True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 74: The Bolsonaro Method
Aired: 2020-06-11
Duration: 01:29:51


=== Doing the Intro Still (02:56) ===

[00:00:00]  I have live in La Vida Loca stuck in my head.
[00:00:04]  Can you give us a couple of bars?
[00:00:06]  I don't remember the words.
[00:00:08]  Then how is it stuck in your head?
[00:00:10]  Da, Living la vida loca.
[00:00:15]  Like that.
[00:00:16]  Please do not put this in.
[00:00:18]  We're not doing this.
[00:00:19]  Fuck, I was trying to trick her.
[00:00:22]  No, I could see your little, you both were like smiling.
[00:00:26]  Now you pulled a knife on me.
[00:00:27]  Well, I can't do it through the computer.
[00:00:29]  Believe me, I have tried, honey.
[00:00:52]  I think that's it.
[00:00:53]  This is the intro.
[00:00:54]  Okay, well, then we are doing the intro still.
[00:00:58]  I am rocking right now, guys.
[00:01:01]  I'm so excited to, well, I'll be honest with you guys.
[00:01:07]  I'll volunteer you and be transparent.
[00:01:09]  We are actually recording this intro after we do the interview.
[00:01:11]  So I was about to say I'm excited to do this interview, but we already did the interview.
[00:01:15]  Why do we got to fake it?
[00:01:17]  I don't know because it's, you know, it's the intro.
[00:01:19]  People expect us chronologically.
[00:01:21]  It sounds like I would do this before we do the interview, right?
[00:01:25]  I know, but I kind of like it like, hey, we like our little gumshoes.
[00:01:30]  We respect them.
[00:01:32]  We trust them.
[00:01:33]  So we say, hey, we already recorded the interview.
[00:01:36]  Guess what?
[00:01:37]  The interview rocks.
[00:01:38]  Interview is fucking fantastic.
[00:01:42]  Should we say hello and welcome?
[00:01:44]  You first, baby.
[00:01:47]  Well, hello.
[00:01:48]  Welcome to Truanon.
[00:01:50]  Hello.
[00:01:52]  Hey, I'm the, I'm, uh, I'm the little, I'm the little Batman.
[00:02:00]  that's what they used to call like that would be like your assistant in in victorian england be like i gotta get is that a racist term I don't think so.
[00:02:10]  I'm like, all of a sudden it was like, is that just what they called like Indian people?
[00:02:14]  But I think that it was just your assistant.
[00:02:16]  All right, shut it down.
[00:02:16]  That's my new person.
[00:02:17]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:18]  My name is Bryce.
[00:02:20]  And this is Truanon.
[00:02:23]  We are, of course, joined by our producer, Young Chomsky, who's doing all the music.
[00:02:28]  And we have kind of a part two in the now what we're going to say is a thing, which is a Truanon series on post-war CIA anti-communist fascist international.
[00:02:47]  The spider network.
[00:02:51]  We are joined today by, we didn't even really intro him when we did the interview.

=== Bolsonaro's Brazil: Corona and Controversy (15:15) ===

[00:02:56]  No, we didn't whatsoever.
[00:02:58]  We just like went right in.
[00:02:59]  So we're going to do it now.
[00:03:00]  Vincent Bevins, journalist, who's also the author of the hot ticket book.
[00:03:07]  Everyone's reading this thing, including ourselves, The Jakarta Method.
[00:03:12]  We're going to talk a little bit first about the situation in Brazil.
[00:03:19]  He's there too.
[00:03:20]  We should make that clear, too.
[00:03:21]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:22]  He lives in Sao Paulo.
[00:03:24]  But yeah, the increasingly volatile situation in Brazil with Bolsonaro and Corona and a whole lot of other things.
[00:03:33]  And then talk about his excellent book.
[00:03:36]  So that's bring, bring, bring.
[00:03:38]  Call up the Brazilaphone.
[00:03:57]  Well, we have with us today, live from the Brazilian bunker, Vincent Bevins.
[00:04:04]  Vince, how you doing?
[00:04:06]  Good.
[00:04:06]  Yeah, fine.
[00:04:07]  Mostly.
[00:04:07]  Mostly.
[00:04:08]  How are you?
[00:04:08]  How are all of you?
[00:04:10]  Yeah, I'm all right.
[00:04:11]  Good.
[00:04:12]  Yeah.
[00:04:12]  Same old, same old.
[00:04:14]  You know, it's a worldwide civil unrest, but other than that.
[00:04:19]  Yeah.
[00:04:20]  Yeah, we have that here too, like kind of related, but also different.
[00:04:24]  But this morning you were supposed to go to some kind of march, but it got canceled.
[00:04:29]  What was going on with that?
[00:04:31]  So this is quite interesting is that last week you had a big anti-Bolsonaro march that was organized by what you might translate best as football hooligans.
[00:04:44]  Yes, the football fans.
[00:04:46]  Yeah, so there's like, it's called like in Portuguese, it's like organized fans, like ultras, basically.
[00:04:51]  And some of these ultras, some of these ultras were important in bringing down the dictatorship in the 80s, but also some part of this like football culture was pro-Bolsonaro as well.
[00:05:00]  So there was really big protests last Sunday, and that kind of ignited a lot of momentum around having anti-Bolsonaro protests today, which did happen.
[00:05:09]  But at the last minute, the governor moved them to a faraway location, and a lot of people decided not to go because of coronavirus, because a lot of medical professionals came out too and said, hey, this is really going to be bad if you go.
[00:05:22]  So last Last week was a big clash.
[00:05:23]  There was fights on the street, and there is kind of a new momentum from parts of the sort of tough first sections of the working class to oppose Bolsonaro at the moment.
[00:05:33]  And there's been lots of like pro-Bolsonaro protests kind of like throughout the corona epidemic, right?
[00:05:42]  Absolutely.
[00:05:43]  So I wasn't supposed to be here this long, but when I first came here, I went to Brasilia to interview sort of like the core group of Bolsonaristas in Congress in the run-up to a protest which was meant to not only show support for Bolsonaro, but to call for the end of democracy.
[00:06:01]  So to call to shut down Congress and Supreme Court, which has always been a threat as long as Bolsonaro has been back in Brazilian politics.
[00:06:07]  And all of those kept going throughout the pandemic, but they also kind of took on the second element, which was calling for an end to the lockdown.
[00:06:14]  So throughout the entire quarantine, quote unquote, era, Bolsonaro has been joining protests that say, ignore the quarantine, and also I'm with these people that are calling for the end of democracy, which is what caused the backlash on the football.
[00:06:30]  Are those like pro Bolsonaro dictatorship rallies?
[00:06:35]  Are they sizable?
[00:06:36]  Does it seem like just sort of like a group of wing nuts or is it like an actual sort of movement?
[00:06:42]  Well, I think that Bolsonarismo, to the extent that it is its own political movement, it is that, right?
[00:06:49]  So whether or not you can get a lot of people on the street to support that, the core sort of 20 to 25% of Brazil, which is really, I would call, Bolsonarista, which is not everybody that voted for him, by the way.
[00:07:01]  Bolsonaro had to make a lot of alliances with other sectors of Brazilian society in order to take power, in order to stay in power.
[00:07:09]  The core absolutely has always wanted the end of democracy.
[00:07:14]  It's a violently right-wing movement.
[00:07:16]  But really interestingly, during the pandemic, a lot of those other alliances have started to either fall apart or to become really unstable.
[00:07:25]  And that is what is generating all of this sort of chaos.
[00:07:30]  These bridges to other sections of Brazilian society are either falling apart or could fall apart.
[00:07:35]  And no one knows if that would mean that he falls or if he does what him and his families have always wanted to do and to try to use that as an excuse to just take power and ignore competing political structures in the country.
[00:07:50]  Well, to bring it back a little bit in time, the coronavirus, as far as I understand, there's a good deal that it came to Brazil literally due to Bolsonaro himself, right?
[00:08:04]  Yeah.
[00:08:05]  I mean, so I was, again, I was in Congress doing interviews with like his inner team when we all got news that he had been in Florida at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Bolsonaro and this businessman, a Brazilian businessman who, by the way, has links to a certain deceased New York financier.
[00:08:28]  He's in the black book, a man named the Garneo family.
[00:08:31]  He was introduced by Bill Clinton, apparently.
[00:08:35]  But we all got news that everyone that was in this dinner at Mar-a-Lago got coronavirus and everybody that was coming back had coronavirus.
[00:08:43]  And even though sort of Bolsonaro and the main, the inner circle were denying that this was true, they didn't let me into Congress because everybody, like working security, knew, oh yeah, no, everybody in the inner circle has it.
[00:08:56]  So to a really large extent, like one of the main vectors for transmission may have been from Florida to Brasilia via that caravan because they all like flew up because everyone, because Brazil is kind of a fake capital.
[00:09:08]  So everyone left that capital back to like their respective little constituencies that weekend.
[00:09:13]  And they might have really brought it to a lot of different people.
[00:09:16]  And the situation now with the coronavirus in Brazil is very serious.
