Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 124
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat
less ads package for you to listen to
in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
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but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome everybody to It Could Happen Here,
a podcast about it happening here,
the slow crumbling of the institutions that make up
our society.
And that includes not just the good stuff that's become the bad stuff, like for example,
Google search, but it includes the stuff that's always been bad and has gotten worse, like
life inside the prison industrial complex, which is partly what we will be talking today because our guest is the great Cory Doctorow, activist, writer, author of a book called The Bezel, um,
which is a fiction novel, but deals with some very non-fictional stuff in relation
to how finance ghouls have changed life for people behind bars.
Cory, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on.
It's a, it's a delight to be on again. Yeah. Yeah. It's always wonderful to have you. I just welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on. It's a delight to be on again.
Yeah, yeah.
It's always wonderful to have you.
I just finished The Bezel.
It took me, it was one of those about a day, you know, in part because I just like didn't
want to stop reading it.
Like I just kind of blasted through.
I picked it up in the morning on a walk and then was done with it at about like 9 p.m.
So I found it pretty compulsively readable.
Amazing, that's great to hear.
With the first one, I knew that I had something going on
when I woke up at two in the morning
and my wife was sitting up in bed next to me
and I said, what are you doing?
And she said, I just had to find out how it ended.
So.
Yeah, and you said the first one,
this is the second book in a series
based on a character, Martin Hinch,
who's a self-employed forensic accountant. I do want to let people know right at the jump.
I actually have not read your first Hinch book yet.
And they don't have to be read in order.
Yes, yes. That's what I was going to point out. Before we get into the stuff about the
plot of this book and how it relates to some very real things that are ongoing, I wanted
to talk about a not so stealth advertisement
within the series for a guy that we're both a big fan
of, Steven Bruce.
There's an extended digression where Martin is sending books
to a friend of his in prison.
And you talk a lot about Steven's Taltoch series,
which was a huge influence on me as a young person.
I could definitely see, I think,
an influence on this series as well.
Yeah, I mean, an influence on this series as well. Yeah.
I mean, Steve, uh, is a wonderful writer and everything he writes is amazing.
That's particular series.
Uh, you know, he started when I was 13 years old, I'm now 52.
I just, I just had dinner with him in Minneapolis.
He tells me he's two books away from finishing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He had planned the whole thing all those years ago.
He's a Zalazny protege.
Yeah.
And also a giant Fritz Leiber fan.
And it's got that wise cracking Robert McGee kind of,
or Travis McGee rather, kind of affect those books.
And also the stuff that I love about the best of what,
you know, disparagingly we could call
men's adventure fiction,
which is that it at its best and Maria Farrell
just wrote something really good about this
on Crooked Timber at its best.
That stuff gets really geeks out about a lot of stuff
that the bad version of it is the kind of
James Bond version where it's like, you know, this is what the status watch is, and this
is what the status martini is, and this is the, what the status, whatever it is.
And that you call that the gourmet version, right?
Where it's like, you know, what all the best of everything is and, and, uh, you
know, how to, how to signal, you know, your verblen goods to other people, how
to, how to signal that you are posh and upper class, but the good version of it is the, is the
gourmand version, which is like, if you're going to eat cardboard pizza,
this is the best cardboard pizza.
And if you're going to, you know, like the, the very best gas station toilets are.
And the, you know, the, the one thing that you should always do if you're
staying in a flop house is right. And it's just that kind of, um, it could be like street smarts,
but it's also very, uh, I want to say self-indulgent, but that's not the right word.
It's, uh, it's very, uh, it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of self care in it. There's a lot of like
deliberate, like, Oh, this is how I'm going to live my life so that it's as good as possible. And I enjoy ever all of the finer
things as much as I can. This is the thing that I do when I'm making a burger. So that's
a 10% more delicious every time, you know, that kind of thing.
It's it's it's interesting. I came across the first book in that series with that I
read was dragon, which I came across a strip cover from my uncle
who worked at a bookstore.
And that's his like military fiction book in the series,
which is very much in line with the like boys adventure
stuff, but as the series goes on,
it increasingly trends towards like Russian revolutionary
literature too, there's a little bit more of that,
which I think had an influence on me.
Well, Steve's a Trotskyist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The thing about communist fantasy writers, there's a few of them.
There's, you know, Chana Mayville and Steve and a few others.
Yeah.
Well Shetterly and so on is that the one thing that they can always be relied upon
to do is get the ratio of vassals to Lords, right?
Yeah.
You know, that the number of peasants in the field is always vastly larger than the number of lords
in the castle.
And they all have a life and an interiority
and a reason for being there that's not just being
scenery or cannon fodder.
Yeah, yeah.
That's something he does well.
I think that's enough of a digression.
I just always love having a chance to talk about
Stephen Bruce's work.
Let's talk about the bezel.
Cause the basic, I mean, I will try not to give away more
than is in like the Goodreads summary,
but the basics of this story is that you've got this guy,
Martin Hinch, who's this forensic accountant.
And as a result, he's friends with some people
who have really succeeded in sort of the pre-dotcom
bubble tech industry, I guess you'd say.
And you take us with, you know,
he goes with one of them to a place called Catalina Island,
which is a real place that was founded by one of like
our nation's early plutocrats who had a bizarre obsession
with there not being like fast food available on the island.
Yeah, he had a lot of bizarre obsessions.
This is William Wrigley.
Mm-hmm.
The gum guy.
Of the Wrigley chewing gum fortune.
And his first obsession was chickle trees,
and which you need to make gum.
And his particular obsession was owning every chickle forest
in the world, which he did.
Which meant that if you wanted to make gum,
even if you were one of his competitors,
you had to pay him for the chickle.
So there was no gum that wasn't Wrigley's gum in some important sense.
This made him, as you might imagine, very rich.
Yeah.
He bought the Chicago Cubs.
There's a reason the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley field and they would have
their spring training on Catalina Island, an Island that he bought.
He loved Westerns and one of the people who lived on Catalina Island was, or
summer there rather was Zane Grey, the great Western writer.
And there were a bunch of Zane Grey movies that were made on the island,
including one where they brought over 13 bull bison because they were needed for
the movie and because they didn't know a lot about animal handling, particularly they did not know that male bison, uh, do not ever
come into contact with one another except to have a violent dominance clash,
which is how the 13 male bison all ended up escaping.
And then Wrigley in one of his other obsessions thought it was un-Christian
for these bachelor bison to be on his Island.
So he brought over 13 cows and, and created the bison invasive species thing.
He also didn't know that bison, um, operate in harems, which was another
thing that he was just badly wrong.
Like it is true that like being a billionaire lowers your IQ by 30 points
and being the son of a billionaire lowers your IQ by 40 points.
Yeah. And, and, uh, you know, Wrigley had all kinds of aesthetic ideas in the same way
that like, um, you know, uh, when, when Ford built Fordlandia in Brazil, uh, a
planned community that was an identical copy of Dearborn, Michigan, including
south facing windows, because he wouldn't let his architects explain that
south of the equator, you want north facing windows.
Yeah.
You know, he said, oh, well, when, you know, like he came up with all kinds of weird
rules for, um, rubber planters, uh, rubber harvesters in the Brazilian jungle.
And Wrigley came up with his own rules for people living on his island.
And one of them is no fast food.
And this turns out to be consequential in the story because the, the
protagonist of the story, it was Martin Hch, who's this, you know,
two-fisted, hard-fighting, forensic accountant
who busts finance scams.
And his pal are on the island in the party scene
while his friend waits to vest from Yahoo
where he's been imprisoned by Dint
of having sold them a company for millions of dollars,
which he can only realize if he can sit tight
and not murder any of his colleagues while they buy and destroy
every promising startup in Silicon Valley using the money from the Royal family of
Saudi Arabia that was funneled to them by Masayoshi Sun and Softbank, they
encounter a Ponzi scheme.
And the Ponzi scheme is grounded in what is an actual practice of people
bringing fast food to Catalina Island.
Like if you go to the K-12 school and you have an away game, everyone brings back a
sack of burgers for their friends because it's forbidden fruit.
It's exotic.
And this turns into a Ponzi scheme to sell flash frozen burgers brought to the island
by various means.
And as with every Ponzi scheme, the thing that they're actually selling is the right
to sell the right to sell the right to sell burgers.
No one wants the burgers, right?
They want the downline.
And this is why Ponzi schemes always implode.
And what Marty realizes is that this Ponzi scheme is going on and that it has been cooked
up by this guy whose parties they've been going to this real estate baron, and that
he's done it the same way you might carefully tend an ant colony for the sole purpose
of burning them with magnifying glasses. You build this enormous sort of Rube Goldberg machine,
a self-licking ice cream cone and then you destroy it. You smash it. He's waiting for
this economy to collapse once he's extracted every penny from the island, which will add 1%
to his net worth. And so they do a controlled demolition of it.
They foil this guy's plan.
And this kicks in motion, the real action in the novel,
which is about the private prison system.
Yeah, yeah.
And I love that in preparing to like,
read this chunk of the book,
where I learned quite a bit about the private prison system,
I also learned a bunch about Catalina Island
and this wealthy madman's insane dream. I appreciate that about your books.
Pete Yeah. I mean, Catalina Island, we could go on. Marilyn Monroe was a 15-year-old child
bride on Catalina Island. The CIA was founded on Catalina Island. The channel between Catalina
Island and the mainland is the deepest channel known to humanity
and Dau dumped 50,000 barrels of DDT into it in iron that is rusting and that we have
no way to remediate and that will someday rupture and kill every bird downstream of
that channel and also lots of fish.
Catalina Island is this very fraught place,
this very beautiful place, very weird place.
It's one of my favorite places to go.
We just booked another trip there.
And everything about it is amazing
and also terrible, but also beautiful. Yeah, and I appreciate the way that you write that.
And I appreciate the way that you kind of wrap us into by first establishing this character,
this friend of Martin's, who then winds up in a California Department of Corrections
facility and taking us over a period
of time as it goes to the way I think most people think
prisons still are, right?
The kind of, the vision of like prisons that was formed
from movies we watched in the early 2000s
and the late 90s where, you know,
they can be pretty ugly places, but like you have family
and they can come and visit you, right?
There's a big room where everybody gets together
with their, you know, and we saw we arrested developments,
maybe the most before this all changed, most recent kind of touchstone on this.
And also it's a place that has like a library and not just a library, but like there are
opera, what comes with the library is opportunities for people to like better themselves, to learn
things, to build skills, to potentially take some more agency of their situation, right?
That idea of like the jailhouse lawyer who, who becomes informed and all that.
And that, that world has really gone away to a significant extent.
It's, it's not completely gone everywhere, but certainly a lot of those, a lot of
that has been pruned away, the ability of prisoners to have face-to-face contact
with their loved ones and the ability of prisoners
to like use a library is something
that is a lot less common now than it used to be.
And it's because a lot of these kind of attitudes
that have characterized finance for so long
are increasingly becoming common
within the companies that run these facilities.
Yeah, and maybe this is a good place to explain
what a bezel is and how this moment relates
to what a bezel is.
So I really think the title bezel is a banger,
but I didn't realize until I started touring this book
that if you say it aloud, it sounds like B-E-Z-E-L,
which is the rectangular on your phone screen. It's actually B-E-Z-E-L, which is the rectangular on your phone screen.
It's actually B-E-Z-Z-L-E or Z-Z, if you're a Canadian like me.
And that is a wonderful term coined by John Kenneth Galbraith
to describe the magic interval after the con artist has your money,
but before you know it's a con.
And in that moment, everybody feels better off.
And one of the great bezel moments was the moment
between the crash of the, the dot-com crash of like 2000, 2001,
and the crash of the great financial crisis, the housing crash.
And in that period, all the money that people put
into so-called investments and into the market,
and that made them feel better off,
made them feel like they had a pension,
made them feel like they had savings and so on.
All that money was already gone.
So this is one of the things about a scam,
is it feels like the moment that you lose the money
is the moment you realize it's a scam.
But you actually lose the money
the minute you give it to the con artist.
The con artists might let you keep some of it for a little while, but, but they
can take it away from you whenever they want.
That was a moment of kind of a giddiness where none of us really wanted the dream
to end, we knew that once the dream ended, we would all be poor, uh, although in
reality we're all poor right then.
poor, uh, although in reality we're all poor right then.
One of the things about that moment is it was the moment when another long con came due and that was the long con of the California three strikes rule.
So there had been a couple of quite ghastly murders of, uh, young people,
a teenager and a child in California that were weaponized
by some fairly cruel racists to pass a law in California that says that if you were convicted
of three felonies, you would go to prison for the rest of your life with no chance of
parole.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, this is California, which is a place that's quite allergic to, to higher taxes, famously the home of proposition 13, where, you know, we, we, uh,
can't raise our property taxes unless something like 70% of us go to the polls
and specifically vote for it, which is why our cities are so cash strapped.
And so in this, this place where you have these anti-tax extremist types, and, um,
you have this increasing tax burden associated
with locking up an ever larger fraction of the population for the rest of their
lives. You have this unstoppable force and this immovable object on a
collision course with one another because at a certain point you're just
going to have prisons that are so full that you're
going to have to do something to relieve them.
You're going to have to build more prisons.
You're going to have to reduce the cost of operating those prisons.
Something's going to give.
In the end, what ended up giving was a Supreme Court case that ruled that just being in prison
in California violated your Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment that, that every California prison
basically constituted a violation of, of the eighth amendment.
And, and California went through the, you know, the five stages of grieving,
which I know they don't replicate that it's, it's, it's not real.
We don't, that's not really a neat description of exactly what happens
when we grieve, but they, they certainly went through a period of denial and
bargaining, including mooting at one point, sending prisoners to like Arizona.
Yeah.
So sending California state prisoners to Arizona and paying Arizona to
take them off their hands.
And, and as all of this stuff was going on, some grifters saw great opportunity.
And that opportunity was to cut costs in the prisons and facilitate moving
prisoners further and further away from their families by replacing all of the
services in the prison with a tablet that you would get for free.
Yeah.
So remember, you know, the, the iPad comes out in 2008.
Steve jobs is touting it as the future of the world.
Media companies are going crazy.
They finally found their daddy figure who's going to save them from tech by,
you know, siloing everything in an app that isn't part of the web.
And, and, uh, all we can hear about is how tablets are the future.
And this sounds quite futuristic, right?
We'll, we'll put tablet, we'll give every prisoner a free tablet.
It's like one laptop per child, but for prisoners.
And those tablets will replace the library and in-person visits and phone
calls and music and TV and continuing education.
And all of it's going to cost and it's going to cost a
lot more than you would pay outside of the, that outside of the prison for the
same services.
So, you know, four bucks a minute for poster stamp sized video instead of,
free zoom calls, music for three bucks instead of one.
And then of course these companies are very grifty and so they're, they're
constantly restructuring, going bankrupt, being
bought, buying one another.
And every time that happens, the company changes its name and says, oh,
we're no longer the same company.
We no longer supply all of those services.
We are wiping out all of your data and you're going to have to buy it again.
And so, you know, if that's music, it means that the song that you paid $3 for that
you bought by, by working in the prison workshop for 25 cents an hour is gone.
And you're in prison for, remember, this is California, the rest of your life.
And so you're going to have to go back and earn more money to get that, that song
again, but also the $5 your kid paid
to have the birthday card that they wrote for you scanned
because you can no longer get parcels or mail.
Your family have to pay to have their letters scanned
or they have to pay to send you email.
And so your kid who's growing up with
the principal breadwinner has paid $5
to have their handmade birthday card scanned.
That goes away too when the prison changes vendors.
And it's a kind of perfect parable for the indifferent sadism of capital, like the degree
to which the pursuit of profit drives people to be far more cruel than mere ideology.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's so important because prisons were not nice before.
They were not humane before.
But someone who is simply trying to run a government prison facility would not think
of the idea of doing like a shell game like a shell game, yank away
of people's music after letting them buy it
and then make them buy it again.
That's like, that's not something that like a bad prison
guard comes up with.
That's only something that somebody from,
somebody from finance comes up with.
Well, and, and you know, you, it, it helps if the way
that you're running these prisons is by employing guards through a staffing agency.
And so you don't even have to contend with the rising costs associated with
staff turnover when prisoners go bug, fuck crazy because you took all their shit
away, right?
Um, those guards are not your employees and it's not your problem.
The whole thing is, is kind of, uh of running at several layers of indirection and remove.
It's what Douglas Rushkoff calls going meta.
You know, the don't drive a cab, found Uber.
Don't found Uber, invest in Uber.
Don't invest in Uber, invest in Uber derivatives.
Don't invest in Uber derivatives, invest in Uber derivative futures, right?
Like go meta, like get further and further away from the useful activities.
So that you are insulated from the consequences of whatever it is you do.
And that's such a, it's part of, it's like a recipe for breaking things, right?
Because the people who are closest, not that they're always good at it in the
case of prison guards, but the people who are closest to the useful activity tend to know how to make things
work, right?
Whereas the further away you get from that, the more likely your ideas are to
break things that you wouldn't have even thought of.
And again, but for that kind of person, everything you break is usually an
opportunity for financializing something else.
Yeah.
You know, the extent to which finance
is the true banality of evil is hard to overstate.
Yeah.
You know, we think, well, we've heard a lot,
when you read about the Holocaust and World War II,
you hear a lot about the cruelty of Nazis,
and no one's gonna say, well, the Nazis weren't cruel,
and the ideological cruelty of Nazis.
