It Could Happen Here Weekly 94

trying to crush the union. The strike has worked so far, but they need support from the community to help pay workers and help these people feed their families so they can continue fighting the bosses, capitalism and building democracy in the workplace. You can go to Bitley's Slash Burger Defense to do it. To their funds, we will have linked to that description. And yeah, thank you all so much, and now onto the.

a podcast and not not try, I think. But yeah, hopefully, hopefully we've sailed through that one. So when are we talking about sheep? Right When you're thinking of getting sheep, the first thing I think you have to ask yourself is why. And that is a good question because obviously they're a lot of work, and they are like born ready to die, and every point in the sheep owning process you are. You can't say that we are all born ready to die. We're just here temporarily postponing.

Do I want these sheep for wool? Or do I want these sheep for milk? Those are the three main reasons. They are also a thing called park sheep. When we're talking about parks here, we're not talking about like that they live in central Park. We're talking about like the it's a big field in front of a rich person's house. I think this is probably a specifically British thing, and people, Yeah, people are looking at me, like it's a British thing. So big stately homes for rich people in rural England

will have a big field in front. At the home, it's a long driveway on it. That driveway is generally planted with big trees leading up to the house and it's like you've watched down to TV. Yeah, so if you can, yes, a country of state exactly. So like in that country estate my dad, by both my parents and agriculture and my dad works. Someone had a large country estate one point in my childhood. They would have

sheep in that park. But like those she aren't really there to like make money, they're there to look fancy. So that's where you get some really crazy sheep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, parksp Yeah. If you if you want to go and have a look up Jacob's Jacob sheep, there's some there's some audience participation. So if you guys get opened up a tab and google a Jacob sheep.

You got your wool breeds, so they might be a smaller They may need shearing twice a year though, so that's something you're either going to have to do or find someone to do, and they'll give a more desirable wool, right. And there are different types of wolf for different things, so that's something you might look into it. Like, g if you're considering spinning or you know you're getting these sheet primarily so you can go from like farm to jumper,

then you need to look into that. And I don't actually know how you sell wool in the US and the UK. It was kind of a centralized sale. It's not it's not worth all for the most part, at least unless you've got something like the Reno sheep. So like, don't be getting wools sheep and thinking like, oh, hell yeah, I'm going to make my fortune in the wall market

that ship. That ship has sailed centuries ago. So kind of the classic sheep you're looking at for Like, a lot of the sheep that you're going to see, at least in the UK are very often mules. So that's a cross breed of sheep. It's a blue face or border lester ram over a hill breed. You So hill breed sheeps are sheep? Are there more hardy?

Like you will talk about fencing, definitely, most sheep need to be fenced in or they will just get out. Some of them are very acrobatic. But yeah, these guys, they can be hefted hill breeds, some hill bredes can be hefted so well. That means it's passed down the maternal line. So you're going to have to to retain that maternal line. Right, So as you're breeding your sheep, going to have to keep the U to the you lamb, and you're going to have to keep that line because

they will teach their lamps to where to come back to. Basically, right, ask a really dumb question, please, sar.

And I think New Zealanders eat a lot of it too, but it's not as common here. So it's relatively common in the UK. Like if you went to Azoopermarket, you'll see it mutton not so much you have to cook it for longer in search, yes they do.

need is quality of grazing for the most part. So let me go through a few breeds of sheep and I'm going to go for what to look for when you're buying a sheep, right, So just just some breeds that I've sort of gone off the top of my head here texels, and you guys can look these up as we go. I think that will add add to the entertainment factor for the listeners at home. So texels, they are big units and not as big some of the other such we're going to talk about. They're thick

that they're mostly like a meat sheep lean meat. Yeah, ugly, they're kind of wide face and kind of the big dominating eyebrows.

to make them more hearty. Right, And this one is a clean l l e y n because you probably would have got that spelling organically. That that's a Welsh word and I'm probably mispronouncing it, but it's that's a it's a meat sheep. It's it's also got desirable. Well, it's also a good mother. They are big, They're like they're big units. My mom had those. And so when one of the things you're going to have to do when you have your sheep is you're going to have

to clip their little feet. Other words, they grow too long, just like just like you have to clip your own fingernails, right, otherwise you need to do that. So and there's a way to do it by sort of grabbing the front leg and sort of dropping your knee a little bit. Like you're you're not just superlexing the sheep.

the horse knows, the sheep doesn't. So sometimes you have a few sheep with horses. They can be companions as well. They can be nice companions.

dad where my dad lives. Like I said, there are some rare breeds.

you a better same return on investment. So if you're interested in having sheep just because it's cool and it looks funky, the rare breed survival trust is a place to like, look, I used to enjoy going there as a kid and seeing different sheep and learning about But.

which is which is? That's an ad break that will do after that downal thanks understood.

to be with other sheep. So I think the way we used to do it when I was a kid was to get orphan lambs and so like that the mother either rejects the lamb or she dies giving birth right well, which can happen. And we used to them bottle feed those lambs and like you know, when they're very little, if you go out on the hill, do people have Argus in America. Sorry, you're looking at no, okay, Like it's a type of oven that like it's always on,

it's a range cooker. Oh no, people, people, Okay, yeah, I can remember, like where I don't know.

for them. So that's a lot of work, but you know, it's a way to get going. But they are more fragile when they're young. So what it was suggest is buying a couple of yews that have been bred and then you just want to either like if you go locally to somewhere, then you'll you'll know this is a type of sheep that can survive and the type of pasture that's near you. This is the type of sheep that can survive in the climate that you have with the food sort of available where you are, So that's

probably a good thing. And then you just want to check that the sheep has some weight on it, right, and you want to check its teeth of course, like any livestock, you want to be checking the teeth when you're buying them. And then a thing I've run into.

come across this in the United States recently. Some people will rage posting on the place I go to to buy chickens because it didn't want to buy vaccinated pickens, which is just h Yeah, because Bill Gates wants to know what your chicken is thinking, right, which is why he micro chips. Yeah, absolute pricks. Yeah, if you don't want to buy back. So I don't know if you're listening to the show that this is not a concern

of ours. I don't think, but yeah, check the vaccine statu is just in case you got some who are trying to sell you some sheep which are more likely to get sick. So yeah, would would if you I can't come up with and I don't know if you want to buy something that's no use to you and won't give you joy instead of sheep. Here are some adverts. Okay, so we're back and we're still talking about sheep, probably will be for quite some times from page one. So

sheep are actually they're quite clever. Sheep can recognize human faces. They'll know who you are. I've definitely definitely known that, Like especially the sheep that we bottle fed from when they were babies, right, they definitely knew who we were and they could be very friendly. Yeah, it's nice, it's no. It will come up to you and they'll sort of nuzzle you and you can rub them. Our sheep were polled.

That's another thing to think about when you're getting a sheep. Right, a pole sheep, it doesn't have horns where it's some people have horns. Some people have more horns. So yeah, they can recognize your faces. They can learn names, so they have a name. They can learn their name. They also like knows it they're sheep, so like, I know, my mum would just go out and go look sheep and then she'd feed them and they'd come. So you're thinking,

you know, they've got a positive reinforcement mechanism. You can train sheep to go on a lead. So another reason you might want to get sheep is you're getting into into showing. Right, a nice thing to do if you you know a strange like me. I suppose it's go to like an agricultural show and look at different types of sheep. I like to do that. They can be really expensive now because it's also the County Fair and so like people are going in to eat like deep

fried stuff, which doesn't interest me as much. But if you want to go and see it, yeah, yeah, we could go together down I'll get.

I think of, you know, go to the village show or whatever and take the sheep and walk it around and then they'll judge your sheep right if it's up to the breed standards or what have you. So yeah, they can go on a lead they like more of like a halter look around the nose, so not not like a collar. So that's the thing that you can do that's that interest you. If you want to get into sheep showing. If that's the case, you're going to want to get like a pedigree sheep right and really

get it to it. You're going to drop some money. It's not really like I was never a very serious sheep show, to be clear, It's just a thing for your child to do when you go up in a rural area. They like I said, they like to be together in groups. They're pretty docile. Like sheep an't going to fight you. It's definitely, definitely like when I was at University of stuff, friends would come home and they'd be very scared of the sheep. There's no reason to

be scared of sheep. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being hurt by a sheep. Yeah, I mean what, they're going to come at you a bit. Sometimes they're angry or whatever, but like it's a sheep, Like it's fine, you know, like I would back you serene if it came to it. Yeah, Like yes, And their horns are mostly like not pointed towards you. I have been gored by a bolt right, like I've experienced like livestock related injury.

they've turned out to be gay. It's what it is, right, Like, I love that gets me about this weird, stupid American. It's not just an American thing, but it's like, oh, it's not natural whatever. Like I know, anyone who's worked with livestock in their life, well for a number of years will tell you that they've come across a gay sheep or cow or what have you. Some you're also going to get. Sometimes some sheep are called free Martins. It's a trans mask sheep for the most part. It

actually has some biological diferences. So like, yeah, what it is is is a female that's been accompanied so like they're twins or triplets or quads sometimes that has been accompanied by male featurists in utero, so they behave in a masculine way and they might lack functioning ovaries. Yeah, you're going to get those two right there, So they're going to be a bit more agro like a ram about you and stuff. But it's just to think is part of natural diversity in species. You're going to see it.

