The World is Burning: Your Guide to the Current Uprisings

be annihilated. But what if Albert was wrong? Brilliant as he was, mister Einstein was trapped as we all are in the time he lived. The towering armed giants of his era where the United States and the U. S s are, and it was only rational to fear them unleashing hell upon each other and the world. But we live in different times now. Today Russia and the United States still pack potent nuclear arsenals. But the great global conflict that increasingly sweeps our world is not a battle

between nations. It is a clash between people who want to be free and the authoritarians who want to squeeze them dry. You've seen some of this in the news. In the last few weeks. More than a million people have taken to the streets of Lebanon demanding the resignation of their government. Protesters in Hong Kong have continued their months long battle against the state. Catalonians have taken to

the street and their fight for independence from Spain. Revolutionaries in Rajapa fight with machine guns and wire guided missiles against the overwhelming firepower of Turkey and NATO nation. Right now, as I type this, uprisings have lit up the skies and capital cities around the world from east to west. Each of these movements has its own reason for taking to the street, but I think most of these activists would agree with the sentiment I saw expressed on a

poster board in Santiago, Chile. We're not from the left, and we're not from the right. We're from the bottom and we are coming for those on top. This will be a different episode of Behind the Bastards than you normally get. This is traditionally a show that tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Uh And most days I weave a

tale of entertaining bastardry to a comedian guest whose rideshotgun. Today, my only guests are activists and journalists from around the world Chile, Lebanon, Rojava. I decided this rather unorthodox episode was necessary because I truly believe that the future freedom of everyone listening to this depends on what we all do over the next year and change. The current uprisings around the globe are but a prelude. There will be more. The world is burning and it will not stop anytime soon.

So let's begin. We can probably trace this current set of revolts to the protests in Hong Kong, which started on March thirty one, two thousand nineteen. Now, the spark that started those protests was a proposed new bill which would have allowed individuals to be extradited to China for a variety of crimes. Since Great Britain gave the island back to China in nine Hong Kong has been governed by an agreement generally summarized stas one country, two systems.

People in Hong Kong enjoy more personal freedoms than the citizens of mainland China. They are in effect a semi autonomous zone, not completely unlike the Curtish cities of Northern Iraq, but pro China. Elements within the government of Hong Kong sought greater integration with China, which meant throwing many of the more subversive elements of their society under the bus.

The people of Hong Kong did not want to see their friends and relatives sent off to mainland China to be beaten and tortured for their political beliefs, so they took to the streets. When the protests started seven months ago, most observers doubted that they would last more than a few weeks. But the people of Hong Kong shocked and continue to shock the world with an array of innovative

tactics for battling state power. They placed traffic cones over tear gas grenades and pour in water to disarm them. They deploy phayleanxes of protesters armed with umbrellas to counter police projectiles. And they organized demonstrations that flow like water around the forces of the state and against all odds. These tack picks have worked. The activists of Hong Kong are still holding out. In fact, their movement has evolved from just a protest against a single law to a

series of five demands from the government. They want the state to officially retract the description of their protests as a riot. They want their jailed fellow activists freed and the charges against them dropped. They want an investigation into police brutality, and they want universal suffrage, a chance to vote for their leaders without the involvement of the government

in Beijing. The Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lamb, has ceded to only a few of the protesters demands, retracting the extradition law, but holding fast against the others. The Chinese government has moved twelve thousand troops onto the island, and thousands more await in the wings. Week after week, the clashes have continued. In the last month or so, a sixth demand has developed amongst the activists, the police force,

they say, must now be entirely disbanded. On September thirty, Carry Lamb took to the last bastion of all would be tyrants, ACE book Live. She did a carefully curated Q and A session where she defended the police of Hong Kong, who have been videotaped firing concussion rounds at journalists and shooting activists. She called the demand for the

police to be disbanded puzzling. Quote, I'm puzzled when I hear this, because when there are public order and safety issues such as theft or unfortunate attacks, people say they must ask police to follow up seriously. So police are playing a very important role and we must support them

in law enforcement. And yet the people of Hong Kong continue to turn out in their millions, and now that they have seen the police as an instrument of violent repression on a mass scale, they are unlikely to go back to the way things were not without being forced to do so by even greater violence. And so the protests continue. The whole situation hanging upon the edge of

a razor blade. It is impossible to know how things will end, but the powerful images coming out of Hong Kong have inspired other acts of resistance around the world. It would be too much to call the protests on that island the spark that set our current fires of revolution, but they certainly provided fuel, just as the people of Catalonia. Now, Catalonia is one of the wealthiest and most productive regions

of Spain. The Catalonian people have their own language and identity that goes back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Barcelona is generally seen as the political and cultural capital of that region. Starting in the early nineteen hundreds, Catalonia became the center of socialist and anarchist politics in Spain.

In the late nineteen twenties, an alliance of affinity groups, which are collections of individuals with shared interests, coalesced into a resistance against the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. A number of different uprisings followed for the next decade, several of which were brutally suppressed by Fascist general Francisco Franco. This all culminated in the Spanish Coup of nineteen thirty six, which was pulled off by an alliance of anarchists and socialists.