[00:09:25]  And the response by the government, I mean, I'd put it up there with the U.S., you know, like it's we're competing with Brazil to see who can have the worst government response to containing and the spread of the virus.
[00:09:42]  Yeah, that's about right.
[00:09:43]  I think I think Brazil is just about to overtake the U.S. in terms of number of cases and number of deaths.
[00:09:49]  And like, it's really underreported here, probably more so than the U.S.
[00:09:53]  And yeah, Bolsonaro has been sort of the loudest and most irresponsibly, like obviously, irresponsibly denialist about what coronavirus is.
[00:10:03]  And like one theory as to why this is the case is because he got it and like it didn't affect him that bad.
[00:10:08]  So he thought like, oh, like it's it's fine.
[00:10:10]  I know from experience that it's fine.
[00:10:13]  But like this, this like this really obvious incompetence was what caused one of his major alliances to fall apart.
[00:10:23]  Sort of the like quote unquote moderate sections of the Brazilian elite that always preferred Bolsonaro to the left, but always told themselves that they weren't really fascists.
[00:10:32]  A lot of them really didn't like this.
[00:10:34]  And he lost two of his health ministers in less than a month.
[00:10:39]  And these were both like people appointed by him.
[00:10:41]  They were right-wing Bolsonarista health ministers, but they just couldn't do their job under him because he was declaring so loudly that they should be doing things that they knew to be irresponsible.
[00:10:51]  So that really caused a big problem for the like parts of Brazilian capital that are really essential to his rule.
[00:11:01]  Because in Brazil, even if you're a dictatorship, you always have to have the support of the rich in Rio and Sao Paul.
[00:11:06]  Like you need this kind of almost feudal elite behind you.
[00:11:09]  And that's gotten really rocky because of coronavirus.
[00:11:13]  Yeah, it's hard, you know, in the States, it's really hard as a non-Portuguese speaker or reader to get a lot of news out of Brazil of like what's going on in Brazil.
[00:11:24]  But it seems like there's, I mean, tell me if I'm like off base here, trying to kind of gauge the different, like the different tensions throughout the government.
[00:11:36]  So there's already rising tensions between Bolsonaro and the governors, right?
[00:11:41]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:11:42]  And then there's also, you know, you mentioned the health ministers, but then also like some real issues with the Supreme Court as well.
[00:11:53]  Yep, that's more, yeah.
[00:11:55]  Yeah, and you said, and the backers, like his like financial backers, as well as it seems like it's pretty unclear how strong his relationship with the military is.
[00:12:08]  Does that sound correct?
[00:12:10]  That's exactly right.
[00:12:11]  Maybe like, would it be good if I just like ran through those alliances that he did?
[00:12:14]  Yeah, do it.
[00:12:15]  Yeah, because I think it's hard too for, you know, I'm assuming that a lot of our, most of our listeners are American.
[00:12:23]  It's hard to kind of like understand these different conflicts outside of each other, I think.
[00:12:32]  Yeah, and they're all, I mean, they're all, they're all really overlapping and like even for like people living here and follow it every day.
[00:12:37]  Like it's very like a complicated, like by nature, Brazilian politics always becomes really like like, it gets deep in the mud and it goes on forever and ever.
[00:12:47]  And I think that that's the sort of strategy in the long term to sort of keep elites in charge.
[00:12:52]  But it always works like that.
[00:12:53]  So just to start, like Bolsonarismo, like as a core movement, is probably 20, 25% of the country.
[00:13:00]  And that composition is probably familiar to anyone that knows the history of far-right movements.
[00:13:06]  It's mostly white people.
[00:13:07]  There's more men than women.
[00:13:09]  It's the elite.
[00:13:11]  But it's not the real elite.
[00:13:12]  It's sort of the petty bourgeoisie, right?
[00:13:14]  So it's like small business owners and like little, you know, petty bourgeois reactionaries.
[00:13:22]  And this is like really a hard right movement.
[00:13:24]  They don't believe in democracy.
[00:13:25]  They don't care about competent governance.
[00:13:26]  They want to wipe the left off the face of the earth.
[00:13:29]  But it's only 25% of the country, probably.
[00:13:32]  So Bolsonaro in his 2018 election, he made a very important alliance, first of all, with the neoliberal elite, like actual big business owners.
[00:13:43]  And Bolsonaro himself is not a neoliberal.
[00:13:46]  He doesn't care about economics at all.
[00:13:49]  If you asked him a year ago if the state should be in the economy or not at all, he doesn't care.
[00:13:52]  What he cares about is wiping the left off of the face of the earth.
[00:13:56]  So he got a very neoliberal finance minister, Paulo Guedes, who's a Chicago boy, a Pinochet, praising, sort of real free marketeer.
[00:14:07]  And that was what allowed certain, you know, Wall Street and sections of the Brazilian bourgeoisie to back him.
[00:14:14]  And then you had Lava Jato, which is this sprawling anti-corruption investigation, which was what led to the implosion of Brazilian politics in the first place.
[00:14:23]  Partially financed, of course, by the USA.
[00:14:27]  Absolutely, there was swapping of tips and support.
[00:14:32]  There were support networks that established certain strategies for carrying out quote-unquote anti-corruption crusades.
[00:14:42]  And so the main guy behind this, the car wash investigation is a guy named Sergio Moro.
[00:14:49]  And he was the guy that put Lula in jail when he was leading.
[00:14:53]  So Lula was number one in the polls in 2018.
[00:14:55]  Sergio Moro puts him in jail.
[00:14:57]  Bolsonaro wins, turns around and makes Sergio Moro justice minister.
[00:15:01]  A pretty clear, like...
[00:15:03]  Right, right, right.
[00:15:04]  He obviously benefited from his judicial decision, which is the most corrupt thing you could ever do, but he still gets to call himself the anti-corruption.
[00:15:11]  Sergio Moro was like this, from what I gather, he was like a pretty big, like liberal hero or whatever, or just all-around hero in Brazil, because there was this issue of corruption that had almost like reached a, it seems like this like hysteria there.
[00:15:26]  And he was seen as this guy who was kind of cutting through the muck.
[00:15:30]  Yeah, there was a definite period when English language international media as well as Brazil's mainstream outlets really treated him as like a superhero.
[00:15:40]  And like I didn't, even though I am one of the like foreign correspondents that was covering Brazil at the time, but like a lot of people blame international journalism for making a hero out of this guy.
[00:15:51]  And to a large extent, he is a hero still among Brazil's center-right media, like the Globo Network, like the all-powerful TV station that puts on the novellas and shows the football.
[00:16:02]  So that was the second alliance he made.
[00:16:03]  Number three is with the military, because even though he pretends like he's a big military guy, five years ago, the military did not like him.
[00:16:10]  He was removed from the military after being accused of planting a bombing in the 80s.
[00:16:17]  The accusation was that he was going to plant bombs around Rio and then use that to agitate for higher salaries for himself.
[00:16:23]  And this is a thing that comes up a lot in like hard-right regimes that have sort of torture.
[00:16:29]  When you have like a torture team, the torture team in the government tends to get their own, like become an independent power structure and make their own demands and carry out false flag operations and things like this.
[00:16:39]  So the military never didn't like him five years ago.
[00:16:42]  He was the guy that was always in Congress defending the things they preferred not to talk about.
[00:16:47]  But when he became, like he would know, like he would just be like, we should have killed 30,000 people instead of just a few hundred.
[00:16:53]  Didn't he dedicate his vote for Dilma's impeachment to her torture?
[00:16:59]  Yeah, that was the day that I first spoke to him.
[00:17:02]  I interviewed him right before I interviewed him right before the impeachment vote and he was still nobody.
[00:17:08]  Like I threw away the interview that I did with him because he was like such a wacko even by the standards of the pre-impeachment political scene.
[00:17:18]  But then he took the stage a couple hours later and dedicated his vote to the man who had overseen her torture when she was a guerrilla in the 70s.
[00:17:26]  And that sort of like made him into the face of the opposition to everything, right?
[00:17:31]  He was like so and he was also like so far outside the political mainstream that he wasn't like important enough to be involved in corruption.
[00:17:39]  You know, like nobody, nobody invited him to the corruption party because he was like so unimportant.
[00:17:46]  Oh, by the way, for listeners who may not be super up on Brazilian stuff, Dilma was the former president of Brazil who got impeached in a very, let's say, less than above board corruption investigation.
[00:18:04]  Yeah, they found, it was a technicality, right?
[00:18:06]  It was a political removal.
[00:18:07]  The people that removed her were all accused of much, much worse things than she ever was.

