Unpacking Alternative Media, Middle Eastern Politics, and the Complexities of Anti-Imperial Discourse with Djene Bajalan

Dr. Djene Bajalan joins us to unpack the intricate dynamics of alternative media and its influence on Middle Eastern politics. Ever wondered how alternative media might mirror the biases of its mainstream counterpart? Our conversation explores this fascinating intersection, focusing on the challenges pundits face in providing evidence-based analysis, particularly in the context of the Syrian conflict. We delve into the nuances of parasocial relationships within alternative media, contrasting it with the often insulated world of legacy media.

Our discussion takes a critical lens to imperialism, anti-intervention discourse, and the misconceptions that often accompany Middle Eastern regimes. We shed light on how neoliberal policies have shaped the region's political landscape, challenging oversimplified narratives about countries like Syria and Iran. Dr. Bajelon and I critically assess the tendency to conflate anti-imperialism with regime defense, emphasizing the importance of nuanced analysis over black-and-white portrayals. From Iran's strategic foreign policy moves to the complexities of leftist journalism, we tackle the multifaceted issues that shape regional and global politics today.

Finally, we explore the disconnect between Western public opinion and state actions, especially regarding Israel and Palestine. We critique the optimistic narratives surrounding Palestinian victories and reflect on the historical complexities that have shaped the region. The conversation broadens to address the frustrations surrounding the idea of a multipolar world and the challenges of achieving a stable global political order. By dissecting the pitfalls of radical discourse among American social democrats, we emphasize the need for realistic analysis and accountability in foreign policy discussions. Join us for an insightful journey through the complexities of Middle Eastern politics and media in an ever-evolving global landscape.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:47

Hello and welcome to Varnblog, and today I'm with Dr Gene Bajelon. Historian of the Middle East, specializing in nationalism and the evolution of Kurdish politics. Professor at Missouri State University. Brit guy who visits podcasts and has kids on air.

Djene Bajalan : 1:13

And.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18

And.

Djene Bajalan : 1:19

All-around great guy.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21

Yeah, all-around great guy Used to host a show with me that we may bring back one in the future. I don't know about role-playing games, although I have become disillusioned with the role-playing game industry, so I haven't wanted to talk about it.

Djene Bajalan : 1:38

We can talk about the beauty of Warhammer, the Old World. Are we live? We're not live, are we?

C. Derick Varn: 1:44

We're not live, no.

Djene Bajalan : 1:47

So I may bring my minis out for your clientele, as it were, because behind me I have my new Warhammer, the Old World Empire Army, which is not so new. It's basically miniatures I bought as a kid in the 90s and I'm doing them up again Sweet. And Sarah has my old 1995 Bretonians which she's repainting. She's doing a much better job. But yeah, and maybe in the new year, vaughn, we can do all kinds of new exciting projects together. Who even knows?

C. Derick Varn: 2:20

There was some call for us to finish our discussion on the history of theories of nationalism, but I'm game. Yeah, I might be down for that, because I think it's increasingly relevant and people are increasingly daft about nationalism, so like it's one of those things.

Djene Bajalan : 2:42

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44

So, gene, you and I started talking, I got tagged in a bunch of things and this is going to come out two months after we're recording it. So for those of you who are expecting punditry, we don't do that here and in fact, we're complaining about it because there has been, I think, a sharp rise in people being unwilling to admit A that the incentives of alternative media, especially on foreign politics, are just as bad as mainstream media. They're just slightly different. Part of that has to do with getting access, which is even harder to do in alternative media. Part of it has to do that a lot of alternative media is actually state-sponsored media from other countries. I don't even mean backdoor. They're literally just state-sponsored media for other countries.

C. Derick Varn: 3:46

I just found that people get mad when you try to hold some of these pundits accountable for being completely wrong on foreign politics.

C. Derick Varn: 4:02

I'll give you the example that we were talking about off air, and I don't want to get into his character or whatnot. Into his character or whatnot but is the popularity of Scott Ritter saying that there's no way Assad's going to fall before he falls in three days, you know and people pretending like Syria's going to become a bloodbath, when it's literally been a pincushion for the bombs of various regimes for the last decade and if you look at the numbers of people who've died between, say, 2012 and today, it's not insubstantial. It's just left us forget about it every now and then. And the other thing is and I don't want to just sound like I'm coming down on the pro-Assad side I think a lot of the people who were anti-Assad have been just as naive and I've said that now for literally a decade or Iran, if let me pronounce it correctly. We can get to some of the problems with this use of foreign policy by pundits as kind of a means of projection of a politics they hope exists, but they don't have a lot of evidence for.

Djene Bajalan : 5:25

I mean, I completely agree with you, I think, a lot of punditry in well. First of all, let's talk about the incentives. Right, there is always a dialectic, especially with alternative media, the extreme importance of parasocial relations in alternative media. And you know, as an aside, I'm sure, these parasocial relations exist with legacy media, whether you're like a big fan of Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity or whatever. But you know, those news actors, as I like to call them, are insulated from their fan base, as it were, because they work within this corporate setting and they have all these kind of like incentives to do what they do in the corporate setting. But I think, if anything, alternative media has to be more vigorously capitalistic in serving the needs of their clientele than corporate media, which in many ways is kind of subsidized propaganda for the main political parties or elements of the political elite in the United States, so they might say things that are uncomfortable to their clientele.

Djene Bajalan : 6:35

I mean, I'm sure Morning Joe didn't make his regular watchers very happy by going down and kissing the ring of Donald Trump the other day, et cetera, et cetera. However, of course, if you're in the alternative media sphere, if you annoy your audience, you're done right, you're out of it. You're finished, right? You're not going to get your likes and subscribes. You're not going to get your YouTube money, your Patreon money et cetera, et cetera.

Djene Bajalan : 7:01

So I do think that you know, I do think you know this notion that alternative media is somehow free from the exigencies impressed upon it by capitalism is nonsense. And the way that the algorithms work obviously, I think, makes this even more significant. Because, of course, if you do one bad video and I know this from listening to kind of hobby channel people who are like, yeah, I do games, workshop videos all the time, because every time I do a video about another game system I get low numbers and that will workshop videos all the time, because every time I do a video about another game system I get low numbers and that will hit me in the algorithm down the road and my other videos won't get forwarded and it's a kind of death spiral. So I think there is a kind of drive that forces people to cover particular stories, because they get the clicks and B to provide a particular type of coverage which will satisfy and make happy the audience who watches, who pays likes and subscribes, etc. Etc. So I think that is an important baseline.

Djene Bajalan : 8:05

Am I saying that everybody is being dishonest? No, am I saying that people believe the things that they're saying? No, but I am saying that there is this kind of engine underneath everything that we need to take into account, projecting onto Middle Eastern politics their hopes and dreams. You know it's easy. Yeah, and I do do this a lot. I go after the quote unquote tankies for their like wishful thinking about. You know what the Assad regime represents, what the Islamic Republic represents, etc. Etc.

Djene Bajalan : 8:48

But of course, the same critiques can be leveled at liberals. You can put it the other way. You have a whole bunch of people who are clutching pearls over HDS being the militant group basically rebranded Al-Qaeda, clutching at pearls that, oh my God, these guys are Islamists, blah, blah, blah. And these are the same people who have attacked anyone who has even raised the fact that perhaps you know Hamas' Islamist politics is also retrograde in a certain way, not to make any sort of claims about the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think we've discussed this before.

Djene Bajalan : 9:39

I think my opinions are pretty clear on this. But it's very strange that someone is going like HDS is this unquantifiable evil, whereas Hamas is like they're just a national liberation movement, even though they they're not ideologically the same, but they are rooted in the same kind of, in a kind of Islamic politics, a conservative national policy. And then the flip side of this is the liberals, who or even like the pro, you know, the anti-Assad people out there who are whitewashing what HTS is and acting like, oh you know, these guys are all, and while at the same time acting as if it's completely inconceivable that you could negotiate with Hamas because they're evil Islamists. So there is an utter cynicism and total lack of any kind of principle in how people assess these political organizations, the way that they are assessed is, in my opinion, people have a priori worldview that they want to jam everything into. So you know.

Djene Bajalan : 10:48

So people are mad that, well, hds is going to collaborate with Israel. It's like, well, hds is going to collaborate with Israel. It's like, well, you know, you could say the same thing about the Assad regime collaborated softly with Israel. So I think you know, I think you have a lot of people ironically. Ironically, the people who complain about Western leftists all the time adopt this utterly kind of bizarre Eurocentric inverted picture of Middle Eastern politics, where everybody that the mainstream media is bigging up is the bad guy and everybody that the mainstream media condemns are the good guys. But the irony is they're still, like, following the ideological agenda that is being set by Western imperialist propaganda. So you know, I think there is a lot of deranged people out there and you have, like you have kind of more highbrow versions of this in some ways, and you have lower, lower versions of this. But people want to hear. You know, people in left media want to hear things that make them happy and they want to hear things that they want to believe.

C. Derick Varn: 12:09

I think one of the things that I have been just hitting the wall on is okay, I am one of those people who balks when people say China's communist, because China doesn't claim to be communist yet, like they claim to be transitioning to it over a very long period of time, blah, blah, blah. Fine, and you know I'm not here to adjudicate the sincerity of that. I'm actually taking on face value for the most part, but then I hear people argue that, oh, china's already achieved all this, and I'm like they don't even claim that. Conversely, I've seen some wild claims about Middle Eastern states, and I saw this in the aughts too, but it's gotten more pronounced and more ridiculous. I mean, like, when you think about it, we used to make fun of the Spartacus League, the group of trots, for saying critical support for Al-Qaeda and critical support for ISIS because they stand up to American imperialism back in the day, to people trying to convince me that some Islamist groups are really somehow secretly principled communists and that stuff like the Iranian state is already socialist in a meaningful sense.

C. Derick Varn: 13:36

You know, we I've seen this argument made actually more and more. Yeah, um, which is a weird claim for to be making for me, because, again, the islam Islamic State doesn't claim that, like they definitely operate on markets, they definitely are hurt by market isolation. What do you think is going on there? And I don't know where people are getting this from, except that it's not enough to say, even if the regime isn't good, we should not encourage Western intervention which has been my stance forever Like we should oppose it, it strikes me.

Djene Bajalan : 14:25

It strikes me those things, not only should they not be connected, not only you know, should you know. I think what you're saying is that we don't need to defend or, you know, criticize a regime to make the case that American military intervention or political intervention in a country is generally going to be a disaster for everybody involved, including Americans who get robbed, who are having the treasure of the American state siphoned off to all these military contractors, et cetera, et cetera, to do these operations. Exactly, you don't need to make the case that the regime X, which the United States is intervening against, is a good guy, right to be against that intervention. In fact, and I've made this case before, ron, I think again, if you do try to defend the record of a state that the United States is intervening in is, in a way, you're fighting again the ideological battle on the same territory as liberal interventionists, because you're saying, oh, the case for US intervention into this country is a lie, therefore we shouldn't intervene, whereas the argument should be American intervention is bad on principle and whatever the case of the regime is, whether it's good or bad is irrelevant to one's opposition to that military intervention.

Djene Bajalan : 16:03

I think, if you leave open if you try and debate the I mean, I think that there's use to kind of debate the records of particular regimes. You know what is Western propaganda, what's an exaggeration, what's a fabrication? That question is a separate question. But I think that should not be linked to the question of whether or not someone should support particular military interventions. What if it turns out that the majority of that propaganda that the West is putting towards against this regime turns out to be true? Then are you going to change your position and say, actually, because this all turns out to be true, america should intervene? It's completely missing why one should object to American imperial interventions, object to American imperial interventions. The opposition should be rooted in opposing imperialism at home. Right that imperialism, you know? I mean even the case that people make that America shouldn't intervene because America makes things worse. Even that, I would argue, misses the point slightly, because then you can open the door to say, well, why don't we just get better imperialists who can do this better, right, right.

