RadixJournal - December 09, 2024


The Fantasy of “Resistance”


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

117.030655

Word count

1,504

Sentence count

117

Harmful content

Toxicity

32

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria is a miracle, and it has huge geopolitical consequences. What will the status of the so-called axis of resistance look like now that Assad has fled to Russia with his family? And what will that mean for the future of the Syrian conflict?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 If you're doing well, and it's time again for another casual update.
00:00:06.360 Quite a bit has happened in the world.
00:00:09.160 I think something occurred that I don't think really anyone predicted, and that is the fall
00:00:17.480 of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
00:00:20.460 His regime is definitively over, and it has huge geopolitical consequences.
00:00:28.480 There is two major, in fact, but one major naval Russian air base, what the status of
00:00:38.220 that is.
00:00:39.400 What the status of the so-called axis of resistance is, I think is up in question.
00:00:45.220 Was Assad abandoned by Russia and Iran?
00:00:49.980 Assad reportedly has fled to Russia with his family.
00:00:54.000 There it is.
00:00:54.780 Is this a sort of Sunni triumph as well?
00:01:00.360 Even mainstream media have been reporting that the fighters going after Assad are, many
00:01:11.380 of them at least, are ISIS.
00:01:13.120 They're radicals.
00:01:14.020 They're former al-Qaeda who have put on suits and ties and now want to lead the country. 0.57
00:01:18.960 And in the case of one person in particular, maybe this generation, Sussama bin Laden, because 0.96
00:01:23.720 much of the same thing was said about him and they knew Jardim back in the day.
00:01:29.420 There's obviously a ton to talk about and just the sort of miraculous nature of the event.
00:01:36.480 Maybe miracle is too strong a word, or too loaded a word, but just the speed at which this happened.
00:01:43.440 But I guess what I want to talk about a little bit is this fantasy of resistance that has been
00:01:55.640 on the alt-right.
00:01:57.960 I'll just use that term.
00:02:00.760 It's kind of a dated term at this point.
00:02:03.360 But I'm referring to alternative media that is right-wing, this way and that.
00:02:14.460 And I'm not necessarily referring to the 2016-2017 event.
00:02:19.380 But this fantasy of resistance.
00:02:23.060 And it is this notion that you're a stranger in your own homeland.
00:02:29.120 If you're an American or a Western European or a Briton, et cetera, et cetera, you just hate 0.98
00:02:34.880 your own country, basically. 1.00
00:02:36.540 And it's gay. 1.00
00:02:38.620 And it's also gay and evil. 1.00
00:02:42.040 It oversees genocides. 1.00
00:02:45.080 It engages in horrifying interventions around the world.
00:02:51.340 And worst of all, it claims to be humanitarian while it has blood on its hands.
00:02:57.640 But it's also promoting rainbow flags and transgender youth, et cetera, et cetera.
00:03:04.620 And then, of course, it's aligned with Israel and Zionism. 0.71
00:03:08.760 So really, anything that you can see as a resistance force is good.
00:03:16.720 And on some level, I get it.
00:03:19.320 You know, you could say, I mean, Russia is not bucking Israel. 0.86
00:03:26.540 The notion that Russia is an opposition to Israel is completely false.
00:03:31.060 But I sort of get the idea of they are, you know, charting their own course.
00:03:38.140 They're resisting the globalist world order.
00:03:42.020 And on that, in itself, they deserve support.
00:03:48.680 You know, Syria is resisting Israeli expansion or Israeli influence in the Middle East.
00:03:57.360 And on that account, at the very least, we should support them.
00:04:02.240 And I sort of get it on some level.
00:04:08.460 But what I, I guess I've, and I get it because I was one of them.
00:04:13.580 Um, I see, when I see a lot of alternative media people lionizing Assad, it's kind of an interesting term there, because Assad means lion.
00:04:25.040 Um, lionizing Assad and lionizing Vladimir Putin.
00:04:29.880 You know, he's trad and Christian, et cetera, et cetera.
00:04:33.600 Um, lionizing all these people.
00:04:37.220 I, I see this fantasy.
00:04:39.240 It's a fantasy based in resentment.
00:04:40.820 And it's a fantasy in which you completely misunderstand what's happening and you overestimate the power of these groups and you become sort of a hater in your own land.
00:04:58.880 And, and what I think is a very unhealthy way.
00:05:03.580 So, let's remember that many right-wing commentators have been telling us for years that Assad is invincible.
00:05:12.460 Well, no, he got played by the Turks, apparently, who, uh, funded or signed off on this operation, including, you know, wild men and berserkers. 0.86
00:05:23.500 Uh, he's beloved by his people.
00:05:25.660 Well, not really.
00:05:27.440 Uh, his regime collapsed really precipitously.
00:05:30.980 Uh, uh, you know, uh, Vladimir Putin, I remember there was a article that came out, you know, Russia can win modern wars.
00:05:41.720 It's going to be days, uh, et cetera.
00:05:45.060 Uh, he's fighting against, uh, the GAE or woke or, or all this kind of stuff.
