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Frantz Fanon on Violence (Gaza) // 143 · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:06
  Our first headline comes from the onion Dying Gazin's criticized for not using last words
• 0:14
  to condemn Hamas. That was a funny one. We can start with this,
• 0:18
  victor, do you condemn Hamas? Oh God, Uh, I think
• 0:25
  it's silly to condemn things. But do I think, like, uh,
• 0:28
  what they what they did was mostly bad? Yeah? That isn't the That
• 0:34
  isn't the response I expect. Yeah. Do I think Hamas is a bad
• 0:37
  organization? Yeah? Mostly I do. Eric, do you condemn Hammas?
• 0:42
  I mean, I guess condemnation is like an official position when you're somebody important.
• 0:48
  Nobody's really looking at me to make those kinds of gestures, so I
• 0:54
  mean it's kind of just irrelevant. But I mean, performative condemned. It
• 0:59
  is a it is a public speech act. I have trouble expressing approval of
• 1:04
  murdering civilians, of course, obviously I do have a lot of problems with
• 1:10
  any kind of violence. But I mean the historical complexity of these things is
• 1:15
  immense, and I'm not an expert. So you know, there's the there's
• 1:21
  the kind of condemnation where it's just a very immediate reaction to a very immediate
• 1:26
  thing, and you have this gut feeling that's something wrong has happened, And
• 1:30
  I mean, fine, you're probably right, but you've got to look at
• 1:34
  the complicated history of these things and sure whatever, that's my cop out,
• 1:42
  and they just need to get Gaza out of the way so that they can
• 1:46
  move onto the land acknowledgment phase of genocide like us. No, it's not,
• 1:56
  it's not. Okay. Well, in that case, I do to
• 2:00
  us advanced colonial nations who've who've got a much longer history with these kinds of
• 2:06
  things. Yeah, I mean, Israel seems to be heading in that direction.
• 2:10
  Do you condemn cannibalism? What if the person? If the person?
• 2:15
  Uh so? I I don't actually I think that if you as long as
• 2:20
  it doesn't involve the killing. I make a distinction between eating a human and
• 2:23
  killing a human. I think if the humans already dead or voluntarily died,
• 2:28
  I'm not sure that I know that it matters. That's what I was going
• 2:30
  to ask about, because what if you're plane crash in the Andes Mountains and
• 2:35
  the only way to survive the only way that movie the only way to survive
• 2:39
  is to eat your goalie. Now it's not a movie soccer. I think
• 2:46
  I saw the movie. I mean, what's it called Alive? Yeah?
• 2:50
  With Ethan Hawk. I think, well, movies come first and reality follows.
• 2:55
  And in the film, the guy said eat me if I died,
• 2:59
  and he agreed to it. Yeah. Yeah. The moralism case I want.
• 3:04
  I think this is a place where theory is actually at its best and
• 3:08
  at its most useful, because what this has turned into is the do you
• 3:14
  condemn Hamas' question is a moralist question, which is who is good? Who
• 3:20
  is evil? How do I align myself with the good as opposed to the
• 3:25
  evil? And the moralist case here is that evil is a cause, so
• 3:31
  evil causes certain actions and good causes other actions. Instead of asking the actual
• 3:38
  important question, which is what is causal? The lumin question is the distinction
• 3:44
  between good and evil good? Is it a good distinction to make or is
• 3:49
  it an evil distinction to make? Like when knowledge of the they ate from
• 3:53
  the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they were cast out
• 3:59
  from eating because that was a bad distinction to become familiar with. So,
• 4:05
  according to according to Luhman's reading of Genesis, yeah, well, systems theory
• 4:11
  is going to be lurking in the background. But there's one side of the
• 4:15
  issue that will say colonizers do things because they are evil and that's wrong.
• 4:21
  And then exactly the flip side, because these these circulate themselves through communication into
• 4:28
  binaries, the other moralists will believe that the colonized do things because they are
• 4:32
  evil, and that's also wrong. And I thought that everyone kind of knew
• 4:38
  this. But our communication apparatus in the pr war side of the war is
• 4:46
  bizarrely dependent on this Manichean divide of good and evil, which of course doesn't
• 4:51
  help anything. It's extremely parochial. That's why Star Wars has such an enduring
• 4:59
  influence because he constructed a kind of a fantasy Manichean universe with the force is
• 5:06
  good and evil and then somehow there's kind of like a neutral force. I
• 5:11
  don't know how that kind of works. There's this sort of a new thing
• 5:13
  they're exploring. But I mean, yeah, we got to see this,
• 5:18
  this sort of journey of Anakin becoming Darth Vader and then redeeming himself by throwing
• 5:26
  the Emperor off. But now he's completely forgiven. Even though our generation was
• 5:30
  exposed to the trauma of seeing Hayden Christensen murdering children on the screen pretty clearly,
• 5:38
  and now he's a good guy again. Do you condemn Hayden Christensen.
• 5:42
  I condemned the character. I feel bad for his career. I don't know
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  what else he did since Star Wars. He's back in Star Wars again.
• 5:50
  Haven't you seen a Soka? Let me stop you there, because while most
• 5:54
  people's morality is processed by either Disney or Harry Potter, today we're reading France
• 6:02
  fanon on violence, and it's applicable to the last two weeks of propaganda for
• 6:08
  sure. And the first lesson I guess of propagandizing violence is to dehumanizing or
• 6:15
  dehumanize your enemy by accusing them, particularly of a hands on type of violence,
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  you know, raping women, killing babies. And it's interesting that you
• 6:26
  brought this up because it's always perceived as worse when as worse violence, when
• 6:31
  Anakin killed children with his hands, as opposed to, you know, ordering
• 6:39
  the Death Star to blow up a planet. So personalized violence makes you a
• 6:44
  beast. And this has been war propaganda from time immemorial. It's in the
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  bi believe in when the Babylonians or Assyrians whatever, they roll up and start
• 6:55
  smashing babyheads. But it's important to propaganda, and it's used as justification for
• 7:01
  the Gulf War even the early nineties, even though it was completely made up.
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  But the Iraqi Army started throwing babies out of incubators was the big line.
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  Now, it does happen. Probably does it not in this case,
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  I don't know, But at least for Phenen and the conflicts that he's speaking
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  about, this personal hands on violence is often the only type that the repressed
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  or colonized people has access to, not the impersonal violence of drone striking an
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  apartment building from a thousand meters up, or what he calls abstract violence,
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  which is, you know, day to day coercion, forced movement. They're
• 7:44
  surveillance, usually backed up by an imperial power. Yeah. I guess that's
• 7:47
  a decent enough place to start. Is that there's typification of different moral and
• 7:54
  less moral types of violence that always favors the oppressor and allows them to cast
• 7:59
  resists as barbaric and savage and inhuman. But the death Star killed way more
• 8:05
  kids than the Lightsaber did, but it doesn't hit the same way. Psychologically
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  speaking, what's the opposite of personal violence is just like a generalized kind of
• 8:16
  violence, like a like kind of like looking at like there's a war going
• 8:20
  on, it's violence, or there's like violence being perpetrated against people's and and
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  and groups and things like a less yeah, like being less specific or not
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  mentioning sort of details of gruesome things, but just sort of saying there's a
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  general situation of horror and suppression. The depersonalization of violence means you push a
• 8:43
  button and people die, so the process is mediated. It's a more humane
• 8:50
  way for the killer to kill where they don't you know, see the effects
• 8:54
  of their actions. Oh, I see almost like the firing squad where sort
• 8:58
  of nobody really knows who shot the killing. Even more removed than that,
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  that's the evolution of you know, not giving your own soldiers PTSD is to
• 9:09
  make it so they don't know whether they did the killing. It's kind of
• 9:13
  like an a moral insulation or something like that, or kind of even psychological.
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  And this is kind of what this is what Fennan calls abstract violence,
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  is the state performs, or the state in a colonial situation, their violence
• 9:28
  is abstract in the sense that it is filtered through whatever values, laws,
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  rules. It's bureaucratized so that you can't really hold the person responsible. That's
• 9:43
  part of the difficulty. I think of reading Fennah without a very kind of
• 9:46
  deep understanding of this situation that he's writing in, which is the Algerian struggle
• 9:56
  for independence, Yeah, decolonization. He's like a psychologist, right, he's
• 10:01
  treating I don't know if you got to the end of the book, but
• 10:03
  he's just they're just case studies, lists of case studies of him treating soldiers
• 10:11
  and you know, people that were that witness that were witnessed to incredible violence
• 10:18
  and they're experiencing psychosis and these other symptoms. So, I mean, this
• 10:22
  isn't just an abstract theory text. He's practicing and trying to sort through this
• 10:28
  by establishing a theory of violence. Yeah, I got that sense. It's
• 10:33
  very much looking at a kind of psychology and culture and the kind of mentality
• 10:39
  around all of this as well. He's not just I mean, he's very
• 10:43
  far from just giving a very a kind of a factual accounts of his I
• 10:48
  mean a lot of it is firsthand his experience, but a lot of it
• 10:54
  is yeah, almost psychoanalytic and social analysis. Can we run through some local
• 11:01
  news real quick, and I do I do mean real quick, but I
• 11:05
  think so. I watch about an hour of news per week on the StairMaster
• 11:11
  because the StairMaster has a TV on it. But are I think we got
• 11:16
  some we got some good mask off liberal democratic consensus reality this week. And
• 11:26
  I'm going to call out, you know, these supposed progressive institutions specifically in
• 11:33
  Canada. And I know this is going on everywhere, but we'll just we'll
• 11:39
  just locate ourselves specifically in Canada. So the Ontario NDP, this is the
• 11:43
  first one. Our socialist ish party, you know, in name only,
• 11:48
  forced a retraction from a representative. I'm sorry, I'm not from here.
• 11:54
  What do you call the Ontario representatives in the in the Ontario Parliament MPP Member
• 12:01
  of Provincial Parliament. Okay, MPP sounds right to me. But they forced
• 12:05
  a retraction from an MPP in which she called for an end of all occupation
• 12:13
  of Palestinian land and an end to apartheid. And they said that the party
• 12:18
  does not agree with her statements because they're anti Semitic and discriminated. Discriminatory.
• 12:24
  Oh that's ridiculous. But I mean, if you look at this through like
• 12:28
  a lumin lens, though I feel like it makes perfect sense, Like you
• 12:33
  can't really like for all the different geopolitical kind of intertwined relationships, like a
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  political party that's vying for real power in a liberal democracy like Canada, there's
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  limits to the kinds of positions they can take on the Israel Palestine situation,
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  which has nothing to do with morality and has everything to do with like interests
• 12:52
  and relationships. I mean, yeah, a lot of their a lot of
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  what they're doing is with what their opposition and is then going to do and
• 13:01
  say after that is what they have in mind and obviously, yeah, looking
• 13:07
  forward to elections and and and at the national level too, with how their
• 13:11
  behavior reflects on the on the federal party, et cetera. Yeah, I
• 13:18
  mean that's that's how you got to kind of look at it, and then
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  how it kind of comes into contact with you know, economics and the legal
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  system and things like that, and especially international law. Right, that's that
• 13:31
  a lot of people love to just observe this whole situation from the perspective of
• 13:35
  international law, which is important but a little bit anemic if you're just using
• 13:41
  that lens. I think we've I think we've seen that international law doesn't make
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  a shit of difference when it comes to the United States, even Canada,
• 13:50
  Israel. Oh, it's a framework for making observations about these situations, right,
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  It's not a solution to anything. It's just an agree upon framework through
• 14:01
  which you can discuss these situations according to rules and precedents. I mean absolutely,
• 14:07
  Before we get too moral about this, I should say, the only
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  reason that this even matters, the reason that there's moral outrage and we care
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  about it, is because it's on Twitter, Like what three hundred reaction machine.