C. Derick Varn: 17:23

And I think of. Neil Ferguson making that argument at the end of the war.

Djene Bajalan : 17:27

This was his book Colossus was all about. I read Colossus and Colossus begins saying, like America needs a colonial affairs ministry, right, because they're not doing imperialism right. So I think the problem is a lot of anti-imperialism is just kind of misses what the main objection should be to US imperialism imperialism which is that it is part of this brutal global system. And even if you can cite cases where perhaps the intervention saved lives and did things, even you know I don't know what case you might want maybe you could say, like in Bosnia, you know they stopped the Serbs doing this, that and the other but the point comes that every exercise of American military power further deepens the penetration of the military-industrial complex into the American body politique, and that should be our main objection. Yes, the human cost of imperialism is important, but we shouldn't be wasting our time defending whether this or that regime is a particularly good regime, like you know.

C. Derick Varn: 18:42

So they're arguing that these regimes are good Gene. They're also arguing that these regimes are things that they don't even claim to be. Go ahead.

Djene Bajalan : 18:51

I mean yeah, I agree. I mean like, I think there are various levels of delusion in this sense. I think there are people who I think there are people who are like you know, yeah, these regimes might not be socialist, but they're not as bad as everybody says and actually they're defending their countries against something that could be worse, which in, for example, in the case of Syria, I think misses the point that it is the degeneration of that failed Baathist regime which opened the way for civil war and imperial intervention. The same case can be made about Iraq. Right, iraq got into all these foreign wars the Iran-Iraq war and then the Kuwait war. That sort of military adventurism of Iraq cannot be disentangled from the degeneration of the regime at home. Right, like the Iranian revolution was a threat as a shia majority country, the iranian revolution was a threat to the stability of the bathurst political order, which rested on uh de facto sunni domination of the iraqi body party.

Djene Bajalan : 20:07

To use an analogy that people might use is one of the problems one of my good friends and colleagues Sarah Pans always makes is that you'll get these people who will say like if Hitler had only supported Ukrainian nationalists and adopted the First World Wars, you know Germany's First World War. Plans for the East to create these puppet regimes Nazi Germany would have defeated the Soviets. Plans for the east to create these puppet regimes nazi germany would have defeated the soviets. But that misses the point that the entire point of the hitler hitlerite invasion was predicated on this kind of race war. Right, if the, if the germans had like nazi.

Djene Bajalan : 20:46

You can't detach the race war element of nazi germany from their invasion of the Soviet Union, just as you can't disentangle, you know, iraq or Iraq's foreign policy misadventures in Iran and Kuwait from the internal degeneration of Ba'athism as a kind of political regime in the country. You know imperialism and this is a point that Spencer Leonard has emphasized in his works is like imperialism is as much about kind of internal bonapartism as it is about like this kind of exploitation of foreign countries. I mean, I don't know what you think of that, but I think people are kind of trying to hive off certain elements of the Ba'athist regimes or these Iranian regimes without looking at these kind of regimes, their domestic and their foreign policies, in a kind of holistic sense, as in a sense that these things are linked. Do you get what I mean?

C. Derick Varn: 21:47

Yeah, I get what you mean. I mean me complaining about the reading of, say, iran as somehow a socialist state, and he kind of marks a sense.

Djene Bajalan : 21:59

I want to be clear that like.

C. Derick Varn: 22:03

What bothers me about that is it does damage to two things simultaneously simultaneously does damage to any idea about what we have historically meant by socialism and it does damage to understanding what is actually going on in Iran and the factions and this, that and the other, like I'm generally sincerely on. You know, I was one of the people who said one of the only good things I liked about the Obama regime was an attempt to begin to normalize the rations with the Iranian Republic. So I want to be very clear on that defensible and B thinking that the US imperial overstructure was defensible either. The normalization there is about creating opportunities for politics to go back to something like independence, where these groups could more hash out what they wanted in their own internal terrain.

C. Derick Varn: 23:16

And when I hear people talk about this, you know people say, well, this is part of this global revolution, and I'm like a revolution. For what, though? Like what is that? Oh, multipolarity, Multipolarity. And I will say this this is finally getting through to a lot of people's heads that multipolarity does not mean no imperialism. It's taken a long time, and I know people well, that's not what we mean by multipolarity. Then I'm like, use a different word, like you know, because it implies that Now that's an old rant on this channel. Like you know, because it implies that Now that's an old rant on this channel. The new rant is just, I'm watching people talk about the Assad regime. The war in Syria is not a war that I want to claim to speak to with intimate knowledge, but it is something I've actually seen the firsthand results of by dealing with Syrian refugees in Egypt and Turkey, and massive amounts of them at that, and hearing all kinds of stories from all different kinds of people, including Alawites, about what was going on.

Djene Bajalan : 24:34

It's a horrific regime. You know, the Baathist regimes across the Middle East were horrific, brutal regimes that you know, in a way, you know were a kind of parody of universalist pan-Arab nationalism, in that the kind of expansive pan-Arab nationalism served as a cover for a minority sectarian domination of the state structure. And these regimes were extremely violent, extremely brutal. I mean, I forget the name of the author, but you know there's this distinction people make between the strong state and the fierce state. These states were not strong, but they were fierce, they were violent. They had to engage in internal repression, violence, foreign policy adventurism to maintain their political order. And you know, when I hear people going, oh you know, like this new government in Syria, they're going to just sell the country out to neoliberalism, it's like what do you think was happening? You know, from the 80s onwards, you had this whole. From the 70s onwards, you had this whole infitar movement of neoliberalization across the Middle East, including in places like Syria. That was one of the things that Assad's were doing before the civil war broke out. In fact, that's one of the causes of the civil war, I'd argue. Is that the kind of status social contract that had been based that you shut up but we'll provide some kind of basic social services for you was being undermined by the drive towards neoliberalism and attempts to attack foreign investment. It destabilized the political order. Same in Iran.

Djene Bajalan : 26:19

People forget that Amin Jatwan plaudits from the IMF for his reforms, which involved ending subsidies and moving towards a kind of neoliberal economy. In fact I think it was. I may forget, I forget it may have been one of the I forget which Iranian leader it was actually has a book that advocates for kind of public-private partnerships and kind of engaging the private sector. Islamism is not kind of at odds with neoliberal economics, as one of my acquaintances put it. You know, even ISIS, if they stabilized, had stabilized, the regime, would be turning to the brothers with MBAs to do their economic policies, to do their economic policies. So there's a lot of kind of delusion about what these regimes mean, what they represent, and utterly arbitrary. It's like Hamas good, hts, bad. Well, why? Why?

C. Derick Varn: 27:33

Or maybe let's go in a little deeper. Some of these people will defend the other, the the Erdogan regime in Turkey, and then attack Erdogan's proxies in Syria.

Djene Bajalan : 27:47

Yeah well, I don't understand that you have people yelling about Israeli intervention and not saying a word about Turkish intervention, and then you have people yelling about Turkish intervention and not yelling about Israeli intervention.

Djene Bajalan : 28:01

It's utter cynicism, because all of people you know I increasingly get the feeling and maybe I'm wrong about this, maybe this is cynicism feeling and maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe this is cynicism is that so much of what people are doing when they're engaging with quote-unquote content about the Middle East is just trying to confirm their priors of goodies and baddies, right, and actually aren't interested in understanding those societies on their own terms. They aren't interested in trying to understand the dynamics that are driving. They're more interested in trying to ascertain who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, which leads to kind of ridiculous statements. I mean, like this is a very common statement on the left is that ISIS was created by the CIA and American intelligence and is this American proxy? I mean, in a kind of very general sense, I guess you could say that's true. You know the CIA, the United States created conditions for ISIS to come about. They funded groups that defected to ISIS, and that's what I used to think people meant, right.

Djene Bajalan : 29:16

Yeah me too. These guys are being run out of the CIA offices in Langley, virginia, which is like are you joking? Which, on one hand, gives way too much credit to the competency of American foreign policy makers and gives not enough credit to Middle Easterners who do, quote-unquote, have agency. Now, I know that agency gets used by liberals to contend anyone who is critical of imperialism. This term is like oh, why don't you? You know, like the Ukrainians want to fight, why should we have to support them? Et cetera, et cetera.

Djene Bajalan : 29:51

That's not what I'm saying. What I'm trying to say is that people have like adopting this bizarre, um and conspiratorial worldview which refuses to try and understand the world on its own terms. I mean, that refuses to. You know that that, that the Middle East is merely fodder to support a preexisting worldview, whether it's some kind of delusion about multipolarity or some kind of notion that Islam is a revolutionary ideology. You know, like people going like calling the. You have people calling the Syrian revolution a revolution. You have some people calling it a counter-revolution. I mean, is it a counter-revolution if Baathism was a counter-revolution in the first place? You know, is it a revolution? I don't even know what these terms mean anymore, vaughn, because you know we're recording this in December and people are making all kinds of wild predictions about Syria. I don't know what's going to happen in Syria.

Djene Bajalan : 30:59

There are certain things we might say, you know, to watch out for. How is the issues with the United States, turkey and the Kurds going to work out? How is this new regime going to? You know? How far are they going to go in terms of implementing Islamic law? What is their posture going to be towards Russia? You know. What is their economic policy going to be? How far are they going to try and push Israel back? What is their relationship going to be with, you know, with Palestinian groups? These are all important questions. We all might have some opinions about where things might go, but you have so many people speaking with like absolute confidence about, you know, a situation which is very unpredictable and very unsure about how things are going. I mean, political movements are hard to predict.

C. Derick Varn: 31:52

People who've been wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 31:54

Over and over and over again People who, we have to be honest, have been wrong. Right, I'm going to say something that's going to get me in trouble. But leftists on foreign policy, the only time they're ever fucking right is when they're parodying conservative realists. And even then then, for example, meersheimer's claim on russia that people forgot in 2022, where and I agreed with meersheimer, by the way I also thought that's what they were going to do. I don't want to come down on him too hard, but like, that's what they's what. That's the best you're getting when you, when you have people, try to do analysis and this broader politics. And then I asked them basic questions like okay, um, we know that China is hosting talks between different factions of Palestinians and try to get Israel to the table, but we also know that, while China is not, you know, one of the major weapons providers that's mostly the US and Germany and France to Israel, maybe Turkey through the back door there's been no attempt to truly blockade.

Djene Bajalan : 33:21

or stop trade with Israel at all. Even Turkey didn't do it, for all the Erdogan jibber-jabbering. For months they were trading steel. When they got caught red-handed, there was public pressure that forced them to kind of shut it down. But then they just started shipping it all to the Palestinian Authority and then they've clamped down on it again, but again, always due to public pressure and journalists finding out that oh look, this AKP MP is making money off shipping things to Israel. That seems pretty hypocritical. And then they put the journalist in jail or send him to think, and then they have to act like China's not going to go to bat for Palestine. I'm sorry. Israel is a major, is a major kind of conduit for technology transfer to China, right? Why the hell are the Chinese going to? Like? You know, they might do some stuff to get some cheap propaganda wins over the Americans in the Middle East, but why the heck would they want to put that toe into that mess? It seems doesn't seem plausible to me.

C. Derick Varn: 34:26

No, I mean, and to be fair, like my point, isn't that China's particularly irresponsible on this or bad? My point is that people are projecting things and when you confront them with facts on the ground, they do not have a response. And then they will claim and this is where claims get really good these are about like the mass movements of working people or whatever, and there's like some giant worldwide revolution against imperialism. Because they read some Italian one time who told them that's what communism was, after he lost his debate in his own party and became just a professor. I mean, you know, and I'm not here to like say that none of these people are our value. That's where I differ from a lot of our colleagues. Like friends, artists say that they have everything right or wrong, but I am sort of like you guys are using these things to create like stories and, frankly, myths, to project your hopes about politics onto when you are also doing nothing about politics in your home country in any meaningful sense.

