Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 128
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It's been almost 3,000 years and Greek mythology has proved that it is not going anywhere,
but it can be difficult to find entertaining and engaging retellings of these myths that
aren't fictionalized.
Lucky for you, I'm here.
Let's Talk About Myths Baby is the Greek mythology and ancient history podcast of your
dreams.
I dive into the convoluted and confusing ancient sources so you don't have to.
Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
I'm DioSeth.
And I'm Mala.
We are the creators of Locatora Radio, a radiophonic novella, which is a fancy way of saying, a
podcast.
Welcome to Locatora Radio Season 9.
Love at first listen.
This season, we're falling in love with podcasting all over again with new segments, correspondence
and a new sound.
Listen to Locatora Radio as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio
app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, hi, you get your podcasts.
Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe, and my podcast Climbing in Heels
is back and better than ever.
You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project,
or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist.
And guess what?
I'm still just as obsessed with all things fashion,
beauty, and business.
Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories
of extraordinary women,
and this season is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamour, inspiration and fun.
Listen to Climbing in Hills every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever
you get your podcast.
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, there's going to be
nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here.
I'm Garrison Davis.
On this show, we end up talking a lot about the various ways politicians, media personalities,
and lobbying groups are constantly trying to make life a living hell for trans people,
between restricting medical care, access to public spaces, as well as banning and literally
burning queer art.
Basically, a lot of depressing stuff that's designed to make us trans people go mad.
We live in a transphobic society. All it takes is one bad day for an aspiring comedian to fall into a vat of estrogenizing chemicals and emerge a jokerfied harlequin.
Filmmaker Vera Drew's new movie,
a multimedia queer fever dream titled The People's Joker,
takes this premise and depicts what it's like trying to make a living
as an irony poisoned trans person in a Gotham City
where comedy has been made illegal.
This isn't just an unauthorized transgender parody of DC Comics,
though it is that as well.
The film is a wholly unique collaboration of dozens of queer artists utilizing fair
use to tell a trans coming-of-age story with the gothic queer-coded imagery of Batman.
If you know anything about my tastes, you probably know that this is incredibly up my
alley.
So, in a departure from this show's usual doom and gloom, I'm putting together a few episodes
on what it means to be a queer artist in today's political climate.
More episodes will come out next week, but I wanted to get this one out right now in
time for listeners to catch the theatrical run of The People's Joker, hopefully in a
theater near you right now or in the near
future.
Last week, I was lucky enough to chat with the clown princess of crime herself, Vera
Drew, about the making of The People's Joker.
My name is Vera Drew.
I'm the writer, director, and I also star in The People's Joker.
I also did some of the visual effects too.
You can get tickets online at the peoplesjoker.com.
I would like to just start with the origin
of the People's Joker project.
Why is there a transgender Joker
and why does that make so much sense?
I'm glad you feel like it makes sense.
I mean, it kind of really started
just because Todd Phillips was in the news talking about
woke culture and how it was too hard to make comedy now and stuff, which is really funny
coming from a director who's made millions and millions of dollars making comedy and like also like made Joker like the year prior.
And that is a comedy like it's a dark comedy, but it's totally a comedy and it made a billion dollars.
But yeah, he was complaining about woke culture as is his right.
But and my co-writer, the person who ended up becoming my co-writer, Brie LaRose,
actually just kind of jokingly commissioned me on Twitter to re-edit Todd Phillips Joker.
And, uh, actually Venmo'd me $12. And yeah, I started doing it, like, in earnest. I started,
like, actually re-editing the movie. And I had worked at Absolutely Productions for
years as an editor and had kind of come up as an alternative comedy editor. So
you know at that point it was probably just gonna be like a lot of fart sound
effects and whoosh noises and slips and slide whistles. But as I was working on
it and kind of just making this like big piece of found footage
video art, like a narrative kind of just like fell into place. And I, it kind of just came
in an instant and I was just like, oh, okay. I think I actually want to make like a coming
of age film, but I want to make like a parody of the Joker, like in that process and kind of just like
tell like a really earnest and super personal
autobiographical story about my life and growing up in the Midwest and coming out
as trans and comedy and you know, my relationship with my mom,
toxic relationship I was in and stuff and but kind of
process and mythologize all of
that through Batman characters. So that's kind of the origin of the movie, I guess.
I had also kind of been kicking around an idea for like a body horror, like a trans body horror movie before that, that was
basically like about a drag queen who was physically addicted to irony and
like couldn't like survive without it but it was also like destroying her from
the inside out. The two ideas kind of like merged together and into this sort
of I guess. Yeah that definitely comes through. One of my favorite parts of this movie
is that it gets to talk about so many intimate aspects
of trans experience, like trans misogyny,
the intersection of transphobia and misogyny
that gets targeted against trans femmes in particular,
as well as trans for trans relationships, or T for T,
and lots of other little things.
It's using the visual language of Batman as a shorthand
to contextualize parts of queerness that just don't often appear in mass media. I showed
my co-host Mia the film last week to get her thoughts on the movie as a piece of queer
art since her and my own tastes often greatly differ. What did you think of the transgender
clown?
It rips? One of the transgender clown?
It rips.
One of the things that was the most interesting to me about it is like,
so I read some reviews of it
and because it's, you know, because it's sort of this is how the media works.
Most of the reviews are by cis people.
And it's really fun to see a movie where you're reading it
and you you you're looking at this and you're going, oh, these people didn't get it.
They have no idea what's happening.
They they they do not know about T-boy swag.
They do not know about like all of the stuff that's happening in this.
And yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing about that's really interesting
because, you know, trans coming of age story is like one of the few kind of stories you're sort of
allowed to tell if you're trans, less so in film, more so like in writing.
You're sort of allowed to do this.
Specifically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's really interesting the way this movie starts with, you know, for the first maybe
10 minutes, it's okay.
This is like a pretty standard coming of age story. And then it hits the real shit in a way that doesn't ever show up on this stuff.
Like I first saw this movie a year ago, and I was shocked at the
depiction of like T for T relationships, which you like never you never see.
Yes, never be able to like look at like emotional abuse
within a T for T relationship being depicted this way. You're like, oh, my God, it's like actually like
showing something that is literally never talked about like openly.
Like this is something that we like people have experiences of,
but it's never really like shown or discussed.
I found that to be incredibly resonant and very like tastefully done.
Yeah, I mean, I was just like weeping, watching parts of it.
Absolutely.
There's a line in there that is I have never ever.
Well, like one of the sort of most real things that like you as a trans woman
experience is someone who's trans misogyny exempt, saying they don't feel safe
around you. Yeah.
And that being how they kick you, like how you get ran out, how you get abused.
That the fact that that's in that's in film.
And you can see all of the people like you can see cis people
like not getting it like they just they don't
they don't understand what's going on.
And that's really incredibly powerful in in a lot of ways.
All while in like Jared Leto Joker makeup.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
They're like getting into all of this extremely intense stuff.
The gaslighting scene was fucking phenomenal.
But it all looks like this fucking copy pasted comic art spliced in
with like Speed Racer and Return from Oz and with all of these
like adult swim aesthetics, because Veridrew has
been an editor on a lot of, starting with Tim and Eric stuff to Nathan Fielder to Tim
Robinson, very entrenched in this layered collage-like adult swim style.
So that's present all throughout the movie, extremely visually unique.
It really is like an internet meme brought to life and puppeteered by an uncanny, unseen hand.
I think it really embraces the aesthetics of an ill-fitting Halloween Harley Quinn cosplay costume.
It's like taking that and deeply interrogating what that visually represents and looks like and why someone would wear an ill-fitting Harley Quinn costume. It deeply understands all
of like the aesthetics sensibilities behind an image like that. Extremely,
extremely fun.
I think it's worth talking about, at least in brief, the trajectory of this movie's release, because it is a very comic book jokerfied story from the idea of this film to its premiere
at a film festival to all of the uncertainty and legal chaos that came along the way. So an earlier cut of this movie was originally set to premiere at TIFF, the Toronto International
Film Festival, back in 2022.
Right before the first showing, Warner Bros. sent a vaguely worded but threatening letter,
which resulted in the People's Joker being pulled from the festival save for one late-night screening that got rave reviews
With its legal status uncertain the movie kind of went into limbo
Here's Vera Drew on what happened after the first TIF showing. I really put all I had into this movie
You know like I really I cashed in every favor I had ever accumulated
in Hollywood. Financially, I took out a huge loan to finish it. And it was just this big,
deeply personal thing that I had made that originally really was just for me and my friends.
It was just a thing that I had just made. Maybe I would have shown it to my Patreon or something.
But it was...
After a certain point, once we had that premiere, it was just like, I need to...
I can't just post this to YouTube.
I can't just dump it somewhere or shelve it.
And what felt right really was like
taking the movie out just to festivals and kind of doing like a secret screening tour, which is what we did and
that was really exciting and kind of like a joker fied way of sort of getting this this movie out there and I was just surrounded by other filmmakers and the genre community and you know who
Would see the movie at this festival and be like you
need to just wait. The person who's going to help you is going to come.
So for a while, the film was making surprise secret screenings at film festivals across
the US and Canada. And now almost two years later, the queer distribution company Altered
Innocence picked up the film, and it's now in movie theaters nationwide.
The thing that's I think is really interesting about this is sort of the timing of it because
this originally comes out in 2022, right? Sure does. And then it gets on came out by
pushed back into the closet by the corporate ghouls. This discovery pushes the people's
Joker back into the closet. Yeah. But what I think is really interesting about it is, is its
position in this sort of arc of queer media, right? I mean, when
I was a kid, there was nothing. It was like, like the first the
first queer thing I ever saw in a in a show was the Korra Sami
kiss at the end of Legend of Korra? Like there was nothing.
And then suddenly-
It's funny.
I just watched last night, like three of the old Law and Order SVU trans episodes.
Oh god.
Oh boy.
Oh boy.
Do they have some extremely, extremely interesting moments.
I will leave it up to the viewer's imagination.
Yeah.
But what's interesting about the rice is you get this moment
that I kind of recognize from you have this sort of Asian American
media to where like there is this, you know, it was if you go back
and watch something from 2004 that has an Asian person in it, it is
it is like like there are people right now in the US
who will physically attack you for being Asian and who will say shit and whose level of verbal racism will be less than the
racism that's just in this movie as a gag.
Sure.
And, you know, and so you get an eventually like throughout the 2010s, we sort of got
like, oh, there's like Asian Americans in movies now.
And that was kind of happening with in with with sort of, you know, in particularly in
cartoons, things like Owl House, it was kind of happening in in media with queer people. And then there was the sort of the 2020s
backlash. And that's in like you can you can you know, it's it's in the same way the Hunter S.
Thompson has this line about like, you can see exactly where this is standing in Vegas, you can
see the line where the 60s receded, like you can see the line, where all of the queer stuff just is
like, gone.
And this forces everyone, you know, if you have two options, right, you can fucking go
back into the closet and you can fucking work on whatever dog shit show that's just going
to be completely cishet now.
Or you can just, you can make the people's choker. Just to say you can just make you just you can just go and do it
and you can make something.
And I think there's something that's very different than a lot than the sort of wave
that had come before it is like this is this trans media
that is made by trans people for trans people.
And there's some like trapping stuff for cis people to sort of like
walk them
along a little tiny bit.
But like it uses the language of DC Comics to handhold other audiences
to understand what's going on.
Yeah. But but at its core, you know, and like obviously like, yeah,
there's, you know, mix of plicks like I'm butchering his name.
No, no one knows how to say that.
That's the whole bit is that no one knows how to say it.
Yeah. I mean, like, you know, so like there's like there's like kind of deep cut
like comic stuff in there, too, because, you know, this is by people who like
unlike everyone who makes these fucking movies these days, people who actually
genuinely like deeply love the source material that they're pulling from.
Yes. And thus are willing to just go off the walls with it
and have
like Jason Todd, T-boy swag, emotional abuser Joker, who is many, many such cases
like so much more interesting than any iteration of the Joker I've seen.
Absolutely. Well, and it also it also pulls on like the very long history
of the Joker being queer coded.
Yeah. I mean, like if you go to like Grant Morrison's Joker,
extremely queer, the 60s Batman show is all very queer. the Joker being queer coded. Yeah. I mean, like if you go to like Grant Morrison's Joker,
extremely queer, the 60s Batman show is all very queer,
but like the Joker has always been seen as this kind of
this like having this queer deviant element,
despite really only having like heterosexual pairings.
But even still in his relation to Batman,
it's always been a very queer heavy thing.
And that's something that DC Comics has definitely
shied away from intentionally. And having something that so blatantly embraces that, well,
not just like does it for like fun representation, like actually interrogates like queer relationships
through that through that extremely like troubling power dynamic is really, really fascinating.
There is no fucking cis man like there is no white cis dude who has gone through enough shit
to make them turn into the Joker.
Like, come on.
It's like, oh, damn, I couldn't get on a comedy show after I became the Joker.
It's like, wait, wait, wait. No, no.
This is insufficient. The Jokerify.
Mia, all it takes is one bad day.
I, you know, I mean, I guess I guess that is like. Do you want to know how I got these emotional scars?
It's really like like every cis man is.
OK, enough with violence that they think that they're one bad day
from just murdering everyone around them, but sometimes they snap and it's like true.
You know, but also come on, like you you motherfuckers, you ain't seen shit.
We've had a very, like, in-cell embrace of The Joker ever since Heath Ledger, of course,
with the Rocking Phoenix movie. Very in-cell coded. Both in conversation with that, because
this piece was made as a direct reaction to Todd Phillips's The Joker movie, but this
is always, it's in conversation with that while highlighting the actual, like,
in like very, very, uh, inherent queerness to this man who dresses up like a clown
to play with another man who dresses up like a bat.
I was lucky enough to catch an earlier cut of The People's Joker at a Canadian film festival last year, dressed in one of my many Harley Quinn costumes.
Again, if you know anything about me, you know I love Batman on Gotham City.
I do my yearly Queer Batman Returns watch parties where I dress up like Michelle Pfeiffer's
Catwoman.
