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Ex-commercial TV Pr-man
old Etonian and occasional pigfucker,
David Cameron would like to bomb Syria.
Unfortunately Russia's got there first
and America's been doing it for ages.
He wants to bomb Syria to stop the flow
of refugees fleeing all the bombs.
He's also hoping it will stop
the increased influence of
Islamic extremism.
Bombing Syria will of course destroy
the one remaining multicultural society
in the region, leaving it open to
the increased influence of
Islamic extremism.
To bomb Syria, therefore,
is clearly mental.
Goooooooooooooood morning slaves
and welcome to another sedition of
It's the End of the World as we Know it
and I Feel Fine....
the show that gets under dictators’ skin.
Need another car.
Fraid this last one ended up in the drink.
Look at you.
You're a -
I'm not puppet.
You're a bloody puppet!
Every person on earth, whether they
agree or disagree with President Putin,
they should respect him.
♫ I've got no strings to hold me down
to make me fret, or make me frown. ♫
You're a puppet!
I'm not puppet.
I am your host the Stimulator,
and this December will mark six years
since 26 year old fruit vendor
Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself on fire
in the streets of Sidi Bouzid,
to protest harassment from the pigs,
and the crushing weight of
systemic poverty,
igniting the righteous fucking wave
of revolt that came to be known as
the Arab Spring.
This historic uprising swept like wildfire
across the Middle East and North Africa,
toppling dictators in Tunisia, Egypt,
Libya and Yemen,
catching the United Snakes and
its regional allies in the Gulf states
off guard,
and scaring the living shit out of them.
Riots will start here.
Iraq will be squeezed.
Syria, Jordan will fall.
Who will stand with the United States?
Who will stand with Israel?
Tragically, the heady optimism
seen on the streets of Tahrir Square
has long since been replaced by
the jackboot of counter-revolution
and the grim fucking realities
of terrorism and civil war.
In Bahrain, a popular uprising was
brutally put down by a Saudi-led invasion.
In Egypt, one pro-Western dictator
has been replaced by another,
who has ruthlessly clamped down on
protests, jailing thousands of dissidents.
Libya and Yemen have both descended
into civil wars, each drawing in
foreign military intervention.
And then there's Syria.
Up until now, me and my subMedia slaves
have avoided putting out an
in-depth sedition on Syria
because the situation on the ground
is incredibly fucking complicated,
and well… frankly... depressing as fuck.
Buuuuuuuuut despite being the defining war
of our epoch, a horrific fucking slaughter
that has killed upwards of
half a million people,
and displaced 12 million more,
reduced entire cities to rubble,
and spawned a massive flood of refugees
that in turn has hastened
the nationalist-fuelled disintegration of
the European Union,
and despite the fact that it has become
a central battleground for
the competing geopolitical ambitions
of so-called great powers
and regional state actors alike...
the fact is that the Syrian Revolution
and subsequent civil war
is still woefully misunderstood.
On the right side of the spectrum,
corporate and state-run media
have depicted Syria solely as
an external threat;
a breeding ground for ISIS terrorists
who are trying to smuggle their way
into Western population centres
by pretending to be war-torn refugees.
Is the United States opening its doors
to potential terrorists?
I could never have imagined
an Islamic radical sleeper cell
becoming president.
If they can cross... anybody can cross.
And I'm here today to ask you:
do you feel safe?
We ain't scared of you.
We're not gonna let you guys use your fear
to take our rights away.
They claim to be in America now!
And as soon as you come into our country
we're gonna trick your ass out!
In other news, Muslims are bad.
What more do you need to know
about these people?!
Many Western leftists, on the other hand,
have adopted a disgustingly
amoral pragmatism that rationalizes
their lack of solidarity by pointing to
the lack of a sufficiently moderate
armed rebel faction to support.
Who are the fighters there?
Well it's not just ISIS, but it's al-Nusra
as well... the Al Qaeda affiliate.
There are said to be moderates there,
but you know... and there probably are,
but they're not a -
they're a minority force.
While others have gone so far as
to throw their support behind
the psychopathic regime of that ugly
teen-stached motherfucker himself,
Bashar al-Asaad.
Death to imperialism,
victory to Bashar Assad.
Victory to the Syrian Arab Army,
the National Defense Force,
The Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, and everyone who is fighting
within Syria for the Syrian people.
