punish these bad cops. Well, but

I think I think I think there's a rate. I think there's a huge racial aspect of this, right, which is that like you know, like the cops were getting prosecuted. Are only the black cops who are involved in this, right? And I think that's a huge part of this entire strategy. I think that's why they framed this as exceptional violence is to play on people's racism, right. I think I think that's why why this is is allowed to happen,

which was that yeah, you can it is. It's like even inside the police it is a lot easier to throw black cops under the bus and it is there white cops under the bus. That's just how the system works. And it doesn't trigger that same like visceral response right that that we all had to seeing the George Floyd video, I don't think quite like like there is a j old tradition of white men doing violent to black men

on behalf of the state. And I think also it's it's also easier politically inside of the police departments because I think I think there would have been a lot more pushback from it, like the police part Like there hasn't been much that I've seen like internal pushback, like from inside of police partments, because I I think if it had been five white cops, I think this would have been a huge fight, and I think you would have had like the fucking police union, like calling Biden

like an anti cop, like whatever. But I I think I think these were people who they were like we could tell these people onto the bus and doesn't looking matter because who cares? Yeah, so arity isn't there for them. I think those are I mean, that's certainly like significant aspect of why like this was the one they focused on.

But I also think a major aspect of it is that it shows and records the reaction of other city employees to this, and you can see in real time the police putting together um that story like it's it.

There's I think a few things about this that are are really unique, but even I don't know the it's relatively unusual to have an angle, which is not like the body camera, right, which really I think the violence in this was was captured and depicted in a way which was more explicit than you would get from many individual cops body camera. And like the fact that they most of the time when cops kill people to do it with guns, right or maybe to taste or something.

That the fact that they took minutes, you know, like several minutes to be a man to death. It's it is just it should be. We've we've said like how this isn't unusual, and it's not, But it doesn't mean it's not repulsive. No, No, it's sucking disgusted by it. It's it's nightmarish. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's even more nightmarish considering how common this is, because yes, they did spend a few minutes doing this, but it was really only I think one or two punches that threw it

right over the edge. Like it wasn't just a punch. Is the thing that I think one of the things that I saw that I think was probably critical and why he died. No, it was when they tackled him. His head bounced against the ground with a significant amount of force. There's a number of like a perfect storm of factors, right, that went into making this the inctident that they talked about, and like this the incident that didn't start two. I guess like it's no one particular thing,

it's all these things that led to it. And I do think also, like we have Joe Biden as president, right, like a lot of the same bullshit it's still happening that we've covered, right, like talking about the cops, talking about the border, talking about all this stuff, but it's not being shoved in people's faces by legacy media outlets. Liberal folks have not been getting gradually angry or more upset at like the appearance of vulgarity from the White House.

And yeah, and that's also a big aspect of why things went the way they did in is you had four years of pent up frustration on behalf of the a large group of liberals as well. Although I do again, I don't like pushing kind of the simple narrative here because I see that on the left a lot that like, oh, the Libs they stopped coming out because Biden one, and

they never really cared. And I think that like, that's there's certainly like a decent chunk of people who who showed up because it was the thing to do and we're not committed. But I also think the folks who are just like, um, you know, people stopped coming out because they suck. That's a that's a little bit of a reductive summary of the take. But I think that

that that broad idea leaves out a lot. One of the things that leaves out is that a lot of those those Libs and moderates who showed up in got the ship beaten out of them and got pretty traumatized and are probably would be willing to get back out again. But are going to need to feel like there's a an actual chance of doing something because they understand the

consequences of showing up in the street better. Um, and they're like, well, I don't want to do the same thing that I just got my ass kicked and there's still cops. Um, there is a decent amount of evidence that for kind of the long term positive impact of getting all those people out in the street and of the fact that so many more people in witnessed police

violence with their own eyes. Um. There's a couple of places you can go to look at this, But I was I was watching going through a recent ABC News Washington Post poll that showed that from three, confidence that police treat black and white people equally fell from fifty two, where it was the thirty nine percent among Americans. Um, and confidence that yeah, and confidence the police still a lot like it's too it's certainly too high, but that's

a significant change. And confidence that police were adequately trained to avoid use of excessive force fell from f to um. Like, and confidence in both of these things fell twice as fast from twenty three as it did from and that like thirty something percent number is just that is also just like close to like the number of people who are like active, like like actively hardcore racist about of the country are biggest. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think the

election was real think that. Yeah. I want to quickly mention that, like some of those liberal folks as well, like like this is not we don't do like shipping on the lips or whatever it's use Listen, it doesn't help.