You know, you might have a gay sheep. Lucky you, right, you know, cherish it, take it, you know, be nice to it. So white fleeces, right, generally we think of sheep, but Dana was saying, you have to think of a white fleece. That's that wild cheap are often brown, right, it's being white. It's not a great camouflage trait. So when we see a when we see a white sheep, that's because it's generally been selected.

hard to look after that sheep. Right stop, it's wall getting matt in stuff. So now we're going to get it to fencing. It's an important topic. So you want your fencing to be about chest high. Obviously, it depends on your height, like if you're a smaller person a bit higher or whatever. But like we were, generally use post and rail fencing. You don't see that as much in the US, but it names pretty self explanatory. Right, Bang in a post rail across the middle. Bang in a

post rail across the middle. And then you're going to want some netting you don't have to use like with chickens, we talked about using construction netting right, like very thin wire just so like things like snakes and rats don't get in with cheap you need that. The you can go with a wider mesh four or five inches across and that's going to be cheaper for you as you're building the fence. You can also use electric fences and you can use those to rotate the pasture, which is

a good idea. So the sheep kind of graze one area, then you move them across to another area. That area recovers. You move the sheep to the next area, they graze that area where the other areas recover. Okay, you learned about this in the school, surely, right, yeah.

touch the fence with the grass. Because the grass is a poor conductor, you're going to feel a little.

fancy gives handy. You just took it up to a car battery basically, so you like, yeah, no, it's a it's a good way to segment your field. You have one field, you know, if you're not rotating the sheep. Did you alreally not learn about field rotation? Sorry, I'm constantly amazed by the things that I did in school that Americans don't do, not at.

at like knowing where to shelter. But then you've got to you can't leave them, out, like when I'm in agricultural states in America where these giant prairies, you know that you don't have hedgerows in the same way that we did where I grew up. Then you if you are there and you're trying to have some sheep, you're going to need to build a little shelter for them.

undifferentiated prairie. And especially lambs, right, they're more fragile. They're younger, and sometimes you'll see the lambs wearing the little coats and little little jackets that they can wear. Yeah, you can google that, just like google lamps, orange jacket. You can get these little little plastic jackets for them. But that you do, you do need to be cautious with lambs when they're young. Sometimes, like I said, you'll have the midside thing with sheep regarding feeding is that they

are ruminants. Do we know what rumin animals are?

I'm sure they have places where they have good access to water and then you, like I said, you do want to rotate them around. Right, You can feed them, you can supplement with like hay or halage or silage stuff like that, but you shouldn't really, like you can't keep your feet sheep in a place where there's no pasture. Really,

you don't want to be feeding them allyet. They need varied pasture right with different things, you know, clovers and grasses and the stuff that's poisonous for them, so that there are different weeds sort of poisonous for them. You're just going to want to It depends where you live, right, you're listening to this in the UK. It's different to North America, probably different to South America. So you'll want

to check that out again. When you're buying a sheep, you can ask these kind of questions and go ahead and pull those out so so you can you can feed them grain. But you really only want to do that sort of durin or just before lambing. It can lead to overfeeding. It's too rich for them, right, Like they're designed with this ruminant system to you know, have these green leafy things. People can use bagged feeds too. You know, again, you don't want to rely on those

whole time. They're expensive. Don't use cow food like bagged cattle food. It's not going to work for sheep. And they need like a mineral lick too, So you're like, I'm sure you're all familiar with salt licks. Yeah, that's yeah, that's it's a similar thing, right, they'll just come up and lick that. They know when they need the salt or the minerals or do they just they know, so they'll just come come and look it. So you just

put that out in the field. It's pretty chill, don't let So A big problem we had was like we had some sheep in the field next to our house, and they were our sheep, there was someone else's sheep, but like forever getting into the garden, mainly because I'm terrible at closing gates and doors, and so they would get into the garden. You do want to be careful. They will go ham like it is the time of their lives when they get in your garden, and they

can eat all your plants. But you do want to watch out for things like rhododendron, which can be dangerous to them and they can be poisonous. So if you've got stuff in your garden. Either don't have stuff as poisonous to sheep or or be aware, you know, if they're getting in there, head to the rhododendrons. Some head them off at the past. Sharene would you would you like to insert your Well.

complete fleece, and there's a technique to that. It's you're just not going to fucking get it straight away, like you're going to have to learn or you're going to have to pay someone to do it. I don't really know how that works in America again because like there's not such a density of sheep, so maybe that's not someone who does it. And lots of this stuff are getting your use ultrasounded when they're pregnant. I'm not sure how you go about that in and of affordable manner

in the United States. Like if you have a large animal vet, you can ask them, but you do want to do that right to check that how many lambs you've got and stuff, of course, But yeah, so if I guess you're just going to have to learn or give it a try. Like as long as you're not hurting the sheep, if you're taking it off in clumps,

I suppose it's not that bad. Just you know, if you don't want to be nipping and hurting the sheep itself when you're shearing, right, And it's just like if you if you're a person who shaves or you know, cuts her own hair or what have, you know, it's not pleasant if you nick the skin.

there was a lot of industry. And one of the things I would do was like, oh, this is how people used to do wool, you know, like the spinning Jenny and like before that, like in cottage industry when people would make it a home, or like when you go to the Rabberry Survival trust, and I think I bet they'll let you do some spinning or cutting when you're going there.

looking like it was just taking off a sheep. You're turning into the raw wall that will then be spun. I'm looking at it right now, and it looks absolutely exhausting.

You're going to have to make sure that you train your sheep's hooves. So depending on your size and the sheep size and yeah, and your sort of skill handling sheep, you might want to get a sheep flipper. We got one from my mum a couple of years ago. It's just a device that helps you turn the sheep so that you can clip its hooves instead of just getting

in there with the knee. And there's a way to do it, and a lot of the stuff you can learn on YouTube, like I've I checked before this, and there's definitely videos on how to turn them over and klip the hoofs. So yeah, you you can give it a try. That doesn't work, you can get a sheet flipper. You you sort of yeah, you sort to drop your kneeto it and turn it over.

You just put in their mouth. It's like a It goes in the mouth and you squeeze. It looks a bit like a gun, I suppose, or like a it's like a little tiny pipe, like maybe a quarter of an inch size. You're pinky and it goes in and you press the thing and it dispenses a dough. It kind of gets it behind their tongue, so don't spit it out. Dispensed it's a bit of wormer.

in the US. I'm sure there are some, but I'm not sure how you do that. I think you can also spray them for this, and you'll want to check obviously, all kind of dips a legal legal, and you don't want to be dipping them with cuts. So like if you have just been through your shearing and you've cut them up, that's not a good time to do it. And you don't want to dip thirsty sheep either for obvious reasons. Right, what they're going into is not suddenly

wanted to be drinking. So predation. Predations are an interesting topic. Sheep are not really great at defending themselves, and they just kind of big flufs. They can sort of butt a little bit with their heads and then they do do that, and they'll defend their their their little lambs.

And when we were little and we had dogs, if the dog, when it was a puppy, would chase sheep, you could put the dog in a little pen with a U and her lambs and the U would be like, heay, get away, get away, go away, leave my lambs alone, and that then the dog would would be less likely to chase sheep again because it's had this probably not great to get a dog a traumatic experience and the U, I suppose, but they'll defend their their lambs like that.

But you know, when you've got especially if you're in North America, right, you've got like mountain lions, you've got coyotes, you've got bobcats, all kinds of bigger stuff than I'm used to. So a couple of options there. You've got guys in animals, right, so something like a lama, a donkey, or like a livestock guardian dog. Me is enjoying the idea of a guardian donkey, but the couple of different badeffits to each one of lama lama can be pretty mean.

I'm sure you guys have seen them. Like I've been spat on by a few lama. They'll then they'll kick, yeah, then theyre bitey, and it's just really sort of obnoxious creatures. But that yeah, that they don't mess about, so those are decent. You know, it looks like one of the sheep is just wildly deformed. If it's running around with the sheep, you can get donkey. Donkey's also quite defensive and very loud, so you know, if your sheep are in a field near your house and you have a donkey,

it's going to kick off. At night, something happens making its characteristic donkey noises, and that will give you chance to respond, and then you've got your livestock. Indian breeds right like like Pyrenees is a great example. People will probably have seen my pictures of the statis Udicorn rutch. They have Pyrenees dogs very helpful as you when you're being attacked by biggots because the dogs dogs will bark. But guardian dogs are like inherently they want to guide

your sheep. So they'll just go out there and they'll move among the flock and they'll bark and run off any attackers and they're very again, it's entirely in their breeding to do it. It's very funny actually, because chuds have this like I'm a sheep dog thing, you know when when they walk around with like five knives and two guns and pepper spray, and then they always have a picture of border collie that is not what the border collie dogs. A border Collige is like a dog

with extreme anxiety that it's obsessed with collective security. And we'll just like border collie is naturally heard things, right, So I'm sure like you've seen people seen like One Man His Dog the TV program Again, it used to be honest Sunday nights when I was little. It's it's a competition as a sheep herding with dogs, competition there rules, yeah, oh yeah, perhaps one of them. I've met American people who do this competitively, but I think it's more of

a hobby than a way of life. But yeah, so if you can google One Man this dog and watch different competitions. Obviously it's not gendered and it can be a person and their dog. But yeah, that's what border colligues do, right, they heard the sheep and when they're little, like you can start them out with herding chickens or ducks in your in your like if you have a farm yard, they'll they'll go out there and heard ducks just by themselves. They want to do it just in

their breeding. But a guardian dog does not do that.

