Inside Iran’s Impasse And Syria’s Shadow Wars with Djene Bajalan

Start with the headlines and everything looks simple: a “crown prince” trending on social feeds, viral clips of pre-revolution Tehran, and bold claims that one more round of pressure will tip the balance. Look closer and the picture changes. We unpack Iran’s internal stalemate and Syria’s shifting lines with a clear eye on what’s driving events: sanctions that harden the regime’s patronage networks, diaspora psyops that mistake nostalgia for strategy, and the vanishing space for any liberal or left alternative that might organize hope into power.

We walk through how Iran’s formal elections and parliament sit under real veto points from the Supreme Leader and security services, why the reformist track keeps collapsing, and how dollarization and elite access to cheap currency rig the economic playing field. That material strain feeds youth despair, anti-religious backlash, and polarizing street slogans the regime can exploit. Outside the borders, expected lifelines don’t arrive. Russia and China prefer stability at low cost. The “axis of resistance” has limits and its own priorities. Israel and Turkey maneuver in Syria while the SDF faces pressure to retreat from Arab-majority areas. Once again, Kurdish politics become the lever many states pull to consolidate authority.

We also scrutinize the information environment: Saudi-backed outlets, AI-washed propaganda, and English-language punditry that often substitutes for real reporting under an intense blackout. When verification fails, certainty thrives—and that’s a gift to hardliners. Instead of romantic solutions or regime-change fantasies, we outline realistic levers that protect lives and keep political possibilities open: unions and professional associations setting bright lines, targeted pressure that hits elite rents rather than civilians, and media practices that prioritize verification over virality. It’s not flashy. It’s the kind of strategy that sustains pluralism after the hashtags fade.

If you value sober analysis without cheerleading, hit follow, share this episode with a friend who loves geopolitics, and leave a review with the one question you want answered next. Your questions shape where we take this conversation.

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Agenda: Iran And Syria
• 3:17 Shah Nostalgia And Diaspora Propaganda
• 8:17 Media, Front Groups, And Opposition Politics
• 13:17 Slogans, Agents, And Confusion On The Ground
• 18:17 Iran’s Hybrid State And Reform Dead Ends
• 23:47 Sanctions, Dollarization, And Elite Advantage
• 28:47 Youth Despair, Anti-Religious Backlash, And Polarization
• 33:47 Regime Options: Repression, Coup, Or Collapse
• 39:17 Regional Posture And The Limits Of Allies
• 43:47 Psyops, Information Blackouts, And Verification
• 48:17 Syria’s Chessboard: HTS, Turkey, And Israel
• 53:47 The Kurdish Factor And State Consolidation
• 59:17 Massacres, “Toleration,” And Bottom-Up Violence
• 1:04:17 Rojava Myths, SDF Realities, And Oil Politics
• 1:09:17 Authoritarian Choices And The Missing Left
• 1:13:47 America’s Fragmented Left And Subculture Politics
• 1:20:17 Unions, Internationalism, And Sensible Red Lines
• 1:24:47 Factional Histories: Islamists, Kurds, And The Left
• 1:29:47 Language, Elites, And Misreading The Region

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:51

Hello and welcome to Vulnerable Hug Dreams with Gene and Mina's on our minds. So we'll be talking about the Middle East today, primarily the totally controversial and not completely delusional topics of Syria and Iran. So Gene, both of these are areas of both personal and professional overlap for you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19

They certainly are not. And I just I just want to let let the uh Vanauts know that I've had to retire the anti-desi racism joke uh because it's just not funny anymore. But yes, the the the the manna stuff is getting out of control and the discourse is quite bonkers, especially around Iran. There's a lot of crazy you know information going around. The coverage is is extremely interesting. I'm sure everybody has noticed that compared to other rounds of Iranian protests, the fail son of the fail son shah is pretty prominent in a lot of the coverage that we are speaking. Now, of course, uh, you know, me and my uh partner Sarah, you know, we've noticed a lot on our social media feeds. There is an enormous amount of pro-shah slogans going around, like TikTok videos, kind of clip montages of Iran under the Shah with people, you know, I don't know, playing tennis or like girls going to school, you know, that kind of stuff. Huge amount of propagandas, lots of videos of people saying the slogan yek milet, yek parcham, yek shah, javi shah, which means uh, you know, one nation, one flag, one uh Shah, long live the Shah. We're seeing a lot of that going around as well. The Iranian TV station, Iran International, which is a Saudi-backed TV channel, you know, they've been on this pro-Shahist kind of beat for a long, long time as well. So we're seeing an intense propaganda campaign taking place, which we should look at as kind of distinct from what's actually taking place in Iran, although there is important connections, which I can come to in a moment. And I think it's also extremely important to note that this morning, Haretz confirmed some of my suspicions that, you know, obviously not all this campaign is organic. I mean, you know, the the pro-shah people probably have enough of their own organizations to do this all, but there are other forces behind it. Now, I would caution against saying like the US government is behind this because within the Trump administration, you know, various Iranian opposition groups have their supporters. Rudy Giuliani, for example, has been on the payroll of the Mujahadini Khalkh, which is a uh, and I use this very loosely, a kind of left-wing Islamist nationalist political organization, highly organized, highly effective. They've done a lot of uh lobbying over the years uh in the in in the West. They work through a lot of front organizations as well. So, you know, within the diasporic and opposition space in the United States, the you know, there's no particular faction in charge as well. Trump's kind of like brushed off talk of meeting with the Felson so-called crown prince. It really annoys me when people call him a crown prince, actually. It's like there's no monarchy in Iran, he's not a crown prince of anything. Like, I'm crown prince, then maybe I should start using my ancestral aristocratic titles if that's if we're all doing that now, right?

C. Derick Varn: 4:49

I mean, he reminds me of like that guy who's like the the great-great grandson of Bonaparte III that goes around claiming to be royalty and you know around France, or the Bourbonist guy, or the Habsburg guy. There's lots of you know two generation Fellsons of monarchies rocking around.