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  Three hundred thousand people were killed in Yemen with fifteen billion dollars of Canadian
• 14:28
  equipment, and it's not like I batted an eyelash about that and Amnesty International
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  said it was a violation of international law. But you know what am I
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  going to do? That's the other side of personalizing violence or and depersonalizing violence
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  is the way that social media is very personalized now because the algorithms, right,
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  they you know, they track your behavior and they suggest things I think
• 14:52
  you'll like, So you end up getting very personal suggestions. So if you're
• 14:58
  depending on what kind of perspective you tend to look at. That's the one
• 15:01
  you're going to be shown. And so it's very also very individualized, very
• 15:05
  personalized. So if you tend to like a more maybe intellectual perspective, maybe
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  you're just going to get like Chomsky interviews, and if not, you're going
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  to get other things. And that's the kind of flip side of personalizing violence,
• 15:24
  is that you have a personalized news feed and whatever you want is going
• 15:28
  to be on there. But again, yeah, it's a very presentist,
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  reactionary kind of thing. Not reactionary, just it's a reaction. Right,
• 15:37
  this happened, Now react to it, all right, Now we have a
• 15:39
  social media thing going on, a phenomenon, all right. So we were
• 15:43
  also glazing up Olivia chaw As being a progressive who is elected a couple of
• 15:50
  months ago, and we were celebrating that. But then there was a pro
• 15:54
  Palaestindian rally in Nathan Phillips Square, which she declared was deplorable. Well there
• 16:02
  you go, our progressive candidate again. Same thing as the last example.
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  Not surprising, I think. If there is a difference though, it's she
• 16:10
  doesn't have a party brass to a piece. She's just a maze, you
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  know. What I hear. I mean, I have listened to Chomsky lately
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  because I know he's an expert on the Israel Palestine situation. And yeah,
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  like what he tends to say is that as that young liberals, young younger
• 16:27
  people tend to be, you know, more sympathetic towards Palestine, whereas maybe
• 16:33
  older people, especially on the Republican side, tend to be more friendly towards
• 16:40
  Israel and kind of steering Israel into in this direction of being a kind of
• 16:48
  well, it has very their support for Israel does have very anti Semitic roots
• 16:53
  in itself. The evangelical community is very anti Semitic and Israel and the support
• 17:00
  for Israel is very ironic, but it's very real as well. And maybe
• 17:04
  there is Lamophobia trumps their anti Semitism, but it's it's all kind of connected.
• 17:11
  Well, final example, which I think parades itself in most other cases
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  as Canada's most left leaning school, but it condemned three student groups for expressing
• 17:26
  solidarity with Palestine, saying in response that freedom of expression has limits. Oh
• 17:33
  yeah, yeah, freedom of expression is I mean, the limits are making
• 17:38
  people feel unsafe. That's the limit, which is now, that's something I'd
• 17:41
  like to see play out in court, because pretty inflammatory it, you know,
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  talks about it, describes like the attack on civilians as an expression of
• 17:52
  like resistance against like like like kind of whitewashing it a little bit, and
• 17:56
  then also saying a bunch of stuff about like they were like so called Canada,
• 18:03
  which cracked me up. It kind of reminds me of Contra points to
• 18:06
  this whole problem with academia so called so called Israel. But they also said
• 18:11
  so called Canada in the statement they're like so called Canada continues to support or
• 18:17
  whatever Israel and all that stuff. It was funny. It was a funny
• 18:18
  statement, just like that is funny out of touch activists, out of touch
• 18:23
  with the broad population. Look, I'm going to say, on a on
• 18:26
  a signification level, so called Canada is is better than Canada. You know,
• 18:33
  Yeah, sure I agree. If we are doing some systems theory shit
• 18:37
  here, then you have to say these are interconnected bureaucracies of communication management.
• 18:45
  They don't necessarily all yield a single thing. But I'm sure they didn't mean
• 18:49
  it that way. In any case, if you've been uh, i don't
• 18:53
  know, jerking off to your own philosophy of resistance, which it looks like
• 19:00
  about which posts are morally justified. We can get back to that later.
• 19:04
  If you're reading how TV has rendered the entire world a Bodriardian simulation, you
• 19:11
  can get back to that later also, because I mean, at least for
• 19:15
  me, this kind of seems to be where the rubber meets the road,
• 19:18
  because our states, Canada, America, and Europe except Ireland. You can
• 19:25
  get back to all of that after. But if you want to look at
• 19:29
  where theory rubber meets the road, this seems to be where it is.
• 19:33
  What do you mean by that? Excuse me? Keep that in my god,
• 19:40
  dude. Well, for example, if you want to know how ideological
• 19:45
  state apparatus functions in tandem with a repressive state apparatus, here you have examples.
• 19:52
  If you want to look at how performative speech acts function like condemn,
• 20:00
  how these words function in place of politics to maintain the status quo, here
• 20:04
  are your examples. And especially if you're a career academic masturbating to your philosophy
• 20:11
  of resistance and yet trotting out all the same lines as the Globe and Mail
• 20:17
  in the middle of a pretty pretty public genocide. Then you're the case study.
• 20:22
  And I like before, before I morally soapbox myself, I should say
• 20:29
  I've never done anything to help any Palestinian. I'm I'm as indifferent as anyone
• 20:34
  else because I'm sitting here in my comfy gamer chair. But still the bullshit
• 20:41
  screen in front of this is it's a it's egregious. Yeah, I mean,
• 20:48
  I guess when the chips are down. But theory tends to be very
• 20:52
  backward looking at as well. It's like, I don't advocate theory as a
• 20:59
  way of predicting the future in any substantive way, but it is it is
• 21:04
  a tool for for looking at history, and starting with learning about history is
• 21:11
  a very good place to go. So that's one of the humanities disciplines,
• 21:15
  right, history, philosophy, literature or kind of the old school core.
• 21:22
  So, I mean that's what when you hear Chomsky speak, right, he
• 21:26
  goes into massive amounts of historical detail, and not just because he has this
• 21:32
  I don't know, amazing memory or and in this commitment to these issues,
• 21:36
  but he sets things in historical context always, which is the complete opposite experience
• 21:41
  of reading the mainstream media is everything is like what's happening right now, and
• 21:47
  and and all eyes are on everybody and how they're reacting to it. And
• 21:52
  that's that's a very stifling kind of situation to make analyses in, because everyone's
• 21:59
  constantly looking at you to see what kind of moral position they can derive from
• 22:03
  what you're saying. Even if you're very carefully trying to just be very factual,
• 22:07
  you're going to be perceived as you know, pro or anti evil or
• 22:11
  good whatever, all right, And I mean that's not conducive to good analyzes
• 22:18
  of situations. It's just not. And that's not what the media is supposed
• 22:22
  to do anyway. It's in depth analysis of situations. And I would like
• 22:30
  to say that this is very much an observation of observation, because the media
• 22:36
  does observation, especially and especially in terms of language and linguistic analysis. So
• 22:45
  the word like terrorist is very loaded. I learned in Grade ten social studies
• 22:51
  that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. This is one of these
• 22:56
  trop er spectavle again, it's a trope, yeah, but it's being cashed
• 23:02
  out again here. We unequivocally decry, you know, unequivocally equivocate about this.
• 23:12
  We will not equivocate unequivocally. Yeah, I mean the terrorists charge is
• 23:17
  is a little bit. I mean it was, it's appropriate. I think
• 23:22
  in one one level it's a terror it's meant it's a terror attack, and
• 23:26
  another level it's being used as justification for other things. Right, and again
• 23:33
  in a kind of ahistorical manner. Right, It's like we are here during
• 23:38
  the Afghanistan War, as if you follow those sorts of things about who was
• 23:44
  trained in the United States and who the United States created and what their responsibility
• 23:48
  for it all. Of course, as the situation is unfolding, Yeah,
• 23:52
  the States are going in there to rescue people from evil tyrannical like dictatorships and
• 23:59
  things, and then years later horrific shit comes out and the whole situation looks
• 24:04
  like it was just the US was just the bad guy the whole fucking time.
• 24:07
  And I think the situation is gonna be the same, right, I
• 24:12
  mean, relatively speaking in terms of of a of a conflict, not not
• 24:18
  universal goodness or evil, but in terms of a conflict, they tend to
• 24:22
  be the aggressors, which we tend to consider to be the not so good
• 24:26
  position to be in, right, right, they but this will come out
• 24:33
  later. Right now, everything is floating in this in this cloud of extreme
• 24:37
  emotion and obscurity and lack of details and so many cross lines of communication.
• 24:45
  And then in the future it's gonna come out. But by then it's too
• 24:51
  late, Like what's happened has happened, And if you don't learn from these
• 24:56
  things, then you're doomed to repeat them. Another another latitude, another truism.
• 25:03
  So why do we look at the text? Then it's France Finan beginning
• 25:07
  of Wretched of the Earth, which is probably his second most famous book,
• 25:14
  and the first bit of this is on violence. So I wanted to look
• 25:17
  at on violence, just to see if we could cut through some of the
• 25:22
  bullshit that feels like we're in a delirium of moral posturing in every possible way.
• 25:30
  So Finan's educated in psychiatry, that's like his main job, I guess.
• 25:37
  But he's also or he was also fighting in World War two in Martinique,
• 25:44
  I guess, in the Caribbean with the Free French, which is against
• 25:49
  what was the Vichy French regime. So he was on the good guy's side,
• 25:55
  you could say. And he's a contemporary of French intellectuals he probably heard
• 26:00
  of like sort to Bevoir La Khan, influenced greatly by Merleu Ponty. And
• 26:11
  we have to go back to at Alexander Kojev at least for a second,
• 26:15
  because he's very much indebted to Kojev's interpretation of Hegel from the phenomenology of spirit,
• 26:22
  which is recognition, and he applies this primarily to colonial situations and primarily
• 26:30
  to the colonial situation in Algeria. Justifying I would say, justifying violence,
• 26:37
  not saying that violence is like a good because he doesn't use those terms at
• 26:42
  all, but just saying that it's absolutely understandable why a colonized subject would,
• 26:49
  for the sake of being recognized as a subject, would carry out acts of
• 26:56
  violence. Yeah, there's a in which he's saying the colonial situations already rife
• 27:04
  with violence, right, Like colonialism is inherently violent, and decolonialization is going
• 27:15
  to be no different. It's also inherently violent. You know, these these
• 27:19
  revolutions, I mean, you know you have He's also writing the Wretches to
• 27:25
  the Earth, and the Cuban Revolution is happening, and and the independence of
• 27:32
  other nations, Morocco Tunisia Sedan, and and you have the the French campaign
• 27:38
  I believe in Vietnam, which was the precursor for the for the US takeover
• 27:44
  of that, and the Battle of Dien Bienfu and the French the French campaign
• 27:48
  in Vietnam where they were defeated. Right, So all of these things are
• 27:55
  floating around in the background. And of course he's in his play with the
• 28:00
  liberation movement there and he's yeah, I mean he didn't. He died not
• 28:07
  too long after this came out, but he's writing reflections and a kind of
• 28:11
  continuing is theorizing of this and violence is just yeah, like the colonial situation
• 28:18
  we already mentioned, it's a Minichian he calls it. This colonization kind of
• 28:23
  our colonialism turns everything into a kind of Minichian universe where good and evil,
• 28:30
  charges of good and evil are going all over the place. Again here and
• 28:34
  I don't know, this is something I learned when I was just researching for
• 28:37
  this episode, but after, I mean, it's relevant to now. But
• 28:41
  Sary wrote the Sacht wrote the introduction to this book. And because of Sart's
• 28:51
  support for the Six Day War, which was the sixty seven Israeli Arab war
• 28:56
  friends. Fanan's wife wanted to get rid of Starts introduction, so he got
• 29:06
  canceled for his prosionist attitudes that she felt were incompatible with her husband's work.