So for example, there were moments where, rather than transporting troops to decisive battles,
they were shipping Jews to concentration camps on those same trains and losing battles.
So they could murder more Jews, right? Yeah.
But up the road from Auschwitz was another private concentration camp run by IG Farben
called Monowitz. Yep. And IG Farben were war profiteers.
They were, they were gouging the Wehrmacht on war
material that they were manufacturing with slave labor.
And they bought thousands of slaves from Auschwitz,
preferring women and children because they were cheaper.
And they worked them to death.
And the, the, the lifespan of a slave in Monowitz was only preferring women and children because they were cheaper and they worked them to death.
And the lifespan of a slave in Monowitz was only three months before they were worked
to death.
It was half of what it was in Auschwitz.
The conditions were so bad at Monowitz that the SS guards who were seconded to it from
Auschwitz wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty of monowitz.
At the end of the war in Nuremberg,
24 IG Farben executives were tried for this.
Their defense was that they had a fiduciary duty to their shareholders
to maximize returns,
and 19 of them were acquitted on that basis.
Yeah. God.
And this is, you know, before the Chicago school guys
had really like fully taken over.
So this idea that like,
that was really the only responsibility
that a business had even above a moral responsibility
was much less established.
Like the more you get into how many,
particularly of the money people got off at Nuremberg,
like it's maddening stuff.
Yeah, indeed.
And it is like, I think an accurate way to look
at the Holocaust from the perspective of those guys
is the mining of populations, like mining them to death.
That's really how a lot of this, like,
is a huge chunk of, especially the early stages
of Nazi oppression of, like starting with German Jews,
but going beyond that as they conquered more land,
was the appropriation of businesses and property, right?
Like that was, it was mining human beings.
And that attitude is persistent, right?
It's not just a thing that happens in Nazi Germany.
It happens whenever you let people who don't have any sort of human concern take control
of every aspect of life.
And you know, this is some of the structural stuff that's going on in the book.
So my editor on this book is this great guy, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who's been my editor
since my first novel.
He and I met on a BBS in the 1980s.
So I've really known him most of my life.
And Patrick, when he gave me the editorial note on my first novel, he said something like, the way that science fiction works is you have a world
that is like a thought experiment world, and you have a character who's a microcosm for
that world. And they are like a big gear that's the world and a little gear that's the character.
And if the microcosm meshes correctly with the macrocosm, then as the
person spins around and around doing their plot stuff, they spin around enough times that the
world, the big gear that they're meshed with makes a full revolution. So you have this microcosm,
macrocosm thing. And often when a book doesn't work, it's because the microcosmic,
macrocosmic correspondences aren't sharp enough. There's some way in which those
teeth aren't meshing. One of the things that this book tries to do and that the
Martin Hench books generally try to do because they're all about these
finance scams, these high-tech finance scams set in different eras from the
1980s through the 2020s, is that they try to create a
series of these similar correspondences between small scams and big scams.
You know, they use the small scam as a kind of set up or frame or like a
cognitive tool for understanding the, the much bigger scam.
And so that small scam, that Ponzi scheme, where you have a person who is setting
out just for shits and giggles to make some money by destroying a bunch of
other people's lives and viewing those people as not as people, but as, as
things, as a means to an end, not as an end, themselves, ends up creating this sadistic, brutal, pointless,
and deliberately unsustainable situation that he knows is going to hurt all these other
people.
And the way that he's able to do it is by simply not considering the people who are
enmeshed in the scheme as fully people entitled to
their own sort of moral consideration.
And in the same way, that is, that's like a microcosm for the kinds of decisions
that are made when people go on to found these prison tech companies and these
other companies that do these, these ghastly things. And it's also very accurate to how an unfortunate number of just like regular people in society
and in government think about the victims of these schemes.
Like when you try to talk about how unfair and how much worse
this situation has gotten, it's like, well, they're prisoners.
They're being punished, you know, as if, as if that makes it all okay.
Yeah.
It's kind of a, it's kind of a, like a, a much more extreme and therefore
much more easily spotted version of caveat emptor or not your keys, not your coins.
These ideas that if something bad is happening to you,
it must be because you did something bad, right?
The kind of providential ethics.
And I think that the work that that does for people is it helps them put their own anxiety
about their own future to rest.
Because you know, if you are worried that something bad might happen to you and you
can convince yourself that the reason that something bad happened to someone else is
that they had a deficiency, right?
They committed a sin.
They were foolish.
Then you don't have to worry about it happening to you.
You know, I, I, um, a couple of times in the last decade, I have been the victim of various
kinds of con and I am also someone who's written a lot about cons.
So I've been successfully fished once and I had a phone scammer talk
me out of my credit card number once.
And I always write about it when it happens.
And I write about it in part because I want to make sure that people
understand that, you know, you're not too smart to be conned.
Anyone can be conned and so on.
And I think that's an inoculant against getting conned, but I also do it
because the reactions are kind of sociological study, right?
If you want to see into the minds of tech bros who justify the terrible things that
they are doing or planning to do, or fantasizing about doing, or working on to
other people, look at, look at their fraud apologetics where they say, you know,
well, that was just a business,
and you know, you had caveat emptor,
or you were lazy, or you were foolish,
or you know, like you did something deficient,
and that's why it happened, and so you deserved it,
and that means on the one hand,
it's never gonna happen to me,
because I don't deserve it.
And on the other hand, if I ever do it to someone else,
that's fine, because if they fall victim to it,
then they must deserve it.
The old con artist saying that you can't cheat
an honest man as a version of this.
Yeah, and it's, I mean, that's like,
it's such a limited view of it, right?
Because it's true that like, there are some cons
that you can't trick someone into
unless they have a little desire for some
larceny, right? But like, an increasing number of cons are just like a company using your bank's
phone number calling you and telling you you've been defrauded and you give them information
because you're not used to the or or somebody calls using the voice of your child and beg and
says that they need a ransom payment, right? That's not, you're not, there's not like a dishonesty
in your heart because you don't want your kid
to be kidnapped.
You're just not ready for what tech has been able to do.
And while there are some of those cons where they,
they're playing on your cupidity or your dishonesty
to make money off of you, even in those instances,
it is downstream of a system where it feels like you can't
survive unless you're cheating.
Right?
Like the, the, one of the things, and so multi-level marketing is actually a theme
that runs through all of these books.
The next one is, is set in the 1980s and it's, it's about a, um, a faith scam.
Uh, it's an early PC company I made up called the three wise men run by a mormon bishop a catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who use you know affiliate marketing through congregations to pray on on their own faith groups.
I'm one of the things about these ponzi schemes is pyramid schemes.
Ponzi schemes, these pyramid schemes, is that they take the only capital that working people have, which is social capital, the relationships they have among one another, and they convince
them that it is entrepreneurial and therefore virtuous to instrumentalize your relationship
to the other women in your life who help you look after your kids or to the, your co-religionists who you can turn to if things go really bad at work or,
or with your family or whatever. And,
and that turning that into a, a transaction that you can milk,
you know,
turning those people into a downline who have to recruit other people to,
to make you whole so that you can feed your own upline is just hustling.
It's just your shot at the American dream.
It's Spike Lee telling you that investing in shitcoins
is building black wealth.
Yeah.
It is like the fact, and I think low key,
this is one of the top couple of problems
that we have in this society,
because it feeds into everything else.
Like it's, I think that's probably why it runs through
so much of your work, because this,
the scam economy is behind every,
and it's increasingly becoming everything, right?
And there's this kind of pernicious effect where by people don't, when the more
people are victimized by this, both the less they trust other people and the more,
the more they begin to accept that like, well, this is just how you get by in our
society, right?
Why shouldn't we take away prison libraries and replace them with more
expensive Kindle that we can yank away at any moment.
Everyone's always nickel and diming me.
I'm always getting more money taken away from me by these same people and I'm not even in
prison, you know?
Right.
Why shouldn't there be junk fees in prison if there's junk fees everywhere else?
If your local water company that's owned by your city is sold off to, you know, plug a hole in the
budget because you can't raise taxes. And then they start charging you a convenience
fee to pay your water bill with a check and then a different convenience fee to pay your
water bill with a credit card and a third convenience fee to pay your water bill in
person with cash. And then you realize that like, that none of these are convenience fees. They're just, they're just fees.
Yeah.
It's just more money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we're in, we're in a pretty infuriating situation here and you
get to that in the bezel, you really get that across well as this guy is trying
to deal with the, and, and it kind of brought home to me the horror of like
having someone you care for in this situation and seeing like their avenues for any kind of relief edged out, chipped away at for the profit of some guy who will never notice the money in his bank account.
I mean, and you know, that, uh, unlike Steve Bruce, I, well, like Steve Bruce in some of those volumes, I told this story from the perspective of a fairly powerful person who's
got a lot of agency only because it gives you the opportunity to tell a story that at
least holds out the possibility of some relief.
Um, I'll leave it to the reader to find out what actually happens at
the end. And, you know, there have been successful prisoner uprisings that have been led by working
people who are serving long-terms. But for the most part, those uprisings, we never even hear
about them. You know, there was a prison labor strike before lockdown, I believe it was 2018 or
2019. There was a national prison labor strike, and it barely made
a dent in anyone's consciousness. It was, you know, ultimately one of the largest strikes in modern
American history, you know, there are thousands and thousands of workers who are on strike, and we
didn't even hear about it, because there's such control over the narrative about prisons and
prisoners that's run by the carceral system.
And so, you know, by, by telling this story about someone who goes into
prison already a millionaire and who has a friend on the outside, who's kind of
a hustler and, um, you know, a pal and to is someone who knows how to finagle
the system, I can spin out a yarn that.
Take you like back to patrick nelson hayden and the big gear driving the little gear takes you on a three hundred and sixty degree tour of how fucked up the system is.
Rather than just the the answer i view or the worms i view that most people get because they aren't even able to explore all the avenues and run into their dead ends because
They're just stuck where they are. Yeah
Cory, this has been wonderful. I want to again let people know your book the bezel is in stores now
You can purchase it wherever fine books are sold
Do you have a preferred URL for buying it the dash bezelbezel.org is fine, but wherever people want to get it.
Yeah.
It's a national bestseller for the third week running.
It's very good.
That's great.
Whoever feeds into the USA Today bestseller list.
You apparently, that's wonderful.
Yeah.
Well, Cory Doctor, do you have anything else you wanted to get to before we roll out today?
Well, Corey Doctor, do you have anything else you wanted to get to before we roll out today? Well, I guess, you know, if you want to follow the work that I do, pluralistic.net is a newsletter
that I write every day, or almost every day, and it's open access.
So that means it's Creative Commons licensed. You can reproduce it.
You can reproduce it and sell it if you want. And there's no DRM, there's no tracking,
there's no ads, there's no anything.
It's black type on a white background.
You'll never get a pop-up asking you
whether you wanna subscribe to my mailing list or whatever.
Yeah.
And the email version of it, you can get it as an email list.
The email version also no tracking.
I can't tell when you've opened the email or anything.
I keep no statistics and I just, it's a letter in a bottle
I write and throw into the ocean every morning.
And it's great.
That's so much fun to write.
It's a great letter in a bottle.
You've been talking, writing a lot, not talking,
a lot about AI lately and kind of the, how that all feeds into a lot of this stuff
you've been covering about,
or the stuff you write about often about, you know,
vessels and scam economies.
And I've really enjoyed getting your take on that.
Cause I think you're one of the people
who hasn't lost their minds over all this stuff.
Oh yeah. I mean, I think we're really like,
so the, we hear so much about AI disinformation
and the, the people who have like most fallen prey to AI disinformation are bosses who've
been convinced that AI is good enough to fire you and replace you with.
And you know, it's like, it's not true.
It doesn't mean they won't do it, right?
But it's not true.
Yeah.
That's, that's actually kind of the worst of all worlds, right? Technological unemployment without, without actual replacement.
It's just, it's just another bezel.
It's a, it's a, it's that long moment where you think you've
zeroed out your labor force costs, but you haven't realized that you're
no longer productive because the chat bot keeps, you know, as in the case
of Air Canada, just like telling people they can get refunds they're not
entitled to, and then, you know, regulators come along and smack you or The chatbot keeps, as in the case of Air Canada, just like telling people they can get refunds
they're not entitled to.
And then regulators come along and smack you around
and charge you, fine you for your chatbot
having lied to people about their bereavement flight
discounts and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm looking forward to that moment hitting, I guess. because where we I mean, I do kind of think we are sort of nearer to the bursting than we are to the peak of the bubble right now.
But I guess we'll we'll see.
Well, remember, the market can remain solvent, irrational rather longer than you can remain solvent.
Yeah.
Oh, I've been predicting the the collapse of the London housing bubble, for example,
for a very long time.
We're nowhere near it.
Yeah.
So that is my, that is my humbling lesson.
It is definitely a bubble.
It is going to burst when it's going to burst
and is very, very, very hard to predict.
Yeah. What will burst with it?
Yeah.
Well, Corey, thank you so much for being on the show.
Again, everybody check out the bezel. Wonderful book. And check out Corey's other wonderful books
like walk away. That's the episode. Have a good one. Thanks, Robert.
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Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast.
Today we have a very interesting interview, very lucky to be joined by Aung Kyaw Mo, who
we've heard from before, who is a minister who is Rohingya in the in the national unity
government of Burma or Myanmar,
both of those words are okay, and we're talking about the situation of Rohingya people and the
development sort of happened in Rakhine state since, I guess, since the beginning of Operation 1027.
So welcome to the show. Thank you so much, James. Thanks for having me and it's good to be back
Thank you so much, James. Thanks for having me. And it's good to be back with you to this show.
Thank you. Yeah, it's wonderful to have you back.
And we're very fortunate.
So I wonder if we could start by summarizing for listeners
the things that have happened in the last few months in Rakhine State,
because there have been some massive changes since maybe listeners
were last aware of what was happening there.
Yeah, sure. Thank you. Since the coup, there were on and off
fights between the Arkhan army and the Malachi Hunters process
in Rakhine State. However, in the interest of the of the of
the humanitarian need, both parties came to enter to a ceasefire agreement in between.
However, the fight against the military junta in Myanmar started in different parts of Myanmar,
continued to be accelerating. And most recently, the 1027 and followed by other operations in the Khorani state has been quite rapidly spreading across
the country and that's definitely one to Rakhine state where the Huntas resume to target the in its political objective to be reaching the situations we are today that the Arkan army
has been in very good positions to be dismantling the Hunters forces in Rakhine State and so far
since Operation 1027 started, more than half of the township districts in Rakhine State has been
seized by the Urkan army, including some of those where majority of Rohingya lives,
and it's continued to be under very deteriorating situations. Yeah, and they've even sunk Hunter ships or captured them in some cases, I think.
It's been a bit of a... there was a video that was quite, I guess, maybe not viral is
the wrong word, certainly I saw a lot, but of border guard forces, right, which are like
militias allied to the Hunter, like fleeing into Bangladesh. Bangladesh? This border guard forces are mostly from
military, they are trained militaries, their uniforms are changed into border guard forces
due to different agreements that exist between two states in allocating its troops
along the border side and the border guard forces are one of the most primary forces that's deported to Rohingya
and burned the Rohingya's forces in 2027 and made them flee.
So six years later, it's the same VDPs who committed the crimes against the Rohingya
atrocities, that includes crimes against humanity and war war crimes had to flee to Bangladesh in a
quite similar way to refuge. And so it's sort of karma or whatever you put it in a way. And the
perceptions and the reality of course when it's kind of confrontations between the two groups,
our army and the military, the reality that has been defined by most of us
in Myanmar and across that we used to believe that the Burmese military is
strong both by human resource and equipment.
And in reality, they are very weak and
our army has proved by dismantling various battalions, infantry battalion and
even capturing alive like second highest commanding officer in the whole of Rakhine state and
also many senior level officer has been killed over this battle.
So the reality and perception has been deeper on the Myanmar
Balochri when we look at it from external perspective. Yeah and I think
just in case listeners aren't familiar it can be very confusing if you don't
read about this stuff all the time it's sort of alphabet soup of organizations
and especially with reference to Rohingya and Rakhine State,
because we have Rohingya armed groups,
or armed groups which draw mostly from Rohingya people
that don't necessarily represent them all.
And then we have the AA.
So can you explain the AA's relationship to Rakhine State
and then how they relate to Rohingya people? The AA has been established in 2009
with aim to be having confederation
and not less than war,
which is another special region in Myanmar
with a special autonomy.
And it has been led by some young people
and it has been led by some young people and it has been quite a leadership
as well within the Rakhine political spectrum and it has been growing very rapidly and the
acceptance of the people, particularly Rakhine people, has been very high. Therefore, the
resource allocations that it got from human resource to other resource
to be rapidly coping with that group growth has been high and that put them in a position
is to be standing in front of a junta in a very stronger positions and defeat them in
a very rapidly. And of course, the Arkhan army,
which we refer here as AA,
is not as inclusive as Rakhine.
Rakhine is very diverse,
and it has got a multiple ethnic group.
The largest ethnic group is Rakhine,
religiously Buddhist people,
and to which majority of Arkhan army's leadership
derived from there.
And the second largest majority, which are the Rohingya and Rohingya, are still the second
largest majority in the Rakhine State, despite a million being pushed off to Bangladesh in
2017 and several hundred thousand are spread across the region.
And the inclusivity in the Arhan army is still not there.