It did just protects. But I think, like this is one of the things that we spoke about with with chickens, right, Like, if you want to have sheep, you're probably going to have to either like well, if you're not willing to defend them for predatives, probably shouldn't have them because it's a bit mean to just put them out there, is like coyote bait, a lion bait or whatever, Like you might have to shoot something that looks like a dog if you don't want your sheep to die, and like

it's just how it's going to go down, you know, Like it's like not everyone has to have livestock. I'm not a person who eats animals, so like it's.

just don't go and work on someone's fun. Right, if you want to do that, you learn if you didn't grow up in this Like there are a million things that I'm not telling you, and I'm forgetting to tell you that I take for granted, and like it just it takes time and it's complicated and and sometimes it's very sad, right, Like I said, she get sick and they die and that's sad, and they get predated, and that's very sad. Lambs get predated. It's really sad. So like,

I don't know, it's not for everyone. It's certainly having a flock of sheep is quite a big and you can't you know, can't just be like, oh right, I'm off to well.

lamb will just like start sucking on that. It's a good sign that it's you know, it's ready to bottle feed, and it's easy to bottle feed, so that you can sometimes do that's kind of a way to lure them

in and then start bottle feeding them. Sometimes you have to sort of rub them a bit to get them to feed, and then they like to have their milk powder of the if you're doing powdered milk, right if with these awful lambs, but every four hours, and you're just going to gradually increase the amount you feed them.

And you know they'll need things like a heat lamp right to keep them warm because they don't have that big heat sink of their mum embedding and water and you know, a bit later you can it's a bit easier, right, you can get a bucket with teats, so you just you're literally screwing the teats that go on a milk bottle onto the bucket instead so they can drink of that. But it's a lot of work getting awful lambs. Like

they'll want to eat about every four hours. It doesn't matter if you're sleeping, they still want to eat it. Like I can remember doing that a lot where it's little and you can get like once the lamb gets a bit older, you're going to want to do things like you might want to castrate it, depending, you might want to dock its tail depending, you might want to

vaccinate it or you do want to vaccinate it. But also like they need time to be social with other sheeps, so you can't just get one orphan lamb and raise it like some kind of sheep person that they need to play with other sheep. They need time to run around. They can be quite fun that they'll follow you around often, but the lawf and sheep like you can sort of run around and they'll follow you around, so that's kind

of fun. And then you do eventually, like if you especially if you're raising a lot of orphan lambs, you're going to have ram lambs, right, and so you're either going to have to castrate those or sell them because you're going to create an issue of inbreeding within your flock. Otherwise if you just keep all the lambs right, and so that's the thing to think about. If you're going to have sheep, at some point you're either going to

need to buy more or breed them. And if you're going to breed them, what are you going to do with the ram lambs so you can castrate them? They become weathers And that's generally where meat comes from that people eat. You don't want to particip that, you're just going to pass it on someone else, right, you you know, think the unfortunately this is commercial agriculture, even if you don't eat meat, like it's about killing animals, which is

why I don't like to do that. Yeah, so with lambs, when you've got pregnant use you'll want to scan them see how many lambs there are, and that helps you make feeding decisions for the pregnant you. And that's sort of when you can look at like how many lambs are coming right, how much does she need to eat? And then once you've done this, you want to get

your barn ready for lambing. Just put We used to use palletts, you know, palettes things come on when you buy like a lot of sheep food for instance, you know it comes on a palette with a forklift and

get under. You can just use those to separate out little stalls from to lamb in, put some straw in there, and then when they lamb just because again they've been bread selectively for so long, they can sometimes strugger struggle to deliver and if you're of the means to do so, having a vet of course is lovely right, like a large animal vet, But generally people who have find me

commerce you don't have the resources to do that. It's just it's just not doesn't fit with you know, the cost of doing that, so you mostly do it yourself, like I've done it a lot. You and you want to get yourself a full arm glove, like a full plastic glove that gets like a sleeve glove, and then you can you can do a lot in terms of like turning the lamb around if it's coming out the wrong way, or helping the delivery. And I'll leave you to google that on your own time. You just need

to do all that one. No, it's yeah, it's a miracle of life, Daniel.

early life. But lambs come out and they like they get up and they can run around and they can suckle and like you know, within twenty four hours they're like a functional tiny sheet. So that that's going up nice. So you do want to when they're when they're when they're born, right, you just sort of get into the little little nose and mouth area and just clear that from anything that might be blocking it, just so they

can breathe. You can use a bit of straw to get into the little nostrils just just to sort of get any any mucus or whatever out, and then you cut the umbilical cord up staying and disinfect that just with somemodine. I think you can see actually that I send you one picture of a lamb last night where it's you can see where it's been disinfected and it's umbilical cord. Sometimes you just want to strip a couple of like you just want to check that you can

give milk. Sometimes the teats can get plugged up in their pregnance. You just give it a little little squeeze, yes, and then then within a week and I want to do things like docking tails and castrating. Some some breedscin lamb outside, but some can't. So again, this is all stuff to consider it when you're trying to buy your sheep. Right.

The last thing I've got about lambing is sometimes you use will reject the lamb you can either try and like hold the u in place so the lamb can suckle, or if she's really hurting them, then you take them away and then you have to look after them yourself, and then they become your little friends and you can give them names. Yeah, it's very sweet, fine, like I said, unfortunately sweet, yeah, yeah, right, this is a thing with commercial agriculture, right, Like it's the nature of the thing.

Like if you're you have cattle, what are you going to do with the with the you know, any male offspring of any species, right, even if you just had the sheep and you want to have them for milk, cool, but they're not going to continue lactating for their whole life, so they're going to have to have lambs and then they're going to have to have lamb. You're going to have decide what you want to do with the ram lambs, and so it's a difficult thing. It's not for everyone.

But yeah, sheep wonderful creatures, very friendly. You know, if you're walking past, you could you could see if someone to train them to come to the words sheep just by shouting sheep at them. And if not, you know, passes by will think you've correctly identified the species, so big dub for you either way. Yeah, the sheep is a wonderful animal, the very friendly of all the farmer animals. I think they're my favorite, and just growing up around them.

If you're small, like you know, only do it if you're a very little human, probably not old enough to listen to some of the content we broadcast. If your agent want to be in like single digits, but you can ride them. You can sort of sit on them, fall on their shoulders and ride them around.

is for cheese. I don't think many people are drinking sheep milk, you know, please don't let me know if you are it's fine. I'm happy for you. No need, there's no need to share.

And I think the start of any kind of sort of theoretical approach to rent is by asking what rent actually is and the answer to this and this is something that is that is relatively consistent across most of sort of classical political economy, and you see this in some sort of geoclassical economics, is that the thing that's special about rent is that rent, unlike you know, anything else, is money that you get because you own something, not

because you you know, have produced anything. And this means that you know, the landlord does not produce anything of value at all. All they do is extract value from other sectors of the economy. Now, this has a wide, wide variety of sort of political and social effects. Mark saw the landowning class as an obstacle to the development

of capitalism, and this is an idea. The idea of that again, landowners specifically as a class that is different from the sort of capitalist class or the working class, hinders the growth of capitalism is an idea that a lot of different people across the basically the entirety of the political spectrum have shared at various times, and this

causes some very very strange alliances. Particularly in places like Latin America, you still have economies that are not entirely based, but economies that have enormous landowners who drive sort of vast portions of both the economy and of the sort of political process and in Latin America, and this is

true in a lot of other places. It was not uncommon for you to get what's known as developmentalism, which is an ideology based on using essentially protectionist measures, things like terriffs, sometimes capital controls, restrictions on kinds of investment that foreign companies can do.

against the land and elite, are politically messy. It draws on a range of ideologies from you know, like pretty right wing nationalists, some very very very scary people technically developmentalists, to liberal and also centrist factions whose sort of productive and social base is in a specific kind of sort of domestic capitalist who's interested in sort of producing stuff locally, and also to people like Bolivia's Evo Morales, who is

you know, broadly considered a socialist, although I think his commitment to anything like socialist politics is tenuous at best. But all of these sort of political groups can and do, and have various times work together. This is actually one of the bases of Morales as well. I guess it's not really Moralys's party anymore, but Evan Morales's MS, which was a very sort of explicit alliance between sort of left wing social movements and then more sort of moderate

centrist factions who were effectively developmentalist. This is sort of a representation of a very common like kind of developmentalist politics, which is again this alliance between sort of left and capitalist factions who ally gets like large landowners on the basis that feudalism, which is which is usually the way that like the sort of the power of large landowners is conceived, is an enemy to both of them. Now, this isn't how sort of develop like states that use

developmentalist strategies have to work. Germany, for example, uses a lot of developmentalist techniques to industrialize in the late eighteen hundreds. But you know, the old landowning class, the old sort of like like German aristocracy, is allied with the capitalists in Germany, and the two you know, the two classes, the sort of German aristocracy and the capitalist class effectively birge.

On the other hand, land owning classes are often implacably hostile to industrialization and coundreds that essentially annihilated the landowning classes by carrying out land reform tend to perform better economically than their counterparts who left a landowning class intact, which contributed to the enormous success of the economies of countries like China and Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam, who, despite their enormous sort of ideological and political differences, all carried

out lander for in the twentieth century were rewarded with eventually by very very powerful in large scale industrial economies. But you know, you might be saying me, you've kind of put the cart in front of the horse here. You've talked about, you know, you've gone into some of the sort of political effects of rent first, but you haven't actually, you know, explained how rent actually works. And

so that is what I'm going to do next. And to explain how rent works, I'm going to turn to an unusual source, the work of the great Venezuela and anthropologist Fernando Corneal. Corneal's a fascinating character. He studied anthropology at my alma mater, the University of Chicago, under Terrence Turner, a guy who I think ninety nine percent people have never heard of before, but is probably most famous now for being also you know, also teaching David Gray and

being a sort of major influence on his work. Now, unlike David Graver. While Corneal was at the University of Chicago, he tried to get permission from the Cuban government to go do field work in Cuba, and you know, so he gets to Cuba and he's like negotiating with the government and the government tells him to fuck off. So okay,

he tries to go back to the US. But Immigration and Nationalization Services, the i INS, which is basically the predecessor of like Immigration Services ICE in the Border Patrol i INS was sort of dissolved in two thousand and three when the sort of like I don't know exactly what the technical term for it is, but with the consolidation information of the Department of Homeland Security, which is really truly a thing that I think we tend to think it was only present, but is actually about twenty

years old, and I am older than.