For a while, these leftists held off the advancing forces of Spanish fascism, but Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy backed Francisco frank Those regime and the so called democracies of the world let the resistance in Spain die. Catalonia was crushed under the fascist boot heel. In time, Spanish fascism died a natural death, and the nation today functions about as well as any other liberal democracy, which is to say that roughly half of the people there hate their

government at any given time. Since nineteen seventy eight, the region, like Hong Kong, has had limited autonomy from the central government. In two thousand and six, Catalonia one even greater independence and was described as a nation in a new statute. But then came the two thousand eight financial crash and bitter austerity measures introduced by the government to cut public spending. Catalonia represents sixteen percent of Spain's population but contributes about

nineteen percent of its tax revenue. Many within the region resent paying so much into a government that continually cuts their benefits. That resentment was further stoked in two thousand ten, when Spain's Constitutional Court reversed the statute that gave Catalonia greater autonomy. Set artists held a symbolic referendum on November two thousand fourteen, which was outlawed by Spain. The vote showed substantial support for independence, and in the two thousand

fifteen regional election, separatists one big. This led rather inevitably to a full referendum on independence on October first, two thousand seventeen. The Spanish Constitutional Court declared this illegal, but

the referendum went forward and ninety of voters supported independence. Now, only forty three percent of the region actually voted, due in large part to a trade union boycott, and other polls show that the Catalonian people are fairly deeply divided about independence, But the Spanish government came in and cracked

down on the separatists brutally. Madrid dissolved the elected Parliament of Catalonia and arrested nine of the most prominent secessionists and brought them to trial on Monday, October fourteenth, two thousand nineteen. All nine were convicted and sentenced two years in jail. This sparked a new and much more extensive series of protests against the government, as even people who'd been on the fence about secession we acted to the

violence of the state. The latest series of Catalonian uprisings have been deeply inspired by the protests in Hong Kong. The primary organizing principle of the Hong Kong protesters, b water, seems to be particularly impactful on Catalonians. The basic idea of this b water principle is that protests should be formless, shapeless, leaderless, and nimble in order to counter the clinched fist of

state power. Catalonians took this idea and ran with it, modifying it into their own revolutionary axiom, be a tsunami. They formed a group called Tsunami Democratic in September, which suggested mass civil disobedience in order to defend the autonomy of Catalonia. Once their leaders were sentenced, protests broke out across the region, blocking traffic and assembling in multiple public spaces to march on Barcelona's airport. As they marched, many of these activists chanted, we are going to do a

Hong Kong. I'm going to quote now from an article in Courts by Mary Hui, who has extensively covered the uprising in Hong Kong and is covering the uprisings in Catalonia. Quote at Barcelona Airport on Monday, Striking the similar scenes played out as thousands occupied both the terminal and the roads outside the building, eventually forcing the cancelation of at

least one hundred flights. Tsunami Democratic even distributed some one hundred thirty boarding passes via the messaging app Telegram so that protesters could enter the airport, and a move reminiscent of some Hong Kong protesters who purchased cheap flights in order to enter the airport in circumvent a court ban

on demonstrations in the building. In late September, the Grassroots Group Assembly in Nasional, Catalania even held a public forum titled Experiences of the use of New Technologies and the non violent Struggle the Case of Hong Kong. Quote quote with un a quote. I should say we've been inspired a lot by the Hong Kong protests, although we are

aware of the differences between both societies. A representative of picnic x republica digital platform designed to mobilize Catalans for political action, told courts the Hong Kong people have done a very good job in letting every buddy else know about their fight through social networks. These are the first lessons we have learned from them, the use of these tools to mobilize the people and keep them informed. The protesters in Barcelona did not just content themselves with chanting.

They lit garbage cans on fire. They damage street signs and traffic lights, and did an estimate at one point seven billion dollars in damage to the city. This sort of activism, the kind that ends with broken windows and serious financial damage to the state is deeply frowned upon by many Americans, even by many American liberals. A lot of you probably feel uncomfortable with the idea, even if

you generally support protests. I'd ask you to think about why that is, and to ask yourself if the state truly understands any language but the language of damage done to its bottom line. The protests in Hong Kong have done even more financial damage. The stock market alone is down five hundred billion dollars since the beginning of the protests in March, and that doesn't include the financial cost incurred by a blockaded airport, by roads and streets cut

off to traffic. A protest that doesn't cost the government anything more than the manpower of its police is not much of a protest at all. Jordy Barbata, a journalist and political writer in Barcelona, said that the protesters in Hong Kong have provided a global dimension to a local conflict by attracting mass international sympathy. This sympathy might be the only thing holding the Chinese military back from more

aggressive intervention. Jordy recognized that now and in the future, activists around the world could only hope to succeed in their struggles against oppressive states by generating mass awareness and international solidarity. To that end, protesters in Barcelona massed in front of the Chinese consulate and a show of solidarity with Hong Kong. Prominent Hong Kong protester Joshua Wong told Catalan News that he was worried about the excessive use

of force by Spanish police. He stated, people in Hong Kong and Catalonia both deserve their right to determine their own destiny. Simultaneous rallies were held in Catalonia and Hong Kong, but as these activists express solidarity with one another, the government's oppressing them did the same thing. The twelfth of October brought this headline from the South China Morning Post,

