Global Dumpster Fire: 2025 in Review w/ Max Ajl

Sina: Thank you. Hi, everyone. Sina here. It's been a minute since I posted an episode. I have been very busy the last couple of months launching a new show for a lot of sheikhats called Psychic Militancy. Expect some stuff on the feed this week. for that. And I've also been working on a very special episode, which was released on YouTube last week. It's a kind of two-parter. It's an episode with Muhammad and Mahmoud. Muhammad, you know, I've mentioned him before. And he and his friend Mahmoud have recorded kind of some reflections on the last two years of And the second half, it's a two-part episode, actually. In this first half, it's these two young men speaking. In the second half of the episode, a good friend of the podcast, Migdalia Arcila Valenzuela, she interviews Lina, the woman who did the translation of the episode with Mohamed El Mahmoud. She did the translation, she and her sister. She's an Arabic teacher in Gaza, you know. Just trying to make her life. I will link to her stuff. That episode is on YouTube. I've been working on getting an audio edition. It's actually harder than you think, or I'm having a hard time with it. I'll be honest with you guys. It's the voices. It's like the voiceover tracks. because I use the AI voiceover and I tried the standard ones and they all sound like, hey, how you doing? I'm Mohammed from Gaza. It's not really appropriate. Then one time I trained it with their voices and both of them came out sounding Israeli. So that's not going to do. So I'm trying to figure out how to get that episode into audio. If you happen to know two voice actors who are young men, they don't have to be young men actually, please get in touch. Or if you're a one voice actor and you can do two voices, that's even better because I'm going to keep trying to do the AI voices, but we'll see. And Anyways, that's a long blah, blah, blah introduction. Without further ado, I'm here to introduce good friend of the show, longtime friend of the show, Max Eil. Max Eil, welcome back. It's been a while. It's been a few months. We are here to do a rear-end review, 2025. Okay, the joke is, I'll tell you all the joke. One year, the Red Nation podcast, I'm the editor of the Red Nation podcast. They do these years in review, and we just did one, actually. And one year, I wrote rear-end review in the folder of my hard drive, which sounds like you're looking at someone's butt. So I just call these rear-end reviews. So this is rear-end review, 2025, 2025. We're here with Max Isle, the one and only. We are looking back at just a dumpster fire of chaos in the 2025. I mean, I'm not like a guy who sits and talks about like bookends and obviously like a year, you know, is like just a kind of arbitrary bookend, but we can do that. I think that's a useful exercise to do, even if it's a bit contrived. But I would say at the outset, Max, How do you feel about everything that's happened? Is there like a single word? Is there an image you can pull up? Is there a single moment that you think illustrates whatever this year was or 2025 was?

Max Ajl: I don't know. Tense flooding in Gaza and people freezing to death because of an infrastructural catastrophe that was... first engineered physically and then engineered politically and mediatically to kind of diffuse popular pressure. I mean, this is kind of the end of the year as I saw it. I mean, it's a fucking catastrophe is what the end of the year was.

Sina: Yeah, we are looking at a catastrophe. We are looking at a civilizational catastrophe. This is 2025, 2024 as well, but 2025 in particular is an absolute knock-off for our species, for humanity and for the Earth. climate disasters, the rising temperature, sea level, you know, everything, all the indicators telling us what scientists have been warning us about for a long time, which is just, this is simply, you know, we have crossed the threshold into dangerous ecological territory. And added, and of course, the insane amount of violence that the imperialist forces around the globe are adding to that with their CO2, with their disgusting genocidal wars. So I don't know. I don't want this episode to become just like, you know, a kind of like, oh, my God, let's look at this fucking tire fire. I mean, I know that's what I said at the beginning, but I feel like. need to do some structural analysis so the last time you were here we were talking about iran and imperialism and the attack on iran into in june 2025 which was itself an insane story i can't believe that was six months ago almost uh oh actually it was more than six months ago it was june and we're in you know so that was something but i would say overall um we can start i guess one way to start is geographically we can think about let's start in gaza what notably do you think obviously we should start with the fake ceasefire right what you know we all a lot of people who are serious about this stuff who follow this stuff who aren't you know dishonest hacks we knew that the ceasefire was to a certain degree not going to be respected by the imperialists, by the Zionists, because Zionists don't, they have no moral compunction. They have nothing. They don't agree. They agree to deals and immediately break them like their imperialist masters, like every, you know, European power has ever done. So that is, you know, very much in line with them. However, The actual ceasefire itself is interesting because the line of demarcation has changed, right? Because what's known as Gaza before has changed, right? Because a lot of what's happened is the people have been corralled into one relatively tiny part of an already tiny part of Palestine, which is called Gaza. And the Zionist military, with its genocidal insanity, has been encroaching upon them, has been doing insane amount of demolition, and basically sort of preparing the land for the ethnic cleansing, the final solution to the Zionist... well what can you call it to like the palestinian problem for zionists that's that's the only way you can call it that this is the final solution they're enacting it and in the last few but go ahead i guess i mean i guess i would pause there and like we reject the existence of zionism this is our um our premise like we need to get it needs to be gotten rid of it's genocidal but um

Max Ajl: I think that even with a sound intention, we often fall into the framing of it as a problem that produces a set of victims rather than, again, refocusing on it as an interplay of Yes, an ideology and state practice which is genocidal, but that is overlaying that genocide on what is a militarized national resistance movement right now. The our manifestation, for example, of what's going on with the creeping shift of the so-called armistice line. whatever the we can call it, even because there's no armistice, the shifting of it west right is the face of it as a humanitarian catastrophe and insult to Palestinian people who are trying to rebuild their lives. And then The other aspect is that there's a huge focus on the fact that it's land engorgement, yes, and that, you know, are they going to try to put habitable Gaza to the right? But actually, there's something else that's happening that I haven't seen a lot of discussion on, and it's kind of illegible to us in its very nature because it's a secret military strategy, or at least one that's sub rosa, which is, that they are destroying the military infrastructure in the areas. They're reducing the spatial... area within which the military of the Palestinians can maneuver every time. And this was a major issue with dealing with the tunnels from the outset of obviously before the October seven operations is a whole different story. Right. But even during the entire counterinsurgency, during the October seven operations, it was constantly being announced by the Zionists. Right. That and you can read their frustrations kind of mumbling out of their military press and so forth and their defense correspondence that the reason they couldn't carry out successful clearing operations. Right. Was because they were under threat of insurgency operations targeting them. wherever whenever they took up a stable fixed position right and this in turn meant that they couldn't carry out the necessary military the engineering operations the sapper operations to destroy the underground infrastructure this is what this is what um this is what is very worrying And obviously it's known to the Palestinians. But this is what I think is worrying about what's going on right now in with the shift of the yellow line. It is yellow, right? The yellow line is probably the most apt way to describe it because it's the only thing that's actually true about it. The shift of the yellow line west means that these are areas where the Zionists can set up stable operations. And because of. the need of the pseudo-armistice from a palestinian political humanitarian popular perspective the need for it to to some kind of rest for uh the popular cradle that gives the zionists the opportunity to further uh entrench their destruction of the permanent military infrastructure of the Palestinian guerrilla movement. Right. And this is what this is what is happening. Right. And probably a lot of it has been a decent amount of it now because none of it was destroyed during the war. Right. We can say they would say 15 percent of it was destroyed during the war, but or 20 percent of it, 25 percent of it. But much of it was also being constantly reconstituted. Right. They were going in and reconstituting it during war. The Palestinians were reconstitute. There was constant tunneling operations to reconstitute it during the course of the genocide. Right now, it's probably not happening in in the eastern half or the part of Gaza that the Israeli military has re-enveloped with its with all its massive technology. And of course, they're not getting everything right, but they're getting parts of it. And the Palestinians have agreed. Basically, there are occasional operations to fight back, but they're in a similar position with Hezbollah where there is uh two dynamics at play right right one there's the israeli that is the u.s degradation of the resistance capacity including through assassinations um including through the the destruction of physical infrastructure which is is proceeding even more in in gaza than it's proceeding in lebanon on the other hand you have opportunities for reorganization and rebuilding in the places where there is still physical space and logistical capacity for it. It's something we obviously know nothing about, right? But it's obviously happening, right? It can't be anything else but that it's happening because this is the only means of national survival for the Palestinian and Lebanese populations and really the entire working class population of the Arab-Iranian region, right? Because it's one... in some disarray and besieged, but it's one regional security architecture, right? It's not actually, even to the extent it's treated as separate, which is a victory of the Zionists and the imperialists, it's one united thing. So I really think we need to keep coming back to that because it's, I know we have it in our heads, but I think it can be very pervasive to forget this aspect of it. Because ultimately it will be the military, it's a battle. And the battle, or it's a war rather, and it will be won by one side and lost by another, right? And that war is not over. And that will be what determines whether or not the ethnic cleansing is allowed to take place.

