Imperial Debris: From 1492 to the Gaza pier w/ Taylor Miller

Alex Aviña: Once again, hello everyone. Once again, I, Alex Aviña, have hijacked Sina's East Is a Podcast to bring back the great Taylor Miller to talk about A 3-part series that she recently published over the course of the last 4 or 5 months that she's published for a website called Corruption Tracker that kind of deals broadly with, with the infrastructure and discourse of genocide and facilitating genocide, US facilitation of genocide in Gaza and in Palestine. And this will also be a way for us to continue the conversation that we started with the first time that we had Taylor on.

Taylor Miller: Yeah.

Alex Aviña: We're talking more about the border industrial university complex and its relation to settler colonialism in West Asia and settler colonialism here in the US-Mexico borderland. So Taylor, welcome back. Thank you for agreeing to be my collaborator and criminal as we take over this podcast once again from Sina. It's great to have you back.

Taylor Miller: Thanks, Alex. Yeah, this is super pleasurable. And we had the delight of Being together in person just last week in Phoenix. We had— we were both part of this beautiful event with the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands with Natalie Diaz at ASU. And that's kind of— we were just like sitting around and like, oh yeah, let's do another episode. And what should we talk about? There's a trillion things. But this is— I'm grateful for the opportunity to talk about this 3-part essay. It was going to be just like one long beast. My friends suggested don't do that for everybody's attention span. But, you know, this space is like— this is really special. Yeah.

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: And sacred to me. And I'm grateful to have this time with you and, you know, just with East as a podcast, because, you know, I've been thinking so much about Hala Arian. She was there, the poet, beautiful thinker, mother. She was there with us. And, you know, I was thinking back on some of her older work, too, in addition to what she read from her latest poetry collection. And she talked about last year about how, I see what you see. I see what you see was what she emphasized. And it— that's, that's haunting to me, but it's also like this, this, this, this call to care and collectivity to me and to like be in these spaces with you all and just to like know that there are other people in this like grotesquely perverse world who are also seeing what we see. Feels really good because, um, Yeah, it's just, it's really overwhelming. And I feel like I'm going crazy because nobody in Tucson seemingly cares, even though we're in the belly of the beast.

Alex Aviña: So it was great. It was great to finally meet in person, Taylor. And it was a wonderful event set up here at ASU by our comrade, the poet Natalie Diaz. I got to meet your mini partner in crime, Nora. Nora gave me this great watermelon bracelet that I haven't stopped wearing since she gave it to me. She's amazing. But it was, it was, it was great. It was great to be around brilliant people, brilliant committed people like you and like Makthi and like Hala and Natalie. And I think at least for me, it gave us, gave me the push to kind of finish out the rest of the year. So let's, so let's start talking about your, this, this 3-part series. Maybe if you want to talk about, give like a, say a little bit about Corruption Tracker. I had not, I didn't know about this. this outfit until I read your wonderful essays. And then maybe we can start getting into the 3 articles and just thinking about broader things about language, about infrastructure of empire, about borders existing everywhere. And we can also think, yeah, some of the things that we've talked about at that event and that we have continued to converse about in terms of the use of language in this genocide.

Taylor Miller: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, like the I don't even know what the cool way to say it is, but like the too-long-didn't-read version of the series is that I was kind of writing alongside or almost like a stream of consciousness with the development and then the destruction, the dismantling of this pier. But Corruption Tracker, you know, I— not by trade, by whatever, I guess I'm a political geographer, which is in and of itself a redundancy. But I'm always looking, especially in this time of just like compounding catastrophe, I'm looking Mm-hmm. For, again, for these spaces of kinship and solidarity and just like other people that are trying to think through some of these questions. And I came across Corruption Tracker and sort of their parent, if you will, Shadow World Investigations. And they're based in London. And what they are doing is they're trying to see and parse out the connections and the corruption in the global arms trade. And sometimes that is like the very tiny nuance of one particular person with one particular organization or a government and the ways that money has been laundered, but oftentimes it's part of this much larger network, this much bigger picture. But what's so sacred to me about them and about this space, you know, is being corruption trackers, that I'll have an idea and we'll be on a Zoom call and I'll just be like, I want to follow this thing around. You know, I just want to write about it. And to be amongst this very teeny tiny, like barely funded group of people who are like, hell yeah, go for it. Like, go investigate this thing and tell us what you find. And they— there's, there's no structure that my writing has to follow, blah, blah, blah. And so I'm just like, I'm gonna follow this goddamn pier around, you know? It's like sort of, I guess, an ethnographic methodology of like following a thing. But for me, I'm more of like Charlie in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where he's like all cracked out with like the heavy eyes and—

