At The End of Hope: Self-Immolation In Tunisia and China

sell fruit. And you know, Mohammed lived in a very poor region, a very poor part of Tunisia, the city of cd Boozid. It's about one hundred miles south of

tunis which is the capital. And like a lot of people, you know, in that part of the world, it is not uncommon, particularly for young men, because unemployment is so high, for young men to kind of make their living doing a mix of odd jobs and like odd vending, right where you're just kind of like selling whatever you can get your hands on and think that you can make a profit on because there's there's not jobs in the traditional sense, and because political corruption was so horrific in

the state at that point in time. It's one of those things where most everybody who's out there selling shit on the street is breaking the law by doing it, right, because you can't get the permit, because the permit is basically a bribe, and you can't afford the bribe, right, That's how a lot of this stuff works. So, you know, Mohammed kind of prior to this, he had he had been his friends. When you read interviews with people who knew him, he was always like one of these guys

who was like really upbeat and funny. His nickname basically meant like funny.

understand empathized with where he was coming from. So he goes out to self fruit and this municipal inspector fight a Humdi sees him, realizes he doesn't have a permit and takes his shit right, and there are accounts that he like hits him too, basically is like what the fuck is wrong with you? You're not paying your god damn bribe and like smacks him around. So this is

kind of the breaking point for Easy. He goes to the police stationed because he's got like this scale that he's using to weigh out fruit and stuff that he wants to get back it had been confiscated. He like can't work without it, and they tell him like, fuck you, you're not getting shit back. So he says, like, I want to meet with the governor and like plead my case to the guy in charge, and they're like, fuck you, the governor doesn't want to see you. So at about

eleven thirty am. He takes his cart outside of the governor's office. He pours I think lighter fluid something flammable over his head and he lights himself on fire. His cousin gets a call. Ali was easy gets a call I guess from someone who was nearby and knew them both and was like, Mohammad just lit himself on fire in front of the governor's office, and Ali runs there, sprints over to the governor's office with his smartphone and he gets there in time to record his cousin's body

being taken into an ambulance. Protests start up after this, almost immediately people take to the street. I think it's just everyone is living under the same regime. They're living under all of these like fucking corrupt ass officials. Everyone pieces together this.

in Tunisia are are holding protests. And this is the kind of thing where it's like, you know, we all saw this, you know, obviously with a different cause in twenty twenty. Sometimes something happens that's so horrible that the whole country takes to the streets. And that's what happens in Tunisia. So the president at the time, basically a dictator, Zeen l Abadin beIN Ali, does the normal dictator thing. He sends out and non dictators, right, we do it

here too. Yeah, he sends the cops out to beat the shit out of everybody. Right, But he's also he's you talked in when we were talking about Vietnam about like the playbook and they didn't quite have it down. Part of the playbook is down because in addition to sending the cops out to beat the shit out of people. He visits Wazizi in the hospital because he lingers for a while, right, And he also has the officer the

guy who slapped Wasizi arrested. You know, he's kind of desperately trying like maybe this will call him everybody down. It does not, was eas He dies in the hospital a couple of days later, and the protests, which are known now as the Jasmine Revolution. It takes about a month, but they force ben Ali to flee the country for Saudi Arabia and you know, successfully bring an end to his regime and the return of a democratic system. There

are functional elections for a while in Tunisia. They gain a significant amount of like political freedom, Like there are some really significant inroads made in terms of like civil rights during this period immediately after the Jasmine Revolution. But things also don't get better, at least not enough.

The problem is that the other issues, the high food prices, the fact that unemployment is at a night maarish level, the fact that corruption was a hideous problem in Tunisia. This doesn't just go away, right, because it's deeper than

the dictator. The culture. Whenever you have a culture of corruption like this, which is by the way, it's not just the Middle East that has to deal with this, but if you've spent time in the Middle East, one of the things that is really depressing is how massive and absolutely different, by the way, from the kind of corruption that we have in the West, it is over there.

The degree to which and you start to care about this not because you're getting fucked over as a tourist, because you really don't notice it much as a tourist.