But the social groups I'm often in can sometimes be a little bit weird about Batman stuff,
because he's like a fascist or whatever.
But I've always thought that Gotham City is really queer as a concept, and I loved that
someone else appeared to share that opinion and decided to explore Gotham City as an aesthetic
zone to operate in as a queer artist. Here's Vera Drew talking about
the connection between her queerness and Batman.
I really am like a lifelong Batman comic fan and I've been working on this movie
for four years and I'm somehow still not sick of Batman, which is crazy to me. Yeah.
I mean, I think like the, the lore has just kind of always been there in my life
and it's always just felt very queer to me.
I mean, I guess mostly in like a subtext way, but you just think back to like all
the iterations, like, I mean, my, my entry point into Batman was Joel Schumacher
I mean, my entry point into Batman was Joel Schumacher Batman. I saw Batman Forever when I was six.
And it was literally one of the first times I realized I was trans was that moment, was
just seeing Nicole Kidman.
I wanted to look like her.
I wanted to be perceived how she was being perceived.
I wanted someone to look at me the way Batman looks at her.
And that was all very confusing for a six-year-old,
who up until that point was pretty sure they were a boy.
I grew up in the 90s, so I didn't really have like,
my representation was the Jerry Springer Show
and Howard Stern, that's where I saw trans people. And I think
like comics were just this space where I could, I don't know, it just feels very queer. Like,
it's not just subtext. I mean, there is, there's a lot of subtext, obviously, in like, the
Schumacher Batman's, like his Gotham City just is a like gay neon
nightmare of beauty.
We're definitely like taking that aesthetic kind of in the people's Joker.
Like that was always kind of my vision for Gotham.
But even the 60s Batman, despite how absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's it's super conservative, but like it's
it's so colorful and like...
It's very gay.
It's extremely gay.
It's, and it's like, I get that.
Does somebody actually described it to me the other day as like, you have like a character
like Riddler and like he's just surrounded by like hot women.
Like it's just everybody feels like kind of like a queer, Polly, annoying person, which is me and my friends.
So I feel like Adam West is definitely playing like a closeted gay man in that show as well.
Totally. Who's like surrounded by much more like flamboyant queers and he like doesn't
know how to deal with it. That's totally fair. I really appreciated like
there's so many Batman Forever jokes in this like you even use the Batman Forever font like
constantly throughout the film. There's so many like little bits. I really appreciated all of the
Alexander Knox jokes throughout the film because I feel like that's one of the most underrated
characters from the Tim Burton movies and then all of like the Grant Morrison super sanity bits also I found incredibly funny.
And when I was watching it, I felt like a big strong sense.
I felt like this is what a piece of art would look like if it was made like within the DC universe.
It feels like something that comes like from that point and is like somehow like emanated into our world. Wow. Thank you. It feels like something that comes from that point and is somehow emanated into
our world.
Wow. Thank you.
It was wonderful. There's definitely some Speed Racer elements, a little bit of David
Lynch's Dune, especially the Mr. Mixlplex scenes felt very much like all of the weird
Spice Visions.
It was great seeing this progress from the cut last year to this one. It flows
a lot. When I was talking with my co-host Mia about the film, we both pointed out how
this movie doesn't just feel like a movie with gay people in it. It itself feels like
a piece of queer art. Like the art itself has a sense of inherent queerness. I think
there's a lot of reasons for that. The fact that itself has a sense of inherent queerness. I think there's a lot
of reasons for that. The fact that it's a collaborative project from dozens of queer
artists sending in background pieces, characters, voice acting, music, set design. It all creates
a very like DIY queer zine kind of feel, but in a moving picture. So I wanted to talk a
little bit more about this difference between just queer representation
and queer art.
You kind of touched on something previously where, like,
the difference between queer representation
and, like, art that is that, like, is
queer. These are, like, two very different things.
And the movie actually is in conversation with this as
well, being like the difference between hiring
a trans person to be on the SNL cast versus a trans person doing their
own comedy show, right? And how those are two very different things with very
different politics. And I think this movie is a large statement against that
assimilationist drive that a lot of people kind of fall back on for like
self-preservation reasons, self-coping reasons, and like financial reasons, sure.
It is extremely critical of that notion and reifies like this like DIY approach
towards queer people making our own art.
Yeah, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot
because like, you know, like Asian Americans have like,
we got there, right?
Like, citizens Americans, we got our representation.
Like, what is a representation?
It's like, well, they found a way to make like,
being East Asian, the thing you can sell
the white people by having it be about food and selling the version of like a slightly
different version of the traditional family.
And I, you know, and like any you can you can sort of ask what good has this done for
Asian American people.
And mostly what it's done is that Asian American cinema,
there's it's a wasteland.
Right. Like and you know, and you can you can see it like there's a there's a version of sort of of
where the 2020s go, that's different, where the assimilationist drive kicks in and we don't.
And this happens to queer media, where it's just this nothing.
It's just this void of sort of formless content that gets sold to the cis people.
I mean, and I think you could even look at that from a lot of like 2016 to 2020
stylings of queer media that does come off as very assimilationist.
And now I feel like we are entering this new age of trans cinema
where we have a lot of people either working with more independent production houses.
I'm very excited for I Saw the TV Glow coming out next month.
But we have a lot of other independent trans filmmakers starting out quite young,
getting into filmmaking also not quite young, like into their 30s,
who are working to actually produce films and media that don't just get thrown up on YouTube.
That producing art that does not just become another transgender video essay,
that floods the site, right?
It's finding other ways to actually engage artistically,
besides the very comfortable ways that we've gotten used to,
whether that's like, you know, your average trans DJ,
trans like electronic music or trans video essay,
which feels like really the only two ways to make art as a trans person reliably
are making YouTube videos and making music.
Both of which can be very good.
Absolutely.
There's some fantastic trans musicians.
There's a lot of great video essays out there.
But the artistic landscape is so much bigger than that.
And being able to watch people realize that this YouTube thing is so self-limiting and
starting to grow past that is incredibly cool to see.
I know there's stuff like Nebula,
which is like this streaming service kind of built on YouTube,
but trying to do more of its own things.
That's been interesting to watch grow.
But also a lot of people attempting just to actually, like,
take movies to film festivals and actually, like,
engage with this as, like, art,
and, like, having it be recognized as art.
Like, it would have been so easy to turn The People's Joker
into, like, a YouTube fan film, right? Just fucking thousands of fucking Batman fan films art and like having it be recognized as art. Like it would have been so easy to turn The People's Joker
into like a YouTube fan film, right?
Just fucking thousands of fucking Batman fan films
on YouTube, that would have been so easy.
But the insistence are like, no, I'm actually gonna use
like fair use law, gonna actually do like a legal parody
and push this through film festivals,
get it in actual movie theaters.
We are seeing a lot more trans films at film festivals.
We are seeing this start happening. And I'm very excited to watch this grow.
Yeah. And I think what's ultimately happening here is that there's
a combination of two things.
One is that we were getting spat out by the traditional media machine
and to the traditional media machine is rotting from the inside. Right.
And it's not good that either of these things are really happening,
but simultaneously, it also means that we're in this position
where having been spat out, we can go make the giant media monster.
Yeah, we can go stab it and force a bunch of these like
random sys critics to be like to try to figure out a T for T relationship
but just blow it.
Something like this would have never been made by Warner Brothers. That's just impossible.
No. Yeah.
This art could have never, never been made under Warner Brothers, right? That's just impossible.
And being able to say, no, I'm going to use these cultural iconography that we keep being told
endlessly that this is our culture's version of mythology, which is fucking people talking
about superheroes like that all the fucking time. Like this is our Greek gods. This is our culture's version of mythology which is fucking people talk about superheroes like that all the fucking time like this is this
is our Greek gods this is our blah blah blah blah yeah it's just owned by like
two companies who control everything about it and don't allow the public to
actually engage with these as cultural figures and say no we actually are gonna
find a way to use these characters in relation to someone's own life as an
artist and using it to talk about queerness and comedy and working in the comedy industry as a queer person to create a very unique piece that yeah, literally could have, there's no way would ever be made.
So this is a piece of art that could have never happened any other way. And now we have it playing in a local theater near you and I think that's very cool. Here's Virajru again, talking about the theatrical run.
We're playing a lot of cities, we keep adding more. If you don't see your city, bother the
theater in your town and tell them you want them to play it and show them one of the many
articles about this film and maybe they'll do it or reach out to us and let us know.
ThePeoplesJoker.com and you can follow me at Virajrew22 on Twitter,
Instagram, and now TikTok. Don't know how to use it, but we're going to figure it out together.
Thanks for listening. Again, you can check out The Peoplesjoker at ThePeoplesjoker.com.
Look for tickets and showtimes. Hopefully, there'll be one in your area.
Next week, there'll be more episodes talking about the making of this movie, as well as a few other trans comedian art projects that are currently ongoing.
See you on the other side.
What up? I am Dramos, host of the Life as a Gringo podcast.
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Then every Thursday I'll be tackling trending stories and current events from our community
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Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa?
But how much do you know about them from the ancient world?
Let's talk about Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life.
Greek myth and history is timeless, and unless you've been living under a rock, you have
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But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice.
I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and every week I bring
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thousands of years old stories.
I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology
and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between.
Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories.
Listen to Let's Talk About
Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe and I'm back for another season of my podcast Climbing in Heels. You
might know me from the Rachel Zoe project or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist.
And guess what? I'm still just as fully obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business.
My podcast Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating
the stories of extraordinary women,
and this season we're taking things up a notch.
I'll be talking to some incredible women
across so many industries.
From models and beauty industry stars,
to doctors, entrepreneurs, and TV personalities,
Climbing in Heels is here to bring you a weekly dose
of glamor, inspiration, and fun.
Every week, listeners will be able to ask me any questions.
I'm answering it all.
My life is absolutely crazy with so much going on,
and I'm so beyond excited to bring you along for the ride.
Whether we're talking red carpet looks,
current trends, or products I'm obsessed with,
I'm here to be your fashion fairy godmother.
Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Good Afternoon.
I'm Andrew Siege of future channel, Andrissel.
I'm joined by...
Mia Wong, did not miss your cue this time.
This will not make any sense to you
unless you've heard the previous episode in which I missed my cue.
But hello.
Indeed, indeed. Welcome. Did miss a cue.
So recently, I read Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. It was his memoir of his childhood in South Africa.
And politics aside, he's a decent comedian and had me laughing out loud and thinking a lot as well.
And it really reignited my long-passing interest in South African history,
because he's given a lot of context when sharing his stories.
because he's given a lot of context when sharing his stories.
So I decided to look into the history of anarchism in South Africa, and that's what we will be exploring today. Much of the information I gathered is thanks to the scholarship of
Lucian van der Walt, a South African anarchist and professor of sociology. Particularly I'll be looking at the work on anarchism and syndicalism in Southern
Africa from the International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, and anarchism and
syndicalism in the colonial and post-colonial world.
Without getting into the lengthy and storied history of the region, I do need to provide
some context.
So we'll start in the mid-19th century, where the region that became South Africa was considered
marginal to the world economy.
You had the port at the Cape of Good Hope and Port Elizabeth, which handled mainly agricultural
exports, and this was during the second period of the British Cape Colony's existence,
after it had briefly fallen into the hands of the Batavian Republic during the Napoleonic Wars. None of that is particularly necessary to know for our sake, but you know,
fun fact. At this point, once again under the British, the land was broadly agrarian,
and Britain's farms were worked by coloured and African workers. The neighbouring Natal colony, also under British
rule, had its plantations worked by indentured Indians. The rest of the interior was under
various Afrikaner republics and African kingdoms. For those not in the know, so African in this
context refers to, obviously, Africans, black Africans to be specific. Indians referring
to the indentured laborers from the Indian subcontinent. Afrikaners referring to the
Afrikaans or Dutch-speaking white South Africans. And then we have of course the British, which are white British people.
And the coloured as a designation, as a group, as a self-identified ethnic group,
referred to the people of mixed European and African heritage
that had begun to develop their own identity and their own community,
because the settlement of South Africa had started centuries before.
So other than the agricultural export and ports providing a respite for trade between
the West and the East, the Southern African colonies weren't particularly high up on
anyone's list of priorities.
But then the economic landscape of the region transformed with the discovery of diamonds
in Kimberley in 1867 and gold in Witwatersrand in 1886. To make a very long
story short, this led to the rapid centralization of mining activities and the growth of towns like
Johannesburg, one of the most well-known towns in South Africa. Imperial interests intensified,
resulting in the British Wars on Africans and Africanas and the establishment
of the Union of South Africa in 1910, an extremely diverse and polyglot society under British
rule.
By 1913, almost half of the world's gold output came from the Witwatersrand area, and
the Witwatersrand mines employed 195,000 Africans and 22,000 white workers. The working class clearly faced many racial and
ethnic divisions. It was primarily composed of various Africans, which had their own divisions
between them, and there were also divisions between the largely skilled white immigrants
from Europe and the largely unskilled local
white Afrikaners. The marginalized African and colored middle classes that began to form from
the few free laborers involved in various growing industries would come to lead early nationalist
movements while grappling with segregation, discrimination, and linguistic challenges.
As van der Waal said, and I quote, they lived in a situation where cheap African labour
formed the bedrock of the mines as well as state industry, and the growing commercial
farming and manufacturing sectors, and where the cheapness of African labour was primarily
a function of the Black's historic incorporation into the country as a subject people.
In this sense, local capitalist relations of exploitation were constructed upon colonial
relations of domination.
Fast forward to the eve of apartheid in 1948 when African nationalists took power and extended
the segregation policies of the first four decades of the Union even further, you get
two responses to the national question preceding the development of apartheid from the organized
labor crowd at the time. The first response, known as white labourism, was associated with the mainstream
white labour movement, leading back to the 19th century. The South African Labour Party and South
African Industrial Federation were key proponents of white labourism, and both organisations were
born from the exclusiveness of early craft unions that later
evolved into more pronounced racial exclusiveness. This white labourism approach combined social
democracy with segregation, promoting job reservation and preferential employment for
whites, urban segregation, and Asian repatriation. White power for white workers, basically. The other races can figure out their
own deal. Of course, on the reservations that we put them in. So it's no surprise that the apartheid
government in part mainstreamed this white laborism movement. But the second response
to the national question was linked to the Communist Party of South Africa, the CPSA, from 1928, when it adopted the Native Republic thesis under pressure from the Communist
International.
