Thread by @AliceAvizandum

oh good lord no. no thank you

like I remember that guy trying to insist I was a Nazi because the podcast is cryptofascist but honestly, it's just like watching RT but with fewer insults to my intelligence

funnily enough dead silence on the novichok stuff

I'm gonna turn into one of those Trump-Russia FBPE weirdos just because I'm slowly getting podcast gaslit

I'm gonna listen to it. Pray for me

RANIA, EIGHT MINUTES IN: if you're in any way affiliated with RT, even appearing on it, you're a bad person
ME: yeah
RANIA: ...in DC

AMES: [Russiagate] must be good for viewership, there's, there's a cult around this, a cult that controls this, it's a cult that likes to buy things
ME: okay so the guy calling it cryptofascist, I have to apologise to him

that is nearly verbatim and the 'it's a cult that likes to buy things' is

the gang agree that it's wild that there are no politicians in America who, even cynically, are centering healthcare for all to get votes because it would lose them money. I go hoarse yelling about Ocasio-Cortez

'alleged chemical weapons attacks' oh yeah baby I love Politic's

RANIA: it's basically over, the Syrian government is doing its last operations, Alexa play all I do is win

RANIA: [seemingly seriously] Russia basically sort of stepped in to stop the Israelis from ruining everything, because they're obsessed with Iran and paranoid about it

'what's amazing is how quickly things have gone back to normal'

Rania talks about how the rebellion was totally inorganic from the start because the rebels use a lot of bullets. Dolan implicitly accepts that to talk, correctly, about how the nature of the fighting meant they had to be getting outside support

Rania literally attributes the whole thing to 'outside agitators'

RANIA: you know you sometimes still see people talking about a revolution and I'm like, you're mentally deranged

'people like to envision this idea that, um, anybody rising up against a government has good intentions'

'Idlib is basically under the control of Turkey, and is going to stay that way indefinitely'

?!

RANIA: Idlib is an Escape From New York hellscape filled with the worst jihadis in the world, they fear the government and they should
RANIA FIVE MINUTES LATER: the Syrian government is fine with this because it's good for trade(?) and trade with Turkey goes through Idlib(?!)

she's super giggly, which is incongruous when she's talking (correctly) about how human life doesn't matter to pundits

it's kind of creeping me out, honestly

DOLAN: nobody talks about the war crime in the four towns agreement where a bunch of Shia kids got killed
RANIA: [giggling] I think you mean 'pro-regime children'

DOLAN: part of the reason sectarianism predominates is that all the socialists got killed

yeah absolutely. but he attributes this entirely to the CIA and MI6 like Assad didn't like killing anyone left of him too

RANIA: the Kurdish community in northern Syria, it's definitely more progressive now, but it wasn't always that way

exposing the pre-woke phase will never not look desperate

the gang talk Palestine. this bit is boring because they all mostly make sense - Hamas advantages Israel and was maybe helped by it as a wedge against the socialist PFLP and PLO, and that's responsible for a lot of sectarianism. k

RANIA: Iran and Syria are friends but very different culturally because they're very religious, they don't drink [hurriedly walking that one back] at least that's how people in the army are,

so basically they're the scary kind of Muslims, non-secular, got it
no agenda there

'they're very pious, and in Syria they're not, they like to drink, they like their women'
I guess a podcast is not a good medium for the photos of girls in miniskirts bit, huh

RANIA: they say that Iran owns Syria but that's ridiculous, if anyone owns Syria it's Russia, that's who benefits, I mean if you're Russian in Syria you're like a prince, or a princess
DOLAN: wow
RANIA: [hurriedly backtracking] no I mean uh

Russia's the only one stopping Trump letting Israel start a war with Iran

uh

okay so you know how I said this was *less* insulting to my intelligence than RT

'Israel just wanted a weaker Syrian government, one that wouldn't challenge them'
how much challenging was Assad doing, really

I wanted to make sure I got this next bit verbatim

RANIA: this is gonna sound really messed up, I don't know how else to say it, but like, it's not like rape is ever okay, it's never okay. but like they [Yezidi women enslaved by ISIS] were being raped by like the dirtiest people imaginable, people who had, like, nasty long beards

and, were like, at war, and weren't brushing their teeth, and like, just like, I mean, it's just like, the worst thing you can imagine, what was done to them

I mean uh yeah sure thing, if I'm being raped my concern is absolutely that the guy doing it looks like he belongs on a Charlie Hebdo cover. That's normal. That's a normal thing to say and think

the kind of implicit thing there that maybe Assad's guys do some rapes, but - not even that they do fewer, which is probably even true - but that it's okay because they wear uniforms and shave

weird sublimated racial anxiety thing

in the Mukhabarat dungeon while the guy sparks up the car battery like, well at least he has breath mints

creepiest thing besides her giggle is that every time she talks about the areas the SAA has retaken she talks about them being 'reconciled' with the government, always 'reconciled'

she both-sides the Shia militias in Iraq - they were both doing terrible things to each other, plus the Sunnis were tied to al-Qaeda (woooooooooOOOOOOooooooOOOO scary)

Dolan is much smarter about sectarianism, and correct that it's the dominant group that ends up more resentful, because they could have run the whole thing if it weren't for [minority]