• 29:12
  Yeah. I mean, the French intellectuals have been kind of famous for the
• 29:17
  positions they've taken on some of this stuff, like Fuco as well. I
• 29:19
  think I think he was in support of Iran at one point. I'm not
• 29:26
  super familiar with it all. I'd have to look it up again. But
• 29:30
  this leads up to I guess Finnan's take on the dialectic of recognition, which
• 29:34
  is to say, yeah, this is all well and good for like white
• 29:38
  people to write about phenomenology and how one comes to be a subject. But
• 29:45
  because I'm Black, and because I'm from the periphery of the Empire, I'll
• 29:52
  never be a subject in the eyes of French society. And this is this
• 29:56
  became the book Black Skin, White Man Asks, which says not only do
• 30:02
  French subjects see Black French subjects as secondary, but Black French subjects also see
• 30:10
  themselves as secondary. That everything white stands on the side of civilization, rationality,
• 30:18
  culture, and everything black stands on the side of the irrational and the
• 30:23
  primitive, And no matter what you accomplish in your life, like he's an
• 30:27
  accomplished academic intellectual in Paris, but you're always going to be haunted by your
• 30:34
  status of recognition as other. And the only solution to that is to fight,
• 30:41
  because fighting with violence is the only way to be free. You can't
• 30:45
  be given your freedom because if you accept the gift of freedom, then the
• 30:52
  other will never recognize you. The other will only recognize you in self determination,
• 31:00
  which in his view requires a sort of violence. He says, for
• 31:04
  instance, near the beginning, the colonized who have been who have made up
• 31:10
  their mind to make such an agenda into a driving force, that is decolonization
• 31:17
  and disorder, They have been prepared for violence from time immemorial, as soon
• 31:25
  as they are born. It is obvious to them that their cramped world,
• 31:29
  riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence. Yeah,
• 31:34
  I call that justification if you want it. Seems to me he's just
• 31:37
  commenting on the inevitability of it. You're born into a world of violence,
• 31:41
  and violence seems like the only option you really have. And I noticed he
• 31:48
  doesn't he doesn't really specify violence against whom. It's usually just you know,
• 31:55
  colonial violence, decolonial violence. You know, the kind of cycle of violence,
• 32:01
  right, you know, the tit for tat kind of violence. You
• 32:05
  know, you you committed an atrocity against us, Now we're going to commit
• 32:08
  something against you. And it's a cycle. It's a cycle of violence.
• 32:13
  And he talks about the compartmentalization of the colonial world into these I mean,
• 32:20
  Baba Homie Baba comments on this and saying that this is an interesting kind of
• 32:25
  spatial understanding of colonialism too. So this spatial understanding of violence, you know,
• 32:34
  the compartmentalization of the colonial world into into certain areas where the natives go,
• 32:42
  and then the areas where the where the Europeans are supposed to go,
• 32:45
  where the colonists are supposed to be, you know, conducting their activities,
• 32:51
  and they become almost like separate worlds, but they're looking at each other,
• 32:53
  they're not unaware of each other's presence, and there's this play of of of
• 33:00
  animosity, antagonism, men and envy. Even in some cases he doesn't he
• 33:05
  doesn't restrain from saying things that you know, you know, the colonized envy,
• 33:10
  the colonizer things like that he's going into his psychoanalytic kind of framework with
• 33:16
  that and looking at the mindset, I guess you could say the mentality that
• 33:22
  is developed in these situations. I don't know. I don't want to go
• 33:25
  all the way to the endpoint where we say speech is violence, you know,
• 33:31
  because that gets a little bit cringe. But to say that violence is
• 33:37
  speech, it's something I think that I'd agree with. But liberalism, to
• 33:42
  me, the great insight of it is that state governance is not based on
• 33:49
  the gods or nature, on God who founded the state at some point in
• 33:54
  time immemorial, Like the state was founded by vile. Every state founded by
• 34:00
  violence, and Victor you have to correct me on this. It's either Lock
• 34:05
  or Hobbes. But who said we have a primal right to violence? That's
• 34:09
  one of our most basic rights and your basic right. Then you rent to
• 34:16
  the state. You rent it out so that the state can do the violence
• 34:21
  on your behalf for the purpose of stability and security. But you can always
• 34:27
  be for Lock probably said it to but you can always take it back,
• 34:30
  right, you can take it back if the state is not holding its end
• 34:34
  up in terms of well that parts that part's lock. Okay. Well,
• 34:37
  also, Hobbes kind of says that because he says that the only circumstance in
• 34:42
  which you can rebel against the against the sovereign is if they are violating your
• 34:50
  most important natural right, which is really just like self security. Like,
• 34:54
  so if they're going to kill you or something. Yeah, I feel like
• 34:58
  by the time you get to Mills on liberty, that violence is supposed to
• 35:04
  be taken over by the legal system. Basically, you're not supposed to go,
• 35:08
  you know, challenge someone who's wronged you to a duel anymore by that
• 35:13
  point and shoot them on the streets. You're supposed to appeal to the courts
• 35:17
  or something like that to resolve this situation non violently, or at least you're
• 35:23
  supposed to. Yeah. Yeah, they subsidize violence for you. Well,
• 35:28
  you have the original act of violence, and then you have a whole bunch
• 35:30
  of bureaucratic institutions that take its place. So you have to go through the
• 35:34
  appropriate channels. But I kind of agree with this point in liberalism is that
• 35:38
  if the channels do not work for you, as I believe they don't work
• 35:44
  for the people of Gaza, then if violence is the last type of speech
• 35:50
  or the type of communication that you can perform. Then yeah, I don't
• 35:58
  want to use the word justification, but you can understand why no other type
• 36:02
  of speech works. So this is the type of speech that remains. And
• 36:07
  this is this isn't gonna work either. It's actually gonna make things worse.
• 36:13
  Like strategically it's a terrible move, but it's just giving Israel all the justification
• 36:17
  to be even more brutal. But you're supposing that there's another world in which
• 36:22
  this justification didn't exist, and then they sought a different solution, which they
• 36:25
  So Finan's point is like by using violence, like the colonizer gets to see
• 36:30
  their humanity and their subjectivity. It's like, I feel like this is doing
• 36:32
  the opposite, Like if anything like the thing you were saying at the beginning,
• 36:37
  Israel's like you know they're talking they bring up the beheading of children example,
• 36:42
  right, like probably not true in an effort to dehumanize It's like it's
• 36:46
  like and if anything like watching like seeing the paragliders, or like kill a
• 36:52
  bunch of concertgoers like that just makes I think, like gives Israel authority to
• 36:57
  dehumanize them even more so, I don't see where the Fanan argument applies here.
• 37:01
  They are part of the argument is they are already dehumanized. They are
• 37:05
  already seen as only animals. They have only they've done. They tried the
• 37:10
  two state solution, they tried the PLO, they tried peaceful protests. In
• 37:15
  every case they got shot down. Literally. Yeah, I'm not saying I'm
• 37:21
  not saying that like there's a solution. I'm just saying that this is a
• 37:23
  good way to make things way worse. I don't think you can argue on
• 37:25
  one end that the situations are ready terminal and then argue that they also made
• 37:30
  it worse. I think in the Manichean universe that Fanon is describing here is
• 37:37
  also the universe of the Cold War, where you have capitalism and socialism in
• 37:43
  the backshop. Right, But there isn't any of that anymore, right for
• 37:46
  us living in capitalist societies. Who are we told are the evil ones?
• 37:52
  Right? They tend to just be isolated people like you know, North Korea,
• 37:58
  Russia, the sorts of things, right, some sometimes Saudi Arabia when
• 38:02
  they're not, you know, getting along very well with the oil lobby in
• 38:06
  the States. Or are those sorts of that becomes evil, Right, So
• 38:09
  what what is calling somebody evil? Isn't you know, you're not in danger
• 38:15
  of pushing them into some kind of communist sphere. We're not. We're not
• 38:22
  you know, worrying about We're not got this old United States kind of Red
• 38:27
  Scare stuff going on where the communists are going to infiltrate. So the whole
• 38:31
  context is completely different in that sense, right, Evil is something much more
• 38:37
  nebulous and non specific. Now, well, I think I think also there's
• 38:42
  there's a couple of different things too where I don't know if the phenon I
• 38:44
  mean, he's thinking about it from the Algerian perspective too, where there's like
• 38:47
  a clear delineation about like who are the indigenous people and who aren't? And
• 38:51
  I mean I think that they're I don't know enough to be sure about this,
• 38:54
  but I think that there are like some legitimate claims that you know,
• 38:58
  Jewish people are some how like ethnically like rooted in that piece of land,
• 39:04
  and as are the Arabs. So it's like I don't think that there's like
• 39:06
  a as clear delineation between like who is the indigenous, who are like the
• 39:10
  true indigenous populations like yes, of course, I'm just saying it's more complicated,
• 39:15
  but clearly, like I said on the last episode, I think there's
• 39:19
  good reasons to think Israel is obviously an apartheid state and there's a power differential.
• 39:23
  But I'm just saying that in terms of using the finan framework, I
• 39:29
  don't know if it works perfectly well. I think, like another thing is
• 39:35
  I'm pretty sure he talks about being able to overcome the colonizers with like you
• 39:40
  know, greater and greater arms, but if you face them like in a
• 39:45
  situation where there's not really much chance of that, like I think in some
• 39:49
  places he even says, like there's a chance that that could lead to another
• 39:52
  system of exploitation that like, it's not always the case that facing the colonizer
• 40:00
  with like if you don't have basically I think you like, if you just
• 40:04
  have bare minimum of arms and not actually like enough to make a dent to
• 40:08
  get the colonizer to realize your humanity, then you're not actually going to be
• 40:14
  doing any good. I think that's absolutely right because if if it is like
• 40:19
  a typical colonial situation like Algeria, for example, the colonizer, if if
• 40:27
  it becomes too much work. They can just go fuck off back home.
• 40:30
  Exactly, they can go home is real, there's where the Israelis are going
• 40:34
  to go. They don't have another place to go. But this it's more
• 40:37
  like a North American colonial situation. Yes, like where are we going to
• 40:45
  go? They don't have a Yeah, we go back to our whatever home
• 40:52
  home ethnic country. You know, israel Is is sponsored by the US,
• 40:59
  it's not, that's not their metropolis that there's US is their sponsor. But
• 41:05
  in finan situation, it's clearly French occupying. It's clearly French occupied, and
• 41:10
  those people, to those soldiers are happy to go back to France. Like
• 41:14
  I mean it's not or at least it's not as big of a deal.
