Let me read you
some of what
your own MP's have told
me about what's been going on.
"It's checkmate, we're stuffed."
"It's dire."
"We're all done for."
These are your own colleagues.
Well my message to
my colleagues is yes.
Do you feel humiliated?
That must feel humiliating
so early in office.
Look I understand it
is very difficult
for families across the country.
And they're blaming you.
and if...
But do you accept that
you have made it worse
But we've
What you've done has made
it worse for people.
It's made it harder for
people to pay their bills.
Definitely.
Well it... yeah.
First of all I
have said sorry.
Oh hello.
Welcome to System Fail,
the show that speaks
truth to power.
It is my great pleasure
to present you with
the chief's award for valour.
Congratulations, I'd like to
give you an opportunity
to say a few words.
I'm very uncomfortable being
here with you guys.
I do not rock with the police.
And I just want folks to know
that they don't keep us safe
We keep us safe.
Riots work.
Thank you.
Blow, how you like me now?
Appreciate it.
I am your host, Dee Dos,
and for months now,
the drums of war have
been growing louder.
84 missiles and 24 drones
targeting at least 10 cities
From one end of Ukraine
to the other
Revenge after a key bridge
connecting Russia to Crimea
was blown up this weekend.
Tensions in the Taiwan straight
The largest ever military
maneuvers that China has done.
Are you willing, militarily,
to defend Taiwan
if it comes to that?
Yes.
Taiwan is an inimitable part
of Chinese territory.
Could we be heading toward
World War 3?
You know, global thermonuclear
war end of days scenario.
Despite the focus of
western media coverage,
today's most deadly war
is being waged in the
territories ruled by
the Ethiopian state.
In Amhara and Afar,
recent fighting has
displaced tens of thousands
of people from their homes,
mostly women and children,
while in Tigray, millions of
people are being systematically
starved to death, underconditions of a
government-imposed
communications blackout,
regular shelling, air strikes,
mass rapes, and other atrocities
carried out by the Ethiopian
and Eritrean armed forces.
I'm starving. It's awful.
Hunger doesn't kill you in one hit,
it destroys you slowly.
Turkey continues to wage
a vicious and largely
unreported war in
Syria and Iraq,
bombing Kurdish villages
and repeatedly using
chemical weapons against
guerrilla fighters aligned
with the Kurdish Worker's
Party, or PKK.
And in Yemen, civilians
are bracing themselves
for a fresh round of fighting,
following the collapse of a
six month ceasefire that
had provided a temporary
reprieve from eight years of hell.
Meanwhile, Putin's invasion
of Ukraine, and increased
sabre-rattling over Taiwan,
have ramped up geopolitical
tensions between the world's
so-called Great Powers
to levels not seen since the Cold War.
Geriatric politicians, some
of whom look like they
could barely fight a cold,
have assumed the role
of wartime leaders, framing
armed conflicts over
energy markets, trade routes and
so-called spheres of influence
as epic clashes of moral,
cultural and national values.
Democracy will and must prevail.
Against neo-nazisand extreme nationalists
The actual values in question
have proven quite elastic.
In Ukraine, Western media outlets
have gone to great lengths
to rehabilitate the neo-nazis
of the Azov Battalion,
re-framing them as
misunderstood patriots,
while RT and Sputnik
have heaped praise on
the neo-nazis of the Wagner
Group for their efforts to,
quote, de-nazify the so-called
Donetsk and Lugansk
People's Republics.
Beneath all the misinformation
and patriotic spin
lies the brutal reality of war:
working-class humans
slaughtering one another
for the vanity of politicians
and the profits of their
capitalist handlers.
When you look at the leadership
that's come from the
defence contractors it's
telling us that this conflict
in Russia and Ukraine will last
longer than the consensus expects.
It's giving us the same message that
say the energy stocks or oil here is.
So this idea of peak conflict
or peak inflation or peak yields
I don't think the market is
justifying any of those
and these defence contractors,
I think, support that view.
But not everyone is going
along with the plot.
I'm not afraid of anything
The most valuable thing
that they can take from us
Is the lives of our children
I won't give them my child's life.
In Russia, a militant anti-war
movement has risen up,
launching a sustained,
multi-pronged attack
on the government's war effort.
The Russian state, for its part,
has arrested thousands of
protesters for peacefully
demonstrating their moral
objections to the war.
No to War!
No to War!