When we talk about Rohingya,
there might be some small number of Rohingyas
in different battalions of Arkhan army
and to the administrative units that they are building
at a very grassroot level.
However, the Rohingya need to be included
both by functions and in order to have to
describe that relationship in an inclusive way between the Rohingya people and the Arakan
army.
Yeah.
And Arakan, is that, am I right?
Arakan is the name of the area before it was called Rakhine state.
Is that right?
Correct.
It's even, it's before Burma became Burma, Ararakhan was a kingdom and it used to have its own palace and its diversity,
its heritage and its natural resources. And then of course the Burmese colonizations
happened within Burma and later on Arakhan has been named as Rakhine State.
Yeah, so it describes a geographical rather than ethnic identity, which is distinct from some of the other
revolutionary organizations like Karen, Kareni,
Kachin or what have you. I think there are similarities and as well as there are
differences when you put them together and
from a diversity perspective, Rakh of state is very diverse compared to
other ethnic groups. And also it's politically very complex. But they are overall similarities
as well, like, you know, all are fighting to defeat the junta, to end the dictatorship in
Myanmar. But the primary thing here is the self-determination and self-autonomy,
like people want to decide to determine what is their present and future look like, how
they want to treat with their past.
That's the aspect.
But of course, to the best of my knowledge, these ethnic resistance organizations, both political and the armed
groups have never claimed that they want to separate from Myanmar.
It's coming together in a different way.
The holding together would be in a different way.
Yeah.
And even when I speak to Burma people who are like the majority ethnicity and the ethnicity
from which the Hunters leadership are drawn, like they tell me they're committed to a federal and like a federal Myanmar with autonomy
for these different regions and groups and that's something that has held that coalition together,
right? Yeah, there are approximately more than 50 million populations in Myanmar. Majority are Burmese Buddhist and they have been having this
Buddhist supremacy and like Pama supremacy over ethnic and religious minorities across the country
and of course, Kachin, Khoran and others and went to disarm their future by themselves and have an equalcy, both their functions and number.
And that's where we're having the 70 years long civil war that came to collective revolutions
in 2021.
And historically speaking, people have been fighting in Myanmar for equality, justice
and to end the cycle of impunity for the last 70 plus years.
Great.
I think that's a great place to take our first advertising break.
All right, and we're back. I think you did an excellent job of explaining the history
that got us here. And people will be very familiar with the atrocities committed by
the Burmese military and its proxies against the Rohingya people, I hope. But one thing
that's been happening recently, which is particularly appalling, is the forced recruitment of Rohingya people by that same military. Can you explain what's
been going on? The conscription law has been reactivated. It has been there, launched by the previous military educators, but it has not been active.
So since the junta has been falling apart and collapsing, not only the Rakhine State,
across the country, wherever they fight, they lose.
And they are battalions by battalion that's running away to Thailand, running away to India, running away to Bangladesh,
and putting white flag.
And there are several casualties.
And apparently, the junta became the largest military equipment supplier to the Revolutionary
Force, where we did not get international support when young people, actress, models, and writers,
poets decided to go to the forest to fight against this hunter.
And there was little to no international support and we have been struggling to equip
ourselves to fight this junta.
And of course, the resilience and the courage that young people had and the tactical and
strategic capacity that the ethnic resistance organization had in combined became a factor
to have an strategic sourcing of the military equipment and who wear junta
like battalion by battalion you don't need to buy the weapons and military tank and things like that you go and fight one battalion and they run away or they die and then you take over the
that's how the whole thing started in air then when they are losing uh they they reactivated these
conscriptions law and started to in the interest of making making mandatory everyone to be serving
by force in in the in the in the in the military by chance and of course when it's come to Rakhine
state Rakhine state the 600 000 Rohingya and 250 to 60,000 of them has been
in concentration camp, consolidated in one place with movement restrictions,
no access to to to allegations, healthcare and things like that where
they have been living more than a decade in some of those camps. And villages where those people who are not in the camp
as well has been imposed by additional movement restrictions.
So you don't need to really go and mobilize people
to be forcefully recruiting.
And at the beginning, the junta went to them
and to give them sort of show them incentive
of like, you will become the citizens
and we'll give that and we'll give that
and you need to fight against the the the the arkan army and of course the the grassroots
the leader community leader responded in a way that they need to respond to reject the the
the request from from the from the military hometown then military started to of course impose
by using the post.
And as I mentioned earlier, they will need to like when you have consolidated people,
that amount of young people doing nothing and you just go and catch them and put them
on a truck. And some of them don't know where they are going because their whole life has
been in this camp. Like when you were six years old and you are now 18 and it's mandatory
for you to be serving in the military and you don't know what is happening in our side of your camp.
And then we got to these news and of course we have been talking to different community
leaders and the community has been approaching to us as a government and there are several
media coverage as well and the military started to say,
these Bengalis are not referring to the Rohingya,
are not the citizens of Myanmar.
Therefore, there is no way that we make them
serve in the military.
So those are fake news.
So they use this state propaganda TV channel
and the state newspaper, which is now under control of SAC, to deny
that.
And on 7th October, sorry, 7th March, those who they have kind of scripted more than 500
has been brought into the commanding office of the UNta to be training in full uniform.
Some of those inside there has got managed to get internet access and then sent to me
the video footage what is happening inside there.
So I posted that on my Twitter and then it's spread from there and then we caught them
like their denial initially,
the lies that they had been putting by denying that
Rohingya were not conoscrooted, oh, what's wrong?
And then a few days later, they have been sent to the front line
to fight against EE.
And then there are handlers of those Rohingyas who were...
who died in this front line.
And the junta came back a few days later talking to their
family saying that okay 300 plus people have died and we don't know who is who and when
we bring you that body you will be able to be identified and the first dead body that
they brought and handed over to the community leader
with one million jets which is $350 plus 100 kg of rice as an incentive for the life that they
have given in the fighting. So that's the situation and we can of course continue.
and we can of course continue. Yeah, that's very bleak, isn't it? And so this, and we've seen like
just today, actually, if people have been online today, there was a protest in
Rakhine state somewhere for a hint of people rejecting the Arakan army. Can you explain, like, that might not be what it seems on the face of it, right? Can you explain
what might be happening there?
The situation in Rakhine State has been very much complex because there are hidden factors
being created, artificially created by the junta for so long, from 2012, 2017. Between these different communities, there has been always interdependency and social
cohesion to some level but honda always used the divide and rule methodology to bring the
conflict between these communities and hate each other and then they can carry out what they need
to do as a power holder and of course when the arkanarmi is getting greater control over the Kaina
state and the junta is losing, the Malachi junta needs to use all tactics that they have,
including the inter-communal tensions. And so, there are a few Rohingya, maybe, who have businesses with these junta are being
used as a proxy to push pressure on the Rohingya to organize.
And so that's why the protests started a few days ago in one of the townships in Rakhine State, where 80 to 90 percent are
Rohingya and claiming that we don't want war and we don't want EE.
Of course, this can be happening artificially, organically, and it's so artificial.
Anyone who looks into this video footage can see that the Rohingya never had in their life,
like those who were protesting,
never know what freedom of expression means. And suddenly, in one random morning,
hundreds of Rohingya, including minors, children, coming on the street and protesting
is not something normal. It can happen. We don't, we don't the,
and of course majority of the Rohingya
are peacefulizing people
and they want Burma to be an inclusive federal democracy
and they want to be part of it.
And we are, that's why I myself as a Rohingya
taking a leading role in the government
as the first Rohingya holding back
ministerial positions in the cabinet since 1962.
And of course, the Rohingya equally want to end the dictatorship
once and for all because that very junta has been committing atrocities crimes,
including crimes against humanity and to genocide to Rohingya.
This is the very same military who deported a million Rohingya killed more than 24,000 soft
people in burning children's life in 2017. So in which way that Rohingya collectively will come
and ascend with this junta with the whole country. So this is not, this is really not something organic and this is
artificial. This is so fake and this is so like junta made into fit into be fitting into their
political propaganda. Yeah and I think one has to when one's looking at things in Myanmar be aware
that the junta just doesn't care about lying. It's something they've done for a long time.
I apparently can't download I Heart podcast in Myanmar now.
Like someone tried to download our podcast there and so they had to use a VPN.
But yeah, they manipulate the media environment heavily.
You can read Hunter newspapers and some of it's comically false.
But one thing I did want to talk about is like when I talk to young PDF, and I've spoken to dozens of them now, people who are Karen, people who are Karen, people who are Burmah, people who are Kachin, they, a lot of realize that the way the Rohingya were being treated was so appalling.
And that now they're very upset about what happened and like for them, I guess the litmus
test for like a future for Burma is one that can include Rohingya people.
And so like, with that in mind, I guess, we've seen this kind
of changing of language, right, where previously they were referred to as Bangladeshi. And
then now they're referred to as Muslim or Rohingya people. I guess, can you just explain
like, what is the NUG PDF kind of like, how do we ensure independence and safety for Rohingya people
in Myanmar in a federal democratic future without a dictatorship?
We are in a context of identity politics where the identity is so much associated with very
rights, whether it's political, social, and economical rights that you deserve,
and what you need to give back as an active citizens
and obligations to the country that you belong.
Therefore, the identity of the Rohingya
is a primary thing for Rohingya to be enjoying equal freedom
and to be able to contribute equally as others in the nation-building process.
And of course, before 2017, even before that, there has been a lot of misinformation, disinformation,
propaganda, widespread state-sponsored against the Rohingya that could be misleading and incitement of violence and the term Bengali is a term
that's refer that you are coming from Bangladesh illegally and you're illegally resettling. That's
how the terms came to it from. It's false, right? It's a false accusation. It's false accusations in the the the the the the Rohingya people has
existed in Rakhine state side by side with with Rakhine people,
even Burma became Burma. And there are historical facts that
there are so many undeniable things that you could you could
look into and into into various historical facts.
And so in between, of course, the Rohingya, the Trump become illegal and the military
denied it, rejected it.
And then they started to use the term Bengali and most of the Burmese people fall into that
trap and even some were either silent in this horrific genocidal attack in 2017 or some were taking
sight of a military at that time that is okay to kill and it's okay to and of course these
are being propelled by all this information and disinformation that I earlier mentioned
and 2021 attempted coup happened and that's where a new perspective is being
offered to the people of Myanmar because the same military that has been carrying out atrocities crimes
against the Rohingya and other minorities came to larger Burma people doing the same thing. So what
has been told to us by the Rohingya and the religious and ethnic minority in Myanmar for the decade
came to be true and that's how the acceptance of the Rohingya has started to grow. Of course,
it's not to the level that we would be satisfied with yet. It's a process and there is so much to unlearn because one provoking factor like attempted to
shouldn't like wouldn't fix a problem that has been there for decades. And
National Unity Government declared that we accept the Trump Rohingya and there has been a policy
stating very clearly in 2021 June and that
policy to be implemented of course when the situation is conducive and there are significant
challenges with the territorial control and things like that when it's come. But again,
the momentum that I mentioned we got as a result of the spring revolutions need to be maintained in the higher
scale. That's not only the Rohingya and anything that's wrong, that's primary, that's principle
and value-wise strong. We need to be able to say it's wrong regardless of whoever it is and regardless
of race and religion. If we are talking about federal inclusive democracy. We cannot preach to our people or international community saying that support us or asking
for support or be a part of this movement where we see as a preferred future as an inclusive
federal democracy where actual values that we are not practicing by ourselves.
So before we preach, we need to act upon those principles by ourselves.
And overall, I would say that all the loss that we had, including life and livelihood,
that hundreds and hundreds of people, thousands of people, has been killed, jailed, and hundreds
of villages, townships, has been destroyed.
The good thing that we got is the this consciousness on the morality and if we're able to accelerate that
consciousness at the greater scale, that's where we will be able to
maintain the values and principles of the inclusive federal democracy. That
will be the pillar to maintain this as a process.
Yeah, I think so. It's really fascinating to talk to young people. I was talking to some Mandalay
PDF people not so long ago and they were like, oh yeah, well when we left, we were told that
the Ta'ang would hate us because we're Burmese and that they would fight us and then they're like,
oh they're really nice. This is a Ta'ang guy right next to me. Because they're joined up together
now, the PDFs and the
EROs are largely fighting like side by side against so and is
there like, are there PDF forces present in Rakhine State as
well?
No, there is our army, particularly, which is an
alliance with the we have been there have been multiple
insurrected like, you an alliance relations committee that would deal
with all the alliances as a national unity government. And of course, they have been
playing an important role in defeating the junta and there is no PDF in our kind of state.
Okay, yeah, so it's a little different there. Although often the PDF and the EROs are very similar in fight side by side.
Also, our army is not alone in Rakhine State. They are also in Shahrn State and they are fighting not only in Rakhine State. we talk about like even though the physical PDFs are not there, it doesn't mean that there is no
military connections between the ethnic organizations that exist across the country.
Yeah and like we've seen that a lot since October, right, like since the Three Brother
Alliance started their campaign, that moves Hunter forces to one place and that allows other people
like the Koreni to take advantage of the way those forces have moved and they've liberated huge parts of their territory.
So look, it's all joined, I guess.
Yeah, the tricky part that they have used in the past is like hidden cut, is that they will do ceasefire in one part of the country yes allocate all of their resources in another part of the country and where they will defeat or they will at least like come to bargaining positions, it's Hunter who violates again all all these agreements that always initially sell and uh and this time uh it's so coordinated uh across the country that the
Hunter like cannot be able to position themselves or strategize themselves or put them themselves
in the tactical positions their old tactic did not work in the modern coordination of the PDF and
ethnic resistance organization. Yeah no they've tried multiple times to have like little individual tactic did not work in the modern coordination of the PDF and Ethnic Resistance Organization.
Yeah, no, they've tried multiple times to have like little individual ceasefires and
it hasn't worked.
So I wanted to ask just to finish up, people, I think, who listen to this will be very familiar
with the situation in Myanmar and they want to help and they see that the international
community is doing nothing.
And I think a lot of people are rightly very upset about that.
So what can people do to help and especially to advocate for Rohingya people?
Particularly when it's come to the Rohingya people.
Rohingya people's crisis ishingya people crisis is so much
interconnected with Burmese democratization process.
Rohingya will not be able to have a life that's dignified, safe, and in their place of origin,
unless Burma is solely in the hand of a civilian government.
So the democratization process that
Hulvermice attempting to make need to be supported by international community as
I mentioned earlier. So far we got little to no international support and on the
on the Rohingya crisis as well there's 1 million people in Bangladesh where
their rations are cut to $8 per month per person and which is a cup of coffee in the United States.
And there is a greater danger of hunger, starvation, and malnutrition, and so many other social
economic problems that would have an impact on the regional security, stability, and things
like that. If the shortfall remains,
funding shortfall remains for the Rohingya.
That's on the human tree and of course,
Rohingya need to be politically organized
in order to be fitting into the changing
political dynamic of Myanmar. And Rohingya has been oppressed.
They were not able to form civil society organizations.
They were not able to be educating themselves.
So all these societal leadership aspects need to be supported,
including having a company, like having an organized political platform for Rohingya,
which will be able to represent Rohingya
in the larger political table,
ensuring their voices are heard
and they're able to equally take the rights that they deserve
and more importantly, equally able to contribute
to a decision that will have an impact on their life.
And United States has determined the crimes
against Rohingya as genocide two years before.
And of course, the genocide determination does not simply,
is an announcement, it's come with the moral
and legal responsibility.
So we do want to request United States and its people to firmly stand on the
moral and legal obligations that it has in ensuring that the Rohingya are able to live
equally peacefully and more importantly the justice that they deserve on the physical and
mental damage that happened as part of the genocide. And it was peak in 2017. It's continued to be happening today.
And even today, 150 people were arriving in Aceh, Indonesia, where the Indonesian people who were
showing greater humanity in opening their arms and parts to be accepting Rohingya are denying
the Rohingya. So for the Rohingya, there is little to no space to be accommodated both in regional and
international and local setting and it is very important that we are able to tackle and navigate
these issues together with the international community in an innovative, effective, efficient
and sustainable way for the sake of humanity. And there are competing priorities across the world,
but the international community is, we are so aware that international communities are capable
of doing more than one thing at a time. It doesn't have to be either or. No, it can be both, and it
should be, right? Like obviously people are very concerned with the plight of Palestinian people,
rightly so at the moment, but yes, we should remember that as a Muslim people have been subject to genocide for the last nearly seven years, I
suppose, and it's ongoing and they deserve our support and solidarity as well. Yeah, I hope.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it does seem like, I guess, a little more hopeful than it was even a couple of years ago that there will be a democratic Myanmar.
Yeah, the journey is almost made and what we need is greater international support.
Support doesn't mean just releasing the statement, meaningful comprehensive support that we are able to defeat this junta once and for all
for the sake of people of Myanmar, 50 plus million people
giving the price at the highest possible price in their life.
That's include again, the lives and livelihoods.
And international community was not doing more
than condemnations or releasing a statement of concern
over the last three years.
But it's time to act.
And an international community again
has to answer this question to next generations
when there is a question on the morality
where the international community,
when the genocide comes against humanity and war crime has been
happening to millions of people in the eyes of our international
community.
Yeah, no, I hope they do. And it's incredible the progress
that has been made without that support. And I think it's just
incredible to me that even I remember in 2021 talking to
people who were just beginning their fight and to see how far they've come is outstanding.
Yeah.