=== Brazilian Backsliding Battles (15:18) ===

[00:18:11]  And she was the successor to Lula, probably the most successful social democratic president in the history of the developing world, like hugely popular.
[00:18:20]  She was mostly popular until the very end.
[00:18:22]  But when Bolsonaro became the de facto opposition to the left, the military kind of got behind him sort of.
[00:18:30]  And he gave huge numbers of spots in his government to the military, far more than even the military had in the dictatorship.
[00:18:37]  Like he just packed his government with military people because he knows that like they could go back and forth.
[00:18:43]  And then finally, the last alliance that he made is that with some sections of the working class that voted for Lula.
[00:18:48]  So like at the at the polls, a lot of people you talked to, they were just like, among Bolsonaro voters, like half of the people I would speak to were just like straight up fascists.
[00:18:57]  Like, no, we need to destroy the left.
[00:18:59]  Democracy is a joke, whatever.
[00:19:01]  And the other half were like, yeah, I voted for Lula, but like, let's try something different.
[00:19:05]  Who knows?
[00:19:06]  So of those four alliances with the sort of, with capital, the corruption party, the military, and the working class, the Lava Jato alliance totally fell apart in the last few weeks.
[00:19:16]  Sergio Moro left the government, accused Bolsonaro of really serious crimes.
[00:19:21]  That could be one thing that leads to impeachment.
[00:19:24]  The way that he's handling the pandemic is making the sort of elite business community in Wall Street especially very worried about what this decision they made.
[00:19:34]  The military could go either way.
[00:19:35]  And I think this is really important to watch where they go because if he just decides not to obey an order that the Supreme Court gives, no one knows what really would happen.
[00:19:47]  And the military is kind of on the fence.
[00:19:49]  And then finally, these football marches last week are real evidence that a lot of like regular people that aren't maybe not so politically engaged might get politically engaged if things got really rough.
[00:20:02]  So that is, that's like where I'm looking more than like specifically his approval numbers or whatever, because there's not going to be an election that decides this, right?
[00:20:11]  It's going to come down to will Congress decide to remove him?
[00:20:15]  And if they do, will there be some kind of a reaction where he tries to just ignore that and take power?
[00:20:21]  Or will people like sort of on the streets be like, no, no, no, you actually have to go?
[00:20:26]  Yeah, so I think I do want to kind of pinpoint this kind of newly developing fight that's going on with the Supreme Court in Brazil, because this is kind of a trend that you see in not to be a dork, but to use that stupid term, like back democratic backsliding, whatever they want to call it.
[00:20:51]  Where, you know, the only kind of institutions that can retain sort of legitimacy by virtue of being kind of like unaccountable in a way, kind of like in a perverse way, are the courts in order to battle like, you know, an executive that has perhaps like overreached or is overreaching or, you know, so you get these kind of like, you know, two polls of unaccountable bodies kind of going at it.
[00:21:20]  And that seems to be what's kind of emerging in Brazil.
[00:21:25]  Yeah, I think that's right.
[00:21:25]  And like, I also dislike the like sort of knee-jerk framing of like populist leaders or whatever.
[00:21:31]  But in this case, there is like a lot, a lot in common between Bolsonaro and like what's in between Hungary and Poland, for example.
[00:21:38]  Like yeah, that's Bolsonaro's son, Eduardo, who's like probably the main ideologue, he's really explicit about his like his admiration for Hungary and Poland.
[00:21:53]  So yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:54]  So when Bolsonaro tried to fire the head of the federal police, which is basically the Brazilian FBI, and then Serge Romoro, the car wash guy, quit and accused him of trying to interfere, the Supreme Court blocked his new appointment to the federal police, claiming that it was politically motivated.
[00:22:12]  Now, this was a really, number one, this created a lot of like animosity towards the Supreme Court on the part of the Bolsonaristas.
[00:22:21]  I mean, they already think that it shouldn't exist.
[00:22:23]  They think that it's like, it's tainted because these guys were appointed by the left, so they have no legitimacy.
[00:22:27]  The Supreme Court should be shut down.
[00:22:29]  But when they blocked Bolsonaro, they became really the enemy.
[00:22:33]  So people are protesting members of the Supreme Court, like the Bolsonaro, the Bolsonarista, like hate machine.
[00:22:39]  And there is like, there is technically like a group of people that work in Brasilia called the Hate Cabinet.
[00:22:45]  And all they do is they send out messages on WhatsApp, sort of coordinating.
[00:22:50]  Yeah, I'm in a couple of these groups.
[00:22:52]  Like just like, it's a really well organized operation to get like the whole Bolsonarista on the same page about who they're supposed to hate this week.
[00:23:03]  Well, also, that reminds me of something.
[00:23:06]  We'll get to this later when we talk about your book, but I just kind of want to pinpoint this.
[00:23:10]  I remember during the election where Bolsonaro won, they were sending out these insane WhatsApp messages about how like the socialists were teaching kids how to give hand jobs in school and stuff like that.
[00:23:27]  Pedophilia.
[00:23:28]  Pedophilia.
[00:23:29]  Exactly.
[00:23:29]  And how it mirrored so much of kind of what was going on here, too.
[00:23:33]  Yeah.
[00:23:34]  You know, I mean, that's to a really large extent why he won.
[00:23:36]  Like he didn't have TV advertising because he's for such a small party, but there was a huge amount of WhatsApp messages sent out throughout the country.
[00:23:44]  And not only is that the mechanism by which Bolsonaristas found out in the last week that they're supposed to hate the Supreme Court more than anybody else, the Supreme Court is now, the Supreme Court is now opening an investigation into a fake news operation implicating his other son and who's criminal in a different way.
[00:24:02]  And the Supreme Court called on lots of members of the Bolsonarista world to come give statements and like they're like refusing.
[00:24:10]  So there's like really like a battle of the institutions now.
[00:24:13]  And like you say, it's like when Dilma was removed, a lot of the people on the left were saying, oh, well, this is law affair.
[00:24:23]  This is the new way that in South America, military coups are carried out.
[00:24:28]  And once you lose the support of the deep state, they find ways to strangle you.
[00:24:31]  And now Bolsonaro is, yeah, now Bolsonaro is appropriating the same discourse, being like, well, actually, these people are just coming out me because I've lost the support of the political and economic establishment.
[00:24:43]  Trump has done that similarly.
[00:24:46]  Yeah.
[00:24:46]  And if you ask me, it's like not exactly wrong, right?
[00:24:48]  Like the moment that he lost the sort of, as I said, like the Rio and Sao Paula bourgeoisie is exactly when all these cases pop up as a means to remove him when necessary.
[00:25:00]  But you're absolutely right.
[00:25:01]  Like the war on the Supreme Court is happening right now.
[00:25:05]  Bolsonaro took a different stance for a very long time with regards to Congress.
[00:25:09]  He had been like, I'm never going to do the deal making that everyone else does.
[00:25:12]  But in the last couple of weeks, out of a defensive mechanism, I believe, he just is like, oh, no, I will.
[00:25:19]  I will make friends with whoever I need to in Congress because Congress ultimately decides if he's impeached or not.
[00:25:25]  But the Supreme Court is like the enemy of the week for the Bolsonarista hate machine for sure.
[00:25:30]  I just want to pause for a second too, because like when I was reading about all of this, I just, I had to like stop and I couldn't stop laughing at like underground fake news operation.
[00:25:42]  It's just like, what?
[00:25:44]  What is happening?
[00:25:45]  This is all, it's all just how quickly this all kind of became its own thing is so bizarre, you know?
[00:25:53]  Yeah, because it was only like 2016 when we like, or not we, but somebody invented that idea, right?
[00:25:57]  The Democrats.
[00:25:59]  Yeah.
[00:25:59]  Yeah, the fucking democracy.
[00:26:00]  It was that proper not, remember the proposal.
[00:26:03]  Oh my god, welcome me started on props.
[00:26:06]  That's Michael Weiss, who is, by the way, talk shit on this podcast.
[00:26:09]  You are fake news and couldn't get a job at CNN.
[00:26:13]  He said something about our podcast?
[00:26:15]  Proper not ID service, which I think is Michael Weiss.
[00:26:18]  But you also couldn't fucking get a job at CNN because I heard a little Me Too was coming allegedly.
[00:26:25]  Anyways, continue.
[00:26:26]  No, yeah, like that's to a really large extent why he won in 2018.
[00:26:30]  There was this coordinated campaign to be like Fernando Adage, who is the like the Workers' Party candidate.
[00:26:36]  He supports both Marxism and pedophilia and it's the same thing.
[00:26:39]  Classic.
[00:26:41]  Like there was like all, yeah, there was just basically the left wants to train your kids, wants to kill God and train your kids to be to be sexual deviants.
[00:26:52]  And like it wasn't, of course, the only thing that propelled his victory, but it was a really big part.
[00:26:57]  And now, yeah, the Supreme Court is now spearheading that investigation.
[00:27:00]  But that's one of many, many things that they could grab on to impeach him, right?
[00:27:04]  Like his sons are very deeply linked, it appears, to the paramilitary police organizations in Rio de Janeiro that killed Councillor Marieli Franco a couple years ago.
[00:27:17]  Yeah, I think the intercept had that article where it basically shows that there's no way that it could have been anybody but his sons that ordered it allegedly.
[00:27:26]  Well, I don't know who the question of who ordered it is the question of order who ordered it is very strange, but like his sons, like when you get to be city council member in Rio, you get to hire loads of people and so you just give the job to your friends.
[00:27:41]  One of Bolsonaro's sons hired the mother of the leader of that militia that carried out the execution.
[00:27:48]  So like they have very, very deep ties.
[00:27:50]  Who knows whose idea it was to do what and who knew what at certain times?
[00:27:54]  But like they're much more linked than the Bolsonaro family would like people to realize.
[00:27:58]  And that's one of many things that Congress could use to impeach him if they want.
[00:28:03]  And they'll make that decision based on their own interests.
[00:28:05]  But it's very, I think it's important to like to flag for like people outside of Brazil, that does not mean like Lula and social democracy are coming back.
[00:28:13]  Yes.
[00:28:14]  If Bolsonaro is impeached, the vice president, who was an actual general in the actual military, also a hard right-winger, becomes the president of a sort of more technocratic military government instead of an ideological right-wing government.
[00:28:29]  So there's been like moments of shot in Freud for anti-Bolsonaro Brazilians in the last two months because he's like fucking up left and right and like losing his allies and Ser Jamoro's on TV and like Sergeamoro leaked all the conversations that he said like had where he said very illegal things.
[00:28:44]  But like there's not like a light at the end of the tunnel that anyone can see from here.
[00:28:50]  I mean, it could be, it could be, it looks like there are a lot of different paths towards a rule by military, whether it's like a dictatorship or whether it's just like what they used to call authoritarian democracy.
[00:29:05]  But because if Bolsonaro does his own coup with some factions in the military, okay, military dictatorship.
[00:29:11]  But if Bolsonaro is even legally removed, you could find yourself in a de facto military dictatorship too, because then the vice president who, you know, being a general, generals in South America, no disrespect, but not always great fans of holding elections once they take power.
[00:29:31]  They tend to say they're going to do that and then not do it.
[00:29:36]  That seems to be a classic tactic that everyone keeps believing them over and over when they say that they're going to do that.
[00:29:41]  Because that was what happened in 64, right?
[00:29:43]  With the big U.S.-backed coup that led to the long dictatorship.
[00:29:48]  A lot of people believe that, oh, well, we'll just run in two years.
[00:29:53]  Like, it's fine.
[00:29:54]  Like, they could just sort it out, like do their little thing and we'll run.
[00:29:58]  But if there was another, there was no election for 25 years and they set up an international terror network.
[00:30:02]  And so yeah, it's like a very dicey time.
[00:30:05]  Like the left is also against the ropes here because the Lavajato people still have a lot of power.
[00:30:11]  So like Lula, some people speculate, like who knows, is not as loud as he might be in attacking Bolsonaro day in, day out because like they could just throw him in jail again.
[00:30:21]  Right.
[00:30:21]  And this is true for, this is true for a lot of the people that were involved in overseeing the most popular and successful social democratic governments in the history of any large country in the developing world.
[00:30:31]  Like, so it's a very, there's very like, people are walking like very carefully in the way that they oppose this or oppose that, trying to find out like what, how this could lead to something better, actually, instead of just a different kind of bad.
[00:30:45]  Do you think that the military is going to take over?
[00:30:50]  I think there's a 40% chance that his vice president becomes the president.
[00:30:55]  Yeah.
[00:30:56]  There's a 20% chance Bolsonaro carries out his kind of soft coup and like just ignores other institutions.
[00:31:03]  And there's a 40% chance we just like get this interminable, ever more complicated, elite judicial battle that drags on until the next election.
[00:31:12]  I mean, it hasn't resolved at all when you when you brought up Poland.
[00:31:18]  I mean, it has not resolved at all in Poland.
[00:31:22]  No, it's not good over there.
[00:31:23]  Or, you know, in Hungary, sure.
[00:31:26]  No.
[00:31:27]  And like, I didn't, I was going to say this as well, but like Eduardo Bolsonaro, the countries that he looks to, for an example, are Poland and Hungary.
[00:31:35]  He talks about them all the time.
[00:31:36]  He's also instituted a project in Congress to ban communism, to make it illegal to be a defender of communism.
[00:31:44]  And for his, his inspiration for that legislative project is Indonesia.
[00:31:49]  He like specifically cited the law that Indonesia passed.
[00:31:52]  I don't know if he knows this while the mass murder was still underway.
[00:31:56]  So like he's very much tapped into like the global far-right network.
[00:32:00]  He, you know, just like in the 20th century, these movements learn from each other.
[00:32:04]  They trade tactics.
[00:32:04]  They see what works.
[00:32:07]  They use the kind of propaganda that works.
[00:32:09]  They sort of, they feel out possibilities based on what they see around the world.
[00:32:14]  You brought up 65,
[00:32:40]  and I feel like this is the perfect transition for now talking about your highly acclaimed new book, The Drakkarta Method.
[00:32:52]  Washington's Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World.
[00:32:58]  Every book has a colon, so you always got to include the rest of the man.
[00:33:05]  The rest of the title.
[00:33:08]  It looks like it sold out on Amazon.com.
[00:33:10]  Congratulations.
[00:33:12]  Yeah, it sold out on Amazon and Bookshop or whatever, which means that it sold more than it was supposed to, but you'd be really surprised how little you have to sell in order to qualify as more than a book like this is supposed to.
[00:33:24]  But yeah, like, no, I spent like three years on it, and it was really quite difficult to do.