China offers support to Spanish government amid Catalonia crisis. China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said quote, the Government of the People's Republic understands that supports the Spanish government's efforts to protect national unity and its territorial integrity. Being result of the struggle for Catalonian independence, like the protests in Hong Kong, is still very much up in the air, but both struggles offer important truths for the rest of us, including

my fellow Americans. Dictators and authoritarian powers around the world. Whatever ideology they claim to hold, dear will always stand together because the people on top always have more in common with each other than they do with you. This is why Turkish dictator taip Air Dooan and President Donald Trump were able to come to such a chummy arrangement about the future of the autonomous region of Northeast Syria

known as Rojava. The Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF, an alliance of a issues who protected the leftist revolution in that area, fought alongside US forces for years. More than eleven thousand of them died in the battle against Isis. But when push came to shove, the American President felt more affinity for his fellow autocrat than he did for the revolutionaries of Rojava, so he abandoned them. I've talked about this issue at length on my podcast Worst Year Ever,

and a number of other places. For our purposes today, I'm going to let the words of a much better journalist than me tell the story. Kabat a Boss is a reporter, a documentarian, and a fixer living in Northeast Syria. She's one of the most remarkable people I've ever met. In mid October two thousand nineteen, she wrote an article for The New York Review of Books. This is Ethnic Cleansing,

a dispatch from Northern Syria. I very much recommend reading the entire article, which will be linked on our website behind the Bastards dot com. I'd like to quote from the beginning of the piece. Now, this is Khabbat. When my mom called to ask me where I was, I lied to her. Sometimes I do not want to worry her, as I'm often reporting on stories from play says that aren't safe. When she said get ready to remove, I realized something was wrong. Komischli was under attack. Can't you

hear the shelling? She screamed. She lives in Rimmelan, a city an hour away, but she was here to visit my brother. The Turks were targeting my neighborhood, she said. That was Wednesday afternoon, October nine, the first day of Turkey's attack on Rojava Western Kurdistan, as we call it in Kurdish. Commischli, my city, was one of the few places in Northeast Syria that had enjoyed relative peace despite

Syria's eight year civil war. In past years, Turkish president Receipt Type Erdowin made constant threats against us, but I never really expected him to make a move. The Americans were here and they promised they would protect us, so Edwin's bluster seemed meaningless. I was wrong. First we experienced clashes with the regime forces of Bishar al Assad. Then it was our turn to face down the fighters of ISIS,

the so called Islamic State. After the group rose in two thousand and fourteen, ISIS detonated bombs and planted suicide attacks in Kamischli and the towns of northeast Syria. For all that, we never had artillery showing before, so when

my mother called, I was scared. Everyone was. That day, October nine, I was driving back from Sarah Khanyi, about fifty miles from Commichali, when an air strike targeted a military base a few hundred yards from the scene of a protest that I had been due to report on about a half hour later. In the aftermath of the bombing, we feared we were going to be hit by another wave of Turkish planes. Everyone fled the scene. My colleague Alan, who was an exceptionally good driver got us out of

there in seconds. This is Robert again, and just a few months before, Kabat wrote that. In August of two thousand nineteen, journalist j Canrahan and I spent more than a week in Alan's car with Kabat. At that time, Rojava was at peace. We felt safe virtually everywhere. For days. We visited all women farming collectives, local communes, representatives of a justice system that was experimenting with art therapy as a treatment for captured ISIS fighters. The sheer amount of

optimism we felt in the air was staggering. It almost tasted Neither Jake nor I wanted to return to Iraq when our visit ended. Today, however, Rojaba is in chaos. Hundreds are dead and an unknown number of ISIS prisoners have gotten free. In the confusion. Two hundred thousand civilians have been made refugees. I asked about how the autonomous Region has handled the flow of so many refugees in

the wake of the fighting. Here's how she responded, I went to in the past days to these shelters, and there is uh every time, new numbers increasing very fast, and the humanitian situation get worse and the response is so slow comporting to their needs. In addition, it's it's wars as a results of the Turkish attack on the

virtual centers. As the Turkish air strike they hit they unlogged them in Surigny, which is feeding the WATA to a city of Serikani and Hasseta ntil Timer and that result a cut of WATA three days from those cities. And this situation of the population and the IDPs, it's gate wars as a result of that. Also, I met many families and most of them basically from Trilabias Regani and even some of them have been many times displacement

as they were from Afrin. I think if the international response is limited, that will gonna lead to a humanitarian crisis. Even I met the head of the West Municipality of the Hassaka, Mohammed Shammy, and he was explaining to us how it's there is a pressure on the city and there is no support. For example, he gave an example about the needs of the bread. He said, we use it to back thirty five tones of the floor daily for Hassaka. Only last days we are baking fifty tons

and we cannot cover the needs of the population. So the situation every day, every hour, gate wars and wars, and there is a gap and and all the organizations have to respond to these needs. In the face of ethnic clins in out of sheer desperation, Rojava invited in the Assad regime and the Russian Army. This was not a decision anyone wanted to make. Many people in Rajava had risen up against Assad in the early days of

the Syrian Civil War. I asked her about how she felt that this development would affect the women's revolution in Rojava. Regime is representing the patriarchy system. On the contrary, Rojava is representing the woman revolution. Women of Rojaba built last eight year specific system for the woman in all levels military, economically and politically, and they made impact in the education via teaching digitology, which is a woman's sense on the

mentality of the new generations. In addition, the implementation of the co presidency system and all the institutions starting from coming to the highest official ranks allowed very effective participation of a woman to lead this region beside them and interview with the bidality co presidency of a society. Protection forces in Al Jazeera kanton about this subject, and she said, we know how to protect ourselves now a there are years of experience and we are not afraid of a

region coming back. It's obvious that the woman of Rojaba will not lead their gainst easily, but there is a great risk on the woman evolution in case the regime take over Rojava. I do believe that the region will first start get the woman specifically, because this is what makes Rojava unique on a global level. The very last thing I asked her was what if anything people outside Syria could do to support Rojava in its struggle. Here

was her answer. I think the people of the outside can help Rojaba, and specifically, all the feminist movements have to rise up for otherwise we as a woman all over the world might face the risk to lose the woman revolution. Any activity to support Rojaba like demonstrations, donation by Code Turkish goods and rise the awareness of the