This approach advocated for the establishment of an independent South African Native Republic
as a precursor to the Workers' and Peasants' Republic, separating national liberation,
specifically in the form of nationalism, and then socialism
into distinct stages.
The CPSA initially considered leading both of these stages, but later abandoned this
idea and opted for a united front with the African National Congress, aiming for a unitary,
democratic, and capitalist state with land reform and partial nationalization. But there's a hidden history that goes unnoticed,
prior to the rise of apartheid and the CPSA.
All the way back in the 1880s, Henry Glass played a pivotal role in establishing the
local anarchist tradition in South Africa. He was an Englishman born in India with a background in radical London circles.
He moved to Port Elizabeth in the 1880s and engaged in various jobs, including working
on the Witwatersrand mines among African people.
He contributed to the Cape Labour Press, translated key works by Kropotkin into English, and distributed
anarchist materials through various organizations.
Glass seems to have taken a good look at colonialism, saw how Africans were treated, and didn't
shy away from calling it out.
Some of his writing did idealize pre-capitalist cultures, for example pointing out in a letter
to Kropotkin that you can still find amongst them the principle
of communism.
But his main focus was on pointing fingers at an order that treated Africans like second-class
citizens and going even further to champion the idea of a working-class movement that
bridged racial divides.
He understood the foolishness of white workers to try and pursue their liberation alone while
sidelining their coloured comrades, and though Glass spent his time agitating in Port Elizabeth, this was
also a perspective shared by the Social Democratic Federation, or SDF, based in Cape Town, which
despite its name, was all about pushing anarchism and syndicalism.
Actually, let me be more precise, there was a dominant wing within the SDF of Cape Town
that emphasized anarchism and syndicalism.
There were also moderate and status elements in the SDF as well.
Cape Town was quite different at that time from Port Elizabeth.
Port Elizabeth was mostly African and white, but Cape Town had a significant coloured population,
which created a situation where much of Cape Town had a significant Coloured population, which created a situation
where much of Cape Town's working class was free labour, rather than bound to some
form of slavery or indenture.
Coloureds were facing growing official segregation and popular discrimination from the late 19th
century onwards though, so there was a growing discontent as the working class fractured
even further.
But there was a key figure in the Cape Town SDF that pushed anarchism and cynicalism,
and that was Wilfred Harrison, another friend of Kropotkin, a carpenter, a trade unionist,
and an ex-soldier.
He was known as a very dynamic speaker, and a staunch anarchist communist who pushed for
a future where workers owned and controlled everything.
With Harrison at the helm, the SDF set up shop in Adderley Street where they were organizing pushed for a future where workers owned and controlled everything.
With Harrison at the helm, the SDF set up shop in Adderley Street where they were organizing
talks, events, and even standing in elections for propaganda purposes.
The SDF's events attracted thousands, creating truly uniquely integrated public spheres that
would bring coloreds, whites, and Africans in some of the same spaces. They
were holding speeches in Afrikaans, which was the most popular language of the coloureds,
and in East Nkosa, the language of the Nkosa people. They had bookshops, reading rooms,
refreshment bars, beach trips, choirs, and even a few socialist christened. At the various talks, they welcomed controversial figures,
including a young Gandhi. Harrison's wing of the SDF further sought to remove union colour bars,
unionise coloureds, secure equal pay, and build unions that would unite all workers regardless of
race. In the early 1900s, socialists in Witwatersrand launched the weekly Voice of Labour, led by
Archie Crawford and Mary Fitzgerald.
The paper served to connect socialists across cities, from Durban to Kimberley to Cape Town
to Johannesburg.
Archie Crawford was a staunch anti-segregationist, pushing back against the South African Labour
Party for its policies and organ organizing the neglected Coloured Workers. In 1910, the SDF hosted British syndicalist Tom Mann, whose tours of the region would inspire
the founding of the Socialist Labour Party, or SLP, in Johannesburg. They adopted the ideas of
Daniel de Leon, the American leader of the International Workers of the World, and were
followed by the Industrial Workers Union, which linked with the IWW in Chicago.
The IWW's ideas spread to Durban and Pretoria, but it was Johannesburg where they flexed
their muscles with successful strikes and challenges to labour laws.
The IWW's position carried the same as its forebears.
Fight the class war with the aid of all workers, whether efficient
or inefficient, skilled or unskilled, white or black. IWW organizer Jock Campbell would
be the first to specifically make propaganda amongst the African workers in which workers ran.
But don't get me wrong, these efforts do not mean that they necessarily succeeded. The IWW and SLPs' struggle to recruit to cross racial lines stems not primarily from
prejudice, but from their overall weakness as union organizers outside the tram sector
where they saw their most successes, and of course the practical challenges of organizing
the predominantly unfree African workforce under Witwatersrand.
So they talked a good talk about reaching across racial lines, but not to massive success,
because they didn't have a strategy in place to actually establish those connections between
Africans, coloured, and Indian workers.
In this regard actually, the SDF in Cape Town was a lot more successful.
However, something did happen in Witwatersrand.
In May 1913, a significant general strike erupted on the Witwatersrand, initiated by
white miners and quickly spreading across industries.
The strike was marked by riots and gun battles, and escalated on what's called Black Saturday,
July 5th, resulting in 25 deaths at the hands of the Imperial troops. Subsequent strikes by African
miners and Indian passive resistance campaigns further intensified the social unrest.
But the failure of a compromise in the aftermath of the 1913 strike led to a second general strike
in January 1914. The state responded swiftly, declaring martial law, mobilizing forces,
and suppressing the unions, resulting in the arrest and deportation of key activists,
including Archie Crawford.
Then World War I further disrupted things, with the country joining the British side.
While some organisations suspended activities to support the war efforts,
hardline African nationalists launched an armed rebellion, leading to split tooth in the SDF and
the South African Labour Party. Although anarchism and syndicalism played a role in these turbulent events, the actual
syndicalist movement on the Witwatersrand was weak and divided by 1913.
Despite attempts to forge unity through the United Socialist Party, the USP, it fell apart
due to existing divisions and ideological differences among the constituent groups.
While organized syndicalism struggled
to lead the strikes, syndicalist ideas and slogans gained considerable traction in labor circles.
The strikes and war issues reinvigorated existing anarchists and syndicalists,
radicalized new activists, and sparked widespread interest in radical ideas.
Which would lead to a new development.
In September 1915, the Industrial Socialist League, the ISL, emerged as a prominent
syndicalist formation. Comprising other syndicalist veterans and anti-war South
African Labour Party activists, the ISL quickly became the largest left political group before the Communist Party of South Africa.
The ISL, rooted in the IWW tradition, advocated for the organization of workers on industrial
lines, irrespective of race, and envisioned an integrated, revolutionary, one big union
for national liberation and class struggle.
The ISL criticized white craft unions for their divisive practices, and advocated for
industrial unions to confront the challenges posed by giant corporations and trusts.
Racial prejudice, according to the ISL, served the ruling class's interests, ensuring a
steady supply of cheap, unorganized African labor.
At the same time that the ISL was actively opposing discriminatory laws, the ISL also
doubted the efficacy of African nationalist programs in genuinely emancipating the Black
masses.
It contended that national oppression was rooted in capitalism, making national liberation
unlikely under the prevailing system.
The ISL aimed to reform white unions while leading efforts to organize people of color.
They faced challenges, of course, in the form of opposition from white workers,
electoral defeats, and hostility from established unions. They were evicted from Trades Hall in
1917 for resisting discriminatory policies, but continued their activities, cultivating links with people of colour, particularly
through its passionately anti-Zionist Yiddish-speaking branch.
The ISL played a pivotal role in establishing unions among people of colour, launching the
Indian Workers' Industrial Union in Durban in 1917, and later, through night schools
for Africans, initiating the Industrial Workers of Africa in the same year, both of which would be led by their own constituents.
In July 1918, there would be another general strike, this time primarily by Africans.
Earlier that year, 152 African municipal workers were sentenced to hard labour for striking,
leading to protests organised by the Industrial Workers of Africa,
the International Socialist League, and the South African Native National Congress, the S.A.N.N.C.,
which was the precursor to the ANC. The Joint Action Committee proposed a general strike
on the Witwatersrand for the release of the sentenced workers and better pay for African workers.
Although the strike was cancelled last minute, several thousand African miners participated
anyway, resulting in arrests for incitement to public violence.
The arrested individuals included ISL members and a member of both the Industrial Workers
of Africa and the SA
NNC.
A year later, in March 1919, ISL members played a role in their civil disobedience campaign
against past laws, which required non-whites in South Africa to carry documents authorizing
their presence in restricted white areas.
That resistance campaign led to nearly 700 arrests.
That same year in Kimberley, the ISL established syndicalist unions among coloured workers,
such as the Clothing Workers Industrial Union and the Horse Drivers Union. These unions
achieved significant successes, including wage increases. In Cape Town, ISL members Sitiwe and Kraai aimed to organize the Industrial Workers of
Africa on the docks.
They collaborated with the Industrial Socialist League, the IND-SL, a syndicalist breakaway
from the SDF, and played a role in the major strike on the docks in December 1919.
Now the strike ultimately disintegrated, but it still marked a significant event.
All in all, the ISL, heavily influenced by syndicalism, will play a major role in the
strikes of the late 1910s.
The ISL's influence extended to the formation of the Communist Party of South Africa, the
CPSC, alongside the SDF and the Ind SL and a few other groups
in the 1920s.
That party would go underground after the Anti-Communist Act of the 50s and re-emerge
as the South African Communist Party, the SACP.
For most of its history, it has been explicitly Marxist-Leninist, heavily influenced by the
Bolsheviks. However, when it first started, syndicalist concepts still lingered within the party for
many years before it was eventually excised.
The internationalist and multiracial vision of the syndicalist movement was later taken
over by the two-stage strategy of the CPSA slash SACP, which sought to establish an independent,
democratic, capitalist republic as a precursor
to a socialist order.
This of course diverges from the earlier anarchist and syndicalist strategy which viewed the
anti-colonial, independent, and class struggles as interconnected, and didn't see national
liberation as solely the purview of nationalism.
A view which, to me, is more sophisticated and revolutionary than this one-track status
view that Marxists tend to adopt, contrary to the organizing efforts of actual working
class people.
Interestingly, van der Waal argues that while CPSA undeniably contributed to the working
class struggles since the 1940s, a critical look reveals that they made consistent caricatures
of the pre-CPSA left. They sought
to establish themselves as the true vanguard in the fight for South Africa's liberation,
so they portrayed the pre-CPSA left in two main currents, the proto-Bolsheviks, considered
true socialists, and everyone else. The pre-CPSA left was deemed a failure, with the proto-Bolsheviks
credited for pioneering socialist work among
black workers.
According to their narrative, it was only in the late 1920s, with the CPSA's adoption
of the Native Republic thesis and Marxist Leninist ideas, that the national question
was adequately addressed.
Anarchism and syndicalism are portrayed as marginal and bothersome, predominantly white
movements that, at best,
underestimated the significance of national oppression, or at worst, endorsed white supremacy
and segregation.
This interpretation, of course, positions the CPSA slash SACP as the sole bearers of
a revolutionary socialist solution to the national question, while ironically erasing
the history of early African socialist and syndicalist
radicalism. So, wrapping up a bit here, we delved into the intricate history of anarchism and
syndicalism in South Africa, uncovering a movement that played a significant role in
Southern Africa from the 1880s to the 1920s, and consistently grappled with the complexities
of the National Question. We've seen a multiracial and internationalist movement, marked by a steadfast opposition
to racial discrimination and a commitment to interracial labour organization and the
unity of the working class.
They had a vision of a society rooted in class solidarity, of an industrial republic, distinct
from the conventional nation-state, and in lockstep
with an international industrial republic.
Now despite the decline of anarchism and syndicalism in the years following the founding of the
CPSA slash SACP, anarchism is still alive today in South Africa.
The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, or ZACF, is a specific anarchist political organization
based in Johannesburg, South Africa and founded on May Day in 2003.
The organization operates on an individual membership basis by invitation only, emphasizing
theoretical and strategic unity among members.
The Zabalazas align with the anarchist-, communist, platformist, and Especialista traditions within
anarchism, subscribing to the idea of an active minority pushing anarchist ideas within larger
movements.
In fact, unlike the anarcho-syndicalists, the Zabalazars don't aim to build mass anarchist
movements but rather to participate in existing social movements
spreading anarchist principles within heterogeneous organisations.
Zablaza advocates for direct democracy, mutual aid, horizontalism, class combativeness,
direct action, and class independence. It emerged during a time of political closure within trade
unions which were controlled by the African National Congress government.
It oriented itself towards emerging social movements, such as the Anti-Privatization
Forum and the Landless People's Movement, aiming to advance anarchist principles within
these movements.
Sabalazza's work includes popular political education, combating reformists and authoritarian
tendencies, and
advocating for the independence of social movements from political parties and electoral politics.
So that's the story. The history of anarchism and cynicalism in South Africa. Obviously this
is a summary, but it goes to show the influence that these movements have had in shaping the history
of that often forgotten region of the world.
Thanks for joining me.
Once again, all power to all the people.
Peace. Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast.
We've been with iHeart's Outspoken network for a year and what a year it has been.
Every weekday I navigate our rapidly changing world alongside our series of fabulous expert
guests.
As we head deeper into 2024 and yet another life-changing
election cycle, Woke AF Daily is here to keep you sane and
woke. Woke not just to the latest headlines, but also to
the collective power we all have. Woke to the need to build
community with those around us. Woke to how to avoid burnout
and woke to the ways we can all find joy in the madness.
Make Woke F Daily with Danielle Moody your podcast destination for 2024 election news
and analysis.