=== Eastern Europe's Secret Propaganda (14:59) ===

[00:33:30]  So I'm glad that it's gotten any attention at all.
[00:33:33]  I'm happy about that.
[00:33:34]  Yeah.
[00:33:34]  Yeah.
[00:33:35]  Every freaking lunatic I know is reading it.
[00:33:37]  So congratulations.
[00:33:39]  Thank you.
[00:33:39]  So it's good.
[00:33:40]  The book's called The Jakarta Method.
[00:33:44]  Well, let's start with where it got its name.
[00:33:47]  So Jakarta, give us a little, I mean, I know you've done sort of more in-depth things on other podcasts.
[00:33:53]  People, the Chapo episode you did, I think does a really good job of explaining this super in-depth.
[00:34:00]  But just give us a little rundown about what happened in Indonesia in the 60s.
[00:34:05]  Yeah, the book tells the story of the massacre of approximately 1 million unarmed leftists in 1965 in Indonesia.
[00:34:12]  This was one of the most important turning points of the Cold War.
[00:34:15]  I think probably the most important turning point, especially because it was a victory for the side that actually eventually won, the United States and the project of creating a global capitalist system.
[00:34:25]  And it was such an obvious and total victory that other far-right movements around the world, Latin America especially, but not only, looked to it and sort of copied from it, learned lessons and instituted their own sort of quote-unquote Jakarta plans.
[00:34:42]  Chile and Brazil are the most sort of obvious examples because they actually used that word.
[00:34:49]  But I found in doing this book that at least 20 US allied countries in the Cold War carried out intentional mass murder programs of unarmed civilians in the service of constructing authoritarian capitalist states that to a very large extent shape the fabric of life in the whole planet, but especially in the former third world.
[00:35:12]  Yeah, you talk about, you talk about how, you know, the anti-communism kind of shaped this.
[00:35:19]  Can you kind of expand a little bit on that?
[00:35:21]  Because I feel like this is like a very, we've, you know, we've had people on the podcast before to kind of talk about the post-war anti-communist, quasi-fascist turn.
[00:35:34]  Yeah.
[00:35:35]  But this sort of the interest in, I think, the kind of anti-communist international that forms after the war and its role in kind of solidifying or maintaining control over, as you say, the former third world, is like becoming a very new, or at least like there's a lot of like interest in this history.
[00:36:04]  Yeah, like I think it's, I don't really know what it is about this certain moment.
[00:36:08]  Maybe it's like the stability of U.S. hegemony is shaking just enough that like it makes sense to reanalyze like where it came from.
[00:36:18]  I think maybe from like 1990 to 2015, U.S. unipolar power was so established that it was just like not even not even worth thinking about.
[00:36:27]  Anti-communism had won so completely that we couldn't even see it in front of our faces.
[00:36:31]  It's like a fish doesn't know that they're in water, you know?
[00:36:35]  Whereas this new, this sort of this obvious crisis of English-speaking liberal liberalism and the global liberal orders probably generated some interest.
[00:36:46]  But you're absolutely right.
[00:36:47]  So like after World War II, we all know, especially in the United States, about like international communist conspiracies, real and fake, but there really was to a large extent anti-communist cooperation across countries.
[00:37:01]  Oh, yeah.
[00:37:03]  A lot of this, as you guys talked about in other episodes, a lot of the early ingredients for this were Eastern European fascists that sort of needed somewhere to go after World War II ended.
[00:37:16]  So this was the first really big organization, which was the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.
[00:37:22]  I was just about highlighting that in my notes right now.
[00:37:25]  Exactly.
[00:37:26]  Love to hear that name.
[00:37:27]  Well, I hate to hear that name, but.
[00:37:29]  Yeah.
[00:37:30]  So they're hugely important in Eastern Europe.
[00:37:34]  And the early years of the CIA involved a lot of very poorly thought out and very failed attempts to use these remnants of the far right in Eastern Europe to actually break into the Soviet bloc, the Eastern bloc.
[00:37:53]  They totally didn't, it didn't work at all.
[00:37:56]  They failed every single time.
[00:37:57]  They sent people to their death.
[00:37:59]  They had no idea what they were doing.
[00:38:00]  And this is to a large extent why they turned towards the third world.
[00:38:03]  They like weren't good enough to actually take on the communists.
[00:38:07]  So they started looking for easier targets to like Kim Chilby was handing over a list of names.
[00:38:14]  But Frank Wisner, the first head of the covert, like the head of CIA covert operations, he continued sending people to their death after he found out that Philby had, like, they just, these people, I don't know.
[00:38:27]  I mean, like, I'm sure a lot of the listeners of this podcast know like the social makeup of the early CIA, but it was like cosmopolitan liberals that all went to Yale.
[00:38:35]  They were all in secret societies.
[00:38:37]  They very much fancied themselves like educated, forward-thinking people.
[00:38:42]  And they like really wanted to get results, right?
[00:38:45]  They grew up in this meritocracy.
[00:38:46]  We're like, well, the government gave me lots of money.
[00:38:48]  I'm going to take on the communists.
[00:38:49]  And even when they failed very badly in Eastern Europe, they turned to the global south.
[00:38:55]  And so they went after easier targets.
[00:38:57]  So alongside the anti-Bolshevik bloc of nations, you had the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, which was founded between the dictatorship, the U.S.-backed murderers, dictatorship in South Korea and Taiwan and the Philippines, all three countries where there had been really horrible U.S.-backed terror carried out.
[00:39:16]  And then in Mexico, there was the Inter-American Confederation for the Defense of the Continent, founded in 1953.
[00:39:22]  And in the early years of the Cold War, these groups, they get together and they trade strategies.
[00:39:28]  They trade tactics.
[00:39:30]  They trade terror methods.
[00:39:31]  They talk about the way to stop the communist menace.
[00:39:35]  And while I don't get too much into speculating about this in the book, because there's so much that is so well documented that is shocking enough, there are some really strange coincidences between the ways that right-wing coups went down at certain points in the Cold War across huge distances.
[00:39:53]  And the coincidences are so large that I speculate like, well, these people must, I mean, they could have been trading tactics, right?
[00:40:00]  Like you get the same kind of stories about communist, evil communists stabbing heroic generals in the middle of the night.
[00:40:09]  You get the same kind of attempts to kidnap generals and then blame it on the left as an excuse for a coup.
[00:40:16]  So I think there's really underinvestigated importance to these, the international, you know, the anti-communist international as a way to make happen what eventually happened, which was the globalization of planet Earth in the way that we all occupy it now.
[00:40:35]  Yes.
[00:40:35]  The Earth.
[00:40:36]  That's like the Ur WhatsApp fake news network.
[00:40:40]  It is like it would like they were so similar that 64 in Brazil and Indonesia in 65 were similar enough.
[00:40:46]  And 1970 in Chile was similar enough to Indonesia in 1965 that if it happened in the age of the internet, someone would have been like, okay, that's the same thing.
[00:40:57]  So you mentioned the similarity there.
[00:40:59]  Those are the two countries where they actually had plans called Jakarta, right?
[00:41:03]  Yeah, well, so this is, I'm referring, I was initially referring to 64 Brazil, which is the big coup that leads to the dictatorship.
[00:41:09]  And there's 65 Indonesia, which is the mass murder.
[00:41:12]  And then in the early 70s, at the same time in Brazil and Chile, you get the use of Jakarta to signify mass murder.
[00:41:19]  And it's probably not a coincidence because at this time, this is under the government of Salvador Allende, the Brazilian military is also collaborating with the Chilean right to lay the grounds for a coup.
[00:41:30]  It's not just the CIA.
[00:41:31]  The Brazilians are very, very active in Santiago as well.
[00:41:35]  So yeah, it's Brazil and Chile that actually come up with Jakarta to signify mass murder.
[00:41:42]  And there's some like similarities, it seems like, in both the lead up to all of these, just like you were saying, and the execution of one of those, of them.
[00:41:50]  And I want to sort of circle back to what we said earlier.
[00:41:53]  The use of like castration, sexual, like women killing female assassin sort of trope is used in a lot of situations like this.
[00:42:04]  Like in Indonesia, right?
[00:42:06]  One of the big sort of stories that the Suharto and stuff said afterwards was that the female auxiliary groups of the communists would castrate the generals or castrated the generals that they kidnapped.
[00:42:21]  Right.
[00:42:21]  This was the story that was told just in the wake of the clash between the left and the right that the US and MI6 had been trying to make happen for two years.
[00:42:31]  And the story that the Indonesian military, the US-backed Indonesian military told was like so perfectly terrifying and like hit all the notes that would send like a regular Indonesian man into panic at the time that a lot of people speculate that he did not come up with this himself.
[00:42:48]  This was a pre-existing plan, a pre-existing piece of propaganda that was going to be spread.
[00:42:53]  And by the way, the BBC and CIA and Radio Australia all helped to spread this story, even though they knew it was a lie.
[00:43:01]  And the story is exactly as you said.
[00:43:03]  The story is that it was not an uprising of low-level military officers that kidnapped some generals.
[00:43:10]  It was the Communist Party.
[00:43:11]  And they took them to their secret lair.
[00:43:14]  And Gerwani, the Indonesian women's movement, which was probably the biggest feminist movement in the world at the time, campaigning for things that like almost every American liberal would consider heroic now.
[00:43:28]  They placed the blame on them and they said that Gerwani women took the generals into their den and performed a satanic communist orgy of castration, tortured them to death by stabbing at their genitals and then eventually throwing them into a well.
[00:43:43]  None of this is true, but we didn't find out this wasn't true until decades later Benedict Anderson finally uncovered the autopsy report.
[00:43:51]  You know, Benedict Anderson, the nationalism guy, the big Indonesian specialist?
[00:43:55]  Yeah, whatever.
[00:43:56]  What's the biography he fucking wrote?
[00:43:58]  I have it.
[00:43:59]  I have it.
[00:43:59]  It's good.
[00:44:00]  Oh yeah, it's good.
[00:44:01]  What is it called?
[00:44:02]  I just read it.
[00:44:02]  I can't remember.
[00:44:04]  It's something about a frog, I think.
[00:44:06]  But yeah, he's like the best.
[00:44:07]  Yeah, that was the best.
[00:44:08]  And he was kicked out of Indonesia for decades for questioning Suharto's version of the story.
[00:44:16]  But it was like, this story was so effective and the mass murder of a million people was such an effective way to keep everyone quiet that it was only decades later that we found out definitively that this was a lie.
[00:44:28]  Well, there's also, there's a museum dedicated to this.
[00:44:33]  Yeah, there's the, yeah, you can go to the museum.
[00:44:36]  Well, technically, I wasn't allowed to go because they banned foreigners because they know that it's so obviously insane.
[00:44:43]  But I just went and it's the Museum of Communist Treachery.
[00:44:47]  So it is a museum that is dedicated to basically celebrating that they were all killed.
[00:44:53]  It's technically dedicated to the six generals who were, you know, who did die and they do deserve their own memorial or whatever.
[00:44:59]  But to this day, there's like a really long diorama tour you can go on of the museum that shows all the ways that the Communist Party was treacherous and evil throughout its history and basically why they deserved to be crushed.
[00:45:12]  And again, like the Indonesian Communist Party, 20 minutes before all of this erupted, would have won elections in Indonesia.
[00:45:21]  They were the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China.
[00:45:25]  They were a unarmed moderate party.
[00:45:27]  They were really like old school Marxist-Leninists.
[00:45:30]  They were founded before the Russian Revolution.
[00:45:33]  So they really believed, they had like the old school line of you have to develop capitalism for like 50 years and then you developed socialism.
[00:45:42]  And they went from being something that like almost everyone in the country except for the extreme right either was involved in or like thought was fine.
[00:45:49]  They would like put on puppet shows in your neighborhood and they organized the teachers union.
[00:45:53]  Like if you were in any union, they did it to being like literally Satan in a matter of weeks.
[00:46:01]  And I told like in this book, I decided to tell the story through like people that lived through it.
[00:46:06]  And like I got to know a lot of the people that were accused of being parts of this operation.
[00:46:11]  And like to this day, they are like witches.
[00:46:15]  They are considered satanic, anti-Muslim, anti-Indonesian outcasts that if they didn't deserve to be killed, they at least don't deserve to have any friends.
[00:46:24]  And this is still like the official truth in the world's fourth most populous nation.
[00:46:30]  It's wild too that like the Communist Party of Indonesia came out of a Muslim party too.
[00:46:34]  It was like the left wing of a Muslim party.
[00:46:36]  Yeah, like they, so like in the really early years of the Comintern, the Indonesian Communist Party had always collaborated with what they would have considered a bourgeois nationalist Muslim union, just called the Muslim Union.
[00:46:52]  And President Sukarno, who was the first, who's like the founding father of Indonesia, he came out of this milieu where there was an obvious union between nationalism, Marxism, and Islam.
[00:47:06]  And he wrote an essay in 1926 or 27 making exactly that claim.
[00:47:11]  And Indonesia, like as an idea, as like a nation itself, is basically born out of this idea.
[00:47:17]  Like the thing that brings these 13,000 islands together, or 17,000 or however you want to count them, is an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist stance that we will stand up to our former colonizers, create a more just economy, and do it in such a way that values local traditions and this international European Marxist movement.
[00:47:42]  And this was like kind of tolerated for a bit by Washington, but by the 1950s, it was not tolerated at all.
[00:47:48]  And the CIA used all of its new stupid, goofy, try-hard and tragic tools to try to destroy him.
[00:47:58]  Why do you think it stopped being tolerated?
[00:48:01]  Eisenhower is elected.
[00:48:04]  Eisenhower didn't like the Korean War because it was a lot of hard work.
[00:48:09]  Eisenhower put the CIA to work in Iran and Guatemala.
[00:48:14]  And in Iran and Guatemala, this team of loser, totally incompetent CIA guys, they find their first really big success in Iran in 1953.
[00:48:26]  And after that, Eisenhower is like, oh, well, let's just, we could do this everywhere.