Which leads to an obvious
conclusion: if all opposition
is criminalized, you might
as well make it count.
Members of the Anarchist
Communist Combat Organization,
known by its Russian
acronym BOAK,
have carried out dozens of
acts of sabotage against railways,
aimed at disrupting the transfer
of military equipment and ammunition.
They have been joined by
partisan counterparts in Belarus,
whose sabotage of railways has
disrupted Russian troop movements,
and played an important role
in thwarting its initial invasion of Kyiv.
Meanwhile, within Russia,
more than 50 military
recruitment offices
have been attacked since the war began,
many of them set alight in
brazen, night-time, molotov attacks.
Government buildings, and police vehicles
have also been put to the torch.
The pace of these attacks
has intensified since
Putin issued a decree on
September 21st,
mobilizing 300,000 reservists
for active duty on the front lines.
That's it!
The games are over.
You re all military!
We're here to takeyou to the army.
What army?
I m 52 years old.
The conscription age has been
raised to 60 years old.
Raised by who?
What do you mean by who?
The President.
On September 26,
a 25 year old man named
Ruslan Zinin shot a military
officer in a conscription office
in the Siberian city
of Ust-Ilimsk,
after his friend had been
called up for service.
In Primorye, near the country's
border with North Korea,
the commissar in charge of
regional mobilization
and enlistment was found
dead on October 14th.
Numerous protests have broken
out in the country's far east,
as well as the Caucasus regions
of Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria
and Chechnya, where the region's
Putin-obsessed strongman,
Ramzan Kadyrov,
I can't hide the way I feel
about you anymore
I can hold the hurt inside
keep the pain out...
responded to protests
by threatening
to forcibly conscript
participants and their families.
Why are you taking the boy from us?
Don t allow them to take the men!
On the other side of the
increasingly fluid border,
a number of Ukrainian,
Russian and Belarusian anarchists
have joined the Ukranian war effort,
integrating themselves within
the national army in order to
fight against what they see as
the greater evil of
Russian occupation.
Other anarchists have
maintained an active
antagonism to Russia, NATO,
and the Ukrainian state,
which has enacted authoritarian
war-time measures criminalizing dissent,
limiting freedom of
movement for refugees,
and enforcing military
conscription on all men
and trans women between
the ages of 18 and 60.
On October 5th, the Ukrainian
embassy in Prague was vandalized,
and a communique was released
blasting Zelensky for forcibly
confining Ukrainian
civilians who want to flee.
It goes without saying,
but Ukraine's oligarchs are
not fighting on the front lines.
Most of them fled the country
for the safety of Western Europe
as soon as the first
bombs started falling.
Meanwhile, in France,
Germany, Italy and Greece,
anarchists have carried out a
number of clandestine attacks
against NATO military contractors,
and disrupted weapons shipments.
Despite all the death,
devastation and divisions
sparked by Russia's invasion,
new solidarities are being formed
between those fighting
to end the war.
Peoples of Russia have been oppressed
by the Russian state for a long time and
all have reasons to fight it.
Radical ideas have surfaced
in the political environment.
We don't think Putin
can win this war
and losing the was could
be followed by anything
from change of power to the
collapse of the Russian Federation
which is a scenario that
is becoming more and more
beleivable by the day.
It's worth noting that Russia's
defeat in World War One,
hastened by widespread defections
and military sabotage,
served as a primary catalyst
for the February Revolution,
and the overthrow of the Tsar.
History, as they say,
doesn't repeat itself
but it sometimes rhymes.
When the dust settles from this
there's going to be hell to payin Moscow.
Well perhaps maybe some
good will come from it.
A little revolution, now and
then, is a healthy thing.
We have now reached
the end of this
episode of System Fail.
To support anarchist and
anti-war prisoners
in Russia and Belarus,
consider following and
donating to Anarchist Black
Cross chapters in Belarus,
Moscow and Irkutsk.
You can support subMedia
by buying some gear,
making a one-time donation,
or signing up to be a monthly
sustainer on our website, sub.media.
A huge thank you toour latest sustainers,
Andrew, Elisa, Tyler,
Cecilia, Michael and Bea.
Be sure to follow us on your
favourite corporate data-mining
platform of choice, or on federated
social media platforms like
Mastodon or PeerTube, by
searching for sub.Media.
Or better yet...
sign up to our mailing list
to get each new episode
delivered directly to your inbox.
Godspeed, humans.