Djene Bajalan : 35:37

It's very narcissistic. In certain ways. It's like externalizing the problem. You know your failures at home and because you failed at home, you're pinning your I'm sorry.

Djene Bajalan : 35:56

Like Hamas is not going to bring about socialism in the United States. The best case, let's say Hamas wins and they get a Palestinian state. Whatever is going to just turn into like a conservative neighborhood of Istanbul, which is an improvement on things, but there's just going to be a conservative capitalist regime. What do people think that is going to? I mean, like the Palestinians should be supported, but let's not be delusional about what the end product is. I think having a situation where you have neoliberal economic development and relative, you know, like people aren't getting bombed every day would probably be improvement on what we have at the moment, which is the you know, genocide. I think that's the first thing off against the Palestinian people. That needs to obviously stop and we should support that stopping. But like let's not delude ourselves about what a solution is going to look like. You know, I would be happy if just people can live peacefully and we're not having bloodbaths every day, right, um, and people can make some money maybe yeah, I mean, you know, people don't starve like this is.

C. Derick Varn: 37:07

this is my stance too. I One as a side note while we're talking about this, but we're talking about this from a leftist perspective. I guess I don't have to believe that everything that I advocate for is going to lead to communism, because, frankly, most of what people advocate for has not a goddamn thing to do with communism. That is gloss they put over it to justify why they feel like they need to do that, like the idea that mere anti-imperialism would automatically be left wing because something, something core of capital, something, something totally misses the fact that, well, in the last round of national liberation movements in the 60s and 70s, most of them, even the ones that started off professing socialism, ended up totally integrating with the capitalist world market. And, and most of the alternative world markets, such as bricks, are also still not claiming not to be capitalist. They're not even claiming to be leftist Look at the governments involved outside of China. They're not even, particularly always claiming to be anti-US See India.

Djene Bajalan : 38:26

I mean certainly there are powers around the world that want a kind of bigger slice of the global capitalism pie.

Djene Bajalan : 38:35

Right that's not irrational and that's not an unfair demand for many people. But that doesn't have anything to do with socialism. So why are socialists getting so excited about it? I mean, you know what's his name? It's a reordering of the global capitalist order, which is fine, right. But what does a reordering of the global capitalist order? It just means new winners and losers in the global system, right? New people exploited. It means maybe, if you're an African dictator, you can get a better deal because you don't just have the United States being the only game in town and you can perhaps do something, or France really, but go ahead oh, france.

Djene Bajalan : 39:16

Yeah, I said more france and africa really, but yeah you have more options, you have more, you have more shopping, but really, what you know, you know this. Syria is a perfect example actually, of like, how confusing left discourse becomes because you know the, the, the quote-unquote, stalinist, trotsky, trotskyist split, you know, which used to be about socialism in one country versus permanent revolution, is now just about like, do we support capitalism in one country or permanent? You know, counter-revolution, you know, you know, are we? Are we talking about national? Are we going to support national developmentalism or are we going to support countries getting integrated into the global capitalist system, which is also a way that countries have developed quite successfully see China. None of these things seem to be very relevant to the question of socialism, but people are shoehorning them in because there's nothing, you know, there's nothing else that you can, there's nothing else to hang your hat on Politics, even like, even milquetoast social democratic politics in the United States. It might as well be, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 40:36

Well, I mean, we are dealing with people and we should be very specific here. We are dealing with people who are the hangers-on to an idea of socialism which, if we are quite honest, every Pew poll has indicated has been declining for a while. In 2022, the popularity of socialism dropped again from that 2018 high, and yet everything in 2023 that I was seeing from the DSA was not mentioning the most recent people, because it's not convenient for them. The DSA has been hemorrhaging members for forever Well, not for forever for four years. They're going to have a slight boost in the Trump administration, although I don't think it's going to be like the boost they had in the last Trump administration, because what do they have on offer? They're an internal heightened contestation between factions who were not reconcilable to each other but who refused to also split.

C. Derick Varn: 41:36

But all that is such minor peanuts, because we're talking about a few hundred thousand people in a country of 330 million, talking about events that are affecting millions of people all over the world, although, again, to put it in perspective, I support anything that's going to end the current genocide Well, almost anything, I mean. I guess you could end the genocide by everyone dying In Palestine. But I'll be quite honest with you. I don't know how viable a new state is in that region for a variety of reasons, including ones we haven't mentioned like climate change. I don't know how these areas are going to handle that and we are doubling down on this idea.

C. Derick Varn: 42:51

That I mean the idea of indigeneity, being read in a Middle Eastern context, for me has been very fascinating Because on one hand, yes, compared to Ashkenazi Jews, ashkenazi Jews, the Palestinians are indigenous and you know, the Zionist claims are based off of biblical readings from 3,000 years ago, but sort of now, they actually weren't originally. They were more just Bismarckian nationalism back when Herschel was around. But when I say stuff like will you quit pretending that most of the Israeli population is Ashkenazi and can go back to Europe because they all have European passports? And when you say like oh well, 20% of them have passports and belong or citizens of other countries.

Djene Bajalan : 44:26

And when you say, oh, 20% of them have passports and are citizens of other countries, and I'm like, okay, 20% of them are you still don't? They wouldn't matter if the Palestinians had appeared in that region, in the UAE and things like that. They should all have citizenship. They shouldn't have to have these tiered kind of not having a blood-based, blood-and-soil nationalism as far as it is possible within a system of nation-states.

C. Derick Varn: 45:04

Well, I mean, this is an interesting problem to point out to people. It's like why are you, in the context of the Americas, talking about indigeneity makes a lot of sense, although the idea of land back that some people believe that we're going to depopulate the United States of all settlers and I'm like where are you going to fucking go?

Djene Bajalan : 45:28

It's absurd, it's just. It's like. It's just so absurd it's not even worth contemplating as a serious ideology, and I think a lot of people can posture radical because they know that that kind of stuff is never going to happen.

C. Derick Varn: 45:43

I'm sorry, it has no meaning.

Djene Bajalan : 45:45

It has no meaning.

C. Derick Varn: 45:48

I mean, like, let's be honest about this a little bit. We saw this with BLM, where people make milquetoast demands and the most radical demands possible Because, if we're honest, they know that the radical demands aren't possible. I guess they are trying to convince people that that'll bring them the milk toast demands, but it's so embarrassing in hindsight that people just bury the fact that they all jumped on this train. But why did they jump on the train? And so and that's a case of something internal to your own country, right, the way people talk about this online now, when I ask, okay, so what do you want the left to do to support these movements that you want them to support, you know, or to stop imperialism?

C. Derick Varn: 46:50

And a lot of times they're like oh, they just need to get out of the way and let the third world have the revolution and lead. And I'm like, who in the third world's even asking for that? Like, if we're all serious these days, who's even asking for that? What would they have to join up to, to? And what kind of politics do you think is going to come from this idea that there's nothing you can politically do in your home country except wait for some kind of global people's war that you are also somehow advocating, coming from religious conservatives and bourgeois factions, to overthrow the entirety of the world order, when even the states you are citing don't advocate for that? Do you think that that's China's secret plan?

Djene Bajalan : 47:46

It's pure projection. Let's talk concretely. We have this concept of the axis of resistance and, as we're speaking, somebody sent us both me and you, a video of Rashid Khalili talking about the axis of resistance, talking about it, and he makes the claim you know I can't speak to every claim he makes in his statement about the fall of the Syrian regime and all this kind of stuff, but he makes one of the claims which I think is controversial, that he points out the axis of resistance is a, you know, it's an Iranian creation and it's driven by Iranian foreign policy. Right, it's driven by Iranian national interest, which I think is an indisputable kind of claim. Like I think, perhaps Khalili maybe oversimplifies it, but you know, I didn't see the entire interview but there are internal reasons why Palestine is important to the Islamic Republic, going back to its inception, going back to its legitimacy, although I would say today, I think probably the Iranian population is not in the same place they were in 1979 regarding their position on Palestine. That being said, the axis of resistance served a very concrete foreign policy objective for the Iranian regime, which was to defend itself against Western hostility. Again, there's no moral logic to this. It's just, you know, realist politics? Do I believe that there are people in the Islamic Republic, people making policy and stuff like that, who truly believe in Palestinian rights, who deeply care about? Yes, of course there are people like that, but this policy at its core is driven by a foreign policy rationale.

Djene Bajalan : 49:46

Iran is a regime that's under attack. It's been under attack since 1979. And it's taking a forward posture to defend itself. You know it's intervening in Iraq. It's doing brutal things in Iraq from time to time to squelch any opposition to its influence in that country. It supported a brutal dictatorship in the form of Bashar Assad. You know it supporting the Houthis, which you know people laud the Houthis for. You know attack. You know for participating in the defense of the Palestinians, their attacks on the Red Sea, but of course, the Houthis aren't any angels and have a pretty appalling kind of internal record as well, but Iran is doing that. There is a foreign policy logic, which I would say is the first order thing that you need to understand, behind Iran's posture and Iran's you know axis of resistance discourse.

Djene Bajalan : 50:44

Now you have all these and the irony is you know they have all. You always have these. You know these people. You know a lot of these left media sites, I'm not going to know. They always have people like what's his name? I don't know if you've seen him, mohamed Marandi, have you seen this guy? Yeah, I have.

Djene Bajalan : 51:07

They present him as this kind of objective speaker, you know, speaker of truth to power, and you know he does say correct things about Tahrir. He does expose Western hypocrisies on certain things, but the dude is the son of a. I think the guy was actually Khomeini's personal doctor and the former Ministry of Health. He's not some kind of like unconnected professor, he's literally like part of the Iranian elite and he's a paid Iranian propagandist. Should we listen to him at times? Sure, I think we should listen to a lot of people, right, but like, let's not elevate this guy as if he's some kind of way speaking some kind of truth to things, because he, at the end of the day, is doing his job, which is defending the Iranian regime. So Iran's foreign policy is a logical foreign policy, one that is born out of, you know, an unprecedented isolation and assault on that regime.

Djene Bajalan : 52:05

But you know, I don't think the Iranian I don't think like I don't think, like the Iranians are, the Iranian regime is going to like or put it this way, I think when it becomes more feasible and maybe we're getting to that point now I'm sure the Iranian regime will redeploy its resources away from supporting, you know, Palestinian groups, groups like Hezbollah, towards trying to build a nuclear weapon, because that's more effective. Iran is not this kind of sectarian Shia regime that that only will support Shias. That whole discourse is nonsense. It's a rational state actor operating in a very hostile Middle East and, ironically, Iran's foreign policy hasn't really changed since the era of the Shah. The main difference is that during the Shah's era they were doing the foreign policy within the American bloc and now they're doing it against the American bloc. It is what it is.

C. Derick Varn: 53:06

I mean we also have to deal with, like some of these access and resistance power stance towards, like the PLO, for example. It's not like some of these access and resistance power stance towards the PLO, for example. It's not like some of these groups haven't actually fought the PLO in different time periods in history.

Djene Bajalan : 53:23

There's all kinds of. It comes down to this People want to identify many people and it's not just the quote-unquote Western left, but leftists in general. You know like I really balk at the whole leftist Western left discourse because you know, leftists the world over sound pretty freaking similar to me at times. You know the same kind of divides exist in a lot of different countries. But put that aside for a moment.

Djene Bajalan : 54:04

But we have this whole situation where these regimes have complicated relationships, makes the claims that there were documents showing that the Assad regime had been heavily penetrated by the Israelis, that was, had a kind of quid pro quo with the Israelis, and I think there is some evidence for this because, like, as soon as the regime fell, israel just bombed everything in Syria and seemed to know where all their weapons were. Right, so right. So it's not like you know, you have this whole discourse that the regime has fallen now like the other front against the Israelis. It's like these guys were never freaking serious in the first place anyway. Right, you know they haven't been serious, you know, for a long time. You know they're doing their own.