Like arrest him immediately, and they deport him and ban him from the US on the grounds that he he was that they suspected him of being a quote subversive agent. Now and again, I cannot emphasize this enough. The sequence of events here is that he tries to go to Cuba and the Cuban government tells him to fuck off. So he goes back to the US and the US government is like, oh, yeah, no, this guy through the Cuban government just refused to lent to do field work.

This this this guy is definitely a Cuban agent. So his his entire sort of like life gets derailed by this. He wants up, I think back in Venezuela for a while. I think it takes like twenty almost like twenty years for him to be able to get back to the US to finish his PhD. But you know, when he does and sort of be in the process of this, he becomes a very very famous and well respected anthropologist.

Now when I was it U Chicago, like all of the people who sort of trained Corneal that that whole generation and really like the whole sort of school of anthropology that he came from, which is a very very interesting school that you know, if if you want to like read about this kind of stuff, I read David Graeber's Towards an Anthopological Theory of Value. I might do an episode on it at some point later, but.

heard of him. But in anthropology O'Neil is important enough to like, if you write about the state, you at least have to like mention him. And you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that like most of the people who say the words that the Magical State, which is the name of his sort of famous book. Actually have read it, but I did read this book. I've read this book multiple times and it's really really interesting.

of the extraction process, and a lot of other aspects of oil that are very very important. And what Corineal realizes is that oil is intricately tied to sort of the political conception of nature, to systems of land ownership, and also to Venezuela and state craft. Now this may seem a bit far afield, but in order to understand oil, you have to think about rent and rent extraction. And that's what Coroneal does in ways that are both sort of profoundly interested and I think, in a lot of

ways profoundly ahead of his time. So Corneal, like us, ask the question what actually is rent now? For for you know, Corneal goes through rent in a lot, you know, and it like goes goes through what you could, I guess called economic history of concessions of rent, right starting

with the classical economists. Uh, we're not that interested in the classical economists, because quite frankly, if you're if I don't know if you're running into a neo Ricardian analysis of what rent is like, I don't know, you're you're already a specialist, like stuff is stuff, Stuff is happening for you, thus quite interesting, quite odd but we're we're mostly going to ignore them because the original classical economists' work has it's it's largely not the way people think

about this now, and to the extent that people sort of claim to be derivatives of like these people, like people claiming age of Adam Smith, like e that's kind of sketchy. Is that we're going to turn to Corneals analysis of the way that neoclassical economics thinks about rents now.

Corneal someone who has spent a lot of time in the sort of literature of like oil pricing and sort of theories the sort of price formation and the state of the market or the effect of political actors on it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and he argues that there's basically two ways of thinking about rent. In terms

of a commodity like oil. There is a macroeconomics view in which the rent someone who owns oil extracts when people have to buy it from them, you know, Okay, So like like if if you're a landowner, right, you get rent because you own the thing, and then people

have to like take it, like people need it. You have it, so you get to extract rent from it just by virtue sort of having it in the In the microeconomics view, when someone like pays the rent, right, what that is is they're paying for what's called natural capital or capital that's you know, provided by nature that someone now owns through like the miracle of private property.

And so for these people, rent isn't something that's extracted at all, right, It's just someone getting paid for their capital. Because the way that they think about, you know, about something like oil, is that they think oil is just sort of natural capital. Now, okay, it's like this is this is in some sense, you know, I was like, okay, what like who cares about this? This is kind of like this this seems very obvious. But there's also a macroeconomics

perspective which is very different. And the macroeconomics perspective holds that, you know, rent isn't a payment for capital at all. It's something paid to landowners by capitalists. And the rent that these landowners get is basically the difference between you know, what it costs you to get the oil out of that you use sort of the landowner to get the oil out of the ground, and what it costs the person who has the highest price of production to get

the oil out of the ground. Now, okay, for reasons that are very complicated that I can't get into here. Basically, the person who is like the worst at getting oil out of the ground is the person who sets what the price of oil is. So you know, the sort of like highest possible extraction price tends to be the price.

And then you know the micro the sort of macroeconomic analysis of what rent is, right is that it's a thing that capitalists pay to landowners who own natural resources, and the amount of money they get is based on how much cheaper it is for like that you know, that landlord to get their oil out of the ground than it is for like the landlord who's like the worst at this. And this is a real question, right.

The question is is someone who's getting rent paid to them, is that rent payment for capital that they own or is it money from capitalists that capitalists have to pay to a non capitalist class. And cornials answer is like, well, obviously rent is distracted from surplus value because out because landouners don't produce value. But there's two different sort of

places that they can get this value from. And this is where we have to get into something that's kind of weird, and that is the two different kinds of rents. But okay, before we get into the two kinds of different rents, do you know what else there's two different kinds of Yeah, that's right. It is the products and services that support this show.

of macroctive we talked about earlier. So differential rent is rent that's set by the price of production on the market right now, as we sort of mentioned, prices tend towards the highest price of production e's scept by the people who are worse to producing it. And differential rent is the rent that the rest of the market gets by costing it by you know, by it costing less for them to extract oil than it does, you know for someone who's like the worst at extracting oil. Corneil

explains these in terms of it. For a long time, the US was sort of the price leader of oil, and it was the price leader of oil because the American like property right system is so absolutely bonkers that it makes it.

So differential rent is a product of your efficiency, right, It's how it's an amount of money that's based on sort of the price of oil, and it's based on how much better you know, because you're still selling the oil at that like the same price, right, But the amount that you get, you know, the amount of rent that you get is the difference between how much it costs you to get this oil out of the grant and how much it costs like some sort of American

dip shit. You have to spend all this time negotiating with like thirty thousand individual landowners in the US to do it. So that that's differential rents. But there's also something called absolute rent. Now, absolute rent is very, very very different from from differential rent because absolute rent is not really determined by sort of production prices or like the market or supply and demand at all. Absolute rent

is determined by the social power of the landowner. And this has really interesting effects, right, because again, absolute rent isn't based on the production process and is instead based on you know, the social it's it's a social product of power. And this, you know, this means that landlords and rent extractors can do something that capitalists aren't supposed

to be able to do. They can get profits that are larger than the general rate of profit, and they could do it just by virtue of being powerful and owning land. And this has a bunch of very very weird knock on effects.

seen the consequences of this. These people genuinely believe that they have a sort of moral right to returns with no risk all of the time, and that all of society should be structured in such a way as to guarantee that they have this free income that they do fucking nothing to do other than own buildings, and it should be guaranteed, you know, it should be structured to guarantee this by forcing tenants to pay rent no literally, no matter what is happening, you know, like regardless of shit,

like I don't know, a pandemic.

sort of militaries as polices. And this causes economists who are attempting to use supply and demand to explain rent to get very very important events very wrong. One of the things that Corneal points out is that Maurice Adelman, who is a very very famous oil economist predicts in nineteen seventy two that the price of oil is going

to collapse based on over supply and competition. Instead, the price of oil between nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy four increases by four hundred percents because oil produces banded together to exercise their power, and this organization, known as OPEK becomes a genuine world power. Here's how Corineil puts it. The sharp increase of nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy four in oil prices did not result from a world

shortage of oil. It was rather the outcome of a long historical process by which OPEC nations, acting as landowners, developed the means to extract a rent on the basis of their ownership of the oil fields, an absolute rent in addition to the differential rents they collected in the past. In nineteen seventy three, a seat of converging political and economic conditions helped establish their collective ability to restrict the

world's supply of oil. With this power, OPEK felt entitled to set market prices of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from the previous constraint of the market price now rent itself absolute and differential would come to determine the market price of oil. Now you may be asking yourself, Bia, this is all well and good for describing the price, for describing how the price of oil changes, but what

does this have to do with me? And the answer is that while Corneal is specifically focused on resource rants for obvious reasons, he is doing a study of the state of Venezuela, you can apply his analysis to the kind of rent that we all pay.

amount at lower rates, suddenly become clear. Armed with the backing of the state's secure at social power by carrying out evictions, and with the state's implicit backing to carry out technically illegal evictions, landlords can extract both differential and absolute rent, allowing them to tell the market to take a hike and setting ever increasing rents that renters have no choice but to pay or be swept aside in brutal anti homeless rays. This has massive consequences on any

potential strategy to reduce rent. Opek, remember, was able to use its social power to increase the price of oil by four hundred percent even in a period where the actual supply of oil was enormous, by pure virtue of

organization and the power of their landownership. While American landlords are certainly weaker unless organized than OPEK, their social power is still such that increasing supply is not guaranteed to drive down prices, because in a situation governed by the extraction of absolute rent, rent is not determined by prices.