RANIA: yeah totally, Sunnis in Iraq were like white people with Obama, they had a really hard time accepting a Shia in charge

basically the general impression I get from this is that every Sunni is eight feet tall and breakfasts on Yazidi infant, but that's not sectarian to say, only Sunnis do sectarianism

and especially with the appeals to secularism, the feeling I get is that almost all of these people would be totally happy with everything the US does if it had bet on Iran and the Shia instead of Saudi and the Sunni

cause uh, scary Muslims. there's an alternate timeline where the Shah stayed in power and all of these same people are talking like Wahhabists do now

RANIA: a lot of this is Saddam's fault because in his later years he did ethnic cleansing in favour of Arabs and Islamised in favour of Sunnis
DOLAN: but he did that against [almost universally Sunni] Kurds too
RANIA: [talking past him]

I almost feel sorry for Dolan because he correctly identifies a constructed identity that's as much ethnic as religious and in which Kurds don't really count as Sunni even though they are, and he thinks Rania's on the same page and not just out to do some, uh, sectarianism

So of course she's like, no, Sunnis are just nazis - I mean she called salafism a nazi ideology, which is on par with Christopher Hitchens' 'Islamofascist' thing

even the ways in which it's accurate betray a certain amount of bloodlust

Dolan just has this romantic kind of association - not a baseless one - that Shia are all just Irish Catholics. It feels naive more than anything, especially given that he's written eloquently about stopping being a teenager about Irish republicanism without abandoning it

DOLAN: what happens to Rojava
RANIA: [doing a bit of a retcon] well they weren't really fighting against the Syrian government and anyway if they don't want to be in Syria they can all get killed by the Turks sorry not sorry

DOLAN: okay but is there like a prospect of them gaining more autonomy
RANIA: [lying] sure

RANIA: I don't want to be too romantic about it because Syria's a kind of, irritating, authoritarian government, that's not going to change. It's stubborn

well that is one way of phrasing it, and an interesting hedge for when YPG people start turning up missing

AMES: what happens to Syria's Sunnis, they're the majority, and [mentioning this for the first time in an hour] they were the biggest victims in raw numbers of all of these jihadists...
RANIA: well so long as they get back in their place and don't even think about being too Musl-

AMES: yeah but are there gonna be reprisals from that like Alawite core in the security state
RANIA: actually when 'reconciliations' went really well a lot of these Sunnis who were in rebel groups ended up being put in charge of areas as police. this is a good thing

absolutely no precedent for an ethnic group about to get a shoeing being put in charge of policing themselves. and if these 'rebels' are the same jihadists as before, well uh, at least they're fucking with Sunnis

really just making it explicit that the problem was never with these guys whipping people for allowing their wives out without a niqab, but for doing it without accepting the primacy of the Syrian state

RANIA: [giggling again] well just with the way the Syrian government is, it's the people who go to Idlib who should expect reprisals

'on a local level, people might, like, get into fights'

again, all of this is a morally justified existential crisis when it happens to Shia, but just cost of doing business when it happens to Sunnis

not that ISIS or al-Nusra wouldn't have killed every Shia they could, just kind of selective in terms of who gets that sympathy

RANIA: I don't want to romanticise the Syrian government, I wouldn't want to be the guy who got amnesty and gave up his weapons [this weird giggle] I'd [giggle] sleep with one eye open

'I don't think that any government that cares about terrorism would want to do anything about [foreign fighters in Idlib] except make sure they stay there [gigglesnort] or die there'

by her own admission there are also tens of thousands of civilians stuck there with them in this sort of shitty purge movie but go off I guess

now they're talking about people being mean to her on Twitter, which I don't care about

[the gang talk about how anticlimactic the fall of east Ghouta was in terms of atrocities]
AMES: I guess they or their (((funders))) decided to move on to a new scam

RANIA: the Syrian government [weirdly singing] sucks, but it's not, like... evil [giggle]

I guess I'm part of what Ames then calls 'a very narrow Anarcho-Trotskyite (hm) tendency on Twitter that's obsessed with making people follow their line'

AMES: I'm the only one whose paper got shut down by the Putin regime for extremism, who got criminally charged, and I can't tell you how many times I've been called a Putin puppet

okay but what's Limonov up to these days Mark

(he's a Putin guy, because for some reason it's like Invasion of the fucking Bodysnatchers and all of these anti-government guys are all aboard now)

a more conspiracy-minded person would think about all the old Exile articles about date-raping strippers and then ask Mark to blink twice if there was something being held over him, but it's also plausible he's just a huge idiot

Limonov comes up after this and it's kind of a funny story

He goes to talk to the Cossacks about Putin and he asks why they have this insane hate for Jews, he goes like 'you're surrounded by 25 ethnic groups that hate your guts and none of them are even Jewish'

and this Cossack kind of gives him the death stare and says, 'Perhaps you, Eduard Vinyaminovich, are a Jew'

Anyway he's chill with those guys now, which strangely does not make it into the story

Rania says she has more hope for Syria than Lebanon because in Syria the government could still pick up the trash during a civil war

I wonder if the trains run on time too

it's done
why do I do this to myself