And yeah, people should be very proud of that. But it doesn't mean that they don't need more support. It doesn't mean that they don't need surface-to-air missiles.
Yeah.
That is the thing that we should be doing.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We really appreciate your time and your insight into this.
Is there anywhere where people can find you online if they want to follow on?
Yeah, they can follow me on my Twitter and Facebook.
My Twitter is akmur2 and my Facebook is like my name if you type my name on the channel it will appear.
Looking forward to seeing you in the near future.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me. We'll see you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.
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Welcome to Kedavp Here, a podcast being recorded with pays of painkillers. I'm your host, Rio Wong. I'm fucking dying. Yeah.
I'm your host via Wong. I'm fucking dying.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Phantom episode. You've been waiting for it.
Here it is.
Yeah. The other thing that's dying was dying, has died.
Sort of was a bunch of French colonists in Algeria.
Yeah. Yeah.
The French Empire as a whole, one could say.
Yeah, thank God. Jesus Christ.
Why did why did you let these people have an empire?
Terrible idea. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. What is it?
What's it? Not an empire.
The abroad France, right?
Like the little parts of France, which just happened to be in Africa.
Totally a normal thing.
Which particular part of the French Empire are we talking about?
Many, many such cases of French French Empire taking L's. Not that that's unique, to be fair. Also British Empire.
Took a lot of L's.
Yeah, so today we're talking about Algeria, and I think...
One of the things that I sort of realized about
how the Algerian Revolution is remembered in the West is...
about how the Algerian revolution is remembered in the West is.
OK, so there's there's the kind of the Frank Herbert
reaction where they saw people who were Muslim in the streets and were like, holy shit, it went insane for 70 years.
Yeah, yeah. To be fair, to be fair, that was also poorly
partly being driven mad by the Portland Dunes, which like, you know, like I get sometimes
sometimes you're driven, you're driven completely insane by dunes.
But, you know, so there's like that's there's a sort of reactionary memory of it.
There's a sort of memory that functions in inside of like the American military,
where, you know, Algeria, as you remember, it is one of those sort of like examples of failed kind of insurgency.
Yeah. And then there's there's the memory inside of the American left,
which is largely confined to Fanon and the movie The Battle of Algiers.
Yep. Classic movie, to be fair.
Yeah. Great movie.
Like nothing, nothing good. Good movie.
However, comma, this is a real issue because the Battle of Algiers, again, great movie
ends in 1957.
Fanon, great theorist, dies in 1961.
Now notably Algeria gains independence 1962. So, OK, the issue with this is that people kind of broadly know
the outlines of the first Algerian Revolution, but the second Algerian Revolution,
the one where the Algerian working class
sees as the control of the means of production, attempts to run them autonomously,
is just has completely faded into the midst of history.
I talk about it. No one has any idea what the fuck I'm talking about.
And this is kind of startling because, you know, up until
that there's probably like there's like a four year span
where the Algerian Revolution is the sort of like capital S,
capital R social revolution.
Like it's the big one is the one people all over the world
taking inspiration from and then it kind of, you know, it flounders out for reasons that we're going to talk
about and also the Cultural Revolution starts and everyone lashes onto that.
But it's it's sort of fascinating to me that this the the second part of the
revolution and the part that everyone was really excited about which is the
core of the revolution being workers
self-management and that being the sort of great theoretical innovation of Algerian socialism,
that has just completely faded from memory. It's just gone.
And so today we're talking about that revolution. Unfortunately,
one of the most detailed studies on this, I'm
deciding from a lot is in Clegg's work yourself management in Algeria.
Now, this is a good book.
However, comma Clegg is.
He's he's he's a very specific kind of cremogyne Marxist guy.
Yeah, I'm familiar with that kind of guy.
Yeah, it's like the back third of
this book is him engaged in a protracted ideological war with Fanon over the
nature of nature of revolutionary consciousness which is largely pointless
and goes nowhere so many such cases you know but it is a very very detailed and
very useful account of what actually happened after the first revolution, like after the French are forced to pull out of Algeria.
And what happens effectively is, well, we need to go back a little tiny bit. So.
know, there is a staggering slaughter of people who attempt to resist French colonialism. A lot of the sort of techniques that are going to be used in Vietnam, that are going to be
used all over the world in counterinsurgencies are developed in Algeria in this period.
I'm going to read a quote from Clag about what they were doing.
The use of air power in Napalm to clear cover made movement inside the country almost impossible.
The construction of mined and electrified barriers along the border with Tunisia and
Morocco kept the better trained and armed elements of the Army de Liberation Nationale
from coming to support the guerrillas and moving in supplies.
One of the most successful moves encountering guerrilla activity was the policy of regroupment
initiated by General Chalet.
This strategy, learnt from the British and Malaysia, involved moving the rural population out of areas favorable to the
guerrillas and resettling them in camps under military guard. An estimated 2
million peasants were treated this way, creating vast social and economic
problems for the future. So like they put 2 million people in concentration camps.
Yeah, yeah. Calling it regroup more is a fucking exercise in like, in marketing.
Like rarely have I seen something so nefariously named.
Like we're regrouping them parentheses in a fucking concentration camp.
Yeah, and this is this is a strategy that, you know, so the British sort of start doing this in Malaysia.
A lot of it's derived from attempts to counter.
And this isn't really an episode about that
Udgerian Revolution, but I want to talk about this a little bit.
It's designed as a way to counter sort of Maoist insurgency
campaigns, which becomes the new template for insurgencies.
Yeah, because it works really well.
And the key thing of Maoist, well,
there's a couple of things, obviously. But one like the key thing of Maoist, like, well, I mean, there's a couple things, obviously,
but like one of the key elements of it is this is this line for Mao.
Is it like the gorilla moves to the people like a fish moves to the sea?
Yeah.
So it's about like, it's about building social bases such that, you know, gorillas can move in and out of communities
and not get turned in and stuff and use them as terrain.
I've had that particular Mao phrase paraphrased to me, I think sometimes for people
who are aware it comes from Mao, sometimes people who probably have just sort of come to it through
their own understanding or heard it but not realized the source of it, by people who are
certainly not Maoists all over the world. Like I've heard it in the Middle East, I've heard it in in the Middle East. I've heard in Africa. I've heard it in Asia. Like it's a it's a it is a very important thing.
And like it yeah, it does make guerrilla warfare easier
if you can rely on the population.
This is something that's propagated through because because of the success
of of sort of Mao's like guerrilla insurgency.
This is something that's propagated through.
I mean through the through obviously like through through communist parties,
but I mean like a lot of Islamist groups also pick it like pick up a lot of elements
of it, because a lot of those groups are trained in the PLO camps in the valley in
in Jordan. And so like a lot of groups like all over the world of completely
unrelated ideologies all sort of pick this stuff up.
And the British response to this is the British are fighting a communist insurgency in Malaysia.
And they're like, OK, we're going to do concentration camps for our purposes.
So obviously, this is a you know, this is an unfathomable atrocity.
But it has enormous effects even after the war ends, because suddenly,
you know, OK, like the war ends, the French are gone.
But, you know, two million people have been taken from their homes
and locked in and locked in camps.
And this has enormous.
You know, I mean, this is this is enormous economic effects.
And the second thing that has really sort of stunning economic effects are
so there there there's been a class of people in Algeria
called the Colognes who are basically the colonists.
They're not actually all French. A lot of them are from other European countries.
But they come to be this sort of hardcore French ultra ultra nationalist sort of
fascist turbo racists.
I guess they're they're they're not quite the Rhodesians, but
I they're they're only not quite the Rhodesians because they didn't stay to fight it out.
And when when the French lose the war, when French pull out,
these people just flee like all of them.
We're talking hundreds of thousands of people just are gone.
I'm going to read another quote from Clegg because, you know,
if these people had merely left,
I think a lot of what's going to happen in this revolution goes a lot better.
But they didn't just leave.
Well, in June, a policy of scorched earth was declared
inaugurating an orgy of destruction with his dream crumbling.
The colonist response was to destroy this world.
Which I think is a really sort of elegant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's actually very well written.
And it's funny, it's this thing that, again, like
you see replicated so often.
And there was this slogan that they use at the start of the Syrian civil war,
like a sad or we burn the country. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's this real, you know, so what what the what the comments end up doing is they end up just destroying.
Yes. Yeah. Everything they can get their hands on, they're destroying houses, they're especially destroying any kind of sort of factor of technical equipment, anything they could find.
They're burning, they're lighting on fire and some of the other thing about.
OK, so I'm sure he is a colonial economy.
Right. And the structure of the colonial economy is such that, you know, if you are a.
Anyone who has any kind of technical or managerial experience are all colonists, right? Everyone else in the country is either doing subsistence farming or has been fed in as like these sort of like seasonal workers or really, really badly paid sort of contract workers on the on the sort of like cash crop agricultural farms, a lot of orange production, stuff like that.
And so when the colonists flee the country, suddenly, like the entire technical managerial class, everyone with technical experience and also all of the bosses and the entire bourgeoisie are just gone. And this takes everyone by surprise.
The FLN had assumed the FLN's the kind of like umbrella organization that carried out
the revolution. They it kind of falls apart very quickly because it's not really a coherent
ideological group. It's just a sort of banner that everyone who was fighting kind of falls apart very quickly because it's it's not really a coherent ideological group.
It's just a sort of banner that everyone who is fighting kind of attaches themselves to.
Yeah, this is quite common, right?
Like national fronts or like a popular fronts very often do this post-revolution.
Yeah, they disintegrate.
But but they had all expected that the colonists were going to stick around.
And they don't because they're turbo racists. Right.
And the thought of having to live in an Algeria world by Algeria, this was like,
Nope, I will fucking literally light the world on fire and flee to France.
You know, what else is going to light the world on fire and cause people to
flee to France?
Is it the products, products and services that support the show?
Yeah.
So how, how fucking good they are.
It's going to, it's going to cause the world to burn and make people flee the show. Yeah, so how fucking good they are, it's going to cause the world to burn
and make people flee to France.
Yeah, I have to think about that.
When I think about how big my pile of gold is,
I think that it's too small.
I'd better just bend it all down and move to France.
["The Last of Us", by The Bachelorette plays in background.]
And we are back. Now enter here, the heroes of this episode, the workers council or very specifically.
So this is a French colony.
So in France and in Spain and in sort of, I guess, the romance languages. There was a concept called autogestión.
I'm pronouncing it really badly because I'm reading the French version of it
and trying to pronounce it half in Spanish, the only one of these languages
I can even sort of speak.
But it so it means self-management.
And it basically it has this context of sort of like workers,
democratic self-management, right?
If you're if you're doing it as the own your
Like the workers of a factory have taken over the factory and are running it themselves
the most prominent example and at this point of
Self-management is Yugoslavia now this it's very the Yugoslavian version is very very weird
But as a way basically to tell the Soviets to fuck off
very weird, but as a way basically to tell the Soviets to fuck off. Yugoslavia adopts a very different kind of model of socialism than everyone else's.
So their models based on the quote unquote, the withering away of the state.
So there, you know, you have basically these like reasonably democratic
like workers co-ops.
That are the sort of that are sort of the productive basis of society
and these these co-ops sort of compete against each other on the market.
But on the other hand, there is a like a very large level of workers control
that's different from, you know, like the U.S.,
which is just a pure dictatorship of.
Your boss in the workplace tells you what to do,
and if you don't do it, you get fired.
Yeah.
And so Algeria gets there, has their own version of self-management.
But unlike Algeria, which is sort of effectively imposed by the top down
from the Communist Party in Algeria, what happens is you have this this enormous mass of workers who used to work on these plantations, used to work in factories.
There's these huge colonial agricultural states.
And what happens is with with the entire ruling class gone.
And when I say the entire ruling class, we're talking from all the way up from, you know, the highest level government officials through all of your sort of capitalist bosses
right down to sort of the middle management guys are gone.
Yeah. All people just have disappeared.
So what happens is workers start taking over.
All of their all of their workplaces and they start forming workers councils.
Right now. This is this is driven largely by I mean, there's there's there's
there's a few different drivers.
There's we'll get to the ideological aspect.
A lot of it is that these people have no money
and no one else is going to run it.
So they're there.
The the the the workers who have now seized all the stuff are like, OK, well, we're going to
we're going to get the money we need to survive by running,
by running all the stuff ourselves.
Yeah. And so this sort of starts in 1962.
And it it sweeps across the country very quickly.
I mean, there's a lot of rare regions where it never really takes hold.
But largely, what's happening is that permanent workers
who had been who had been workers at these firms seize control of them.
This has benefits and downsides.
The benefit of it is so there's an attempt by the sort of the new Algerian sort of Bushwazi, the sort of like small faction of Algerian capitalists to buy up all this land.
And there's a bunch of really funny stories of these guys buying these estates and showing up in the workers
committee, just kicking them out.
Yeah, yes, I've seen that is.
This is extremely funny.
Yeah. There's also issues.
So part of what's going on is this is this is the sort of
this is the permanent workers taking over the stuff with their people.
Right. And so a lot of times they'll they'll kick out seasonal workers.
Because, yeah, so it's not it's not perfect.
And there's a lot of issues with it, right, because this is this is all being
formed effectively spontaneously by a bunch of extremely desperate people.
That's what I was just obviously like, because it's me.
The point of comparison I'm thinking of is the Spanish Civil War, right?
Yeah. And workers self-management.
But there you have a workforce, which is, which
has been working towards collectivization for more than a decade in some cases.
And also like, and this is a point actually that gets missed a lot in
online discourse about the Spanish Civil War, perhaps because people don't
know as much as they think they do.
That like there were anarchists in all kinds of roles like when people talk about their their root economy
Whatever like they were absolutely anarchist non-commissioned officers from the military who they relied on heavily
For advice and the same is true with the collectivized workplaces, right that there were anarchists in many roles
You know in shop stewards and and and things like that obviously not in like the higher management roles
I think yeah doing that is kind of incompatible with anarchism.
But obviously what we're dealing here with is anarcho-syndicalism for the most part.
The FI was more of a purist anarchist group.
But there you had people who had been working towards this for a long time,
who had been planning for it, and who did have people with a variety of experiences.
And I think oversight might be a better word than management perhaps or like sort of organization,
but they were very successful.
But that didn't just happen overnight.
It often gets presented as if it did, as if on like the 18th of July, these people were
just sort of going to work and by the 20th, they were fully formed anarchists running their own workplaces, but that's absolutely not the case.
Yeah, and I'll judge you as the exact opposite of this, which is there's a very low level of
political consciousness. Organization is almost non-existent because, so I mean,
the kinds of organizations that had existed are, you know, you have these sort of Vanguard cells, but those are largely rural.
And then you have there are some unions, but they're not very, they're not very large because they've been outlawed.
Yeah, there's repression, right?
Yeah, like unbelievable oppression.
Colonial context is extremely important.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, obviously, neither me or I is blaming Algerian workers
for not not being in Catalonia.
No. Yeah. Like this is this is this is the French's fault.
And, you know, but but this is such cases.
Yeah. But this seizure really takes everyone by surprise
because all of the sort of leaders of the FLN, all leaders of the various
factions had assumed that either they were going to sort of do.
I don't know. There's ideological conflict, but they
all assume that.
They're going to do some kind of like giant state led
industrialization project, right?
Whether it's a socialist one, whether it's more Islamist one.
And then suddenly they're there now all, you know, OK, well,
your economy is now on the Yugoslavian
self-management model because all of these workers have just seized all their workplaces.
Yeah. Now, there are there are a few organizations that are are politically very supportive of this.
Um, the the UGTA, which is Algeria's big sort of trade union, are very politically socialist and they
they are really the only people
in this entire country who are who are an organized political body
who actually want to see this thing work.
And so they do a lot of work helping helping workers set up
their their committees and spreading the revolution.
Their plan is to use this against any attempt to set up
basically a dictatorship by, you know, it's OK okay. This is where it gets sort of interesting because
Very explicitly they're trying to stave off sort of Soviet style social dictatorship, right?
They are and their plan is we're going to use we're going to use the workers councils as the as the basis of of an actual sort of workers democracy against against the sort of orthodox like marcus lena stuff and everything else going on to use the army is a lot more orthodox marcus lena list then.
Then you the workers committees with unions and so a lot of parts of the countries in the west the army just rolls through knocks off the workers committees and sees the land for itself.
is the land for itself.
And that's a fiasco. But now, pretty very quickly, Ben Bella, who emerges as as the
as the leader of Algeria after a set of
political maneuvering that we're not going to get into here,
is basically forced to in 1963, set a bunch of decrees saying that,
yeah, these guys are the people who run the economy, et cetera, et cetera.
But there's there I want to talk, I want to actually get into something that is really not
talked about in 99 percent of the accounts of stuff, which is how do these councils actually work?
Because, spoiler alert, this whole thing is going to fail and all these people are going to be
crushed. And a lot of that has to do with how this thing set up, which is very badly because
it is a system designed by Marxists and they're very sympathetic Marxists to a broad extent.
But unfortunately, the way that these that this is set up is that, OK, so there's an
assembly, right? That's like all the workers in the firm are in this assembly.
The assembly elects this workers council,
which has like 10 people.
And then that council elects the management committee,
which is the people who actually do the management.
So it has a president.
And there's also a director supposed
to represent the interests of the state or whatever.
And the issue with this is that it's designed specifically
to keep power out of the hands of workers directly, right?
That giant assembly, it can't actually make policy.
The only thing it can do is approve plans or disapprove
plans set down by the management committee.