This confused and politically bankrupt
fucking narrative is particularly popular
with tankies who have a collective hard-on
for Vladimir Putin, and seemingly base
their entire fucking worldview on
a fossilized Cold War narrative that
supports any state that they deem to be
an official enemy of the United Snakes.
Tankie leftists believe that Assad
has been targeted for regime change by
the United Snakes and its allies,
and that Syria is being protected
by its staunchly anti-imperialist homies,
Russia and Iran.
Buuuuuuuuut putting aside the fact that
Russia and Iran are both gangsta
imperialist states in their own right
who oppress the fuck out of
their own citizens, there's an
even more obvious flaw in this logic...
the fact that the United Snakes isn't
actually trying to overthrow Assad at all.
The real threat to Assad's fascist
fucking regime has come from Syrians
themselves, who after growing sick and
mothafuckin tired of having their peaceful
protests bombed and machine-gunned,
launched a popular fucking armed uprising.
And it's racist as fuck to ignore
this fact, and to see all Syrian people
as either Islamic terrorists or
helpless victims only worthy of support
once they become refugees.
As the Presidential elections in
the United Snakes draw ever closer,
members of the Obama administration
are in a rush to add a victory over ISIS
to their presidential legacy,
before the next war-criminal-in-chief gets
sworn in in January.
To help accomplish this,
they've stepped up cooperation with Russia
and the two sides have recently agreed
to a so-called Cessation of Hostilities,
in order to join forces to fight ISIS
and Al Qaeda.
Buuuuuuuuuuut few peeps following things
on the ground actually think this latest
diplomatic push is gonna work.
There’s only one person who can end
the civil war in Syria.
You would rule in the possibility
of using nuclear weapons against ISIS?
Well.... I'm not going rule anything out.
Oh fuck no... not that fucker.
I’m talking about Syria’s greasy,
sunken-eyed, goose-necked dictator
himself… Bashar Al-Assad.
So with that in mind,
I’ve got a simple plea.
Bashar… you’ve done some pretty fucking
heinous shit over the past five years.
But there’s still time for you to do
the right thing.
In fact, it’s pretty simple…
just fucking kill yourself.
You do realize you’re not getting out
of this shit alive, right?
Once Russia and Iran get tired of
propping up your corrupt,
hollowed out regime, and decide to reach
some sorta deal to cover their own asses,
they’re throw you to the fuckin sharks.
So how do you wanna go out?
You wanna die like Ceausescu,
swarmed by a pissed off mob and lynched?
Who knows… with all you’ve done,
you’d probably get the full Mussolini.
Or maybe, just maybe, you’d prefer to
take the dignified way out,
like a fucking samurai,
or... or viking warrior or some shit…
or as dignified as a man as hideous and
awkward as you could possibly hope for.
Fuck it… you could shoot yourself out of
a fucking cannon into the Mediterranean
....that might be fun.
And seriously… who’s gonna miss you?
Aside from these tankies,
and your ugly fucking cousin Rahmi.
And on the plus side… just think about
how much suffering and bloodshed
you could avoid…
let alone all the rope peeps would save
by not having to hang you by your
freakishly long neck!
Anyway Bashar… just an idea.
Ball's in your court,
you miserable piece of shit.
♫ Head high, you made a revolution
Be proud of yourselves,
you destroyed a dirty band.
I know I have lost many things
But I feel I have gained many things.
Freedom, dignity, it is not easy.
It's not easy to do something
without victims and war machines.
Destroy the tree and the stone
Not one wall left standing
The regime humiliates me,
fuck him, he will not have me
Opposition failed on one side,
the other false media
Hezbollah, Daesh and others
countries of a world cursed
They let the people die & prepared coffins
I speak for the people,
gone are the days of silence
Gone are the days where you not dare express
If the revolution is here, it's your time
This is not a civil war
its the revolt of your people
The Refugees of RAP,
the voice of the people came back.
This is not a civil war
It is the revolt of a people, began peacefully
This is a revolution. ♫
On August 25th, Turkey’s thin-skinned
proto-fascist tyrant, Tayyip Erdogan,
officially joined the geopolitical
clusterfuck in Syria, when he sent
Turkey’s armed forces to lead
a cross-border incursion, ostensibly to
fight Daesh or the so-called Islamic State
but transparently as an effort to
halt the breaks on advances by
the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the
Kurdish People’s Protection Unit, or YPG,
which has been making territorial gains
in the region that Syria’s Kurds have
re-christened as Rojava.