Prices are determined by rent. On the other hand, this means that you can reduce rent by breaking the social power of the landlord, and indeed, even in very hot housing markets like Toronto and Los Angeles, this strategy canon has worked. Tenants unions which deploy the power of collective bargaining and the social solidarity of renters to combat the power of landlords, have succeeded in reducing rents, and can

and will continue to do so. But these efforts are only the beginning of a process that finally answers the question why are rents so high. If rents are high because of the social power of landlords, the way to bring rents down is to crush the batters completely and appropriate them, to seize every last building and plot of land from every landlord in the country and drive them as a class from the political mainstream into the pages

of history. And then, and this is crucial, not to replace them with another landowning class, or, as the Leninists proposed that it actually did, replace them with the state. Only by destroying the category of landlord, not by regulating it or nationalizing it. Can we finally escape the long nightmare of rents and enter a world where people's ability to live is determined not by the sort of capricious and arbitrary will of a small class of landowners put

on their human need for housing. This has been it could happen here. You can find us in the usual places, and yes, go into the world and make the world without rented reality.

happening in Ukraine. And so what we wanted to do here was kind of paint a picture of how they have a long record of human rights abuse, and Dermot's more expert in Africa, so that's what we're talking about, but also in Syria, of course, and I just wanted to give some more information. So we recorded this on

last Friday. Today it's Tuesday, the first of August, and we talked a little bit about the Coup Nijier, which has continued and since we recorded, Getty Pregausian, who of course is the head of Wagner, the founder of Wagner that Oligarch is in charge of that private military contracting group, made a statements sort of not exactly saying like, oh, yeah, we did this coup, but more like saying oh cool,

I see you've had a coup. What you could use is a group of mercenary Russians who are prepared to do incredible and horrific violence on your behalf and let us know. We'll roll up. Also, since then Ekowas, which is the Economic Community of West African State, it's a West African block there threatened intervention in Nize if they

don't sort of return to a democratic process. And then Mali earned Bookina Faso to other countries that are run by military government's military more or less hunters have threatened have said they'll stand with Niche, stand with the Niza coup. So it threatens to destabilize again the whole region. Right, You'll see lots of misinformation about this on Twitter. I've seen a ton of stuff from like oh just tanky accounts who don't fully have a grasp on what's happening

in this part of the world. And I think it's quite dismissive to just use Africa to further your whatever your political agenda is, rather than treating this as a tragedy that will impact people living in these countries. Rights between Niche, where people are already often struggling to get by, really struggling to make ends meat like sanctions on this country will hurt them. Tanctions on this country will hurt

the poorest people in this country. A military dictatorship rarely delivers a better quality of life for people, and I would like to see people focusing on that and not on some stupid argument about decononization, like it's that's not what's happening here. What's happening is the powerful people have wanted more power, and they've taken that at the expense of the quality of life and often the lives of

other people. Obviously, with Mali and Bikina Faso saying that they would like support Nizia, those are both governments that struggle to support themselves and defend their own people and capitals from Islamist insurgencies and other like our movement. So you know, not a hugely I guess serious threat, but still very destabilizing and again like this will have negative impacts for everyone living there, which is the thing I'd

like to focus on. So we're going to start here with introducing himself and then we'll go from there.

Next thing, these Russians shot up and it was just a little bit kind of Yeah, I'd heard about them in operating in Syria, but you know, next thing, they're in, of all places, the Central African Republic, which you know is a it's kind of is you know a little

bit of a backwater in the middle of Africa. It's it's squashed in between Chad, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo, places like that, and it's historically it's it's been there's always been a French French presence there, but it's always been a place where there's been quite a bit of conflict around it.

involved in militias. Then words started coming out about, you know, there was murders on checkpoints that were joint checkpoints between government militias and Wagner Group operatives. And next thing, this story broke where three journalists, three Russian journalists disappeared. They'd been following the activities of Wagner in Central Africa, and I think the last thing that we've seen of them was that they were stopped at a checkpoint and then gone.

There was just they disappeared in the bush, and that was I suppose that was kind of the first peak that these are a nasty bunch of operators. And there had been a company in Russia years ago who were the Alpha Group, and they had basically they were basically the Afghan veterans. Well they operated kind of in the shady Ali Guard section of Royal security in Russia itself.

But Wagner Group were a completely different animal. You could tell from the right from the start these were they had a different model.

some racist shit. It's hard for me to not like hear a South African accent and be like, oh, fucking I don't want to have anything to do with this. But obviously that doesn't define everyone from South Africa by any means. But yeah, like there was that, there was there were a lot of Colombian people in that industry

as sort of the civil warring Columbia became. But these guys are kind of different, right, Like they seem to be operating more like on behalf of governments or people who would be in government, who would like to be in government. Yeah and m yeah, explain how they do shit just differently.

for for a contract. It was they wanted a percentage so they would clear like executive ocomes cleared out some of the diamond fields in and Gola, and I think they're going rate with something like fifteen percent. Wagner Groups seemed to have done that, taken that model, but at the same time they've rolled in a little bit of the Blackwater type idea in Iraq where they were operating us an arm of Blackwater, operating us an RMS government.

They were Paul Bremner's personal guard and or Wagner seemed to have of combined the two along with making Hollywood movies, because they've made they've made a couple of movies, one about Central Africa and there you know, these Rambo esque kind of movies, and it's it's just it's like, what the hell is going on here?

I guess Western nations will be ex military people. Is that the case with Wagner or where are they getting people from?

of Russians who come from the more elite units. Now they've been they've been really assigned to be the money making contracts in in Africa, so you know, they they've operated alongside Malian truce and the whole idea there is that if they do take control of zones in the Marian government dissing them a percentage of mineral, mineral section and whatever in the in the region, they've there's also been talk of there are blatant intimidation and protection rackets

of other Western you know, Western companies working in the Sahel, so they'll rock up and kind of we'll look after you. Isis or I kinda won't get you if you pay us a fee, and then if the company goes well, you know that's crazy, then you know, suddenly attacks started happening. But they seem to be a core in in Africa police and in Libya where they were heavily involved, there was a core group of Russians who were there, and then surrounding them there was kind of lesser specialized, lesser

specialized troops, lesser elite troops. And then in Libya, especially during the during the fighting there when they fought for half darkly for a half there, you had you know, they brought in Syrians, they were known to have got in a few other different nationalities of basical eyes. They gathered in other countries and offered jobs. Yeah, so you had I think there was about fifteen fifteen hundred two

thousand Syrians at one point. Because there's these huge numbers of Wagner kind of been bandied about on maps and stuff like that on the Internet, and it's smoking mirrors. Actual proper Wagner personnel are wouldn't be massive numbers what they've got. You know, they're bringing these almost auxiliaries from the like to Syria or other places that they've been.

human rights abuses would probably be more accurate. Yeah, we should probably talk about some of those, just so people can get a sense of I think what I'd like people to take from this, just to like be explicit about it, I suppose, is that, like all this stuff was happening in Africa, there was no lack of evidence or people trying to say and it was not paid attention to by the government or media really, especially in

the US, but also elsewhere. And then every already suddenly got sad when it happened in Ukraine because it was happening to people who were more valued. And I think we can we'll keep sucking up like that if we keep ignoring.

I mean, the BBC had had a report, a special report where they'd actually found the iPad of one of the Wagner operators with tons and tons and tons of evidence as to what they were doing, numerous human rights abuses, and again it's just like, yeah, that's fine, we won't really worry about it. Ops Ukraine.

There are videos that people can find on their own time if they want to, some brutal executions and such. But yeah, could you like at least sort of enumerate some instances where where they've done that in Africa? I can think of three or four countries at the top of my head.

murdered three hundred people, including beheadings and whatnot. And that was there was absolutely, one hundred percent guaranteed there was Wagner operators did murder and behead local villagers six weeks ago. Eight weeks ago there was there was an attack against a convoy which included Wagner personnel, and their response was

to rock into a village and execute ten people. So you know, that's two cases that again, unless you're looking unless you're kind of aware of the certain sources that are available and looking at local, local journalists who are in these in these countries, it's not popping up anywhere. It's just not coming to life. You know, there's Central Africa there there's been rapes, murders, there's been mass rapes, there's you know, there's been executions, torture. You know, it's

just off the charts. In Mali there is actually unknown and it's becoming famous in Mali. There is a torture house inside one of their bases in Mali and it's becoming it's widely known as there. You know, it's the multinational organizations, the UN, the EU all know about its presence, they all have the evidence, and yet there's nothing. There's still nothing being done.

but yeah, there are other forces. Like I remember someone positing that like Mali had been liberated from French control uh France left, but like these guys came like it wasn't as if you know, there was say, you know, a democratic transition of power or you know, the desirable outcome.

a media thing. Yeah, but it's I think I think people may not be aware of. Is the one thing that has been reported a lot is the heavy, heavy losses have taken in Ukraine, right often in like they called the almost piano battalions that they have like that, they'll have convicts and things like that, Right, can you explain, Like I think this might lead people to believe that they're not capable of doing what they've done in Africa for a long time, But that's that's not correct, right,

They're still sending I guess operators to Africa. They're still doing their terrible shit in Africa.

So it looks like there's been a ramp up again in a lot of African countries, so they it looks like they're upping the personnel now. Whether it's they've they've cut some kind of deal where they're now just going to be a money maker, I'm not quite sure, but you know that'll remained to be seeing if they have orchestra Nicher, which is possible, then it's clearly kind of a ramp up of operations. They're very, very skilled in whipping up local population because they whipped up anti French

assettlements in both Mali and in Brookino Fasso. And even though and you're the French did the French did arm kind of drone strikes which you know, did kill civilians and stuff, but they they the massive reaction to two reasons stunts was definitely by Wagner at the time.

way to what we've seen before, but in a less formal way, I guess than you know with French and British colonialism.

mineral kind of extraction further south into the Congo. But the thing is in and I've worked in Mauritania. You know, you had Mauritania, which is three times the size of France with a population of four million, and yet only one percent of the country has actually been surroted for its mineral wealth, and it already has massive gold, iron and iron ore deposits and copper deposits. If you take that, if you go over into Burkino Faso, it has huge

gold gold deposits which are under explored. It's relatively the vast majority would be artizanal mining. The same with Mali. And if you go across into Niger you've got the huge uranium mine which is a keystone of the of the French nuclear industry arlet, which would be worth a fortune to whoever would control the territory. So it's it's a very colonialist. I suppose manual to what the what Wagner are doing, but it's a very it's it's very much a corporate model as opposed to coming in and

establishing governance. They're they're quite happy to leave kind of administration and governments and stuff like that too and go, but they want the mineral wealth and they'll you know, they will manipulate and embed themselves with local military who you know, if you you know you've got Mali, it's it's governed now by a military military junta. Niger is likely to be the same. And you can get Brookino Fasso.