Western community about what is Rojava facing currently. It's a genocide, it's an ethnic glancing, and it's a demograh demographic changing and everyone have to take the responsibilities in order to make some steps and that's what'll going to help Rojaba. For sure. She's calling for solidarity, the same sort of solidarity the protesters in Hong Kong and Catalonia have expressed for one another. Whenever I write or talk about Rojaba, people always ask me where can I send money to help?

And you might do some good by donating to the Kurdish Red Crescent. But at the end of the day, the people of Rojava, like the protesters in Hong Kong, won't be helped by any money you could send. What might help them is your solidarity, your willingness to harangue your elected leaders on their behalf, or to get into the streets and protest at the Turkish embassy or the

Chinese consulate, or wherever it might get attention. There are protesters in Germany right now who have protested in front of buildings of companies that supply arms to the Turkish nation. The United States supplies plenty of weapons to Turkey. There are places you could gather. Another group of humans who could really use your solidarity. Right now are the people of Santiago, Chile. As I write this, the city has been convulsed by marches and brutal clashes between police and

demonstrators for more than a week. If you read most of the news about what is happening, it places the blame on a four percent hike in the cost of public transportation. I was lucky enough to sit down with two activists in Santiago over Skype. Saul is an American living in Santiago over the last eight years with his wife, Stephanie, a native Chilean. They told me to be wary of

attributing just one cost to the protests. What initially started this protest was a group, a bunch of students who were evading uh the metro so to protest the rise in the fair which is the second or third time they've raised the metro in the last three years. Um. And so it's the most expensive metro in South America. And and even though for someone from the United States it might seem it's still very cheap, or how are

they only protesting over ten more cents or whatever? But um, in Chile, if you make the minimum wage, you could be spending almost of your wage on the metro. It is very expensive here. And uh so what happened is a lot of students were getting together. It's like a big group and so there will be hundreds of them and they would all rush into the metro together and jump over the turnstiles and so the h that's how

it all started. And then the police were very heavy handed in their reaction and got very violent, and then it got kind of worse from there, and so the protest exploded into more of a general protest because, um, there's been a lot of problems in Chile and there's a lot of um inequality and a lot of things that have never been fixed since the since the dictatorship, so they're still using the same constitution that was written

by pinol j and um. Yeah, and there's lots of other things, Yeah, the corruption of Pinera, the current president, and then a lot of protests over the last couple of years about the pension plans the AFP. Sault speaks fluent English, so he does most of the talking for the segments of the interview I'm including this episode, but his wife talked quite a lot too, And I'm going to include the full audio of this interview when all of the other interviews in an episode that will drop tomorrow.

It's just going to be a straight recording of all the interviews. There will be a normal episode on Thursday. You can get back to your regularly scheduled comedy now. I've interviewed several other Chilean dissidents over Twitter, and crippling inequality in that nation is one thing that every single one of them has brought up as the real cause

of these protests. One popular memes sir reculating among activists in Santiago is a picture of a glacier with a tiny peak of ice above the water line and a gargantuan mountain of ice underneath it. The images labeled social uprising in Chile. The bit above the water is the forcent metro fare increase, and the bit below the water line is extremely high. Social inequality, decades of abuse of power.

Almost everything is privatized, including water, high taxes and low benefits, precarious jobs, miserable pensions, politicians, outrageous salaries and benefits, high student loan debts, unfair justice system, political police and military corruption, predatory lending and banking system, and more. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development the o e c D measures

income equality via something called the Genie coefficient. This ranges from zero, the minimum which would exist in a perfectly equal society to one which would presumably be a society in which Jeff Bezos owns everything and we have to pay rent for access to our own bones. Chile's Genie coefficient is among the highest on the planet point five zero and when to quote now from a write up

in Borgan magazine. Despite the high tax bracket, a higher proportion of tax tends to be levied on individuals from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. This system greatly reduces the disposable incomes and consumption ability of the common people. As a result, the poor in Chile often suffer from malnourishment and hunger because they are unable to afford basic necessities. Poor education

also forms the bedrock of economic inequality in Chile. Thousands of young people have recently called for more education, reform and peaceful demonstrations. A majority of the population is lacking the skills that are essential for attaining good jobs and incomes. Moreover, this inequality is also prevalent and higher education, as the poorer unable to pay for college and other institutions of

higher learning. Additionally, Chile has had to juggle with the issue of corruption at the hands of the rich and powerful oligarchs in the country. These powerful entities often evade tax. Similarly, the Ministry of Public Services unit has also been caught up in various corruption scandals since two thous and two due to a lack of resources and misallocation of funds.