=== CIA's Kidnapping Operations (15:04) ===

[00:48:30]  So while there was a brief moment when Truman tolerated neutrality in the third world, the Eisenhower line is like, if you're not with us, you're like, not only you're against us.
[00:48:38]  And if you're against us, we're going to overthrow you.
[00:48:39]  Guatemala was another big success in this, like, in this new approach.
[00:48:45]  And then they tried to apply the lessons of those countries to Indonesia later.
[00:48:49]  But like, basically, they just were not allowed.
[00:48:51]  They just decided that if you were not specifically in a U.S. military alliance, you were a threat to the United States.
[00:49:02]  So this, this, this anti-communist sort of network that spread across, I mean, it seems like there's, there's like a few on different sort of continents or sort of hemispheres of the world, but they're all connected through certain people.
[00:49:16]  Right.
[00:49:16]  Like I was surprised to find that one of the most virulent right-wing propagandists in Chile was a Croatian.
[00:49:23]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:49:23]  So like this is something that we this is like discovered through our research in Santiago.
[00:49:29]  So when We like spent a lot of time, well, I like I worked with a Chilean researcher.
[00:49:35]  He spent loads of time in the library and then I followed up with us with interviews in Santiago.
[00:49:41]  We think that we kind of tracked down who it was that brought this tale of quote-unquote Jakarta to Chile in the early 70s.
[00:49:50]  And it's a guy named Yurai Domich and he's Croatian and he's always referred to as Croatian.
[00:49:55]  And this like, well, we can't prove it, this raised a lot of red flags for me because as we like talked about a second ago, the anti-Bolshevik bloc of nations was like a huge part of it was Croatian fascists, right?
[00:50:08]  So the idea that the idea that the person that ended up bringing this particular myth from Asia to Indonesia was a Croatian member of an international anti-communist organization is really plausible to me.
[00:50:23]  But it's not the only option, right?
[00:50:24]  Like the United States is everywhere.
[00:50:26]  This is like the one constant, the one country that is in every single embassy, has an embassy in every country in the world at the time, is the United States.
[00:50:34]  But it was a, and like, I hope somebody in Chile like follows up on this, actually.
[00:50:37]  Like, I think this is a, there's like, there's a lot of points in the book where I don't want to get into speculation because there's so much that is already so fucked up that you could just prove.
[00:50:46]  But there's like a lot of fertile ground for conspiracy theories like in the like most positive sense of the term because like we know there were conspiracies and you have to come up with a theory to like figure out what they were.
[00:50:58]  There's no way.
[00:50:59]  There's no other way to do it.
[00:51:01]  So like a lot of the Indonesian historians or Chilean historians, like I hope people like grab onto this or that connection and be like, okay, well, who was this Uri Domich guy and how did he get this idea?
[00:51:10]  Or why was it that the Chilean, like the first attempt to bring down Allende was literally kidnapping the head of the armed forces with the attempt to blame it on the left?
[00:51:19]  But then they got caught, right?
[00:51:21]  So like, I think maybe if they hadn't got caught, it would have just been a repeat of the success of 1965.
[00:51:26]  They like the plan was to do exactly what Suharto successfully did five years earlier.
[00:51:32]  Yeah.
[00:51:33]  Are there any other things that like you ran into the book where you're like, I know there's something here, but I can't figure out what it is?
[00:51:40]  Well, people have been working on the September 30th movement, like who exactly it was that organized the kidnapping of these generals in the middle of the night, why they were killed, why Suharto was not kidnapped, why Suharto.
[00:51:56]  Yeah.
[00:51:57]  Can you just really quickly respond?
[00:51:58]  Can you really quickly explain to the listeners what the September 30th movement was?
[00:52:02]  Yeah, that's a good question.
[00:52:03]  I forgot to.
[00:52:04]  Yeah, like so in 1964, after LBJ takes over for JFK, the approach to Indonesia totally changes.
[00:52:15]  And whereas they had for a while been sort of tolerating Sukarno, they bring in an ambassador who is sort of a coup specialist, let's say.
[00:52:26]  He did a coup in South Korea.
[00:52:27]  Everybody knows he's there for regret change.
[00:52:29]  It's like, it's obvious.
[00:52:30]  And what we know now from declassified files is that CIA and MI6 spend all of 1964 and 1965 agitating behind the scenes to create a clash between the left and the right, knowing very well that the left doesn't have any weapons and the U.S.-backed army will know exactly what to do in such a situation.
[00:52:47]  Now, very mysteriously, a group comes together called the September 30th Movement.
[00:52:54]  In the early hours of October 1st, 1965, this movement, led by two lower-level officers, Latif and Untung, both colonels, send other soldiers out in the middle of the night to capture high-level generals in the army that they say they believe are about to carry out a right-wing coup.
[00:53:15]  They go on the, like, Indonesia wakes up on October 1st to radio broadcasts saying the September 30th movement has carried out a successful operation to kidnap coup-mongering right-wing generals, blah, blah, blah.
[00:53:28]  They only control the country for like 12 hours.
[00:53:31]  Immediately, Suharto, who for reasons we don't understand was not part of this, he was not a target.
[00:53:36]  We do know that he was friends with both of them.
[00:53:39]  He went to one of their weddings, I believe.
[00:53:42]  We don't know, but he takes control of the country immediately.
[00:53:45]  And then it becomes clear later in the day that these generals were not just kidnapped.
[00:53:49]  They were killed and thrown into a well.
[00:53:51]  Nobody knows why they were killed.
[00:53:53]  If that was an accident, one theory is that they like messed up.
[00:53:56]  This doesn't convince a lot of people because kidnapping other members of the military in Indonesia in the 50s and 60s was like a really common way to put pressure on somebody.
[00:54:06]  Like Sukarna was kidnapped himself because some people in the revolutionary movement wanted him to declare independence from Holland earlier than he did.
[00:54:16]  And that was fine.
[00:54:17]  He got kidnapped and he did it.
[00:54:18]  And then they were bros afterwards.
[00:54:20]  It was fine.
[00:54:21]  It was fine.
[00:54:23]  What's little kidnapping between two people?
[00:54:25]  Yeah.
[00:54:26]  And so to this day, I asked every single person that I met interviewing for this book, all survivors of people who spent decades in prison, people who were in the Communist Party, people who were not, but were accused.
[00:54:39]  Everyone has a different theory.
[00:54:41]  One theory is that the Indonesian Communist Party did kind of know that they were going to do this and gave tacit approval.
[00:54:48]  One theory is that they didn't really, but once it started, they were like, yeah, that seems fine.
[00:54:51]  If you're arresting guys that are planning a coup, that's fine.
[00:54:55]  We do know that the Indonesian communist newspaper, which I like spent a lot of time reading and reconstructing, they put out an editorial on the day of the coup saying that they supported it.
[00:55:06]  It was the only newspaper to come out on October 1st or October 2nd, 1965, because the military had shut down every other newspaper in the country.
[00:55:15]  No one understands if perhaps they let it come out because they knew that it would be incriminating or if they had sort of had some hand in making it come out.
[00:55:22]  I interviewed the guy who was like the agony ant.
[00:55:25]  He like wrote the advice column for the Indonesian Communist Party.
[00:55:30]  He's still very active on Facebook and I've met him a bunch of times.
[00:55:34]  He knows that the paper that came out that day was not written in the same language as it usually was.
[00:55:41]  And it's been whatever, 55, 60 years.
[00:55:45]  This is still really active territory for researchers, people that are still maybe tracking down somebody that might know who might have been a double agent or why the generals were killed.
[00:55:57]  We still don't know who organized the September 30th movement or what their real goals were, if they were meant to fail or if it was just a very poorly organized operation that were led to believe that they had to act because CIA and MI6 had planted stories that they were going to be killed if they didn't, something like this.
[00:56:19]  And that is like, I mean, the reason I stay away from trying to answer that question for two reasons.
[00:56:25]  One, because like I don't speak the like 10 Indonesian languages that you were like the there's like real experts that have been doing this for 50, 60 years.
[00:56:33]  I thought it'd be kind of hubristic to kind of walk in as like a guy who wrote for the Washington Post and also like yeah, maybe that's one way to put it.
[00:56:44]  And also the stuff that we really know about without any shadow of a doubt that started the next day is so awful and unknown that I thought it would be sufficient just to concentrate on that.
[00:56:59]  But there's all kinds of this that that the September 30th movement and then the very strange coincidences and similarities between what the Brazilians anti-communists were telling their people and the Indonesians and the Chileans.
[00:57:12]  I think that's really like ripe, ripe material.
[00:57:17]  Well, walk us through like what sort of the Jakarta method as an export was like, right?
[00:57:23]  Because you're saying that there's these similarities.
[00:57:25]  And from what I gather, a lot of those have to do with basically, like I was saying, the lead up and the execution.
[00:57:32]  Yeah, the, I mean, at its most stripped down, it's just the mass murder of civilians that don't know it's coming, right?
[00:57:42]  The reason the Indonesian Communist Party could be wiped out so quickly is because they had no idea that they were in any way enemies of the state or enemies of the people or whatever.
[00:57:52]  They all like turned themselves in thinking it was just going to be an interview.
[00:57:56]  And they ended up not just being murdered, but disappeared.
[00:57:58]  And this is something that a historian, John Russo, turned me on to.
[00:58:02]  This is probably the first time in Asia that anyone was disappeared.
[00:58:06]  This is 1965.
[00:58:07]  The first time in Latin America that anyone has disappeared, according to Greg Grandin, is 1966.
[00:58:12]  So, and people move from U.S. posts in Indonesia to Guatemala at the same time.
[00:58:20]  So, like, again, I'm not, you know, I like to shy away from speculation, but it would be really, it's not hard to imagine that.
[00:58:27]  We can speculate.
[00:58:28]  I'll be the speculator.
[00:58:30]  Sounds like there's a connection.
[00:58:32]  There you go.
[00:58:33]  So, yeah, mass disappearance of people that you believe are opposed to your regime.
[00:58:40]  And then you tell the United States that you had to do it because they were anti-communists.
[00:58:44]  You know you're going to get away with it, right?
[00:58:46]  Because if you're looking at what happened in Indonesia in 1965, Suharto not only killed a million people and then left another million in concentration camps just for their political beliefs.
[00:58:56]  He became the golden boy of the quote-unquote free world in Asia, right?
[00:59:02]  He was welcomed with open arms into the community of respectable world leaders.
[00:59:09]  So it's those three components.
[00:59:11]  Mass murder, people that don't know what's coming.
[00:59:12]  You don't tell their loved ones what happened.
[00:59:15]  And in a very horrible way, I don't want to go into it too deeply, this really paralyzes people.
[00:59:22]  Yeah.
[00:59:22]  Because if your husband or brother or sister is in jail and you think that they're probably gone, everybody holds on to the belief that they're not.
[00:59:34]  And this stops you from taking up arms or saying something or making problems for the regime.
[00:59:42]  And this became famous, of course, in South America in the 70s.
[00:59:45]  So after the Jakarta, the actual Operation Jakarta in Brazil in 72 and 1, and then after the successful implementation of Plan Jakarta in Chile in 73, these countries get together to form Operation Condor, as I think probably true non-listeners know a bit about, like the international mass murder network across South America.
[01:00:03]  And this was their modus operande is to disappear people so that their families won't make any noise.
[01:00:15]  And in ways that this is another thing that I think should be looked into more, to a very large extent, there is evidence.
[01:00:21]  There's a really good researcher in Chile, Patrice McSherry, who's written about this.
[01:00:25]  There's a lot of evidence that Condor was based a lot on what had been developed in Operation Gladio in Europe, that the stay-behind networks in Western Europe organized by the CIA and those remnants of the far right also provided lessons as to how to carry out international terror networks.
[01:00:47]  Yeah, I think there's something, I mean, you just briefly mentioned it, but there is something about being in that like liminal state of like shock and unknowing and mystery in the case of like having members disappeared that completely, like you said, paralyzes you to not, like, it's, it's like, you, uh, it's like demobilizing in a sense.
[01:01:11]  Like you can't like, there's nothing to kind of hold on to in order to use it as like a, um, towards like political ends or retribution or anything that would kind of, because there's no finality, you know?
[01:01:27]  Yeah.
[01:01:27]  It's completely horrible.
[01:01:29]  I mean, it's like horrifying.
[01:01:31]  It really is.
[01:01:32]  It's very bad.
[01:01:32]  Yeah.
[01:01:33]  And it's, cause it's like you, you think, well, like, no, well, my, my son is going to be the one that's still okay.
[01:01:38]  And if I just keep my mouth shut, maybe he'll come out in 10 years.
[01:01:41]  And like somebody made this point to me recently after the book came out that like, oh, well, obviously like they should just disappear everyone because, you know, why tell people?
[01:01:52]  But actually there is like a distinction.
[01:01:54]  Like I went to Guatemala where there was the worst anti-communist massacres in the Western hemisphere.
[01:02:00]  They killed 200 to 250,000 people from the 70s to the 80s.
[01:02:05]  And this is very horrible.
[01:02:07]  But out in the countryside where they didn't care about people that much, where they were like low value targets, and this is basically indigenous Mayan populations, they would just come to the village and just kill every single person.
[01:02:18]  They had no, they didn't go through the trouble of like kidnapping, hiding the bodies or whatever, because they didn't care who knew out there.
[01:02:26]  Whereas in Guatemala, in Guatemala City, if you were a target, they would make sure that they grabbed you and took you away because they wanted to disappear you.
[01:02:34]  They wanted to like maybe get some information from you.
[01:02:37]  But definitely they wanted to create this dynamic where nobody knew what had really happened.
[01:02:41]  If they just burst into your like Miguel, one of the people I've interviewed for the book, Miguel is really interesting because he remembers the CIA-backed bombing in 1954 that led to the overthrow of Joco Arbenz.
[01:02:54]  So he was a kid and he remembers being traumatized by the bombs being dropped on his city by the CIA's little fake army.
[01:03:02]  And then in the 70s, he became a union leader and he believes the reason he was, that he survived is because they wanted to disappear him rather than just murder him.
[01:03:11]  Because they burst into a union meeting and instead of just shooting up the whole place, which would have been easier, they wanted to chase him down and grab him.
[01:03:19]  And he like jumped onto the roof, like ran across like the like several buildings and then eventually like left the country.
[01:03:26]  But yeah, like it's a horribly, yeah, this is the thing's horrible about the whole book is like horrible and horribly effective.