SPEAKER_00: 5:08

But I do want to note, like, you know, the Bonaparte guy and the Fail son Shah, like at least the Bourbons and stuff actually have like a deep history leading back into the medieval period. The you know, the Bonaparte just nicked it in the 19th century, and the Pahlavi, like Reza Khan Pahlavi was just basically kind of an illiterate dude who joined the Cossack Brigade and rose to like prominence within the Iranian government after the second first world war, and initially wanted to establish a republic, but you know, faced some opposition from the more conservative elements of society and instead overthrew the Qajar dynasty, establishing his own kind of uh dynasty in its place, the Pahlibi dynasty. So, you know, we have this huge you know, we have this huge propaganda campaign. I'd never seen anything like it. You know, there's always pro-shah propaganda lurking around on certain corners of the internet, but there's a real push going on at the moment, and it's like that it must be botted to hell. There's probably some people, you know, liking it. There's a lot of pro-shah sentiment amongst amongst the diaspora, as people will know, you know, large numbers of pro-shah people, former officials, former intelligence agencies, people, business people, you know, left Iran after the revolution. Many of them settled down in places like California. And there, you know, you'll find, for example, within the Iranian community, you know, a significant bit of you know, a significant sense of pro-shah sentiment, quite understandably so. So we have this kind of uh very strange propaganda campaign taking place in the West, which has been picked up by some of the mainstream media. Although, you know, if you pay attention to a lot of the mainstream media coverage, you know, there there is some skepticism as to how much support Mr. Pahlevi has in Iran. You know, I saw Vari Nasser, who's a pretty well-respected scholar, you know, make the point that, you know, the Shah doesn't have any quote unquote ground game in Iran. There's like no political party, no political organization. He's kind of a lazy bun, to be honest. You know, like he's a typical Fail son, he just does interviews on podcasts. He was on PBD's podcast, for example. I think on PBD's butt podcast, he said he wouldn't go back to Iran because all his friends were in America. So, you know, he's just like lurking around there. You know, he's he's more of like an internet personality. But that's coinciding with some stuff that's taking place in in Iran. You know, I've spoken to a few people who are a little bit more connected to what's happening inside the uh Persian majority regions of Iran, and people should always remember that Iran is a multinational state. You know, like you have Persians, maybe 50 to 60 percent of the population, but then you have like lots of different national minorities, the biggest being uh Turks, or perhaps we might call them Azari Turks, but you have Kurds, Balouch, Arabs, you have sort of sub-ethnic groups such as in the north of the country, Turkmen, you know, lots of different groups in the country. But there is some kind of, you know, there are signs that there have been, you know, pro-monarchy slogans shouted by some of the demonstrators. Uh, it's again very difficult to know what's going on. Some people say that it's Mossad agents trying to direct the events on the ground. People should remember, for example, uh Mike Pompeo made this bizarre statement praising Iranian protesters and the Mossad agents behind besides them, which seems like if you want to overthrow the Iranian regime, it seems like a pretty counterproductive thing to say. Some people say that the regime, you know, a Kurdish journalist I know makes made the claim that some documents have come out. I haven't seen them, that the regime is sending people in there to start those chants as like agent provocateurs. And then others are saying, you know, people are, you know, maybe just picking up the the pro-shah slogan as a sign of kind of complete political and social despair. You know, uh previous uprisings, you know, most notably the green movement uprising, you know, were directed towards reforming the Islamic Republic, making it less Islamic, more republic. It's all important to understand when we look at the political structure of the Islamic Republic, at least the formal political structure, you do have the quote unquote, you know, institutions of bourgeois democratic government. You have a parliament, you have an elected president, but you know, all of those institutions are have a under the veto of the supreme leader and the guardian council, and then you know, the practical veto of the security services, most notably the Basiji, the Revolutionary Guard, etc., etc. So, you know, previous movements and you know, going back right down to the 1990s, where you know you have the election 97 reformist candidates coming in, attempts to sort of move away from the hardline period of the early Islamic Republic, you know, various attempts to kind of reform the Islamic Republic to be something a lot more democratic and a lot less under the control of the clerical and military revolutionary elite. But those movements have sputtered out, you know, Pazishkiani is the current president, is you know, more on that reformist camp, but you know, has been really hampered both by the intransigence of the United States and the hard line the Trump administration has taken, and also the suspicion of hardliners within the security apparatus and within the clerical political elite. So you have a kind of political impasse in the country. And as the economic conditions and the environmental conditions continue to degrade over time, you're getting these periodic outbursts of public anger. You know, this one is triggered by the inflationary prices. You know, it was initially framed as an economic, you know, as an economic rebellion, which, you know, I've argued with people, people that are, well, it's not just economic, nothing's that ever just economic, but the, you know, uh, it's the inflation and the prices which are driving people into um into despair. And of course, alongside that, you have the particular political economy of Iran, where you have the the children of the regime's elite, you know, very much like having a much better position. For example, you know, you have this one, I like to call them the tanky native informants, you know, the the elite children of the Islamic Republic in the West going on the kind of quote-unquote anti-imperialist, Marxist-Leninist, pro-Palestine podcast. I'm not naming names, but but these people are extremely elite, right? You know, many of them are in Canada. There have been, in fact, slogans shouted against the regime kids who are in Canada. And then, of course, you have these, you know, huge you have these economic elites who in many ways benefit from the sanctions regime because there's not one exchange rate in Iran. You know, like there's the regime has access to the cheaper dollars, and you know, that puts them in an extremely strong position within the economy. And, you know, it's my understanding that more and more things are being denominated in dollars. And if you don't have dollars, you're kind of in a tough situation. And it's really hitting, it's hitting the middle class, it's hitting the poor, it's all sectors of society, even you know, some of the pro-regime kind of talking heads that you see popping around the West, you know, admit that there are issues. Uh, they may even admit that there's corruption issues as well, but you know, there is obviously a deeper political malaise in the country. And it's important to remember it's 2025, right? Memory of the Shah's regime isn't really alive anymore. Like, let's say, you know, you were 15 years old, 16 years old at the time of the Iranian revolution. How old are you now? You know what I mean?

C. Derick Varn: 13:17

You're 15 years older than me because I was born pretty much concurrent with it.

SPEAKER_00: 13:21

Exactly.

C. Derick Varn: 13:22

So you're like 60.

SPEAKER_00: 13:23

Well, I think you're in your 60s. So, like young people, uh, you know, millennials will probably remember from their childhood the Iran-Iraq war, etc., etc. They grew up in the 1990s, uh, you know, during the period in which like the reformers seemed that they might actually bring around change to the to the system, and there may be some way to kind of reform the Islamic Republic. But you know, now we're getting to Gen Z and you know, millennials who are just in our absolute out despair about the future of the country. There's just no hope going forth. And what seems quite striking, and uh, you know, we were discussing this with friends last night about you know how people approaching Islam. You know, it looks like there have been attacks on mosques, there have been attacks on shrines. Uh, you know, how accurate the pictures you're seeing are coming out are extremely difficult. But there are several theories that could be behind this. You know, it might be the regime trying to consolidate their support amongst more conservative elements of Iranian society by doing again agent provocative stuff. It could be foreign intelligence service, that could be the conspiracy, or it could just be uh a generation who just absolutely see not just the institutions of the Islamic Republic, but the entire religion of Islam as the kind of root of all of their, you know, all of their uh problems and issues, right? You you're you're probably seeing a kind of polarization amongst like the generation, you know, 10 to 15 years younger than me, as they just feel that they're youth and they're hope and they're like like there's no hope going forward. So I think there may be, in response to this, at least amongst some segments of Iranian society, calls for the Shah simply as there is no other viable opposition. My friend uh uh Eskender Sagid uh Sadiqi, who you know studies this you know quite closely, who's an expert on the Islamic Republic and who was interviewed on Navara, I think two days ago, you know, made the point interviewed on this show before, although I don't believe it is currently available for reasons that I'm not gonna discuss on air. So yeah, so he you know he made the point that like what what what are the options right now? Repression, right? And I think he leans, and I I kind of generally agree, is that I think uh there is perhaps an attempt to make the Islamic Republic look shakier than it actually is, at least in terms of its security apparatus. And uh we've seen this huge internet blackout, and it's not just internet, it's like I don't think people can't phone there, it's like extremely hard to contact the country. Well, that's one of the reasons that it's very hard to verify anything coming out of the country. You know, the regime could just like turn its guns on people, right?

C. Derick Varn: 16:18

And you I mean it probably is, and it probably that's what the rumors are is that I mean I protest.

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

I was messaging with a friend of mine who is was very connected with the green movement in in 2009, who was quite high profile in that movement, and you know, she was saying that her contacts were saying that the bodies are piling up, the hospitals can't cope in Tehran. Again, how much of that is exaggeration, how much of that is reality? We don't know, we can't verify. But I suspect that the hammer is coming down hard. You know, the Supreme Leader was not in, you know, was talking about vandals, thugs, foreign agents, you know, that kind of stuff. You know, the the broader uh questions are, you know, could there be some kind of coup from within the system? You know, is there anybody within that, you know, anybody within the system who could push towards a little bit of liberalization?

C. Derick Varn: 17:12

That is or at least figure out a way to get a patron so that so that the banks aren't empty. Yeah, like no help.