• 41:16
  Well, I mean it's it's it's a pretty big deal for for the for
• 41:21
  the people who are you know, drafted to go over there. No.
• 41:24
  No, what I mean is like is like like pills, there's a homeland,
• 41:30
  just go back to France and it's like, yeah, sure, could
• 41:34
  we go back to Europe? I guess, but that would be like it's
• 41:37
  not the same as just like a French soldier drafted, Okay, just go
• 41:40
  back to France. Like I don't know. Oh, That's what I was
• 41:43
  saying, is that there's not going to be a one to one application of
• 41:46
  Fenan to anyone, that any to say, more recent situation, because so
• 41:52
  much has changed, you know, the not least of which being the end
• 41:57
  of the Cold War, but also internet and media and how fast news travels
• 42:01
  now and how how that can be you know, used as part of as
• 42:07
  part of a strategy, right, the emergence of the sudden you know,
• 42:12
  eruptions of violence now can be very much capitalized on to garner support, right
• 42:19
  because the media can choose what to run and what not to run, and
• 42:23
  you know that that creates a bit of a bias, a bit of a
• 42:27
  problem already because what are you seeing in the news and more importantly, now
• 42:31
  what are you not seeing? Because news travels really quickly, but what is
• 42:37
  being selected and put in front of you? That becomes a huge question,
• 42:40
  right. So you know, slow violence, violence that kind of just lingers
• 42:45
  under the radar, you know, kind of slow squeezing out of people,
• 42:49
  creating conditions that are unlivable for them and hoping that they'll leave, Like those
• 42:53
  things aren't sensational enough. You can do that sort of thing and fly under
• 42:57
  the radar a little bit, But when there's big explosion of violence, especially
• 43:00
  when they serve some political purpose, those can then just be kind of flouted
• 43:05
  in everybody's faces and whip everyone up into a big frenzy over it and then
• 43:09
  garner support for some I don't know, some agenda or other. I mean,
• 43:15
  the list, the list would go on infinitely about the differences between now
• 43:20
  and then when when Finan's writing and this decolonial situation where you actually have the
• 43:27
  former British empire falling to pieces and and and what's gonna what's the world going
• 43:31
  to be like after that? And I kind of disagree with you, Victor
• 43:37
  that this is suddenly worse to flare up more violence is worse because this would
• 43:45
  have happened eventually, Like you can, you can blame the current administration or
• 43:51
  administration's past, but this, the situation is unsustainable regardless, and eventually violence
• 43:59
  is the only act that takes any significance. But at least from Anon's perspective.
• 44:06
  He says, uh, like if the if the inferiority of the colonized
• 44:08
  is an assumption on both sides, like the colonized, say the gods and
• 44:15
  people say we don't have a future, we don't have a promise, we're
• 44:19
  not going to have a better life, And the other side, the Israelis,
• 44:24
  say, you know what, Yeah, we're not going to give you
• 44:27
  a better life. You're just going to live and die in a state of
• 44:32
  occupation. Then revolutionary violence is meant to be a shock to the entire system.
• 44:39
  It's meant to be like as to create a sense of awareness to anyone
• 44:45
  who's listening. And I think it has succeeded on that front, to say
• 44:51
  we're really willing to die and risk our lives for the possibility of another future,
• 44:58
  which is almost a demand for recognition, a recognition that they wouldn't have
• 45:02
  got otherwise. That they they're they're going to die anyway. But I might
• 45:07
  as well, I don't think that's true. I might as well it's true
• 45:09
  that they were going to die anyway. I don't think it's true that there's
• 45:13
  going to be a ground any no matter what, We're going to die in
• 45:15
  the state of occupation, regardless of whether Hamas is there. They've been in
• 45:19
  a state of occupation for well, first of all, who is this day
• 45:22
  right? Like, we're not even talking about the Palestinian people. We're talking
• 45:24
  about Hamas. Okay, we're talking about a terrorist organization, Like, I
• 45:28
  think that's an accurate, an accurate. We're talking about the the over two
• 45:32
  point three million people in Gaza, the two and a half. They weren't
• 45:36
  the ones, but they weren't the ones who whoo who decided to engage in
• 45:39
  violence, right, Like, So that's another way in which I don't think
• 45:42
  that the I don't think that the the parallel with with the Finan because I
• 45:45
  think that what Finan had in mind was like a much more broad based like
• 45:50
  resistance from regular people. Right. We're not just talking about like totally ridiculous.
• 45:53
  Never is the entire populace on board with a viral. But I'm just
• 45:59
  saying, I'm just saying, when you when you say like they you talk
• 46:00
  about you talk about like, I just think it's it's better to not to
• 46:05
  specify, right, Like, we're not talking about Palestinian people in general,
• 46:07
  Well, then talk about talk about the If you look at revolution, the
• 46:12
  American revolution, it's not always a popular it's always a population plus combatants.
• 46:17
  That's always what it's right, But well, yeah, sure, but but
• 46:21
  I mean if you look at public opinion within both the West both the West
• 46:23
  Bank and Gaza, like support for Hamass was like quite low, below fifty
• 46:29
  percent in most cases, Like who are they speaking for? Like with their
• 46:34
  violence, there's probably speaking for themselves. That the fact that they're willing to
• 46:38
  risk their life for another future I'm talking about, Yeah, I know,
• 46:42
  another future of theocratic Muslim rule, sure, or just a future where they're
• 46:47
  not dogs and humanized systematically. I'm sympathetic with. I'm extremely sympathetic with like
• 46:55
  the Palestinian people having some future. I don't know how to get there.
• 47:00
  I don't have the solution. I'm just saying, like having theocratic terrorists commit
• 47:05
  acts of violence on your behalf is maybe like not the best exemplification of like
• 47:08
  a revolutionary spirit. And what is then? I don't have the answer.
• 47:14
  They tried all the other options. They tried appealing to the international community,
• 47:19
  they tried peaceful protests. It's like there's one card left to play, Like
• 47:23
  you're acting like Hamas is not Gosins who were born under occupation. Yeah,
• 47:30
  I mean we'll see what happens. I mean, there's gonna be a ground
• 47:32
  invasion. Now, there's gonna be like endless missile strikes. It's gonna be
• 47:36
  a I'm sure it's gonna lead to a great future. Well no, violence,
• 47:39
  Yeah, violence is not going to be the answer in the end,
• 47:45
  right, but I mean violence, it's the whole thing is a violent situation.
• 47:52
  There's everything's violent. A look like net and Yaho is the worst.
• 47:58
  He's like he's like a right wing crazy person and he's he's like, you
• 48:02
  know, winning off the backs of like the most reactionary like horrid like political
• 48:09
  I guess momentum. I mean, it's a terrible situation. I'm not saying
• 48:15
  that like Netanyahu was gonna was going to lead to, you know, some
• 48:21
  great solution, but I think maybe eventually there would be like some I have
• 48:23
  no idea though. It's like one of the most complicated situations in like geopolitics,
• 48:27
  in terms of solutions, in terms of like where is the differential power.
• 48:32
  It's not that complicated in the sense that clearly like Israel has u is
• 48:37
  kind of in a domineering position. That's clear. But from a solution's perspective,
• 48:42
  I think it's extremely complicated. I have no idea what the answer.
• 48:45
  I think, in a very direct way, what Fenon, I think is
• 48:49
  saying here when he says he talks about these divides in this Minichian situation,
• 48:54
  and what he says near the beginning is looking at the immediacies of the loneal
• 49:00
  context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what
• 49:05
  species, what race one belongs to, and the colonies. The economic infrastructure
• 49:09
  is also a superstructure. Now this is a very discussed passage, but I
• 49:15
  think basically what he's saying is, you know, there's there's you have these
• 49:21
  white Christian colonists and you have the black and brown natives, and I mean,
• 49:28
  what what what's what's it going to turn into? Do you have?
• 49:31
  You now have a kind of Judeo Christian side versus the Islamic side. Right,
• 49:38
  But that's not that's not where we want the line to be drawn.
• 49:42
  We don't want a religious war. That's the problem. I agree. But
• 49:46
  that's such a that's such an easy simplification. And that's what the news kind
• 49:51
  of is good at is, you know, presenting simplifications of situations. But
• 49:54
  it's it can be very very dangerous at the same but I'm hearing, I'm
• 50:00
  hearing people who are like sympathetic, Like, I just think there's also a
• 50:04
  simplification happening on the other Like I agree with you, I think, but
• 50:08
  I think there's also a simplification happening on people who want to be sympathy,
• 50:13
  who are very sympathetic to the Palestinian side, a conflation of like what Howmas
• 50:17
  is versus what Palestinian people like actually want. And that's also a simplification.
• 50:22
  If you're just like, Okay, this Hummas act, Well, that's just
• 50:24
  the people. It's not. It's not just the people expressing their will.
• 50:29
  It's a fringe real Yeah, well you're acting like violent simplification too, Like
• 50:35
  violence is discriminate in terms of rational response. Violence is after response, after
• 50:43
  rational response has failed, and every rational response has failed, Like there's no
• 50:49
  there's no there's no reasoning with So let me let me just make really clear
• 50:54
  where I agree with you and where I don't. Where I agree with you
• 50:58
  is it's not surprise rising that something like this happened. I agree that there's
• 51:01
  been like the fires of this have been stoked. I would go further,
• 51:06
  it's inevitable that something like this would happen. Sure, because if you treat
• 51:08
  it's inevitable. Sure, if you treat people then that way, if you
• 51:12
  treat people without measure, without reason, inevitably they're going to do something unreasonable.
• 51:17
  God, I sound, I sound really fucking dialectical, but this is
• 51:21
  I don't I don't disagree, so I don't disagree with you. But where
• 51:23
  the part that I don't agree with you on is that it's actually gonna work.
• 51:30
  Like, it's not gonna do shit, It's gonna make things worse.
• 51:31
  That's it's it's but like, but okay, but hold on, why are
• 51:35
  you why are you like on all of a sudden being like, oh,
• 51:37
  well, of course it's inevitable. But what's inevitable? What's the inevitable response
• 51:42
  from the Israeli side? Like, why are you discounting that? Oh?
• 51:44
  I think that is inevitable. It's just that I'm paying exactly, I'm paying
• 51:47
  for that though it's a cycle. It's a cycles. But that's my only
• 51:52
  point, Like like, but it's just like when you when you add this
• 51:54
  finaw, sort of representatives are representing me in terms of favorability towards that.
• 52:01
  What I'm saying is like, when of course it's going to be a disp
• 52:06
  that's what I meant when I said things are gonna get way worse. It's
• 52:08
  gonna be a way disproportionate response from the Israeli side. I'm not saying that
• 52:13
  from the perspective of like, well, then these you know, these irrational
• 52:17
  like like Hamas agents who are like acting involved. No, I understand that
• 52:22
  they're just acting in they're reacting to the situation that's really bad. But but
• 52:27
  I'm not. But I feel like there's an edge of like celebratory like,
• 52:30
  oh, this is like an expression of like what Phenonan describes as resistance.