For many outside observers of the
Syrian civil war, the Rojava Revolution
has been a lonely beacon of hope
in an otherwise bleak fucking tragedy,
and anarchists and other revolutionaries
around the world have accordingly flocked
to show solidarity with their cause.
This has ranged from the establishment
of Rojava solidarity chapters in cities
and countries across the world,
all the way to peeps traveling to join
international battalions of volunteer
fighters on the front lines, in an act of
international solidarity that hearkens
back to the Spanish Civil War.
Over the past several years,
the liberated cantons of Rojava
have witnessed some of the most
inspiring revolutionary transformations
in modern history, most notable being
its grassroots Tev-Dem system
of participatory democracy, and the
accompanying self-organization and
mass empowerment of women.
Freedom for Kurdistan starts with
freedom for women.
When women are free,
then Kurdistan will be free.
These hard-fought gains have been
all the more impressive given the fact
that they've taken place while waging
an existential war against the
genocidal fucking jihadis of Daesh.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuut while this will no doubt
piss a lot of peeps off…
Oh boy, here we go!
the uncomfortable truth is that many
supporters of Rojava have adopted a
dogmatic, uncritical approach to
the Kurdish struggle in northern Syria,
particularly its military aspect,
and in the process have ignored or
downplayed actions that not only
contradict fundamental principles of
the Rojava revolution, but also
pose serious fucking threats to
its future viability and the spread of
values within the region.
Kurds have long and tragic history of
betrayal and oppression at the hands of
the different states and ethnic groups
that surround them on all sides.
Under the Assad regime they were
officially banned from speaking their
own language, and were targeted by
so-called Arabization policies aimed at
controlling natural resources and
manipulating ethnic demographics
in the region.
One of the main tenants of Rojava’s
Tev-Dem system has been an embrace of
secular pluralism and cultural
and political autonomy for different
ethnic groups and religious minorities.
At the same time,
the Democratic Unity Party, or PYD, the
ruling Kurdish political party in Rojava,
has pursued a policy of geographically
linking the three Kurdish cantons of
Afrin, Kobane and Jazira, which are
physically separated from one another by
large swaths of land primarily
populated by Arabs.
The YPG militia, from the start of
the revolution, has been working for
its own interests.
It created an autonomous area....
it never recognized the Syrian revolution,
but it used it to create its own state.
The efforts to link the cantons militarily
has provoked a great deal of inter-ethnic
strife in Northern Syria, with YPG forces
benefiting from both US and Russian
airstrikes - in the latter case leading to
ethnic cleansing of rebel-held positions
in the province of Aleppo.
YPG supporters have tended to justify
these actions by claiming that the Arab
forces they have been targeting are all
head-chopping jihadis,
or members of Daesh or Al-Nusra.
Hopefully this doesn’t become a
self-fulfilling prophecy, and the YPG
and local militias of the Free Syrian Army
are able to come to an understanding
and mutual fucking coexistence.
This is especially important now that
Turkey’s military has joined the fray,
and Erdogan, drunk on the authoritarian
fucking powers he seized in the wake of
July’s failed coup,
has begun further cracking down on Kurds
in south-eastern Turkey.
While it’s important that anarchists
fully support aspirations of Kurdish
autonomy and self-determination,
whether in Syria, Turkey, Iraq or Iran…
it’s also important to support the
autonomy of Syrians in other parts of
the country, who are struggling against
a fucked up combination of
authoritarian Islamists, the Assad regime,
and its Iranian and Russian backers.
They are more powerful with weapons,
but we are more powerful in our hearts.
Many of you have your freedom
because of a revolution.
The time for our freedom is now.
So… in an effort to shed some
well-needed light on this other aspect
of the Syrian Revolution, I recently
caught up with Robin Yassin-Kassab,
a Syrian-British journalist, and co-author
of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution
and War.
Hey Robin, how the fuck are you?
I'm very well indeed.
Back in January, you and your co-author
Leila al-Shami published Burning Country:
Syrians in Revolution and War, which is
widely regarded as one of the best
English-language accounts of
the Syrian Revolution.
What inspired you to write this book?
I think we wrote the book because
we felt that the story of the Syrian
Revolution, and then the various
counter-revolutions which came back at it
wasn't being told properly.