=== Understanding Modern Authoritarianism (11:22) ===

[01:03:34]  And like to a large extent, I think the reason that most Americans don't know about all this stuff is that it was so effective.
[01:03:40]  Like the reason we know about Vietnam is because we lost, right?
[01:03:42]  We know about Vietnam because it was embarrassing and it was like obvious.
[01:03:46]  Whereas these other things where you actually suppress the truth for so many decades, it remains suppressed to a large extent.
[01:03:54]  I don't know why they let me do this book, but like I think too, like, you know, we began this episode talking about the like increasingly volatile situation in Brazil.
[01:04:05]  And I think that, you know, it cannot be overstated how much of what happened in these years from the early 50s through the, you know, mid-70s, basically, like absolutely shaped everything in contemporary politics right now.
[01:04:25]  Like the legacies of this stuff, like we're still really like very much living in.
[01:04:30]  And there's no way to kind of understand the situation like throughout South America.
[01:04:34]  I mean, you know, it's like, I think a lot of kind of like lefty types kind of sometimes without understanding this stuff, like bemoan the end of the pink tide.
[01:04:46]  And they're like, what went wrong?
[01:04:48]  What can we learn?
[01:04:49]  And it's like, dude, like, this is a massive part of that story.
[01:04:53]  Like the kind of anti-communist turn after the post-war and like, as you, you know, rightfully say, this like transition from Gladio through to Condor and these various networks that are set up and these new tactics that are used have shaped the second half of the 20th century to such a degree that it's impossible to talk about anything like contemporary politically without understanding this context.
[01:05:21]  Yeah, like speaking of the pink tide, like I became, like I started journalism in Venezuela.
[01:05:25]  It was like an accident.
[01:05:26]  I was supposed to do other stuff.
[01:05:28]  And this was in 2007, 2008.
[01:05:30]  And when I talk to a lot of people outside of Venezuela that like rightfully point to some major mistakes that the Chavez and Maduro governments have made, I also tell them like, you do understand that like everybody that I met that lived there thought that the CIA was trying to overthrow their government and then would murder them if it worked.
[01:05:47]  You know, like you, you have to understand like what does this do to a political system where the leader like quite justifiably thinks that if he does not become self-defensive and almost paranoid in the attempt to hold on to power, like they might kill you and your whole family.
[01:06:04]  And this is something that's so hard for Americans to think about, yeah.
[01:06:07]  So that's why you talk about the American reaction to Allende and how it was on the part of the Americans in the methods they used, it was to try to force Allende's hand to become more authoritarian and to become more violent.
[01:06:25]  Yeah, no, this is another thing that people like tend not to understand.
[01:06:27]  They're like, oh yeah, like the CIA overthrew Allende, but it's because he was being socialist and they didn't like him being bad at being the president.
[01:06:36]  No, like they started the right-wing terror against Allende started before he took office.
[01:06:41]  And we know from declassified information that the specific thing that worried the Nixon administration was that he would be successfully democratically socialist, that he would provide a model for other countries in Latin America.
[01:06:54]  This was what was absolutely unacceptable.
[01:06:56]  So they hoped to push Allende into a more authoritarian stance so that they could justify crushing him, or at least that he would just not be such a guiding light.
[01:07:06]  But this comes up again and again in the Cold War.
[01:07:10]  In Guatemala in 1954, it was the same thing.
[01:07:12]  I think the language they even use is like, if it appears that David stands up to Goliath and is successful at doing so, then everyone will want to do that.
[01:07:20]  So it's just, it cannot be tolerated.
[01:07:23]  And like, I don't know, somebody else made this comparison.
[01:07:26]  It's kind of like the Roman crucifixion thing, right?
[01:07:28]  Like, if you challenge us, we're going to come to your village and we're going to make an example out of you.
[01:07:33]  All the other villages are going to know that they shouldn't try that kind of shit.
[01:07:38]  And like, yeah, it went on well after the Cold War ended too in Latin America.
[01:07:43]  Yeah.
[01:07:43]  And it's like, you know, I think too, for people who are not, like, don't understand these nuances too, it's like, you know, these were not like communist regimes.
[01:07:54]  Like Allende was not like full.
[01:07:56]  I mean, it was like, you know, implementing, like you say, like social democratic reforms starting, you know, slowly.
[01:08:03]  Like even in the case in Indonesia, like it's not full out, you know what I mean?
[01:08:10]  Like it's not, you know, he's mostly like, you know, kind of like left-wing nationalism, you know, and anyway, but like, I think people lack this kind of understanding when they try to maybe like get a sense of the like might of the United States in the 20th century and what it's done.
[01:08:35]  It's like, you know, nothing, it wasn't, nothing had to hit a threshold.
[01:08:41]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:08:42]  It wasn't like, oh, and now you've gone too far.
[01:08:44]  It was like anything that, like you say, demonstrated that even a tiny bit of reform away from U.S. hegemony was possible.
[01:08:57]  Yeah.
[01:08:59]  And like, yeah, they didn't.
[01:09:02]  Yeah.
[01:09:02]  No, there was no, so this is a really tragic thing that comes up when like a lot of people that I talk to is that a lot of the people that ended up dead were the people believed in that line that you just spoke about, that believed that if you're like, oh, no, if we follow all the rules, then like it'll be okay.
[01:09:18]  Oh, yeah, I got something to say about Brazil there, by the way.
[01:09:21]  Yeah, like that was exactly like Allende's like take was like, oh no, no, like actually the Cold Wars.
[01:09:27]  Well, this is another thing like that a lot of them would say too is that they thought, and this is like in the 70s, they thought like, oh, that kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore.
[01:09:34]  Like that's the 50s.
[01:09:36]  Oh, no, no.
[01:09:36]  Like, and then in the 90s, like, oh, that's the 70s.
[01:09:39]  And it's like, oh, no, no, no, in 2009 with Honduras, like, oh, that's coup in Latin America.
[01:09:44]  No, that's from 20 years ago.
[01:09:45]  It's always like they always believe that if they follow all the rules, they'll be fine.
[01:09:49]  And they always believe like, oh, that stuff doesn't happen anymore.
[01:09:52]  Yeah.
[01:09:53]  I mean, you see that legacy even with PT.
[01:09:56]  Like, I don't know.
[01:09:57]  It's like, oh, well, we're just going to see where these corruption charges go.
[01:10:01]  We'll follow the rules.
[01:10:02]  It's like, what are you guys doing, man?
[01:10:05]  Yeah, like that was another, you know, it's one more example.
[01:10:07]  Like I said, it was like Lula's popularity was insanely high.
[01:10:13]  He had the, he had the support of like the international community to a very large extent.
[01:10:18]  I was sent here in 2010 by like the Financial Times to cover like the rise of the Brazilian economic powerhouse.
[01:10:25]  He had his like shining moment where he had done everything right.
[01:10:28]  He had gotten rich people richer as well as getting poor people richer.
[01:10:32]  And he had, you know, finally he cracked the code.
[01:10:35]  And like, I think that allowing taking huge steps back and looking at the whole global system allows you to realize like, oh, there's no code.
[01:10:45]  Like when has there been, when has there been a country in the global south or the post-colonial world that like got it right?
[01:10:54]  So never.
[01:10:55]  So either the game's rigged or every single country outside of Western Europe and North America is like too incompetent to run a government.