Got it.
OK.
And these people at the management committee
are presumably representatives as opposed to delegates, right?
Yeah, they're representatives. They they also have three year terms.
And they can't be recalled.
I think they can, but it's really hard.
OK. And the other thing that that that sort of destroys this is that they those
they there's a lot of sort of like election rigging by the state
who doesn't want these things to be actual sort of democratic.
And the this leads into the bigger issue, which is state control.
And this is this is where I think really there's something that Clegg
doesn't get into much because Clegg is a Marxist.
But this is where the Marxism of it all really comes into play.
Oh, but first, do you know who's not a Marxist?
Oh, yes, almost certainly.
Yeah, not Marxists. I think we I think. Yeah, not Marxists.
I think we I think we can say not Marxists.
All right, we are back.
So the biggest issue here, and this is something that was kind of true
in both Algeria and in the others,
kind of big Marxist self-management experiments in Chile, which is that these the self-managing firms
don't have control over a lot of the things that they need.
Right. So in Algeria, when the state essentially tries to absorb all of this stuff,
when it when it gets sort of legitimized under these decrees,
I there are a lot of issues.
One is that these self managing organizations don't have control over their own money.
So, yeah, you're you're paid.
You're getting paid by the state.
Right. And you so you give the state your money and then they they pay you.
And this becomes a real issue because the state goes, oh, well,
the people in these self-managing things are actually like privileged workers.
So they have permanent pay freezes.
And also you can't reinvest your profits back into the firm,
which is a real issue.
It's just like a horrible combination of like and cap and and like
Stalinist, like it without.
Yeah, I don't I don't want to like derail us too much.
But this again, like it's a distinct.
It's so much worse than the Spanish system.
It's so much worse.
Like every part of it is set up to fail.
Yeah. And I think this shit always get this is the sort of discourse.
I am now going to derail us. I'm sorry.
This is the kind of like the online, like a hammer and sickle
in bio discourse that we, that we see so often, right.
And you don't have to pay attention to those people.
And like, you probably shouldn't, but just, just to like put it out there.
I think like anarcho-syndicalism is right there and it allows for the
like unions and syndicates, which overlook a whole industry to coordinate
between workers, committees, and ensure that things get done and people get treated with
dignity and they also make enough money or have access to the resources that they need
to survive.
And when we try and cut the corners off this or kind of make a little collage between this and
Marxist Leninism or state socialism like
neither thing works and we just end up with this kind of terrible hodgepodge in which
It doesn't it doesn't function right but that doesn't necessarily mean that workers self-management itself is invalid as a concept it
Yeah, and and there's a lot of things here that, you know, so the the the the the
one of one of the big criticisms of this at the time by
socialist intellectuals is people going, well, there's not coordination.
You know, the firms competing against each other, there's not broad economic
coordination. It's like, well, yeah, that's because that's because the state
controls all their finances.
They don't they don't have the ability to do coordination with each other.
And the big thing and this is the thing that really actually
kills this is that.
So I claim calls it marketing is controlled by the state,
but that's not quite what's going on.
The other thing is controlled by the state is the state is has the responsibility
or and is the people who are in charge of selling the products.
And they just fucked this up completely.
They can't they can't figure out how to get like the fruit
that's being produced sold.
Right. The problem here isn't is an output.
It's at the state.
The state is doing things like I mean, sometimes sometimes they'll
they'll have all these oranges.
So a lot of the the Algerian agricultural economy is set up
as a cash crop economy and you're supposed to fight you.
So, OK, and it's never really worked very well.
But the Algerian state just completely shits the bed.
And there's I mean, this is like, I mean, we're talking like tons of fruit.
It's just sitting there rotting.
A lot of the time, what they do is they just dump it onto the French market
at for like basically zero cost.
And so and so you you you get these things and you look at the sort of profit loss thing and, you know, the sort of like right wing parts of the state
in this is, oh, I guess you like I guess they are right wing.
But the sort of anti self-management part of the state are going, oh, well,
look at these these firms are hemorrhaging all this money.
It's like, well, yeah, they're hemorrhaging money because instead of actually
selling the goods, you guys are throwing all of their goods into a dumpster.
Like, yeah, of course, it's not working, right?
Yeah, and this is a struggle of like post-colonial economies.
If you, in the French colonial system, like they've decided that Algeria is going to be
the place that makes oranges for the entirety of the French, I'm just sort of manufacturing
example empire here, then evidently once you secede from that empire,
you now have a fuck ton more oranges than you need for Algeria.
So you're now going to have to navigate.
Oh, and you might not have enough.
They can't even figure out how to sell to other Algerians to that.
That's that's the best problem with the sort of state control.
The market is they can't they can't do either because they're completely
because the bureaucrats that they're running this are completely incompetent.
Right. Yeah, I mean, one could argue the state's
impossible incapable of advocating resources equally or fairly.
But yes, even so, they've done a bad job, even by state standards.
Yeah. And the and the and the subsequent issue, too, is because all the finances
are controlled by the state, even the firms that are profitable.
And there are firms that are very profitable.
They can't reinvest their profit back into, you know, improving efficiency
or doing the basic things that workers need, which is having money to eat,
because that money is that all of that sort of capital is just being eaten by the state.
And so, you know, there's a quote, Clay again.
As the president of a self-managed farm said to me in 1965,
in this situation, how can we persuade the worker that he is no longer working for a capitalist exploiter?
And like, well, yeah, he objectively is, right?
He is, he is, like, the state is stealing all of his money and then doing some stupid bullshit with it.
Yeah, I love that they're like, that they're not quite joining the dots there.
Like, these guys don't seem to be getting it.
Like, maybe they do, maybe they do get it.
And this is this is one of these things where, you know,
like I could click, click, doesn't really draw this line because she just
I mean, click just refuses to talk about
either Hungary or the Spanish Revolution at all. Right.
And this is where she's.
You really don't like.
Well, he's not an ML.
Like, that's the thing.
He he he is a he is a pro worker self management guy. Right.
But he's a Marxist pro worker self management guy. Yeah.
So he's attributing the failure this largely to like, well,
there wasn't sufficient consciousness.
So it's like, well, no, like this system,
even if everyone wanted to work, this system couldn't have worked
because it was set up in such a way that it was it was.
And this is something, you know, this is part of what I want to talk to you
about this was that if you look at the way that the
that the Spanish system is set up, right, it's it's built off of
coordination, like basically like sectoral coordination
between everyone who's doing a thing, right?
It's built on resource sharing if I'm remembering my stuff, right? I mean they have basically
They have a banking union and people put their profits into the into the banking union and then people can get money from the banking
Union to reinvest it in other places. Yeah, I think that's correct. It's also
Like yeah, like this this I guess, would that be called vertical integration
if it's the whole sector, even if it's.
They, they, they do this thing which takes advantage of both of the advantages of self
management gives you, which is one like, and like sort of, you know, and it was like socialist
self management, right?
You have the advantage of scale, which is that you're now instead of competing against
each other, you're now coordinating an entire sector, right?
And you're producing stuff that you're producing stuff
for need.
And then on the other hand, you have the other thing
that's supposed to be the advantage of self-management,
which is that the workers themselves,
who are the people who are supposed to know,
understand the production process the best
can make decisions over how they're going to do things.
But then if you look at the Algerian system, because it's because it's set up by Marxist, it's specifically designed such that basically
the like you're you're you're instead of you actually.
Managing yourself, you're you're just electing your boss
and then your boss manager. Right. Yeah.
That's not actually good.
This is it's weird because looking at this, right.
This is actually a worse system
in terms of self-management, I think, in a lot of senses than the Chinese one,
because the Chinese system is not designed for self-management,
but you can't fire people.
So because you can't fire people, you have to listen to what people think
and what people sort of do, whereas this system.
I don't know,
it pisses me off because this is a revolution that very, very easily could have worked.
But it was, you know, there's intentional sabotage by the state because most of the
sectors of the state don't want this to work. And then just structurally from the way it's set up,
it's doomed to fail from the
beginning.
And the consequence of this is that in 1965, Ben Bella gets overthrown in a coup by another
sort of basically the army, a sort of state socialist faction, the army, and they hold
on to power by basically turning Algeria into an oil economy.
Yeah. And dismantling this entire thing. on to power by basically turning Algeria into an oil economy.
Yeah, and dismantling this entire thing. And it I don't know, it makes me really angry because.
The the like the actual Algerian ruling class had the right idea,
and then they just got completely fucked by everyone
who was supposed to be leading them or, you know, people who
were supposed to be selling the stuff that they made, people who are supposed to be reinvesting,
all the people who ended up with the financial control just completely screwed them.
And I don't know, it's it's it's really it's it's it's really depressing
in a lot of ways. But on the other hand, right, like it does it doesn't
it doesn't have to go like this, right?
You don't have to hand control of your workplace
over to some fucking guy in the the the department of
agricultural waste management or whatever.
So he can use your oranges for fertilizer.
Like you can simply not do this.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know the exact situation that these workers found themselves in and
maybe there was, you know, like a degree of sort of need to get reproducing in order to
solve hunger issues.
But yeah, you simply do not have to do that as many examples.
I'm thinking of the collectivized farms in Spain as well,
because perhaps they would have been a better example, right?
I guess there it was slightly different because it was somewhat of a collectivized community
that in turn collectivized the land as opposed to collectivizing the agricultural labor.
And then you have this sort of source of labor, which is not inherently tied to the land that like, you know, when, when there was a need, like, for instance, I'm writing a book right now, I'm writing about the Dorutti column, and like, they would, because they had less rifles, and they had fighters, they would rotate their fighters off the front line during the harvest time, and have people help with the harvest. And then they didn't like need those people the rest of the year. Right.
So they were able to incorporate like temporary surges in labor without it being like destructive
to their model, because it was the idea was like a collective community, as opposed to
a collective, as opposed to like just the workplace being this island of, of,
of pseudo collectivization, like, like you're seeing in Algeria. Also shout out to the iron
column who I've been writing about recently, who solved their supply side issues by, by leaving
the frontline and raiding the cops because they didn't have enough guns either. So they simply
took them from the cops. Hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Incredibly based. Yeah. Very big.
Yeah. I think I think that's kind of the point that I want to end this on,
which is that, you know, this is something that that contributes
to the collapse of of Slavia, too, is that.
If you know, the the the dichotomy they got forced on.
People in the 20th century was you can either choose.
To okay so you your choices are you get a you get a sort of you you get a sound is planned economy completely run by the state or you get a bunch of workers cooperatives competing each other and those are like your those are your two models of socialism.
competing against each other. And those are like your, those are your two models of socialism. And those both suck and both are set up to fail from the beginning because they're not
actually, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're not actually doing the thing. You're
not actually having the entire, the entire class as a class, you know, abolishing itself
and then also managing, managing production in such a way
that people are cooperating to produce what people need instead of everyone fighting over
like, either it will instead of either the state setting a steel quota and having that
be the entire goal of the economy or like 17 co-ops in the like, both producing all
producing the exact same kind of coffee trying to figure out who can produce it more cheaply.
Yeah, yeah, we can do better.
Yes, we can and we have and we should try for I guess I know people want to read about the Spanish Revolution.
This is shit ton of books on libcom.
I would say that book is pretty good. The Senate and the Spanish Revolution. Murray Bookchin has a book about the heroic years of Spanish anarchism. Abel
Paz has many books. Yes, you can spend time on libcom and read a lot about collective
production in the Spanish Revolution and for free, which is nice.
Yeah, this has been Nickatapin here. Go take over your workplace and then also help everyone else take over theirs and coordinate with each other.
Yeah, that would be very nice.
And then then we'll do an interview with you on the podcast.
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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart.
And also about militant resistance, which is an aspect of things falling apart.
As things fall apart, any country,
you get people who crawl out of the woodwork
to either accelerate that process
or try to reverse it in their own lives.
And some of those people use weapons to do that.
Now, we've talked a bunch on this show
about the various forms that militant resistance can take.
We've chatted extensively on this network about Rojava.
We've talked a fair amount, James Stout and I, James is on the show
today, by the way, hello James.
Hi, Robert.
We've talked a lot about Myanmar and the, the Jinzi revolution there,
3d printing of firearms and kind of this, this war that these, these people
have been waging in the jungle successfully in
order to overthrow the military dictatorship of their country.
But we haven't talked a whole lot about naval warfare.
And this is because for most of history, for most of at least our recent history, naval
warfare was not really a thing insurgents could engage in.
You could every now and then if a ship was docked or something, you might
be able to get off a bombing, right?
Like what happened to the USS Cole.
And I'm not expressing general sympathy for everybody who does a militant insurgent act,
but I am talking about like the overall kind of like tactics and strategy that underline
how that stuff works.
And one of the things that's really changed in the last couple of years, since 2022, you could really mark it out.
Is that irregular non-state groups can now to an extent never before possible
challenge the sea power of nations like the United States, which has an
unquestioned, previously at least unquestioned level of dominance and
sort of conventional Naval power.
Um, and we talked about conventional naval power in the 21st century.
That means aircraft carrier groups, right?
The U S has 11 of them, which if I'm not mistaken is more than the rest of the
world, we have a lot of fucking aircraft carriers and previously that was
believed to be, you know, a guarantee of both dominance on sea.
And if, and if a carrier group or two is in the area, you generally, we generally,
the United States generally could count on having air supremacy.
You certainly wouldn't expect it to be countered.
You know, you could expect like, for example, if we were to have a conflict over Taiwan,
the Chinese Navy could, or the Chinese army could potentially interdict a carrier group
using ground-based, you know, ground to see anti-ship missiles or something like that.
But we're increasingly in an era in which these kind of irregular non-state groups have access to similar technology and have access to kind of even more bespoke technology like drone swarms
that poses a unique threat to the naval dominance of the United States. And I wanted to start, you know, we've got a two-parter here. We're going to be talking about the Houthis in Yemen.
We're going to be talking about the Ukrainian Navy,
which does not really have much in the way of boats,
but it's still challenging the Russian Navy.
And we're going to be talking about rebels in Myanmar.
We're going to start today, we'll be talking about the Houthi.
And to understand Houthi resistance to the United States
and why a militant group has had such success
challenging US Naval power, you first have to understand how theyi resistance to the United States and why a militant group has had such success challenging US Naval power.
You first have to understand how they got to the point
that they're at right now,
where they are kind of in a lot of ways a near state actor,
not a world power actor, but near state actor.
They're probably more capable in some ways
than the state of Yemen, which they are at war with.
Yeah.
And to get how they got to that point, you have to understand what happened with their
fight against the Saudis.
So the Houthi movement or Ansar Allah, which means supporters of God, is a Zaydi Shia Islamist
movement run primarily by members of the Houthi tribe.
Zaydi Islam is a bit of an odd duck.
You'll hear it described as, yeah, like a Shia segment. It's really
probably more accurate to look at it as like, it's kind of in between Shia and Sunni. Of
like the Shia kind of denominations, it's kind of closest to being Sunni. I'm not an
expert on any of this, but it comes out of a guy named Zayd ibn Ali's rebellion against
the Umayyad Caliphate, which did not succeed, but we still have the Zaydi.
What matters for our purposes today is that the Houthi
as a movement came out of opposition
to the Yemen's president, Abiy Abdullah Saleh,
who was corrupt as hell.
He was seen as corrupt and he was in fact corrupt as hell.
And it was specifically they were accusing him
of basically being bribed by the Saudis.
That's where like the Houthis started the rebellion
in around 2003.
So they began as a resistance movement
to this corrupt president, Salah.
They adopted the slogan, God is the greatest,
death to America, death to Israel,
and a curse upon the Jews, which is still their slogan.
So they are not what you would call unproblematic.
Again.
But they're out there. They're not hiding. They're not what you would call unproblematic. Again, they're putting it out there.
They're not hiding it.
You don't have to dig for this stuff.
They're not using the triple parentheses.
They just say the thing.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, part of why we're talking about irregular naval warfare is
that who knows what the next few years are going to include.
It's always a long shot, but there's not a 0% chance that people listening to this
will wind up engaged in some sort of irregular conflict.
And it's important to understand how modern technology
has changed the dimensions of how that works
from like a naval perspective.
So that's why we're talking about this.
Now, Houthi armed activities against the Saudis
really kicked off and hit a major level after
the Yemeni civil war, which officially started in 2014.
The new president of Yemen, who was not Saleh at this point, asked for military support
from the international community, which in this case meant the Saudis.
So the Saudis, it's called a coalition.
There's technically some other people involved, but it's the Saudis. And the president of Yemen calls in the Saudis when his forces are kicked out of
the capital of Yemen, Sanaa by Houthi fighters, by the way, when the Houthi
take Sanaa is when they get their first cruise missiles, uh, largely just like a
bunch of scuds and stuff.
So like old Soviet shit, right?
Operation decisive storm is the name that Saudi Arabia gives to their intervention in Yemen.
And a lot of people will say this is basically
Saudi Arabia's Vietnam,
not an inappropriate comparison to make.
So the Saudis start bombing the shit out of the Houthi,
and then they send in ground forces
because bombing the shit out of people who are motivated
never really works as well as you want it to, right?
Yeah, a lot of people have been bombing a lot of people.
I mean, you can destroy a lot of shit.
You can kill a lot of civilians.
And kill a shitload of civilians, yeah.
But many, many such cases,
if you're looking around the world right now.
But yeah, one thing it doesn't tend to do
is really to get rid of motivated fighters.