Sina: So... I guess the question for me is, do we zoom out? Because I, so, okay, here's where I'm going. I've been reading about the Seven Years' War a lot. I don't know why. Like mid-18th century global conflicts. And one, let's say, aspect of the Seven Years' War, one theater of it is... In Europe? Yeah. Well, it's a global war in a sense, because one aspect of it is the fight in the Western Hemisphere, which is to say Turtle Island, the indigenous lands, what's now called North America. Because you had multiple European settler colonial projects set up on the continent, a Spanish one, a French one, an English one. And they all had sort of their own relations with the indigenous people, different kinds of relationships. But ultimately, one victor emerged from that because and part of that struggle, one part of the Seven Years War battle, part of the Seven Years War, at least I'm just getting into this now. I'm like on shaky ground here, but I've been like obsessed with the last few weeks. And one aspect of it is the so-called French Indian Wars. And I couldn't. And one of the takeaways that I've come out of that, and I think it's not really a takeaway, it's that this decided, let's say, the shape and character of settler colonialism in what's now called, at least in the US and Canada, for... Until now, right? Like it's decided that, right? Because we don't speak French. We're speaking English. I mean, there is a part of Canada that still retains that French settler colonial inputs. It's called French Canada. But ultimately, like one side won, right? And they made deals with their own allies. They transferred, you know, say everything west, I think it's like west of the Mississippi to Spain, right? Or something like that. I can't remember the actual details, but essentially the, what we know today of North America or like the kind of current collaboration is set up then. It's kind of established then or it begins then. because it was unclear what the character of the settler colonial project in this region would be now. Or do they develop the same? Does what's called Canada develop the same way as the US? Obviously not. Then there's the whole question of Mexico, there's the sprint, there's the movement West, the colonization of the American West. So all these different things are interplaying. But at the end of the day, something that's been drawing me is Pontiac's war. Right. Chief Pontiac was an indigenous native leader and he was inspired by religious doctrines and political and like political realities to do this uprising. And I'm actually working, I'm actually trying to get a historian to come on to talk about, you know, Pontiac's war and how we can understand it. Because for me, I see some overlaps. I don't want to make connections between the current moment and 250 years ago or almost 300 now. What, 275 now almost. I don't want to just like... you know, push them around. But I think ultimately, whatever happens in this, whatever is happening now, whatever we call it, however you date it, if you date it to the American invasion of Afghanistan, which you could, You could. You could sort of date it from 9-11. However you date this, whatever you bookend this, when this ends, this region will be changed. Like, that's it.

Max Ajl: No, I mean, I date the sequence to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Sina: Well, I guess there's that aspect of it. There's that aspect of the US because Oslo, you have to include Oslo as part of this. I think we're watching the fallout of Oslo. The fallout in terms of the battle over Oslo. right, the Oslo Accords, is partly what Gaza was resisting. And this war, right, is a way to end that Gaza's resistance and to reestablish the Oslo order, which is to say the Comprador ruling class Palestinian factions who have been selling their own homeland to the Zionist entity, for however decades now, where they even cooed their own leader, Yasser Arafat, right? It was a coup, right? And they put in a quizzling, useless Mahmoud Abbas, useless man, completely feckless, will not be remembered as anything other than a complete traitor and a quizzling.

Max Ajl: But I guess what I'm saying is that... You know, through 1991, I feel that the U.S. was involved in a containment process. It was punctuated with very aggressive warfare to try to, at times, right, the U.S.-Israeli so-called intervention. I mean, it helped to spark the so-called Lebanese Civil War, 1967, 1973, the U.S., kind of creating a balance, trying to arm, eventually arming both sides in Iran and Iraq, just basically to burn up human beings, right? To burn up oil wealth. I mean, putting aside any, the internal dynamics of each, which was very significant in those cases, from the US perspective, it was burning up their resources. And this was a containment operation. When the USSR fell, the US moved to beyond containment and it moved to rollback. Right. In the region on the whole. Right. It really moved to not just it didn't move. It was kind of doing before that it was doing to all the various national projects in the region, a kind of occasional mowing the lawn, like what it ended up doing to to Gaza. Right. In the post 2008 period. But it was doing applying that on a regional scale. Then it moved post-Soviet to. to kind of roll back and suppression, right? And what enabled this was the fall of the Soviet Union. This is very clear. I mean, that this could not have, the fall of Iraq was not possible or the war, which was very monetarily costly, and then the sanctions campaign, that was not possible without the fall of the Soviet Union. And I don't think Oslo could have been imposed without the fall of the Soviet Union and the encirclement, the economic encirclement, asphyxiation, military destruction inflicted on Iraq, you know, with all of Iraq's problems, right? Which is, I don't mean to... Let's not get into it. But and I think this is this is what we really need to focus on, because this is like this is when the U.S. is moving on the economic and military planes to a huge amount of even further. I mean, already it had been permanent warfare in the Arab Iranian region. But the permanent warfare was sharply, sharply accelerating at that juncture. Right. I mean, it was permanent. Structural warfare has started to what be applied to Egypt. Right. And these other wars started to, okay, it was doing a very funky thing. These other wars were starting to be applied elsewhere. And I mean, we see what, you know, the sequence of destruction of the remaining Arab republics really started to take place in 1991. This is part and parcel of what is being inflicted on Palestine. today. And this is where I really think we need to take it back to, to understand what was accomplished militarily, what was accomplished economically, because economics is more important than the militarization in the Egyptian case, right? And also, of course, what was accomplished culturally and ideologically, right? You know, in fact, the idea of an Arab resistance It exists in Yemen, right? And Hezbollah, you can say. The fact, you know, this isn't to like lament it from like, why aren't the Arabs doing better? No, the Arab defeat, the disorganization was imposed by the U.S., Right. This was a sequence that was imposed by the U.S. to create the conditions where Palestine would have behind it very few allies. Right. When this attempt at a second Nakba was imposed on it. Right. And this is really important to keep in mind. And so, I mean, we should I think it's important to zoom in again. I mean, to point out that this, you know, this war, it's not it's far from over because there's no other options for Palestinians. The same way the war, you know, Hezbollah took a hard hit. The war is not over because neither Hezbollah nor Israel and the US have other options in Lebanon. Right. The same way the Iran war is not over, because, you know, with all the equivocations that are sometimes present in the Iranian leadership political sentiment, there is a huge awareness, obviously, in Iran that there is a confrontation is happening. coming sooner or later. I mean, and that's hence the, you know, as we know, the production of ballistic missiles has rapidly accelerated in the last six months since the short war, right? I mean, so these wars are very far from over and their outcome is very far from predetermined on either side.