Everybody knows about the jihadists and
the head-choppers, and everybody knows
about Putin, and Turkey and Qatar,
and Saudi Arabia.
But nobody seems to know about, y'know,
grassroots Syrian workers and farmers,
and students who were going out there
and protesting, and then who began to
pick up weapons when they were
so oppressed.
So we did it because we wanted to give a
voice to those remarkable Syrian
revolutionaries, which we thought they
were lacking in the English language,
and in the west.
You have been pretty fucking outspoken
in your criticism of the international
response to the conflict in Syria,
and particularly scathing with regards to
the posture adopted by western leftists.
What in particular pisses you off
about how peeps have approached
the situation.... and what do you think
that this says about the current state
of the left more generally?
Well I think it's been really depressing,
really tragic that a lot of Syrians
expected at the start that they would be
getting help, or solidarity from the
leftists, the so-called anti-imperialists
in the west, and very often it was
the left, at least the mainstream or
dominant left, which misrepresented them
and spread lies about them even before
the right did.
So for example, nowadays we have the
right-wing telling us that all these
Syrian refugees, they're all Al Qaeda,
they're all dangerous jihadists
and we shouldn't let any of them in....
this notion that every Syrian, or every
Syrian revolutionary is Al Qaeda was
actually spread by lots of people
on the left.
I think what the left has done, not just
in the case of Syria, but in general,
tragically, the left has given up on
ordinary people.
It seems to have lost hope that people at
the grassroots can actually change things,
and therefore it's just got itself
obsessed with states.
It seems to think that being
left-wing is about supporting certain
states against other states, as if there
are, y'know, goodie states against
the badie states.
But that's not classical leftism.
It's not Marxism... I mean Marxism talked
about doing a class analysis in which you
give your support to the working classes
in their struggle against
the ruling classes. And I think that's
what leftists should be doing
if they want to be in any way relevant
to real struggles in the world.
They should be supporting people within
every state who are trying to fight
against their oppressors.
And the left has failed to do that,
and instead, through this very inaccurate
state-based analysis, they're just making
silly assumptions. They seem to think,
for example, that this is a regime-change
plot directed by the United States against
the glorious resistance regime in Syria.
And, y'know, the facts don't bear
that out at all.
You've stated on several occasions
your belief that the Syrian Revolution
has been the most significant revolution
since 1930s Spain.
Could you elaborate on this?
In the revolution, and then particularly
as it became a war, when the regime was
forced to withdraw from certain parts of
the country... as the regime withdrew,
it withdrew the services that if offered,
of course. The state collapsed.
And what you had then, was that in many
different parts of the country,
people started setting up their own
self-organized administrations.
So they set up local councils for example.
At the moment there are about 400
local councils operating in the liberated
areas of Syria. And these are the people
who are keeping life together in the
liberated areas, under the bombs,
in the most difficult circumstances.
They're keeping the electricity going,
they're keeping the water supply going,
they're trying to build makeshift
hospitals and underground schools
where people can be educated
despite the bombs.
This is remarkable!
This self-organization, this local
democracy, and nobody notices it.
Nobody talks about it. It's much easier
for us to talk about the Saudis and
the Russians and the states than it is
to talk about the remarkable things
that people are doing.
Not just councils... women's centers,
free radio stations,
free television stations,
newspapers, an explosion of popular art,
all of this kind of thing is happening
in Syria, in the middle of an awful war,
amidst starvation sieges... it's really
remarkable and it's inspiring what's
happening in Syria, as well as tragic,
and it's our loss that we don't
pay more attention to it.
Outside of Rojava, many western anarchists
are unfamiliar with the influential role
that anarchists have played in the
Syrian Revolution - a prime example being
Omar Aziz.
Can you tell us a little bit more about
who he was, and his material and
theoretical contributions to
the revolutionary process?
Yeah well, Omar Aziz was a remarkable man,
and a very influential man.
He was an anarchist, I mean, he
self-identified as an anarchist.
Of course, many of the people who set up
the self-organized committees and councils
that we were talking about, do not
necessarily use the word anarchist to
describe themselves.
They don't necessarily come from that
theoretical tradition.
They haven't necessarily read Bakunin
and so on, but what they're doing
is anarchist. Omar Aziz actually
identified as an anarchist, and he'd
obviously read a lot of anarchism,
and studied it. He was living outside
of Syria, he came back to join
the revolution, and then in the 8th month
he wrote a paper in which he said
it's not enough to go out and protest.