Alex Aviña: Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Miller: Has the murder board of like the red string and the pushpins on the wall, trying to piece it all together. Like, that's kind of how my brain works, hence why I can't even like answer the question here. But I'm like, I'm going to follow this pier around, because I know that it's more than just this one little piece of architecture. There's something else going on here. And I know that, you know, Sina had the conversation with Ahmed earlier on, where they were talking a bit about the pier. But over the course of the spring and then into the summer and then even into this fall, I'm so fascinated by what the material implications are of this thing, you know, what its piece is in terms of the ongoing ecocide and, of course, the greater genocide, and what this ruination is implying and what it's foreshadowing and, you know, how it's a sinkhole for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of U.S. taxpayer money. And just like all the pieces to this puzzle. And so, it's this ongoing project of like, let me follow this thing around, even though the thing is now dismantled, because, you know, these architectures of empire, there's this— there's a longer durée here, of course, you know, as we know. And I'm not a historian like you are, but there's this longer durée of like all these players involved in this, you know, and all of the foreshadowing of the ruination to come. So I followed the thing around.

Alex Aviña: And—

Taylor Miller: Yeah. Yeah. And I kind of started— well, I started with what it even is. That was kind of part one, and sort of who the key players are. And then from there, I wanted to, you know, start to scratch more at the different stakeholders and what its presence and its temporariness means. And then, you know, I zoomed out but also, like, clawed in simultaneously of, like, who—

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: Are these bozos that are calling the shots, and there's a lot of them. And so that's like the part 3 of the essay series is my favorite because I love to follow around a bozo, and I love to sort of visually dissect their bad websites and, you know, where their funding is coming from and all of that. So that's an extremely long too long, didn't read. Yeah.

Alex Aviña: So where, where actually is the Gaza Pier now? Did it like float away somewhere in the Mediterranean, or are we going to find it at the US-Mexico border like we did with the helicopter landing pads from Vietnam? Like where? And again, to reiterate, your whole, your 3-part series is about the Gaza Pier. And yeah, let me, let me just, let me just, let me ask you, answer that part about where the Gaza Pier actually is. And then let me ask another question.

Taylor Miller: Yeah, sure. So right now, to my understanding, it's nowhere. You know, and I want to preface all of this for all the listeners by saying that, like, I'm not a military analyst by any stretch. You know, so don't be mean to me about, like, what I do or don't know here, you know, the intricacies of combat and the intricacies of the weaponry and, like, how it should be mounted to a ship or not. But I think, you know, as somebody fixated on the visuality of it all, I'm like, well, this thing—

Alex Aviña: Right.

Taylor Miller: It sprouted up really quickly, and then it was gone really quickly. And in its wake, it left an immense amount of destruction. You know, there was the massacre, the Nasrallah camp massacre, where— well, we can get to that later. But, you know, all these implications of the violences and the ways in which it is upholding and scaffolding the genocide and the sprawl of the military outposts, the further fortification of the Netzarim Corridor, and all of these actual sites on the ground are all It's all part of this bigger picture of the pier, you know? So the pier is gone. I think, technically, it's gone. It got packed up in July, right? And it was this, like, mission accomplished moment. You know, we delivered the aid, which, of course, they didn't, because every child's skeletal remains is testament to how no aid is getting in the way it should be. You know, the— I just saw 2 days ago Anwar was saying that— He's still alive. 6% of Gaza's food needs are being met. And I sat with that for a moment and I was like, no, no, it's not. It's 0%. Because every caregiver is rationing to make sure that their child is eating, you know? And so that's not a food need being met, you know? And if you're not sleeping well at night and if the incessant drones buzzing are disturbing your sleep and disturbing your meals, Right. Then your food needs are not being met. You know, there's no stability there. There's no— the hierarchy of needs are not being met. So it's 0%. Anyways, the pier is gone, but there are so many lasting architectures, and not just lasting, but exponentially blooming and booming, right? And so, like I said, the Netzarim Corridor, which is severing North Gaza from the rest of the territory.