Djene Bajalan : 54:48

These regimes are out for themselves. Right, their own, these regimes are out for themselves. Right this notion. You know, it's really remarkable that people who will be rightly looking and critical of statements coming out of the Western press, coming out of Western governments and critiquing and trying to understand, read between the lines and understand what is being said, but then become completely credulous when there's a statement from a country that is opposed to American interests. But suddenly they believe everything that they're saying is being gospel true. It's like they're all lying to you or they might all be telling the truth, right it?

C. Derick Varn: 55:30

completely misses the point, right. But I know that we've been pretty hard on the left to sue generously here, and by that I mean like pretty much all of it. But I do want to like go back to why this is so easy to do now, and I do think we do have to look at both bad incentives we talked about one set of bad incentives, the other set of bad incentives. If you're in journalists in the market today and I've talked to some other people with JG Michaels and I've talked about this and you can't break into the LASC media Cause there's just not a whole lot left, you need some kind of patronage to launch your podcast, to start up on top. So you can maintain that the beginning of the Ivy League journalist slash lawyer doing a podcast that people pretend is somehow outside of the mainstream is hilarious.

C. Derick Varn: 56:27

To me, because we see a ton of that today and it's not particularly effective either to me, because we see a ton of that today and it's not particularly effective either. I was pointing out to someone that outside of Chapo Trapoth and really liberal things like if books can kill, which don't even deal with foreign policy at all, left media has dramatically, dramatically fallen in the profile of public podcast and whatever. Candace Owens has a thousand times with the next biggest left media outlet on Podcast World. Now, podcasts are now veering older. Maybe you say, well, look at YouTube streams or whatever, but again, I don't think that actually ends up looking as good as people think.

Djene Bajalan : 57:16

Well, there's a no. I mean like there's no money in it, like there's no startup capital, as it was. Like if you're Candace Owens, you've probably got some rich guy who's going to help you buy ads and stuff to do your nonsense. You really have to grassroots it if you're going to do a left podcast, because no one's going to fund it well, I'll push back on that a little bit, because left podcasts were getting some pretty major funding six years ago.

C. Derick Varn: 57:54

Um, I mean, they were flush with ngo money and whatnot, and we don't see that anymore. Um, I think you're still. I mean, I think you're right. But I think the reason why you're right is not that, oh the poor leftists, they never have any money behind them. That's not true. It's oh the poor leftists. They're not very effective for the money spent, so people don't give them money.

Djene Bajalan : 58:18

I'm just gonna like put that out there also, when we talk, when we talk about the left podcast sphere, we're really talking about a very heterodox thing, aren't't we? I mean, do we include kind of liberals in that, in which case there are pretty big liberal podcasts out there.

C. Derick Varn: 58:35

Yeah, yeah, I'm not including the liberals, but I am including things like Crystal Ball's podcast, for example, because that's like the most are are Brie Joy Gray. But again, these people also come from like fairly normal pundit backgrounds former politicians, former Ivy League lawyers, campaign staffers, etc.

Djene Bajalan : 58:58

Yeah, I mean, a lot of these people come pre-connected, as it were, which gives they have networks to which to build off of, for sure, and some of them are skillful. Like Brianna is like a talented kind of host, you know she's not like an everyday, she's very well put together. What's his name? Crystal Ball. It comes out of Legacy Media, the Kyle Kalinsky. You know he may not come out of legacy but he's been doing that podcast since the new atheist era.

Djene Bajalan : 59:37

So you know, you have the kind of like. I guess you have like kind of this weird zone between like left podcast world and legacy media, which is occupied by your um crystalline sagas and your um risings with ryan graham and things like that. But then when you get, and then you have a few big streamers and things like that, but then you just have like um, a ton of um, just a ton of little podcasts, like our podcast, which have a very limited appeal to a kind of a bunch of leftists and doesn't have the money behind them to kind of like spread out into the world. They have to do it organically and we're not media trained people, we're just random dudes. Although I guess I could, I suppose I count as an Ivy League person, even though I'm not Ivy Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:39

And I did have journalism courses. I just didn't go into journalism. My point is, though if you're a smallish podcast, or even a biggish podcast, let's say you're a podcast that grew out of progressive legacy media that had to find other funding in the teens. And no one knows where your money comes from and no one knows where your money comes from. You delete everything you did before 2014.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:15

But, anyway, you know and you know you had you're from legacy political families. For those of you who don't know who I'm talking about, it ends with own, ends with who. I can own Just say it, Ron Grey Zone.

Djene Bajalan : 1:01:41

Oh, grey Zone, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, grey Zone is a kind of legacy media as well. Aaron Mate comes from, and maybe I'm a bit harsh on Aaron Mate and the Grey Zone, or maybe I'm not too harsh on him.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:54

I'm not here to talk about whether or not they're bad.

Djene Bajalan : 1:01:58

They come out of legacy families. They come out of legacy families, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:02

Blumenthal's dad was part of the the Blumenthal.

Djene Bajalan : 1:02:07

Yeah, he's the Blumenthal. Yeah, he's the Bloomin' Files. Yeah, I mean, and they were funded by Celebrity Academic.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:18

And Grey Zone was initially funded by Alternet and that progressive media, which has deep ties to progressive legacy media, fell apart in the aught teens, in the early aught teens, and they had to get other funding. And I pointed out that, like I'm not accusing them of corruption at all, but you have to get access right, you just do. You can't just Let me put it to you this way If someone's reporting from the Donbass, someone had to get them there, someone had to, someone had to protect them and someone had to pay for them to get access, or a state had to do it and increasingly it states to do it. One of the things that I talked to JG Michaels about was like, if you're a young, if you're a young journalist today, you're either trying to go into your own podcast and find some kind of niche that can get you some kind of patronage or startup, or you're trying to work for a state outlet abroad.

Djene Bajalan : 1:03:28

Yeah, and there are more options and there are options for you. I mean, it's a little bit like academia, to be honest, like academia is collapsing in the West, so people are searching for opportunities in other parts of the world and are trading off their quote-unquote western identity to serve in universities as kind of trophies that show that, look, we have white people at our university.

Djene Bajalan : 1:03:57

that's how serious we are right yeah, I used to be one of those people before I left and then and then, um, and you have a similar thing, because it doesn't take as much money as it used to, the technology is relatively accessible. You can set up your own cable TV channel, I mean. And then there are opportunities that you know. Maybe you'll get a job working for TRT or press TV or whatever. I mean George Galloway, I think. I think he had a show on Syrian state TV as well. They'll pay you a bit of money. Maybe it's not like the megabucks, but it pays the bills, right. So there are opportunities out there. But, yeah, go ahead. No, I was just saying, but you go and work for another regime, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:48

Right and like look, I'm one of those people who used to defend Russia Today's coverage as long as it wasn't about stuff that Russia really cared about. They did good journalism there. They also did really terrible journalism there sometimes, and I don't just want to pick on RT, because that's what everybody knows, but like I really pick on Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera seems super, super liberal in English, but if you read it in Arabic it does not.

Djene Bajalan : 1:05:19

Oh yeah, it's like that's something my dad we have to take away as Al Jazeera so that he doesn't get too anti-Arab, because it just drives him nuts.

Djene Bajalan : 1:05:28

I mean it's the same with you know, yeah, like well, you know what's fascinating, I think, you know, when we look at a lot of left media, depending on who their favoured native informant is, they internalise a kind of sectarian, a secularised sectarian discourse, right, you know, like they end up taking all the positions that a kind of highly sectarian Shia or Sunni might take, except, like the religious aspect has been taken away and it's just, you know, kind of like there's a kind of patina of left, kind of verbiage to justify what is in a sense, a kind of sectarian politics.

Djene Bajalan : 1:06:14

And the rise of these alternative state news outlets is kind of interesting in the sense that they help fuel that, I think. I think people people, not bad people come to me and say, well, TRT, the Turkish state broadcaster, is, you know, really good and they tackle things. But, like you say, they'll tackle things that they don't care about very well, but as soon as it comes to something that is in their state interest, it's just straight up state propaganda. That seems to be the model of these English language international services that you just you let a bunch of people do whatever journalism you want, Unless it's something that is core to your state interests, and people are not smart.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:58

I mean they recognize it in their own country. They don't recognize it. They don't recognize it in other. Like, if you get the average leftist Today, they probably didn't actually Feel this way in the. They don't recognize that. Another, the average leftist today, they probably didn't actually feel this way in their ox. But the average leftist today, if you point out that there is neoliberal government propaganda, despite how woke NPR seems, they would get it Right. They would get it right, uh, and they would get also that like um.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:35

Voice of america is a terrible thing but it occasionally might do good journalism, as long as it was about something that the us doesn't really care about, like um, and they would understand that and they might get it with the bbc. I remember when liberals were super, super naive about the, about the BBC, and then leftists were also kind of naive about the BBC. But like they probably get it about the BBC now because we have 30 years of exposure to it, you know it's everywhere in the U S. Now Al Jazeera really benefited from being unfairly targeted by the Bush administration. That's where a lot of its street cred came from, and yet I remember like it being blocked.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:17

Now I know enough about the complicatedness of sectarian and national politics in the Middle East that even when I'm reading English language stuff or I'm using a translator to read Arabic stuff guys, I'm not fluent in Arabic, but I do occasionally try to read Arabic language newspapers with translation. I know that, like Al Jazeera is good on certain things and it's terrible on others, that Mideast Monitor is good on certain things and terrible on others. You know, it's just, you have to read newspapers this way. Mideast monitors good on certain things and terrible on others. You know, it's just, you have to read newspapers this way, and we know to do it domestically, but for some reason people can't do that on state media.

Djene Bajalan : 1:09:04

Well, with Americans specifically, it's inverted. American exceptionalism strikes again that you know, just as you have liberals who will be completely credulous about claims from the Western press and condemn anything that comes out of the non-Western press as being fraudulent or fake or propaganda, Particularly if it's from Russia, particularly if it's from. Russia, particularly if it's from Russia. But you know, not everything that was reported on RT was like fake or propaganda, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:36

No.

Djene Bajalan : 1:09:38

You might not like it that the story that they're reporting like. Maybe they're reporting a story, maybe it's true that they want to like sow discord in the West, but the story that they're reporting may actually be true. Right, you know, they may have a malicious reason for presenting that story, but that doesn't chase the facts of the case, does it, you know?

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:03

Well, I mean, let's be honest about propaganda for a second. The best propaganda stuff. That's at least three-fourths true.

Djene Bajalan : 1:10:10

Oh yeah, exactly as well. I mean, that's the other thing. You know, that's the other problem with anti-imperialism is that a lot of anti-imperialists, I think, think that imperialism, imperialist propaganda, is predicated on lies right. Imperialism, imperialist propaganda, is predicated on lies right, which in certain cases it might be, but, like you said, in a lot of cases the question is not whether they're lying or not, is why are they telling the truth? Why are they telling you the truth about this regime, which is a terrible regime, but that other regime that does exactly the same thing, that they're not emphasizing?

Djene Bajalan : 1:10:51

Those are the smart questions you know, like why, suddenly you know great, you know why suddenly is everybody talking about Saddam Hussein's chemical weaponing people in 2001? He did it in the 80s. It's not that they're lying about it. It's like why have they suddenly decided to emphasize this as something? No, people have a very simplistic view of how these things work. Right, like you say, it's a very rarely outright. I mean there are outright fabrications, but I mean even with the WMDs that people go that they lied about, it wasn't straight up in the way that people think that they just like concocted a fabricated story entirely.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:34

No, I mean we sold them some of the WMDs.

Djene Bajalan : 1:11:36

I mean, yeah, they sold them and also, like also the Iraqi regime right internally was telling people that they had these weapons, even though they didn't. But the reason they were telling him was they wanted people to be scared, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:52

Right.