SPEAKER_00: 17:19

The other the other possibility is which is which Escandis sees as a kind of variant of this, that you have a kind of Bonapartist figure emerging and kind of seizing the reins of the country. But again, who would do that? Hassim Suleimani perhaps could have done it, but he was liquidated by the United States back in the first Trump administration, and there is no sort of individual of similar similar stature. And not only that, the Iranian armed forces have taken a pounding over the last couple of years. You know, the Israelis uh have inflicted defeat on defeat uh uh upon them, and you know, the Iraqi has pushed a little bit too hard in the quote unquote 12-day war because they got a punch back from those ballistic missiles. But, you know, in terms of Iran's forward position in the Middle East, it's like, I mean, I I would wager it's probably you know it's it's restricted to kind of mainly Iraq these days, you know, Hezbollah is kind of in a different position. So there's no outstanding, maybe someone who I don't know, or you know, I'm not the I'm not like the world's expert on Iranian politics. So, you know, maybe some there's someone else who could do that, but you know, there's no one with an obvious stature. And then of course you could have like uh an actual democratic break within the Islamic Republic, a move to kind of just just move towards democracy, extremely unlikely. There's no reason to believe that the regime would liquidate itself with you know such polarization in the country. And then the final option, again, not impossible, but also remote, is that you could have the Syrianization. There was a lot of talk about the Syrianization of the country. Again, Iran doesn't have, doesn't have the kind of same sectarian soup as Syria does, but there is a lot of potential. Iran, over the course of the 20th century, has gone through periods of kind of centralization followed by state collapse. You have the constitutional revolution at the beginning of the century, which you know ends by about like 1911, and you know, the central government virtually collapsing until the Rezachan Pahlavi seizes power, and then you know, in the 20s and 30s, you know, through enormous coercive violence and thuggery, re-establishes central control. Again, this breaks down in the wake of the you know Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941. And again, under the early uh regime of the Shah, in the late 40s, central authority is re-established, and then of course, during the Islamic Revolution, briefly central authority collapses until it is again consolidated and strengthened. Are there any groups you know that could, you know, the reason that this I think is unlikely is not that there's a potential, there isn't a potential for fragmentized uh fragmentization in Iran? I think at more than at any moment since the Islamic Revolution, there is a fragmentation and a failure in the Iranian nation-building process, but there's a military balance of power. Does anybody have the amount of guns that they could actually resist the power of the Iranian security services, which remain linked and controlled by the regime? So Syrianization seems pretty far off as well. The reason I say that uh the Islamic Republic. And the Iranian nation building problem is in trouble, is that you know there is no left or liberal alternative seen in Iran. And in many ways, insofar as there is organic calls for a Pahlavi return, this is kind of a right-wing solution to the problems of the Islamic Republic. And it's a right-wing solution which will not bring along the national minorities in Iran. I read an article today from a scholar of Iran who has been noting that you know there may be pro-Shah slogans shouted in certain parts of the country, but amongst Kurds and amongst Azeri Turks, a very important and influential community in Iran, a community that has not historically been attracted too much to uh separatism. You know, there is no appetite for a pahlavi. In fact, I have never seen separatist sentiment amongst Iranian Kurds as strong as it is at this, as it's been developing. I've been noticing over the last couple of years the Iranian Kurdish intelligentsia has gone, you know, super hardcore separatists. I'll give you an example. 20 years ago, I visited a camp of exiled Kurdish, Iranian Kurdish fighters in Iraqi-Kurdistan. You know, check it out, talk to them. And you know, when you looked, you know, what their slogans continued to be were, you know, autonomy for Kurdistan, democracy for Iran, right? This was the kind of slogan that was, you know, within the party political line. The party may still maintain that line, but I think Kurdish opinion, at least among some sections of the Kurdish youth and the Kurdish intelligentsia, is far more radical. Slogans in Kurdistan include things like, you know, in Tehran they're fascist, in Kurdistan they're occupiers. So, you know, there's that separatist sentiment. Again, historically, Azari nationalism, Azari Turk nationalism for a variety of different reasons, most notably because Azeri Turks are a very privileged elite often in Iran or constitute a very important component of Iran's elite. You know, for much of the, you know, for much of the last 1,000 years, Iran has been ruled by Turkic dynasties. Turkish groups are important in the clergy, in the ulema, etc., etc. So, you know, separatist nationalism has never really taken root to the same degree as in other communities. But we are I've seen more, you know, pan-Turkish nationalism than I've seen ever amongst the amongst the Azries. Again, I don't think it's a dominant trend amongst the Azriz or as strong as it is amongst Kurds or other groups such as Boluch, uh, both of whom are not only non-Persian but also non-Shia. But you know, there is, you know, there is like these ongoing kind of low-level insurgencies taking place. And those could ramp up, but I just don't think they're in any position to uh to kind of you know challenge the state. But you know, if we look at these calls for the Padovis, the Padlaves to return, I think that is kind of analogous to the growth of separatism, you know, in the absence of a liberal political project in which you know Iran's diversity is recognized and issues are to be resolved through kind of like democratic competition, or in the absence of a left-wing version of that of a kind of class-based politics, what do people have left except nationalism? Now, a friend of mine messaged me today and he was asking me what I thought about uh, he goes, Well, you know, like people are married, you know, well socially integrated. You know, there isn't, for example, like a huge social stigma in Iran about if a Persian marries a Kurd or an Azeri marries, you know, outside of the community. Everybody has an Azeri uncle or a half Turk, you know, a half Kurdish, you know, cousin or what have you, right? And you know, I had a big long think about that, and I was like, well, that might make one feel a little bit better about the prospect of the country. But then I remembered Yugoslavia and in particular Bosnia, which had a particularly high level of integration, and it these things can go south very quickly. So it's quite it's it's quite it's quite concerning, it's quite scary. And of course, the ongoing conditions are in Iran, the political impasse is only made worse by the sanctions regime and the unrelenting war of the United States. You know, the tankies always want to foreground, and I'm using tankies in a kind of sarcastic way, but they always want to foreground the uh US imperialism, which uh or and the kind of economic warfare and actual warfare that has been waged against Iran. But in many ways, that has actually served to consolidate the strength of the regime.

C. Derick Varn: 25:35

I mean, so right now it looks like there's also, I mean, look, at the moment, if you're even listening to the State Department, it feels like we might be fighting five wars at once, plus a war internally to the country at the same time, which of course would not be viable for any nation, even us. But there's apparently two warplanes being shipped off to the Middle East right now. Some have talked about it's bombing supports for Iran. I don't know how that would help anything. Obviously, it would just be the top of government. It's hard for me to know though. I mean, one of the things that that I have gotten the most pushback on in the last three days is saying that because people have been misinterpreting what I said, for one thing, that the multipolarity that we have gotten was the statistically most likely one, and it involves the Bolshevik empires trying to maintain you know sustain themselves by on a regional basis, and people get really mad about that. And then, you know, I think one guy accused me of of getting this from the TV and not you know reading the actual fucking books about this topic. Um not that I not that I cite more than than than Dugan and Lenin, but also Hans Morgenthal, EH Carr, and even fucking free Tikaria. But the point that I'm making is that there doesn't seem to be any regime also really willing to help the Iranian regime right now in any substantive way. Russia doesn't want it to fall, but doesn't seem to be willing to commit anything. China probably the same. I haven't I don't know about the Azure's or you know any of the other uh Central Asian states, what they would do. It does seem like this will be left to be an internal affair, with the exception of the United States and Europe putting its finger on on the button uh on the the scale. I shouldn't say the button because it makes it sound like we're gonna nuke someone. But I also don't know how serious that is because you also have rumors that that the US is going to invade Greenland at any moment.

SPEAKER_00: 27:50

That would certainly be easier than overthrowing the Iranian regime, right?

C. Derick Varn: 27:55

Although that would fundamentally in NATO immediately would be a way to do without congressional authorization.

SPEAKER_00: 28:01

So I think you know, one possibility that uh might happen is you know, over the years the Iranians have uh cultivated the popular mobilization forces in in Iraq. So you have the Shia militias in Iraq, Shia armed groups in Iraq, some of them which have had conflicts with the United States and have been attacked by the United States and Israel as well. They may be able to make use of those groups in a campaign of repression within Iran, much in the same way as Hezbollah allowed itself to be become, you know, the jackbook for the Assad regime, right? So they may be able to call in those favors. But as you say, you know, Iraq is in no position to do anything. Turkey is not going to intervene on behalf of the Islamic Republic for all their rhetoric, they remain wedded to the United States. Azerbaijan, it's got its own thing with uh Armenia, and they're close with Israel as well. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Israel's operations take place via Azerbaijan. And then what? Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, are they in any position to intervene in Iran? No, the Gulf countries. I mean, they could theoretically do something. You know, you have a huge propaganda channel being, you know, Iran international being broadcast. I actually always find it quite funny. A lot of the you know, the shyest Iranian nationalists are deeply anti-Arab, but like their entire you know propaganda campaign is bankrolled by the Saudis, like who they look down at the most. I don't think the I don't think the the Gulf Arabs really want to get into a head-to-head fight with the Iranian regime. It's not that the Iranian regime would destroy them, but they could certainly fire some missiles across the Persian Gulf and cause havoc in the oil industry. If one remembers a few years back, you had those, you know, um uh drone attacks on oil facilities, etc., etc. So there's just nobody in a position to support the Iranian uh government. They're they're allies. I I don't like to call them proxies, actually. I think it's a little bit condescending to call groups like Hezbollah proxies or things like that. They're groups with their their own agendas, etc. But the the pro-Iranian quote-unquote axes of resistance, which so many people put their faith in to resist you know US imperialism and the Israeli genocide, they're in no position to do anything, right? They're no position to intervene. And of course, al-Qaeda's victory in Syria has you know cut uh Iran's, you know, pathway to the Mediterranean as well. So they're in a geopolitically extremely difficult position. They're deeply unpopular at home, but you know, so long as they can maintain a base of support within the armed forces and some kind of social base, I think the regime will be uh quite resilient. The Shah's regime collapsed ultimately because the Shah was like a tick on the body of Iran. You know, he was imposed there by the United States and Britain. He didn't have it deep rooted in the society. He made political decisions over and over again, which alienated his base of support. You know, his initial base of support in the more conservative reactionary elements of society were alienated by his desire to modernize and that attacked their interest. He his anti-democratic instincts and his authoritarianism alienated the intelligentsia, the urban proletariat, and large sections of the middle classes. And so by 1979, it was a relatively, and not, you know, on top of that, the Shah was a kind of very flighty person. We used to call him the suitcase monarch. You know, he was always ready to run off like he'd done in in the 1950s. And, you know, he bolted at the first time of trouble. And his paranoia about the security forces meant that they were kind of in disarray at the time of the revolution, unable to kind of perhaps establish a military regime, something of the type that had emerged in Turkey in 1980, where you have a kind of more coherent and independent armed forces from the kind of civilian government. So the Shah kind of was removed quite easily. But the Islamic regime, as much as people despise it, has deeper roots in society. Those are economic roots, those are ideological roots, those are political roots. They they have a fur, they've had historically a firm base of support. And even as that base of support contracts, you know, revolutionary regimes are a lot harder to dislodge because they are more deeply rooted in the society, they have a deep root in the political economy. Something, again, I would emphasize has been exacerbated by the sanctions regime, which sanctions have this paradoxical effect. Whereas on one hand, they might limit a state's ability to engage in foreign adventurism, they do uh assist in the consolidation of power at home. And then, of course, you have the Iran-Iraq war as well, which helped consolidate that regime. So it's not an easy thing to dislodge. This is not, you know, this is not a regime that was, you know, that has been historically sustained by external forces. It's a regime that has been kind of forged within a crucible of both direct warfare and indirect economic warfare over, you know, 40 years. And even as the ideology kind of becomes empty, even as you know, you know, all of this kind of you know, all of the let's say the kind of redistributive gains of the early revolution, etc., even as all these kind of fade into memory, there is still like some kind of oomph, as you might say it, left in that regime. And because there's seemingly no off-ramp, there's you know, what's the way? You know, what's the you know, what's the path out? So we have this really fundamental impasse at the moment. And there's seemingly, you know, the the actions of the US at the moment only facilitate the closing of ranks within that regime. So they will kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, because if they don't kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, they fear they will be killed.