And tune in to hear the ways I am working to stay grounded amidst it all.
Listen to Woke F Daily Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your
podcasts.
Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa?
But how much do you know about them from the ancient world?
Let's talk about Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life.
Greek myth and history is timeless, and unless you've been living under a rock, you have
seen just how true that is today.
But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice.
I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, and every week I bring
you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of
years old stories.
I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology
and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between.
Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories.
Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, baby,
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe,
and I'm back for another season
of my podcast, Climbing in Heels.
You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project,
or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist.
And guess what?
I'm still just as fully obsessed
with all things fashion, beauty, and business. My podcast Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the
stories of extraordinary women and this season we're taking things up a notch.
I'll be talking to some incredible women across so many industries. From models
and beauty industry stars to doctors, entrepreneurs, and TV personalities.
Climbing in Heels is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamour, inspiration and fun. Every week listeners will be able to ask me any
questions. I'm answering it all. My life is absolutely crazy with so much going
on and I'm so beyond excited to bring you along for the ride. Whether we're
talking red carpet looks, current trends or products I'm obsessed with, I'm here
to be your fashion fairy godmother. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
almost three in the morning is being recorded at three in the morning instead of any normal time, because a bunch of protests broke out
across college campuses against the genocide in Palestine.
We will cover that at some point very soon.
However, comma,
there is this episode to be done.
I'm your host, Mia Wong, and this episode is something a little different.
So. There's an element of Trump's agenda 47
that we didn't really talk about in our episodes.
That's actually a pretty significant amount of the material,
and that's Trump's trade policy.
And this is sort of surprisingly a very large part of his pitch.
The sort of gist of it is that Trump's appeal to like the white working class
TM is OK, we're going to do a bunch of protectionist terrorists.
This is going to bring jobs back to the US by imposing costs
on manufacturing in other countries, etc, etc.
This will bring jobs back to America and it will make America greater
some shit. Now, the centerpiece of this is what's called the reciprocal tariff bill.
I mean, it's not that complicated. Basically, what it says is if a country imposes a tariff
on an American good, the US imposes an identical tariff on that tariff. It's designed to basically automatically start trade wars.
Now, the reason we didn't cover this
in the original Agenda 47 slate of episodes is that.
Even in the worst case scenario, where Trump takes power
and like a coup and, you know, the sort of power of anyone
to oppose him is significantly curtailed.
I don't think he can get this one passed.
And the reason I don't think you can get this one past is because,
you know, as as it turns out, this package
and what we're going to sort of explore this a little bit,
but actually seriously messing
with tariffs is something that is really, really going to piss off
a lot of corporations that actually matter now.
OK, so like we could have I could have just done the episode anyways,
led with that and just given the sort of, you know,
just given the disclaimer that like, it's probably not going to happen.
But I think there's a more interesting story here
that hasn't really been talked about about the origin of.
Basically, the framework of modern American politics, both on the right and on the left,
because they both emerge, I think, from a series of arguments about.
Trade that has been kind of broadly forgotten,
I think that's to our detriment. And the product of this
is that there's been a sort of raft of arguments.
And I've seen this as much from the left as from the right,
that Trump's support for tariffs and particularly the sort of trade spat
he got in with China from 2018 to 2019 marks the end of the sort of
like neoliberal free trade regime and the emergence of like new nationalist
protections against free trade.
It's like the new economic system that's replaced neoliberalism.
And I am very skeptical of this.
And the reason why I'm very skeptical of this is because I.
When I was coming up as a leftist, I spent a bunch of time
seriously became involved in like IRL left organizing around 2017.
I'd done some stuff in like 2013 before then.
But that meant that, you know, a lot of the stuff I was reading was accounts
of what was called the global justice movement, which was or
an alter globalization, anti globalization.
There's like it has it has a million names.
But it was it was this series of mass protest movements against.
The sort of raft of free trade agreements coming out of the 90s.
So. And you get a very, very different picture of the history of free trade
that is sort of broader and more expansive in the history of the resistance to it.
Then you get if you just sort of like, you know, assume neoliberalism has been the same always.
And Trump is the sort of aberration to it now.
Trump's status as an aberration is something that I question.
I mean, you know, the trade war that he got into is something,
you know, it is different. But.
I think there's a lot of
there's a lot of sort of hype around Trump's like opposition to free trade.
Like one of the big things, you know, that Trump ran on
was pulling out of NAFTA and he did.
He did pull out of NAFTA. However, comma.
He then set up a new trade NAFTA, by the way, is the North
American Free Trade Agreement. It's really shit.
We're going to talk a bit more about what exactly it did later.
But, you know, it's broadly seen, I think rightly, as
something that smashed both huge portions of what was left of the American manufacturing economy and
the parts of the economy that had been rebuilt in the 80s, and also just absolutely annihilating
the machinic agricultural industry. For reasons that we will explain it a bit. It's now it's now becoming extremely deeply unpopular because unbelievable
numbers of workers lost their jobs.
And, you know, the jobs that they got afterwards had shittier wages,
you know, entire communities are ravaged, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So Trump, you know, famously campaigns on pulling out of this deal,
but he replaces it with something called USMCA.
Now, here's the thing about this deal.
This is basically just NAFTA
with slightly stronger carve outs for the auto industry about like
what percentage of the parts of vehicles have to be produced in the US
and some like slightly stronger
labor, like protections, which is like fine.
But it's it's basically the same deal. Right.
So, you know, you have to take this whole sort of like
Trump is like the anti free trade thing with a grain of salt and look at
again this deal that he negotiated, which is just NAFTA.
It is literally after all of the hype of him pulling out of NAFTA.
He did NAFTA again.
Now, this is something very interesting that I don't think people remember.
Obama also opposed NAFTA and they came into office and then nothing ever fucking happened
to NAFTA.
So you know, the sort of like the rumors of NAFTA's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
But comma, the story of the building of opposition to NAFTA is very, very interesting.
So something I don't think most people understand is that the modern American left is descended
from the Zapatistas, very specifically.
We're going to one day cover the Zapatista uprising in some detail, but the sort of cliff
nose version is that on January 1st, 1994, the Zapatistas, who are
named after the great Mexican revolutionary hero Emilio Zapata, staged an uprising in Mexico. They
seized a bunch of cities very quickly. They were sort of driven out of those cities, but eventually
they took control of a decent part of the territory of the Mexican state of Chiapas.
The Zapatistas staged this uprising for a number of reasons. The most famous of them is that January 1st, 1994 is the year the NAFTA took
effect. One of the things about this free trade agreement is that in order to ratify it, the
Mexican government changed the constitution and the part of the constitution they eliminated was
the part that had secured collective ownership of a
bunch of land for indigenous people.
And this would allow corporations to seize and control this and
seize and control the indigenous lands, exploit it for resources,
kick the people off of it and kill them.
Now, this obviously was unacceptable to the Zapatistas.
They go into revolt.
What I think people don't realize is the Zapatista
with the Zapatista did next, which is holding these
a series of these things called in Quintros, like encounters.
Sorry, my Spanish is
not as good as it once was, and it was never great.
But you know, in which they invited,
you know, sort of leftist activists from all over the world to get together.
And this is the thing that rebuilt the left after the absolute catastrophe of the death of the old
left around the collapse of the Soviet Union, which sort of annihilated.
Like the sort of old left, like communist political parties and, you know, ushered in like the pure error of the March of neoliberalism.
And the activists that came out of these encounters go back to.
You know, go back to their respective countries and they start and, you know, they're they're organizing against.
These against, you know, these series of free trade deals.
And they start doing what's become what's become known as summit hopping.
I think the most famous of these in America is what's become known
as the Battle of Seattle, the 1999 giant protest against the World Trade
Organization summit.
Yeah. And this sort of, you know, and this starts from about 1999 to 9-11.
There's a huge wave of these.
Well, I mean, it goes on after 9 11, but 9 11 really damages it.
But there's this massive.
It's like really the first sort of real like mass mobilizations
and social movements like in in in the U.S.
since like there was a stuff in the anti-nuclear room in the 80s.
But this is this is the first really big sort of like.
Resurrection of the left.
And I think importantly for us, like the people who people who found occupy,
like David David Graber, for example, is someone who starts doing politics
but during this period, during during ultra globalization,
during these sort of protests.
And those people, those are the people who build occupy.
And, you know, occupyupy for whatever, whatever else
you can say about it, Occupy is the single event that brought
that like drag the American left kicking and screaming out of irrelevance.
And all of that shit, everything, you know, every
all of the sort of organizational tenants of occupy, all of its sort of ideology.
That stuff is all stuff and multiglobalization, right?
Opposite is in the sort of tense of like of direct democracy,
of the sort of like the sort of economic egalitarianism,
this opposition to free trade, this, you know, this whole thing about
the way that the World Trade Organization and the World Bank,
you know, use sort of economic restructuring deals
to devastate economies. And like turn entire nations into sort
of debt peons. This is all to globalization stuff. And this
movement is very, very powerful and very successful. Even the
sort of arch, like, you know, by the time you hit 2016, right?
This has reshaped politics in the U.S. to the extent that like arch neoliberal Hillary Clinton
says she's openly in fit, like openly says she's in favor
of renegotiating NAFTA and opposes her own trans-Pacific partnership,
which is the last of the sort of giant free trade deals
that would eventually like die and go up and smoke with Trump. Right.
I'm going to read a passage from David Graber's piece,
the shock of victory about what actually happened
during this movement.
This is a section about free trade agreements.
All the ambitious free trade treaties planned since 1998 have failed.
The MIA was routed, the FTAA, the focus of the actions in Quebec
and Miami stopped that in its tracks.
Most of us remember the 2003 FTAA summit mainly for introducing the quote-unquote Miami model
of extreme police repression against even obviously non-violent civil resistance.
It was that.
But we forget that this was more than anything the enraged flailings of a pack of extremely
sore losers.
Miami was the meeting where the FTAA was definitively killed.
Now, no one is even talking about broad, ambitious treaties on that scale. The US is reduced to
pushing from minor country-to-country trade pacts with traditional allies like South Korea and Peru,
or at best deals like CAFTA uniting its remaining client states in Central America,
and it's not even clear it will manage to pull that off. And this is what we've seen from, you know, sort of projecting forward
from the future, from the 2000s when this is written.
Free trade was not killed by Trump or Xi Jinping.
These free trade agreements, if anyone, was killed by the Zapatistas
in the global justice and the global justice movement that the Zapatist
that, you know, sort of like incontros and the Zapatistas built.
Now, one thing is that thesis didapatistas did not build is the product
services that support this podcast.
And we are we are back from products and services
products and services that is slightly ominous.
Now, the modern left isn't the only thing that sort of descended from the backlash to free trade, right?
We've, we've, you know, we've gone over the extent to which
the left is built off of this stuff. But much of the modern
right is descended from the sort of Ross Perot, like right wing
nationalist backlash to the same stuff. I think probably the most the most famous link between that era
and this era is Alex Jones.
This is the reason that like Alex Jones and people like him scream
about like scream constantly about globalists, right?
Because, you know, the global justice movement has.
Two kind of wings, there's or, you know, what was called anti-globalization.
It is two wings.
One wing is a sort is a leftist wing, which is like, OK,
we actually support like the we know we support the global
like movement of ideas and people.
But we but you know what what globalization and free trade actually means is.
Locking people down in their countries with militarized borders,
what capital boosts really between them, and we think that's fucking bad.
There was also another, you know, there was also the right wing reaction,
which is this incredibly right nationalist reaction, which is that like,
I like these these like rootless cosmopolitan globalists are
I are like, like, you know,
taking all of our jobs and moving them to like Mexico.
And you know, they've like sold they like sold out the American people. taking all of our jobs and moving them to like Mexico and.
You know, they've like sold, they like sold out the American people. And, you know, like, obviously, the stuff is just it starts.
It starts like as a cosmetic dog whistles and just gets the I mean, like, OK,
these are like the loudest dog was of all time. Right.
But, you know, they get increasingly anti-Semitic.
And this is the kind of stuff, you know, that Alex Jones is doing. And this is the kind of sort of
right wing politics that wins out over to sort of like
neoconservatism, more like sort of hurrah free trade, we're
going to use the like the the might of the American Empire to
like, you know, spread sort of like, this very civic model of capitalism to other countries.
And you get the sort of Trump style like fuck every other country.
We're going to kind of do tariffs and stuff.
Now, what I think is very interesting.
So what Trump eventually sort of winds up, you know, producing as a discourse,
I guess you could say, is this image of,
OK, so like the thing that's holding back the American worker is China because all of our jobs
are being sent to China. And so if we just put more tariffs on China and we defeat China
geopolitically, everything will sort of like be great in the American nation. Like you,
the white worker, are going to have jobs again, like everything's going to go back to the way they were.
And what's fascinating about this is that.
You know, as the trade wars intensifying in the mid-late 2010s in China,
there is a parallel discourse, which is almost identical,
where Chinese nationalists will do this thing where they talk about like
breaking through the great Ming as a solution to involution. We talked about
evolution on the show before is this concept that's very
popular in China right now, where, you know, it's becoming
increasingly clear that like working hard is not going to
actually get you any more money than you're getting now like
you're not going to get ahead in life, you're just sort of
stuck. And so you're stuck in this condition of putting more
and more effort into nothing. And the Chinese nationalist argument is that if you can, if you can geopolitically defeat the U.S.,
China will sort of like break out of its wage stagnation and economic stagnation.
And so, you know, what you have is this very, very dangerous collision of these two sort of
like right wing nationalisms that are like offering these. Really sort of categorically false assertions that if you just follow their sort of nationalist geopolitical agenda than all of the sort of class issues that everyone's dealing with will suddenly magically work themselves out.
Now,
Contra this and Contra I think the argument that.