Djene Bajalan : 1:11:53

Now the CIA said like, hey, you know we've heard these rumors that like these cashiers here, but we have no concrete evidence of that. And then that was taken. You know that was taken by the Bush administration to to kind of like harangue the United States in war. But even the lie of WMDs is not the lie in the way I think most people consider it to be a lie.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:19

Yeah, I used to talk about that for the blood, for oil theories too, because I was like we are not taking Iraqi oil and giving it to the America.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:29

We're not even undermining the Saudi oil regime with that shit. What that really seemed to be about, in so much that oil was about it at all, was about oil futures and access to not the oil itself but to other markets for people to play off of each other on the futures market. And like that's not an easy thing to explain to people, right, it's very easy to say, oh, we just want that oil. Oh, look, there's oil there. The United States is going to bomb it very quickly and I'm like that actually isn't so much what they want. I mean, you know, for all the stuff about Venezuela, for example, venezuela has played against and with American oil politics at different times under both the Chavez and the Maduro regimes. So it's just, it's not that simple. Nor is it that simple to say, well, you know, you have these pink wave things in Latin America, but they're all on the same side.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:37

Brazil and Venezuela are often at each other's throats, even under leftist leadership, like it's just. And when we talk about the Middle East, like you know, americans thought they got smart because they finally figured out the difference between Shia and Sunni during the War on Terror, because we never talked about that in the 90s, particularly when the Shia were bad and then it became kind of good, blah, blah, blah, blah blah In the War on terror. But when you sit down and explain to people like Qatar and the Emirates are at odds, even though they're they're both Sunni regimes. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are frenemies at best. Erdoganism plays well sometimes with Russian Eurasianism and sometimes it really is hostile to it.

Djene Bajalan : 1:14:47

Erdogan was very upset about what happened in Syria.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:50

Right, and so for people to go like there's a simple axis of resistance and basically everybody who's not part of the West is a non-agent in it and somehow they're running the Erdogan state out of Langley Virginia is nutty to me, particularly because Erdogan is probably the most you know. Erdogan and Erban are the most unstable elements in the NATO coalition, so, like Erdogan's, constantly making life harder for the US, but also is really crucial to US interest and to Russian interest against Saudi interest, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean.

Djene Bajalan : 1:15:36

Yeah, like the whole I mean the whole axis of resistance discourse is in many ways a mythology. It's a narrative that has been built up and I think has proven to be not a great way to understand the region. I don't think it's particularly helpful because, you know, as we're seeing with the Syrian regime, you know they were in it for themselves, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:16

I mean, like Syria has been on. You and I were talking about this off air Syria was Syria and Iran, which people forget were part, were collaborators with the US rendition policy for black sites.

Djene Bajalan : 1:16:29

There were black sites in Syria. There were black-siding people there, same with Qaddafi as well. Before he got ousted, he was black-siding people as well for the US.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:47

Yeah, and again, I want people to understand I think China is probably one of the most responsible international actors in the world. Okay, I'm going to say that. But also, china supported the US war on terror In the artss explicitly. They censored protests against it explicitly. Now the US-Chinese relationship was great before the pivot to Asia under not Trump but Obama. So maybe you'd expect that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:31

And again, my point of bringing it up is not like, oh, china, they're totally inconsistent. No, china is acting with its own interest at hand. There's no common turn. There's no like Islamist coordinating committee or anything like that, getting all these people on the same side. The allegiances shift constantly. An example that I like to point out was the hostility from the al-Sisi regime to the Qatari regime, while it was warming up to the Saudi Arabian regime, because the way Saudi Arabia and Qatar had different alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood after the Arab Spring. When I was there, when I lived in Egypt, one day Al-Jazeera just went away. We couldn't access it or watch it on TV anymore From the American leftists. We're coming down too hard on leftists, not too hard. We're coming down appropriately hard on leftists. But I don't want to make it sound like this is just a leftist delusion.

Djene Bajalan : 1:18:51

No, no, you see this with. I mean, you have these people who are. You have these mainstream liberals and neoconservatives who are, with no shame in their face, praising Al-Qaeda, because that's what HTS comes out of. Now they've probably changed ideologically, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:23

Yeah, just like Hamas has changed ideologically, just like a lot of political organizations have changed.

Djene Bajalan : 1:19:29

They've certainly nationalized, right. You know, like Al-Qaeda was this kind of pan-Islamist movement. You know this is kind of a nationally orientated regime. But it's still remarkable to see people who war on terror, people praise a political movement that has come out of Al-Qaeda, right, who are saying let's give these guys a chance, a movement that's done pretty horrific things, things that look very similar to what happened on October the 7th. And these are the very same people who are like to what happened on October the 7th. And these are the very same people who are like there could be no negotiation with Hamas, right, because they're Islamists. But yet we can. These Islamists are okay, right.

Djene Bajalan : 1:20:20

There's no consistency in it because, again, just you know, the anti-imperialist left which we're critiquing is really just a pale refraction of the inconsistency and hypocrisy that exists within the broader foreign policy media establishment in the United States and in the West right. It's that incoherence which is that's the kind of core incoherence which is creating this kind of stupid anti-imperialism which I'm often critiquing. But I think it's fair to say like, that stupid anti-imperialism I dislike is kind of second order to the absolute hypocrisy and incoherence in many ways, or ideological incoherence, not necessarily real political incoherence, but the ideological incoherence, the hypocrisy that one sees in the mainstream political discourse regarding, for example, the Middle East.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:28

Well, I mean, what I would say about this is one of the reasons why I get mad about some of the narratives you see out of the anti-imperialist is that I think it's very vital that we have an anti-imperialist discourse that can counter a lot of the bullshit you see from mainstream liberals and conservatives on the Middle East. I just don't want it to be based on stuff that anyone who does a Google search can disprove. You know, that's that's really important to me and I I mean, like it's one of these areas where, like I often actually have to go to paleo conservative, anti imperialist, because they're less likely to project visions upon other states because that's not part of their worldview that you know. They basically think all states are are just in it for themselves and we should be in it for ourselves. But in it for ourselves would probably weaken the, you know the the state. Now, every now and then I'm I am surprised at the comments I'll get, even on my thing, from supposed leftists that are just they'll just buy mainstream like MSNBC, frankly neoconservative arguments about like Ukraine or you know whatever. And I admit, ukraine's a difficult thing for leftists to deal with because, in a way, you have to deal with the fact that there's legitimacy to both sides of that fight and that, you know, russia is the aggressor, but that there is legitimacy that they were being encircled by NATO bases and shit Like. That's not fake. And yes, there's US intelligence all up and shit after Maidan, although there's not a whole lot of evidence that the US was totally singly orchestrating that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:46

And that's a problem that I have with a lot of these narratives, is they do they do like we talked about with. You know the U? S have been at Al Qaeda. I, you know, used to say stuff like that until I also realized that people thought that I meant it literally, that like it kind of was like concocted in a lab at in Langley, virginia, or in the Pentagon. And I'm like no, al-qaeda, like we set up the conditions for it in fighting the Iranian revolution and the Soviets. You can see this in the way that we funded the Mujahideen, etc. Etc. Etc. Like that was what I thought I was saying. And then, like I realized, no, people think I'm saying that Al-Qaeda was a US invention to court and that all these states were stable and only US intervention destabilized them. And I'm like do you know anything about the history of modern Syria, or, like you know, the pan-Arab state. For a while that existed between Russians. I mean not Russians here, egyptians here.

Djene Bajalan : 1:24:55

Yeah, I mean, even if imperialists are kind of setting the agenda, they can't make history entirely as they want. There's a very famous book about the end of the First World War in the Middle East called A Peace to End, brought Peace by Frumpkin, and Frumpkin's case is, you know, he makes I forget the exact quote, but he says something. This was a period when Western imperialists, like made up these countries in the middle east. Right right now there's obviously more than a kind of kernel of truth to that right. But a lot of the newer literature is pointing out and critiquing this view, saying like, okay, you know, yes, imperialism is a factor, but you know, imperialism interacted with the region that was there. Resistance mattered, the response of people mattered, you know it wasn't entirely determined by the West, but rather about the interaction between imperialism and that region.

Djene Bajalan : 1:26:00

That people on the periphery do make their own history. They can, like, shift the direction of history in a particular way through their specific acts. People aren't docile sheep that American intelligence services can completely operate on puppets. Very often these intelligence services are becoming involved because of a process of regime collapse. Now regime collapse might be caused by other factors sanctions, et cetera, et cetera but very often, it's just caused by the fact that these regimes suck. They lose legitimacy over time, they begin to collapse, and then imperialists get involved, because that's what they do.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:52

But the idea that Go ahead.

Djene Bajalan : 1:26:54

No, I was saying the idea that Syria was some kind of a stable paradise. Oh, let's not say this. It was bad, but maybe it was stable. It's like, well, it wasn't stable. Was it Because it started to collapse? It's like, well, america did it. It's like, well, it wasn't stable. Was it Because it started to collapse? It's like, well, america did it. It's like, did they, did they, or was there mass protest in Syria? The Syria government repressed them. You began an armed insurrection and then everybody in the region, including Uncle Sam, decided to try and get a piece of the pie.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:30

So I say Uncle Sam and Russia both worked together and against each other in Syria, depending on what was going on in particular.

Djene Bajalan : 1:27:35

Iran worked with the United States in Syria and Iraq in the fight against ISIS. Completely confusing. It's like you have these people go like America is bad and evil and should pull out of the region. Everything they do is evil Same people who are praising Iran and America and Iran are basically working together to fight ISIS in Iran.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:00

I mean, here's the thing Like you should know this from studying British imperialism and when I say you, I mean the audience, not you personally, gene the imperialists play both sides in a region against themselves so that they'll have some foothold, no matter who wins. I mean classically. Classicallyically, they attempted to do that in Cuba, like they gave both Batista and Castro, at different times, aid and also tried to kill Castro. Like why? Because they wanted influence in the regime. Unfortunately, you know, playing both sides like that turns people against you. You want to see an example of that. It took a long time for Trump to be unpopular in Egypt Because why? Obama was deemed as a mealy-mouthed traitor who wouldn't pick sides.

Djene Bajalan : 1:28:59

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:01

Like um, and so you know? Uh, and when I would explain that to people here, they'd be like what do you mean? Trump is totally anti-muslim. Why would they be pro-trump? I'm like they know where he is, they know what he is saying, they know how to adjust to that. Now they got mad when Trump declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel and that really alienated a lot of people in Egypt. But I just Like the vision that a lot of standard liberals have was just wrong about why people felt the way they did in the region and when it comes to Palestine, you and I have been on the Palestinian defense kick for a while, but I've also. Every time that you and I have talked about it, I have been so despairing that I don't know what to do. Because when people would say to me like well, you know, you know Hamas is going to win this, I'd be like in what world do you think Hamas wins that?

Djene Bajalan : 1:30:22

I'd be like in what world do you think Hamas wins that Without a?

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:24

larger regional war. Now, israel's been pretty discredited across the board for common people, but we already see that that doesn't affect states very much. Exactly Like, the idea that states care about what their population think about foreign policy actions is only true in so much that there's an alternative to be had, and in most of these states, when it comes to Israel, there really isn't. There's not an internal alternative to be had, there's some, but in the West, like in the West, if you, I'll say in the West, if you're in Germany, who are you going to vote for? To be pro-Palestinian? The ADF.

Djene Bajalan : 1:31:13

Yeah, exactly, People don't the.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:15

AFD. Excuse me, but go ahead.

Djene Bajalan : 1:31:17

People I mean like and this is a point that Danielner always makes is that you know, more and more these days, the foreign policy establishment is completely disconnected from public opinion on anything that the state, you know, because the state doesn't have to conscript people or even have, like you know, a significant portion of the population employed in directly in the military services doesn't really need to like give a shit about what people feel about foreign policy, because they can get away with that. I mean, look at domestic policy.