Sina: So I do I want to stay on the sort of rear end review thing, but I'm also because it's so much fun to do this with you. I think you and I kind of think together in similar ways. And obviously, like I've been consulting you on this stuff since the beginning of all this. But for me, I find I'm trying to think through a kind of global analysis and think about. You know, imperialism is a kind of anti-sovereignty, right? Like anti-sovereignty is a force of anti-sovereignty. Imperialism cannot have any kind of sovereignty. It just can only have imperialism. Everybody needs to get in line. It's like some insane kindergarten teacher taking the kids to gym class. Everyone has to be in a line, know their place, take their position around that weird parachute thing. And everyone just sort of works together and entertains themselves while somebody is really in charge. So when I think of this, I think of this like, yeah, they have immense power, right? And they do immense amount of violence and destruction. However, the scale of their task shifts. shouldn't be minimized. What they need to do is so insane. They need to conquer roughly 300 million people in a region that's vast, that stretches from Morocco or whatever, Tunisia or Algeria, all the way to Afghanistan. And they need complete and utter submission. And they have it from some countries. They have it from Jordan. They have it from Egypt. They have it from Morocco. They have it from parts of the Lebanese government. They now have it from the Syrian government. They have complete Jordan, obviously, all that stuff. Like this Iraqi government, every penny of Iraqi oil money goes through New York and London or New York.

Max Ajl: I'm not even sure. I mean, I guess that I'm not convinced that they even want... submission only. I think they want it further than that, right? I think they have their submission. They have their submission in Egypt, right? But I think they would also be happy with a collapse, like a further collapse of the Egyptian state, right, and its capacity. I mean, it's an immensely strong state still, right? I don't think they don't care. Right. The look that of course, there's lots of don't care about what they don't care about this. They don't care about the state sovereignty system. They want to profit through war. and through mayhem and through, I mean, the weapon sales that are constantly being, the weapon sales that are, you know, they're signing off with the UAE. I mean, they are basically alchemizing these huge oil profits that are reminiscent of the 1970s, right? They're alchemizing them into these massive profits. I mean, the UAE is now in massive arm contracts with Israel, but also again, there's, you know, the, is, the, is, Purchasing arms from the U.S., Saudi Arabia is again reinvesting even further portions of its sovereign wealth fund into the U.S. And so, you know, I think the U.S. is going to be happy with a stable Morocco, a stable Zionism.

Sina: Stable is a word, but stable, but also you're right in the sense that it's not enough to have submission. You're right. The submission is the beginning, right? But you also have to keep them weak. You have to keep them weak. You can't allow them to develop. say, a powerful military. So Jordan, Egypt, I mean, Egypt is not Jordan, mind you. Egypt is not Jordan at all. Egypt has like an air force. Egypt has a military. But keeping that military bribed to stay out of the conflict, stay out of the Palestinian liberation struggle has been, and to essentially make Egyptians a properized, a fully properized society. That's That's how they've done it, right? They've bribed and also impoverished this huge country. I mean, Egypt is so colossal and yet it can't muster anything. And obviously the repression is intense and obviously the memories of 2013 and what happened to Mohammed Morsi are still probably lingering in the minds of Egyptians and the chaos of the so-called Arab Spring, right? We I don't think I feel that I probably should do an episode on Egypt. I haven't done one in a while. And I but Egypt say, but that's not but every country obviously is different. And they have like different sort of historical and national contexts. But say, for instance, you know, Jordan, right? Complete non-entity. It's just, you know, like a fruit basket and like a bread basket for the Zios for, you know, a regional thing. The, you know, the Clown Prince is fully under the thumb of the West. There's no, you know, you can get in trouble, you can get a deep amount of trouble for even articulating. pro-Palestinian sentiment, even though a huge chunk of the population itself is Palestinian and supports Palestinian liberation. But you have this complete and utter defeat of national sentiment in a way, right? Because say, for instance, nobody likes Jolani. Nobody likes Jolani, okay? And yet he became president of the new whatever Syria is called. I guess it's still called the Syrian Arab Republic, actually, isn't it? Or is it? I'm not sure, come to think of it.

Max Ajl: They sure didn't keep the flag. But I think what's important to go back to this, I mean, is what you were saying before, is that if imperialism is a war on sovereignty, What the U.S. wants is more than merely submission itself. It actually wants to roll back the political sovereignty regime on a world scale, right? I mean, look at what it just did with Somalia, right? It's actually fracturing states. Right. And it's what is setting off a civil war, you know, like who it's arming in so-called civil war, like what it's doing in Sudan or what it's subcontracted to the Emirates to do in Sudan, what it's doing in Rwanda. Right. What is this? But actually disrupting, you know, these are not like developmentalist states that it's at war with. And so it's a what is it at war with? It's at war with the political sovereignty regime itself. Right. The political sovereignty regime was imposed because colonialism was the preferred way to maintain power on a world scale. That is, it kept the overall political architecture for extraction. including income deflation and worldwide control of resource extraction and labor, that was under the direct control of the imperialists. And they preferred this. The neo-colonial model is not a new fancy upgrade. The neo-colonial model itself, which was shit, But the neo-colonial model was the U.S. reacting to a historic defeat that had been imposed upon it by the national liberation movements, that the national liberation movements imposed on the French, that they imposed on the Portuguese, that they imposed on the British. Right. And the national liberation movements and the nationalist movements imposed a rollback and forced the reconfiguration and with important results. Right. You know, in not least in in China. Right. But also in in other places. I mean, even in in South Africa. Right. That was much later, obviously. But we're really seeing significant changes. And I'm really I think this is something that is is poorly written about because it's Unfortunately, like the BRICS is turned into a kind of discursive and polemical football between like, to use the word of the day, two camps, right? The anti-BRICS and the pro-BRICS. But it's like, what's interesting from a liberatory perspective is that the monopoly on technology has been broken and the precondition for the Western monopoly on advanced technology, including advanced military technology being broken is the sovereign state system that was established on a world scale in the decades after World War II. And so I think it's significant that the U.S. is engaged, the Arab region especially, but also in many other places in Africa. The U.S. is engaged in a rollback of the sovereign state system itself. And I think this is kind of this is what you were just talking about. And it's very, you know, it's insufficiently appreciated. It's kind of like a global gamble. I mean, they already did it economically with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. Right. They put they took the economic reins of national planning outside of the control of sovereign states. And now they're like, OK, fuck it. Post-Soviet Union, we are just going to take the remaining reins outside of the control of national states to the extent possible. What are Palestinians fighting for but a sovereign state?