It's when you make friends in that country and you talk to them about, like, how many different people are constantly taking a little bit from them, right, and often not a little bit, like the degree to which regular people suffer because every single person who is quote unquote a government official is just soliciting for bribes is that's so much deeper than any one guy in charge. Right, That's something you can't just revolt your way out of him. Yeah.

a train. And there's just like so many layers of like this guy who controls this specific thing and thus can fuck you over unless you like do what he tells you, which is usually give money. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads. We'll be back in a second, and we're back.

that's part of it. I'm not saying that it's not, but a lot of it is that, like, well, maybe it's technically my job to stop the guy who works at the train station from denying people entrey if they don't bribe him. But if I do that, then maybe he's gonna make a fuss about how I'm doing the same thing for like permits to fix your roof or whatever. Right, Like, it's so much more bottom up in a lot of way.

And so the reason this matters is that like, shit doesn't really get better in Tunisia, right, And now that the so while all these problems continue, corruption continues to be an issue, high food prices continue to be an issue. Unemployment continued to be an issue, particularly for young men. Another thing that's changed is that now everyone has seen

what what's Easy does has done. And like, obviously he dies horribly, but one thing that happens is like his family moves to Canada, right, Like they and this is

I don't think fair to his family. I haven't seen evidence they were like corrupt or whatever, but like I think because of how like because they're able to like get out of this situation, it's seen as like, well, maybe if I do this, not only will that hurt whoever whatever, corrupt motherfucker you know, I'm angry at but maybe shit will work out for my family.

do in this situation, you know. One of the articles that I read for this was an AP News piece that interviews a guy named Hasni Kaleia, who's one of the dudes, one of the many Tunisians who have attempted or succeeded in killing themselves through self emolation as an active protest. Hasney survived, right, and he did not survive without serious injury. Right now, he has to he covers his face at all times. His left hand he's lost a bunch of fingers. His right hand has no fingers

at all anymore. He is just grievously injured as a result of this. And he said, when interviewed by the AP quote, I would never describe the act of self emolation as an act of courage, because even the bravest person in the world couldn't do it. When I poured the petrol over my head, I wasn't really conscious about what I was doing. Then I saw a flash, I felt my skin start to burn, and I fell down.

I woke up eight months later in the hospital. And I found that really interesting, because there's a lot of talk right now, you know, with what Aaron Bushnell did about like principle and courage or mental illness or whatever, and like to what do we credit something that is so incomprehensible to most people. And I found what Hawsny says here really interesting because what he's saying is that like you can't even call it courage, you know, it's

almost like someone else's doing it. You were animated by such rage and home hopelessness that it's almost like someone else is in control of your body. And I don't that doesn't sound like mental illness to me for certain. That sounds like someone that sounds like desperation of such an extent that it's mind altering. I don't know any other way to describe it than that. And I'm not saying this is what goes through everybody's head when they

sell f emlight. But you don't get a lot of interviews with those people after the fact, right Yeah.

too here. But like the Chinese government line, and this line worked pretty well, is like these people were mentally ill, these people are terrorists or they were like misled by like the Dalai Lamo who's like leading his people to the flames. Yeah, and that's been kind of the that's been kind of the playbook everywhere for this. That like the one, the one that kind of works is that one. It's it's you have to attack the moral character of the person because it's such an it's such an.

of those things. This is listed as like an example of the tactic succeeding, and it does in terms of it, it gets the regime out of power. But things are not better in Tunisia, especially since so you know, there is a period of time where there is at least a functioning democracy and significant gains for civil rights, but

because food still doesn't get affordable, there aren't jobs. A lot You'll find a lot of articles from around twenty twenty, especially where people are like, yeah, I guess freedom's nice, but it's not really worth much if you're starving, you know, yeah, which you know I anyway, all of this leads in part to the coming to power of the guy who is currently leading Tunisia, Kiss sayed. And as you noted, Mia, you know this guy is a populist. He is elected

with seventy two percent of the vote. He frames himself like populist. Him to do is like I am you know, I'm outside the system. I'm gonna help you take on the elite that have corruptly ruled our country, and he also is very anti migrant right Tunisia. A lot of people who migrate into Europe do so through Tunisia just for geographical reasons, and he is blaming a lot of their problems on He does like great replacement shit that