So we're seeing in Chile is people at the top who have access to basically all of the money, who are not taxed nearly enough of their income, and who are increasingly pushing the burden of funding the government onto the people who have almost no money. It's a problem that doesn't sound familiar to anyone else in the world. By the way, the Genie coefficient of the United States is point four three, just a little bit under point

five zero. And um, it's really interesting because in Chile almost uh ten family are they have control uh for all the they are they they are they have control with the gang. Yeah. So it's it's similar to the United States, where there's you know, a couple of hundred billionaires that are kind of controlling everything. But in Jilian it's literally ten families, and these ten families are are very very rich and have a lot of control in the country. Um. But but yeah, so it's it's about

a lot of things um the protest now. On October nineteenth, President Piniera announced that he was reversing the fair increase, but this did not assuage protesters. Thousands continue to take to the streets. Bonfires lit up the Santiago sky, and unrest began to spread to other cities in Chile, like Valparaiso. Late that night, the government declared martial law. General Javier

Ettiaga de camp told citizens. We invite all citizens to return to their homes and to evaluate the measures that the government has arranged and cooperate to protect their family, their integrity and their own assets. This is the first time Chileans have reverted to military rules since the era of Dictator Augusto Pinochet from nineteen seventy three to nineteen ninety, and by all accounts, the state's repression of these demonstrators

has been brutal. At least eighteen people have been killed in the protests, and by the time you hear this, that number will likely be much higher. I like to quote now from an article in the Guardian than interviewed one protester. I was coming home and the military patrol stopped me, said one bruised and blooded man as he stumbled home in the early hours of Tuesday morning. They put me in the truck and bang, bang, bang. They smashed me in the head with the butt of a gun.

I begged them to stop it. They kept on kicking me, and they took my friend away. There's video now circulating on Twitter if Chilean soldiers detaining a protester and then as casually as you or I might swat a mosquito, shooting him in the leg with an M sixteen. The government, for its part, claims all these people are looters or criminals, general terms the state now applies to anyone it does violence against one protester I interviewed on Twitter. Juan told

me this. Whenever they give a speech mentioning our current situation, they talk about the protesters that way, criminals or bad elements of society, or similar expressions, giving to understand that this is a criminal matter rather than one of policy, which explains the curfew, the soldiers on the streets, and so on. And now here's uh Saul and his wife

Stephanie expressing very similar opinions. The police respond to often peaceful protests with with tear guys and um and violence, and now of course there's been declared the state of emergencies and now you have the military in tanks in the streets too. And why you said that the police have gotten more aggressive and more violent this year, Why would you do you have do? Is there a reason behind that? Do you think like, is there some sort of cause to that that you can see? No, it's

not any reason. It's only a strategy of the government. But it is a bad idea. And in UM, a couple of months ago, we saw some car of the cuffs uh driving in the in the passel really traditionally the center of the city and uh tear gas. Oh yeah, yeah. A couple of months ago there was some crazy protests and the police we were driving through like plaza, their armost, like the downtown, like the center of the historic center of town, and and and throwing tear guys that people

who aren't even protesting. And um, But to answer your question, I think that it just has to do with the government, because um, a couple of years ago the president was Bachelete, who is more center left, and so I think the police now under Vinera understand that they kind of have carte blanche to do whatever they want and that they

won't be reprimanded for um violence against protesters. And when this, when this current wave of like heavy street actions broke out, were y'all there for sort of the beginning of that. Were you there on sort of the first day that this like really kicked off into um, you know, a citywide sort of thing rather than just kind of a

fair protest. Yeah, definitely. So we Um we live about step six or seven blocks from the Plaza Italia, which is the Metro Bacadado, which is like the center of downtown, and it's the historic place where protests always start and and so we're kind of in the thick of it. And then also we are right by this intersection where when the protest really got serious two nights ago, um, the there were five buses that were burned right at our intersection, so um yeah, it's kind of right outside

our door. These burned busses have become part of one of several conspiracy theories that have grown up around the protests. Whenever there is mass civil unrest in the country, people from one are both sides of the conflict will cook up conspiracies, and the world being what it is, some of those will be true. Most of the conspiracies in Santiago center around the burning of three busses and the arson attack on the headquarters of an L Chile power

company who recently hiked their prices. When I first encountered video of the n L building burning, it was being celebrated by non Chilean leftists as a justified attack on a corrupt capitalist institution. But every Chilean I've interviewed has expressed severe doubts as to whether or not these arson

attacks were the work of protesters. Yeah, like you know, we're not typically uh like conspiracy there as people, but as far as like what a lot of people have been talking about is with both the n L Electric Company, UM, with the fire that happened on their their staircase right there, fire escape, and there was a number of suspicious things about it. You know, it started on the eleventh floor,

so it's like, how could a protester do that? And I don't know, um, And of course it only burned that the fire escape and it didn't touch anything about the main building. And there's so there's a lot of suspicion here UM of that, and then uh of the idea that possibly it was the police or the government who started that as a way to justify um, bringing in the military and all of that and starting the curfew. And what's that thing is very similar is uh these

five buses that were burned outside of our apartment. UM. It was very strange because yes, there's there's almost never five buses all right next to each other on the street in the corner and UM. And then there's also been videos that have been passed around what'sapp and um social media where you see that these busses were like discontinued, so they were already like in bad situation, their bad shape.