Sina: No, sovereignty is still the issue. Yeah, no, sovereignty is still the issue because human beings want sovereignty. They don't want to live as part of a cog in a supply chain, right? That's just reality. But the imperialists can't allow that to happen because their economic system and their military system would simply collapse and their political system along with it. Now, with that being said, with everything you just said, let's fast forward a little bit. Let's get back to our original task, which is a year in review. But right before I do that, there was an anniversary yesterday, an important anniversary, which was a certain person came to power in a certain country called Russia. And that was there's a scene, right? There's like a whole there's a strange, absurd scene, which is Vladimir Putin met. Vladimir Putin, who was like a young, I think, intelligence officer with the, I want to say FSB, I'm not sure, KGB, it wasn't called that, but he was a young sort of intelligence officer. He met with Yeltsin in that office, New Year's Eve, 1999, and Yeltsin submitted his resignation. That's it. It was done. What's called wild capitalism of the 90s in Russia, right? The complete gutting of everything, the sovereignty that the Soviet Union and its largest country, Russia, had achieved was bled out. They sucked the marrow out of the Soviet Union. And a ton of it benefited the entity, by the way, right? Not just in human terms, but in economic terms. I mean, the end of the Soviet Union was an actual calamity for the Palestinian struggle. So if you're like a chode who hates the Soviet Union, but wants Palestinian liberation, you should know that, that that was a big boon to Zionism. So if you wanted, like, what's more important to you, Zionism or being right on the Soviet Union?

Max Ajl: But Sina, we should be a little more concrete about this. I mean, the... The import of, first of all, the human material, just demographically speaking, from the former Soviet Union to Israel, was like a new lease on life for the scientists.

Sina: It was a shot of plasma into their project, big time, huge. Then there were two other aspects.

Max Ajl: Right. Which is that the Soviets built up scientific and engineering, intellectual and also physical. Let's just say intellectual now apparatus. That was incredible. Right. I mean, this is part of why the Russians are still able to produce a massive amount of their own equipment. military military needs and go toe-to-toe with with the us military in the ukraine i mean this also this engineer these engineers right played a role a huge role in the israeli tech boom right which started taking off in the 90s and really has become uh turned israel into this world center for surveillance technology. Right. This you know, this is because it's profitable and because there is they are good programmers. They are good engineers. They're vicious. They're trained in and born into inhumanity through their training and unit 80, 200 and so forth. Right. This is all the fruit of the fall of the Soviet Union. Plus, of course, all the slush money coming in from the oligarchs who all have double who all have dual citizenship, I believe. And finally, of course, right. We cannot forget that the you know, whereas the Soviet Union was other than Stalin's catastrophic mistakes supporting the partition, the Soviet Union was supporting the opposition to Israel, whereas Russia was is often is trading and doing weapons purchases with the Israelis, right? I mean, so they're on at least four fronts, the fall of, and of course, I should add that, you know, the Soviet Union was a major support base for the PFLP and the fall of the PFLP or that's kind of total disorganization, NGOization was a major mechanism for Oslo. Right. Which I don't know that we have good histories of, but it's known within the Palestinian national movement and the Palestinian left. So on all of these fronts, on these five fronts, right, the fall of the Soviet Union was disastrous for the Palestinian cause. Right. I mean, very luckily, the Iranians were available to pick up the baton. Right. Your people. But, you know, it carries problems also. which we can acknowledge that the Soviet support, the Soviet support had a slightly more universalistic aspect in many ways, at least potentially, right? It was not vulnerable to the sectarian, dimension the sectarian instrumentalization right which uh you know we don't have to go like alikadri level about this necessarily but like at all but like they're it's it's creating there's there the the iranian project doesn't have a way to knit together the region in the way that secularism with with all of its very shitty problems did right um and the soviet union was underpinning uh the arab nationalist secularist region for the vision right And so I think there are these things that we have to keep in mind, right, that there are so many lights and shadows that are worth paying attention to.

Sina: No, I appreciate that. But I think where I was going with that story, though, is that like, yeah, the collapse of the Soviet Union was this calamity, but it's not the country that emerged out of it. Yeah, 10 years of, you know, I mean, how else can you describe the 90s for Russia other than a complete calamity? I mean, that is a calamity. Their life expectancy fell like 50% or 30% or something, some insane stat, 10 years to 15 years. I think it was like in the I think it was like in the mid 50s for men, I think was like life expectancy or something like that, which is a complete insane drop from what it once was. I mean, I guess what I get to be a hopeful to do a hopeful reading. You look at Russia today.

Max Ajl: Can I add another thing? Because there's something else about this that people really don't know about. Right. You know that, you know, part of what that, you know, there were two things that enabled the U.S. to really to to be so unipolar. Right. I mean, the fall of the U.S. USSR with its vision of economic planning as an alternative vision of society. Right. This kind of helped. And of course, the fall of the nuclear. Soviet nuclear umbrella, this kind of opened the way to a lot of U.S. aggression and expansion in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia and so forth, right? The U.S. was just able to use kinetic violence to just kind of disorganize societies, right? That's part of it.

Sina: And they did it to defend against the genocide, remember? Remember, it was a genocide they did it to defend against. Right.

Max Ajl: Yeah, always. But the other thing, right, that is really poorly known, right, the decline in life expectancy also was both caused and also contributed to a decline in, a massive decline in food grain absorption, which is like the technical terms that the patent diets use, the amount of cereals available per person. Right. That is that globalization basically relied on this kind of huge a kind of lowering of wages. Right. That also depended on this massive like sweatshop position of the world, which also depended on decreasing prices for the primary input into the consumption basket of working class people. Right. So this huge economic globalization project. under which that was occurring under the brand of under the aegis of globalization. That was the expression of U.S. imperialism. It actually depended on what had happened in Russia because the Russian state was no longer able to organize its economy. The Soviet what became the Russian state and the Soviet Union was no longer organizing production and consumption to basically keep people in an acceptable status. Right. All this cereals went on to the world market. right, depressed world cereals prices. And this was a huge boom to this kind of globalization project where, oh, the free flow of capital was going to allow a wide scale of prosperity and a global spread of industrialization, blah, blah, blah, and so forth. Right. This was really, you know, a huge boon also that was created by the fall of the Soviet Union. That also is very poorly discussed. Right. So there are all these ratchet effects. that kind of really constituted the world as it became, right? As it became with the period of aggressive imperial expansion, which started again with even more energy in 2001 with the serial wars of aggression that the U.S. started engaging in to just kind of soak chaos, release assets for acquisition or put in place income deflation and so forth.