Yeah, when you've got an air force,
everything looks like Dresden.
So the Saudis try that for a while,
they send in ground forces,
they carry out naval blockades.
None of this does much,
but make the Houthis more determined.
And they exit this conflict.
I mean, they're not,
it's not like you wouldn't say completely done,
but they exit this conflict with the Saudis a lot stronger,
right, a lot more organized
with a lot better weapons, right?
And a lot of this, you know, so by the way,
I should also state that like now the Houthis
are on the side of former president Saleh.
It's a complicated conflict, right?
But at the end of this all,
they have a shitload of Iranian weapons
because Iran is a geopolitical enemy of Saudi Arabia
and they see the Houthis as allies.
And so they spend a lot of time during this conflict
shipping in AGTMs, which are wire guided missiles that are just aces and blasting holes
in Saudi Arabia's tanks, which are U S supplied, if I'm not mistaken as a
general, a lot of Saudi Arabia stuff is U S and like, yeah, basic, most of it.
Right.
Much of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are a lot of contractors over there.
Yeah.
And yeah, the, the Houthis, they make a lot in like waves and kind of people who are following irregular
Conflicts during this period in the late aughts because they're so successful at taking out these tanks that had previously been
Pretty hard to fuck up and it's it's kind of you know now agtms in Ukraine are like one of the dominant weapon systems
That has shaped the battlefield environment, but this is kind of when people start to realize
Oh fuck you know Syria as well
These are this is really going to change a lot about how armor gets used.
And this is also where we start to see the first Houthi deployments of ballistic missiles,
which were used sort of, they initially use them not dissimilarly to how the, um, the
Germans used V2s, right?
In world war two, there were terror weapons and they're used in retaliation for Saudi Arabia's use of a terror weapon, which is us jets and missiles, right, in World War II, they were terror weapons and they're used in retaliation for
Saudi Arabia's use of a terror weapon, which is US jets and missiles, right?
So Saudi Arabia is terror bombing Yemen and Yemen starts firing missiles back at Saudi
Arabia because, you know, that's what you do, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and I'm going to quote here from an article in the national news, quote, Houthi
militias in Yemen launched ballistic, and this is from 2022, Houthi militias in Yemen launched ballistic, and this is from 2022.
Houthi militias in Yemen launched ballistic missiles at Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on
Monday in the latest attack on neighboring states.
Two missiles were destroyed in mid-flight during the attempted terrorist attack on Abu
Dhabi.
While in Saudi Arabia, one was shot down and another missile wounded two civilians in an
industrial area.
So this is giving, that gives you an idea of like where they are a couple of years ago,
and these are not super advanced cruise missiles, as you can see by that kind of like casualty right right they're not doing massive amounts of damage but they're they cause terror right it's scary to know that a missile could come out of the sky and kill some of you.
You know from their perspective how else are they going to strike back they don't have an air force in the conventional sense but what do you see here is by being able to carry out these attacks back on Saudi Arabia who's bombing them despite not having an air force in the conventional sense. But what we do see here is by being able to carry out
these attacks back on Saudi Arabia, who's bombing them
despite not having an air force of their own,
you already see how new technology
and cruise missiles aren't new technology,
but them being available to a non-state actor is fairly new.
You see how that has already changed the game
in terms of like, you can't really say the Saudis don't have this air supremacy.
You can still say they have air supremacy because again, the Houthis don't have much in the way of air power at this point, but they can't stop missiles from hitting their cities entirely, which is a different game than when you know, that's not really a possibility.
than when that's not really a possibility. The Houthi arsenal today includes a dizzying array
of different Iranian, Soviet, Syrian,
and indigenously produced rockets,
including the Berkhan III missiles.
These are for long range strikes up to 1200 kilometers,
and the Badr P-1 rockets,
which have 120 to 160 kilometer range.
They also have old Soviet Frog 7s,
which are useful to about 65 kilometers.
None of these are accurate in cruise missile terms, you know, but they work well enough
for the Houthis purposes.
The Bader P is indigenously produced.
It's made by the Houthis.
It's thought to be based on the Syrian Khaybar rocket.
It is unguided and experts will say it's closer to being functioning as just like dumb artillery
than an actual cruise missile.
UN inspectors claim, quote, it is produced locally from steel tubing, very likely sourced
from the oil industry.
You hear this a lot in a regular conflict in the Middle East.
When I was in Mosul covering the fighting with ISIS, their mortars were made off out
of tubing that was like part of construction projects.
I think that traced back to the oil industry, at least some of it.
Now there are several variants of this rocket,
like the Bodder F and the P-1.
It's not really useful going through all of them.
You can find some interesting studies on this,
but it's not necessary to understand their capabilities.
Their most accurate missile, as far as I can tell,
is the OTR-21 Totschka, which has a range of about 70
to 120 kilometers and a 480 kilogram
payload.
They only are believed to have a few dozen of these, although that's an estimate from
an earlier report.
And these were the ones they would use most regularly on ground targets during the Saudi
intervention when they needed a precise strike.
And I'm going to quote from an article in an analysis of their missile capability.
The Houthis first fired a Tachka missile in September 2015, targeting the coalition's
– that's the Saudis – Safar military base in Mareb, Yemen.
The strike hit a weapon storage depot and killed 60 coalition soldiers.
The Houthis fired another Tachka on December 14, 2015, targeting a coalition base south
of Tayyiz city in Tayyiz, Yemen.
The strike reportedly killed over 120 coalition soldiers.
The most recently recorded Tachka fire
took place on November 19th, 2016,
landing in a desert in Eastern Marib province.
The target was unclear,
but was likely the Arab coalition's Al-Ruweek military camp.
So those are significant casualties.
These are very effective weapons
that do a lot of damage, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, international experts,
and especially if you read just kind of like
think tank analysis of what the Houthis are doing,
we generally say all of this is only possible
because of aid from Hezbollah and Iran, right?
That's the only reason the Houthis have these weapons, right?
Now, there is an arms embargo on Yemen.
This has not stopped anyone from getting weapons to Yemen.
It also, to be very fair here, didn't stop us from selling arms to the Saudis, even though
they're bringing those arms to Yemen, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's a farcical, ridiculous notion.
Yeah, I don't know who you wanna get angrier at here.
I'm not really convinced either side is, you know,
better than the other.
Certainly the Saudis are not better, right?
Right, yeah, it seems like that.
To what extent that matters, I don't know, yeah.
Yeah, it's just a shit situation
for people who are trying to get on with being alive.
Yes, to not get blown up, yes.
Yeah. Really bad situation. I think to not get blown up, yes. Yeah.
Really bad situation.
I think that is overselling it a bit.
Obviously Iranian aid is critical to the Houthis
and that has gotten them a lot
of their advanced weapons systems.
So I don't want to undersell it.
But at this point, they are making a significant chunk
of these cruise missiles,
specifically some of the less advanced ones indigenously.
So because of the state things,
I think it is accurate to say that Iran was crucial
to them getting to that state,
but even without Iranian aid,
there's probably a significant degree of time
to which they could continue to produce some of these weapons
because they are making them themselves.
Yeah, they make 358 missiles, right?
Like loitering, anti-aircraft. Yeah. Even if they make 358 missiles, right? Like loitering and aircraft.
Yeah.
Yes.
Even if Iran is not supplying these, it's probably worth noting that like, this is like
an Iranian design or concept at least.
It allows for a lot of testing, a lot of like a real world kind of versus the NATO US.
Let's the Iranians, yeah, test their weaponry.
And again, I'm not trying to undersell how important they are.
Just you get a lot of like, well,
if we can just cut off Iranian trade,
the Houthis will collapse.
And I don't really think that's accurate anymore.
Yeah, I mean, you know,
I can't say that to a point of certainty, but yeah,
I think that that's kind of wishful thinking
on behalf of some people.
So these are great weapons for a non-state militant group.
Again, this is this stuff.
If you think back 10, 15 years, the idea of a non-state insurgent group having
access to a cruise missile library like this, you know, not to say about like the
other weapons they have, the drones and stuff they have, it would have been kind
of unprecedented.
That said, these are not good weapons in the modern military sense of the word. By which I mean, they are not very accurate for the most part. And compared to more advanced missiles like the kind the United States,
Russia and China have, they are easy to shoot down with the kind of weapon systems aboard, say, US aircraft carriers.
We will discuss that more later.
This is largely
inconsequential to what's been happening in the Red Sea because the vast majority of naval traffic that passes by Houthi territory
does not have access to say phalanx phalanx systems.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you don't have much in the way of anti-missile systems
on a normal container ship.
Yeah, no, you have anti-bridge anti-missile ramming devices.
But like, yeah, it doesn't matter if your missile is not super accurate,
if it can't defeat these expensive systems if you're just
Yeeting them into a narrow channel or anything that goes past right right right yeah
And the Houthis are aware of that and this is again an intelligent strategy on their part
Yeah, you know sometimes people get angry when you say that because they point out horrible things the Houthis have done which I don't want to
Deny, but we're not talking about the overall morality of this conflict. We're talking about how these tactics work, right?
Right.
Like the Nazis had intelligence and strategies as well.
They were terrible fucking people and I'm glad they lost and are mostly dead.
But like, yeah, we would be unwise to just dismiss everything that they've been affected.
No, no.
And likewise, the fact that the Houthis right now, that this interdiction of the Red Sea
is based on an attempt to stop the genocide in Gaza, which I don't think it's going to work, but I, I would like it if somehow it did.
That also does not have an impact on how this is working strategically, right?
You are kind of setting all of that aside to just talk about how this is
functioning, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in recent years, the Houthis have expanded their stock of anti-ship missiles.
In an article for the international Institute for Strategic Studies, a guy named Fabian
Hens writes, quote, the parades, these are Houthi military parades, also featured a variety
of anti-ship ballistic missiles, ASBMs, and guided rockets employing Iranian infrared
or imaging infrared seeker technology.
The 450 kilometer range ASEF appears to be a rebranded ASBM version of Iran's Fata 313 missile,
while the Tangkil represents a previously unseen anti-ship version of the IRGC, Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps, developed 500-km range so higher.
The two designs constitute the heaviest Houthi anti-ship missiles, both with warheads of
more than 300 kg and are of Iranian origin.
Three smaller ASBMs, the 140-km range Fallek, the Mayun, and the Bar al-Amar strongly resemble
Iranian design philosophy and secret technology, but do not precisely match known Iranian systems.
They could either be Iranian systems not observed before and smuggled to Yemen, or Houthi-produced
rockets combined using Iranian guidance kits, not unlike developments made by another Iran
proxy, the Lebanese Hezbollah, in its precision-guided surface-to-air missile program.
Finally, the Houthis have presented an S-75 SA-2 surface-to-air missile, likely from pre-war
Yemeni Army stocks, modified for an anti-ship role using an Iranian guidance kit."
So that's a potent, and probably in some ways more advanced than their general cruise missile stockpile arsenal
for taking out ships.
Now the Houthis are still a non-state force.
When people say online that like the US is fighting Yemen,
not quite accurate
because the Houthis are fighting Yemen too, right?
Like the government, if you're saying government,
you're talking about the people,
well, people in Yemen are fighting each other, right?
Yeah, that is the situation. They are at war with the government each other, right? Yeah, that is the situation.
They are at war with the government of Yemen, right?
That is still the case.
Right.
We're shooting missiles at Yemen, but as a geographical area rather than as a state.
Yeah, exactly.
So the Houthis did not survive years of intense bombing by Saudi Arabia, a nation with an
on-paper extremely modern military, by making a lot of stupid mistakes.
So when they decided to attack shipping in the Red Sea
after Israel launched their genocidal campaign against Gaza,
they did so with a competent plan,
which was to make civilian freight travel in the area
too dangerous to continue.
Their stated goal here is to force damage on Israel
and the Western nations who support it
by hitting the only thing they care about, commerce.
And their actions here have done real damage to international trade.
Not exclusively Western international trade, I should note.
The latest several months have seen them capture or sink a couple of merchant vessels.
They've sunk one.
They've hit at least 16 vessels with drones and missiles.
I found a Bloomberg report with the telling title, Huthy missiles do far more damage to trade
than to actual ships,
which is an interesting way to frame it.
Yeah.
And they're kind of trying to minimize
what's going on here.
Well, 16 strikes is a large number
for the industry to withstand.
There have been even more failed attempts.
Since the Huthys began their attacks,
there have been more than 60 incidents of some kind
in and around the waterway,
including everything from near misses to hijackings
and harassment by armed militants and small boats.
If you look at the damage that's occurred
in most of these incidents, it has not been significant,
says said Marcus Baker, head of the Marine and Cargo
at Marsh, one of the world's top insurance brokers.
So far we haven't seen a total loss caused
by a missile strike.
That changed in March when the Houthis successfully sank
the Ruby Mar, despite more
than a month of US strikes to degrade their capability. The vessel was initially wounded
and drifted unmanned for almost two weeks before sinking. While it listed, a Houthi representative
promised the ship could be salvaged if aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza. The Rubimar
wound up sinking. Now, Houthi strikes have also hit at least one ship bound for Iran
and another
that was going to be delivering aid supplies to Yemen. At least three civilian sailors
have been killed thus far and a strike on a bulk carrier named the True Confidence.
Now, how you kind of interpret this as a success by the Houthi stated goals, which is right
to inflict enough pain on the West and on Israel economically that it forces an earlier end
to what Israel is doing in Gaza, right?
If that's their goal, well, it hasn't happened yet, right?
That's one thing we can say, right?
It has not yet, there's no evidence that I have seen
that it has affected the tempo
of Israeli operations substantially, you know?
Yeah, it would seem there It does not. No difference.
And obviously there's an incentive for the United States and other international actors
to like not let this tactic succeed because you do not want a world in which I think it's
not unreasonable.
There's a thing called the right to protect an international law, which is probably what
the Houthis are claiming they have of the acting under. And that's not like on the face of it, unreasonable, but yes, I think the U S has this very like
strong incentive to not let it become a thing that keeps happening.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm not surprised we sent a carrier group into the area. I'm also not surprised that
that does not seem to be working either, right? If you were judging how the U S is acting and
how the Houthis are acting based on their stated goals, the Houthis have not yet accomplished their stated goal with these strikes.
And the US airstrikes do not seem to have stopped the Houthis from being able to interdict
naval traffic in the Red Sea.
Right?
I've heard some argument that the tempo is reduced since the US got there, but it's also
one clue to me is like, well, they only have a limited amount of these missiles, right?
Has the tempo changed
because they need to marshal their ammunition effectively
or has it changed because there's been damage done
to their infrastructure?
I don't know that we'll ever really get
a perfect answer on that, right?
I know the US claims that it has,
we claim that our strikes have weakened them,
but we always claim that, right?
You know?
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
That's what we're gonna say, right? Yeah, we all lived through that, right? You know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. That's what we're gonna say, right?
Yeah.
We all live through Afghanistan, right?
You're aware of what the US says about shit like this?
Yeah, I mean, it would look pretty bad if we were like,
no dude, we just yeeted billions of dollars of munitions
into the desert.
Didn't do shit!
We could fuck all.
Like, massive L for us.
It's unclear how much damage the Houthis have actually done to the global economy
as a consequence of all this.
Traffic has dropped to the Red Sea by about 35%.
And since the sea carries about 20% of global trade,
that's a major hit,
but it hasn't stopped trade through the Red Sea either.
Again, most trade is still, you know,
most of the pre-war level is still occurring.
35% is a substantial drop.
That is a hit.
And it's hurt a lot of people, right?
It also has not wholly blocked, like there's a longer route you can take around Africa
to get into the Red Sea.
But that makes everything more expensive too.
The country hurt most is actually Egypt, because Egypt depends on the Suez Canal for about
a quarter of its currency earnings.
And you go through the Red Sea to get to the Suez Canal,
for reasons that are obvious if you look at a map, right?
["The Red Sea"]
People who rightly see what's happening in Gaza
as a crime against humanity are unlikely to care too much
about the Egyptian economy, nor should they necessarily.
But the bigger questions here are, can the Houthis actually force an end to what Israel's
doing and how long can they keep this up?
The answer to the first question, can the Houthis force an end to Israeli aggression
is not yet.
And the answer to the second question is how long can they keep this up?
I don't know.
They might be able to eventually bring about international pressure through economic damage.
But given the state of the US presidential election,
I don't see that as particularly likely a method
for changing Netanyahu's behavior.
The answer to the second question is,
how long can they keep this up?
Probably forever, right?
US strikes have been lauded by the US
as damaging infrastructure,
but we don't know that that's true.
Our airstrikes in the region have been launched by the USS
Dwight D.
Eisenhower, the head of the carrier strike group in the red
sea at present.
And again, when you look at kind of like leftists analyzing this,
cause they don't often know much about the military, you'll get a
mix of like people being like, ah, the Houthis are going to kill a
carrier cause they put out a video of like a carrier in their sites
and shit and like, I don't think so guys doesn't seem likely
The these are very well defended ships and they are very competently led look I have looked into the captain of the ship
I've looked into how they have handled the considerable tempo of tax against them. I think that these guys are
Operationally competent as the US tends to be now that doesn't mean they're going to win. The US soldiers tend to be operationally competent most of the time and we also lose
a lot, right? Because operational competence doesn't matter if the operations you're being
asked to undertake have no chance of victory. And that is more or less the situation I think
that these sailors are in, right? Where they're pretty good at sailing around in an aircraft carrier and not
getting killed, but that doesn't mean they're going to defeat the Houthis in
a meaningful way, right?