Djene Bajalan : 1:31:49

They do the same, you know, it's just um yeah yeah, like, what influence are we going to have on foreign policy? And if anything like say it's getting less and less, You're getting less and less influence on this point, you know at the moment, Like what the student, what the public want and what politicians do has, especially in foreign policy, doesn't have that much correlation, Otherwise we'd be having governments who are not so much Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:33

Anyone who has studied the correlation between quote-unquote democratic unquote governments and public opinion has had to deal with the fact that we've seen massive de-democratization in almost every Western country period into discussion, and it is the most thorough on foreign policy, and so it makes a lot of these projections. I mean, like, this is where I want to be sympathetic to these people who are projecting something on these movements, even though I think it's ultimately a bad move, is because, like you want to be able to support anti-imperialism, but you also kind of know you can't overthrow your government because they have nuclear bombs and drones and shit. Like you know, um and uh liberals want to say that it's only um, that it's only like trumpets who are delusional. They'll say stuff like well, the average trumpets doesn't even know what Trump believes in, though They'll project whatever they want to believe onto them. And I'm like well, you did that with Obama on war, you did that with Biden on war. Like you know, you guys told me that Obama was an anti-war candidate and I would literally point to like he's only anti-Iraq war, he's not anti-Iraq war, he's not anti-Afghanistan war. That was also true for Kerry. I don't know what you think, you are also doing the projection of your hopes onto something else. That's a normal response to hopelessness.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:16

The average anti-imperialist today has seen their protests not matter People who tell me liberal visions of politics don't work. And then all of a sudden, on palestine, they're like we can do what the? What the protest, the student process did to south africa and I'm like in no way is what, like israel, learned from south africa. One of the things they learned is to not make the Palestinians part of the working body of the society and in fact it would be easier to bring in labor from outside so you can keep them from being integrated into the workforce, because then they really would have more leverage to end apartheid, which is what did happen in South Africa. And the other difference is and I've pointed this out to people before apartheid was entered the George Herbert Walker Bush administration who wouldn't even recognize the apartheid, by the way got South Africa to denuclearize before it happened.

Djene Bajalan : 1:35:18

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:19

None of that's happened in this case.

Djene Bajalan : 1:35:21

No, no. I think there's a lot of delusion about the whole, like I find it very dishonest that people are doing this like we're on the verge of victory thing. I've seen less and less of that today.

Djene Bajalan : 1:35:40

Yes, there's less and less of it because I think reality is sinking in. But I think a lot of people, well, I think I don't know, get some former Hamas militant and I don't know an IDF torturer on your show and have them argue right. But more generally, there's just a hunger for Palestine content and I think people make it, makes them feel righteous about everything. But it just, you know, it's just utterly depressing because, you know, people seem people seem to think that the ultimately quote unquote the good guys win. The arc of history is long but it tends towards justice, it doesn't.

Djene Bajalan : 1:36:38

I mean, this was when we did our discussion show on Syria, with sorry on Palestine and Israel, with you, Cuba, me, electra. You know, one of the critiques I would have of Electra's position and she knows I would have this critique is that I think she's over optimistic. I would have this critique is that I think she's over optimistic. You know she goes like. You know, just like the Greeks won their independence in the end. You know, palestine, I was like the Greeks won their independence because of a, you know, a confluence of geopolitical interests which led to the establishment of a tiny little Greek kingdom in the 1830s. A tiny little Greek kingdom in the 1830s, but for every Greece there's a Kurdistan which nothing happens, and they don't get us and you get screwed. So really, you know this mythologizing that you know this is. I mean, I think this is more. You know Israel is far more sustainable than South Africa, because I would go further in what you say, like South Africa was a society predicated on the exploitation of black labor, like that was the point.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:54

Right, right, whereas Israel is a settler, colonial state in a real sense, that they don't need the labor.

Djene Bajalan : 1:38:02

They don't want the labor. They might need the labor.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:04

Yeah, they'll get it from elsewhere, but they would rather get it from elsewhere.

Djene Bajalan : 1:38:08

No, it's like a big difference and you know this notion that it's unsustainable so long as Israel maintains its military superiority and the unconditional backing of the United States and Germany and Britain and the other major powers. I mean, what kind of military defeat is are we looking for? I mean, in 1967, there was, there was actually a chance of military defeat, right, but I just in 1970, there was a chance. But today, I mean, I just don't see it and I don't see the path forward and I don't think the quote-unquote axis of resistance is going to be able to do it. And not only that.

Djene Bajalan : 1:38:54

I also think you know putting your hopes into a bunch of autocratic regimes that lack any internal political legitimacy. And if you, if you're, if your hopes are that iran is going to liberate palestine, good fucking luck. You know what I mean. It's like I don't think that's going to happen, I don't think it's realistic and I don't think these regimes, the biggest threat to israel, if you ask me, would be if you had democratized and highly legitimate regimes in the Middle East that were able to pressure the Israeli government. But at present these regimes are very brittle. It's very easy for the Israelis to push back on them. The Israelis have totally penetrated Iranian society. But there's a reason why Iranians are willing to sell out Iran because they freaking hate the regime.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:51

One thing I would say you probably made a lot more people mad than me on that one, but one thing I would say about this is like okay, the other thing you could do is try to re-instigate democracy here, because ultimately, like yes, there is some sympathy for the existence of Israel here, there's not that much sympathy for what's going on in.

Djene Bajalan : 1:40:15

Gaza. I think most of the rabid pro-Israeli people are A evangelicals boomers who you know watched that movie with Golda Meir. I can't remember who played Golda Meir, but they stuck a big fake nose on her and they're just conservatives. Wanting to own the left Like an anti-Semitism is their way to relitigate the racism of the 60s and say you're the racist, not us. Like it's not actually about israel, palestine, it's just about, like fighting social justice wars. It's totally driven by internal stuff to the united states, stupid cultural war. And that's what the problem with israel palestine in the american discourse is is that it's been utterly, uh, put into the blender of the culture wars. There's nothing inherently left-wing or right-wing to support Palestinian self-determination right there's. You know, palestinian self-determination does not have any organic link to leftism. You can be a right-wing nationalist and make exactly the same defense of Palestinian right to self-determination, or a liberal. It's not a cause that only socialists can have a position on.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:36

No, I mean clearly Candace Owens, who, in addition to spewing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories recently, is actually pretty good on Palestine. Why she's good on Palestine might be uproarious, but that's neither here nor there.

Djene Bajalan : 1:41:56

People can say, like we said earlier, people can tell you the truth, but for the wrong reasons. The question is why are they telling you this truth and not another truth?

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:06

I mean, I've been noticing liberals and leftists being totally baffled by the fact that there's a group of under 30 MAGA people who are pro-Palestinian and they're not huge, but there's more of them than there's ever been in the past.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:21

that aren't like explicit neo-Nazis or something, and that you know, and I've said there's a thousand reasons for that. I like, I pointed out, like, well, you know, if you want the Palestinians there and not here, you need to have a state Right, like, if you're an isolate, if you're, if you don't want people immigrating to the United States, well, you need them to have a state right. Like, you know, it's not that hard to get there. But I think you know we sound very hard on this. I mean, like, I agree with you that part of the problem that we have about talking about this is that, um, you know, we're complaining about a kind of anti-imperialism that morally and even politically, I mean, this is maybe a place where I differ from spencer leonard. I think that the anti-imperialist impulse is correct, like I. Like I don't really see. But the way that they talk about states and whatnot is totally naive as long as you're not dealing with Western powers, or sometimes totally naive as long as you're just not dealing with the United States.

Djene Bajalan : 1:43:36

Go ahead, I agree. In fact, maybe we should stop calling these people anti-imperialists, although that's what they call themselves, but really they're just. Is it really anti-imperialism, guys? I said this to that. You know, for so much of the left it's so much the anti-imperialist left.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:08

Internationalism seems just to be support the nationalism of other people all right, there's no, there's not a whole lot of of you. And to be fair to them, I'm going to actually say that Marx and Engels are not remotely consistent on this issue, like the way they talk about nations and whatnot. Sometimes their early Marx is kind of pro-imperialism, late Marx is not Middle period. Marx and Engels talk about historical nation states and non-historical peoples, and this, that and the other nation states and non-historical peoples, and this, that and the other. They talk about the need to organize this in terms of nations.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:49

But, as our friend Dr Jeroen Nunez points out, that's because they believe that if you got everyone in the nations and you had the rationalization of national polities, that they would start to abolish themselves once you got rid of capitalism. And we've just never seen us get to that point, if that point's even real Right, like the assumption. It is kind of like vulgarly dialectical that the assumption is if you get everyone into a nation state, then we can start to undo nation states, because we'll have to agree with things in an international, because we've done this all in nation states. But also we don't want the proletariat of any nation state to side with its nation state over the proletariat as a whole, like that's in the manifesto like like and we don't have a lot of evidence for that like that's a big leap of faith.

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:48

Um, and I don't have an easy answer to it. I mean, you and I are both often like we, we're supportive of cultural nationalism, like we don't want people to raise people's cultural identities and I I would like uh, I'm sympathetic to like autonomous regions and stuff like that in an ideal world, but I'm not really big on promoting like nationalism, except in the cases where I think if you don't under the real politics of the planet, those people are sitting ducks. But it's not great that you have to basically advocate for a nation state to have any say. And I don't just have to turn to the Palestinians for that. We can also talk about the Roma and people who just don't want a nation state period, and why that's a problem.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:36

Like you know, under the international framework, it's hard to deal with that framework. It's hard to it's hard to deal with that. Um, and I I do think it's a little weird the amount of faith that a lot of these people have in nationalism. And yet, like when I, when I say like okay, why would these nations, who are also at odds over resources, inherently joined together as nations like there's. There's reasons why working class people would be these nations like once the hegemonic powers are weak which, by the way, you're supporting certain regional hegemons anyway but once the hegemonic powers are weak, why won't it just be a free for all?

Djene Bajalan : 1:47:15

Yeah, I mean multipolarity could end up with a there are two ways it could go right. You could end up with a situation where two ways it could go right. You could end up with the situation where multi-polarity people bounce each other off so you have a lot less foreign policy adventurism and people behave more responsibly. That could be one outcome, I guess. The other outcome it could be like you shot the top mafia boss in town. Now all the other mafia bosses uh, all the other like lower level ones are going to murder each other to be the top dog. Who knows right? This is why I always say I'm always quite strict on this. When I say multipolarity, I'm not someone who is like multipolarity is bad, but I'm militantly of the opinion that multipolarity is merely a sidestep to the current order. It's neither forward or backwards. It is what it is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:08

To me it's like complaining about a thunderstorm.

Djene Bajalan : 1:48:14

Well, it's literally rearranging the back chairs on the Titanic, right, that's what it feels like. It feels you're just litigating it. I mean, I would like a more stable political order. I don't want to see all this stuff that is etched in my mind of like the most horrific things happening all over the world, whether it's the mundane exploitation of people, good people just being broken down by daylight, horrific war crimes, new kinds of. I don't like that stuff. It makes you miserable. Right, I would like a better situation, but I don't think deluding yourself about where things are heading or projecting your wishes and hopes on regimes thousands of miles away in a different part of the world is going to get anywhere. I think that is a deep pathology and delusion. Hey Donna, will you come over here? It's the baby.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:21

I think in some ways it's even my fear is like it leads people to not even begin to contemplate what would need to be done internally to ramp down these imperial policies.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:37

Like, like, if you want a multi-polar world be stable, you need to start trying to figure out how to influence the United States government to act as a more stabilizing power and not fall into a Thucydides trap. Merely frankly projecting your hopes from academia or from your pulpit online is not going to do that line is not going to do that, like you know. So, for example, um, I have been more pro the protests at the universities on, uh, on things and some other people, uh, when they were happening, I was more pro, um, the, the, no contest, but at a certain, you know. But I was also, I think, pretty realistic about their likelihood of succeeding, which was very, very low, and not being recuperated, which was also very, very low. And today I get why the left is in a kind of major cul-de-sac in regards to what even alliances they could forge and, frankly, there isn't one, because the neoconservatives have kind of returned to their traditional home in the Democratic Party, by the way, before.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:03

Reagan that was their home.