C. Derick Varn: 34:28

I mean, but that I mean, that is the logic of every civil war. I mean, that's why civil wars are so fucking bloody, is because it is zero sum eventually. I mean, like, and I'm not saying we're anywhere near a civil war in Iran. I mean, like, although who knows? We don't know. The what I find kind of interesting and terrifying about this is I I do have a truism that I've held for most of my life, and that is no ideology withstands more than two months of starvation if the starvations will, and there's no one willing to come to their aid. It's just I'm not even talking about governments, the ideologies itself wither. And so, on one hand, I completely agree with you, but the support for the Islamic Revolution is tenuous, but also does have deep roots in society. It is organic, unlike the Shah, unlike Twitter changing the Iranian flag to the Shah's Iranian flag. They've done that, by the way.

SPEAKER_00: 35:34

It's like there's a huge psy-up taking place. Like, you know, people like to talk, but I mean, it's like a very blatant psy-up, right? It's it's the most obvious psyop I've ever seen in my life, to be honest. And the AI swap that is just coming out is like, oh, and like I have to admit, some of the Mar-a-Lago face stuff, the Iranian uh exiles is pretty disturbing to see.

C. Derick Varn: 35:59

Well, I mean, there's that. I mean, we got AI slap everywhere. People were sharing this thing with this cat uh with this cardinal fighting with ice and winning that was totally AI generated, and then uh there's just uh tons of stuff that are foolish right now. I think, you know, in so much that I have uh I do think the Iranians have tried to play well with. I mean, you know, they've been trying to get a deal with the West for a while. I mean, like and they have won under Obama and they seem to have mostly played by the rules of it.

SPEAKER_00: 36:38

Um I mean, the the tearing up of the the Iran nuclear deal is truly has truly been a disaster because it's created this impasse. Because, you know, with the nuclear deal, there was perhaps an opportunity for the economic situation to be alleviated, the siege to be ended, at least to a certain degree. And I think that would have, you know, that would have facilitated you know a certain degree of opening up in society. It may have provided up, you know, may have provided an opportunity for more republic, less Islamic. It may have also created an opportunity for alternative bases of economic power to develop for a more equitable society. But now we have this kind of uh siege economy, which is not too dissimilar from you know the dynamics during the 90s in Iraq, where you know the siege economy basically meant that you know everything was in the hands of uh Saddam and his buddies, and everyone else was kind of screwed. The Islamic Republic has a broader base than the Basist regime in Iraq, but you know, a similar dynamic. You know, who's getting the last loaf of bread? It's not gonna be you know Javit down the road, it's gonna be, you know, some you know, Syrial war veteran, right?

C. Derick Varn: 38:01

That that said, I mean, if this week last events uh this last week's events are any indication, that does mean there might be internal fracturing within the regime itself. Because if if and this is all you know, I'm gonna answer a question. Is is Iran the the second darkest information zone with only North Korea more opaque? I'm gonna tell you right now, Iran's more opaque than North Korea. We probably know more about what's going on in North Korea today, at this very moment, through at least exchanges with Chinese and Russian sources than we know about what's going on in Iran. And that's not normally true. Like Iran is not normally that closed off. Uh, it is right now, which means that you know we can know what's responding to it in the West. I mean, you know, Gene has ties to to Irani scholars, I have ties to Iran Iranian expatriates that I've talked to many, actually. This is a weird thing in my life. I go down to the poetry and grocery store all the damn time. So it's it's talked about a lot here. I'm not even I I'm I'm not a big I'm not in a big hotbed of like rich uh Baha'is. I'm mostly you know, here is a lot of well there's a lot of people in uh uh Iranian Jews.

SPEAKER_00: 39:29

A lot of people go back and forth, you know, until recently, people could still get visas and come back and forth. You know, here at Missouri State, we had you know a number of students coming from Iran during this period, studying their university here in the United States. You know, people I know from the UK travel back and forth and things like that. So, you know, it's not it's not like you know it's a hermit kingdom where like you can't get in or out, right? People could travel. There are of course risks, you know. There were people there are people who you know being arrested and things like that, but you know, people could travel, people could visit, you could do tourism and stuff like that. You know, it's like there was a flow of information.

C. Derick Varn: 40:07

They would let Americans in if you were willing to have your the it in your passport and deal with it when you came home. I've known someone who'd done it, like yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 40:14

I mean, what's his name? It's not like the only Iranians in the West are people who fled in 1980, right? You know, you there are people here coming all the time, right? Or were coming all the time. Now that's tightened up because of the Trump administration, but you still have large numbers. Like the this is the thing. The r one of the things that annoys people is you have the regime people, you know, being in Canada and like studying, going to elite institutions, you know. I I'm not gonna again name names, but you know, there were always scholars, Oxford. Who were always like looking to bootleg a regime people so that they could get access to Iran, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, many of these people, there are you look, there are people who, you know, go on the podcast circuit, who are in the West and go on the podcast circuit, and they're like the daughter of an Iranian diplomat or the son of Khomeini's doctor, right? You know, who speak good English and who, you know, you know, give the quote unquote other side of the picture, who who spoon feed a certain variety of anti-imperialists the story that they want to hear. That, you know, there may be a few flaws in the country, but actually, you know, the regime is deeply popular, right? When it's not, right? When people have felt, especially since the green movement in 2009, increasingly, that there is no escape hatch or no pressure valve through which change can be achieved. And the future is just a human boot stamping on their face until the end of eternity. A human boot which is reinforced by another human boot of the United States, which also stomps on their face. So they're getting stomped on on in two ways. So, you know, trying to explain the dynamics that take place in the current in the country and understand Iran in its own terms is not the sculptory of the actions of European, European or American imperials. And obviously, you know, Iran has profoundly being shaped by the the uh that condition. But you know, that is also not the same as saying that the regime is deeply popular or that people aren't right to to be angry. As some one of the most annoying Iranian native informants on the podcast circuit always goes on about, you know, like how dare you criticize Iran, they're gonna liberate Palestine, they ain't gonna liberate shit, right? They are not gonna liberate shit. And mind my words, like inside Iran, people will be saying, fuck Palestinians, right? Because the Palestinian issue has become so connected as an ideological raison d'etre for the regime, you know, people you know just take a kind of knee-jerk reactive response to it and say, like, fuck those Palestinians. All our money is going to support Hezbollah to support the Palestinians. Why isn't that money coming to us? Iran, you know, when the neoconservatives complained that Obama quote unquote gave the Iranians all this money, there is a quote unquote rational kernel to that because you know the end of the nuclear deal, funds were unlocked, and what happened, you know, Iranian adventurism in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, and they didn't get the money back, money that could have been spent on alleviating the situation within Iran was spent on Iranian geopolitic to geopolitical ambitions. And you know, people can make all kinds of uh arguments about why that's necessary, why that's not necessary, etc. etc. But at the end of the day, for your average Iranian citizen who's not in a great economic position, it's irrelevant, right? It's irrelevant.

C. Derick Varn: 44:00

I guess you know the type to we I mean, since we're talking about the the paradoxes of the middle east middle and near east. We have to talk about the Kurds because it comes up in multiple situations right now. I mean, we have this there is uh a weird celebration, like a weird celebration of the of the end of the Bathist regime, not a regime I'm fond of, but I knew that what was likely to replace it was going to be you know worse. And it looks like right now, not only do you still have Syria being used as a pincushion for a lot of the world's bombs, which it's been now for over a decade. It also seems like we are seeing the Kurds get betrayed yet again, which is something I feel like I say every year and a half, Gene.