Sina: destroy the World Trade Center, false flag attack, that kind of thing. I guess, but I guess again, but at the backdrop of all this though, in this year alone, right, the imperialists for all of that that they've accomplished, they also in a way defeat themselves because think about Ukraine, right? They took one of the largest countries in Europe, right? One of the largest populist-wise and economy-wise, one of them at least, and de-developed it. They could it, they put the worst people in charge, actual literal Nazis, the most, the most, you know, chad like members of that society got in charge. They started waging war on their own citizens in the area called Donbass. And, you know, passing laws that no liberal would ever, if it was here, would ever agree with, right? Like I live in Canada, we have French, Canadian everywhere, you know, but you had rules in Ukraine that was put on by, who was it, Poroshenko, whatever guy's name is, Petrovsky, Petrovsky, I forget his name was, Poroshenko. They have this like, oh, you can't speak Russian, you can't do that. I mean, this was a plan to provoke Russia, to provoke it into bleeding itself dry. Now, you think about that. We've seen that movie before. It was called Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was designed to bleed the Soviet Union because they used dirty war. to bleed the Soviet Union and its allies, and eventually led to state collapse, right? That was the plan in Syria too, and it worked largely. It was even on a grander scale because it took in even more countries than the Afghanistan War, the 80s Afghanistan War, which is to say. Because it was a kind of regional theater. It became like a regional conflict of all the various forces fighting against each other. And so you think about, I just think about the fact that I connect Syria and Ukraine in my head, right? In terms of what they were trying to accomplish. And in one way, they won in Syria. I mean, In a lot of ways, they won in Syria, which is to say they induced state collapse and they put in their crypto-Zionist Al-Qaeda leader and his goons who have gone to slaughter minorities, ethnic minorities. And on top of that, because partition is the dream here, right? Ethnostates is what the region, is what they want for the region. Small, weak ethnostates. ideally a Kurdish one, maybe an Alawite one, maybe a Dursi one, maybe, you know, you have a, and they always do this for Iran too. Oh, we'll break this up. It'll be an Arab. But ultimately the goal is to make these into smaller, weaker countries that they control, which is what they did in Yugoslavia. And it worked. It worked in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia is weak. Bosnia is a Zionist entity state. It's weak. They have no sovereignty to control over themselves. And they're just a bunch of countries now that used to be a big country with a big population. Now they're a bunch of smaller countries that are all dominated by the U.S. Right. So that plan went to scale. But the Ukraine, the Ukraine-Syria sort of axis, whatever you want to say. I mean, sure, they won in Syria, I would say. You can say that now. But they're hauling a pile. They're raining over rubble. Right. They're raining over rubble. Like, there's no Syrian, like the new Syria, right? This is a destroyed... I'm not sure.

Max Ajl: But, you know, what do you mean?

Sina: Hold on a second. Hold on. The military consequences are severe, right? The military consequences for the region because of Syria's location, because of what it used to do in terms of establishing some kind of deterrence, the destruction of the Syrian military, all those things, undeniably very bad, very, very bad. However, the idea that Syria will now become... I don't know. First of all, I don't think the Jolani regime will survive. I don't think so. I think you take him out and it all collapses. However, that actually might be the plan of the imperialists to begin with, because they like chaos. They want chaos. Chaos benefits them. Chaos makes people weak. Chaos makes people migrate away. It bleeds you of the middle class. It bleeds you of your resources, right? We have water wars coming, right? If you can control water, you can control massive amounts of population. So all of these things are adding together, and the result is this weak, nothing state that used to be a serious force in the region, that used to be able to push itself around, that used to be able to sort of, let's say, throw its weight around, to put it mildly, which is to say...

Max Ajl: This is why I was I was balking a little bit when you said they're going to reign over chaos. I mean, you know, there's so many benefits to the reign over chaos. Right. I mean, first of all, there's there's say that you get you get 20 to 25 years of highly of highly skilled, highly trained Arab labor, which they're also getting from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and now getting it from Syria. from Syria as well. You're getting this highly skilled labor that's been trained through labor inputs from the Syrian popular classes. And you're getting that labor basically as a subsidy to the European middle classes. Right. They don't have to pay for the production of skilled labor power. And then they benefit from its use value. Right. And this is how they're roped into imperialism. Right. This is how they are roped into imperialism, because through either war and economics, the Arab region is so much is exporting. It's exporting other things, too. But it's also one essential aspect of is that exporting skilled labor directly? not even embodied in goods they're just exporting it directly in embodied in literally in human beings and their physical location refugee status whatever into europe and they're benefiting directly from that and then of course it's it's uh creating massive uh unskilled laborers as well which uh all over uh all over europe right which um are probably working in undocumented illegal jobs whatever And then there's another benefit to the European economy and European and European consumption and a subsidy into both the capitalist wage bill and the European social aristocratic labor pact. So, you know, and then there's the war. And of course, the war means, OK, so who do you you have sectarianism? You have armoring of the remaining states, right? Increased security assistance, increased arms sales to Jordan and, of course, to Israel, which just signed another. Didn't they just sign a deal for like $8 or $10 billion from Lockheed Martin? I forgot exactly the terms. I barely looked at it.

Sina: Yeah, I think it was like for planes. For planes, yes.

Max Ajl: It was either, I think, two days ago that they signed yet another, right? And, you know, the Gulf will... The more chaos there is, the more the Gulf states will say, OK, we need to purchase even more weapons. So the ruin, I mean, you know... this is the basic Qadri thesis, right? Is that the point is the ruin. The ruin is the process of destruction itself is the input into the regional accumulation process, right? Not to mention, of course, that if there's no states to organize for people to come together and articulate their common interests, you're going to have a sectarian problem, which is, of course, aggressively fueled, right? And it's also historical. But if it's going to get worse and worse. And we see it because the imperialists are able to set different communities against one another in Syria. I mean, we're seeing it literally in front of our eyes right now with, you know, the further massacres in the west of Syria, right, targeting the Alawite community. And the more there is sectarianism, I mean, the sectarianism does not, it doesn't stay in a national box, right? It also infects Lebanon, right? Right. And it infects Iraq and it infects Palestine to some extent. Right. But especially it infects Lebanon. So it becomes a war, a mechanism to dilute social support for the resistance. Right. So for me, the war is the ruins was was an achievement. And whether Jolani stays or Jolani goes, the inputs into the accumulation process are manifest, right?