Alex Aviña: Right. Uh-huh.

Taylor Miller: —is further fortifying. And, you know, the weapons are there. The weapons continue to get delivered, because we haven't stopped making the bombs. And so, just because, like, that one pier is gone doesn't mean that the jets flying over my head every single day to and from the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base that are loading up the munitions from Raytheon here in Tucson aren't being constantly streamed in. I guess that is, yet again, a very long way of saying, like, it's very much there. And so, these— the imperial debris, right? I think that's Anne Stoller's term. But like the imperial debris remains. And so, there are chunks of the pier assuredly floating in the Mediterranean Sea, just as all of the concrete, right? Just as all the phosphorus, just as all of these ways that the air and the subsoil and the soils and the aquifers and the dams and everything are just being poisoned, right? You know, cellularly. The land and its people of Palestine are being poisoned. And just because the pier's gone doesn't mean that its ruination doesn't persist. Yeah.

Alex Aviña: Yeah, I think one of the things I really appreciated about this series is your ability to essentially X-ray both what US global empire looks like and then how it interfaces with Israeli settler colonialism and how this gets condensed in the form of the Gaza Pier. So I think one of the really cool things about this series is that you're able to be very specific in terms of the— and you do this across the 3 parts, right? You're very specific in showing how the Gaza pier allows the United States to cast this as a humanitarian mission. And we can talk about that in terms of language because that's one of the big points that you make. But it's an X-ray, right? So we get to see how US global empire interfaces with Israeli settler colonialism. In Gaza in the form of this pier. And you— and so it's very localized, and you allow us to see the function of the pier in relation to its potential connection to the Nusret massacre, its connections, physical infrastructure connection to the Netzarim Corridor. You even link it to untapped natural gas and oil deposits off the coast of Gaza and how the Gaza pier is potentially connected to that. But then you, like, you move out from there and you allow us to think about The actual infrastructure and logistics of US empire on a global scale. And it's this, you know, to use this term, it's like a public partner. Well, ostensibly it's a public partner, public-private partnership between the US government and LCCs. But these LCCs are all run by like former military people. So it's like, how, you know, is there really a separation between the public and the private? So maybe the thing we can, we can think about that is to go from, from the very local to the global as, as your series does, and we can think about what the Gaza Pier was meant to do in Gaza, and then we can kind of work our way out.

Taylor Miller: Sure. So, you know, the pier actually went by several terms, several of their names. And so there was the Trident Pier was one of its formal names, but it's part of this bigger plan of a JLOT, right? This Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore operation. And so that's basically when the US Marines and the Navy and the They all are very much assuming responsibility, but they're all part and parcel of these exercises, these joint exercises. And so, basically, all the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense and the president, right? So everybody has their hand in this, because what they're basically doing is creating these prefabricated ports. So there was all this destruction already wrought. And so then we said, Well, now we have to put a Band-Aid on it, right? And so, President Biden, in the State of the Union address, he, in very much fleeting ways, mentioned that, oh, the United States is going in and going to construct this humanitarian pier. And as we all know, like, U.S. empire and humanitarianism are— can't be said in the same sentence. But, you know, these floated— floating causeways or these prefabricated ports, they're all exercises that have been used in the past. They've been used in Afghanistan. They've been used in Iraq. Right. They've been used as ways to deliver aid, right? Whether it's formally through U.S. aid or whether it's through an NGO and other private stakeholders to deliver just a little blip in the pond of you know what is actually necessary and needed to try to heal these situations that are caused directly by the U.S. government. And so the pier was purportedly constructed as an easier way to get aid into Gaza, right? Circumventing.

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: Any kind of hiccups, circumventing any kind of resistance interference. But really, in my understanding, it was just a way for these vessels, these U.S. naval ships, to arrive to offload weapons, but also to offload X amount of aid, which was then stockpiled near the Netzarim Corridor, so that The deliverable could be met, right? X amount of aid was technically delivered to the Palestinian people, which, you know, of course we know is not enough. It's not effective. And ultimately, as we can see the fallout from the pier and we can see all the damages that it's caused, you know, it's ultimately done nothing.