all these black migrants are causing our country's problems. He inspires a wave of violence against black people in Tunisia that's pretty hideous and horrific. And he has gained a significant amount of backing from particularly the Italian government, I think also the French government, because he's cracking down on migrants, right, and those migrants come to Italy and France and that's a problem for those governments. So they're supporting this guy, who,

by the way, has turned himself into a dictator. All those gains Tunisia had in the wake of the Arab Spring, he has rolled back. He has centralized power, he has more or less destroyed the judiciary is something that's independent, you know, he is if he's not a dictator, he's

not all that far from it, you know. And he's being supported by the these quote unquote democratic nations because well, I mean because racism, right, Yeah, same reason they support a Gadaffi, Like, yeah, when it comes to the politicians, it's a mixture of racism and just like well, racism wins votes, and when it comes to like why racism win votes, it's back to racism, right anyway, So those are that's Tunisia more or less.

unemployment rates of like thirty forty percent. Right, Yeah, it's it's and that's that's the thing that that's the thing that can't be solved without changing the economic system.

I've talked about this a bit on this show. One of the ways that labor works in China like structurally is that so you're a contractor, you work for a contracting company. The contracting company is this like series of shell companies, and there's like a there's like there's a payday on like New Years because that's when the like the financial like the year sort of rolls over and

that's when you get paid. And so these companies are designed to specifically go out of business like the day before New Year, so they don't have to pay any of the workers for the work that they've done. And this leads to a rash of protests in China, like every single year on New Year's Day, there's like this massive there's a protests like fucking everywhere because people have

been screwed. It happens a lot with construction companies, and so there's a very like one of the very common tactics you see is people like standing on top of buildings holding banners saying like we're going to jump unless you guys like pay us. And so that that's kind of the background of this, which is that that's like,

that's a fairly common kind of like workers protest. In twenty twenty one, there's a delivery driver in Jongsu who he so something something I didn't really talk about the ten episodes is that Chinese economy is increasingly becoming a gig economy and this has been this has been happening

for a while now. And so this guy is a delivery driver for Ali Baba and he's like, he's like trying to change apps, and the app garnishes his wages and steals seven hundred dollars from him, and that's an enormous amount of money.

of the building because of over work. And this sets off like a giant kind of shift in in the way that the Chinese public is thinking about labor, because up until this one, people have been you know, like China. It's it's not it's nowhere near as bad as a Nia, but it also has this problem of like everyone works

harder and harder. You're working, You're working nine ninety six, right, You're working nine am nine pm, six days a week, and you're like, you're working more and more and more hours and you're not getting ahead, right, You're still stuck in your shitty apartment and your app isn't paying you

for the work you did. And this leads to a whole like a whole thing that sort of culminates in in something I talked about a bit in the time of episodes, which is the Chinese Supreme Court, Like the Chinese Constitution says you're not supposed to be able to work people for longer, for like thirty five hours, unless like special circumstances, and the Chinese Supreme Court goes like, well, obviously, you're not allowed to work people like twelve out like

twelve hours a day, six days a week, and that isn't like in large part and partially it's because of the the Temu suicide and the Temu thing. But the other huge contributing factor to this, and another huge thing contributing to Chinese society attempting to reckon kind of with their unbelievable overwork culture is is the self immolation. And it's it's it's one, and it goes viral so fast that there's no way to sort of like cover it up.

There's it's it's you can't. The Chinese government can't really just press the racism button like they normally would, because this isn't someone into back and someone in changeohn they can't really do that, and so they kind of are. They're forced to make at least like some kind of change because it pisss off so many people in ways

that like can't really be contained. So you know, I guess the lesson from that, if there is one, is sometimes very rarely you can back a government into a corner where the normal things that they would say about it, or like the normal like mental illness, terrorists, deluded things don't work because the raw simplicity of what they did and why just breaks through the media sphere thing, and it's.

and the national media. I don't know that's that's really outside the scope of these episodes, but I hope you at least now have more of a grounding and like how this has gone other times, people have used this as a method of protest, and hopefully that's of use to you anyway. Have a good day, Bye.