It's not quite far off that either. And yeah, so they're if you don't in these countries, if you don't have the backing of the military, you've got nothing. You're not going to be in power.

and these helicopters arriving. So you know, there's there's been Turkish built drones are starting to are coming in left, right and center across all with the aid and shipment by Wagner. So they're they have incredible with Russian produced equipment. They have incredible access access to it and it can only come from one place, it only it can only come from the military. And you know, you know, we've seen Russian troops arrive in Ukraine with weapons that are

fifty years old because there's nothing on their basis. Well kind of it's very clear that there was nothing on their basis because these weapons are shown are being transported for use in Africa.

culture that exists was in Wagner. That is, it's an extreme glorification of violence, right and in a glorification of sometimes of Nazism, yeah, of other sort of related kind of things that I guess they see as like warrior societies. And you can see a lot in the telegram. Can you speak a little bit to that.

left graffiti of you know, the sonon Rand and a lot of these other Nazi symbols, and there is this whole mass glorification of violence from the top down. I mean, the executions, the beatings, you know, the torture of local non white people in there, you know that they're coming upcoming contact. But we've seen it in Syria, brutal executions. It's a very much of white supremacist far right. It's not even undertones because it's so it's so blatant, it's

right in your face. I mean, they just don't hide it on their telegram channels, they don't hide it where they go. You know, we've seen military patches that they're wearing, which are you know, extreme right, graffiti they leave behind which is extreme right. You know, even I haven't seen the movies they've met, but I believe they're they're actually there's there's a lot of image there as well, which would be you're right up the street of kind of neo fascist organizations as well.

with other organizations as well. You know, they've been I think there was a number of them work had been photographed that had actually been id during some of the football violence in Marcia during the European Coupled a few years ago. So you know, they're they're in this in this circle and they're they are moving over and back between different organizations. But again it's it's a massive shower identity.

Twitter that they were all posting on Twitter. And you know, there was some fantastic local journalists who were posting on Twitter as well, so you got to see in almost real time what was happening in these places. Yeah, and when there was no other media really and I carried

on using Twitter. And then because I do write security report, you know, digging around and you had there's a couple of online and analysts and awesome people around who cover kind of global conflicts, but they do cover quite a lot in the heel. Okay, Yeah, so you would have like the likes of war and War and people like that were very good on the arm side of things.

to work, especially in parts of Africa. It gives them sort of like especially in place with the government's hostileity journalism, it gives them an outside audience that will, one hopes, you know, make them a little bit safer also to be able to share these things. Yeah, yeah, and losing that like there's no other platform that does that.

message out. They are more visible in countries where they've got repressive regimes, and it keeps an eye on them, and you're the more visibility they have. It wouldn't be one hundred percent safe, but they are a little bit safer.

so ineffectual in places. I mean, my my brother was in was in Lebanon on three separate occasions with the with the U Utiful Force and came home described with this, you know, one hand clapping because they they even ham strung their own people. But you know, there there isn't outside of the EU which can enforce sanctions on them. You know, there needs to be massive sanctions on anyone associated with Wagner. Yeah, and there needs to be more. I mean, you know, the the EU has pretty much

been kicked out of the Sahel. There needs to be more a better relationship built up with these with these organized these governments. As repulsive as some of these governments are, there is no real other choice. But there has to be a way where Wagner have to be highlighted. If you know, journalists, get to journalists, ask them, why isn't he Why aren't these questions being asked? Is it? You know, why is it only being the focus? And I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but why is it only since

Ukraine that we're seeing wave televisions? Yeah, yeah, they've been They've been murdering people, they were putting you know, they were boobly trapping kids, toys and literally as they retreated out of out of western Libya. Yet none of that appeared, you know, the one BBC report and it came out and it died afterwards, which you know, is you know, horrendous. You know, this needs to be They need to be hammered left for the center.

I've got I've got an Instagram account, but that's only really if you like pictures of dogs.

an author and amazing person. They've just written a book called To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living and it's out now you can go get it. I'm the Wine Traub. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to talk to you.

mix of all the thoughts. So yeah, when I was thinking about like defining Zionism, I was thinking about sort of like the origins of Zionism and like how did we even get to that place? And Zionism for me reflects and I think is like this political desire to have a Jewish state, and to have that Jewish state

like on the land of Israel. Is how is how Zionism has materialized in its formation, and prior to like the actual political movement of Zionism, there has been like a connection of the Jewish people to that specific land, it just hadn't materialized into like an actual movement to establish a state on that land. So there's like there's been like a yearning and like a memory and like a collective sense of connection to like Jerusalem, to that

piece of land. But it was only in like the eighteen hundreds, when there was nation state building occurring in general in Europe, specifically in Eastern Europe, that the movement for Zionism started to develop in the form that we have today. And a lot of that was because one reason, like Jews were saying, oh wow, like German people are creating a state or French people are creating a state, like we are a people, we should have a state.

And at the same time, Jews were also being excluded from citizenship in a lot of the actual like newly formed countries that they were living in, So there was like this dispossession also from place where they were and matched with a general like rise of anti Semitism as well. So I think all of those things kind of crystallized into creating actual political movement around that kind of nascent

like more like religious spiritual yearning. Yeah, and then that formed into like many different types of Zionism, like more militaristic Zionism, more socialist scions, religious Scionism, et cetera. And that's all kind of yeah, make its way to become Israel.

state like at that certain moment. So the like different categories of like religious Zionism versus political versus militaristic versus socialists were kind of like the ways that Zionism was. There was like different movements of Zionism in Europe and

Eastern Europe at the time of its origins. So it's kind of like referring to more of its historical relationship and then that still influences the politics today in contemporary like I'll just say a state of Israel and also many like Israel Palestine, but speaking about Zionism that feels

more relevant. So you still have like socialist scientists who are more on the left than you have like more like right wing religious scientists, you probably have more historical origins and like more militaristic Scionism and religious scientists who maybe are like we are here for the religious reasons of being Jews on this land versus like a socialist scientist, Like their framework was more like we want to create this more socialist utopia sort of vision versus a more

political moltastic scietists. Their original vision was like want to dominate this land and right. Yeah, political power.

been founded by Theodor Herzel in eighteen ninety seven. However, the history of Zionism began earlier and is intertwined with the Jewish history and Judaism as a whole. The organizations of I'm going to probably mispronounce this Hoveve Zion the lovers of Zion. How you save? Yeah, yeah. This organization was held as like the forerunner of the modern Zionist ideals, and they were responsible for twenty Jewish towns in Palestine between eighteen seventy and eighteen ninety seven. This is from

just online history. And at the core of the Zionist ideology was this traditional aspiration for a Jewish national home through the re establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, and this was to be facilitated by the Jewish diaspora. Herzel apparently sought an independent Jewish state, usually defined as a secular state with a Jewish majority population, and he wrote a eighteen ninety six pamphlet to describe exactly what he wanted.

And though he did not live to witness it, Israel was established and so what he wanted did come to fruition, even though in my opinion it was not done in.

was like an empty field, you know. And I think a lot of zion Is today kind of erased that history and a race that like they massacred hundreds of people and they displaced over seven hundred and fifty thousand people. It's called the neckbut it's called a catastrophe. That's what Palestinians refer to it as and I feel like Zionists tend to not. I mean, from what I understand, it's

as if that isn't like real history. And from what I've read or like from what I've heard from people that have grown up in Israel, the history that they learn is also a little bit selective in what they learn. But but yeah, that's I've just been I've been reading a lot about Zionism for a long time. Yeah, but it's nice to have someone actually, like with experience in it because I can only learn so much from the Internet and from like secondhand stuff.

part of your people's liberation is going to involve lots of oppression and violence. And that's kind of where I ended up, like, yeah, like understanding the history of Zionism, like being able to have empathy for that original message, and then just really being like that's what led me into like anarchism ultimately, was saying that this desire for a nation state to be like a liberatory project is kind of always going to be flawed in a way.

So actually, like and I kind of said, like, you know, Jewish like agencies, sovereignty and like liberation, like we actually deserve better than that, you know, being deserve to not actually be like held within the confines of like what is possible in a nation state, as I think like all people deserve.

you know, and Christian people everyone got along. I'm from Syria, but even in Syria, everyone, like in all in most Middle Eastern countries, there was a mix of all these religions and they all got along and I think that's what really angers me when it comes to like basically like the news saying it's like this ancient religious conflict,

because that's just simply not true. And I think that's a huge defense that a lot of like militant Zionists have, where it's like this eternal cultural religious war and it's simply just false. I think that's something that always bothers me. I just want to give a little bit more history just to bring us to like current day. Just I

think it's this stuff is a little bit interesting. So in nineteen seventy five the UN General Assembly, they passed Resolution three three seventy nine, which designated Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. However, this resolution was repealed in nineteen ninety one by replacing Resolution three three seventy nine with Resolution four to six Slash eighty six, and this new resolution it was adopted on December sixteenth

and nineteen ninety one. It revoked the determination in the previous resolution three three seven nine determining Zionism as racist, and Israel had made the certification of this resolution a condition of its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference, which was a conference that was held at the end of nineteen ninety one, and it was also raised under pressure of the administration of President Bush. Papa, I just find that funny, No, hw Bush, I'm sorry, this is not

funny stuff. I just this is how I cope. But basically the revocation was simply this one sentence, the General Assembly decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution three three seventy nine of tenth of December nineteen seventy five. And this motion was supported by one hundred and eleven nations, including the ninety nations who had sponsored it in the first place, and it was opposed by twenty five nations and abstained by thirteen nations. And I just thought that

was incredibly fascinating. It also just like illustrates the power that Israel has always kind of like held like as far as like a political state in like world affairs.