• 52:34
  You know, it's going to create it's going to make them feel like they
• 52:37
  gain more subjectivity. Like I think that's all bullshit. It's just going to
• 52:39
  make things worse because we know what the predictable response of is of the Israelis.
• 52:45
  Like we were talking about different situations that they don't have somewhere to go
• 52:47
  back to, like the Algerian situation. So the solution, like it being
• 52:52
  part of a solution maybe like one hundred steps down the line. This maybe,
• 53:00
  but I think like there are one hundred steps down the line, something's
• 53:01
  gonna happen eventually. I just don't agree that this is like, Oh,
• 53:06
  this is like going to lead to something better, Like, no, I
• 53:08
  think it's gonna We have every reason I think it's gonna lead to the situation
• 53:12
  being way worse. So Fannan in this reading draws this very important distinction of
• 53:20
  like people will die, they will sacrifice their life in a suicidal way,
• 53:25
  even for a shred of dignity. Now, I don't know if he's right
• 53:30
  on that or not. I'm not a psychiatrist he is, so I'm kind
• 53:34
  of willing to defer on that. And in the case of something like completely
• 53:38
  separate but the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, right, there was a survivor from the
• 53:45
  Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who said, we knew that we were going to die.
• 53:51
  We knew this would not be successful, but we owed it to our dignity,
• 53:57
  to our lives had been dictated by the Germans in every case thus far,
• 54:04
  we wanted to choose. We did this because we wanted to choose how
• 54:07
  we would die. And this is a this is a context that's absolutely foreign
• 54:13
  to our experience. Obviously, I don't want to just like drop it in
• 54:15
  there and transplant like I understand it. But I think Fennon at least does
• 54:22
  understand that that there's a case to be made for dying with some dignity,
• 54:28
  to not die without hope, and that if someone's willing to do that to
• 54:32
  die, then you have to ask what are the situation, what's the situation,
• 54:37
  what are the contingencies that made that the best option? Yeah, and
• 54:45
  I think I think even Finan's really just tracking the development of a national consciousness
• 54:51
  and saying violence contributes to that awakening of the national consciousness. I don't think
• 54:55
  he's saying like that's the best way to do it, this is good or
• 54:59
  bad. He just seems to be tracking this sort of development. It's almost
• 55:04
  in the same sort of valence as proletarian class consciousness, right, Like,
• 55:10
  if you're having similar experiences, you're going to develop a kind of collective consciousness
• 55:15
  eventually, and and maybe unfortunately those will come through violent struggles for freedom and
• 55:22
  survival. Right, But it does create a kind of national consciousness that if
• 55:28
  we get bobbed down in like these who's speaking for who kind of scenarios,
• 55:31
  then will never really as we're trying to make sense of that, and that's
• 55:37
  not I don't think that's something we're going to be able to do as as
• 55:40
  a situation is unfolding. But I think it's undeniable that violence brings attention.
• 55:46
  Violence creates a kind of at least a perceived kind of unity, even if
• 55:52
  it's not real or not total, or there's many people who disagree and diverge
• 55:57
  from that. And even at the end, once that class consciousness, what's
• 56:00
  that, sorry, national consciousness emerges, he says, it's nothing but a
• 56:04
  crude, empty, fragile shell. It could it could go right back to
• 56:08
  kind of tribalism, right, It doesn't necessarily then lead to a progressive,
• 56:13
  better future, Like everything is always hanging in the balance and situations like these
• 56:19
  and there's there's too many contingencies to make statements like that. I think he's
• 56:22
  just positing that, you know, in these situations which are just inherently violent,
• 56:29
  there's a national consciousness dynamic, and that's kind of he seems to be
• 56:34
  going through it in dialectical fashion. You know, Okay, the colonizers dehumanize
• 56:38
  the colonized. Okay, now something happens to the colonized, what happens to
• 56:43
  them? There's an internalization, there's a kind of envy there's a projection almost
• 56:47
  of a utopian state now onto the colonized communities who live in abundance and wealth,
• 56:55
  and they extract the resources and use the use the country trees, you
• 57:00
  know, in that sort of way. So he's and then he goes back
• 57:04
  and forth, and what does that create? Now? Now the colonizers are
• 57:07
  aware that they're being looked at in this way, and like there's he sort
• 57:12
  of does this back and forth dialectical movement, and he's just tracking this sort
• 57:15
  of situation and this developments, and yeah, he eventually gets to the point,
• 57:22
  you know where once a violent situation is now going to emerge. What
• 57:27
  happens is then the bourgeois class, the colonizers will turn to the colonized and
• 57:31
  say, hey, what about like universal human values? Right, you should
• 57:36
  peacefully protest, like, don't commit these acts of violence. So now we're
• 57:39
  talking down to the colonized people, saying you should adopt these these because violence
• 57:46
  is bad and you shouldn't do it right, you should take again, and
• 57:51
  then he goes back to the colonized side. I'm sorry, I'm just jumping
• 57:53
  around. But then he goes on to the supply side, and I don't
• 57:57
  think they ignore these values. They they mock these values because they're obviously being
• 58:02
  deployed in a very instrumental and timely way in order to, you know,
• 58:07
  assuage the fear of the colonizers at the at an uprising, right, Like,
• 58:13
  there's these sort of very particular motives and this very kind of this unconscious
• 58:20
  development. Right, Like I have a hard time just like reading this and
• 58:25
  then being like, oh, yeah, the Fenon was totally down with violence,
• 58:29
  Like it just seems so much more complicated than that. But we hear
• 58:34
  these stories all like people are invoking fanan to justify the violence. It's like
• 58:37
  what, okay, what where's the quote for that? I don't where's the
• 58:40
  analysis? Like it's just totally out of context. Yet we take this shit
• 58:45
  seriously because that's what the media kind of delivers to our feeds, and then
• 58:51
  we react to it. Right, This is actually a circumstance where I feel
• 58:54
  like using theory, it's I'm surprised, Pills that you're like this maybe is
• 58:58
  where a theory matters, because if anything, I would say, like appealing
• 59:01
  to the theory of an on just confuses things, like if you're trying to
• 59:05
  apply it to Israel, Palestine. I just I think it's actually a good
• 59:08
  circumstance where theory just isn't helpful at all. Well, I think it would
• 59:12
  take it. It would be helpful to step back and learn some things,
• 59:15
  like do some careful studying. It's not like having theory in your pocket and
• 59:21
  then whip it out the moment anything happens, right, Like, oh,
• 59:23
  I have a dairy doak quote for what just happened. Now I have something
• 59:27
  else for that. Like, no, it's like step back, like unplug
• 59:30
  for a second to get your mind straight, and like, y, I
• 59:34
  totally agree some research, like but that's not but but again, we just
• 59:38
  like let social media kind of just roll in and define the situations and all
• 59:44
  the positions for us and that and yeah, we let that happen. That
• 59:49
  does happen, and it just creates this just complete confusion, right, total
• 59:54
  is going down on the left and the right is is you know, chastising
• 1:00:00
  the moderate rights and they're sniping each other. Who's more like the competition and
• 1:00:04
  the among the Republicans is like who is the most behind Israel? Now,
• 1:00:07
  right, that's the position that the candidate wants to So they snipe each other
• 1:00:13
  if they feel like they're a little bit hesitant to support is right, Like,
• 1:00:15
  it just creates this fucking total confusion and it's and that's what theory can
• 1:00:22
  do as long as you step back for a second. Well that's the problem.
• 1:00:25
  The problem I think is like if you have like this Phinoff framework,
• 1:00:29
  and you have it, and then you look at a situation, you're like,
• 1:00:31
  well, I'm just gonna plug in this situation into the Phinoff framework,
• 1:00:37
  when really I think you should start by just like reading the history and looking
• 1:00:42
  into the specificity of the situation, and then maybe you could be like,
• 1:00:45
  well, maybe it's pino helpful as opposed to having the I don't don't I
• 1:00:49
  think, I think again, I go back to the original pills the ideas
• 1:00:53
  theory doesn't matter here. Well, as I've been trying to say, I
• 1:00:59
  think the utility of Fenon here is the notion that violence is equivocal. I
• 1:01:07
  think, if anything, Fenon is too hopeful or his his definition of colonialism
• 1:01:14
  doesn't work here because in a colonial situation, the colonizers actually need the colonized
• 1:01:22
  for their labor, and in this case, in Zionist settler colonialism, the
• 1:01:27
  only purpose is actually just to get rid of them, so we can have
• 1:01:30
  an ethno state precisely, but that that would that would make it even more
• 1:01:37
  to the point that there is no speaking back. The colonized cannot speak back.
• 1:01:44
  So there's this, there's this is one of the most oft quoted passages
• 1:01:49
  of this is that he says colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a
• 1:01:53
  body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and
• 1:01:59
  it will only when confronted with greater violence. So when he says something like
• 1:02:02
  colonialism is not a thinking machine, you know, we have these these state
• 1:02:07
  sanctioned companies in you know, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. They're seeking out
• 1:02:15
  profits. They don't see the natives that they arrive upon as as people.
• 1:02:21
  They see natural resources and then a source of labor. So they exploit the
• 1:02:25
  people, get the resources, send them back home. Everybody makes money.
• 1:02:30
  And then there's like a new class definition here. But in the case of
• 1:02:37
  I guess Israel occupation, it is very much a thinking machine. He says,
• 1:02:43
  It's not like colonialism doesn't think. This is a thinking machine. This
• 1:02:45
  is a plan carried out by you know, you could not Israel in general,
• 1:02:52
  but by in particular, the current regime has very much a plan understanding.
• 1:02:58
  The logic and rationality is that are going to produce the end at once,
• 1:03:02
  which is no more Palestinians. So I would I would concede only on
• 1:03:07
  that point. If you want to say this is not actually a colonial situation,
• 1:03:12
  but this would mean it's worth I mean, I mean, yeah,
• 1:03:15
  I agree, it's worse. But he does say that it's kind of characterized
• 1:03:20
  by one person on one side replacing the other. He does say, it's
• 1:03:23
  not really about you know, holding somebody in thrall infinitely, it's it's about
• 1:03:29
  replacement. It's about he says, one species or race which in quotes,
• 1:03:35
  you know, replacing the other one. And so it is he I mean,
• 1:03:38
  that's what we would sort of call the language of ethnic cleansing. He
• 1:03:43
  says, like colonialism is sort of about that in a way, right,
• 1:03:49
  and so no, no conciliation is possible in it within a colonial framework.
• 1:03:54
  Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's just and I think that
• 1:03:57
  that crucial difference that why it's not really I agree it's a worse situation,
• 1:04:02
  right, Like, I think that's what makes it more complicated and way harder
• 1:04:08
  to imagine an end to right. It's I mean, it's it almost feels
• 1:04:11
  like there's like an Israeli realism here, kind of like capitalist realism. It's
• 1:04:14
  I just can't imagine, you know, a kind of world without Like I
• 1:04:18
  can't imagine how I could end right, Like I just it's so difficult.