Sina: I know, yeah. I'm not trying to put lipstick on a pig. It sounds that way, maybe. I know I've watched, obviously, Syria, and it's broken my heart for a long time. And it's been a year now of this ridiculous, absurd farce of this Al-Qaeda Zionist movement ruling over this amazing country. What it's trying to do is wanting to expand. This is the Yinon plan, the so-called Yinon plan of greater Israel. They want more land. They need to expand. And I think... that this desire to expand will eventually lead them to start making stupid moves. I think that the idea of this entity and how it needs the US, because at the end of the day, the entity is nothing without its backers, without its donors. There's a donor class of countries who support and underwrite this genocidal entity. And if you look at the status of those countries, they are in complete disarray. If you can't see the connection between the decline of the U.S., the decline, the severe decline in life quality in the U.S. and Al-Aqsa flood, then you see nothing. Right. Because this this however much money they're spending to keep to put down this ghetto uprising, right, to then expand, to give this racist ethnostate and its special little supporters everything it wants. This is not good for American empire. Like I don't think it's good. Like I don't think this actually works because it's bad for actually American life because American life needs those super profits to keep going, right? Like you need that profiteering that never ends, but that profiteering is being pumped back into insane wars, right? I mean, just today, somebody, I don't know who, somebody shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone in Afghanistan. That's $36 million or $30 to $40 million, depending. That is not... This is what they spent in Gaza. I mean, that humanitarian pier was, I think, a quarter of a trillion, a quarter of a billion, $300 million or something like that. All this money that they're spending... The chaos that's now being put upon the American people, right? Like today, what are they doing today? Today, I think healthcare costs have gone up 30% today, I'm pretty sure. I know they don't care. I know they don't care.

Max Ajl: But I guess there's a basic, you know, I think we have to zoom out a little bit, right? The tendency overall is that China is... going to not just produce, but also consume a greater, a share of value commensurate with its population, right, eventually. That's going to happen unless China is erased or put down. Right. Exactly. It's just like it's unimaginable. Right. It would take a massive nuclear exchange. And even then. Right. I mean, you can't it just it would basically mean the end of the world. Right. So that's going to happen. Or at least unless somehow it's derailed. Right. So China's comparative advantage is trade and production. The U.S., is very dysfunctional on many levels. Even bracketing, because of course, I take a very different position about the degree of dysfunctionality support for Israel. I think it's functional for what the US is doing. I mean, the US is operating on the plane of its comparative advantage, which is violence and de-development and finance. Right. I mean, this has been the U.S. is it's funny that I was just drafting the chapter of my of my book that deals with the birth of the petrodollar system. Right. And the U.S. basically engineered its comparative advantage in violence. to shift the world into what Peter Gowan called the, what is it, the dollar Wall Street complex. It's funny, Peter Gowan, it's like the only good book Verso ever published. Those people, right? Those silly little people. Let us not discuss them then, but we have like, I would rather discuss like daffodils or something important for human civilization. So, yeah, but this is a very important issue, argument, right, which is that, you know, at that point, the U.S. was really losing its comparative advantage that was based on industrial dominance. And by now, I mean, it's just gone. So. its fighting and its support for Israel is an expression of its other comparative advantage, which is financialized violence, the development of techniques of violence. And this is exactly for that reason that I think it was not going to stop until it has burned Lebanon, Iran, and and Gaza, their people, to the ground because there's no other way of eliminating their military capacities, right? Except like the incineration of the people who compose them and the populations those military capacities sit in. So, you know, what they spent on the pier, I mean, no, it goes from the US taxpayer. Right. I mean, you know, there is, you know, the U.S. infrastructure is crumbling, but sure. But the U.S. also has, you know, the the the the top the top quartile of income and the number of millionaires in the U.S. I mean, there's plenty of resources from which to extract the the the from to do fiscal extraction. So the U.S. can afford a million of these peers to carry out its violent counterinsurgencies. Right. So I think the U.S.

Sina: I don't know, though. I don't know if it can. I don't I don't know. I'm less I think I mean, America is a big country. The United States of America is a huge country. Three hundred million, something like that. It's not it's a continent. Three thirty. Three thirty. Yeah. Three hundred million is long ago. It's true.

Max Ajl: I don't I don't ever think properly, but that's it.

Sina: Yeah, I mean, especially. Yeah. But I mean, ultimately, what we're talking about, though, is this like it's continental settler colonial project. Right. And it needs immense amount of accumulation and to suck up that accumulation from around the world. But you can't do that anymore because there's another there's another sort of what's the expression like? Like there's another thing. There's another shop that's been opened. There's another mall that's been opened. And that mall is called China. It's called the PRC, the People's Republic of China. And in that mall, you can find everything you could ever imagine, anything you can make, anything that the West made and was dominant. So for instance, cars. Right. Germany until I think 2015, like, you know, the high like Germany control the Chinese job car market, at least for buses or something. Right. A huge Mercedes Benz or German cars in general. I saw that yesterday. It's escaping me. Right. But essentially What has been clear by the American system, right, which has been so hostile to China, which since the president, since the ascent of President Xi, right, has gone from, OK, China's here. It'll be our nice little these people will make our stuff, our workshop. That's fine. We'll get it. We'll cut them in. It'll be OK. Which was kind of the relationship that. I think Putin still wants with the West to just be cut in, but even though they're just never gonna do it, and maybe he's learned his lesson by now, but ultimately they thought they could probably just cut in these funny yellow people over there, 1.5 billion of them, who cares, let's overwrite them. But lo and behold, look what happens. They asserted major amount of sovereignty in 2010s. They didn't allow their country to be overrun with psycho nationalist terrorists who murder people in subway stations and train stations by the dozens. They didn't allow that to happen. They didn't succumb to sectarian civil war, which was the plan. They didn't succumb to destroying their outlying states, which is kind of like what Ukraine war is. It is an outlying state of Russia. It's Russian in a sense. At least it's people, right? It's identity. So chipping away at it and going at them is what they do, right? And they tried that in the 2000s in the caucuses with Russia, right? They creeped around them. And so they had to finally, in 2022, they had to finally put up and shut up and take the war directly to them, which is what they did. I mean, of course, there were other wars, obviously the Caucasus and stuff, but this Ukraine war is very, very big, right? I mean, more people have died in Ukraine and they're mostly soldiers. It's done the right way, whatever you want to call that. I think it's over a million.

Max Ajl: I mean, so they're actually, you know, it's... In terms of casualties. It's crazy. I mean, they're just burning up. all the young people of the Ukraine, right?

Sina: They destroyed multiple generations of Ukrainians and they did it while waving Ukrainian flags here in the West and putting Zelensky on every normie lib publication you can ever imagine, right? Find your inner Zelensky. They published a book called Find Your Inner Zelensky, Max.

Max Ajl: Do you remember that? I haven't, but I think that was an American thing and I haven't been around, but like, have you been in Europe lately? It's a disaster. No. Have you been in Europe since the Ukraine war started? No. No. OK. I mean, because I was, you know, back and forth a bit because of where my postdocs. I'm like my fifth postdoc. I'm just like chilling on post.