And then there's a video that's been passed around of the police like escorted one of these busses very slowly, almost like they're escorting it here so they can burn it and again use it as justification, um to ratchet up the police response. So it's hard to say, and you know, you don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but certainly there's uh, there there's suspicious things happening in

that regard and on the street here. Almost every chile and that we've talked to has has said that they pretty much believe that it was the police that that we're doing that. Now, I don't want to act as if I have any real understanding of who is correct here. It is entirely possible that piste Off protesters committed these arson attacks. It's also possible that the state did so to justify President Piniera's declaration we are at war and

his assumption of martial law. That's the thing about serious civil unrest. Once your government starts gunning down people in the streets, all kinds of conspiracy theories suddenly become plausible. Another local Chilean activists I found on Twitter goes by the name Antifa al Farrado sent me a translation of an anti protest meme that blames all the unrest on Venezuelan President Madeiro and essentially frames the uprising in Chile

as a communist conspiracy. It's basically framed as a flow chart that starts with financing politicians and parties close to our ideologies, networking and universities and NGOs degrading the meaning of social values, indoctrinate young people in liberal ideas. Constitutional accusation. It's Chili's term for impeachment uh and and so on

and so forth. So it's basically like a little flow chart showing that everything happening in Chile right now is a part of this communist conspiracy cooked up by Madeiro and the bowlev Orens, which is kind of one of

the names for the communist revolution in that country. And I've seen zero evidence that this is actually true, and I share it mainly to make the point of how confusing these situations can get, particularly to an audience of foreigners who are unlikely to understand the nuances of the politics in the region. Most Chileans and Santiago are unlikely to be convinced of this last conspiracy theory unless they already believe in some sort of all encompassing communist plot

to destroy their nation. But conspiracies like this can play a role in cutting off international solidarity with activists. More conservative members of foreign nations might see something like this and become convinced that the government of Chile is only trying to defend themselves from an insidious Venezuelan plot. The

same behavior occurs on the left. By the way, you do not have to look for to find people on Twitter condemning the Hong Kong protests as Western BacT and part of a capitalist conspiracy against the Communist government of China. In my opinion, all conspiracies like this are a way to distract and detract sympathy from real human beings fighting

for their lives. I have my own political beliefs, but whenever I see people facing rubber bullets and tear gas grenades and extra judicial murder at the hands of the state, I'm always going to side with those people over their government, no matter where that government lands on the political spectrum. On the day before I wrote this episode, Friday, the twenty six of October, more than one point two million

people took to the streets of Santiago to protest. That should be all the evidence you need that this is not just some conspiracy and is in fact the result of very real, very honest anger. Some Chileans continue to take to the streets at night in violation of the curfew. Others, not willing to risk it, stay at home but contribute to the protest by banging on pots and pans to

make noise and, in Juan's words, signaling their discontent. The early stages of the protests in Santiago were pure expressions of local fury based more on emotion than calculation. But as the days have worn on, Chilean activists have found themselves looking out towards Hong Kong for inspiration. When I first interviewed Juan on Sunday the twenty, he told me there isn't a greater level of organizing or planning. It's

not like the Hong Kong protests, for example. I guess we're not very sophisticated protesters, and then he sent me up smiley faced with sticking its tongue out. But a few days later on I ran across a video on Twitter. It shows hundreds of protesters in the streets of Santiago. A police tear gas grenade comes sailing over the crowd and lands in the middle of it. A dozen or so men and women quickly surround the grenade, dumped into

a plastic bag, and douse it with water. Linked in the video was a tweet from a Hong Kong activists from four days earlier explaining this exact method for dealing with tear gas. The only recent protests to eclipse the uprising in Chile in terms of scale are the ones currently happening in Lebanon on the twenty October, more than one point two million people marched against their government nationwide, and on the nineteenth more than a million people assembled

in Beirut alone. Now, the Lebanese nation only has a population of four or five million, which makes these protests the proportional equivalent of some eighty million Americans taking to the streets two days in a row. And if you follow mainstream Western news sources reporting on the unrest, they'll generally blame it all on What's App. On October twenty, two thousand nineteen, Public Radio International published an article titled how Lebanon's What's app tacks unleashed a flood of anger.

But as with the public transit tacks in Chile, the events being looked at as causes of this unrest just the straws that broke the camels back. In fairness to p r I, the actual article does go into this in a little bit of detail, but we all know that in the social media era, most people barely read past the headlines. So I sat down with joey Ayoub, a Lebanese writer and Middle East North Africa editor for

if X and Global Voices. He's been present for many of the marches in Lebanon, and he pointed out that a lot of the recent unrest in his country was actually kicked off by a series of brutal wildfires and an incompetent government reaction to the crisis. Lebanon actually had horrible wild fires back in two thousand eight, which inspired a group of citizens to raise money to buy a small fleet of firefighting helicopters to protect the country in

the future. Now, these helicopters were very successful in putting out wildfires for a couple of years, but due to outrageous corruption, money to repair those helicopters was funneled away towards god knows what and who, and my two twelve the fleet was no longer operational. Here's Joey the wildfires. That was last Monday, So that's fourteen the night of the fourth into the fifteenth, and classed about forty eight hours and it was Yeah, and those for the that

was well lost basically years worth of teas lost. Usually, so I think there was something I came against teas that's horrible. That's usually an average. Yeah. Uh So that obviously pasted a lot of people off because the government was utterly incapable on reading whatever wants to deal with it.