And if you've listened to my previous episodes, then you know that at the current saying time, and like for decades leading up to this, the government in Israel is extremely far right and Zionist to the point where it's extremely racist, and they've built in apartheid state based around their Zionism basically, Dianis values serve as the ideological foundation of Israel. I think that's kind of a big part of why Israel was created in the first place, was

this hope for a place where everyone was safe. Obviously that kind of became twisted and they went about it in a terrible way. But I do understand what you mean also by having empathy for the original feeling of it, because I feel the same. I think every marginalized community wants what the original idea of Zionism had. I think Zionis today is defined so differently, and I think that's really unfortunate because it didn't have to become a racist ideology,

but it did. I've been rambling too much, and we're going to take our first break. When we come back. I want to talk to you about you, so br B and we're back, Ammie take it away what he had a response for the thing I said about how Zionist values they serve as the ideological foundation of Israel.

of power in the hands of a few. So again me like that's where this like the original idea of like let's have a place where Jews can have like safety and sovereignty and cultural like flourishing. Like attaching that to a state was like kind of always bound to fail, but not inherent like not exactly, like not innatially, because

that desire is like a wrong desire. Yeah, and then when we pile in kind of like like other people's interests in terms of like the West having like an interest in having like Israel being like a friendly like I consider like a proxy state for the West like in the Middle East where they can you know, like we've seen like send their police officers to be trained in these ways. But also the West is benefiting from

that exchange. They have a little hold in the Middle East like they always wanted to exactly, So their interest is to like maintain Israel like as something that they can have influence in and have this kind of control over and like to make it creepier like the Christian like Evangelical Zionism, like Christian Zionism is also like a

huge influence in the US. There was just a really interesting documentary I can't remember the name now that that was released like a year or two ago about this, and Christian Zionists actually make up like a larger lobbying body than like Jewish Zionists in the US just because backwards, because they there's just so many more evangelicals and their interest in the state of Israel is that Jews will return there and then the rapture will happen.

right now to Palestinians. It has moved, in my opinion, so far away from like an actual like vision of like Jewish liberation. And then you look at like who's actually really supporting this project right now, and it's people who actually just want us to die. It becomes very convoluted, and it again motivates my anti Zionism in a lot of ways too.

me that feeling of like this is really important. And then also like living out a time right now in the US where like anti Semitism is violent and I've experienced that violence and it is like a threat to like my sense of safety and my ability to express my culture. I've just been like very obsessed with, like

what does actually achieving those goals look like? Yeah, And when I look at the state of Israel and I see all eighteen year olds are conscripted into the army, which is like literally like my great grandfather left Russia because he didn't want to be conscripted into the Russian army. And a lot of Jews Aushraazi Jews in the US like have that story Like that's not liberation when I see that, like a lot of Jews in Israel have the choice of either being like very secular or being

extremely religious. When even like a lot of more diverse like Jewish cultures have been assimilated into like this one monolithic culture. Languages have been lost, like practices have been lost, Like that's not like our culture being able to flourish. And also the violence done to Palestinians, like in the name of the state and the name of this liberation,

like nothing, nothing is worth that violence. Ever, so all of those things have kind of coalesced into my Jewish anarchism of also analyzing that through the state apparatus itself and being like, oh, yeah, states will do this. We need to think more creatively, We need to think in a way that builds actual solidarity between Jewish community and

Palestinian community and other marginalized people. And all of that has kind of just coalesced into Jewish anti Zionism, like just making sense on all of those levels.

it becomes something else. It devolves into something that it really shouldn't be. Like, I think what disturbs me the most is how many young people are like rallying in the streets, like a lot of like far right groups in Israel will be like death to all Arabs or like they'll say the most heinous things as well as do the most heinous things. But I think it's unfortunate because I think even they kind of lost what zion

is supposed to be about. It's not supposed to be about being only there just you and killing everybody else, or or seeing someone else as second as second citizens or anything. But no, I yeah, thank you for saying all of that. The arm thing is a really good thing to bring up as well, just because Palestine has no army, so it's a little bit silly to demand everyone and even join the army for this fake, imaginary

bad guy. Not that there is not. There's definitely terrorist like activity on both sides, I would say, but the vast majority is like this imaginary big bad wolf that does not exist and is like powered by US and Western media totally.

And I don't have enough research to like back that claim up in a way that I would like to That's that's like my next like research wormhole is to try and yeah, just understand like that dynamic because I think something else that I have a lot of questions about you and like the formation of the state of Israel is like yeah, understanding that like England did or

like I don't great Britain. In England, I think England they were the ones who like practitioned that land and like they were the ones who ultimately signed it over.

you know what I mean? Like I think in an alternate universe, Jewish people were welcomed into nations and Britain was like opening their doors to immigrants, I think that is a much more kind notion in my opinion, but what I do understand the desire to do otherwise. But it is interesting to connect those two now that we've talked about both of them, and how similar that is.

like go, just go. And I saw this. I was in Berlin last summer, and I saw this picture of Nazis creating like a travel agencies in the right word, but like a travel depot that was specifically said like go to Palestine and was like directing Jews to go to Palestine. So like in that context, like the state of Israel then has like a totally different like frame of the George story almost yeah, of being the place where like the world could send their Jews when they

didn't want them in their home countries. And and for me, that's also like a place that I've really fixated on is Like wait, wait, you can't just like say you're in solidarity with Choose because you've created this country and we all have to go there. Like you actually have to stop being anti Semitic, you know, you actually have to like you should work on that for yeah, like let us like live in your countries and be safe.

And and it relates back to the evangelicals too, right, It's like they're all about like being Christian Zionists and like supporting Israel, but they're also like very anti Semitic in this country. So it's like it feels like a similar sort of dynamic of like yeah, yeah, we support you because we want you to go there, We want you to leave this country and go there, and we're not going to actually make it better for you in the place where you want to be, which is your

family's home here, you know. So like that's another frame that I've been working in, which makes me just kind of have a bigger question of like global responsibility for what's happening in Israel Palestine right now, and how does this global resistance to actually addressing anti semitism like play into the continued violence against Palestinians.

is vitally important in this moment. Now, I was trying to divide these two episodes up. You already know this, I've told you, but just for the audience, like I wanted to this first episode to be a little bit more about the history and about how we got here, and tomorrow's episode you'll hear about what I really want to talk to you about. It is like your work and ancestral healing and how that's a huge part of your work, and also the community that you've built in

certain organizations. I think that is so critical when it comes to anti Zionism or having solidary of Palestinians, because that's what you need to even make change happen. Right. So on that note, I'm going to wrap it up here for now, Amy, can you plug? Like if people want to know more about you and your work, where they can find you.

and why it's important. And today I want to talk about their work and how much of anti siism is actually based in ancestral healing. And yeah, I want to just tell you guys a bunch of good stuff because AMI's work I think is really important. So welcome back, Hi, thanks for having me.

Jewish cultural expression, be possible. And so I started to think, like why were those the desires at the time, and sort of moving back into my family's history, which so much of it has been like silenced because of like the pain of the history and also in some ways because you've been told, you know, like you have a you have the home you live in now, and you have the state of Israel, and you don't have to

think about where you came from, you know. And so a lot of my work has been kind of like opening up that conversation of the like, but where where did my great grandparents like actually come from? Like what was that place?

perhaps someone in my family at some point did and we've now forgotten. Or sometimes it looks like researching on Wikipedia, like the flowers that grew in my family's like Stuttle in Eastern Europe. And sometimes it looks like just crying and being sad about like the things that we've lost. And sometimes it looks like talking to my ancestors like in meditation or trance states and offering them back the healing that I'm doing in this generation.

But I think what you said about like recognizing that, like your pain is not just your own, Like you're carrying a lot of a bird in generation from generation to generation, and I think think acknowledging that and learning more about yourself anyone can do that.

like recognizing that there's a connection there. I think people don't look at it as much as I want them to. I guess I think it's a little bit too petty for people, and it really isn't. It's just about like evolving and knowing yourself better, like when you really when it really comes down to it, totally.

like tell the story. So when I think about, like how do I really learn about who my ancestors were or what their practices and their culture was, It's like, oh, at least I can see what they saw, you know. I can see the trees, I can see the frogs, and the land is holding that story for me if I can just open up and listen to it. So that's also been like part of it for me as well as like opening up like opportunity for like connection and joy even in the face of a lot of destruction.

And again, also like you're saying, I really think this is something that like most people can do in is really enriching and would help us like all kind of metabolize like so much of what has happened in the twentieth century. Before the twentieth century, just like there's been so much like disruption and violence like that's happened for

so many people. Yeah, and still happening obviously, and in America, in like the dominant American culture, I think there's like a really big emphasis on like forgetting and just kind of being in this like present moment and not realizing that we've come from somewhere. And I just really resist that that like urge to forget, and I for me that's also part of ancestral healing is like how do we learn to remember?

it because it's just personal. But we could talk off Mike if you want, but for audience purposes, the point that I'm trying to get across is I learned something, and I learned more about myself, and I was almost more at peace with how much I was struggling with what it was, and I let myself be okay with how much I was struggling and the pain I was carrying because I recognized it wasn't just mine, it was it was hers. So yeah, I think if you ask me what the whole point of life is, it's self.