Right.
And the Houthis are aware of this.
They're in a holding pattern.
They understand that the primary thing that is that all of strategy really
hinges around stopping and denying terrain to the enemy.
And all the Houthis have to do to deny a significant amount of terrain to the entire West is keep
lobbing missiles often blindly in this sea.
And it will make everything more expensive for everybody, keep them in the news and that's
a win.
And it's unlikely, if not basically impossible, that using current methods,
the US Navy and US air power in this area,
based in this carrier group,
is gonna be able to do anything
but spend a shitload of money.
Now US Navy officers in recent weeks
have reported attacks by both anti-ship missiles,
regular cruise missiles, swarms of unmanned aerial drones,
which has led to a general conclusion
among people who analyze this stuff, that drone swarms are goinganned aerial drones, which has led to a general conclusion among people who analyze this stuff,
that drone swarms are going to be a significant part
of naval warfare in the immediate future, right?
You can overwhelm, you know,
the Houthis, you know,
as impressive as their drone swarms are for a non-state actor,
cannot put together the kind of a swarm
that a state actor like China, for example, could.
But people are looking at how close some hits have gotten
to the carriers and being like, well, shit,
if you had a lot more of these things,
you could really cause some fucking problems
for these boats, right?
They have also used unmanned boats
and unmanned underwater vessels.
These are basically unmanned drone boats
with explosives in them, right?
And again, significantly more of these
could potentially do some damage.
This is by any account, the most direct combat
US Naval forces have seen since World War II.
And one thing I, fun thing I've learned
reading articles about the operation
is that our jets now get kill markers
for the bombs they drop.
Yeah, yeah, you could be a drone ace
or a, not a drone, a missile downing ace.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, I don't know,
I guess it makes sense, whatever.
It just, it doesn't look as impressive.
I did some Googling.
I guess you could become an ace shooting down
barrage balloons in World War I, but then again-
Yeah, there was ACAC shooting back at you.
Yeah, yeah, they were very strongly defended.
Yeah, it's a little different.
Or V2 rockets, I guess, in World War II.
I did also find out that the naval,
some of the unmanned underwater vehicles
are replacing, more as a pity, the seals and dolphins
that were previously in US Navy service.
I don't mean seals like,
No, no, no, literal seals and literal dolphins.
Yeah, like literal, ah, ah, ah, seals.
Heartbreaking.
Yeah, very sad.
They live in San Diego.
I often go past them.
You know what? The seals don't want to do war.
Well, again, the marine mammals, the other seals very much.
The dolphins might.
I remember from the documentary Sea Quest that they enjoy naval service.
I think you watched Sea Quest, James.
I've not watched Sea Quest, I'm afraid.
I'm afraid.
It's Star Trek, The Next Generation underwater,
but the role of Picard is played by the sheriff from Jaws
It's actually great. Yeah, I'm looking forward to being exposed to more of this universe
Look, I'm hoping that the the dolphins join force with the orcas and take on the super rich
With that using the skills given to them by the US military. Yeah, inshallah James
So when it comes to the economics of this conflict,
and a lot of this does come down to economics, right?
What the Huthi are doing is an incredibly efficient,
good ass deal for them.
These drones, specifically a lot of what they've done,
they fired missiles, but like those are expensive,
they don't have a lot of them.
I think that at this point,
they would prefer to use those on ships that cannot defend against them. They have sent some manned boats, which
the US has fucking merked immediately and they don't seem to be doing that anymore because
it's dumb and the Houthis didn't get where they did by repeatedly doing dumb shit. What
they seem to have settled on is sending out drone swarms, both of these boats, these underwater
drones and of aerial drones. And these things can cost just a few thousand dollars each.
Some of the biggest ones are probably more like tens of thousands of dollars, but the
Navy missiles that we use to interdict this shit and some of these, they also have some
dumber cruise missiles that are pretty cheap.
The missiles we use to interdict this shit are $2.1 million a shot, right?
This is all in addition to the insane cost of keeping a carrier battle group in the field
and fighting.
It's not at all cheap.
I found one political article that quotes a DOD official admitting, the cost offset
is not on our side.
Now we have some cheaper systems that can work really well on particularly drones.
They can work on missiles too.
We've used them in that.
These are air burst shells fired from the conventional guns on destroyers.
These have worked really well, especially against drones and tests, but they're only
effective from about 10 miles or less away.
In ballistic missile terms, that's extremely close.
You don't want to rely on these for a ballistic missile.
And it's not even all that far away in drone terms, right?
As a result, the US has expanded research into more efficient anti-drone and anti-missile
weapons, including what amounts to laser and microwave weapons that could be fired indefinitely for the cost of electricity.
Given the nature of these weapons, that's not insignificant either, but it's a lot less than 2.1 million is shot.
As is always the case, the kind of fight the Houthis are waging right now has an expiration date.
Right now, any group that can put together a few million dollars
to make hundreds and hundreds of explosive drones, right?
Which a number of groups are capable of could at least exact a substantial toll on a US
carrier battle group, make it spend a shitload of money, potentially even do some damage.
And again, even if this stuff hits an aircraft carrier, you're like very unlikely to see
that thing sink. There's a story that's worth knowing that like,
when we decommissioned one of our aircraft carriers
15 or 20 years ago, they started, they shot it a bunch.
Like they, just to see like how well it would hold up.
And like they could not sink in.
They couldn't sink the fucker.
Like you could do that, you could kill sailors.
It would be a big deal.
If they hit a fucking aircraft carrier and killed some sailors, even if the carrier doesn't kill sailors, it would be a big deal. If they hit a fucking aircraft carrier
and killed some sailors,
even if the carrier doesn't go down,
that's a huge fucking deal.
I don't know that they're capable of doing that,
but it's unlikely they're gonna kill one, right?
Right, yeah, they're gonna send one
to the bottom of the ocean.
Yeah, it's hard to do, right?
They're made not to sink, and they're pretty fucking big.
But one can imagine kind of a future
in which the war the Huthies are waging right now
is rendered kind of impossible because
Weapons like that are positioned permanently around say the Red Sea
Blanketing into the defense grid that basically kill anything fired into the sea
That's something that might happen in the future if this continues
But that's also just the way war works, right?
You know the the Houthis 10 15 years ago wouldn't have been able to wage a war like this against the U S Navy.
They fought the Navy to a standstill.
That's the only way to analyze this.
Right.
And again, that doesn't mean either side is achieving their operational goals.
Right?
The Houthis have not ended the genocide in Gaza and the U S doesn't seem to be
capable of ending the Houthis.
So they fought each other to a standstill in this matter.
And that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago.
So, right.
20 years from now, what's going on will be different.
You know, the fact that the US seems to be pretty close to developing more efficient
anti drone and anti missile weapons that are a lot cheaper to use doesn't mean that non
state actors will not find a way around those.
But that is the situation we're in right now with the Houthis.
And that is the end of this episode.
We're going to get back to you tomorrow for part two,
where we're going to talk about irregular naval warfare
in Ukraine and Myanmar.
James, you got anything else to say?
No, I didn't think so.
You know, it'd be a bad day to be a boat, I guess.
Bad day to be a boat, bad day to be a drone.
They're really suffering in this war.
Yeah, it's a great day to be a military contractor,
which is every day in America. Oh my God, such a good day to be a military contractor, which is every day in America.
Oh my God, such a good time to be a military contractor.
Whether you're doing it for Iran or the United States,
you are in clover right now.
Which is a massive change from the entirety
of this century so far, so that's nice.
Yeah, it's nice to see the military contractors
finally pick up a win.
Yeah, yeah, rare one I wouldn't fit in.
That's been It Could Happen Here.
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Tongue Unbroken Season 2, this podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience,
erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our special two-part series, Irregular Naval Warfare
and You, where James and I teach you how you too can challenge the U.S. Navy's dominance
of the seas or at least the coasts for fun and profit.
Actually today, last episode, we talked about people challenging the US Navy's coastal dominance.
Today we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy.
So that's going to be fun.
And of course, the Navy of Myanmar, which is a bit of a different class from the US and Russian Navy, but no less interesting.
Yeah, it's still fun.
Love to see a boat lose.
Yeah, I just like boats going down, you know, I just hate a boat.
Yeah, yeah, us the Yorkers, many, you just like boats going down. You know, I just hate a boat. Yeah. Yeah. Ask the Yorkers many, many such cases. Yeah. I'm going to start with
Ukraine. And then we're going to throw to James to talk about our friends in
Myanmar and how they have repurposed civilian technology and stolen weapons to
counter a Navy without really having one of their own. But first, Ukraine. In
2014, when the Russian army invaded Eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine lost a significant
portion of its already not that impressive navy.
Most of their boats were just taken by Russia, along with a number of sailors who defected.
A lot of other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes in cities like Sebastopol
to continue serving their country in a war that, a decade later, is still ongoing.
One of these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to flee his home possibly forever
in order to continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's Navy,
Admiral Nezpapa.
He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships, and on paper it is utterly incapable
of challenging Russia's legendary Black
Sea fleet. Since the Age of the Tsars, the Black Sea fleet has been infamous as a pillar of Russian
military power. However, also since the Age of the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly
housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the first time
it's taken unexpected loot.
Yeah, it has a legendary history.
That doesn't mean good.
There's bad legends out there, you know?
Yeah, it's well known.
Yeah, today that enemy is Ukraine.
Since the expanded Russian invasion in 2022,
just two years, Ukraine has destroyed
or badly damaged more than a third of the Black Sea fleet, despite
having no battleships or destroyers in the sea to counter Russian naval power.
They have done enough damage to reopen Odessa and at least one other port on the Black Sea
to international commerce, which has provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic
lifeline.
And that's a remarkable achievement, sinking a third of the Black Sea fleet and re- basically
when you reopen a port,
that means that you have taken away naval dominance
from a country that has a Navy and you don't.
That's pretty good, pretty good stuff.
Over the last two years,
Ukraine had damaged irreparably
or sunk seven active landing ships and one to,
seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't know
the difference. They've they fucked up a lot of boats. They have destroyed a submarine
with sea to ground capability that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser, the
capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva. They've also sunk a supply vessel
and a handful of patrol boats and missile boats and a number of other boats have been
damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties,
especially when you consider that every actually
destroyed vessel, we're looking at a years,
multiple years lead time to replace.
You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore.
Back during the big dub dub dose, the US did,
but nobody really does that anymore.
Not with the big ones at least.
You just can't just roll through that.
We were just yeeting aircraft carriers
into the sea back then.
It's true, just fighting them out.
Yeah, it'll take about a week.
Yeah, it's because Rosie the Riveter
was really riveting at a high speed at that time.
She was quite a riveter.
So at the start of hostilities,
Turkey, which controls access to the black sea, forbade
any additional military vessels or at least military vessels of significant size from
entering the area.
What this means, this has a significant impact on how well Ukraine strikes work because even
if Russia can replace the losses physically, they can't actually get replacements into
the black sea easily.
They can't sail new shit past the Turks.
The Turks are not allowing that right now.
So again, this is a situation that has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has adapted
to countering Russian naval dominance.
It is possible that at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea fleet could be rendered
inoperable in less than two years.
Like if they keep going at this rate, it's like 18 months or something before there's
not really much of a fleet anymore.
Now if Ukraine had accomplished this task with a traditional Navy using standard naval
tactics, this would have been an impressive victory given the disparity in resources between
the two nations.
But they've done all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country,
aerial drones and new bespoke locally produced suicide
drone boats.
This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one RAND Corporation engineer
and analyst Scott Savitz described the Black Sea Fleet as a fleet in being, quote, it represents
a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check
for now.
And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article on the topic to provide a little more
context.
Ukraine has effectively turned around 10,000 square miles in the Western Black Sea off
its southern coast into what the military calls a gray zone, where neither side can
sail without the threat of attack.
James Heapy, Britain's Armed Forces Minister, told a recent security conference in Warsaw
that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat and contended that the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea
was every bit as important as the successful counter-offensives on land in Kherson and
Kharkiv last year.
"'The classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies does not work
now,' Admiral Ney's papa said.
Therefore, we have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning and implementing
work as much as possible."
That article is about a year old or so.
So the Neptune anti-ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nascent arms industry.
Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moskva in April of 2022.
Ukraine also has access to several Western anti-ship missiles, including the Storm Shadow
and Scalp missiles.
I believe the Storm Shadow comes from your folks, right James?
It does, yeah.
Yeah. And these seem to be pretty effective missiles. These are obviously much more advanced.
These are modern naval weapons, right? These are much more advanced than, for example,
the weapons the Houthis have. These are the kind of things that can counter to some extent
modern anti-missile technology. For an example of kind of how that tends to work, they used a barrage of, I believe it was mostly storm shadows, to rain death on the Crimean port of Sebastopol recently.
Seven out of 18 of the missiles fired made it through Russian air defenses, and these damaged or destroyed four landing ships in a single strike.
And these are sizable naval vessels.
This is the most recent attack.
Although as after I wrote this, there was another attack on the Kirch bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place yet. That
seems to have shut it down again. But that gives you an idea of like what you actually
have to do, how much of these missiles you have to put in the air to get some through.
And that's not too bad, right? 18 missiles, seven get through four ships down. That's
a really good rate of return. Especially when you consider that, like, you
know, we were talking in our first episode
about how the US is spending significant resources on maintaining its, defending its carriers,
right?
Russia does not have the same ability to keep producing munitions.
And so like, that's a finite resource, right?
Their means of defining that, defending their ships and defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource. So anytime you can, even if the ship doesn't
get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles, which it doesn't, which the
whole country doesn't have very many of that, that's still a win.
Now this is, we're talking about irregular naval warfare. And then this is not, this
is not what most people would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to the expansion
of hostilities in Ukraine.
However, we are talking,
this is very different than the case of the Houthis,
Ukraine is a state.
It doesn't have a massive arms industry, but it has one.
And it has the support of nations
with sizable arms industries, right?
So we are not talking about this part.
We are going to talk about the aspects of Ukrainian
irregular naval warfare that are some guys that are hobbyists building shit.
This is not that part yet.
But I think this information is kind of significant and that it shows the tactical use of anti-ship
cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an operational environment even when
the country using them has minimal conventional naval assets of their own.
It is largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able to reopen their
Black Sea ports.
That matters to people seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of unconventional
naval warfare.
I mean, I guess you could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but
I think we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment, at least in terms of how
doctrine is changing as a result of this.
So maybe I should update how we're defining this, but for our purposes as people unlikely
to have access to cruise missiles, but significantly likely to find ourselves waging an unconventional
war than having cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems
Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the Black Sea fleet using civilian
hobbyists.
And this is where we get to drones.
Ukraine's conventional aerial drones are a mix of actual military hardware.
I'm talking about stuff like the Bayraktar, the Turkish drone, which is like kind of like
the Predator, right?
It's like an actual military product.
But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones
or at least drones that started out as civilian technology.
A lot of these are now built to be military,
but they're still based on these designs
that started with people hacking
and cobbling together civilian drones.
And outside of Naval stuff, prior to the war,
there had been a lot of veterans and hobbyists
who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military
that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale,
the kind of drone warfare that you can do with these, these less expensive
drones.
And they received a lot of pushback until the war started.
And these guys just took to the field and started fucking murking Russian armed
units and infantry and killing generals and shit.
And now Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going to follow.
Like a Ukrainian, like battalions have like companies now that are drone
assault companies and like line battalions.
And every within infantry you have people use or artillery eating drones
and forward observers to get.
All over.
They have set a goal for this year of producing at least a million and
ideally more like 2 million drones.
And at least from what I read, that looks like very plausible.
And most of these are quite small, right?
But that doesn't mean obviously ineffective.
I know they buy a lot of their drones in the UK
because the UK has consistently kicked itself in the nuts
when it comes to like Brexit.
And so the pound is significantly weaker.
And so they're able to get the drones at a cheaper price
and then drive them all the way across.
Yeah.
I know people who have done that
and I was going to go join them, but never worked it out.
Yeah.
And you know, there are a number of different, I know people who have done that. And I was going to go join them, but never worked it out. Yeah. And.
You know, there are a number of different, like these, these, these drones earlier in the war had an easier time being effective and causing
casualties on the Russians than later.
This is something that, um, you know, kind of the, the hoopla and support,
which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets, leads some people to discount
the degree to which Russian forces have adapted and gotten smarter.
And one of the ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in blocking drones and
using drones of their own.
You know, one of the stories that last couple of weeks is that Russia has succeeded in carrying
out strikes on advanced weapons systems like SAM sites, deep in Ukrainian territory.
They've extended their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of
and that's because they've adapted.
They're also adapted with less efficacy
at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels.
Some of this has been kind of funny.
I wanna read a quote from Business Insider article here.
Russia is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land
to try and trick Ukraine,
which keeps destroying its warships.
In an intelligence update on Wednesday,
the UK Ministry of Defense said that,
silhouettes of vessels have also been painted
on the side of Ks, probably to confuse
the uncrewed aerial vehicle operators.
They showed, there's some images of this,
they don't seem convincing to me.
I don't know if I think this is working.
This is great.
This is, I love this.
They have a cardboard Navy next to it.
Yeah, it's a very Bugs Bunny.
Yes, it is.
But not working as well as Bugs would.
They've painted a hole in the side of the cliff face
and drones keep crashing into it.
Ukraine keeps throwing drones at it.
Yeah.