• 1:04:21
  And that's another reason why, even though as I havingnowledged, I understand why
• 1:04:27
  a Hamas would it would end up engaging in a violent act, and perhaps
• 1:04:32
  other groups in Palestine, I'm sure it will right in the future. But
• 1:04:38
  that's why I'm just I just don't see anything to celebrate here in terms of,
• 1:04:42
  oh, it's gonna maybe lead to something better, because the situation is
• 1:04:45
  different than a normal colonial situation. It's like you said, it's a thinking
• 1:04:50
  entity, there's a plan, there's an entrenchment. It's just gonna make things
• 1:04:56
  way worse. I'm not saying that they should be rational and think about that
• 1:05:00
  and be like, well, then I won't engage because it's gonna be worse.
• 1:05:01
  I'm not making a normative claim here about like what they should have done
• 1:05:04
  differently. I'm just making I just feel sad about it because it's just gonna
• 1:05:08
  make things way worse. More people are gonna die, more people are going
• 1:05:11
  to lose family members. It's just gonna be way worse. I don't I
• 1:05:15
  don't see any reason to be like, oh yeah, oh my god,
• 1:05:17
  they're going to realize and the Israelis are going to see them as like,
• 1:05:20
  you know, more real people, and they're gonna know it's the fucking the
• 1:05:25
  fucking war. Drums are are pounding hard and loud as fuck, and it's
• 1:05:30
  going to be horrible. I don't want to go so far as to say
• 1:05:33
  that, like so so as to forget that there are Israelis opposed to that
• 1:05:41
  genocide project. That's said, there's another thing that Fennan could not have foreseen
• 1:05:47
  because he's doing some phenomenal phenomenology of spirit shit. This interaction where people look
• 1:05:56
  each other in the face and you force yourself to be seen and recognized.
• 1:06:01
  But through the technological mediation, at least the surveillance is total. But technological
• 1:06:11
  Gozans don't interact with even police or soldiers. They interact with walls or speakers
• 1:06:19
  or a surveillance camera or drones. It's absolutely inhuman like. Even this is
• 1:06:27
  where I would think this is even more depressing than Fennen could have imagined.
• 1:06:31
  Is that there's no possibility to even be recognized. It's just indiscriminate, anonymous
• 1:06:40
  misery forever, without promise and without hope. So it's hard for me to
• 1:06:45
  see anything but a reaction of violence emerging from a situation like that, indiscriminate
• 1:06:54
  violence. Even Yeah, I don't disagree. I just don't think it's anything
• 1:06:57
  to be happy about or like hopeful of that. You keep saying that people
• 1:07:00
  are happy and hopeful. I've never I don't know who these people are unless
• 1:07:03
  you just what do you mean? What do you mean? The fucking statement?
• 1:07:05
  The literal statement was like that we were talking about at the beginning,
• 1:07:09
  was like, oh my god, they engaged in an act of like resistance,
• 1:07:12
  and like we fully support them. It's like, well, they did
• 1:07:14
  do that. No one should be happy about that. They did engage in
• 1:07:16
  an active resistance futile as it may be. Sure, Well, but okay,
• 1:07:21
  you were saying, like who's celebrating it? Like I thought I detected
• 1:07:25
  celebratory tone in that statement. If that's the case, I think, uh,
• 1:07:32
  I just think I always thought it was a kind of nineteen eighties ironic.
• 1:07:39
  I mean, it's not it's not a good look. I feel like
• 1:07:44
  you want to say something pells. I feel like you got you got a
• 1:07:45
  thought at the tip of your tongue where you're not sure. No, I'm
• 1:07:48
  just trying to look through my notes. Like if you're if you're saying that
• 1:07:54
  this is worse, then I don't know it was. It was already worse.
• 1:07:57
  This was faded to happen. Yeah, Like I'm not disagreeing with you
• 1:08:01
  about that, right, Like I'm saying, I'm not surprised. Like Finan's
• 1:08:05
  understanding of this is like when someone is absolutely pushed to the limit, he
• 1:08:11
  says, like he says, they're going to have stochastic violence, not from
• 1:08:16
  the integrated people, not not for the people that are involved in the political
• 1:08:24
  discussion. You could say that the Palestinian authority, for example, completely neutered.
• 1:08:29
  They're trying to engage in a political solution, and they're seen as basically
• 1:08:35
  traitors. And for Fhenonen, it's going to be stochastic violence that is indiscriminate,
• 1:08:42
  that emerges from outside the class system, entirely, from outside the bureaucracy,
• 1:08:46
  entirely because the bureaucracy is managed by the colonizer and that externality that other
• 1:08:56
  of the system is going to be the first to discover that only violence communicates
• 1:09:01
  or only violence has a cash value. It's the only thing with an exchange
• 1:09:09
  value. So I kind of am just wondering where you think this is either
• 1:09:15
  celebratory or whether you think where you think that violence is not the only answer,
• 1:09:21
  because what is the other one. I've already said that I have no
• 1:09:25
  idea how to solve this situation, like I literally and I would never presume
• 1:09:29
  to. So then how to say what's wrong? How do you know which
• 1:09:31
  is the right and wrong version of communication? Because Okay, in the same
• 1:09:35
  way that you know that it's inevitable that the Palestinians or whoever are going to
• 1:09:40
  react to that situation, I know that the Israel israelis the Israeli state,
• 1:09:44
  which is I don't know, maybe a thousand has a thousand times or a
• 1:09:48
  million times more resources and have no intention of leaving, like I, Like
• 1:09:55
  you should know that they're also going to react in a way disproportionate way like
• 1:09:59
  I. Just it's just I don't understand what's not clear about that You're ending
• 1:10:03
  the chain of causation with Israeli response because I think, oh, but of
• 1:10:08
  course it's going to respond there because we're old Ish, right. I remember
• 1:10:12
  the responses to two thousand and eight and twenty fourteen, and our politicians,
• 1:10:20
  including our quote unquote progressive politicians, are still towing the same line. But
• 1:10:27
  I don't think anyone's falling for it anymore. And even if that's the case,
• 1:10:30
  I mean, I do, I mean, I do think that,
• 1:10:32
  like real it's the case that it's even moving the needle, then you have
• 1:10:36
  to say that Almas was successful. But who says it's going to move the
• 1:10:41
  needle? Like that's that's a presumption. That's I mean, that's I don't
• 1:10:45
  have evidence. I mean with men yahoo in power and like more anger about
• 1:10:49
  this, like I just don't, I don't know, man like like I'm
• 1:10:54
  I I think my assumption about the causal chain here is just that it's going
• 1:10:59
  to lead to further escalation. That's like in the near and medium term,
• 1:11:03
  okay, like and then beyond that we are just being extremely speculative like okay,
• 1:11:10
  like maybe it'll maybe it'll like do something. I just I don't see
• 1:11:13
  it look like my I mean, hundreds of hundreds of American Jews, like
• 1:11:17
  holding a sit in and getting arrested in Congress. That seems like something that
• 1:11:24
  what do you mean, I don't, I don't know. I don't actually
• 1:11:26
  don't know what you're referring to. They held a sit in at Congress for
• 1:11:30
  what purpose? In protest of what? Of the Israeli occupations? Oh?
• 1:11:34
  Yeah, sure. Why are you all of the sudden so optimistic about that
• 1:11:39
  these things can make a difference because you're so adamant that it's not making any
• 1:11:43
  difference. And I'm saying there has been no difference made for I mean honestly,
• 1:11:48
  like like again, I feel uncomfortable like getting into the like the details,
• 1:11:54
  since I'm not that educated on the internal politics of Israel. But it
• 1:11:58
  seems to me that the most likely change probably has to happen within the Israeli
• 1:12:04
  government, Like there needs to be some like I think it's ultimately going to
• 1:12:09
  be up to the political will of like maybe left wing Israelis to fight for
• 1:12:15
  maybe a multi ethnic, one state democracy, uh like like South like a
• 1:12:21
  South Africa situation, except in this case it would be like a fifty to
• 1:12:25
  fifty because about the populations of Israelis versus Palestinians about fifty. I mean,
• 1:12:30
  I don't know, like that seems like maybe violence on the Palestinian side,
• 1:12:34
  continued violence could help further that, But my worry is just that it's also
• 1:12:40
  just as likely it's just as likely that that's just going to further entrench the
• 1:12:44
  right wing, fucking crazy net and Yahoo fascistic side within Israeli politics. To
• 1:12:49
  me that in the case, I think there's he's got like eighty five percent
• 1:12:54
  disapproval at this point. So oh yeah, okay, good, I mean
• 1:12:57
  good. So oh, I mean, I think I think we can say
• 1:13:00
  things are changing, things are happening. It's just we're just getting bogged down
• 1:13:04
  on one very specific event, right, Like, I mean again, I
• 1:13:10
  just have to differ and say, go listen to something Chompsky said recently about
• 1:13:15
  this, right, I mean, like the biggest thing he'll point out most
• 1:13:17
  recently is the way that you know, Israel has kind of been thumbing its
• 1:13:24
  snows at the States recently, right, Like you had kind of the Trump
• 1:13:30
  administration and they completely cowt out to they gave Israel anything they wanted, and
• 1:13:38
  up until not long ago, you know, Israel would kind of do what
• 1:13:44
  the Americans said, right, like, they wouldn't they're not beholden to them,
• 1:13:49
  but they would still listen. And we still think that might be the
• 1:13:53
  case, right, if the US would just stop giving them billions of dollars
• 1:13:57
  every year, if the US would just actually say something, then maybe something
• 1:14:01
  would change. But they're clearly intent on being completely permissive and abided by anything
• 1:14:08
  that and so that's that's a good point. That's what's different now is that
• 1:14:12
  there's a chance that Israel even is now going to cut ties with the US
• 1:14:17
  or at least now start openly defying them, which then means okay, less
• 1:14:21
  control. Like now we can't you know, even even if we do pressure
• 1:14:26
  our governments to you know, say stop it, which is in itself very
• 1:14:30
  unlikely that people can get together because of all of this fucking discussion that's really
• 1:14:34
  just demonstrated it even among us that we can't agree. So imagine now now
• 1:14:40
  scale that up to the whole population. So not probably not going to happen,
• 1:14:44
  but that's what's going to be different in the future. And that's I
• 1:14:48
  mean, that's what again, I'm just trying to keep on illustrating that,
• 1:14:51
  focusing on you know this like a chess match. Okay, their move,
• 1:14:56
  what are they going to do? Like, you're missing a huge, huge
• 1:15:00
  overview of the situation. That again, people like Jomski or if you watch
• 1:15:05
  Democracy Now you get a bit of it, although you know they're a bit
• 1:15:11
  moralizing sometimes for my taste with you, you get a big overview. And
• 1:15:17
  that's but that's not what the mainstream media conversation looks like. What the mainstream
• 1:15:24
  media conversation looks like right now is Israel is at war with Hummas and that's
• 1:15:29
  the end of the story. No mention of Palestine, no mention of history,
• 1:15:32
  no mention of anything else. That's the only thing that we're supposed to
• 1:15:36
  focus on, according to most of the mainstream outlets, and that seems to
• 1:15:43
  be it. I agree with you about the US. I think like,
• 1:15:45
  so if we're talking about what's likely to change things like US cutting funding,
• 1:15:51
  so like political will. In fact, every single country in the world,
• 1:15:55
  I think in the UN accept Israel and the United States endorse a too date
• 1:16:00
  solution like as official policy. So like, okay, the US withdraws its
• 1:16:05
  support, withdraws there are billions of dollars that could make a difference. Guess
• 1:16:09
  what happened. In response to this, Biden just had a speech yesterday committing
• 1:16:13
  to funding both the Ukraine War and the Israeli war. Yeah. Great,
• 1:16:16
  that violence really really worked well there to to further that. Yeah, I
• 1:16:21
  mean it didn't well, it didn't stop what was already happening, which is
• 1:16:26
  a constant. They admitted even more, they're they're doubling down. Yeah,
• 1:16:30
  well yeah, I mean yeah, and that's taxpayer money. So that's you
• 1:16:35
  know, telling people, you know, your tax dollars are going to fund
• 1:16:41
  this horrific thing. Right Honestly, now that I'm thinking about your better chance
• 1:16:45
  of making changes, like you need basically like like strong political coalitions within the
• 1:16:50
  United States and within Israeli politics to basically try to put a stop to the
• 1:16:55
  to the money and the funding. That's where you're going to see you're going
• 1:17:00
  to probably see like your best chance of getting some real meaningful change. And
• 1:17:04
  I think that's one problem with the problem with Yeah, that's like those are
• 1:17:08
  the that's the biggest levers in the US. Just they just vetoed a UN
• 1:17:13
  proposal that Brazil put on the table to call for a ceasefire, and they're
• 1:17:17
  voting on it, and the US vetoed the season exactly, so they are
• 1:17:23
  actively they are actively promoting this situation well exactly exactly because the violence authorizes it.