Djene Bajalan : 1:51:05

Yeah, 100%.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:10

And if you confuse yourself into thinking that, like the peacenik end or the anti-peer end of the GOP, is the only end there and there's not just different kinds of war, hawks really would like a war with china, which you know would be, which would precipitate world war three in a nuclear war, um, then you're fooling yourself, right, like you know. For example, who am I going to support for a responsible policy in the United States towards China? Nobody. There's nobody to turn to there. The Biden administration was bad. The foreign policy realists there are bad. They're not as directly bellicose as the GOP. And similarly, if I want a responsible policy towards Russia, who do I turn to? I got no idea.

Djene Bajalan : 1:52:08

Yeah, I mean, everything seems bonkers out there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:11

You know it's, it's, it's just like. So of course, I think in this sense I am sympathetic to why people are getting weirder and weirder in their politics. But my, my point is the more we do that right now, the more we have no idea what's going on and we're blindsided constantly by current events, and we should not be rewarding pundits for doing for, for encouraging us to do that to ourselves, like, like when people really push back on me when I critique a pundit for being objectively wrong not theoretically wrong, but objectively wrong we don't know what to do go ahead.

Djene Bajalan : 1:52:58

We had all these people uh, gray zone and gray zone adjacent people let's be concrete about this in 2002, who were telling us 2022.

Djene Bajalan : 1:53:10

Huh, 2022. Yeah, telling us that Russia was never going to invade Ukraine, and this was all a lie and it was all propaganda. This was all a lie and it was all propaganda. Now, you did have my friend, harum Yilmaz, who said Russia's not going to invade Ukraine because it would be insane for them to invade Ukraine, because he literally and I remember this very clearly said it's going to be like street fighting in the streets of Kharkiv. This is a serious war. This is not like Georgia. The Russians don't have the capacity to have this overwhelming victory, etc. Etc. Which is a he may have been wrong, but he was perhaps wrong based on some concrete analysis. Right, but there were people out there who were saying it's just a straight up lie that the west is spreading.

Djene Bajalan : 1:54:00

And then russia invaded. They shut up for two days before they reformulated their argument to just say that this, you know, act like they'd never said what they did and instead started saying that, well, russia was forced into invading, which, as we said, obviously in a kind of general sense, the encirclement of Russia, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff created conditions for the rise of a kind of revanchist regime that fell under threat in Russia from Western aggression, but the more. I guess there was no pressing need for them to invade at that particular moment. Right, it was nothing about. Ukraine wasn't about to join NATO, the United States was not about to deploy millions of people, russia had secured control of Crimea, they had the Donbass more or less under control and they just miscalculated. They thought they could get away with it, win a war in a few days.

Djene Bajalan : 1:55:07

And then I think even the Americans thought they would win a war in a few days. And when they didn't, when the Ukrainians managed to stand up to them, then America started pouring in all the money and stuff like that, and then we end up with this kind of thing. But suddenly we have this kind of thing. But suddenly we have this, a kind of shift in the discourse just overnight and the forgetting of what happened. It really is. You know this, the level of intellectual dishonesty is remarkable.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:35

But I shouldn't be surprised well, I mean, my thing that I always would would get a little bit weirded out was like reading Peter Zion the kind of liberal, realist warmonger I don't want to be clear on that who predicted that Russia was going to do this in 2022, like four years ahead of time. And I've always been like, well, why don't we talk about that? Like what did he see that we didn't see? I've always been like, well, why don't we talk about that? Like, what did he see that we didn't see? Like, because I've always been like, I'm sympathetic.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:10

I am very sympathetic to the larger complaints Russia has about NATO and encirclement and particularly the way certain things were played out in Ukraine, but I'm also fairly sympathetic to the idea that, like what do you expect the Ukrainians not to resist and use everything that they have to do? So, I mean, the one thing I was really wrong on is I thought that they would realize that NATO was not going to really push to expand the war for a lot longer, but then, you know, when Biden started leaving hell, he looks to even be trying to do that. So I don't know. Like, and from my standpoint I also want to make it clear I think the you know like the Ukrainian government under Zelensky has been a negation about half the things he said he stood for when he ran for office, so it has not been good internally. There's not heroes there. For me, I want that war to be over, even it's over slightly on russia's benefit, because I don't know how else you end this without most of ukrainian civil society being literally turned to ash right. But the other thing is we a lot of people thought that that war would be won in a few days, and what we're learning is it's very hard for anyone to win a war in a few days in the modern world. We're just seeing that, even against overwhelming odds.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:52

Like you know, I don't know how people expect this to be. When we talk about things like projecting this worldwide revolution that's going to happen very soon because of anti-imperialism, etc. And I'm always like what do you think that's going to look like? And how do you? Who do you think is going to walk away from that? You know like, what do you think is going to be left? And so people say, oh well, you're against anti-imperialism. I'm like, no, I just I'm not. But if your only answer to anti-imperialism is a worldwide war, but with nuclear bombs.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:39

That's not going to work out well for anybody. And if you don't see that's what you're advocating, you're really not thinking this through, Like particularly if you don't think there's anything for people to do in the core to start making this easier for people to ramp down Like this is something. Kuba and I disagree on the details of foreign foreign policy all the time, but we both agree that basically even milquetoast social democrats in the united states become ultra leftist when they're talking about stuff abroad, partly because there's no accountability for them one way or the other about what they say. And why not take the most radical position? Because there's nothing else you can. You can say whatever. You're not going to have any effect anyway. So you can signal whatever you want to signal. And at a certain point that becomes dangerous in so much that it leads people to not understand the situation in the world.

Djene Bajalan : 1:59:36

And if you like you know like a hundred percent.

Djene Bajalan : 1:59:40

No, I think I think it's dangerous because, also, I think it's the road also to neoconservativism, because I think a lot of people, after buying into this anti-imperialist, so-called anti-imperialist let's not even give them that name this so-called simulacrum of anti-imperialism, imperialism, once they start realizing that these people don't have even a basic command of certain facts or that they're just outright lying, they will become disoriented and may well end up completely rejecting anti-imperialism, saying like, wow, this was all a lie and so I'm going to believe the opposite, right, I think it's profoundly and I also think it's patronizing.

Djene Bajalan : 2:00:29

There is this tendency, amongst anti-imperialists as well, to say like, even if they admit that something is bad, they were like well, you shouldn't talk about it because that's just justifying imperialism. It's like rank not only dishonesty but also elitism that people can't comprehend, that you can say things like this regime is bad, it is a really bad regime, but America invading it is going to make things a hell of a lot worse, right, that's not a difficult concept to say, right, it's not a difficult concept to understand. But these people think that any type of honesty about these regimes, even if they themselves admit that what is being said is true. They say you shouldn't say it because it's just supporting Western propaganda, complete elitism and dishonesty, which I think is ultimately counterproductive and leads to people being confused and disorientated and then eventually, you know, becoming renegades Thoughts.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:31

Well, I mean, I think that's a whole lot of reactionary thought on the left right now. That actually is dependent on people making over claims so that other people can step in and utilize it. Frankly, I'm not going to name names here, I don't really want to get into that because we that actually is dependent on people making over claims so that other people can step in and utilize it. Frankly, I'm not going to name names here, I don't really want to get into that because we have to get into who we think the left is. But I do think, like, when it comes to stuff like American fallen policy, if you advocate it as a good thing, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, well you're a duck and I do think that comes a lot out of people making wild state. I mean, like I'll give you an example, I'm going to name names here.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:10

Michael hudson has been predicting, for anti-imperialist reasons, that the us dollar de-dollarization is happening. But he's been predicting that us dollar is going to collapse overnight for three and a half years. It hasn't happened at all. D dollarization doesn't even look like that Right. Yet there is no pushback on this on the left. No one calls him out on it. Even ultra leftists won't call him out on it, because they want to. They also kind of want to believe that there's going to be a collapse that solves all their problems tomorrow. Yeah, the final process of capitalism is imminent, right? Yeah, except that we've been saying that for 100 fucking years.

Djene Bajalan : 2:03:00

Yeah, it's millenarian.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:02

More than 100 years. Right, it's just like you know. Maybe deal with the fact that, yes, virginia, there is something like a declining rate of profits, but capitalists figure out how to adjust to it pretty quickly. You know, it's something that you kind of have to deal with Now. You know we've been coming down, we throw this anti-imperialist stuff up. I just think so much of it is. I think so many people do not realize they've also. Basically, they have the same vision of the world as what they detestest, which is a world of nations with national interest in. They're claiming that, oh, this is in the interest of the oppressed. But, like you will notice that class talk completely falls away and we pretend that there's like, not different classes in these societies, or that, oh, if we deal with the contradiction of imperialism first, then we'll get rid of the contradiction of capitalism. You know the classic Maoist stance and I'm like in what world would that make sense? If you think that capitalists have to grow their markets all the time, why wouldn't there just be a new imperialism?

Djene Bajalan : 2:04:19

Because indigenous people are somehow different from the rest of humanity and people of color are just good, I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:34

Except when they're not.

Djene Bajalan : 2:04:36

Except when they're not.

C. Derick Varn: 2:04:37

Even in these worldviews, right, there's not a consistency to it, but there's not a consistency to it, and you can kind of see the desperation in the way people are projecting this.

Djene Bajalan : 2:04:54

It does feel like desperation. This weird politics is a function of political desperation. I mean like maybe I'm blackpilled or what, but I think at least being blackpilled and feeling a little bit nihilistic is kind of an honest response to not knowing what to do. But I think people, people, when they face everything I think you know this maybe comes down to in the West at least to the Bernie moment that wants to kind of Bernie moment crash, to burn, like any positive agenda for the future whether you agree with the burning movement or not was out the window and people have kind of become nihilistic. So how do people respond to it? Some people become burned out and blackpilled, which includes you two, vaughn. You can't just dump the blackpilling on me. You're a bit blackpilled too. You're a bit pessimistic about the future as well.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:47

I was pessimistic before you were to be fair. I've never been optimistic, but go ahead.

Djene Bajalan : 2:05:58

That doesn't mean you have no faith in humanity. I think a lot of people, it seems to me, rather than you know, admitting that like, wow, this is like seems really difficult and insurmountable and may may be a way out of it, but I feel kind of lost in it. They attach themselves to some kind of politics which they feel gives them an, a ready-made answer to everything that like, uh, and this might be just becoming a normie democrat or it might become.

Djene Bajalan : 2:06:30

Usually it is becoming a normie democrat, um, but it's also could take the form of becoming some kind of weird sectarian, joining some weird online cult or whatever it is, because at least then you don't feel helpless, you feel like there's some kind of hope, but it is ultimately copium.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:03

Yeah, I mean, it's just you know, like, when I ask people okay, what do you want us to do in the core to help these movements? You know that would involve getting people on your side actively engaging in politics, filling out what political limitations is. There's not a lot of will for that. All right, yeah, I'm blackpilled, because I'm blackpilled to easy answers.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:36

By the way, I never believed in Bernie, which puts me in a weird position with the rest of the left, like my friendship with michael brooks was always, you know, was always me saying like you know, we fought, like privately over the fact that I'm like what are you going to do when bernie can't deliver what you say? He's going to deliver because you haven't built the, the apparatus to support it and he's going to fall into the same party apparatus that currently exists. And he's like well, look at what trump did. They changed up and I'm like he didn't do it overnight and honestly, this is like, if you actually look at the history of of these battles in the gop, this battle has been raging pre-trump um for 40 years since, since the reagan coalition emerged and started to weaken you've seen um, these different elements try to assert themselves and they finally kind of did, but only kind of now, because it's not like Trump is really cut away from traditional republicanism right.