[01:11:03]  And like, I think the first, the first, the first conclusion is probably like plausible.
[01:11:09]  The second one is racist.
[01:11:11]  Well, it's like, it's like we saw, it's astounding to me how people believe like, because if you do talk to people, you know, they might be like, oh yeah, Operation Condor, you know, Gladio, all these things happen.
[01:11:22]  But there is sort of this mental block with a lot of people where they think the end of the Cold War meant the end of sort of the bad stuff.
[01:11:30]  This battle.
[01:11:31]  But it's like, look at what just happened to Bolivia.
[01:11:35]  It's the same fucking playbook where, I mean, yeah, again, now it's like lawfare or whatever, but it combined with basically a military takeover and then a very unpopular right-wing sort of neo-fascist comes into power.
[01:11:49]  And that's something, like, that's something I want to stress so much is that this moves dialectically, right?
[01:11:55]  Like we go from after World War I to these sort of right-wing nationalist semi-monarchist movements in Europe and then sort of eventually their copycats in South America and Asia.
[01:12:06]  But it's like we can see even with the castration stuff, you know, the Free Corps, if, you know, if you read that book, Male Fantasies, a lot of that is echoed in what you talk about in your book in the propaganda.
[01:12:17]  Anyways, we have the interwar stuff that becomes increasingly, increasingly further right and away from monarchism.
[01:12:24]  And then World War II, well, okay, they're Nazis, but the Nazis and fascists, they lost.
[01:12:29]  And so they have to transform sort of their crusade sort of shape, but not really the general content.
[01:12:35]  And they become just anti-communist.
[01:12:38]  And then anti-communism, you know, which shares basically, like in its sort of ideological form, like really hard in anti-communism is basically, in most cases, just like fascism without the Jew stuff.
[01:12:54]  Except or in Argentina.
[01:12:57]  Yeah.
[01:12:59]  And then now it's sort of morphed into whatever kind of form it is.
[01:13:03]  Now it's sort of a little more amorphous, but it's become like in a way kind of globalized and a little more liberalized in a way.
[01:13:11]  But it still exists.
[01:13:12]  And you can trace a direct line, basically, from fascism to many of these like parties and regimes today.
[01:13:19]  No, like speaking of the like amorphous nature of the current justifying ideology, I think Bolivia is really interesting because like lo and behold, once more, when there is this, when the military demands that Morales steps down and then he has to leave the country, this is an obvious military coup.
[01:13:36]  Guess who, guess who comes to the defense of this coup once more?
[01:13:40]  It's like the international quote unquote liberal journalists that are only care so deeply about norms and democracy and like fighting populism or whatever.
[01:13:52]  And they're able to couch the exact same defense of the exact same thing that happened in 1954 and 64 and 65 over and over in these new terms of like, oh, well, like you, you, you need to make sure that there's alternating power systems and like you need these like the formal provision of institutional control is really what I care about.
[01:14:14]  And like in Latin America, this was like Latin, I mean, it was like very frustrating for people like me at the end of 2019, like the people that came out in defense of the Bolivian coup.
[01:14:24]  Because like even down here, even on the right, people were like, what are you doing?
[01:14:28]  Like, do you not understand what happens when the military throws out the most popular leader and the person that comes in has absolutely no support whatsoever?
[01:14:36]  How do you think?
[01:14:37]  5% support.
[01:14:39]  How do you think she's going to govern the country, right?
[01:14:42]  She's going to engage in repression.
[01:14:44]  She's going to use the military to maintain her stranglehold.
[01:14:47]  And it was like these big anti-populist global thinkers or whatever, I think.
[01:14:53]  There were some like self-identified leftists as well.

=== Waiting for Lessons (03:26) ===

[01:14:56]  I'm just going to say that.
[01:14:58]  There's a lot of soft, like, you know, it's just been too long.
[01:15:01]  It's like, that's not a thing.
[01:15:03]  That's not.
[01:15:05]  Anything that's ever, any government that's ever been overthrown has been committing some mistakes somehow or another, right?
[01:15:12]  Like there's always a way that you can justify if you want to.
[01:15:16]  Like there's never been a good government in the history of the world, right?
[01:15:19]  On any side.
[01:15:21]  Pointing to some small but real problems in the way that Morales was governing towards the end of his term is so far from justifying act because he he agreed.
[01:15:32]  He agreed to hold new elections under the aegis of the OAS before the coup happened, which really, which really gives the game away, right?
[01:15:38]  Like they weren't waiting for him to do it right.
[01:15:41]  They were waiting for an excuse to take power away from him.
[01:15:44]  No, it was very, it was a frustrating couple days for me, for sure.
[01:15:48]  Yeah, I talked to this guy at MIT who did the MIT elections lab or whatever, who's like crunched the numbers and found that basically the whole pretext for the election being false is bullshit.
[01:16:00]  It reminds me, I got to talk to that guy more.
[01:16:04]  So we got to wrap up here pretty soon.
[01:16:06]  One thing I want to ask before my, this is my penultimate question.
[01:16:11]  One thing I want to ask is, is if there's anything like really one message that you want your book to instill in people, what is it?
[01:16:21]  This might sound like a corny answer, but I'm still trying to figure out like the message.
[01:16:27]  It's not like the kind of book where I have like, it's not like a pundit book where I have like a point that I want to make on TV.
[01:16:32]  So I like assemble all this crap.
[01:16:34]  It really is just like this story that I uncovered.
[01:16:37]  And I don't really know where it points.
[01:16:39]  I think it points to some directions that are not quite that comfortable, but I think probably need to be confronted.
[01:16:45]  So, like, I kind of want people to, like, think through it also and figure out what the point is, because I don't really know.
[01:16:53]  Like, it was very, there was, like, some moments of real psychological difficulty, like, as I was wrestling with the story.
[01:16:59]  And I'm kind of on the other side of it now.
[01:17:01]  But I still don't know exactly what the lesson is.
[01:17:04]  So I kind of hope that other people can think through that with me.
[01:17:08]  Thank you.
[01:17:09]  That's, I mean, yeah, it does not seem like a polemical tract.
[01:17:14]  Although, I mean, I certainly came out of it basically having having had many of my opinions about the liberal world order reinforced.
[01:17:24]  Yeah, which is always good to do.
[01:17:26]  A little refresher.
[01:17:28]  Yeah, it's an excellent, it's a really excellent book, I have to say.
[01:17:31]  Yeah, I gotta say, we're not just blowing smoke up this Joker's ass.
[01:17:34]  No, because I don't like anything.
[01:17:37]  Thank you.
[01:17:37]  Thank you.
[01:17:38]  Me and Liz both read this motherfucker in like a day.
[01:17:41]  Great fucking book.
[01:17:43]  Love it.
[01:17:43]  Truan Seal of Approval.
[01:17:46]  Wax seal.
[01:17:48]  Yeah, that's going on the second printing.
[01:17:50]  That is, yeah, that's on the front cover.
[01:17:53]  No, that is.
[01:17:54]  It's like the national book award seal, but it's like the our upside down pizza with the I in it.
[01:18:00]  Just, yeah, just the whole cover.
[01:18:01]  No, no, that is, that is really nice.
[01:18:03]  That does mean a lot, I think.
[01:18:04]  I do.
[01:18:05]  I think that means a lot to me.
[01:18:07]  So there is one thing I want to close on, which is, I mean, you talk a lot in your book about sort of the insane propaganda directed at the left or at leaders who are not thought of warmly in Washington.