SPEAKER_00: 45:07

I mean, like you know, I'll I I'll put it, I'd put it like this. It's like it's it's not even betrayal, it's just like the structural nature of Middle Eastern politics. Like I have a I was actually thinking about, you know, like for a second book to write was actually to to be on this uh on this very topic about you know the role of the Kurds in the way that states consolidate themselves in the Middle East, but that's kind of a second order issue. Oh, Vaughn's disappeared. I'm gonna have to vamp for a second. One second. Is he gonna message me? Is he alive? Where are you, Vaughn? Has power cut in the uh in uh in uh Utah? I don't know. Anyway, well what I what I was going to say was the regime, the regime, Al Shaara in particular, has been quite astute in his foreign policy. It's very clear that he wants to make a deal with the Israelis. He has been very soft on the Israelis, despite you know, Israeli expansionism into Syria, beyond the Golan Heights. So you already have the Golan Heights, which have been occupied by Israel, but now you of course have them pushing beyond towards the south of Damascus, pushing for this kind of demilitarization, taking advantage of uh sectarian and you know just gangsterism within the territory south of Damascus to kind of extend their influence and doing it on the rubric of protecting the uh Druze religious minority, which are a group which are seen as kind of beyond the pale uh for the Muslims. Uh, also Jolani is a protege of the Republic of Turkey. He's uh you know obviously following Turkish policy. Uh Turkey hopes to gain kind of perhaps military bases, something that Israel opposes, and Turkey will probably be the you know at the forefront of the reconstruction of Syria. Turkey's uh construction industry is extremely important, and this is a new market for them to push into. And of course, as part of that, Turkey wants to ensure that you know schemes of Kurdish self-rule and autonomy, in particular, because uh the Kurdish movement in Syria is dominated by the PKK sister organization, you know, they want to ensure that is suppressed. Then you have the United States at the same time, you know, Al-Shara seems to have had a you know good impression on uh on Trump. And the the economic zeitgeist is neoliberalism. I wrote the I wrote the article about it in Compact, which was the you know, like neoliberalism with salafi characteristics. You know, Islamism doesn't have a fixed economic policy, you know, you know, in the 1970s, the Islamic Republic uh you know cribbed a lot of the kind of left-wing populist discourse of that time period, uh, engaged in redistributive uh projects of economic development, but even they neoliberalized in the 1990s, and you know, like what's the you know, we're still at the end of history. Everyone's talking about the end of the end of history, but are we really at the end of the end of history? We seem to, you know, the the past.

C. Derick Varn: 48:29

I don't think we've ever been at the end of the end of history. I like I both think history both never stopped, and also for all the post-liberalism, you know, even Marxist-Leninists frame their arguments on liberal terms today, whether they realize it or not.

SPEAKER_00: 48:54

I mean, that's my whole point. That's my whole point about like arguing about the virtue of this or that regime that's under American attack, is actually framing your argument in terms of liberal internationalism because the opposition to military adventurism should have nothing to do with uh the character of a regime under attack. I mean, like, what's the worst regime that everybody hates? Like Urban's Hungary. I don't know. Let's say the US went and did a regime change operation in Urban's Turkey, in Urban's Hungary, or I don't know, where like they did a regime change war like in Saudi Arabia.

C. Derick Varn: 49:30

Or we can just like talk about you know the U club wars and stuff or Norieger. Noriega was a piece of shit.

SPEAKER_00: 49:36

Yeah, yeah, Norega was a piece of shit, and probably that's one of the few interventions that turned out better, right? You know, for the people of Panama, like because it blowed Noriega sucked, right? And it was like the US's guy, wasn't he? Wasn't he like a school of the Americas alarm?

C. Derick Varn: 49:51

Yeah, he was a school of America's guy. I mean, like look, I mean, one of the things we're very good at is turning on our guy. Um, I I laugh, it's really dark, but it's it's like true. I mean it's it's an interesting thing to think about right now. I mean, we're talking about this when at any moment you can the peripheralization of the core is a lot more possible. And this is what I mean about the end of history being both never have never been true and is still completely true, is because like we might be living through liberal justifications for you know any number of fragmentary whatevers. I mean, look, your home country, and by that I mean the UK, is degenerating to airship one remarkably quickly. My home country, where I currently live, is on one hand trying to hate everyone's wall itself, on the other hand, trying to do it in the most bellicose way possible to maintain it. I agree it is to maintain its own imperial power just in a different scope. And lastly, is doing it at the cost of I mean in my lifetime, I've never I used to laugh because the liberals were being unserious about civil war when they were talking about like MAGA chuds in 2019. There's a real sense that today it is a non-zero possibility that you could have a National Guard opening fire on federal agents or a non-zero possibility that you could have the invocation of Texas versus white when a blue state that's had all of its funding cuts from the federal government refuses to send federal taxes. Those are all real things that are non-zero. They're not likely yet, but they are non-zero. Now, I say this because that makes all the stuff going on with all these power plays everywhere else really damn precarious. We're talking about the Middle East, right? And I'm I'm talking about the situation in America, but like the United States has been putting its finger on the scales in all these situations. So much so that like, on one hand, no, we wouldn't honestly be talking. I said if the world wasn't on fire the other day, we'd be talking about Iran. And then I said, you know, friends, like, no, we wouldn't. I'm like, well, we wouldn't honestly be talking about it, right? Because hell, most people be talking about their mass and whatever the media told them. But they would be talking about it right now. This is like seventh thing on the fucking news panel, and the same with what's going on in Syria with the Kurds. You know, it's like where I would have put like what happened with the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians a couple years ago that no one was fucking talking about.

SPEAKER_00: 53:28

Well, I would say this, like uh the US is probably is probably not particularly happy about what's going on right now, but they've got a lot of other things that are taking place at the moment, and there's really like uh you know, short of a military intervention, there's not really much the US can do possibly at the moment. You know, the enclave in a Halipo that is under attack is being, you know, it's a Kurdish neighborhood that has been under SDF control for ages, and you know, there's an intense propaganda campaign being directed against the SDF. No, I'm fine with criticizing the SDF, you know, like they've done some pretty dumb things, some pretty shitty things. Somebody in the chat asked about the child soldiers. I don't know how true all that is. There has been like accusations in the past that they have recruited from 16, 17 year olds. That's certainly true. Some people just go and join them for a variety of different reasons. For example, a lot of young women to say to escape socially conservative backgrounds. This is kind of an escape hatch, is joining the SDF, you know, getting a weapon and you know becoming a fighter is, you know, just like young men is a kind of an exciting opportunity and a way to uh escape a stultiing social life. And also the SDF, you know, years ago said that it wasn't going to recruit child soldiers. So there's a harsh propaganda campaign going, particularly from Turkish uh backed think tanks. So this is really about Turkey. This is really about what they want. I'm I suspect that this operation, which has been launched by you know ISIS and Al-Qaeda veterans. I mean, like there's a guy called Robin Kasab who's looks he's like an Anglo-Syrian author, always trying to justify anything the Julani government does, like through woke language. Big dude looks like he's not allowed within you know 250 meters of a school, to be honest. But you know, this, you know, like I said, that it's it's fine in my book to criticize the SDF, you know. Like I wrote an article not so long ago about this, about like some of the illusions about Rojava. You know, there are things to praise, but you know, honestly, at the end of the day, if you're expecting like uh the anarchist utopia to emerge from like a periphery off a periphery, you really need your head checking. And at the end of the day, the political order is a kind of anarchist bonapartism, like centered around the military commander of the STF forces, Muslim uh Kobani, right? So you have this kind of situation on the ground. But you know, don't suddenly like criticize the STF and then act like Al-Qaeda or or whatever we're calling the new government in in Syria are like some kind of like saints. You know, these are people who have engaged in a lot of head chopping, a lot of violence, and you know see it with your own eyes. We're already seeing, you know, uh people being executed, people being uh like killed. This is all, I think, in an attempt to pressure the SDF to at the very least withdraw from Arab majority regions. So I think what that'll be the next fault line. But there it's going to be a little bit more difficult because this is where the United States has interests, this is where the United States is based, Syria's oil is there. And one thing I think that uh stopped Trump doing is uh doing a full pullout in the first term was the fact someone said to him, you know, there's a bunch of oil there, and if you leave, we've basically been there and we didn't take the oil. Like the oil is like worthless to the United States, nobody wants to go in there and get get it, to be honest, mostly used for local consumption.

C. Derick Varn: 57:00

Yeah, so that's even further the poor the price of shale. Like, come on.

SPEAKER_00: 57:06

Yeah, so but you know, there is a pretty harsh propaganda directed against the Kurds. And you know, this is for this is the perennial character, what I was talking about. You know, what I would might want to do as a book one day is about the role of suppressing Kurds in state consolidation, because there it's it is an all, you know, it is a continuous power. The Republic of Turkey was was uh consolidated on the back of a Kurdish rebellion, not just through the suppression of the rebellion, but the use of that rebellion to as a as a pretext to launch a kind of broader repression campaign across the country. I think a war against the Syrian Kurds in Syria could well be used by the Jolani regime to bolster its internal in its internal legitimacy for the militant wings of the movement to kind of bolster their position. Saddam Hussein's consolidation of power was you know only possible following the suppression of a Kurdish rebellion in the 1970s. The Islamic Republic consolidated its political power in Kurdistan. That was the first internal enemy, the first kind of major conflict. So, you know, this is not to say, you know, Kurdish political movements are like you know, saints or that, you know, every Kurdish political demand is the right one or the wrong one or whatever. It's to say that, you know, this is a kind of perennial dynamic in the regions and the technologies and the the uh forms of repression and the kind of enhancing of security apparatus in face of quote unquote an internal enemy has been critical in the consolidation of authoritarian orders across all of these all of these countries. And I think that's perhaps a dynamic that's at work here in Syria. But I also think that this is deeply linked to the wishes of the of the Turkish government. The Syrian government is a supine government that is trying, which you know really is like you've got to admire them in a certain way. They're managing to please Israel, Turkey, the United States while maintaining their core mission of murdering non-Muslim and non-Arab minorities. It's impressive.