Alex Aviña: Thank you. And I mean, it's really inefficient, right? I remember at the time just listening to like Electronic Intifada, them saying that it was a really inefficient way of delivering aid. Like it made no sense. Like aid should have been coming through land crossings or, you know, Biden even said he convinced the president of Mexico to open up aid coming from Egypt into Gaza, right? So, so that's why one of the questions that I have reading that, especially the first part of your series, is So if it was, if the delivering of aid is inefficient through this peer, there's obviously ulterior motives, right? And this is where we get into thinking about this coded language of genocide under the guise of humanitarianism and how throughout this entire genocide, how the US government, the Biden administration has just completely butchered language. Um, from things like humanitarian aid to things like ceasefire, which— and, you know, doing things to language that other genocidal regimes in the past have done, right? There's really good work by people who've worked on like the Argentine military dictatorship of the '70s and '80s talking about how the lexicon of terror and how they, they butchered language to, to describe, you know, state terrorism and state terroristic practices. So, but that was a different situation. Here we're in the situation of this was supposed to be humanitarian, right? So If you want to talk about how the language that the Biden administration used for this pier, and then just in general, like throughout this more than a year-long genocide.

Taylor Miller: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as I mentioned, I'm not a military analyst. And so I'm not like those amazing folks maybe we see on Twitter or elsewhere who are able to track the different vessels and know exactly what that's implying. Or, you know, people like Trevor Ball who can find like a little fragment of a weapon And then trace it back, you know, backwards to exactly the manufacturer where it came from. Like, I think that kind of work is so necessary in a bigger-picture understanding of who is responsible for all of this. And I think that what I'm working through right now, you know, I was so struck by— in one of the Tankie Therapy conversations just the other week that I was listening to, you know, so seldom do I, like, replay a podcast, let alone with a notebook in hand. Right. —where I'm like actually jotting down notes and like feeling very, very connected to what's being said. But, you know, shout-out to Nora and Lara Sheehi, who, through psychoanalysis, were talking about these psychic interruptions and thinking about the psychic interruption and thinking through shame and thinking through all of these ways that our everyday lives are being so disturbed and disrupted by all of this. And so, how I piece that into my aims with all of this is that I— this coded language of slaughter in these contracts and in these websites and in all of the propaganda and all of the hasbara that's circulating, I'm so fixated on this current— this coded language of slaughter, this rhetoric of slaughter, like you were kind of talking about. And, you know, even in a Jadaliyya episode many months ago, Fadi Jouda said, Like, English is the language that genocides me. And, you know, these are these moments that I just can't— I can't shake. I can't stop thinking about them. And so, every single day when I refresh the Department of Defense's, you know, contracts page, I'm just thinking through how, like, all of this slaughter and every single new massacre is encoded and embedded and hidden and obscured, right, in these contracts that otherwise mean nothing to anybody except the profiteers.

Alex Aviña: Right.

Taylor Miller: And so, you know, to understand the pier and to understand how the Biden administration has talked about it and how all of their accomplices, you know, from Cyprus to the UK to France to Qatar, the UAE, everybody who's helping finance this— and, of course, you know, we can get into the, you know, the other, the nonprofit and NGO bozos later— but, you know, they're all using these oblique and opaque Phrases, the verbiage, to hide the massacre. And so, one of the— one such instance, as pertains to the pier, is this notion of no boots on the ground. You know, Biden says time and time again, or whoever it is, Matthew Miller or Patel, there's no boots on the ground. There were no boots on the ground during the construction of this pier, during the implementation of these humanitarian deliveries and this and that. But it's like, OK, great. A drone is still a boot on the ground, you know, in my eyes, or like the ways in which the land and the air and the sea and the subsoil, like I said, all of it is occupied, and all of it is being decimated. There are very much many boots on the ground, if that makes sense. And so, you know, that dates back to like General Westmoreland's—

Alex Aviña: Yeah. Right.