• 1:17:29
  Ceasefires are andti Semitic. Sure, yeah, I mean whatever the rhetoric
• 1:17:33
  you want to throw at it is like okay, but that's what happens.
• 1:17:36
  And so we can see a sort of permissiveness coming from you know, America
• 1:17:43
  and then any other countries aren't really going to go against what the US is
• 1:17:47
  doing. And if the UN mechanism fails, even I think I'm the I
• 1:17:51
  feel like I'm the only one who's like being a kind of like structural realist
• 1:17:56
  here about what's going to happen. Like I feel like there can be a
• 1:17:58
  slippage on to some sort of romanticism about like violence, like that it's gonna
• 1:18:02
  like like some radical LARPing about like what violence, the promise of violence.
• 1:18:06
  I understand from a realist, kind of structuralist perspective why people in in Gaza
• 1:18:13
  are gonna there's gonna be bursts of violence. But I think, like geopolitically,
• 1:18:17
  structurally, like I just don't see any reasonable argument for like how it's
• 1:18:23
  gonna lead to a shorter or medium term, like a better situation. Well,
• 1:18:27
  the cynical response is that we're going to see this on Twitter for a
• 1:18:30
  while, then something will calm down and then we'll just forget about it.
• 1:18:36
  But the non cynical response is that by provoking Israel by doing something that is
• 1:18:44
  terrifying, horrifying, that's idealism. By doing that, and by forcing them
• 1:18:48
  to just bomb churches, hospitals, apartment buildings, then people see those images
• 1:18:57
  that can maybe not now, maybe not in the near future, but when
• 1:19:01
  the geriatric ruling class of our of our countries is out of the way because
• 1:19:06
  they will die inevitably this is also that's possible, then it's idea on the
• 1:19:13
  table. So I think the most likely responses that we just forget about it
• 1:19:16
  and go back to Taylor Swift, dating that first precise football player. But
• 1:19:24
  also I don't think that I don't think that there's been such a swell in
• 1:19:33
  twenty fourteen or two thousand and was it eight or six anyway, every every
• 1:19:39
  cycle that this happens, I don't think there's been that swell of support.
• 1:19:43
  I mean, I will say, I will say I am genuinely like I
• 1:19:46
  am actually a little bit surprised by Like I knew that for geopolitical reasons,
• 1:19:54
  US Canada, like all these other places would kind of be like pro Israel.
• 1:20:00
  But I will say I was actually surprised by exactly how pro Israel they
• 1:20:04
  were. Like I was even a little bit like oh wow, like like
• 1:20:08
  yeah, this is fucking mask off of progressives. Yeah, I was.
• 1:20:12
  I was surprised. I thought I thought they would. I thought they would
• 1:20:14
  be a little bit more like measured, or they would be supportive, but
• 1:20:17
  kind of like Tempe, or in their support they would include some kind of
• 1:20:20
  statement about like they worry about, like you know, what's going to happen
• 1:20:24
  to Palestinian civilians and stuff like that or something like that, Right, But
• 1:20:27
  I was actually surprised that, which makes me actually just more scared for how
• 1:20:30
  much worse it's going to be. I Mean, what this kind of just
• 1:20:32
  tells me maybe is that they've been pro Israel like that all along, and
• 1:20:39
  they've just never had to make a decision that is an either or decision.
• 1:20:45
  Right, they could always kind of just pursue their policies and have that,
• 1:20:49
  but now it's very forced. Now the choice is being forced. It's like
• 1:20:55
  you know, the situation is very visible. We're asking politicians to make statements
• 1:21:00
  or do things about it, and they're revealing, they're showing their cards a
• 1:21:03
  little bit, right, Like they've been like this all along. Right,
• 1:21:08
  Like again, what Chomskiel say is has everything changed in what was it when
• 1:21:13
  when the occupation started, which is what like nineteen sixty seven or something like
• 1:21:17
  that, and and suddenly it was very a Republican pro Israel situation, you
• 1:21:27
  know, evangelical Christians and the American right, and especially within the last twenty
• 1:21:31
  years, right, like, Netanyahu's strategy has gone from you know, being
• 1:21:35
  moderate and making overtures to moderate America to now like openly appealing to very right
• 1:21:43
  wing America. He's a smart politician and he knows how to appeal to the
• 1:21:47
  States, right, that's and he's playing those cards now. And I mean,
• 1:21:54
  I'm not saying it was like that all along. There's a lot of
• 1:21:57
  opportunism involved as well, right, And we're not dealing with hive minds right
• 1:22:02
  here, right. You know, if you have a powder keg situation,
• 1:22:06
  all it takes is one person to light the match for the whole thing to
• 1:22:10
  fucking blow up, even no matter how many people didn't want it. No
• 1:22:14
  matter how many people did want it or didn't want it, it just takes
• 1:22:15
  one match, right, and then some horrific development, and then suddenly you
• 1:22:23
  know, you're all on the same side of a situation, maybe with people
• 1:22:27
  that you don't want to be on the same side with. But unfortunately,
• 1:22:30
  you don't really get a choice in how the media tends to represent you and
• 1:22:33
  how you're discussed, either in the UN or in any individual countries, in
• 1:22:41
  parliament or whatever. You don't get that choice, so you just have to
• 1:22:45
  kind of live with the consequences or die by the consequences. Very unfortunately,
• 1:22:51
  it does get split into sides that you never predicted, because, like I
• 1:22:57
  said, I would expect progress to understand, you know, the especially a
• 1:23:04
  differential of force in this case. But some of the people that are coming
• 1:23:10
  out pro Palestine, you know, Andrew Tate, newly newly converted Muslim,
• 1:23:17
  Glenn Greenwald, I didn't know what happened to him, but he's he's back
• 1:23:20
  on pro Alexander Dugan. Alexander Dugan is propial Stine. Oh I guess,
• 1:23:26
  oh yeah, big time. He's he's just anything the Jews do, right,
• 1:23:30
  And it was It was really funny to see Michael Millerman, who you
• 1:23:33
  know, if you remember who that is, was like the UFT student who
• 1:23:36
  wanted to study my h Dugan He's Jewish, and I saw him tweeting.
• 1:23:41
  He was like, you know, Dugan is like a great thinker, but
• 1:23:45
  I don't always agree with him on everything. And he was posting his thing
• 1:23:49
  about being like like pro Hamas and you know, contributing to like multipolarity by
• 1:23:56
  trying to overthrow Israel. Yeah, that budget was four billions to Israel and
• 1:24:00
  sixteen billion to the Ukraine or something like that. So of course you've put
• 1:24:05
  you know, that kind of in a way puts Russia and Palestine in the
• 1:24:09
  same basket, very strangely, So of course you know there's there's a natural
• 1:24:15
  that's that's less than that, that's that's less than what I heard. I
• 1:24:18
  heard that they're sending sixty one million to Ukraine and ten point six billion to
• 1:24:21
  Israel. Oh I heard it four billion and then sixteen billion. I think
• 1:24:27
  it's four billion a year already, but and then sixteen billions of the Ukraine
• 1:24:32
  war put you put Russia and Palestine in the same being not funded by the
• 1:24:38
  United States sent to it, So you're going to create a weird opportunity in
• 1:24:42
  that case, he sent he sent an emergency funding package to Congress. I
• 1:24:46
  think I just saw Glenn Greenwald tweeting about it. It's like sixty one is
• 1:24:51
  to Ukraine, ten point six to Israel, nine billion to humanitarian aid in
• 1:24:58
  all of those places, twelve billion for border agents, and then seven point
• 1:25:02
  four billion to Taiwan and other Pacific allies. Yeah, it creates a weird
• 1:25:12
  clearly, it draws a weird line through all these situations. Yeah. Well,
• 1:25:16
  the system is very point I guess is that it forces a decision and
• 1:25:21
  then those those decision makers that you would have figured would be on one side
• 1:25:28
  of this or on the other. I've I don't know what he said,
• 1:25:31
  but there's some some Twitter people very upset with Bernie Sanders, for example,
• 1:25:38
  on this. What did he say? I'm not sure the future is radically
• 1:25:43
  uncertain? No, I agree. I mean, I think the system's theory
• 1:25:45
  point is actually strong with these things, because I think it just clarifies why
• 1:25:49
  people and why agents are doing the things that they're doing. Right, It's
• 1:25:55
  just like and most of them are not doing anything. These are of speech
• 1:26:00
  acts they take place on the internet. I decry, I allow, I
• 1:26:04
  permit whether we say that or not, no one gives a fuck. It
• 1:26:10
  doesn't move the needle. But the question really is, though, like what
• 1:26:13
  you're saying is what moves the needle. You're saying this is this is worse
• 1:26:19
  or will be worse? I think I think it's gonna make things worse.
• 1:26:23
  I mean that's that's based on the power differential, based on the fact that
• 1:26:28
  Israel is not it's not a colonial situation, and the way the way that
• 1:26:30
  Phenon describes it's it's a it's more complicated, the more there's it's more entrenched.
• 1:26:35
  They've got nowhere to leave, right like they've got endless money. The
• 1:26:41
  horrifying anti humanist point is like, yeah, it takes. It takes lives
• 1:26:46
  to change these things in a situation of just total violence, Like Finan says,
• 1:26:53
  I don't. I see. That's the thing where it does take.
• 1:26:56
  It doesn't take. Words have not worked. They've tried words for a long
• 1:27:00
  time. It didn't work. So the last sort of communication is to give
• 1:27:04
  up your own life, even just to force people to wonder, why did
• 1:27:09
  you give your life for this? Yeah? That I mean that point.