It's very funny.
I mean, obviously, they just, Ukraine just sank,
like, or damaged, badly damaged four boats.
So I don't think this is,
I haven't seen evidence that this is working well.
Their actual, like, jamming efforts have been much more successful, right?
Yeah, they always will be on civilian. One of the things that's really interesting compared to
Myanmar is that Ukraine tends to rely on modified off the shelf civilian drones, right? Your DJI,
that kind of thing. In Myanmar, because of where a lot of the PDFs are, because, well,
they increasingly do control
the borders, but they haven't always.
They have been making their own drones, the group called Federal Wings.
You can find them on Telegram who make their own drones.
And I think those seem to be less, the jammers that the, the SAC that the
Tatmadaw has are Chinese made, they're like jammer rifles.
You see them all the time in captured weapon caches,
but they don't seem to be having as much impact
on these homemade drones, which is really interesting.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's, you know, I've mentioned a couple of times,
we're doing this in part because the odds
that people listening might be involved
in an irregular conflict are not zero.
You know, what I think about when I say that is not that
there's high odds for any individual person fighting themselves in that
situation, but there is given the number of people who listen to this podcast,
probably someone who is not currently involved in a conflict that will find
themselves that way in the future.
And I based that in part on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar who are
currently fighting a war were a couple of years ago, delivery drivers and, you know, PUBG online and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.
Yeah, I've spoken to a number of people who are currently fighting down in Myanmar who have listened to our Myanmar podcast and realize the capacity of 3D printing to be very useful. And so like, even in that sense, it's already happening. But yeah, no one in Myanmar, like many of them said,
their entire combat experience was playing PUBG.
And now they are working ships.
Yeah, so anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff.
And this brings me back to Ukraine's
irregular drone warfare units,
which again, a lot of these guys started out
as civilian enthusiasts who expanded,
responded to the outbreak,
or at least expansion of hostilities,
by expanding their hobby into a real world military effort
that had a real world effect.
Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev,
allowing Ukraine to do severe damage
to that massive Russian armored column
heading towards the city,
and providing intel that led to the assassination
of multiple general level officers.
So it is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same group of volunteer hobbyists
when it came time to expand their naval arsenal.
And there's a really good article I found in CNN by Sebastian Shukla, Alex Markat, and
Daria Tarasova.
And I actually want to give you the title of this article.
Yeah, I'll try to throw those in show notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea
drones, part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea.
Haven't really seen the word fight back used that way, but there you go.
So I'm going to read a quote from that article.
A government-linked Ukrainian fundraising organization called United24 has sourced money
from companies and individuals all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to
a variety of developers and initiatives from defense to soccer matches.
The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict guidelines on filming
and revealing identities.
Those who seen and met with declined to give their full names or even their ranks within
Ukraine's armed forces.
On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants to go by Shark.
In front of him is a long black hardshell briefcase.
He unveils a bespoke, multi-screened mission control, essentially an elaborate gaming center,
complete with levers, joysticks, a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches
that shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like BLAST.
The developer of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their work on sea drones only
began once the war started.
It was very important because we did not have many forces to resist the maritime state,
Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing
capabilities." time state, Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing capabilities.
So again, these are hobbyist design and this guy's not really a hobbyist anymore, but that's
how he started.
Um, he's only not a hobbyist because the military recognized the value of what he was doing
and the current iterations of this sea drone, way a little over 2000 pounds with an explosive
661 pound payload, a 500 mile range and a max speed of 50 miles
per hour.
That is a significant weapon system.
Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets in the Black Sea and drones
were involved in a successful attack that severely damaged the Kerch bridge last July,
rendering it impassable since until September.
So these have had a real battlefield effect and they probably will continue to do so.
The developer of these drones told CNN these drones are a completely Ukrainian production.
They are designed, drawn and tested here.
It's our own production of holes, electronics and software.
More than 50% of the production of equipment is here in Ukraine.
And that's really significant because, you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty
Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as a result of fucking around in Congress.
And so it is a necessity for them to be able to develop weapon systems like this that can
interdict and counteract more advanced and expensive weapon systems and can be produced
indigenously.
You know, I don't think we have seen a mass suicide boat attack.
I'm interested in what happens when we do like, like with, with more significant numbers
and we've seen deployed.
I kind of wonder, uh, the degree to which the Russians have gotten good at spotting
this stuff.
I've, I've come across at least a couple of stories of these boats likely destroyed on
approach so that they certainly don't always work even a majority of the time, but given
the cost of these things, they don't have to get through the majority of the time. Right.
Very much worth it, right?
Now in that interview with the New York Times, Admiral Nezhpapa cautioned that Ukraine is
still outgunned in the Black Sea, even though the Russians no longer have supremacy.
They still have air superiority.
They are still able to launch from the sea long range missiles at Ukrainian targets,
including civilian targets.
So this is not, again, a situation that should be portrayed as them having their own way.
Their ability to kind of interdict the sea has been the primary effects of it have been number one, the reopening of trade in the Black Sea.
And earlier in the war, by locking down the ability of these landing ships to put more troops on ground and by doing damage to the courage bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements and Russian material from entering.
The war zone in order to in this this aided in some of the advances, particularly in like areas like croissant at this moment, the situation has changed because again.
Russians aren't just kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over and over again, or at least not always.
And we don't tend to talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things, but that is
an important part of the story.
And one of the things the Russians have done is kind of acknowledged that the Black Sea
fleet may not be a fleet in being forever, and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle
everything they initially thought it would handle.
And so Russian engineers spend a significant period of time
building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov
and Southern Russia to Mariupol
and occupied Southern Ukraine.
This has allowed them to get high volume shipments
into the area and supply troops to the area
along Ukraine's Southern front
without relying on that bridge
or relying on naval landings. Right.
Um, so the fact that Ukraine has been able to take out for landing ships
recently is good.
That's a win for Ukraine.
It reduces Russian capability, but it is not half the same effect that it would
have had, for example, two years earlier, right.
Yeah.
Um, because Russia has also evolved and among other things, railroads are a lot
easier or a lot harder to destroy, to like take out, right?
It's easy to damage a railroad, but they're easy to fix.
It's not, it doesn't take a lot to get some guys over to fix a damaged
sunk of railroad, fixing a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk
boat is a lot harder.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, and there are people within Russia even who are sabotaging
railroads, but as you say, it's like, it's very high stakes for them and it's
relatively low cost
for the, for the Russian state to fix that stuff.
So like it's not as effective.
Yeah.
But, but I think this gives you an idea of kind of like what we're, what we're looking
at when we look at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side that does not have access
to a functional Navy, not able to interdict or destroy fleets, but able to
stop them from dominating the coast.
And when you can stop them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them
terrain that they can act in without being countered.
And you have also denied them from stopping you from acting in that same terrain.
Even if you don't have total safety in that area, that opens up the operational possibilities
substantially.
And this is something that I kind of don't think is going to get put back in the bag,
even if some of these star Wars ass weapons systems do come out in the near future, you
know, maybe that'll have an impact in the immediate term on people like the Houthis,
but I don't think that it really will on a, you know, for example, what, what Ukraine's
doing right?
Yeah, Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms, body armor, grenades and shit.
Like, there's no way it's gonna implement some kind of massive Star Wars system over its Navy.
Not right now, not in the middle of a conflict that it's struggling to supply.
Yep. You know what? Here's an ad break.
Alright, we're back and we are traveling around the world, spin your little globe in your
head and look for Myanmar, which is, of course, in Asia. Now, I'm talking about two different, I guess, anti-ship,
sabotage or attack or two different ways
that ships have been sunk in Myanmar.
I'll start with the first one,
which is undoubtedly the flashiest,
just because it's fun.
So a ship in the port of Yangon about a month ago,
so we're recording on the 20th, it's about the 1st of March,
it was in the river in Yangon, and it was allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now, if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese freedom movement, one of their demands for a long time
has been to stop supplying the junta with jet fuel, which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages,
schools, civilians, PDF formations, just about anyone in the country.
It's bombed at some point in the last couple of years.
And they haven't been successful, right?
They haven't been able to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the junta.
So they've taken it into their own hands.
And what they did on the 1st of March was that they snuck onto a boat.
So to, this is the story from the Burmese National Unity Government's
Ministry of Defense anyway.
Combat divers snuck onto this boat, planted a kilogram of TNT or a charge
equivalent to a kilogram of TNT.
Robert and I have both spoken to people who make explosives in Myanmar.
So we do, we definitely know the PDF has access to a kilogram of TNT. Robert and I have both spoken to people who make explosives in Myanmar,
so we definitely know the PDF has access to a range of explosives.
Yeah.
They set it on a five-hour fuse and it blew up in the middle of the night.
And there's definitely footage of the ship on fire having blown up.
Now, this is pretty remarkable for Never Read.
This is like why the United States has units like the Navy SEALs, right?
Like the higher speed guys, because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor,
climb onto a ship, set an explosive charge without being detected,
and then leave that ship and have the charge go off and sink the ship without you being compromised,
without the charge itself being compromised and the ship
being saved. This is some classic, this is why there are special units within the US military.
Now, the PDF very obviously did not have combat dives two years ago. I was looking into hobby
scuba diving in Yangon. The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very low. So the people who
you find diving in that area are not so much like hobby scuba
divers or freedivers, but they're salvage divers. And
there's a whole little industry of people. And these people are
diving in equipment that I would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an air hose
in between your teeth and diving down and trying to find... There's a large deposit
of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship that sunk. There's of course copper,
everyone all around the world including the Viet Cong in Santee are stealing copper. There's
iron, right? So these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap
and sell that for whatever minimal amount they can, right?
It's an extremely dangerous and extremely low income.
It's one of the sort of really high risk, low reward jobs
that you get in economies where people are really struggling
to make ends meet, right?
So those are the only divers I can find evidence of in Yangon.
I don't think it was them who did this because you have to have a boat above
you with a pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth.
Right.
So it seems like somebody in within the, they said it was a Yangon PDF.
That's who they attribute it to.
So that would be one of these,
it would likely be an underground group within the PDF, right?
Some people living in the city who were able to
sneak onto this boat, set a charge and blow it up.
And they would also have to have intelligence at the boat,
where it was, what it was carrying, et cetera.
So it's a pretty daring mission that,
this is the first one like this we've seen
and we haven't seen anything since, but it's of course possible that this is the first one like this we've seen and we haven't seen anything since.
But it's of course possible that this is a story that we're being told.
In fact, they had like someone undercover on the ship, right?
Or like they had some other means of getting this charge onto the ship.
But one way or another, they managed to blow up the ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detriment to them.
And that's how they get most of their shit.
It's not over land, especially with more and more.
The terrain there is just absolutely like even with modern technology, difficult
to get significant amounts of shit through.
They're resupplying some of their outposts that are 10 miles from a
town with helicopters right now.
Like A, the terrain is burly and B, they don't have, the PDF has denied them access
that anytime they send out a convoy, it gets attacked. So
sending out, plus, you know, that their land border crossings
are increasingly falling into the hands of the PDFs and the
EROs. So getting stuff through the ocean is one of the ways
that they can still get stuff.
And if this keeps happening,
then they will make that more expensive for them.
And that they're not exactly a wealthy like Hunter,
even though I guess Min Aung Hlaing
just made himself an Air Force One recently.
I was looking at it today.
He's got himself two luxury.
They called it dictator class.
Like he's upgraded from president class to dictator class. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes, he has.
Yeah.
In many ways.
So yeah, that's one way that the PDF has been blowing up ships in the Yangon
river.
Robert, do you know who else has been blowing up ships in the Yangon?
Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa the mid 1800s.
So I would guess them. That's right. Yep. Yep. Uh-huh. It's, uh, circa the mid 1800s.
So I would guess them.
That's right. Yep.
Yep.
Uh huh.
It's a, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lots of repressed, uh, repressed feelings and a lot of cabin boys with, with
deep trauma, um, anyway, here's the hats.
All right. Alright, we're back. We hope you enjoyed that ad pivot, one of our best ones yet.
And we're talking about the Arakan army now.
So the Arakan army, not to be confused with Arakan-Rahinja Salvation Army, different group.
Arakan is a name of what is now Rakhine state before
it was colonized by the Burmese. I think Arakhan was a king before it was colonized by the
Burmese. That's what that refers to. It's a geographical appellation rather than necessarily
an ethnic one. The Rakhine would be the ethnic group. So what the AA have done is sunk, I
think, at least four Hunter ships now.
And most of these ships are kind of,
they're like the, they look like big Higgins boats.
They're like landing craft or like car ferries,
like flat bottom with a bow that goes down, right?
I rode around a lot in the Marshall Islands
in little landing craft like that
because they can get them in, they don't have like docks.
So they can just ride that right up to the beach
and then drop the front and off you go. And they use them a lot. The
Hunter doesn't have like per se Marines, they don't have maritime infantry, but they use
them to transport their regular army around, right? And they use them to transport them
upriver. They also use them a lot in Rakhine State to shell AA positions and any town ships that they've decided
they want to wipe off the map and kill all the people in, right?
So these, these boats have been a real, uh, like thorn in the side of the
Arakan army after operation 1027, when they joined with, uh, two other groups
to form the three brotherhood Alliance and launch attacks on the Hunter all over Myanmar.
And, and so what they've been doing, it appears, is using underwater mines to sink these ships,
which is interesting, right?
Like, I guess the mines are like a very old technology, right?
It's probably 100 years plus that underwater mines have existed.
It seems the way that, like, the reason they're able to get away with using what is a relatively dated technology is because the
hunter just doesn't expect to encounter anything, right? And so has not equipped his ships as such. Like they do have stuff like submarines, but that's not what's
getting sunk, what's getting sunk in these big kind of landing craft riverboats. And it seems that they're using mines and then once they disable the ship they're then attacking it with small boats, small arms, like indirect fire mortars
and stuff.
Yeah.
I saw one post that suggested they'd use, which is pretty cool if they did, the Burmese
military has these like tank destroyers, self-propelled, it's a tank, it's a tank is what it is.
And they've captured, the AA has captured a number of these, right, and I've seen suggestions that they're using some of these on, like, they just
set up an ambush along the banks of the river, right?
And as the ship comes in, they can, they can maybe disable it with a mine
and then attack it with those.
But there are videos online, you can find them of the AA sinking these ships.
And then they've done some amazing drone photography of like, they've, obviously
they then like staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the drone and
they had the Arakan army flags and they're actually really cool photos of
them taking these ships.
But again, like I think this might be the first sinking of a Burmese naval ship.
Since it's independence from Britain, like I can't think that they were, they really haven't played much of a role at all in its
conflict with the EROs aside as from like basically kind of just shelling places when
they want to do that.
But there's never really been any significant opposition to them and that's changed now.
They have to obviously, just like everywhere else, watch out for drones, right?
Drones have been used to a massive extent in Myanmar.
And the AA doesn't have as many associated PDFs.
I haven't seen them doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs.
The PDFs tend to be the more urban folks, the younger folks,
the Gen Z folks that we've spoken about before.
And a lot of them have been very savvy with their use of drones.
Like I said, you can look up Federal Wings and you can see them
dropping bombs with drones and all kinds of stuff
with their heavy metal soundtrack that they like.
But that it wasn't even drones.
It was pretty simple. It was just mines.
So things that they do love mines in Myanmar, mines all over that country.
But in this case, these,
I guess, massive mines in the rivers, given that the hunter is the only entity sending big boats
up and down, you could set them at a certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them and
eventually one of the hunter boats is going to hit them, I guess. And so it's pretty basic
technology, but it's still a massive step forward in terms of like a place where the state had
complete impunity. It now doesn't, right? They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people.
They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate soldiers and their families
from a position the soldiers they were trying to like, rather than surrendering,
they were trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else.
The AA asked them to surrender and they didn't try to evacuate them so then they mined the
ships and took those out.
I think the the hunter has like tried to spin this, it's like the AA is attacking civilians
but I think a Burmese Navy ship with a Burmese Navy flag when those ships have just been
shelling you seems like a legitimate target to me and I think it's very hard.
It's you know it's a hunter who put children on one of their naval ships
rather than the AA who attacked the ship because it had children.
You can hear in one of the things you can hear the AA are like attacking
the ship in small boats and they're shouting like there are children on board
and you can hear them acknowledging it.
And there are videos of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard,
rescuing them from the river.
And then like, I guess they just held us POWs.
Cool.
Yeah, it's cool.
It's interesting.
Obviously, not many of us have access to underwater mines, but, you know, maybe in a fictional
future we might.
Yeah.
Well, there you go, folks. This has been a regular naval warfare and you a podcast about a regular naval warfare and you.
Yeah. Send us to your videos of yourselves in regular naval warfare.
Yeah, absolutely. Go out there. Look, how about this? Every listener, go out and sink one naval vessel, you know, doesn't matter who Doesn't matter whose. Just any boat, go sink a boat, any boat.
Go take out a boat.
You see a fucking super yacht?
Knock it out.
You see a dinghy, take that fucker out.
People kayaking, fuck them up, you know?
Banana boat?
Absolutely, a banana boat for sure.
One of those weird duck boat car things
that they have in some cities.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Drive them in San Diego.
Actually, you know what? You don't need to do anything with that that'll kill everybody on board
Just pray for those people yeah, but any other boat yeah, you see a donut you know behind being behind a speedboat. Oh, yeah
Merk it anyway everybody go away
Anyway, everybody, go away.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
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