Taylor Miller: Attrition warfare against the Viet Cong. And, you know, U.S. troop numbers surged between '65 and '68, right? And they insisted, though, just as they insisted during Obama's cloaking of U.S. intervention in Syria and so forth, that no boots are on the ground. But that doesn't mean that immense amounts of damages aren't being wrought. And so, it's like a— it's a trick, right? It's a sleight of hand. Trick, where we're misleading and we're gesturing towards things that aren't happening. And I write this like things that aren't happening instead of describing them how they really are. And so, I think that, you know, the ways in which all of this damage is just cloaked in nothingness on the website, you know, it's just like, oh, we are Right. Experts, and we excel, and we're— and intelligence and sustainability and like all of these huge words that are so vacuous and getting us nowhere are very much getting us an absolute somewhere, getting us to absolute atrocity. And so I'm just trying to understand it. And then I'm trying to understand like the terrible stock images that they overlay with this. And I'm trying to understand like the aerial photography that is commissioned by the U.S. military, you know. And so, like, how all of that pieces together into this bigger picture of this genocide as it's unfolding, um, it's just so fascinating and maddening. And like, it truly speaks to how these borders are everywhere, you know. The borders are here in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. They're here on I-10 where Raytheon and Leonardo and Elbit and everybody has their, their headquarters and their factories.

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: You know, and they're on these terrible websites. They're all borders to me. And so, those psychic intrusions are just like how, once you know that there is a border there, you can't unsee it. Like, I can't unsee that there are borders everywhere. They're proliferate. And so, the pier was a border, you know? And these shipping containers that are across the Netzarim Corridor, as these new military outposts, and the forward operating bases, and the 800 military installments globally plus, You know, these are all iterations of the border. It's not just the fence in Nogales. Yeah.

Alex Aviña: Yeah, I think one of the things that reading your series got me thinking about, like, on a big, like, broader global historical level and thinking about, like, what US empire is, is it's— in one way, US empire is one big-ass exercise of plausible deniability. And I think this is, like, what distinguishes it from other empires historically, whereas other empires historically have been very open about what they do and why they do it as empires. The US tends to be extremely hesitant, and they have to butcher language and conceptual frameworks to disguise or to reframe the absolutely horrific imperial things that they're doing on the ground. So like the way I understand the language that they used for the Gaza Pier or the language that these demonic spokespeople constantly use day in, day out to tell, to lie to us, right? Like to tell us not to believe our eyes, essentially. It's like such a hallmark of US imperialism. Like it's US imperialism always trying to negate its existence as a US empire. And a lot of it depends on a lot of innocence and naivete on behalf of American citizens. It depends on American citizenry, you know, just believing and really making exceptionalist claims about the US as central to their national identity. And this is like, you see it across the scope of US history, right, from the very first attacks against indigenous peoples in the what was then the old Northwest Territory to today, right? The idea and one of the constants I think that I see with regards to language and with the way that life is described in U.S. imperial language is the enemies of U.S. empires are always described as communities and people who do not value life in contrast to the life-loving Americans. And we see that from the way different Native American groups are described to the way Westmoreland, the guy you cited, talked about, quote unquote, Oriental peoples not valuing life the same way that Americans value life, to the way that monsters during the War on Terror talked about, even before the War on Terror, but then especially after, talking about people in West Asia not valuing life like the West does. Like, it's just this weird— like, US empire depends on this absolute butchery of language in a way that perhaps previous empires did not, because of the way that it kind of self-fashions itself as this exceptional democratic nation, when in reality, as we know, right, if we take a look at its history and the present, it's the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, to steal that from Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beyond Vietnam speech. So I wonder, like, I wonder, thinking about going back to the Gaza Pier and this language of humanitarianism that the Biden administration used to describe what it was doing with this thing, Like, I always think about like, who is this for? Why is this? What is like the function of this language? Who actually consumes this language? When in this era, at least, we're able to quite clearly see what's happening on the ground. And what's happening on the ground is just a genocide, like a horrific genocide. Maybe that has to do with like the psychic intrusions too, like the idea that we're like going mad because we know what we see, we know what we read, we know based on testimonies that we've collected from an assortment of Palestinians, international organizations, whatever, but then we're being told something else, like we're the ones who are not correctly interpreting that in this instance, this pier was there for humanitarian functions, not to interface with the Netzarim corridor and to provide weaponry and to get to continue American boots on the ground in whatever technological, physical state that that may be.

Taylor Miller: Well, you know, ultimately— and I have many friends who are doing such brilliant work, you know, unpacking the histories and the nuance of political or religious Zionism or, you know, delving into all of these various angles of how to explain the horror right now. And I read all of it, or as much as I'm capable of.

Alex Aviña: Right.