• 1:27:13
  Sure, yeah, it's anti humanist. I understand why it would sound totally
• 1:27:16
  offensive, but it's it's the way that every revolution has ever happened, including
• 1:27:23
  the successful ones. Yeah, I mean, I think revolutions require like for
• 1:27:28
  them to be successful, require radically different conditions and also like buy in from
• 1:27:33
  that's the thing. Like, like I said, you know again, I'm
• 1:27:38
  not ascribing rational actor to anyone, Like I understand that these are just like
• 1:27:42
  reactions, but the attention should be like Israeli politics and American politics, like
• 1:27:46
  that's where you're most likely to move the needle. Speaking of needles, I'm
• 1:27:51
  always reminded of the funny needle when I read Chomsky of the what is it
• 1:27:56
  the doomsday clock, and he's very fond of referencing where that's at and with
• 1:28:02
  the with the war and the Ukraine. At the beginning of the year,
• 1:28:05
  they had already moved it to ninety seconds to midnight, and I imagine now
• 1:28:11
  it's even closer because yeah, well there's nuclear weapons unfortunately involved in Well it's
• 1:28:19
  yeah, it's the the you know, we should do an episode about it.
• 1:28:23
  I don't know, scientist, Well, they're warning, they set the
• 1:28:27
  winter, they set it to warn people about how close we are to nuclear
• 1:28:30
  annihilation, right, and so when there's wars going on, they tend to
• 1:28:33
  you know, So this is another war that started up since they've moved it
• 1:28:38
  to ninety seconds to midnight, which is quite close historically, and so it's
• 1:28:42
  probably even closer now. And yeah, nuclear weapons being involved in the situation
• 1:28:47
  also make things much more dangerous and complicated. I feel like, God,
• 1:28:53
  I feel like our Patreon is just going to hate me after this. And
• 1:28:58
  I don't know why, because like all, I'm I'm making any normative statements.
• 1:29:00
  I'm literally just saying like my own I think I'm being like the most
• 1:29:03
  cynical structuralist here about this, and I think that, uh, I actually
• 1:29:09
  think surprisingly Pills has been a little bit of an idealist. Well, I
• 1:29:14
  hope we've I hope we're I gave you the cynical I hope we're discussing.
• 1:29:17
  No, No, I agree, maybe maybe maybe you've moved over a little
• 1:29:20
  bit. I hope we I encourage disagreement. I'll end my point at least
• 1:29:27
  with one quotation. This Manicheanism reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonized subject
• 1:29:34
  in plain talk. He is reduced to the state of an animal, and
• 1:29:40
  we've heard that, haven't we. Consequently, when the colonist speaks of the
• 1:29:44
  colonized, he uses zoological terms. But the colonized, no, they are
• 1:29:48
  not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity they begin
• 1:29:54
  to sharpen their weapons. I mean, I did find some of the statements
• 1:29:57
  that Phenon made quite uh yeah, out of context. They do reflect the
• 1:30:03
  kind of rhetoric being thrown around. I mean, I think I think that
• 1:30:10
  maybe even the Lacanians will be better than us because they understand the power of
• 1:30:15
  retroactivity and how you know this, this event is going to appear in a
• 1:30:20
  completely different light in the future. Who knows. Depending whatever whatever the future
• 1:30:27
  brings, that's going to bring with it a different past as well, and
• 1:30:30
  we have to keep aware of that. Right alongside our pathetic ability to predict
• 1:30:36
  anything, is that the fact that the future tends to also alter the past
• 1:30:43
  retroactively, and that just adds another layer to it. Yeah. So here's
• 1:30:48
  a quote that I found that I think is maybe uh it was from like
• 1:30:53
  another article that I was reading about this. The militant who faces the colonialist
• 1:30:57
  war machine with bare minimum of arms, realizes that while he's breaking down colonial
• 1:31:00
  oppression, he's building up yet another system of exploitation. This discovery is unpleasant,
• 1:31:05
  bitter, and sickening. And yet everything seemed so simple before. I
• 1:31:10
  remember that. Yeah, there's some lines like that in there that complicate the
• 1:31:15
  very simplistic. You know, Penn was pro violence kind of view, and
• 1:31:18
  I think that is a mistake in view. He's very much a dialectical thinker
• 1:31:24
  about this. That's like, uh, yeah, when you succeed, I
• 1:31:29
  mean, this is kind of your your concern and your main concern is if
• 1:31:32
  you succeed with overthrowing the oppressor, then what are you left with that too?
• 1:31:41
  And if you've done it, if you've done it in the name of
• 1:31:43
  like a radical jahad, then you know the situation following that is not going
• 1:31:49
  to be necessarily better. But again, I say, we're still on We're
• 1:31:54
  still on the first turn of the dialectic. We're not on the second term.
• 1:31:57
  Sure dialectic. Think of Machiavelli's advice to the Prince even right like,
• 1:32:00
  once all the violence is done, you know, he advises the Prince,
• 1:32:04
  you know, whoever you commit violence against you better get them all because if
• 1:32:10
  you don't, they're gonna come for you. They're gonna go into hiding,
• 1:32:13
  they're gonna build up a following, and they're gonna come back and kill you,
• 1:32:16
  right Like, I mean, of course, Machiavelli is in exile and
• 1:32:20
  trying to appeal to the Medici's with this book to try and get let back
• 1:32:25
  into Florence. And so he's Jerry's out whether Mackievelli believed what he wrote,
• 1:32:30
  but that's his advice as a as a skilled states person, he probably knows
• 1:32:36
  what he's talking about. And yeah, I mean, does violence begets violence
• 1:32:42
  right again? You know, it can suddenly turn you think you're on the
• 1:32:45
  side of justice and then you're faced with a new horrific situation that you've now
• 1:32:51
  created. That's dialectics baby unsatisfying, But yeah, but maybe maybe a a
• 1:33:00
  little closer to real exactly. It's pretty uncensored. So well, see,
• 1:33:03
  I wonder what kind of reaction we're gonna get for this one. It's not
• 1:33:06
  gonna make a huge it's not gonna make any difference either way. Oh God,
• 1:33:10
  I'm never gonna I'm never gonna work again. I mean, I don't
• 1:33:15
  know. I feel like I feel like my only point should be so is
• 1:33:16
  so uncontroversial. I'm just like, yeah, things are probably gonna get worse.
• 1:33:19
  Like that's literally like the simple my point. I know. I'm just
• 1:33:24
  waiting for the before they get better part that never seems to come. I
• 1:33:29
  just don't even see a path for that. But yeah, and there's always
• 1:33:31
  the chance of retrograde motion. The inertia is all going in one direction,
• 1:33:36
  So I don't know, like anything to slow the inertia. I don't know
• 1:33:41
  what that is because our representatives don't represent us. But when yeah, this
• 1:33:49
  is this is like the system's theory. Most accurate and also most depressing point
• 1:33:56
  is that you can't do anything as an individual to change that inertia. The
• 1:34:01
  only thing that could change, and this is even idealistic to say this public
• 1:34:06
  opinion changing. If it were to, you might eventually see results in a
• 1:34:14
  political system down the line, But we already know that our political system to
• 1:34:19
  beholden to special interests in our country in America. And even if public opinion
• 1:34:27
  did shift, which would be a needle move, I will say it'll be
• 1:34:30
  it would be a needle move. But even if it happened. That doesn't
• 1:34:33
  mean that anything else will happen. You saying it's going to get worse.
• 1:34:36
  I think the inertia is going in one direction anyway, which is genocide and
• 1:34:42
  eradication. And if that's the end, and as long as that is the
• 1:34:45
  faded end of the current course and all the decisions that led up to this
• 1:34:49
  point, I don't know what you mean by worse, that more will die
• 1:34:53
  from missiles instead of toxic drinking water. I don't I don't know, but
• 1:34:57
  I don't think it can be worse. I mean, I think maybe I
• 1:34:59
  have uh, I agree with that. I also think that, you know,
• 1:35:03
  maybe it's worth paying more attention to the Israeli left, though I've been
• 1:35:09
  told that by some people, like you should just pay attention to what they're
• 1:35:12
  doing, because, like I said, if like, the best places to
• 1:35:15
  move the needle are probably within Israel and within the United States in terms of
• 1:35:18
  funding. Yeah, I'm not dealing with hive minds exactly. No, that's
• 1:35:24
  an important point Eric to keep emphasizing, just to exemplify just how shit this
• 1:35:29
  world is. Like I'm just noticing Tucker Carlson's show on Twitter, Like right
• 1:35:32
  now, it's like, well, you'll be shocked to learn this, but
• 1:35:36
  it turns out the whole George Floyd's story was a lie. And it's like,
• 1:35:41
  it's like, what the fuck is this world coming to? Yeah,
• 1:35:44
  what is he gonna say? He's saying that like he wasn't. He's like,
• 1:35:45
  and I'm seeing it because it's coming up in subtitles, and it's like,
• 1:35:48
  he wasn't murdered at all. We all think that that guy in prison
• 1:35:51
  murdered him, but he wasn't. And it's like, I have no idea
• 1:35:54
  what evidence he's offering or anything, but yeah, I assume it's gonna be
• 1:35:57
  pussing. I'm shocked that someone would say that. Pictures every surfaced of George
• 1:36:02
  Floyd hanging out in the Bahamas. Oh my god, is that he's hanging
• 1:36:08
  out with Tupac? Yeah, two and all of them? All Right,
• 1:36:13
  Well, this has been just a barrel of laughs, boys. Any final
• 1:36:19
  thoughts from you guys? God, I feel like, well, I just
• 1:36:26
  saw a poll come up on Twitter. I don't know if this is like
• 1:36:29
  change, but apparently, like on the question of should US send weapons and
• 1:36:32
  supplies to Israel, it's like pretty bipartisan that it's like fifty to fifty,
• 1:36:36
  Like about about fifty percent of Republicans think that they should and fifty percent of
• 1:36:41
  Democrats think that they should. Oh, only fifty on the Republican fifty seven
• 1:36:46
  percent Republican forty seven percent Democrats. So it's a ten percent difference, but
• 1:36:50
  still closer than I would have thought. Yes, I mean, i'd call
• 1:36:55
  that manufactured consent. I don't know. Eric keeps bringing up Chomsky on this
• 1:37:00
  point. Yeah, I know for sure. I mean I'm not I'm not
• 1:37:02
  saying I disagree with that. Well, if Anon said they would sort of
• 1:37:08
  you have there the more progressive people in the colonial government once you know,
• 1:37:14
  the the native intellectuals and and and people start joining in in into the government,
• 1:37:20
  and then you have the more radical people, and they tend to get
• 1:37:24
  isolated and then kicked out, and so there's almost like a progress you know,
• 1:37:30
  it's like the leftist camp and the democratic government in the US right now,
• 1:37:36
  right we're all very aware of who they are. They've been very much
• 1:37:40
  isolated, at least singled out, and that's a danger, right, But
• 1:37:45
  they might also you know, create a movement within the party and bring it
• 1:37:49
  in a more progressive direction. Again, We never know these things, but
• 1:37:55
  there's a big likelihood that they'll just be shut out. The progressive voices will
• 1:37:59
  get shut out, and the uh more right leaning Democrats will win over who
• 1:38:04
  knows. That is our unsolicited, our unsolicited submission to the void, and
• 1:38:12
  we went along. Nothing will come of it, so it's not really consequential
• 1:38:15
  either way. I'm just gonna dox myself after this just to get ahead of
• 1:38:18
  it. All right, Well, guys, uh, no place to end
• 1:38:25
  it, but that's where we're gonna end it. Yep, thanks for listening,
• 1:38:31
  despondency. Good note to end on Shit's grim Man sits grim