C. Derick Varn: 59:17

Yeah, it is impressive in in some ways, a very dark ways. So I mean it looks like the key players in the region remain the key players in the region anytime soon, no matter what happens in Iran, and definitely what happens in Syria.

SPEAKER_00: 59:39

So I have somebody in the chat saying, I'm not saying HTS is unpopular, that they're pretty popular amongst Sunni Arabs because the Sunni Arab population is pretty radicalized towards a reactionary form of uh you know uh Syrian nationalism. Of course they have some popular support, uh, but they're also massacring minorities. Or if uh and I would say this, I don't think al-Shara necessarily is like calling the shots and demanding they be massacred, but you know, at the end of the day, the uh the the the Syrian Islamists, you know, it's a coalition of a lot of different groups, and it's really difficult to control, right? I don't think so Giovanni wants like too much trouble, to be honest. I think he just wants to like get some foreign direct investment, enjoy some Dubai chocolate, and you know, just chill. But you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of rad very radical people within the Syrian, you know, armed forces.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:41

So when if we think about like I mean, I I want to point out that point on everything. I've taught I've talked about this even in terms of like studying the Soviet Union and the purges. We talk about the deft tolls of the purges of the deft tolls of the of the cultural revolution, which I actually tend to defend a lot more than a lot of people like.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:02

You want to send podcasters like working picking strawberries in the Midwest.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:08

I mean, I also wanted some professors to pick strawberries in the Midwest, but you're already there, so I don't have to send you anywhere. I've also picked strawberries. Uh yeah, I know you like that. Um you're living through rustification, Gene. No, you know, in all seriousness, my kale is all dead, though. So that's unfortunate. Really? None of it grossly.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:30

It all died, it all died, it all died. Cyrus plants are doing great, but mine uh my okay. My onion is doing okay.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:40

One thing I want to like emphasize here though, when it comes to massacres, and it's something to think about, it's happened in US history too. Even state-sanctioned massacres tend to not be directly state-sanctioned. That's true when even when you look, I mean you look at studies of Germany during during the Shoah, you look at the you look, you look at the Middle East. The purges, you look at anything that happened in the Middle East.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:06

Look at the history of the pogroms. I mean, like this is this is the kind of innovation of you know, studies of the pogroms for a long time they were portrayed as like a direct, you know, a kind of direct conspiracy of the Russian government. But a lot of scholarship came out demonstrating actually, no, the government tolerated them, but uh, you know, the dynamics were very often local, very often a product of you know social change, you know, like in Russia, the the gradual improvement of the economic and social position of, let's say, Jews led to a reactionary black, you know, backlash, and you had these massacres, and to maintain legitimacy, you know, reaction regimes, if not directing them, because reactionary regimes don't want violence taking place out of their purview, right? You know, it's not like something they like to have because that can get out of control, but they were tolerated as a kind of necessity. Same with the pogroms against Armenians in the late 19th century. Kurdish tribes uh were certainly empowered by the government through patronage and military, you know, integration as like informal militias within the military, but the pogroms were often driven by the ambitions of particular tribal leaders to seize land and were then tolerated by the regime because they didn't want to alienate an important sort of column of support for a particular regime.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:26

So, like I mean, yeah, I I think about this in terms of what I saw in person in in Cairo in 2016, where there were attacks on the cops that were protected by the government, where the government just happened not to be there on certain days. I do not think the government set that up. You know, I don't think they were like conspiring with certain Islamist groups, but it was very convenient for them to turn their head and just allow whatever to happen, happen, and then impose stuff later. I mean, I think that's true in a lot of these massacres in history, and states are very good, as actually, unfortunately, part of the nature of nation building, knowing how to just kind of let these organic tensions overflow. And for those of you in the United States, you're living through it in a much smaller way than what normally happens in other places.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:28

Yeah, I mean, I think like a good example, let's say, is like uh a military coup, right? Let's say you have a bunch of junior officers, you know, they it's like 1955, a bunch of junior officers, you know, they kick down the prime minister's door, arrest him, you know, take the radio station, do all that kind of stuff. You're a senior officer in the armed forces, then. So what do you do at that point, right? Do you resist those junior officers? Or do you say, okay, now I'm in charge, respect the chain of command, right? You know, often it's like, you know, when we talk about bottom-up history, sometimes, you know, it's the tail wagging the dog. Compared, let's say, like you have in Egypt in the 1950s, you have a coup coup, and there's a struggle for power in the armed forces, and the lower-ranking officer, Nasser, he he kind of wins that struggle and takes over the country and sidelines, you know, people like General Nari, people who were like higher up in the hierarchy. 1960, Turkey has a coup d'etat. It's launched by you know junior officers. And at that point, what does the senior command do? They take ownership of the coup and send all the junior officers to be like ambassador to India and then restore the kind of bourgeois democratic political order after rewriting the constitution. You know, so like you know, often, often, you know, when you have hierarchical institutions, you know, it's not just a one top-down process, you know, like within that institution, the actions of lower-ranking officials can force the the hand off those who are formally higher up in the uh in the chain of command. Yeah. Is this live? It is live.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:18

Yeah, it's totally live. So I you know, I mean we ask ourselves what you know domestically there's been a lot of talk of like Antifa and and the PKK, which is which is a very unfortunately there are some high fro profile people, including somebody we actually know who went to Rajaba during that time period. I mean, Brace Belden did too. I think a lot of the left really deliberately deluded itself about the viability of that model and what that would mean in the geopolitical situation that the particular Syrian Kurds were in, with Turkey being right there bearing down on everything. And I think there's been a lot of over-optimism about what would even happen if you did get rid of these regimes, which often leads to like left liberals making profoundly conservative arguments, but ones that unfortunately seem to be somewhat true. So, for example, what I mean by that is like I mean, we saw what happened in the Arab Spring.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:40

Like I mean, even Tunisia's gone now, so it's like right. Well, this is this is the problem. I mean, I think the issue is not just you know, it's not just that there's no kind of left-wing alternative, there's no liberal alternative, right? There's no kind of deep-rooted kind of notion of a liberal political order that is voluntaristic, that respects, you know, individual rights, and we just have this kind of authoritarianism, whether it's a kind of secular variant of authoritarianism, whether it's an Islamist version of authoritarianism, you just have like what was it that what's his name used to say? Gor Vidal said there's two, you know, the United States has two right-wing parties or something. You know, like this is we've got multiple, multiple choices of right-wing politics. Do you like in Iran today? Do you want a right-wing Islamic-flavored right-wing politics? Do you want a pro-Shah uh right wing, you know, Persian supremacist right wing politics? Do you want separatist nationalism right-wing politics? Pick your right-wing politics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:56

I uh I want to like emphasize this though, because people come at me and they're like, Oh, America doesn't have a left wing, but these places in Europe or whatever else do. And I'm like, Do they? Do they the moment, the moment Corbin leaves the infrastructure of labor, he's a joke. And just look at our party for proof of that. The and I think we just have to realize that outside of maybe China, which is actually poorly understood, even by most people commenting on it on in America, which doesn't have I like I've always said China's the most responsible great power, it's the least imperialist great power. I think that's all true. But that doesn't mean that it's even helping out BRIC states, you know, at the end of the day, definitely in doing shit about Palestine or there's no Chinese international of political parties that are anywhere near power that is like you know, offering except in maybe Cambodia, where there's 40 of them. But go not Cambodia, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:02

But you know, you've got you've got you've got you've got China. It's not like the the Chinese are trying to export their model, right? If anything, like the thing that makes the Chinese the like most responsible actors on the international stage is precisely the thing that undermines the notion that the Chinese model can be generalized, right? If that they don't interfere in people's internal affairs, they're like there to make money, they'll play a little bit of hardball, but they're not gonna bomb you necessarily, but they will send the lawyers after you, they just want to, you know, export their industries, you know, do what they want to do, but then they're not offering a kind of like general generalized model. There's no like pro-beijing like communist party on the verge of taking power in I don't know, Yemen, right? Or in you know, Zimbabwe.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:56

I mean, it's even indicated by socialism with Chinese characteristics or Mao Zedong thought, whichever one of those two ideologies you want to pick up the seven or eight forms of Maoism, is that those two ideologies, and those are the two dominant ones that have existed in Chinese history in actual China, have been based around the idea that Chinese development was unique and it wouldn't be easily modeled elsewhere anyway. If it could be modeled, it could be modeled in very specific periphery areas, but ones that were large enough to have you know fairly diverse internal economies, which you know that would be all of India, maybe. So, you know, and the entire history of the left, I mean, even in America, it has been tied into responding to that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:49