Even that sort of just you know the argument that I was talking about
before that, like Trump and this sort of nationalist, like economic policy discourse from
China, like represents something, you know, seismic, like a seismic change in like trade
policy that signals the end of neoliberalism. I want to come back to the point of will Trump
actually be able to implement any of this stuff, even if he had sort of near dictatorial power? And I think the answer to that is no. And the
reason I think the answer to that is no, is that, you know, one of the old observations
about quote unquote free trade from the global justice movement is that. OK, if you look
at what quote unquote trade is right, international trade, Huge amount of it is literally the same company
moving its own resources from one place to another.
Now, the problem is, the more expensive it is for corporations to do this,
the more pissed off they get. Right.
And this means that this kind of like terror for bullshit.
And this happened to the Trump administration that pissed off a lot of people.
And if you know, and Trump is, you know, his intention is to start an even larger
and more powerful series of trade wars.
This is going to piss off a lot of people who actually matter in the sort of
in the American political system, which is to say a lot of shareholders
and a lot of CEOs.
And, you know, and so I think the fairly obvious inclusion
is that what actually happens here is you get exactly the same kind of shit that happened with Trump's
like, quote unquote, pull out of NAFTA, where he makes like one or two symbolic
gestures and then everything continues as normal and he declares victory.
Now, the second problem I have with people looking at this
as a sort of new regime is the way that they're thinking about.
This sort of like tariff and subsidy regime is something that's
that's not a part of neoliberalism, right, like the sort of theoretical ideal
of neoliberalism is countries aren't supposed to do tariffs,
countries aren't supposed to be able to do like, quote unquote, protectionism.
So we're not supposed to give subsidies to manufacturers
and everyone's supposed to like compete on a free and equal playing field.
This has never been true.
And in fact, what free trade has meant in practice,
and this has been true since the founding of the World Trade Organization.
What it means is that Western countries get to impose tariffs
and manufacturing subsidies, and non-Western countries don't.
Right. Even like even in the WTO, there's a bunch of random carve outs
for like fucking like random workers in Germany and stuff.
This is also a part of like literally a part of what started the Zapatista uprising.
I mean, we talked about, you know, the primary cause, like the elimination of collective ownership from Mexican constitution.
But another huge problem is what NAFTA what NAFTA was going to do is force
a bunch of Mexican corn farmers to compete with American corn farmers.
Now, OK, if it was literally just corn farmers from these two countries
competing like Mexican corn farmers, probably eventually could outcompete
American corn farmers because Americans are fucking dogshit at farming.
But under the terms of NAFTA, and this is again, a thing
that's been true of free trade this whole time.
They have to compete with subsidized American corn.
This is impossible. Mexican farmers got fucking annihilated.
All of their land was seized by corporations.
And, you know, it is brought sort of devastation
and ruin to the Mexican economy ever since.
This has been absolutely great for the ruling class
because all of these farmers who suddenly like, you know,
can't afford to keep their farms anymore were forced
into sort of like labor and a bunch of shitty sweatshops that were set up from NAFTA. So
this worked great from the perspective of American capital. But again, if you look at
what actually happened here, right, all of the sort of like rhetoric of free trade, you
know, like sort of like fades into mist in face of the reality of one of the great industrial
policy programs in the in the history of world economies, which
is the American subsidization of its own fucking agriculture.
And you know, this isn't considered in the quote unquote
industrial policy or like industrial, like government
planning or whatever, like largely because people have this
weird bias when they talk about government planning, that it only is supposed to apply to
like government planning means when someone like plans, steal output to some ship.
But like, no, like the actual large scale economic plan that goes on in the U.S.
is the unfathomable billions and billions and billions of billions of dollars
will be poured into the agricultural industry every year.
So, you know, if you look at the stuff that everyone's claiming
that these sort of new innovations that are like the
end of neoliberalism rights, like, oh, my God, other countries
are putting up like protectionist subsidy things like
they're having their you know, people are like trying to make
microchips and they're having like state sponsored programs to
do microchips. It's like, well, they're just doing with microchips what the U.S.
has been doing with corn this entire time.
Right. What's really changing to some extent is that, you know, the deal had always been
that Western countries get to impose tariffs on that manufacturing subsidies and non-Western
countries don't. And I think part of what's waiting for people is that China has actually been
kind of attempting to break the West's monopoly on being able to do with industrial policy.
And this has caused a bunch of people to really severely overestimate the extent to which
this is an actual break from previous regimes of trade and capital.
Now, another point that I want to make that I've talked about this before on the show, but I want to kind of briefly touch on it again, because I think it's really important and it's really badly understood, is that for all of the sort of discourse about how, like,
Like, ah, China's like entering into economic competition with the West. And it's like increasingly using the party to like pursue nationalist aims instead of
like following the market.
If you look at what's actually going on in China, despite all the hype about like, ah,
China and the US are decoupling their economies, or like China is trying to make its own domestic
silicon industry, the actual tendency in Chinese economic policy is towards further integration and increasing foreign ownership.
China has a lot of provisions about foreign companies
needing to be in partnership with Chinese companies
in order to operate in China.
There has always been massive restrictions on how much stock
a foreign company can own in Chinese companies.
And these restrictions in a sector, sector, sector, sector, sector.
Are being lifted.
And so you have to sort of look at this,
you know, the sort of like surface level nationalist narratives about like
our entering an era of like warring, like
like warring, mutually exclusive economic trading series with the reality of China
being like, no, please, foreign capital. Like you can operate here without us.
It's going to be great just to keep, keep, keep pumping more capital in.
If we all if we all work together, all of the sort of bush was he will keep
making money together.
And I think all of this leads to something.
The last thing I want to touch on, which is what's actually happening here
and the thing that's actually happening here
and the thing that's actually causing all of these sort of like
all like the sort of focus on trade itself
and the sort of Trumpian nationalists,
we can solve all your problems by trade competition.
What's happening is that after about the 1960s,
because of sort of structural manufacturing of capacity and under consumption.
Production, you know, industrial production is zero sum, right?
You can't increase production rates in a country without that.
You know, without that production coming at the cost of another country.
And this is this is because and wow, stop me for this one before.
This is because of fucking capitalism.
And what Trump is trying to do and what, you know, to a lesser extent,
sort of Xi Jinping and what to, you know, this sort of Chinese nationalists
are trying to do is turn, you know, they're trying to stand on a beach
in order the tide to recede.
In order to stop the coming class war they're trying to say no we can we can go back to the era where production wasn't zero some we can do this is sort of terrorists we can go back to the golden age of.
I both corporations and unions making more corporations and workers like making money together and the sort of like national collaboration is project.
And they're doing this.
In large part, because they are watching the same thing
that you and I are watching, the same thing that's the reason this episode
is being recorded at fucking three in the morning instead of a normal time,
which is that all across the US and, you know, increasingly all across the world,
you can fucking see the working class
starting to organize again, you can fucking see the working class starting to organize again.
You can see it starting to wake up.
You can see it starting to mobilize.
And this whole fucking thing, all of Trump, right?
This entire sort of racist, xenophobic nationalist project is just utter dread that Ferguson
and the Black Revolution put into the fucking hearts of
these people.
And if we fight hard enough, we fight smart enough, and we fight organized enough, inshallah
we will see the fucking day when these people's nightmare comes true and we never have to
hear another word from these fuckers again. and it could happen here.
Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast. We've been with iHeart's outspoken network for a year
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. It's me today and I'm joined by Megan Burdett, who is the director of research at the Kurdish Peace Institute. Hi,
Megan. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for joining us. So what we
wanted to talk about today was these local elections that have been happening
in Turkey in the last week or so, we're recording in very early April,
so it happened I think towards the end of March, right?
Yeah, March 31st.
Yeah. So can you explain to listeners, first of all, like, I've heard about these
Turkish local elections almost constantly for the past several months, because I
hear about them from Kurdish migrants leaving Turkey almost every time I'm at
the border, right, I meet people and they tell me. Can you explain sort of the context of these elections,
the concerns going into them? Yeah, of course. So first off, these are the first elections in Turkey
following the presidential and parliamentary vote last year that was seen as a huge disappointment
for the opposition and also for a couple of separate reasons
and a couple of similar reasons
for the pro-Kurdish political movement as well.
The opposition underperformed last year.
They were not able to defeat Erdogan
as the polling and the sentiment in the country
had suggested that they would.
And the pro-Kurdish political movement
also underperformed as well.
They did not win as many seats or as many votes as they usually do,
and a lot of that was attributed to the very complex alliance decisions they made,
choosing not to run their own presidential candidate and instead ask their voters to vote for the CHP,
which is the main opposition party that has a history of being very nationalist and violent and exclusionary towards Kurds, though things have changed in these past 20 years. Voters didn't understand
that. A lot of voters weren't happy with that. And then there were some local level issues with
selections of candidates as well. And then of course, the climate of very severe political
repression. And had the opposition won, there was a lot of hope that it would have started to change things on the Kurdish issue in Turkey.
You know, from what I'd been hearing from people, there were prospects of political prisoners being released,
of contacts between the state and Abdullah Ocalan being reestablished, which could have been the opening of a new peace process.
If you follow this, you know the PKK declared a ceasefire
prior to the elections.
They initially said that it was following the earthquake
in order to not allow the conflict
to intervene with humanitarian efforts,
but they did very explicitly extend it
through the elections.
And the discussions around that,
that I heard in Iraqi Kurdistan,
in Northeast Syria and in Europe,
made it very clear that that was an opening
to hopefully be able to leverage it
into a larger peace process were there to be a political change.
But that change didn't happen.
So for Kurds, the situation did not improve.
Erdogan continued his crackdown and his military aggression against Kurds in Iraq and Syria.
And for democracy in Turkey, for the condition of the opposition, for the condition of all
the groups oppressed under Erdogan's regime, whether that's women, whether that's workers,
whether that's the earthquake victims that have been left behind, things didn't get better. So these elections were an opportunity for people
to register their disapproval in a way
that I think many might have wished that they could have a year ago.
And that disapproval was registered.
For the first time, Erdogan's party, the Justice and Development
Party, or the AKP, was not the first place party in Turkey.
The main opposition CHP actually overtook them.
The pro-Kurdish People's Equality and Democracy Party or the DEM Party, which used to be the
HDP, so if I call it the HDP, I'm sorry, went actually, their results were much more in
line with what they had done in the past.
They performed right on standard.
They actually won more municipalities
than they did in 2019.
And there was a lot of enthusiasm for change among Kurds,
among supporters of the opposition,
among people who I think had wanted to see things start
to move in a more democratic direction last year.
So that was a very big deal for
that reason. And it also shows the fact that Erdogan is not
necessarily as invincible in 2028. As people feared he would
be.
Yeah. So talking of invincibility, I think that's a
good kind of key into our next topic, which is that the
elections weren't exactly like a smooth kind of,
I guess, concession by Erdogan and by his party, right? Can you explain to people who aren't
familiar with this what happened? Yeah, so to start before the elections, over 75% of voters who
supported successful pro-Kurdish mayoral candidates had their elected representation
taken away from them. The government removed and imprisoned elected mayors and replaced them with regime
loyalist trustees who essentially ruled these municipalities on direct orders from Erdogan
in Ankara. So this was an unfair playing field for the Kurdish political movement to begin
with, very unfair playing field for the main opposition political movement to begin with, very unfair playing
field for the main opposition as well.
Ekrem Imamoglu is the very popular mayor of Istanbul,
who just won re-election by a very large margin,
has a criminal case against him that could
have him banned from politics.
So this was very difficult.
In the Kurdish regions, there were many, many irregularities
on election day.
One that a lot of people were discussing were these so-called mobile voters,
where the government actually sent members of these security forces, predominantly
from Western Turkey, into Kurdish cities to vote in large groups for the ruling AKP.
You know, there's a lot of videos taken by local media, local politicians and
activists challenging
these people, asking them where they're from.
And then videos of them all crowding into the airports and back on their buses flying
back to Western Turkey the next day.
So they're not even making a pretense of being local voters.
That shifted the results in some districts in Cernak, which is a very heavily militarized
province where the government bases a lot of its military campaigns into the occupied regions of Iraq and Syria from
the pro-Kurdish political movement alleges that these voters shifted the outcome. So you had that
kind of outright attempts at theft in addition to the context of repression. And then most brazenly, just one day after the election,
the local provincial election board denied a mandate of victory,
you know, essentially the document certifying that a candidate has won the elections
and will be allowed to assume office,
to the pro-Kurdish candidate Abdullah Zeydhan in the province of Van,
which is a heavily Kurdish province,
where the Dem
Party won all 14 district municipalities and the metropolitan municipality as well.
So the local election authority essentially said, no, you can't run.
There's been a last minute legal finding that you're unfit to run for office, as there always
is.
And then they tried to give the municipality to the candidate from Erdogan's
party, the AKP, who got less than half of the number of votes.
Right. Yeah. So kind of, yeah, invalidating the results. We're going to break briefly
for an advert here and then we'll're back. So when they tried to validate these results, right, and to install representatives,
I guess you could call them that, who didn't win the popular vote, there was a significant
street response to that, right? Can you talk us through that and then the repression of
it and the results of it?
Absolutely.
So there were mass demonstrations in Van in other Kurdish provinces, and these are people coming out
who not 10 years ago saw the military raising their cities to the ground, killing civilians in the streets.
This is a very costly endeavor for Kurdish people in these provinces to go protest.
That's why you haven't seen it to such a degree as was seen in the 90s and the early 2000s,
since the collapse of the peace process and that violent military campaign in the cities.
But last night they were out in full force and very notably they weren't alone.
There were protests in Istanbul in solidarity as well,
carried out by Kurds living there,
but also by leftist parties, by feminists,
by Kurdish religious organizations,
by all the segments of civil society
that have oriented around the pro-Kurdish political movement.
And there was also a pretty significant reaction
from the main opposition, CHP, which is not known for radicalism.
You had the CHP party leader,
Özgür Ozil, saying that it was illegitimate for the government to deny a candidate a mandate.
And then you had Imamoglu in Istanbul also criticizing the decision,
saying it was illegitimate and calling on the government to respect the popular will.
So at the same time, you had this outcry across the Turkish political spectrum.
You had tens of thousands of people out protesting, braving police violence.
There were armed pro-government vigilantes caught on video shooting into crowds. There were very,
very harrowing videos of beatings and torture of civilians.