Djene Bajalan : 2:08:34

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:35

He's not totally pushing on things that are totally foreign. I mean, he's talking a big game now going into office, but I like to remind people he talked a big game in 2016 too and didn't do about three fourths of what he said Like. So maybe we don't know. I don't push anything beyond it, but I also pointed out to people that basically right now, the only positive message about what people should do in the United States, even to end war, is coming from the fucking right, like the Democrats have basically promised the status quo forever and leftists, by and large, delegitimize themselves after the Bernie campaign, if we are completely honest, because what did they have? I mean, like I heard two years of leftists not liberals, leftists trying to convince me that the Biden campaign was going to be the most progressive campaign in modern history. Right, yeah, I mean, and that you know Biden can push all this through with executive orders and all that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:49

And I'm like dude. He let two senators one of whom used to be a Green Party Occupy person, I might remind people totally squander even the moderate reforms that he had and, like you have to know that you also saw things like Medicare for all and stuff go completely away from the docket because the, the Dems, were in charge and they never intended it. People suggest all kinds of crazy shit when they're not actually in power because they know that there's no cost to doing so. I mean, this is even true for candidates and for sitting Congress people. The GOP does it all the time. They say wild shit in the off years when they actually ruled it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:33

they do all of it, no. No, because it's just on their own basis. Right. So it's just, it's just weird to me that people can't see that and when it comes to projecting on like these scenarios that are far away, like I'm pretty sympathetic to it. On Palestine because, again this, my fear on October 7th was that it would lead to a genocide. I had left this yelling at me that I was being too. We literally didn't we say that like lead to a genocide.

Djene Bajalan : 2:11:03

I had left this yelling at me that I was being too cautious. We literally didn't. We say that like in 2021, me, you and Cuba.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:10

Yeah, we did. We said that we're going to see millions of bodies and if I think we're ever going to correct accounting of the numbers, we're probably looking at a million dead already, which, by the way, is like half of the fucking population of Gaza.

Djene Bajalan : 2:11:28

When those numbers come out, I'm going to you know, the people who have, the people who have. Yeah, people are disgusting on this stuff. I mean, we can debate the numbers, but the notion that there's still only 40,000 people died in this conflict is nuts. I would probably at the moment I would say, maybe you know 200,000 dead, but who knows? Maybe a million, who even knows?

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:52

Well, I mean, I think you're probably looking at 200,000 to 300,000 dead from war, and then famine, disease, winter.

Djene Bajalan : 2:12:01

We'll see what happens.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:03

Yeah, I mean like, but it is crazy to me that they've been repeating the same number from like December of 2023, for yeah, it doesn't say no.

Djene Bajalan : 2:12:18

I mean, the Zionists are completely discredited.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:21

Yeah, I mean like. So, people, as much as we've been complaining about this imperialist stuff, it's not because we think the imperialist policies are good. I mean, I got accused of being a Zionist because I said what did I say? Oh, I said that 90% of the atrocities that you heard about on October 7th were probably made up, but not all of them, and someone accused me of being a Zionist for that. Like you know, it's just like, and I'm like, I'm not kind of situation you can ascribe moral agency to individuals, but you're really dealing with, like you know, like you know, talking about like, oh well, how do you have a party in the light of, uh, an open-air internment camp? And I'm like you live near open-air prisons too. You know, like we live in america. Do you know where the prisons even are?

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:40

you live near one, probably they're all like it's just like oh, it's not the same, like no, it isn't the same. Do you know where the prisons even are? You live near one, probably. It's just like oh, it's not the same, no, it isn't the same. But you shouldn't be surprised that this stuff happens, and I'm also not saying that this was horrible. I think it's just like this is a confluence of factors that if the Israeli occupation had not done what it had done what had never happened, and that's really the only thing that you need to focus on, right, like to me, you could just start there, but people don't, and I get why they don't. But it's also, at a certain point, like, well, what do you do if you keep on saying that they're going to win, they're going to win, they're going to win, and even to the point where people are advocating like, oh, don't take a ceasefire, you know, because you can still win. And I'm like, what you know? Like, like, and I heard leftists say that Now they don't anymore.

Djene Bajalan : 2:14:46

No, but reality hit him in the face.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:50

But they were, as you know, in the up to the summer of this year. They were doing that and a lot of people were, you know they would imply that like, oh I'm, you know, I'm a Zionist. Fine, you know, think what you want about me, I actually don't really care what people think about me, but I can tell you that I do not support the Israeli state, like at all. But I, you know, when it comes to ending a massacre, I'm willing to make compromises to end a massacre period like um, I'm willing to make compromises to end a massacre Period Like, and you know, to some degree it's up to I would love to actually, when I say it's up to the Palestinian people, do any of us actually believe that?

Djene Bajalan : 2:15:39

No.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:40

Like, like, like, no, not really. I wish it was up to the Palestinian people. Actually, I suspect a lot of things would be better if it was, but it's not really no.

Djene Bajalan : 2:15:56

Up to political elites. It's yeah, I mean, it's pretty grim.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:02

Right, yeah, and that's where I like and I get why people want to believe stuff and I get why they want to believe the stuff in Syria, like we're not saying that what's going to happen in Syria is good. I want to be very clear on that. I have no idea what the actual implications of this really are.

Djene Bajalan : 2:16:19

The best case is Syria is going to look like Iraq does now, which is kind of like a dysfunctional quasi-democracy. That's the best case scenario. The worst case is it's going to be round two of the civil war. I hope it isn't Right. No, I hope there can be at least some kind of respite for the Syrian people from this and that people can return to their homes and people can rebuild their lives, even if the regime is less than perfect. You know, like the Sy, the Syrian people deserve that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:02

I mean, like if we just look at what's happened since this conflict started 14 years ago, there is at least at minimum 600,000 dead. At minimum 600,000 dead, which, okay, that doesn't sound like a lot when we're used to talking about the United States population, but the entire population of Syria is only 22 million.

Djene Bajalan : 2:17:31

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:32

And I would not be surprised if that death toll is under counted. And I'm not even this is not me picking like, I'm not saying Assad did it, I can't parse who killed whom, I'm not there, I'm just saying there's been 600,000 dead in the past 14 years. So for people who try to tell you this hasn't already been a bloodbath, they're full of shit. It's been slightly less active for the last four. There's been incursions from Turkey into northern Syria, a bunch in the past five years. There's been incursions from Israel although you're right that there's been a lot of them recently and we're not even getting to the fact that it seems like everybody has kind of used Syria as a bomb pin cushion.

Djene Bajalan : 2:18:19

They sure have.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:21

Like it's been a proxy war, not just between Russia and the United States? They sure have. When we talk about the axis of resistance, I want to be clear about this. It's a rational foreign policy and if it stabilized Syria I probably wouldn't care.

Djene Bajalan : 2:18:54

Very true. That's the main thing you know if you're a socialist. Perhaps having a stable regime where people are able to kind of build up the forces of production and the working class is able to organize, perhaps that's a better state of affairs than a sectarian civil war. I don't know about it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:19:20

Me neither.

Djene Bajalan : 2:19:24

Yeah, I mean. People have lost their minds. Syria has broken many a brain, gaza has broken many a brain, and if anything comes out of this, is that both leftists and liberals are completely incoherent on their political positions regarding the middle east because they're always trying to jam the pieces on the Middle Eastern political board into the holes that fits their ideologies. Everything is priori orientated Like. Think about this If the Palestinians were backed by the US tomorrow and Israel became like a Chinese client state, do you think the discourse on Israel-Palestine would stay the same amongst the leftists?

C. Derick Varn: 2:20:14

Well, I mean, you know one of the elephants in the room is, while the Democrats supported Israel pretty early, particularly Truman, the American foreign policy establishment in World War II did not. The Pentagon was pissed that Truman came out and recognized Israel. Those are historical facts. They've been declassified now you can go read it and you know who did support the creation of israel, including sending them way more arms than the us did to undermine british interest could it be stalin soviet?

Djene Bajalan : 2:20:55

yeah, exactly, I mean all the. If you want to annoy, if you want to annoy the um pro-stylist palist Palestine grifters, tell them that factoid, which they'll try to explain away.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:09

They'll try to say it's three-dimensional chess or some shit, and I'm like you have no evidence for that. What that is a post-hoc rationalization. We don't know. I mean, we have a good idea why Stalin did it, but we don't know why Stalin did it. I mean like and I also pointed out that, like for all the talk of settler colonialism, stalin had no problem moving peoples around from their historical and indigenous areas. He had absolutely no problem doing that.

Djene Bajalan : 2:21:44

Just look at the population of Kazakhstan.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:47

Why are there so many Koreans there? Yeah?

Djene Bajalan : 2:21:49

exactly.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:56

Don't fool yourselves about the historical facts. These people were acting in national defense interest. If you want to justify what Stalin did in that, fine, but be honest about that's what you're doing. Don't pretend like it was in the interest of the world communist movement or that the world communist movement didn't give a shit about imperial imperialism, because I also find that claim to be just wild. You know like when we talk about western leftist, it does seem to me that that is a that, our western marxism, which includes, by the way, a whole lot of people who aren't, and never claim to be marist.

Djene Bajalan : 2:22:42

Oh yeah, like all the post-modernist people. Well, you know, like it's a couple of things. It's a red flag when somebody starts going on about Western Marxism in a particular way for me, Because it makes no sense.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:57

Well, when I start asking them okay, well, what do you know? Like what sides are you picking these debates in China? Other sides do you pick in these debates in China of the Sino-Soviet split? And they won't answer you directly.

Djene Bajalan : 2:23:07

Oh yeah, because they all would have picked the Soviet one, but then the Soviets lost. So now they have to make it up that they have to support China. Mental gymnastics, buddy.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:21

Right and like, well, I'm like okay, then why did the U Right? Well, I'm like okay, then why did the US support? Why did the US give so much tacit support to Camille Rouge for so long? I mean that even fucked Chomsky up, to be fair. That wasn't just Marxist-Leninist, but like, what was that about? Why did China protect Pinochet or whatever? Again, I'm not trying to come down on China. My point is Chairman Mao says the enemy of your enemy is your friend. He says that multiple times in his sayings. I'm like he acted that way, but what did that do to world communism? It's a completely different thing. And when people like you know there was reasons for Mao to be concerned there really was. I'm not saying there wasn't, but it's just. You can't spin this about this being about, frankly, a bunch of academic nerds who may or may not have gotten CIA money somehow undoing world communism.

Djene Bajalan : 2:24:31

If world communism was undone by a bunch of academics paid by the CIA, maybe you guys considered that your world communism was stupid.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:42

Or at least weak. Weak Pathetic, I mean, like I actually think that people aren't thinking through the implications of what they're saying.

Djene Bajalan : 2:24:54

No, they're just talking nonsense. It's conspiracy nonsense. They like a good old conspiracy theory. They love it. You know they. Just Because conspiracy theories theories in a weird way make it so that there are some malign forces. You remove the malign forces, you lift the fog of confusion from people's eyes and the problem is solved when it isn't that easy.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:21

All right and I've always thought that that we on the left always criticize white wingers for for defaulting to conspiracy theories to explain complex problems.

Djene Bajalan : 2:25:31

No, the leftists are just as bad.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:34

We are now.

Djene Bajalan : 2:25:36

Yeah, we certainly are. That's a grim point to end on.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:42

Yeah, it is, but you and I never end on non-grim points. I mean, my call is not for people to give up on anti-imperialism, but please, please, please, try to be more critical and think through what you're saying and not just react to the dominant narrative with a counter narrative.

Djene Bajalan : 2:26:06

Exactly, you know. Don't try, don't confuse analysis, for you know advocacy, right? No, yeah, try and understand what people are saying and try to try to understand the region in its own terms, or just don't fucking talk about it, right, but don't do this nonsense where you project your own political fantasies on people in the Middle East.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:38

Yep, and that's probably a good place to end this. And who knows, by the time I release this, everything might be totally different and even shittier. I have no idea.

Djene Bajalan : 2:26:49

You can probably guarantee that it's going to be even shittier, so that's a safe one.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:56

All right. Well, on that Besner-like note, we're going to end.