But like a lot of those folks have been out doing other ship too, Like I've seen folks so I haven't seen since twenty like to protect trans kids, trying trying to stop biggest shout and get little children going to the pantomime ship like they they've been doing stuff, and and that contributes to close to people being you know, fatigue from other actions. A large part of what I'm seeing people not being willing to do anymore is like the same ship that they did in that stopped working, right,

it didn't continue to be effective. Yeah yeah, And I think also like and this this also you know the s sspectors, like the weather, like the stuff that was happening in the very very like the first week, we're like I don't know, like the cops lost control of like the sid at the center of Chicago, right, like that the kind of people who did that stuff like aren't really like that. Those those those are those those that was not being done by people who were sort

of like political liberals or whatever. That was being done by people who like had like very various tines, very tenuous connection to politics at all under normal circumstances. And you know, like eventually, eventually you'll get we'll see something like that again. I don't know, I mean it took like six six five or six years between like Ferguson

and like that. That will happen again. But there's that kind of that that kind of stuff doesn't happen that Like those those like the kind of people who actually riot very significantly, who are not in the sort of like cadra of like hardcore left or organizers, like, they don't throw in that often. And a lot of political conditions have to like converge exactly correctly for it to happen, and it's just not going to happen most of the time. And that's in pressing in a lot of ways. But

like you like that's just that's just what reality is. Yeah, I don't think there's been enough time between cycles in order for things to really pick up, because yeah, it hasn't required a lot of people to forget, to forget the brutality of what the cops did to people, and like and and and and and just like material conditions and like recovering from burnout, and it creates Like one thing that's been so incredible about Atlanta is the level

of atliency because they've not they've not really stopped since like they've like they've they've kind of they they've they've kept going in a very particular way that both like encourages people to take care of themselves and not to be treated as disposable. And I think a big part of that is having like a multi pronct movement, Like the movement isn't it's not built around a singular thing like going out and breaking windows or even even just

like camping in the forest. Like, the movement isn't just those things. There's a lot of other various aspects. So when you're exhausted from one single thing, you can move on to one of the other many aspects and like do that as like as your recovery um and and have. Having that, I think it's contributed to the level of resiliency that we've seen, um, but I don't think the

rest of the States has those types of practices. Like people in Portland are definitely still extremely burnt out from from and I assume a lot of a lot of other cities are dealing with similar level of fatigue. One thing I do want to address really quickly is the horseshit framing of this by legacy media. Again, like the very fucking people who, like on the day that Derek Chauvin went to Joe retweeted that initial statement where Minneapolis p D like basically said George Floyd died of a

heart attack. I think we had a cardiac condition or something. Um, the very same people who retweeted that statement said never again are we going to be calmed by this ship and now out there fucking just carrying water for the cops, like CNN saying that Tyry Nichols had an encounter with the police, Like I don't understand what it fucking takes for these people to understand, Like and I've been like I was on NBC this year trying to persuade other

NBC journalists to maybe critically assess the claim to the police, and like here we are again doing the same ship again, and we should we should probably close out here soon. But one kind of final thought that I've had is the other another kind of crucial difference between how this

was treated as opposed to the George Floyd videos. At the person who recorded the George Floyd video was like a bystander, Like they were just there and they posted that on their own accord, and it was able to grow to it was able to grow traction over the course of a few weeks kind of slowly in like underground um like in like underground communities, you know, people who are much more aware of police violence, and then

that's the least seeped out into the mainstream. I think there's a difference in having that type of natural growth of people learning about like hey, did you see this fucked up thing that my friends sent me where like did you like Like there's that level of like, oh, we found this thing that is really fucked up and people need to care about this, versus the framing of the police and how they used this as like a world premiere of this like of this of this like

snuff film. It's it's like that there was like a fucking countdown to to to to to watch the video, and that that immediately frames this as something to be consumed. That immediately frames this is something like the way to engage with this is to sit down and watch it and then you're done. Like that, then the that is the like they're they're they're framing this the same way that you would watch like a movie or like a music video drop like that is that is the style

of engagement. Because this video is being published by the police like they are. They are they are from from the very start, They're controlling the way that information is distributed.

They're controlling what information is distributed. It like creates this scenario where the consumption of the video itself like is the event as opposed to any type of like follow up action or protest or direct action that instead of that being like the action event, the action event is just the consumption of the video based on how it was hyped up as as this thing that was to be like officially released and you like count down for it and then you watch it and you're like, Okay,

that was it, that was the thing, um, And I think that does just really impact it when it's like this, like sanctioned premier versus this thing that's spread by regular people. UM. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it kind of became this act of penance. Like you watched the video, you say, holy funk, that's disgusting, and then like the thing is already done right like that, the cops are already fired,

So you just do your penance. You go through the painful thing, rather than the George Floyd thing, which was like nothing has been done about this. I've got this organically from my friend and I'm fucking furious. Oh yeah, I think you're right. I think it's very different. Yeah, alright, well I think that's probably going to do it for us today. Um until next time. Uh, I don't know. Don't don't let your city name a police elite unit scorpion or anything else. Yeah you can tell stuck. Yeah yeah,

I don't have special police if. Yeah, I would prefer no cops. If you're going to have a special police unit, maybe call it like the Barney Fife Battalion or something like that. Um, at least at least try not to hype them up to be scorpions. Yeah. Um, anyway, that that that that that the fuck? Howeveryone it's James again book ending the episode, and I'm just here to ask you again to donate if you have the means, if you're able to, to relief for people in Syria who

are obviously experiencing terrible consequences from this earthquake. The new cycle kind of moves on, but people's lives don't, and they still need your help. So a couple of plays you can donate. The White Helmets that's White Helmets dot org, slash e N for English Syrian American Medical Society Foundation, that's s A M S hyphen USA dot net, metsan San Fontiere, Doctors Without Borders and that's Doctors Without Borders

dot org. And the Curtish Rear Question h E y V A S O r u K dot r G. Those were all great places and we'd love it if you could spare little money to help people out. Thanks bye, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It could

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