We have to withdraw from the state,
and stop giving our consent, and we have
to set up our own alternative bodies
and organizations, and he recommended
setting up local councils - the local
councils I was just talking about.
He helped to set up three of the first
local councils in the Damascus suburbs,
and then he was arrested.
And he died in prison. Some people say
he was tortured to death, we don't know.
He already had weak health when he went
into prison... he died there a day before
his 64th birthday.
But after he died, this model that he had
helped to build, spread like wildfire...
particularly in 2012-2013 as the regime
was withdrawing from key areas of
the country, people were setting up
local councils everywhere.
It's also important to remember, I mean,
in a way that anarchists in the west can
identify with Omar Aziz to an extent
- if they've heard of him - because he
identified as an anarchist. But then,
y'know, when we're looking at cultures
which we as westerners don't immediately
recognize - Islamic cultures,
African cultures, y'know, cultures all
over the world - people there may be using
their own vocabulary, their own cultural
vocabulary, but they're sometimes arriving
at the same conclusions of
self-organization and cooperation that
anarchists in the west would hope that
they arrive to, so that's interesting and
I think we need to look out for that
in the future.
What effects have the revolution
and subsequent civil war had in terms of
women's participation in Syrian society?
As a result of the revolution, women have
been empowered a great deal, and then as
a result of the counter-revolutionary war,
in many ways things have gone backwards.
In terms of the revolution, I mean,
Razan Zaitouneh, a woman, was the founder
of the Local Coordination Committees,
a grassroots revolutionary unit which was
set up at the start and spread all over
the country. There was another group of
coordination committees set up by
Sohar Itasi, another woman,
so those two very important key bodies
were set up by women.
Also, what you've had during
the revolution in liberated areas is a lot
of women's centers have been set up
by women themselves in order to encourage
women's participation in the revolution,
in society, in the economy, in order to
teach skills where necessary, and also as
places where they can go and talk and
express solidarity to each other, and try
to find common solutions to their problems
I think that the fact of revolutionary
work, as well, has to an extent liberated
women. Everything has been questioned
in Syria in the last years, including the
relations between men and women, between
husbands and wives, between fathers and
daughters, parents and children.
On the other hand, y'know... of course
the fact of war, in many ways has made
things terrible for women. I mean, women
have been subject to a mass rape campaign
which the regime organized.
ISIS also, of course, has raped women and
made Yazidi women into sex slaves, all of
this kind of barbarism has gone on.
The fact of war has victimized women
in particular... but the revolutionary
impulses are there, and I think they will
continue, and I think that women who've
had a taste of activism and freedom,
if only for a moment, during
the revolution are not going to give
that up, and they're going to pass
that on to their daughters.
Anything else you wanna add?
I think that we should really be paying
much more attention because, as I said,
it's remarkable what Syrians are doing,
socially, politically and culturally.
As well as all of the terrible things,
the torture, the jihadism, the bombing,
the rest of it, there's all of this
cultural explosion, the free newspapers,
the community cooperation that's happening
which we could learn from.
This kind of thing doesn't happen
very often in history, and certainly
people who claim to be revolutionaries,
anarchists and leftists they really should
be the first people who are without
prejudice, without silly binaries, without
worshiping different lines set out
by states - they should be attending
to what's happening on the ground at the
grassroots, and showing some solidarity.
Thanks Robin… and that about
does it for this sedition of it's the end
of the world as we know it and I feel fine
To listen to the entire interview
with Robin, for a playlist of the music
we used, or to subscribe to our podcast
or email list just visit my fuckin website
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when our webhost banned us,
essentially leaving sub.media offline.
Check them out at newday.host.
Also big ups to Louis, Antoine and Micah
for giving us tips on how to deal with
a hacking crisis this summer.
And of course, mega big ups to the slaves
who help us keep the lights on. So big ups
to: Harjap Jessica, Jay, Jim, Alexandra,
Blade, Karlis, Steve, Gavin, Eradour, Jan,
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Marten, Margaret and Meghsha... Antojitos!
I also want to welcome the newest members
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Sam, Liam, Corbo, Tunic and Talisman.
Bolijos!
That's all for now, stay tuned to
sub.media for more news from
the global muthafuckin resistance.
Hasta la pasta compañeras!