Journalists were attacked and prevented from covering the protests.
This was a very difficult situation to watch.
And a lot of people that I was speaking to were worrying about
a return to the level of violence that was seen in 2015 and 2016 were things to escalate.
But sometimes there's good news in Turkey and Kurdistan,
not always, but sometimes. In Turkish, you'd say, Dirdene, Dirdene, Kazanacaz will win
by resisting. And in Kurdish, you'd say, Berkudan, Ziyane, resistance is life. And
those are very famous protest slogans that proved really accurate last night because today Turkey's Supreme Electoral
Council actually reversed the attempts to give the election to the losing pro-government candidate
and gave the Dem Party candidate his mandate back. So they've said that he will be allowed to assume
office. And I think they looked at this huge street protest. They looked at this opposition coming from not only
the pro-Kurdish political movement,
but many different political forces in Turkey.
And the state decided to back down.
They decided not to pick this fight now.
And that's not to say that voter suppression in other provinces
wasn't an issue.
That's not to say that there are still
outcomes that are being contested. You know, the government's doing a lot of very unfair things
right now to try to take districts from the CHP and from the pro-Kurdish political movement.
But what this does show is that when people insist on a democratic outcome and when they are willing to stand up for it in large numbers
and face the consequences, the difficulty of doing that, that even regimes like Erdogan's,
these very, you know, autocratic far-right governments have a point at which they will
back down. And I think that that display of resistance and solidarity, getting a
government like that to back down is something that can be very hopeful for
people around the world right now.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, we've seen like just to the stuff we've covered, obviously the United States,
but also in Myanmar, like increasingly it's becoming harder and harder for
states to deny people's right to be represented or to be heard.
And like that's a good thing, Germany for democracy.
Yeah.
I wanted to ask about, you spoke a little bit about the Turkish
military's incursions into North and East Syria and into like Iraqi Kurdistan
or the Kurdistan autonomous region.
Can you explain that there's a lot of like, I think Turkey has pretty
clearly like telegraphed plants for increased military activity in that region.
Can you explain what's being proposed and what that means?
So I think because they have gone into this election and found themselves weakened,
this is something that could make Erdogan very dangerous.
One thing that the government has always done when it's found itself weak is try to polarize society
by attacking the Kurds, both domestically
and internationally in Iraqi Kurdistan
and in Northeast Syria.
Of course, you have the AKP government's loss
of its majority in the 2015 elections
during the peace process becoming the reason
for the government's abandonment of the peace process, becoming the reason for the government's abandonment
of the peace process itself. Then in 2019, after the local elections where the government lost
control of Istanbul and Ankara for the first time, that was very quickly followed with the appointment
of state trustees to Kurdish municipalities and then the invasion of northern East Syria
following Erdogan's agreement with Donald Trump about that.
And so this does look like the kind of context
in which he has lashed out against Kurds
in Iraq and Syria before.
And given these threats that you mentioned
that he has been making,
the diplomatic traffic between Turkey and Iraq,
Turkey and Iran, Turkey and the US and Europe,
they do appear to be preparing for something.
Now, I was just on the ground in North and East Syria and in Iraqi Kurdistan, and I heard
from many people that they're concerned.
The threats that the government has been making appear to suggest that they might try to go
for a geographically larger military operation this time.
There's a chance that instead of only conducting
their typical spring offensive into Iraqi Kurdistan,
which usually gets them nowhere,
they might also attempt to invade northern Syria as well.
Of course, that's very internationally contingent.
They would need a green light from the Americans
and from the Russians to be able to violate
those ceasefires and go in there.
But the threat's very real. It's something that people are very concerned about on the ground.
And I think that it's worth paying attention to, and particularly for those of us in countries
that are allied with the Turkish government, making noise about, you know, opposing, trying
to get onto the agenda so that permission is not given here. They're not incentivized to do this.
Yeah, I think that's a very good point, because Kurdish issues
are ones that don't come up very much in the press
in the United States for the most part.
And people and their representatives
don't hear about them very much.
But this is one of those maybe write to your rep things.
A lot of shit isn't going to get changed with an email
to your elected officials, but especially
like certain officials who are on foreign relations committees or something, as well
as other forms of political activism could help here, right?
Especially in an election year, that's a way to stop that.
No, this is something that needs to be made into an issue.
And one thing I hear time and time again, whether I'm speaking to people from the Autonomous
Administration, the YPG and the YPJ, or pro Kurdish politicians in Turkey, is they know,
you know, the weapons that are being used against them, the tear gas canisters, you know,
the drone parts, the bombs, the equipment, the military training that these personnel get.
It all comes from Europe, the United States,
NATO countries that are allied with Turkey.
There's a lot of leverage and pushing to end
that military support is something that could be done
right now that could be very important.
And really, this is something where one feels
almost when one makes these calls,
like one's constantly asking,
you should do this for these people
because they're being oppressed and your government has a say in it. But we really benefit
from this too, right? If you look at what the Kurdish people and their allies in Turkey have
done in standing up for democracy, in getting the government to reverse this attempt to steal an
election, you know, that's one small example of the very powerful democratic tradition that they have.
That is something that we
can learn from.
You know, whether you're in the US or in Europe and many different countries around the world
right now, the threat of authoritarianism and the sort of far-right politics of which
Erdogan is an example, it's an international threat.
And you know, standing with the people who've been able to resist it is something that,
you know, can benefit us all around the world as well.
Yeah, and like it presents a vision for a future in which we all stand united against state violence
around the world rather than being isolated and gradually destroyed by various states and violent
actors. Talking, I guess, of violent actors, the one more thing I wanted to cover, we're jumping
around a little bit, was that, like, I think people will probably have seen, at least maybe
their social media timelines are different than mine, but there was a lot of violence
against Kurdish people in Northern Europe recently, right?
In Belgium, I think, maybe in Germany as well.
Explain a little bit of that.
Like, it's, we get into a little bit of Turkish fascist politics
as well, but can you explain what was going on there?
So this all began when some far-right Turkish nationalists
started threatening a Kurdish family
after returning from Nauros or Kurdish New Year celebrations
and escalated into essentially these far-right vigilantes
prowling the streets looking for Kurds and Kurdish businesses to attack.
And this is not something new at all.
The Turkish government has invested a great deal
in allowing these structures to operate in Europe.
You have the Grey Wolves, which are a fascist paramilitary.
Actually, the paramilitary wing of the party with which Erdogan
is currently allied and with which he has a majority in parliament, the National Action Party
or the MHP. You know, this is a group that's been responsible for murders and assassinations and all
kinds of attacks on Kurds, other minorities, dissidents, and has been responsible for violence
in Europe as well.
You have the government encouraging religious fundamentalism through its network of religious institutions in Europe and trying to make that very extreme and very politically instrumentalized
vision of religion popular amongst the Turkish community. And then you have Turkish intelligence assets
able to freely operate and conduct all kinds of attacks
on Kurdish dissidents within the very center of Europe.
We all remember in 2013, the assassination of Sakina Jansuz
in front of the Kurdish community center in Paris.
That murder was never solved.
The perpetrator who
they caught very conveniently died in prison before he was set to go to trial. Turkish
responsibility has never been proven in court, I think because there are a lot of people who
don't want a full investigation of a case like that to come out. And then just, I believe yesterday
or maybe the day before it came out that a Belgian court
found alleged Turkish operatives responsible for planning attacks on two very senior Kurdish
diplomats in Belgium who were members of the Kurdistan National Congress, which is sort of
like the de facto foreign ministry of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. These individuals had been spying on the Kurdistan National
Congress building.
They'd been in contact with Turkish officials.
They'd been planning assassinations
of very senior politicians.
This is a real problem.
These groups and the state itself
are able to freely attack civilians, plot murders,
and do violence, and really cause chaos.
And that's something that's very dangerous, not only for the Kurdish
community, but for really anybody living in their way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there are a lot of people who would rightly want that to stop, I think.
So like, what's the current, the current situation is a number of people were
like beaten, was somebody kidnapped?
Did I see, or was that? I didn't see any further reporting
on that other than one photo. It was very serious. I mean, there were people were attacked. I'm not
exactly certain of the extent of kidnappings or other instances like that. But this was some very
serious violence. And we know what these groups are capable of. They have killed people and they have essentially gotten away with it.
So it may have died down for now, which is certainly good.
And obviously, we saw a lot of calls for restraint
from the Kurdish community,
a lot of calls for these European governments essentially
to do their job and prevent these groups
from importing their nationalist campaigns against a persecuted minority to a place
where, you know, these Kurds have fled to be free from that sort of thing.
So it's stopped for now, but it's very much not over.
You know, I, when you see the Kurdish community in Europe and spend time with
them and look at the security precautions that they have to take just to hold
conferences and cultural festivals, it's really quite disheartening.
Yeah, yeah. Especially like you say in Northern Europe, like they're not in Turkey,
they left Turkey to avoid that stuff.
Yeah.
We'll take a second outbreak here and then we'll be back to finish up.
So for the last part, do you have anything you want to add that we haven't got to yet? I think that, you know, overall, looking at the situation in Turkey following these elections,
looking at the situation in Europe, we're seeing that the Turkish government continues to be an example of
the danger of these kinds of far-right nationalist religious fundamentalist regimes that are
on the rise everywhere. These are political trends that are growing around the world.
And Erdogan and his current Turkish government are a very clear example of the danger that that causes not to
just the population of a country, but to neighboring countries, to diaspora communities that have left,
that have gone elsewhere, that maintain their culture and maintain their interest in political
organizing. So these are threats that people are going to be looking at around the world.
And I think it's very important to be following the situation in Turkey for that reason.
But at the same time, looking at how the Kurdish people and their allies in Turkey, you know,
on the left, in workers' movements, in feminist movements, and all of these sort of groups
that have also been victimized by Erdogan's regime, we're seeing that resistance is possible,
that people can stand up for
democracy and they can win. And that, look, right, nobody's giving up on their work. You
know, the KNK doesn't stop advocating for Kurdish interests in a diplomatic capacity
because their members face threats. You know, these people go to work every single day.
You know, in Rojava, in North North East Syria, in Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish
groups, Kurdish political organizations, Kurdish politicians and activists, they continue building
up their project. I said I was just in northern Syria. It's extremely difficult right now. People
don't have electricity. People don't have water because Turkey bombed all the infrastructure.
But still, they're celebrating now. they're talking about their upcoming local elections that they want
to hold and how to hold them in the best way.
You know, they're talking about their new social contract
and how they can implement it.
They're moving forward constantly despite the threats that they're facing.
And I think that, you know, many of you listening to this are people
who are probably looking to improve and change
the society that you live in.
And so when we look at what's going on in Turkey and in Kurdistan, we can see both very
clear examples of what it is that people who want change are up against, but also what
they can accomplish even under those conditions.
Yeah.
I think one of the things I took from going to Kurdistan was like how invested,
like how genuine the solidarity that those people have with other like oppressed groups. It's like
I spent as much time answering questions about Myanmar as I did like asking questions about
Kurdistan, which was surprising to me, but obviously happy to do it. But like, it would be nice to see
some of that solidarity come back from the US, right? So are there like, I mean, I guess you can
come down to the border and help Kurdish people literally any day of the week, if you'd like to.
We do that all the time. But what concrete actions can people take, especially with regard to like,
helping the self-administration in North and East Syria, right? Like they're facing constant attacks, their power stations get bombed.
Like all my friends there are always struggling to have power or internet or even like electricity.
And they got flooded recently on top of all that.
Yeah.
So like are there concrete actions people can take to help to be in solidarity?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think one thing, if you have expertise on anything to do with,
you know, power grids that are resilient to these kinds of attacks on alternative clean
energy sources, anything that could possibly help people in a situation like this live,
they want expertise. There's a lot of problems that they're facing that they simply because
of the war don't have the capacity not only to solve, but even to start thinking about how it is that one solves a
problem like this because there just aren't that many societies in the world going through it.
So any kind of expertise in addressing energy issues, environmental issues, these kinds of problems, the second and third order
effects of the attacks on infrastructure, on oil and gas, on power facilities. That
would be very important. They really do need that. And that's something you can write to
us at the Kurdish Peace Institute. We can connect you with people. If you have contacts
on the ground there, you can talk to them. That's one thing.
Then at the end of the day, they have these elections coming up.
That is a big step for them.
They've just put out a new social contract.
They're really trying to listen to some
of the internal criticisms that they get
and really build up the civil, social, political side
of their system.
There's a belief among many people there
that I've talked to that because of the existential nature
of these wars that they're fighting,
they haven't been able to really pursue
the political elements of their revolution
to the degree that they want to.
And they're trying to do that now.
They have this new social contract.
It's an incredible document.
You can read it.
They're going to hold municipal elections on May 30,
I believe, is the date that was announced.
So any, if you know a lot about electoral systems, if you have done election observation
before, if you want to help them do that right and get international attention for what it
is that they're doing, that's another way that people have been telling me that you
can help. And then finally, you know, if you're here listening in the US, Erdogan is coming to the White House on May 9th, according to reports from Turkish and
international media. There is going to be a demonstration, there will probably be a lot of
campaigns around that demonstration as well on things like conditioning and ending arms sales and security assistance, on calls for peace,
on calls for the U.S. to end its support for and enablement of Turkey's occupation of Iraq and
Syria, its repression of its Kurdish people at home. And so anything that you can do to join those
actions and those campaigns would be very helpful. You know, this is going to be an opportunity to let both Erdogan
and the White House hear what the American people think about
US support for what the Turkish government is doing. So be
there, get involved. That's one way that we can, you know, make
our voices heard and try to push for a change in policy.
Yeah, I think that's great. People should like, if you want an example of, I guess, the US complicity, like while
I was in Kurdistan, there was a bombing that killed 39 SAEH, like internal security forces.
And that was a plane that your tax dollars, if you live in the US, developed, right, like
an F-16 with munitions that you probably sold to them.
And the US has sold more F-16 since then, right?
Yes.
Yeah, so that is a thing that we could stop,
and that would concretely stop.