I'm not here, I mean, I think getting mad about the Chinese is silly, but yeah, and what would what would like what would the Chinese model in the US look like? It would be like a one-party state run by Elizabeth Warren. I mean, I you know, I might rather live in that, but what yeah, I mean, like it would be like the Elizabeth Warren, one party state, you know, you'd have the you'd be able to you'd be able to ring up the consumer protection agency and tell them to tell uh nope, don't make the joke, but tell certain people not to keep ringing you with their scams, and you know, we might get five high-speed railway, and we would probably be slightly nicer on the international stage. Yeah, the maybe that's what we want to call for the Elizabeth Warren One Party state. You know, I mean they're not gonna the Chinese are not gonna be exporting their model, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:45

I mean, my my problem right now is that uh I agree with a lot of people that the American left, in so much that it exists, and it does exist. I'm actually kind of also tired of there is no American left. No, there's a there's an American left, it's it's people who've been radical radicalized, whatever the fuck that means, in the last you know, decade and a half, who by and large have no military experience, not even that much work experience. Watch a lot of podcasts, are downwardly mobile and alienated. Who, if they're working class, I mean I I have a working class audience despite what people say about me using big words and shit. That came up today, too. I'm in a foul mood, guys. I'm sorry. But what you know, a lot of them are disabled because one one eighth of the male blue-collar working class population is on disability because they've been injured at work. I mean, it's it is this bizarre situation where I I want to say that the you know the US left has failed, but like it failed so fucking long ago at this point that it's like kicking a corpse.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:06

Insofar as there's a US left, you have we we like I think me and you've been talking about the long 2016, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:14

Yeah, we have.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:15

We were you know, like you you had the quote unquote millennial left, and you know, I got enemies to both use, you know, I got an enemy off the millennial left man to even agree that the millennial left is a kind of useful term, not so much in a generational sense, but in a sense to speak about a political moment, like the 2016 to 2020 moment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:38

I I started with 20 with the end of the 90s anarch anarchistic in saying anarchists is actually giving up too much.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:46

All that like anti-capitalist stuff like they did in Seattle in 1999.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:50

Right. Like my my um ingratiation to the left that by the way led to me. I think it's one of the three events that led to me being for only about four years a flaming fucking reactionary, was my experience of that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:04

So you have you have one fact, you have like the the millennial left, which I think most I think von and I both thought it was dead and buried in 2021, but it's kind of come back. I'm actually surprised that it's come back and event uh avengers, but largely in response to uh the the the Trump administration, and not it's I don't think it's simply because of the kind of more repressive at attitude of the Trump administration, but more to do with the like complete devoid, uh you know, there's it's good the Trump administration is completely devoid of any like practical populism in any sense, who's kind of like left a space for it to re-emerge. So we've got the Mam Dani stuff, we've got, you know, and what's going to be interesting for that faction off the American left is how well it will do in the upcoming primaries. Will they get one or two people? Will they get 10 or 15 people, or will there actually be like a kind of sea change? You know, I I don't know at the moment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:02

I highly, highly doubt it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:04

I mean but what I'm saying is it's what I'm saying, there's gonna it's gonna have a presence. So there's that, and then you have the kind of the faction of the left who who's in the in America, whose entire being seems to be taken up by self-flagellation about how terrible Western uh leftists are, and who, while complaining about Western leftists, seem to want to outsource the struggle against imperialism to people living in third world countries. I mean, like we are outsource a lot of shit to the third world. Why not out anti-imperialism? And you know, who whose entire identity is about whining about how bad Americans are. You know, I gotta I got I got news for you. Everywhere in the world is the same, right? Like everywhere in the everybody, you know, like it's all everything's Americanized, right? Like there was a well-known Kurdish feminist, someone I know personally, who was complaining the other day on on Kurdish TV about how you know nobody cares about like culture, poetry, and art anymore. They all just want to be vloggers and like you know that kind of it's like, yeah, that's that's like that's what everybody wants to do. They want to want to be, they want to do like vlogging and like fashion and you know, people are depoliticized, right? In in a really deep sense. So, and that's not just in America, that's everywhere. People love the consumerism. I mean, what do you think Iranians want, right? You know, if Iranians can like get rid of the they just want to be able to have a freaking hamburger to like you know do some cool stuff and things like that, you know, like do a bit of consumerism. They do, you know, like what is Jelani doing? We had this whole jihad in Syria for years, and what's the result? We're gonna have like foreign direct investment, and you can go to a designer hijab shop, you know what I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:52

Well, uh, I both this this is this paradox of where we're at.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:58

Don't make me talk about Oz Khataji, a piece of shit. Blocked me anyway. He's a real dumb face. Screw that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:06

I mean, if we ask ourselves a couple of things, like somebody asked me the other day what do I do for the working class on YouTube, and I was like, nothing. You know, that like like I'm a teacher, I'm a union rep. I educate people through this. Like, yeah, there's working class people, there are people who don't have college education. Because I don't even know what people mean by working class when they bring it up. I guess they mean not college educated, and they assume that people without college education can't ever understand technical jargon because you know they don't use it on their jobs or anything. But my my response to that is like this, you don't being a political influencer, you're not really doing politics. You know, the best we can hope for is that people will listen to this, learn something from it, and do something. But we know that what most people are going to do is parasocially attach to somebody and go on it until that fad runs out because that person probably attached themselves to some internal political movement or made some kind of hot take that didn't make any damn sense, and then they fade in popularity instantly and start disappearing. And it really, I mean, Jason Miles is not wrong, it really does have the feel of subcultures, and we have to talk about subcultures for a second, political or music or whatever. Subcultures start with hardcore devoted people, they move through attracting the public. When they attract the public, they also attract grifters and sociopaths who follow the morally relaxed public, and you have a cycle with that, unless you break out of being a subculture, that's how it goes. And so much of this, and I get why people outside of the United States are particularly outside of the West, are frustrated with this because they hear people talking a good talk all the damn time. And let's be honest, you know, Chapo Trap House had good things to say on Palestine. Did it change a fucking thing? You know, maybe, maybe internally for like two people, but I don't know that it's changed the outcome of anything. I went to the the Palestinian solidarity protest here, thought it was important, and you you know what. I did it though for the Palestinian community here in Salt Lake. I didn't do it because I thought I was gonna do anything about the barb barbarism that happens, happening, has been happening nigh now, three generations to the Palestinians. And this just you know, I want people to understand we're not giving you this information because we think it changes politics, we're giving you information that if you're ever in the place to do anything, maybe you'll be informed and not misinform people.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:21

I mean, this is my total frustration, Vine. It's uh and you know this is my frustration. I try to give my opinion, and I hate the word nuance, but uh, I would prefer like a real I try to give as a realistic picture of what's happening and try to see what's both both sides, trying to understand what people are saying. But if you're not just like rah-ing for a particular side in the conflict, then you're accused of being against that side, uh, you know, a mutual friend of us try to give a nuanced understanding of you know what was happening in Iran, and the comments are all like, You're a Zionist, you're uh you're a shyist, you're like this. It's like so you just want to hear someone tell you what you already think, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:10

I mean, it was pretty interesting when I thought about, for example, the scholar and by the way, we might be wrong about stuff, right? We're constantly wrong about stuff. I want to be very clear on that. I mean, like, I am more knowledgeable than the average person on a lot of the stuff we're talking about, and that means I know shit. I mean I'm serious about that. Like, I have made some pretty off the cuff calls, be not even sometimes where I'm right about like the larger situation, but it doesn't matter because I can't predict what individual people do, which is why when a lot of you say this isn't gonna happen or this isn't gonna happen, you should stop that shit. You don't know. All right, you don't know what is and is not gonna happen. I've been hearing forever, nothing ever changes, nothing ever changes, nothing ever happens. I even heard it last year. I'm sorry if if this doesn't count as something happening in the world, and then things that's happened in the last, I don't know, fucking week, much less the last year. I don't know what would ever count. Like, so you're a bored alienated person on the internet, and you think that you have some political thing to say. Who you know, like I really like who cares? And when people come at me, they go, like, what do you do? I do all kinds of stuff. Do you know what I not do? Talk about it on a broadly public podcast, it would actually risk my fucking strategy to get clicks. I'm a union rep. You will never hear me talk about the specific things I do as a union rep on this fucking show. You might hear me talk about it in abstract, but you'll never hear it. It took me years to mention what I saw in Egypt. One, because I wasn't gonna, you know, like what can I do about a country I'm not a citizen of, but two, like, it's dangerous. You know, it was extremely dangerous. You know, here I can talk about what happens here in America because I'm here and I can tell you what we know about what's going on in Iran, which you know is complicated. I've been trying to get my head around the Iranian situation, knowing people from there, having lived in the Middle East for I don't know, most of my life. Like I've kind of intuited since the since the 90s that a lot of what I was taught about it was bullshit, but that doesn't mean I knew anything. So a lot of this stuff is for you to do something with or not. I can't make you do anything. These kinds of things are diffuse, right? Like, like, okay, I want to ask you like on political change, why is the DSA pretty much not effective? Most places ineffective in New York. Why? Why you know why have you ever asked yourself, like, hmm, why is that? Because New York is literally the only place where the DSA has a significant portion of the population, which by the way is still very small, to actually have multiple political effects outside of like the city council level. All right. So when we talk about stuff like Iran or Venezuela, I mean what's happening in Venezuela? All of it, all of what I heard about it, Americans' opinions on it on all kinds of sides, it feels like people talking about fucking sports. And it I, you know, for for a year I didn't talk about Palestine very much, and everyone thought it meant I was like some secret Zionist. I felt disgusting making money off of a massacre for fucking clicks. I'm not gonna do that. That makes me an indirect war profiteer. Like, you know, you guys can tell I'm angry, but I really am. Like, what you need to do if you want to do politics on I'm I don't know what you're gonna do on domestic on on foreign politics through domestic protesting or anything like that. A left that wouldn't matter would have to have an international policy and means of coordinating with people outside of just picking governments you want to stand for and work with them. And the only way I actually know to do that, and actually this is gonna bring me something back to Gene, and I'll end my rant because I am kind of angry tonight, is you know, through things like unions, which actually do have an international presence. I'm not sure what they can do, but for example, Gene, you want to talk about what happened at the Iranian unions today?