00:05:49.920 And what you ultimately find when you rip off all of that packaging of the anti-woke, badass, trad, man of the West, maybe a little bit less so as Assad, but I've, I've heard a lot of talk like that. 0.94
00:06:10.460 When you rip off that trapping, you find these 10-pot kleptocratic, just bullshit dictatorships that are, in Assad's case, killing hundreds of thousands of people. 0.86
00:06:28.440 I mean, I will grant you that in the short term, things might very well be much worse. 0.99
00:06:34.600 There's no doubt.
00:06:37.360 I get the idea of just stability for stability's sake.
00:06:41.440 But if you act like that, you are going to become hated, passionately hated by your own population.
00:06:48.600 Um, you know, with Putin desperately seeking help with North Korea, uh, bombing cities, destroying European families, um, throwing more and more Russian men into the meat grinder. 0.94
00:07:06.920 Uh, at some level, it's pathetic and grotesque and really shockingly immoral, these people, these people that you think are resisting. 0.70
00:07:20.960 They're not really, well, maybe they are resisting in some ways, but they're not really charting a new, a new course. 0.55
00:07:29.800 They're not showing us a path forward towards a new type of politics or something that's even marginally admirable.
00:07:40.580 They want to hold on to their really crappy countries, and they want to continue to, uh, murder the opposition on mass, uh, scrape off billions of dollars for themselves and their friends.
00:08:01.800 And they're sort of playing the right wing by claiming that, you know, we're a trad, anti-globalist. 0.90
00:08:10.240 Oh, we love the real America, et cetera. 1.00
00:08:13.480 And my position at this point in my life towards people like Assad or Vladimir Putin or whatever, my position towards them is fuck them. 1.00
00:08:25.540 They're not good enough. 1.00
00:08:27.040 They're losing to the global America, the gay, the global American empire. 1.00
00:08:33.340 They're losing.
00:08:34.360 They can't win modern wars.
00:08:36.960 They can't defend themselves against hordes of berserkers.
00:08:41.260 They're getting played by the Turks.
00:08:45.380 The Shia crescent is getting dismantled day by day by Israel and in, in this case. 0.93
00:08:56.220 So they're not good enough. 1.00
00:08:57.840 So fuck them. 1.00
00:08:59.400 There's, they're merely resisting. 1.00
00:09:02.040 And that's not anything really. 0.98
00:09:04.980 That's kind of pathetic. 0.99
00:09:06.340 It's like being a naysayer. 0.98
00:09:08.020 And at the end of the day, none of these countries, whether we're talking about Iran, whether we're talking about Russia, whether we're talking about Syria in the Assad regime, none of these countries are actually more trad than the United States.
00:09:27.040 If you evaluate them using any sort of metric, you know, premarital sex, abortion, pornography, homosexuality, church attendance. 0.61
00:09:40.940 I mean, it goes on and on. 0.81
00:09:43.140 They're backward. 1.00
00:09:44.720 So fuck them. 1.00
00:09:46.640 They've decided they have leaders that want to carve out a space for themselves by resisting the modern world in effect. 1.00
00:09:58.820 And that's not really a path into the future.
00:10:03.900 They want a multipolar world order.
00:10:08.440 Yes.
00:10:08.800 What that means is it's like liberalism on the scale of the globe where, you know, oh, we, we wouldn't even dare.
00:10:18.260 Our ethno-religious community wouldn't even dare treading on your trad ethno-religious community.
00:10:24.020 It's this non-aggression principle on the scale of the globe.
00:10:28.820 All they are at the end of the day are, are, are, are, are backwards shitholes. 0.99
00:10:35.840 And when their great leaders fail to actually chart a new course, or they fail to genuinely resist the global American empire, and they're just getting their asses kicked. 0.99
00:10:53.200 Then why are we shedding tears over them? 0.99
00:10:56.000 Why, why are we giving a shit about them? 0.97
00:10:58.820 What have they done for us? 0.98
00:11:00.920 Just curious.
00:11:03.180 What has Russia done for us? 1.00
00:11:05.360 Russia, if many of the insinuations and accusations are true, Russia promotes some of the dumbest shit imaginable in the United States. 0.98
00:11:17.780 Assad, I think he might've spent a little too much money on a garage full of Lamborghinis and didn't actually promote anything in the West that could have saved him. 0.99
00:11:31.880 Well, tough luck, tough luck.
00:11:35.140 You can't take those Lamborghinis with you to Russia.
00:11:39.320 So I don't know.
00:11:40.960 I, I just, I, I've developed a certain schadenfreude, to be honest, when it comes to these tin pot resistance dictators.
00:11:50.380 And I'm just really tired of listening to the fantasies of right-wingers about how great and strong and trad they are.
00:12:02.060 And I don't really want to hear it anymore.
00:12:04.620 I will answer a question or two.
00:12:11.900 That was basically the point that I wanted to make.
00:12:14.220 I'm going to go, on Tuesday, I'm going to go more into depth in terms of what has actually happened.
00:12:20.080 And, um, if you guys have any questions, I can answer a couple of, a couple of ones.
00:12:31.620 No questions.
00:12:32.720 All right.
00:12:33.820 You guys just like to comment, which is fine.
00:12:39.180 All right.
00:12:40.520 I will talk to you guys later.
00:12:42.720 Ciao.
00:12:50.080 Bye.