I spoke to a mother who lost her son.
He was a little, I think he was like 14, 15.
He was a little football player.
They had pictures of him all over the house, right?
Like it was really heartbreaking stuff.
And I know that this happens a lot
in other parts of the world.
I'm not saying that's not important too,
but yeah, it's always hard to talk to parents
who have lost their kids and you can stop that happening.
And if we don't sell them the F-16s that do that,
then they don't have the ability to do it,
at least not as much.
And this is one way that we can connect struggles and causes as well, because it's all the same
companies that are providing equipment to all of these states that are doing this.
You know, the targets are the same for these kinds of campaigns.
And look, you know, all of these governments, all of these corporations, they know that
they're on the same side.
We don't always know that we're on the same side too.
And so I think that getting together and pointing out the patterns
and standing against, you know, these arms sales and security assistance
in the context of Kurdistan, alongside many other contexts
where they're also very destructive, is an important way
that we can sort of amplify our efforts to do that.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very good, a very good point.
Like I live in San Diego, almost every single bomb that has fallen on Palestine
and many of the ones full on Kurdistan have, you know, the company that sold that
has an office here and like, like those are places where you can apply pressure
and places where you can hopefully make a change.
Megan, where can people you you mentioned like emailing you,
where can people find you?
How can people keep up to date with what's happening in Kurdistan?
Yeah, of course. So you can go to Kurdishpeace.org.
That's the website of our institute.
If you go to our About page, my contact is on there.
You can always reach out to me, whether you have a question about Kurdistan,
you want to read our research and analysis, you know, you're a journalist or an analyst and you want to submit something
yourself, we can help you there. We're also on Twitter at Kurdish Peace Org. And yeah, that's a
great way for you to follow in the English language. If you're looking for resources on the ground,
you can follow North Press Agency, which publishes in English, the Rojava
Information Center, which publishes in English. And then, you know, get involved with your
local Kurdish community. In a lot of major cities in the US, if you're in New York, if
you're in Boston, if you're in the DMV area, if you're in California, like you know, there
are active Kurdish communities. And, you know, go to a cultural event, go to a demonstration,
you'll find both great ways to get connected and really get plugged into solidarity efforts,
but also, you know, a wonderful community and a wonderful culture that I think, you know, anyone
would be, I've certainly been, you know, very happy to have experienced. So, yeah.
Yeah, likewise. Great. Thank you so much, Megan happy to have experienced. So yeah, yeah, likewise. Yeah.
Great. Thank you so much, Megan.
That was, that was great.
Thank you.
Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe and I'm back for another season of my podcast, Climbing in Heels.
You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist.
And guess what? I'm still just as fully obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business.
My podcast Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women
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Listen to climbing in heels every Friday on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast
Danielle Moody here host of the woke f daily podcast
We've been with I hearts outspoken network for a year,
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As we head deeper into 2024
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Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa, but how much do you know about them
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Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast coming to you from a week where decades are happening.
I'm your host, Mia Wong.
With me is James Stout.
Hi, Mia.
Great to be here.
And also with us is Talia Jain, an independent journalist covering social
movements and protests who is currently covering the Gaza Solidarity
encampments at Columbia University.
Talia, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Yeah, thanks for joining us.
Hell yeah.
Yeah, so I'm excited.
I'm excited to talk about the Columbia occupation.
I also want to briefly mention that there are a lot of there's there's been a wave
of occupations of campuses across the country just right now.
This is being recorded on Wednesday night.
By the time this goes up on like Friday,
a lot of the stuff we're going to be saying
is probably going to be out of date because everything's
moving really quickly.
But I mean, there's occupations, obviously, like Columbia.
There's like CSU Humboldt University of Texas at Austin,
Ohio State, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley,
some university in Italy, Emerson, Tufts, MIT, NYU, City University of New York,
the new schools, University of Rochester, University of Pittsburgh, USC,
University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, UNC Chapel Hill.
I mean, there's so many of these by the time that this goes up.
There will be more of them.
Yeah, it's been wild.
There's been a lot of. I mean, at Humboldt, there is there will be more of them. Yeah, it's been wild. There's been a lot of.
I mean, at Humboldt, there is there was a lot of very intense
fighting with the police.
They the bunch of kids occupied a building.
They beat the shit.
Well, OK, that's that's going a bit too far, but they barricaded it,
kept the cops from coming in.
Cops ran off of campus.
So lots of incredibly wild stuff happening.
Yeah, which I guess brings us to the Gaza.
Is the original one the first one that got a lot of media attention,
the Gaza Solidarity Accompaniment at Columbia?
Yes, I'll tell you, I wanted to ask you.
So how did this sort of start and what's kind of been making it different
from the really pretty large number of other
free Palestine, anti-genocide protests that have been
on campuses and off campuses for the past like time. Yeah, six, seven months. Yeah.
Well, I think the genesis of this was that Columbia University, as we've seen in universities across the country suspended a number of pro-Palestine advocacy student
groups. They were very slow to move their feet about targeted attacks against students
who were demonstrating for Palestine, including an incident where someone was allegedly sprayed
with a chemical irritant or people were sprayed with a chemical irritant by former iOS soldiers who are
also students here and just this you know building tension of there is a actual genocide occurring
and universities are being forced to bend towards the people committing the genocide instead of standing on the right
side of history. Or they're actively choosing to do that too, because their whole thing
is not about actually educating people and preparing them to be tomorrow's leaders and
managers or baristas, but to get people, you know, to give them money to fill their coffers and
portray this image of exceptionalism and elitism and whatnot.
So that was the genesis.
And then Tuesday night, I got a text at like 11 p.m., I want to say, asking me if I wanted to come cover a late night
slash early morning de-occupation demo. And this was from someone I'd never talked to
before. I had no idea who it was. But they said it was at Columbia and they said it was
late night, early morning. I thought I'd be out of here at, you know, 10 a.m. the next
day. And then, you know, standing there, witnessing it all unfold,
it became pretty evident that that was not the case.
And I think the reason why this stands out is because this is an elite university
where you can't say, oh, well, these are just dumb TikTok kids.
These are kids who have like the these are like adults who have, you know,
they have incredible resumes, really high academic excellence. They got into an extremely
difficult school to get into. And they are joining the ranks of the frazzled, fringe,
stinky anarchists and the silly kids who are being brainwashed by TikTok.
And they said like, no, those people are right. Like, this is bad and you need to disclose
and divest and we're not going to stop until you do.
And I think that that stance from a position of privilege really shook things up.
What followed also set a tone of the university
deciding to call the police and claiming
that this encampment was, it posed a clear
and present danger to the safety of students on campus,
which, you know, anyone who has spent any length of time in or around
the encampment can plainly see that that is nonsensical. It's absurd. These are kids that
are studying on a lawn. But that choice of bringing the NYPD in and having 108 students
arrested by the NYPD's strategic response group, which is their, you know, counterterrorism
goon squad that violently represses protests pretty consistently,
to have them arrest 108 people, including carrying them out by their arms and legs,
and arresting legal observers. It was an outsized response for something that was pretty
straightforward. They're hanging out on a lawn. They have everything set up to sustain within that space. They're not going out and roaming around and, you
know, breaking things or assaulting people or anything like that. And they're just using
this to call attention to their cause, which is divestment from genocide and from war profiteering and to end the school's gentrification of Harlem
and to institute an academic boycott of Israel and Israeli campuses that are in community
with Columbia, like they're satellite schools that bring the IOF soldiers to Columbia to
commit harm against students
here. And, you know, so these are these are very basic asks, and they were met with state
force signed off by the president of the school. And seeing that, I think is what provoked a
lot of other schools of like, well, if Columbia is doing it, then we definitely got to, because you have a major elite institution taking this step, making
clear that this is not just a cause that, you know, the scrappy little weirdos at
the bottom like me care about, you know?
And so I think that's what, what set it off.
And the fact that they returned,
they just took over the other lawn
while their classmates were being processed
after being arrested,
they just took over the other lawn
and they're like, all right, we're gonna set it up here,
was such a hilariously like based move
that it was like the defiance and the determination was undeniable.
And when you see a group like with the students at Humboldt, where the cops with the riot
shields are trying to barge in and they're pushing them back, and they're screaming,
get the fuck out. And they're bonking them over the head with the empty water jug.
You have to see things like that. Yeah, the water jug.
When you see things like that, yeah.
When you see things like that, it's very like, there is an energy to this that has always
been there, but that has not been very easily seen by the masses.
And we're now seeing it show its head of like, no, we're not fucking around.
Like you need to listen to us.
We're tired of the song and dance game that you're doing,
dismissing all of our valid concerns
because we know concretely and statistically
that we are on the right side of history
and we're going to make you listen
and trust that if you beat us up, we're coming back.
Like we're not going away.
It doesn't scare us, which is what the kids
at UT Austin were chanting, I think,
when they brought the horses and the state troopers in.
It's like, we're not scared of you.
And that tone has permeated throughout the demonstrations
for Palestinian liberation since and prior to October.
But if you don't follow the protests, or if you only go
by what the major news outlets are saying about them, you don't
see that tone. So this for me is not surprising. This is this is
a continuation of an energy that has not ceased for upwards of
six months. I think it's the 201st day of the genocide.
So it's not surprising for people who've paid attention.
It's a relief for kids who are here
and who have been involved and who have been silenced
and ignored and written off this whole time.
It's a very long answer, I know.
That's a good one though.
I think it's great to have your perspective as someone who's been on the ground.
One thing I wanted to ask is like, obviously, this is a protest that at its core is about
state violence and it has predictably enough been responded to with state violence.
And like you said that people were generally not swayed by that.
I wonder if you've seen people who kind of had the opposite reaction.
Like I can remember the student protests
that I have been involved in, I'm just gonna say that.
And I can remember like the reaction by students
when seeing that fellow students being assaulted
by the police was like, okay, fuck this.
Like, you know, like George Orwell has this thing
about like when I see a real flesh and blood worker fighting his natural enemy, the policeman,
I don't have to ask myself what side I'm on. Like, did you find the same thing with students
where they were like, okay, I wasn't out here. And now I've seen the way the university and
the cops have responded to this. And now I'm coming out because it's not okay.
The encampment went up Wednesday, and it was forcibly removed with arrests on Thursday,
I think, or was it Friday? I don't remember. It was a long time ago for me.
That's fine. But prior to the encampment being taken down, the possibility of it provoked a significant response from
the student body here at Columbia to show up and rally around the encampment all night.
They did this march, this daisy chain, where they were chanting, the more you try to silence
us the louder we will be, and disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest all night
around the encampment to keep it safe and to show that they had larger support beyond the students
who chose to stay on the lawn at risk of being arrested. After they were arrested, more students
came onto the other lawn and have continued to occupy that second lawn. So absolutely,
it was a strisand effect. They tried
to shut it down and it made people feel very strongly that they need to show up and put
themselves on the line as well. And they also, I think, they saw what, I think it also showed them
what the state does and what the university does and seeing it firsthand eliminates a lot of the mystery
that, you know, the fear that can circulate of like the uncertainty of it, seeing what
it looks like, they're like, oh, whatever. And now they're seeing, you know, videos of
protesters being brutalized on other campuses. And like I heard someone told me last night,
they said that they overheard someone like talking to another student on the lawn. And like I heard someone told me last night, they said that they overheard someone
like talking to another student on the lawn. And they were like, Oh, so you a jail support?
Like, yes, you there. Like, it's this sort of, they're gonna, they're gonna do what they're
gonna do. We don't care. Like, because these are the threat of violence, physical harm
is a threat to see whatever it is that you're doing
of academic harm. These are things that are trying to get you to stop doing what you're doing and
when you know that they are being deployed as tools and tactics, you're not going to stop because
they're not scary to you. Well, what are you going to do? You're going to suspend me for
joining in a historic protest? Okay, see if I care, you know?
I think that's the energy for a lot of students.
Yeah, unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a second, but I don't know,
skip them and we'll be back in however long it takes you to press the forward
button like six times. And we are back.
So something I wanted to ask about, I've been seeing a lot of stuff floating around about
the negotiations that are happening between the university and the students.
I want to know, what have you actually heard about these?
Because the statements that have been coming out
don't seem to really be matching anything else
I've seen going on on the ground.
Do you know what's happening?
So the university has taken a stance of,
this is a clear and present danger,
it is disruptive, it is harmful, et cetera.
That's because it's impeding with them building stairs of this is a clearing present danger, it is disruptive, it is harmful, et cetera.
That's because it's impeding with them building stairs
and stadium seating for the commencement
that's happening in a couple of weeks.
No.
So, you know, it's like that's the clear and present danger
is that it's costly for them to have to wait
to complete this this setup.
But my understanding is that the students are very much holding their
ground very firm and their, their demands are very reasonable.
It's saying like, tell us where your money comes from so we can look into
it and see that you're keeping your nose clean.
This isn't a difficult ask.
I think if you asked to see my receipts,
I could show up to you,
although I'm not an elite university,
but I'm also not profiting off of weapons manufacturing.
And so the university's stance
is very much trying to kind of spook them into quitting. And there was a statement
released by the president last night at 4 a.m. saying that the students made some concessions,
two of which were things that they're already doing, one of which was an easy adjustment
that's not a concession, which was just making the camp more ADA accessible and in compliance
with FDNY regulations for fire safety, which I think would be crazy if a fire broke out
at this camp. Anyway, that was a tangent. And then there was a thing saying that they're
going to be ending negotiations in 48 hours.
And what the students reported out from those negotiations at the time was that the university
at around midnight threatened to call in the National Guard and to call in the NYPD.
And that shut down negotiations. And it was only after they put out these widespread calls
and thousands of people gathered on the lawn in support
of the encampment, that that was changed. And the university agreed in writing to not
call the NYPD and to not mobilize the National Guard, which I don't think they have the
authority to do regardless. But it was this written concession from the university. And their perspective of it was that the students
provided concessions.
And I think it speaks to who each side is speaking to.
The students are speaking to the movement
that they have kind of shepherded into existence.