You had pretty much we haven't had several servants paid in like twenty years of these old volunteer forces, and you had you even had like this about defense forces from the Palestinian camps that stepped up that helped, and you had basically volunteers just doing it themselves. There wasn't really anything until two things happened that put them off. One is Greece cyclists in Jordan basically sent some you know, helicopters and whatever. And the other thing is we got

lucky because it started gaining the day after. Yeah, so that's pretty much why, like we the damage was more or less limited, if you want. And so the fact that after all of this, just like a day later or something, the first thing the government can think of doing is to impose it acts on what'sapp, which is obviously free service that people use because actual phone services

are extremely expensive. And Lebanon that was kind of you know, as everyone has been saying that, you know, that whole sort of poly comes back then and then you had protests on that like that Thursday evening, so that's basically weak now. And in that protest you had lots of good blogs. You had basically some of the usual protests that we have been seeing before. And during that protest, one of this if you want symbols, that became this Uh.

I don't know the point of unity, I guess is there was the bodyguard of one one politician took out his gun, started scaring people. People were not scared, they were actually fighting act. And then he had this woman who kicked him. Uh. And that became this sort of meme and it became super popular and that kind of galvanized everything. And then after that it became sort of

like a daily story. More people come down, there's a bit of a passion than the next day, even more people come down, a familiar story if you if you see what I'm going with this, and now how it's day in number eight and people are sitting in the

steats and it's way more than justin by roots. The protests in Beirut started off with the air of almost a carnival or perhaps a dance club, and there was in fact DJs and dancing, but there was also a powerful sense of solidarity that grew between people day after day and built upon itself. The only reason these protests have not been crushed by the government. Is that activists were able to mobilize enough people from a wide enough s wife of society that mass brutality simply was not

an option. Seventy two hours into the campaign, Prime Ministers Sadhariri announced a new economic package, halving the salaries of public officials, read amping the electricity sector, and eliminating a bunch of do nothing government jobs that existed to suck money away from the poor and squired into the hands of rich connected people's children. This was rightly celebrated as

a victory by many activists. Although the protests are ongoing and most Lebanese believe there is much more to be done, the success they've seen already is proof of how much can be accomplished and how quickly it can be accomplished when enough of the nation gets on the same page. Now that may seem impossible and a nation is divided as the United States, but prior to these protests, Lebanon's

division seemed unbridgeable to you know. Two days ago was the thirtieth anniversary or commemoration whatever off the TOEF Agreement, the agreement that was signed in that ended the Libanese Civil War, and they signed it in the city off in Saudiahevia, and that system sort of codified sectarianism even

more than it was before the war. It did a number of things I won't get into now it's not that relevant, but what it did really is make it almost basically impossible for anyone to identify, for like, in any other way other than with your sect. So the fact that I am from a certain sect, it doesn't matter if I am a believer or not, or in

atheists or not, None of these things matter. What matters is that this, this is your sect, and so you vote according to that, and you vote according to sect and according to where your family is supposedly originally from. So for example, I can vote in a Shefie, but I don't live in a shefe I live in a

different part of Lebanon. And that's part of the reason why it's been so difficult to really organize, because, for example, when there was the municipal elections in thousands sixteen, uh something like a quarter of story, like, there's four times more people who actually live in baby boots than people

who are adjusted to to vote in bay boots. So you have many of my friends who live and I don't live in Baywood, but they live in they live in baby Boots, and so they were helping organized people who are officially registered and maybe including people who don't live there to vote there. So that's kind of just like a small example of why it's been so difficult on all levels to really organize for an alternative to

disc thanks with them that we have now. And yet with no centralized structure, with no hierarchy of leadership, the people of Lebanon have been able to at least somewhat transcend the divisions built into their society to stand up and force basic change. The exact nature of the problems that must be confronted will differ from country to country with every protest, but as we see when we observe all of these movements side by side, the basic script

for effective change is always the same. Pick a few concrete things that everyone agrees need to be changed, get enough people out into the street and disrupt the normal flow of life, and make the nation effectively ungovernable and unprofitable until you get what you need now. The fact that this is all relatively simple does not make it easy zy nor does it mean that every uprising like this is guaranteed to meet with success. Quite the opposite, really,

And this rather tragically brings me to Egypt. Ab del Fata Alcisi came to power in two thousand thirteen via a super fun military coup. Since his predecessors have been famously swept out of power by popular unrest and mass demonstrations, he spent much of his time in power making such things impossible in the future. CC knows something that only

the very smartest dictators learned. You cannot let protests start because once they start, they can grow exponentially, like things did in Lebanon, and then there are too many people out in the street to shoot, and then you have to make concessions, and then you fall. In late September two nineteen, an exiled former military contractor named Muhammad Ali started posting a series of videos documenting massive corruption within the Egyptian military. He called for a million people to

march in the streets. This was, of course, just a spark. More than one third of Egyptians live in poverty. Most of the people who did take to the streets cited economic grievances as the reason they stood up but sadly they did not stand for long because CC's military was there to crush their will. And I'm going to quote from the Guardian. Now more people have been arrested since rare protests broke out last weekend, and on Thursday, the Ministry of the Interior affirmed that it will confront any

attempt to destabilize the country with decisiveness. According to local media, central Cairo was heavily guarded as riot police, fans of security officials, and plain closed police spread out among the network of streets surrounding Tafrir Square, the epicenter of egypt two thousand eleven revolution. The figures for the arrests were compiled by the Cairo based GEO, the Egyptian Center for