Maybe not improvements the right word, but like self discovery and like I don't know nature and leaving a place better than you found it. I think it's as simple as that. I think it gets really convoluted with other things. But but yeah, as you said, I think anyone could benefit from learning more. Because I agree. I think what you said about forgetting really resonated with me.

memory culture, like what is our cultural of remembering? And and I think obviously there has been some amount of that or and like yeah, like indigenous history and like Black history in relation to like monuments and Thanksgiving and like all of those things, but we don't have like really like memory culture like integrated into like a day to day existence, and in fact it's obviously being even fought against, like in Florida and other places like that.

atrocity that was done to them. So it's almost like very victimy of America if you ask me, because it's really easy not to get when someone wronged you, but I think it's really convenient to forget when you, you know, destroy the entire civilization. Do you know what I mean? To put it lightly exactly? And I'm not trying to say to take nine to eleven lightly at all. I

think what happened was atrocious and terrible. But when you think about memory culture and what Germany is so committed to remembering versus America, just a little interesting to me now that I think about it, and who committed who or who committed what? Rather, Yeah, before I get it to Rambley, let's take our first break and we'll be

right back, and we're back with Amy. Amy. When we were talking about recording together, in addition to ancestral healing, you talked about the importance of building a diasporus Jewish community that has committed to solidarity with Palestinians and other marginalized people, generally through an anarchist lens, and also building a safe community for Jews outside of Israel to counter the rhetoric that the only place that's safe for Jews

is Israel. And as you said, it generally leads to a large focused on anti fascism and cultural reclamation, So can you talk to me a little bit about that. And then there's certain communities that you're a part of that I really want to get into, but let's start there.

where they are lithid in diaspora? Development into like growing to this like Jewish antisigonism and Jewish anarchism, trying to understand like what does it mean to like actually put this into practice and or what I was thinking of that I was trying to think of, like how do we create safety for Jews in the places where they want to live in diaspora and also create the environment

where Jewish culture is able to flourish. And that's led me, Like you said to developing and supporting and working with a lot of Jewish communities that are like committed to like anti fascism, committed to solidarity with other marginalized peoples, and also really committed to like reclamation of Jewish traditions, specifically by like more marginalized people within the Jewish community

as well. And I really see like those projects as like part of my like solidarity work, even though it is supporting like Jewish people peoples in the day to day, but ultimately it's creating a spaciousness where Jews don't feel like they have to like cling on to Zionism in

the ways that they were before. And I'm really curious also of like how to sort of make that practice more visible to the general left, because I do like a big part of like the book I'm writing, like there's a whole section of me talking about what it's like to have lived in Pittsburgh like before and after the Tree of Life shooting, where I was a teacher

at the synagogue at the time that had happened. So my life was like very impacted by this like really like horrible like active violence, like antisemitic violence, And the most shocking part was that like anti Semitism was occurring before that happened, and it still continued after, like in Pittsburgh specifically. So like the question left me with is like are we actually addressing like the rise of anti

Semitism in America today? And that's why I want to like really talk about this praxis of like addressing anti Semitism and allowing in creating space where Jewish culture can flourish, like as a practice that I'm curious for more people on the left to understand as like vitally important like for Jewish people and also for solidarity with Palestinians too. So that's that's my topic that I'm very interested in right now.

And in that way, it's it's really simple to see how that's intertwined with solidarity of Palestinians because it ultimately is saying like Israel is all the end, all be all, Like we're at the end of the day, people going through shit have We have our cultures and we have

to stick by each other. Maybe that's a little bit elementary, but I think what I'm trying to say is I really appreciate that you have built this community and are so committed to continuing to enrich it and develop it, because I think that's so essential, especially just considering like the idea of Zionism in the first place, like that really pure intention that was there. I think it's okay to still live on in certain areas because it was pure.

It wasn't it wasn't about Israel at all. Israel has today rather, Yeah, so can you tell me about this organization Rage?

stands for Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews. In the most basic sense, we formed this as like a sort of response to like the Zionism that we were experiencing around us, and a lot of it, like the word rage being like anger of like wow, I can't believe, like this is what's being sold to us as like our liberation and what it formed into was like after the Tree of Life shooting my sibling pretty much text memes like let's make this thing happen again, and we started to create

like more like political like Jewish anarchist like art and writing and putting it out on Facebook and people started responding to it, and it really felt like a piece of like the rising of like a Jewish anarchist movement in this country right now, a piece of many, but something that kind of was like a light or like what's the phrase, like like a bat signal is the

only way I can put it of. Like, hey, like all of you out there who are thinking about like what Jewish anarchism might mean, are thinking about like what like organizing could look like when it's based on our culture and our practices and has like deep reverence for

that instead of like an embarrassment around our practices. All of you who are like creative and artistic, and that's your mode of engagement of engaging, like we can come together and we can like create something new, and that has just like that desire has just grown since then and is being reflected and so much organizing right now.

Enrage itself is like not we're not really doing as much as a collective anymore, but definitely that spirit is like living on in a lot of like in the book and writing, and like the work that my sibling's doing, and in a lot of like the artistic creation that's happening around Jewish anarchism.

Or are we going to use as a moment, like a big phrase that was being thrown around in Pittsburgh was like safety and solidarity, or we're going to use as a moment to like really affirm that message and to really like speak to the danger that we are feeling as Jews in this country and the resilience that we have and the resistance and the revolutionary power we have to like sort of call out the systems that

are creating that. And I'm really grateful, yeah that my sibling and others around me were able to like create that path through a more revolutionary mode.

need to heal. And I think I was just also feeling like a lot and this was like in twenty nineteen ish, so the like integration of like healing and more like therapeutic techniques I felt like into like political frameworks like wasn't happening as much at the time as I think it is now even and just really claiming like we can't do political work without like our like healing work, and again like that creating a space where we could engage in like anti fascists organizing, we could

engage in solidarity with other like marginalized people, and we could also really honor Jewish tradition and let that be like a foundation for us. And yeah, I ended up leaving the community this time last year to like pursue other things, But it still is existing in Pittsburgh and is still like very much like a hub for not just Jewish people too, but like a lot of people who are engaging in land and resistance work.

I was going to say that I love that all those things can be true at the same time, like Jewish solidarity and Palestinian solidarity, and remembering and practicing like traditional rituals and culture and traditions and practices and all

this stuff. I think it's nice to remember that all of those can be true at the same time because I think, especially now, people identify anti Zionism with anti Semitism, and I think it's really important to see community of Jewish people like embracing their religion and culture and loving it and at the same time supporting Palestine, because it's just the clearest example of how Zionism is not a factor and your love of your culture and and your religion.

I think it's a really good example of just I don't know, demonstrating how much of a falsity that is in the first place, to equate those two together when really Zionism itself is antismitic. As we mentioned in the last episode. I also want to give us plenty of time to talk about your work, and as much as you want to tell us about your new book, To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living, It's out and now

everybody go get it. It's a book of essays and yeah, can you if you want to tell me how you came about even starting to write these essays and like what motivated you to embark on this journey?

living in Pittsburgh during the rise of antisepitism. And the third section is returning back to my ancestors Shuttle, which the village in Lithuania last summer with my sister and kind of yeah, grappling with these questions of like do I belong here? Like what is this land? Where am I from? Like where do I where can I be

in the world. So I guess like the clearest moment of when I felt like I needed to write this was during the summer of twenty twenty, and there was an incident that I write about in the book of Nazis coming to like the anarchist bookstore in Pittsburgh, which was like a few blocks from my house at the time, and they were I don't even remember like exactly what their posters said, but they were handing out these like anti anarchists posters that like probably had something anti Semitic

on them also or just like that vibe was there and they were just flying, and the cops came up and shook hands with these Nazis and let them stay.

the contemporary fascism that's happening in the US, to the fascism that my ancestors experienced. And it made me really sad, and it made me like really feel so much pain because I just didn't want my family stories to be like forgotten or not to be remembered in this moment when I think we're trying to understand what's happening in this country, and like my family has already gone through a lot of what's happened, you know, yeah, yeah, And we're being attacked now in that way.

point it's not subtle at all. They're very outright about it.

And I've kind of been thinking of it as like in Jewish myth, there's like this idea of like a golum or a gollum that's like this monster created from the mud with like the word Emmett written on its forehead, which means truth, and this monster is like raised from the mud to protect the Jewish community of Prague against anti Semitism.

Did it get solved when Hitler shot himself? If I'm sorry, guys, and so I think this book can help a lot of people, and I really encourage everyone to go buy it now. We're recording today on August first, and today is when it was released, so by the time you hear it, it'll be out and ready to be read. I just highly encourage you to really dive into Omni's work because it's just so important and so healing for everybody.

Thank you, of course, I really appreciate you taking the time to open yourself up and because I know a lot of these things have really painful origins and appreciate that you're willing to talk about them.

they are in the world. And I hope it also like sharing like my family stories that like those bridges can start to like be built and we can start to create more community around that shared history as well.

this topic. And I hope that, yeah, people continue to study and learn and explore the nuances of of what I've shared today.

isn't great right now and all this other stuff. So I hope that someone took that away and we'll continue to have these conversations in their personal lives, because this is just a fucking podcast, you know, but real life is what matters. So yeah, that's all I have to say. Thank you again, you are the best, and go buy AMI's book to the Ghost Source to Living Go buy it now.