=== Sex Tape Conspiracy (05:09) ===

[01:18:23]  And one thing I found fascinating, which I'd heard of before, but kind of forgot about it for a while, is the fake porno.
[01:18:31]  Can you explain the false pornography to our listeners?
[01:18:37]  Yes.
[01:18:37]  Yeah, the fake pornographic film produced by Bing Crosby and his brother Larry in Hollywood.
[01:18:45]  So as I said, when the CIA was trying to destroy Sukarno, first they tried to bribe, they tried to give money to right-wing Muslim parties so that they would win and that the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, would lose.
[01:19:00]  That didn't work.
[01:19:01]  They also authorized a plan to murder Sukarno.
[01:19:03]  They never went forward with it.
[01:19:04]  Maybe they tried.
[01:19:05]  Maybe they didn't.
[01:19:06]  We don't know.
[01:19:06]  But one thing they came up with is that Sukarno was very famously amorous.
[01:19:13]  Anywhere he went, he kind of made no bones about the fact that he wanted to sleep with a lot of local women, whether they be sex workers or voluntary partners.
[01:19:22]  Extremely based.
[01:19:27]  I mean, ironically, this is one of the things that the Indonesian women's movement didn't like about him.
[01:19:30]  They were against the...
[01:19:33]  Wait, ironically.
[01:19:35]  Well, no, I mean, not ironically, because they ended up being murdered for, like, to bring him down.
[01:19:39]  You know, like, they ended up paying for him in a way.
[01:19:43]  Was he, did he, like, try to pass this off by, like, saying it was a religious thing or that, like, you know, he was a relationship.
[01:19:50]  No, it wasn't just.
[01:19:51]  He was a relationship with his wife.
[01:19:53]  It wasn't.
[01:19:53]  No, he ended up, he ended up being, he ended up taking on several wives.
[01:19:57]  So later in his presidency, like, he said that the Indonesian practice of polygamy was something that, you know, he was into.
[01:20:07]  And a lot of Indonesian, like, and this was a very interesting thing about Poly.
[01:20:11]  Yeah, he was way ahead of the curve on Pali stuff.
[01:20:15]  But this is something that was very interesting about the Yale guys is that they were such Americans that they thought that Indonesians would be shocked to learn that he slept around.
[01:20:26]  Whereas everyone in Java, he's from the island of Java.
[01:20:29]  There was kind of a type of guy that did this.
[01:20:32]  There were people that sort that he was more than human almost.
[01:20:34]  Like he had supernatural powers, or at least that he was very, very virile or whatever.
[01:20:41]  So what the CIA did not know is that everyone in Indonesia knew that he slept around wherever he went.
[01:20:49]  But what the CIA tried to do, they came up with a plan.
[01:20:51]  They knew that he had been to Moscow and they came up with a plan to create a sex tape that they were going to claim indicated that he slept with a KGB agent in Moscow and that the Russians had compromat on him as a result, right?
[01:21:04]  That the Russians beat.
[01:21:08]  Yeah, compromat.
[01:21:09]  It's compromised.
[01:21:10]  Wait, the deep state is just still reusing the same plan?
[01:21:14]  They only have a couple of plans.
[01:21:16]  Yeah, true.
[01:21:17]  All right, go ahead.
[01:21:18]  So, no, the CIA thought, this is what we're going to do.
[01:21:21]  We're going to film a tape of him sleeping with this white woman.
[01:21:24]  No, we're going to get a guy in LA, Like an actor from the underworld in Hollywood, get the Crosby brothers to produce it.
[01:21:31]  Because, you know, at this point in the, we forget, at this point in the Cold War, the CIA were troops, right?
[01:21:36]  Like, if you, if you went to the New York Times or if you went to a movie studio and you said, I'm doing, I need to do some CIA stuff, they were going to help you.
[01:21:42]  And so, the way the legend...
[01:21:46]  Yeah. Yeah.
[01:21:47]  No, they will.
[01:21:48]  Yeah, they will.
[01:21:49]  As legend has it, and I like, I really tried to check this because it seemed to sort of interesting be true, but there are overlapping accounts.
[01:21:56]  There's this guy, Robert Maheo.
[01:21:58]  He worked for, who's the crazy aviator guy?
[01:22:02]  Lindbergh.
[01:22:03]  No, no, the one who like stayed in his house.
[01:22:07]  Oh, what's his fucking name?
[01:22:09]  They made it.
[01:22:09]  Howard Hughes.
[01:22:11]  Howard Hughes.
[01:22:12]  So there's multiple, like, this is corroborated from multiple sources, including historians of the CIA that like are very sympathetic to the CIA.
[01:22:19]  They hired a man, a Mexican-American actor, got him either in heavy makeup or a mask to create this film that was supposed to, number one, discredit him as a moral Muslim man.
[01:22:31]  And number two, lead his country to believe that the KGB was secretly controlling him because they had a sex tape.
[01:22:38]  And like, this is like horribly stupid and funny and like insane, but it's like also not funny, right?
[01:22:42]  Like they wanted to like, like the people of Indonesia loved this man and they were like actively trying to destroy his reputation with this goofy shit.
[01:22:52]  Apparently the reason they didn't release the tape is because it wasn't convincing.
[01:22:55]  Like if it they couldn't like hair and makeup wasn't good enough in the 50s in Hollywood too.
[01:23:01]  It's astounding because we talked about this on other episodes of the show.
[01:23:05]  Once Deep Fit gets better, they'll start doing, they'll start trying to do this again.
[01:23:10]  Well, the way that the internet works now, and this is part of Bolsonaro's presidency, is like, if it comes from the right source, you just believe it, right?
[01:23:17]  So Bolsonaro people that get the rumor in their WhatsApp messages that Adaji believes in Marxist pedophilia training, they just, you know, whatever, like if it comes from the right people, I'll just like take it.

=== Propaganda Tactics Resurging (02:59) ===

[01:23:32]  You know, they don't, they don't need, they like, they don't feel the need to look into it because, you know, it's what they want to hear anyways.
[01:23:38]  And like technologically, yeah, I think we're entering territory where that kind of stuff happened, becomes more and more the same.
[01:23:45]  I mean, we can see there's this giant rumor, which like is all across America.
[01:23:50]  A friend of mine posts on Twitter that her aunt threw a plate during an argument about this in a small Wisconsin town that there's antifa buses coming around.
[01:24:02]  And this has led to like all of Cordelaine, Idaho mobile.
[01:24:06]  I mean, granted, it's like the highest, that's like Nazi America, but like, or Nazi Central America, but like tons of people are mobilizing and there's this sort of hysteria that when reading your book has some echoes, you know, obviously I don't think there's going to be a giant massacre of of communist all 500 communists in America.
[01:24:29]  But it just shows how effective sort of this like propaganda, both black and white, is.
[01:24:37]  And it still works.
[01:24:40]  Yeah.
[01:24:40]  And like, well, that's like saying that the protesters aren't really part of the local population is classic counterinsurgency tactics, right?
[01:24:48]  And like this academic Stuart Schrader has done a lot of work on the way that the U.S.'s global counterinsurgency war that we've waged over the last 40 to 50 years has really come home to affect the way that policing happens in the United States.
[01:25:02]  So we should not be surprised, I think, to see security forces in the U.S. reproduce tactics that have been developed in parts of the world that Americans like sort of close their eyes to, where Americans close their eyes to suffering and sort of bizarre strategies.
[01:25:19]  But yeah, like it definitely rang bells for me when they were like, oh no, all like it's not really New Yorkers that are protesting.
[01:25:25]  They're all from California, which means like it's not, they're not really there.
[01:25:31]  Every single politician saying it too.
[01:25:34]  Yeah, it's the thing.
[01:25:36]  It's like it works.
[01:25:38]  The reason these tactics get recycled is because these people talk to each other and they know that it's effective.
[01:25:43]  The Atlantic Council sent out their memos real quick.
[01:25:47]  What did they send out?
[01:25:49]  Oh, just about how I'm saying, I'm sure they sent out, okay, here's the talking points.
[01:25:53]  It's outside agitators.
[01:25:55]  Right.
[01:25:57]  Well, now, I mean, what happened today?
[01:25:59]  Isn't today it's flipped where now it's like actually everybody's in the protest and the protest is for everything and nothing?
[01:26:04]  Is that like yeah, that's like what they're trying to do now.
[01:26:08]  I'm getting the impression from people all over the country that I've talked to.
[01:26:11]  And I'm sort of getting the impression from that here, although I haven't gone to a protest for, I think, a couple of days or for three days, is that the protests have gone from being these really aggressive, really anti-police protests to these sort of like love and respect and, you know, like sneeze.

=== It's About Love Now (03:18) ===

[01:26:32]  Exactly.
[01:26:33]  And one of the things that's another classic tactic, though, too.
[01:26:36]  I mean, this is really reminiscent of what happened in Brazil in 2013.
[01:26:40]  I was just going to say that.
[01:26:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:26:43]  It's like a whole nother can of worms, but like that, there's like really lessons there, I think, that like, you know, if you get the media behind protests and you say, actually, they're about this thing that everybody agrees with, and you get the streets, if you get the streets flooded with people that are anti-political or even a little bit conservative and they say, well, actually, the protest is about this, well, then it just becomes about that.
[01:27:02]  Unless you have like a strict hierarchical organization or very clear demands like built into the protest itself, it's not hard to be like, oh, actually, it's about love now.
[01:27:10]  And like, oh, if you like love, you're out there.
[01:27:13]  And then the entire thing has been diffused into nothing.
[01:27:17]  Of course, we hear our guest, Mr. Vincent here endorsing the true and online that there should be a strict hierarchical organization behind all these protests, namely a party of and for the working class.
[01:27:31]  Well, thank you.
[01:27:33]  This is not, yeah, thank you.
[01:27:35]  That's not that's not far from what like a lot of the organizers of 2013, what did the conclusion they came to over the last seven years.
[01:27:41]  But I'm officially officially a political journalist.
[01:27:44]  I don't have any peace whatsoever.
[01:27:46]  I was putting words in your mouth, which I will be doing during the outro of the show where I imitate you for 45 more minutes.
[01:27:53]  That's funny.
[01:27:55]  Well, I usually ask our guests if they want to plug anything, but we're plugging your fucking book.
[01:28:00]  Liz, rattle off the title again, baby.
[01:28:02]  Yeah, the Japarta method, Washington's anti-communist crusade and the mass murder program that shaped our world.
[01:28:08]  Tell people to go buy it, but you're out of luck.
[01:28:12]  You can't.
[01:28:12]  Pre-order for the second printing.
[01:28:14]  Yeah, it's like two or three days.
[01:28:15]  It'll be back.
[01:28:16]  It's fine.
[01:28:16]  By the time this audit, there's that was a temporary victory.
[01:28:18]  It's not a real thing.
[01:28:19]  I know, but it sounds so cool to say.
[01:28:21]  Oh, that's why listeners.
[01:28:23]  We're putting this over the top again.
[01:28:24]  Sell it out.
[01:28:26]  I know.
[01:28:27]  No, but thank you so much for saying that.
[01:28:28]  It's hard to do.
[01:28:29]  So I'm glad something.
[01:28:31]  Thank you so much for joining us.
[01:28:32]  This is fun.
[01:28:33]  Everything's from me.
[01:28:56]  That was off the Brazilometer charts.
[01:28:59]  No, don't do that.
[01:29:02]  I slurred all those words too.
[01:29:05]  That was a fantastic interview.
[01:29:08]  Yeah, that was fun.
[01:29:09]  We went long.
[01:29:10]  I had so much to talk about.
[01:29:12]  I know.
[01:29:12]  I want to.
[01:29:13]  I've been peppering him with questions basically for the past couple weeks just related to this kind of stuff.
[01:29:18]  And yeah, great.
[01:29:20]  Love having him on.
[01:29:21]  Fantastic guests.
[01:29:23]  Yeah, we'll link to the book in the show notes.
[01:29:27]  And if it's still sold out, I'm selling my copy for $400.
[01:29:33]  All right.
[01:29:34]  Well, we've kept you long enough.
[01:29:37]  This is a long episode.
[01:29:39]  I will say thank you.
[01:29:42]  I'm Liz.
[01:29:43]  I'm Brace, joined by producer Kyung Chomsky.
[01:29:49]  And we will see you next time.