Sina: Get a real job. Stop being a postdoc.

Max Ajl: chilling in my basement, Sina. But aren't you in, Sina? Sina, aren't you in your basement too?

Sina: Yeah, I'm in my mom's basement right now, by the way. Do you like my mom's basement? Is it nice? It's kind of a mess. I should have cleaned up. Look at this mess.

Max Ajl: Your mom must be embarrassed of you, Sina. Yeah, I know. No, so anyway, you know, all the buildings- That's unrelated to the state of my house. Surely not. You know, the northern Europe is like blanketed in Ukrainian flags, right? And they're virulently anti-Russian. And, you know, they're left, the left across most of the states is It was more or less either was in favor of the war and even like the critical portion of the left was in favor of sanctions practically as as an alternative to war with very few with with some exceptions, but not a lot. I mean, so the the Ukraine of Ukraine, Ophelia, which swept across Europe, especially in the northern regions of Europe, was like astounding. Like you just saw Ukrainian flags. I'm like, what is this like? What is this ugly fucking taiko looking yellow and blue that's like enveloping the panorama in front of me. It looks ridiculous. And I was like, oh, right. These these Dutch people think they're Ukrainian now. OK, they're like cosplaying as Ukrainians. And meanwhile, with all of their clapping right for this resistance, I mean, a million people. have died right and because they uh basically shrugged that they build up of the the transmutation of ukraine into a forward base for nato right which they also i mean they all love nato anyway they're very uh usfi over there also so it's it's quite it's it's an absurdity i mean the the toll is you know the the toll of these wars that are kind of enthusiastically supported by like the liberal and the left liberal chattering classes, or they're just taken as objects of kind of disinterest by the kind of, you know, the more cultured portions of our intellectual Marxist leftist thought leadership. They're very, don't pay any attention to them. You know, the human, they're just burning up entire societies, right? I mean, 600,000 people died in Syria.

Sina: Over a million in Iraq. Yeah.

Max Ajl: Over a million in Iraq, 500,000 people died in Yemen. Afghanistan. Right. They're just burning up. I mean, they're burning up the, you know, what they did in Ukraine. It's not very different, except from burning up.

Sina: Well, they brought it home. They brought it home, like, to their own continent. Usually they just export these, but they turn.

Max Ajl: Yeah, right. And, you know, it's been a, again, it's a massive boon. So the sale of the, you know, the death of the human being is also the sale of the commodity. and the weapons that kill the human being, right? Those are actually two kind of descriptive elements of the same historical process, which is the realization of value, which goes into the pockets of the arms companies, right? And I mean, it's I mean, it's it's totally it's very fucked. Right. And then you you know, I think also it's like I mean, to take a bit of a detour. I mean, you know, who is theorizing this is Ali Qadri. And there appears to be a suppression on discussing him. We have one theorist who's actually discussing these things with some sort of relationship to the Marxist tradition. We have one theorist who is really talking about the role of war and worldwide accumulation in a moment when war is enveloping entire civilizations. And we have basically a shadow ban on his name. He's been shadow banned on X, not coming up in search results. It's surreal, actually, right?

Sina: I mean, what's new about that? They don't actually allow critical intellectuals to exist. And if they do, they have to exist on the margins or they have to be liberal Marxists somewhere. I mean, we have dozens, hundreds of liberal Marxist professors out there, thousands probably. And we live in the most reactionary societies, right? Well, I do, not you. You know, what good was it? Well, then you realize, oh, because they put up this fake opposition, right? It gives people a place to feel like they have their say and they're, you know, they're resistant. And what happens at the end of the day?

Max Ajl: Sir, pause, please. That sounds like conspiracy theory. Do you think the CIA invented Marxism, Max? You know, do you even have tenure? Do you even have tenure? Are you even highly cited in the Scopus rankings?

Sina: Max, people who aren't extremely online who are listening to this, they're like, what the fuck are they talking about?

Max Ajl: All right, guys. Our extremely online interlude is over. And Sina, choose a... We're only going to talk for 10 more minutes. But Sina, choose a human being relevant topic for us to get back to. Okay. Okay.

Sina: Okay, in our last 10 minutes, let's think about what we, like you and I, sitting here, well, whatever, our class of people, people who try to talk, right, who break the taboo on this stuff, who say like, hey, Iran isn't a bad country. Iran is a country of, you know, might be part of the good guys, in fact. Like to just say that is so incredibly criminal in our world. Right. In this in this part of the world, at least. And the first line of the defense is a wave is a human wave of gusanos screaming at you slurs. Right. Iranian gusanos. Right. And so like that, this is this is part of the game here of that. You create these insane.

Max Ajl: Are they still talking?

Sina: The Gusano's? Sure. Of course, they're starting it up again. They've been trying to run this op for the last few days. I mean, yeah, there's rage in Iran.

Max Ajl: With the new protest, a couple thousand people that protested. Do you know our comrade? I feel like you guys didn't really have a chance to properly connect. Yoshi Furuhashi. I want to have her on. Yeah, good luck. But she knows more about Iran than anyone, even any Iranian. She read so many books about Iran. I'm sure her Farsi is perfect. And she has the most insightful things to say. I think it was her that pointed out that it would be beneficial for Americans to understand that Iranians are allowed to have politics.

Sina: Yes.

Max Ajl: right yeah not not every time that they that there's a small or big protest is a revolution. This is like if we were like, oh, we're on the verge of a Jacobin-style takeover of state power because Americans gathered at Occupy Wall Street in Oakland.

Sina: Yeah, no, exactly. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. That's exactly what it is. 2,000 people, the most realistic, the most reliable guy who studies protests in Iran, who looks at videos, and there's always videos because that's the point of these things, is to make them mediatic so if they're actually happening, dozens of people are filming them, which is something which is interesting to talk about because you're actually helping your enemies in doing that because you're telling them, okay, here we are, here's their faces, here's everyone that we are. But putting that aside, it's that the idea that 2,000 people could overthrow a country of 90 million, comprised of 90 million, is so absurd. But because they have this media power, they have this ability to make things massive, this is something that I'm struggling with. I mean, I think about all of those, let's say, middle-class Arabs, I'm just sort of like doing Arab guy, you know, fell on, fell on. I'm thinking of him watching Al Jazeera, watching Al Arabiya, you know, like watching all these channels, all of them insanely anti-Iran. But while posing to be pro-Palestinian, not al-Arabiya anymore, al-Jazeera still, but ultimately like these are tools of imperialist media. The imperialist media has just devoured the public sphere in multiple countries, in multiple languages. And Iran is one of the few places where their media power doesn't translate into much on the ground action because it's a competent state authority. Now, the Syrian state authority was competent for a while, and then it was bled dry by 12 years of brutal dirty war, which was coupled with, when that dirty war finished or at least paused, then they coupled it with the most violent sanctions regime ever cooked up until 2022, Russia, by the way. This is not the so-called Caesar sanctions, right? This is not... Well, they don't work, right, yeah. Yeah, they worked way more on Syria, but then they don't. But part of this, Joe, is that the game of besieging our enemy countries, right? Sometimes it works and sometimes it didn't. But think about the beyond that. You know, they've been besieged.