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:04

Oh, yeah, I mean, like this the the Iranian Iranian unions were making sensible, uh, sensible uh statements today. You know, uh I can find it right here. I think I sent it to you. Did I not? Let me find it. Bear with me, people. But yeah, we've you know, we have, you know, this is like a dynamic in in Iran that people don't think about, but there is still some organized labor, there's still the oil proletariat, right? Uh you know, we still have the you know those things, and there's been uh statements from the labor confederation abroad, you know, calling for you know, rejecting foreign intervention. Uh, because I think you know, like this is important to understand. A lot of Iranians, I'm not saying all Iranians, I'm not saying most Iranians, but I'm saying the significant proportion of Iranians are going to put their faith into a foreign intervention to rescue them. Why are they gonna do this? Because they don't think that is any other option, right? Like when you you know, whenever you have a situation in which you know political avenues are closed down, some people are gonna look overseas for their solutions, right? Just as so many people in the quote unquote western left, I don't like the term, see their solutions in, I don't know, socialism on a tropical island, socialism in a petrol state, socialism in a country that doesn't give a shit about you, right? You know, people will look to a foreign land, look to distant worlds to save them. And many Iranians are looking towards that. And we see, for example, Iranian Confederation of Labor, you know, you know, calling on people to shut down anything that could pay pave the way for a crackdown on Iran, but also warning against you know, foreign intervention and how that might do things, condemning the murder of protesters. You know, like there's some real garbage humans out there, right? Like, I can understand someone saying, like, hey, these protests, you know, if they pave the way for a foreign intervention, things are gonna get worse, right? You know, I understand that perspective, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:18

In fact, I think that's probably true.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:20

That's even probably true, right? I would say, like, capital what you wish for, totally understand why you want, like, why you would why you would celebrate if the Americans assassinated Khamanae, right? Totally understand, right? But that's not gonna solve your problems because that might actually just make things worse. So be aware that might be. But if you're actually gonna just contend people who feel like that under like a really oppressive regime, then you're just like you're just uh like an inhuman person, right? Like I try to understand people who I fundamentally disagree with. I understand why Sunni Arabs in Syria have gone so you know butt wild with Islamism. Of course, they've been brutalized by minority rule, they've been brutalized by secularism for years. And what's gonna be the response to that? You think they're all gonna become peace-loving Democrats? No, it's like just because people feel the way and you understand why they feel the way doesn't mean you agree with the weight way that they feel, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:26

Also, yeah, I'm also gonna talk about Islamists for a second because it's a huge range of what that is, and I'm not an Islamist apologist, I'm not a big fan of religious government in general, but I've sat down and had long conversations when I lived in Egypt over lots of mint tea, sometimes actually even under distress. There was a former brotherhood shop owner, he was a British importer, but he was a brotherhood guy, that during one of the sugar riots and the crackdowns in the sugar riots, where there was just you know heads being broken, it was indiscriminate. And I just happened to be, even though I was in a kind of upper middle class for Egypt neighborhood in the wrong place at the wrong time, where this guy took me in his shop and put me down in the basement, and like like he protected my ass. I've never forgotten that. Like, he helped me twice actually. Another time I fell down on the road, was pretty was fairly well injured, and he, you know, gave me water, got me up, got me to a doctor. Like, so I'm not saying that because that's just one story, that's just an anecdote, right? It doesn't really tell you anything about the nature of Islamism, but I talked to him about Salafism and the different kinds of Salafisms and and all that, and I learned a shit ton. And I learned not to run my mouth off about what you know, you know, oh, the brotherhood, but even the even within a singular group like Quattabis and the Brotherhood, what they believed, you know, or how they felt about Americans or whatever or whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:05

Like, I mean, even in the Islamic revolution in Iran, you know, there was a you know, we often think about the fight between the Islamists and the communists, but even within the quote unquote Islamist camp, you had you know Muslim liberals around Bazir Ghan, you know, who wanted a bit more, you know, who who were opposed to clerical privileges, for example, who just wanted a kind of conservative republican regime. You had like you know, social revolutionary Muslims who believed in Islam without mullahs. You had you had ayatollahs who wanted a kind of more democratic order. Khomeini won that factional fight, but like there was no like singular position uh on the Islamic Republics. There were there were people within Khomeini's camp who had different positions, there were Muslim liberals, there were you know conservative nationalists, so many different groups, just as the left, the mythology that the left rallied behind the Islamic Revolution is that just that this is very famously an important leader of the Tude Party, the pro-Soviet party, you know, absolutely capitulated to the Islamists only to get put on trial and executed later on, gave an absolute simping trial, like kissing ass to the mullahs, following the Islamists on the anti-imperialist line. But he was, you know, the the fact that the the Tuda Party and parts of the Fedahin, you know, you know, capitulated to Khomeini caused splits within those movements, right? You know, left-wing Kurdish political movements, Kormala, KDP Iran, both of which you know define themselves as Marxists, never took it on. There were all you know, minority factions within Fedaiin, the Akaliat faction, the the minority group, they were opposed to the Islamic Republic, they resisted the Islamic Republic. You know, every single political tendency has multiple factions.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:00

This was in the Arab Spring in Egypt, too. I mean, like the the the the relatively tiny, I will also admit, Marxist factions in Egypt were spread all over the line, with you know, people like Samir Amin and Senegal actually supporting the Mubarak and then the uh the Al Sisi governments, you know. So, you know, the third worldist guy, like you know, and I find all this quite like the way that a lot of people in in the Americas. I mean, you want to talk about people getting you know, the way they talk the way both sides talk about the Chinese Communist Party just baffles me. I know that like we only really get to hear the the z side, but that is a regionally complicated uh and probably ideologically complicated, but uh the the ideological splits are are our only somewhat obvious situation, of which most people don't even have the language skills to meaningly this to meaningfully discuss because I keep running into this when I deal with Chinese and translation because the translation doesn't make any damn sense, and so I'm like, I need a native speaker to really figure out what the context is for this. So we should be very careful of this. I mean, one of the things I I have a lot of critiques of Vincent Bevan's new book, but one of the things I think he was absolutely right about is on both sides of the representations of like the Arab Spring or what happened in Syria, you know who you normally get elite people who speak English, period. Like when you hear about what happened in the Arid Spring, I I watched this on Democracy Now. I still think about this. I came home from Egypt, I had to literally like actually shouldn't talk about that on air, but then well, let's just say that I had to leave in an interesting manner. And I went and within a week I saw these clips about what was going on in the Arab Spring, as per purported by Amy Goodman on the left, right? And the left, and everyone she talked to only spoke English. Now, I'm gonna say a lot of things. A lot of people in England in Egypt do speak English, but you know what they are highly educated. It is not like when you're in India and it's uh it's like everyone's default second language. This is you know, you know, I mean, in in in Egypt, there's also a lot of people who speak French, but so you got one perspective presented about what the airspring in Egypt into Rear Square was, that wasn't the Egyptians' perspective at all. Or with me trying to explain to American leftists that until the the move of the of the recognition of the capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, that in Egypt, people were still so mad about the seeming betrayal of Barack Obama that the average person who followed American politics in Egypt hated his guts. And that they were not actually all that sad about Trump coming to power in the US until later. This is stuff that I wish people would take in. Because, you know, we live in a world, I live in a world where I can talk to people from all over the planet. And I mean, the one thing about Twitter is I can they don't even have to speak English, it'll auto-translate for me. But at the same time, like there's so much of the of the world that you assume you know through media that you don't.