And the university is speaking to their donors and their trustees and the right wingers
who are having nuclear meltdowns on Twitter.
That's something else I wanted to sort of ask about because I it's it's kind of hard
for me to get a sense of it.
Like, okay, so speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, who is a utterly deranged
shippe Zionist.
Yeah, like you mean the new church hill man.
Godly real weirdo like anti-evolution guy.
He's been he said he said that like he's going to go to Congress
and call for the National Guard to play, which also doesn't make any sense
because Congress, I don't can't do it either.
But I think you're trying to get like the governor.
But what do you think of the actual odds of a National Guard deployment?
Because I've heard a lot of talk about it and I I can't gauge it at all.
So Hokel has said that that's not on the table, I believe.
And there's no interest from what I can tell
of the actual elected reps. in calling in the National Guard.
There is interest from Eric Adams, who is a former cop and basically still a cop, to use the NYPD.
And the NYPD has been very allergic to when the National Guard comes out here because they want to be the ones cracking skulls and being in charge of brutalizing
New Yorkers and they take a great offense when someone else comes in and does it for
them.
So they wouldn't really be on board with the National Guard mobilizing here either.
The school doesn't have the authority to do that.
It's only the governor.
The governor hasn't made any indication.
And Mike Johnson is doing conservative stunt work. He was joined by Elise Stefanik, who is a
conservative. And, you know, she regularly disseminates disinformation and inflammatory
propaganda to demonize, unhoused people, migrants, queer people. So it's no surprise that they're,
you know, banging this drum, which was also pushed by Shai Davidi, or however you pronounce his name,
who is an assistant professor here who attempted to hold a rally in the center of the Gaza
Solidarity encampment with a slew of Zionists. And his ID card was deactivated. And he found out in
real time in front of a bunch of cameras that he called to come watch him.
It was, it's one of those things you witness in real time that you feel like you're living in a
movie. But it was great. And he had a nuclear tantrum and claimed that it was because he
wasn't safe on campus when he was told that his protest was not safe for their students.
campus when he was told that his protest was not safe for their students. So I think we're seeing a lot of rhetoric and a lot of saber rattling from the far right,
from conservatives, from people who have never had any kind of support for Palestinians or
for the cause of Palestinian liberation.
Mike Johnson makes, he receives over a quarter million
dollars from AIPAC. You know, these are, these are not people whose statements should be taken
seriously in the context of what is possible, what is reasonable and what is, you know, reality.
To put it nicely. Yeah, yeah. I think a reason it's fascinating, like at least to be like,
I went to a fancy university, you know, and engaged in plenty of including pro-Palestine actions when
I was there. But a thing that I see like as a journalist now is that the right wing and wealthy
folks generally seem to see the Ivy League universities, particularly in the US, as like
their safe space. And I think the reason that they're so mad at this is that they feel like it's not just that it's happening, it's where it's
happening. And like that's causing to have these massive tantrums like you've reported on.
Yeah, I mean, there's the there's there's it's all hypocrisy for them. Because on the one hand,
these are liberal universities who are ushering in an era of DEI and purple hair and queer kids.
And then on the other side, these are sacred spaces of learning and higher education that
no one should have access to unless their grandparents were in the Aryan Brotherhood.
So it's one of those things where it kind of depends on the day about how they feel
about really elite campuses of higher learning. But
it doesn't matter either way. They don't care. They don't actually care. They just hate the cause
and will do anything they can to bring it to a halt. But the DNA of this cause is to keep going
regardless of the efforts to stop it. Right.
And it wasn't so long ago that everyone was up in arms.
When I say everyone, everyone on the road was up in arms about campus free speech, which
is something that seems to have largely been forgotten in the last couple of weeks.
It's like, we've all seen videos in Texas today, right, of the DPS and state troopers
and horses and bikes, they love to misuse bikes. But yeah, it's a it's a
I guess the hypocrisy is kind of the point with those people
Yeah, I mean like Mike Johnson made a his speech today on the steps of the low library
He was talking about how you know, there was a repression of free speech on campus
But then in the same breath he said that and that's why I want to call in the National Guard to eliminate this protest. Their argument is that this protest is inherently
anti-Semitic because it rejects the state of Israel and the genocide and apartheid that
the state has been doing since its inception and prior to its inception of the Palestinian people. And in the IHRA, in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, it is any
criticism of the state of Israel, which would include people who are living in Israel criticizing
their own government would be labeled as anti-Semitic. And they're trying to redefine reality in real time
And they're trying to redefine reality in real time by claiming that these students who just don't want for mass death to be occurring, and they don't want their university to be
responsible in facilitating that, are somehow anti-Semitic.
Meanwhile, a large number of them are Jews themselves, who, you know, they held Seder
at the start of Passover.
Yeah, I think maybe, do you know Bing Guan, a photojournalist?
Yeah, I meet your friend Bing.
Bing took this photo which went viral on Twitter, I saw it in the New York Times of a Jewish
graduate student just like sitting on a folding chair being like, no, I'm fine, I don't feel
unsafe here.
Yeah, I mean, that's like, that's the thing is that the people who feel quote unquote unsafe are also
the people who are known antagonizers of pro-Palestine demonstrations. These are the kids that bought
fart spray from Amazon to spray on students who were demonstrating peacefully. These are
students who show up with giant flags outside of Columbia
University to antagonize people. They brought thick wooden poles with flags affixed to them
to a demonstration on Wall Street the week prior to this encampment launching. And they
were antagonizing people. They were trying to instigate arguments with people and they
were just kind of trying to incite and then they claim to be victims
when people respond to their inciting behavior. And it's very much like an abusive mentality
that they have. But in terms of like actual antisemitism, all of that, all of that rhetoric
ends up being a distraction from actual instances of antisemitism. And the
more that you try to fuse the political ideology of Zionism with the prejudice against Jewish people
for being Jewish, the more you try to fuse those together as one thing, like, you know, fusing
Jewish identity to Zionism, the more you see instances of antisemitism, actually antisemitism. So if
anything, like the students who are coming in cheering on Israel and boasting about the
murders of tens of thousands of children, the starvations and the displacements of millions
of people, the more that they do that, the more that that teaches
people like, Oh, maybe all Jews are like that. Maybe all Jews are bad. And then I ended up
getting DMS from people photoshopping my face into an oven calling for my death. When you
know, I don't give a fuck about the state of Israel, I don't give a fuck about any states,
you know. So it's just it's it's one of those things like this is like they are planting toxic seeds
and then flipping out when they sprout.
Talking of toxic seeds, now is the time for some marketing professionals to plant some
toxic seeds in your mind as we take our second advertising break.
All right, we're back. Hopefully you haven't bought anything since we last spoke. Talia, I wanted to talk a little bit about a thing that we've seen a lot is like this
idea of like the universe and this happens at every
protest movement right like the state the university whatever will seek to appoint people leaders and
allow them to negotiate on behalf of everyone even if those people have not consented to be
negotiated for and then they'll use that to co-op the movement offer concessions that these
particular people might want and in doing so kind of defang the original sort of protest. Is that something that you've seen happening or the
universities tried to do to like divide people or to kind of pull people out and appoint
them as leaders?
They've suspended the people that they believe to be primary student organizers, but in terms
of other divisions, they have not been successful.
These are students organizing with their classmates.
It's not possible for some outside group
to infiltrate that space because they are not
students at this university.
You know, there's SJP chapters that students are members
of in their schools, but they are ultimately making the choices
of what their SJP chapter is doing.
And, you know, a lot of those SJP chapters have been suspended.
So, you know, I think in terms of the possibility
of the university having any sort of in
to build some sort of op is very low.
The solidarity that we're seeing is,
I don't think I've seen levels of people on the same page
and able to organize the literacy of it is just phenomenal.
There's people who are just,
they're all very clearly knowledgeable
about what it is that they're organizing for, what
the risks are, what the history of the movement is.
And they've spent a lot of time learning those things to make sure that when they decide
to take a step forward, that they're doing so fully informed and fully empowered.
And trying to break that down is something that has not been successful.
And we've seen that, you know, time and time again.
They have this chant, the more you try to silence us, the louder we will be.
And it's true.
And these institutions should probably start believing it because it would save them a
lot of trouble by, you know, trying to write this off as something that, you know, people
don't know what they're doing or, you know, whatever it is, because they are, they know everything.
These are kids that all they do is study.
Like, you're talking about huge nerds joining into a massive, you know, decades long social
movement.
They've done the reading.
Yeah, talking to people who've done the reading. Yeah, talking people who have done the reading. I wanted to
talk about like faculty, because I know a lot of people who are
faculty at universities listen to this podcast. And I'm sure
they're interested in like how faculty have been in solidarity
with students there, how they can be in solidarity with their
own students. Have you seen that? Have you seen faculty
showing up?
Oh, oh, yeah, there was a massive faculty walkout the other day between Barnard and Columbia faculty members.
The schools are kind of related. They're right across the street from each other and they have a lot of overlap.
Barnard's kind of under, slightly under the University, the Columbia umbrella, but still has the president and things like that. And there was a huge faculty walkout from both campuses
that gathered on the steps of the Low Library.
And it was easily hundreds,
I would say maybe like 500 people.
And that was at Columbia.
And then at NYU, the students set up an encampment
and they were surrounded by faculty who had linked arms
as a dating chain around the encampment and they were surrounded by faculty who had linked arms as a dating
chain around the encampment to protect the students.
So we're seeing a very real, you know, multi-layer of solidarity emerging in these spaces.
And I think it's, you know, even if the, even if professors and faculty don't necessarily
wholly agree or wholly understand, they're not fully on the same
wavelength as the student organizers necessarily, they're still showing up on the basis of like,
these students have the right to express their opinions and they should not be getting met with
severe academic or state discipline for doing so because we've seen these same campuses open their doors
to people like Charlie Kirk and Gavin McInnis,
and like white supremacists and white nationalists
who are able to go on their campuses and spread hate
and right-wing disinformation and try and recruit people
through their young Republican school chapters.
Those chapters aren't being disbanded.
There isn't an urgent rush to prevent the hosting
of white nationalists and white supremacists
and people who are actually politically
and intensely anti-Semitic to the extreme,
they're not doing anything to actually like
prevent those people from appearing on campus.
So I think that there's a lot of layers to it,
but there is a very strong surge of faculty saying like,
hey, this is fucked up and we're not gonna let you think
that this is just kids that you're picking on.
Like you're also attacking your own staff
who has a longer relationship to the university,
has a, as hard as it is for these kids
to get into the school, it's harder to get hired to work here.
And so, we're seeing a lot of that.
There's also security people who were put in charge
of evicting students from their rooms at Barnard
because Barnard has chosen that students at Barnard who participated in this demo, they
weren't only going to be suspended temporarily but evicted from their housing, banned from
campus, unable to access any food or meal plans. Whereas the Columbia students have
been suspended are still able to access housing and meal plans, but they aren't allowed to go to class or any campus events, which is fine because the only
one that's happening right now is the encampment. But there was a security person who sent an email
to the school at Barnard saying, like, I quit. This is inhumane. This is undignified. This is crazy.
You're giving these students 15 minutes to uproot themselves from their rooms. They might not have another place to go. These
might be students who don't have a family's house nearby or the funds or the means to
live somewhere else and not worry about the cost.
You're destabilizing people's lives in a very severe way
and this security person resigned.
They're like, this is nuts.
So I think there's the fact that just the overall what is
of how these universities are responding
has provided a type of solidarity.
And then there's also the fact that
a lot of people just generally understand
that genocide is bad.
And it's gotten to a point where
there's a lot of rhetoric trying to obscure that
and obfuscate like, what is genocide?
And, you know, Israel has right to exist
and all this other like bullshit,
like propaganda and disinformation and fear mongering
and all these things.
And people can see very clearly what the game is.
And so we're kind of at a pivotal moment
for just common reality and critical thinking.
And I think that we're seeing a lot of people show
that the efforts to alter what our established
common reality is, is not working.
This brings me to the thing I wanted to close on, which is where do you see this going?
Oh, I'm going to need a minute on that one.
I mean, you know, we're at a very pivotal moment in history. There's a lot of comparisons
being made to protests against the Vietnam War. And in those protests, there was a lot
of state violence, a lot of state repression, but there was also a lot of people willing
to throw down in a very intense way. And, you know, we're already seeing levels to that
that have very, very strong parallels
with like Aaron Bushnell,
which is also a story that I ended up breaking.
Yeah.
And so this is big.
And I think that right now in the midst of it
is hard to guess what's gonna happen two weeks from now
or six months from now, but I guarantee you,
we all know what's gonna happen 50 years from now.
We're all going to look at this 50 years from now
and be like, wow, the state was on some dumb shit.
Those protesters were right.
And it's good that they didn't stop.
Totally. Yeah, I think that's a great place to end. Talia, I wonder if you would like to let people know where they can find you where they can read your
work, how they can support your work.
Sure. So I mostly report live on Twitter, Talia OTG, as in on the ground. And you
can support me by signing up on Patreon for hopefully more than $5 a month.
Those small donations cover the entirety of my living
and survival and allow for me to do this work
for the past four years.
So I'm like incredibly grateful.
People can support on Patreon.
They can also, if you just want to do like a one time,
heard you on the pod, loved it.
I have like a PayPal and a Venmo
and all that other shit on my Twitter account.
If people want to send a couple bucks that way.
And you know, another way to support is send me tips.
If you decide that you're gonna do something, feel free to, you know, email and bio. I always
want to know.
Send Taliah all your tips, especially if you're at Columbia University. Anything else you want to
plug or Mia, anything else we need to do before we go?
I'm sorry that my voice sounds really like this. It's I don't think I've I haven't
gotten a lot of sleep. And I hope that everything I said was coherent, even though I was just
giving you essay after essay after essay. That was fantastic. Thank you so much, Shadia.
Thank you so much. And thank you guys. Something I could say from everyone at Iqdapit here, from the river to the sea, Palestine
will be free.
Fuck him.
Fuck him up.
Keep fucking him up.
Yeah, yeah.
Fuck him up.
Yeah.
Fucking get him.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death
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