Max Ajl: Doesn't work. because Russia just produces too many things that are needed in the world system, whereas you could effectively besiege Syria. I spent a lot of time with reports on the effects of the Caesar sanctions. I mean, you know, Of course, there can be a debate about whether Syria could have possibly come up with reactive measures. It's a purely it's a it's a it's kind of masturbatory. It's not actually a helpful debate at this juncture. Right. Historical what ifs tend not to be, to be honest. But in fact, the degree of economic asphyxiation was almost as damaging as the war itself in terms of the burn up of, you know, of Syria's developmental capacity. I mean, the amount of impoverishment that occurred from the imposition of the Caesar sanctions to 2024, I mean, this ripped the country apart.

Sina: It was genocidal. It was genocidal.

Max Ajl: It was genocidal. Furthermore, it empowered the tendencies within the government that were more interested in – that could have been open to various degrees of normalization with the Emirates and so forth. They were like, this is the only way we're going to get capital to – carry out some rebuilding or escape the siege, the economic siege warfare and so forth. Right. I mean, it was, you know, the the the imperialists carried out this maneuver with exceptional skill in the in their. Mission for the destruction of Syria, right. You know, it's And this is one of the things... This is, I think, one of the... To circle back to something we were discussing before, I mean... You know, other countries obviously could have done more to support the Syrian government. But, you know, if you look at, for example, Iran, I mean, Iran is able to produce endogenously so much. Right. And that's why the cost of living certain things. I've been doing some some research on this. You know, the cost of living for, I think, an apartment in Tehran is very expensive. But the cost of living for the consumption basket in Iran is very comparatively low because it's produced locally, right? Iranians are producing so much locally now, I think, compared to what they were producing 10 years ago. I mean, it is a civilization and a class society that's able to produce so much of its needs locally, and then it's able to circumvent the siege because of the existence of... in large measure, Russia and China, right? That they are able to allow it to sidestep the siege that has been imposed upon it because they have our high-tech industrial bases and high-tech military industrial bases. They're outside of U.S. control, right? And these are the legacies of the communist revolutions, by the way, right? I think this is so important that that is, and God willing, it is the difference between the the siege that has been imposed on Iran and the siege that was imposed on Syria. Right.

Sina: Max, I want to keep going, but I know you have to go. This was a lot of fun. Depressing at points, but we didn't actually do much a year in reviewing, but that's okay. Years are fake. I want to thank you for your time today. I also want to thank all the viewers and listeners and Patreon supporters for all your help to my show over the years. I don't think I've ever done this before. said thank you, which is weird. I should have said thank you long ago to every supporter. So thank you, everyone. East is a Podcast has been around seven years, seven years of, which is insane. For podcasts, that's like a hundred, that's like podcast years are like dog years, but even more. So like one year is 15 years in human years in terms of podcast. Wasn't I like your first guest, Sina? You were early, early guest. The first guest was he who must not be named.

Max Ajl: take it easy someone had to be first and i'm happy it's not someone who um is a basement dweller so you had some honor back then you've fallen into you've fallen into now um

Sina: Well, I mean, the thing is, I also, I mean, to reflect back on that, I spend vast majority of my time producing other people's shows now. And my own show is, you know, it's a, I don't want to say secondary interest. It's still, you know, important to me. But in terms of my actual time, this show has been kind of split. has unfortunately been, I've had to become like a bit of a deadbeat dad with this show. And I'm hoping in the next year I can get back on the horse, produce more. Nick and I have been doing Pod Capital. Max, you should join us for an episode. Let's read, let's do the, let's do some stuff on colonization. You come join us for that. It's a great, it's a great show.

Max Ajl: Just tell me what to read. Tell me to do some reading first. That'll be fun. So I thank you all.

Sina: I will. So I thank you all again. And yeah, let's...

Max Ajl: Happy New Year.

Sina: Happy New Year. Happy New Year and free Palestine from the river to the sea. Obviously, that goes without saying. And I thank you. I thank you, Max. You're a good friend. You're a good friend to the show. You've always been a good friend to my own analysis. So I thank you. And I hope you guys all follow Max. Go buy his book. Get him on your own podcast. Get him talking. He always likes to talk. He's a bit acerbic, but it's all just a facade. He's a big teddy bear. You can say nothing, Max, if you don't want to confirm or deny that, but that's okay. He is a big teddy bear.

Max Ajl: I'm working on a book about Palestine. So hopefully that will be out later this year. It was supposed to come out last year, but I just couldn't really...

Sina: I didn't know it was coming out. I didn't know it was coming out this year. That's great. Oh, I guess it's January 1st.

Max Ajl: Yeah, sure. It better. I mean, it was, it was due like eight months ago and I just, uh, I just didn't manage. Wow. Yeah. I didn't have like a vantage point because of the war. Uh, Yeah. It's hard to see.

Sina: It's hard to see things right now. It's hard. It's so much violence. There's so much pain. There's such an insane amount of racism, psyops, all this, a ton of fake news, a lot of bullshit. Our media system is completely collapsing. I mean, I don't think it's good. I mean, we're supposed to end this conversation, but like I, the fact that Zionists have been forced to buy up, um, You know, like basically all the vestiges of like the boomer media machine or like the US media machine, they're buying CBS, they're buying TikTok, right? And putting their foot down on the necks of anybody who wants to like speak out. I don't think this is a sign of winning, but it may not be a sign of losing at the same time. I think this is just how fascists think and act. And, you know, watching that video of the scum, evil war criminal, Satan Yahoo, you know, walking in being treated like a freaking rock star by these insane people at the synagogue in Florida last night. It just makes you like, wow, this, these like... I don't know. Like, this is fucking sick. It's fucking sick as hell. But I don't think, like, I think all the stuff with the Epstein revelations, I don't think people, like, commonly just saying Zog out loud and being like, yeah, we live in a Zog. We live in a Zionist-occupied government. Like, people, this is not a good sign for And I think chaos in the U.S. will grow. And I don't think it will – the more chaotic the U.S. gets, I don't think that's a good thing. I think there is a point – I don't think the ruling class cares about the well-being of the vast majority of Americans. That's not what I'm saying. But I do think they need their participation. And I think if like 30 million of them are living in cars while Jeff Bezos has like 14 mega yachts, It's not, this system is simply unsustainable. Whereas there is another system out there. There is another world system out there for people, right? And it's just, it's right there. It's right there. You can see it. But of course, in the US and, you know, in the Westoid world, China bad, China bad. Anyways, I'm just blabbing. Thank you, Max. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, patrons. I'll say it again. And yeah, you get the final word, Max. Then I'll press end recording.

Max Ajl: All right. Bye, Sina.

Sina: Bye. Wait, you were supposed to say the final word. I lied. Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