Economic and Social Rights. Bystanders and others who had little to do with the protests were reportedly detained along with the demonstrators, and those arrested being held across the country. Now. When people did try to march in Egypt, police met them with tear gas, with ubber bullets, with real bullets, and with brutal clubbings. They also blocked off access to

much of the Internet, restricting Twitter, Facebook, Messenger. In Skype, as well as a number of international news sites, in order to make it impossible for Egyptian activists to coordinate with one another or to share their stories with the rest of the world. All of this worked, the protests in Cairo fizzled out. Cecy's reign is for now seemingly secure. Sixty thousand political prisoners still languish in Egyptian jails, and authoritarians around the world viewed this development with as much

optimism as I have for the protests in Lebanon. Just days later, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised the dictator for a positive progress and with the relationship between the two nations. U S President Donald Trump called CC his favorite dictator and said of the suppressed protests in Cairo,

everybody has demonstrations now. The Guardians spoke with several Egyptians about their reasons for protesting and for not protesting, sayed a thirty four year old fest employee gave a response that I think embodies exactly how dictators want their people to feel. Quote I never went to a protest and I never will go. There is a lot of things wrong in the country. Some people are literally eating from the garbage, but protesting and riots will make things worse.

God knows. I agree with what they say, but I'm alone and I have no one to defend me, so I can only focus on putting bread on the table now. The good news is that unspeakable brutality does not always halt people from standing up. Sometimes things can get so bad that no amount of bullets and battery will dissuade a population. And this is what we are seeing right now in the nation of Iraq. The basic story there is the same one we've dealt with this whole episode.

The government in Baghdad is corrupted and incompetent. It squeezes the average people of the nation dry while offering them piss poor public services and little hope of a better future. The people there got angry, and so they started protesting. The police and security forces responded with almost unbelievable bloodshed, killing multiple men by firing tear gas canisters directly into

their skulls. I've seen some utterly unspeakable X ray images of the corpses of these protesters, skull shattered and deformed by massive metal cylinders of poison. It's it's beyond comprehension in some ways. More than a hundred people have been murdered so far, and as I write this, the protests are still ongoing. It is possible that the violent sweeping Iraq right now will degenerate into a vicious conflict, not unlike the Syrian Civil War. I hope things will go better.

The people of Iraq deserve a break, and more than anything, they deserve your attention and your solidarity. They are a part of this great global uprising, and their future freedom is tied directly to yours. In two thousand eleven, as the Arab Spring reached Syria and protests turned to gun battles, the world and the United States largely turned away. There is an excellent New York Times column which I would advise you all to read. It always comes back to

Syria by Ranya Abuzed. I'm going to quote from that now. The Syrian War enabled a resurgent Russia to expand its influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Cutter imported their feud into Syria, backing different rebel groups and fomenting rivalries that in part helped splinter the armed opposition Iran and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah supported the government of Bisharh al Assad Hesbala's domestic Lebanese opponents supported the rebels. At

one point in Lebanon, every fourth person was a Syrian refugee. Jordan, too has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis. Turkey, the conduit for foreign fighters and munitions into rebel ranks, absorbed three point six million Syrian refugees and hosts the world's largest refugee population. All of Europe, by comparison, is home to about one million Syrian refugees, on influx that

has nonetheless upended Europe's politics. And then there was the rise of the Islamic State and Al Qaida's use of the Syrian conflict to rejuvenate its ranks and recruit men and money. Both groups exported horror well beyond Syria's borders.

The flood of refugees from Syria and the rise of Isis are intimately tied with the fact that Donald tr Rump is the president in our very own nation, and with the fact that Nazis now march in Germany again, and with the fact that the city of Portland, Oregon, has become an irregular battlefield for fascists and anti fascists. None of the terrible things happening in our world occur

in a vacuum. It is something of a cliche right now on social media to refer to the terrible news that so dominates our daily lives as evidence that we live in the darkest timeline. Much of the reason things are so very grim right now is the complete failure of liberal democracies around the world to respond effectively to the Syrian Civil War. Many people thought that since the country was, in Donald Trump's words, seven thousand miles away

from them, what happened there was not their business. But it was. And what is happening in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Chile and Hong Kong, and in many other nations around the world is all of our business. I didn't even cover the protests in Ecuador and Indonesia and Russia. The world is a fire with rage right now. Those of us who live the islands of stability can turn our heads away and focus on our own personal problems, as say it in Egypt, focuses on putting bread on

the table. But if we do that, the hope for a better world is truly lost. For all of us. And that's that's the episode. That's what I got for you now. Uh. You can find us online behind the Bastards dot com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at Bastard's Pod. You can buy t shirts on te Public. But really, um, what you ought to do is find a way to get involved. To find something that you can do, even if you just started by putting in an hour in a week to some

sort of activism, something near you or far from you. Um, just don't let this moment in history pass you by. There's people out there fighting who need your solidarity. There's things near you that need to be fought for. Go do it.