Taylor Miller: And trying to synthesize as much of it. But in my own mind, all of this, every single dollar of it, every single advertisement, every this and that, is for shareholders, you know? And I say this, it's like this really tacky slogan, I guess, but to me it's just like this truth that I've been trying to speak and share to people, that like there is no ceasefire. Because the shareholders say so. You know, and so every single veto, you know, every single stalemate, every pause or, you know, how dare they even call that a pause, right? Every single ceasefire in Lebanon, right, that continues to be violated, ultimately the flow of munitions don't stop because the shareholders say so. And so, The language that we're talking about and the ways in which this is packaged and presented is just for the quarterly reports, in my eyes and in my understanding, you know? And this kind of— I didn't do the best job yet of sort of talking about who else besides the military is or was, very much so still is, behind the pier. And, you know, one of the main players here was— is FOGBO.

Alex Aviña: FOGBO. OK.

Taylor Miller: It's an LLC. And, you know, incredibly shadowy in my eyes what their aims are, even more so according to their website, which was basically a nothingness. But then my article, like the 3rd installment of this piece, came out in October, and then all of a sudden they had like a completely revamped website with like a new mission statement, and everybody had brand-new headshots. And I'm like, that's convenient. I mean, like the timing, I'm sure I have absolutely nothing to do with it, but maybe Maybe somebody somewhere on your PR team got a ping. They're like, oh, people are noticing your shitty website, even though you're doing widespread damage globally. But anyway, so there's this LLC, Fogbow, that you kind of touched on already. And they are led by just a bunch of ex-Marines and CIA guys and JINSA guys, and literally like 6 white dudes who were all former—

Alex Aviña: Yeah. OK.

Taylor Miller: They're former Marines, or, you know, very much active Marines in that mindset. But they filed as an LLC in the state of Wyoming just a couple days after Biden's State of the Union address, when he announced that the pier was going to be built. And to me, that's not coincidental timing, of course. But when I learned, you know, through, again, a bit of scratching, that they filed in Wyoming— I lived in Wyoming very briefly when I graduated high school, because I thought that my destiny was to be a OK. And, you know, this was before I, like, understood or cultivated a passion for, like, this, you know, for learning and for academia. Like, even though academia hates me, like, I am pleading to it every single day. Take me in. Accept me. But, you know, I thought I was going to be a ski bum for life, and I thought that I was going to live and teach in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is what I did for a little while, until I skied into a tree. And then I was like, OK, I have a high school diploma, and what am I going to do with my life? So I was like, why is Fogbow filing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming? And the more that I dug, I learned— you know, well, first of all, I knew from living there that Teton County has this exceptionally dense concentration of millionaires and billionaires. Like, the Kardashians have a home there. Harrison Ford has property there. Dick Cheney has property there. You know, like, it's no surprise that really rich people love to buy up huge swaths of land and cosplay cowboy, right? They've been doing this for decades, if not, you know, since Manifest Destiny.

Alex Aviña: Right.

Taylor Miller: Destiny's inception. But Wyoming has these incredibly lenient and business-friendly tax laws, is what I began to learn about. And they call it the cowboy cocktail. And so, basically, it's like there's a Wyoming trust and layers of these private companies and concealed ownership that allow you or allow a company or an individual to move money around.

Alex Aviña: Mm-hmm.

Taylor Miller: You know, with very lax— rather, with the strongest privacy laws and very lax in terms of accountability. And there were a bunch of Wyoming trusts that were actually unearthed in the Pandora Papers. But all of that is to say that Fogbo filed in Wyoming to move money around. And so, basically, another way to look at the pier is like, that's where almost half a billion dollars went. And that's where Qatari money is going, and that's where French money is going, and that's That's where Cypriot money is going. And that's where all of these people that are trying to nab a foothold in the trillion-plus cubic feet of natural gas reserves in the Gaza Marine. And that's where all of the real estate speculation and all of these venture capitalists, they're all trying to get a piece of this pie in Gaza, but also in the ways in which they're moving money around in the interests of Gaza under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Right? And so, again, I'm just Charlie.

Alex Aviña: Right.

Taylor Miller: And it's very cracked out in front of the board, and like this is very incoherent, perhaps, but like it all pieces together, right? It all pieces together because it's all in the interest of empire, right? These former Marines are now moving the chess pieces around, but those chess pieces are hundreds of millions of dollars. And, you know, they have like a full team of lawyers and a full team of like anti-corruption specialists on their side to do so, right? And all of these mercenary firms and these real estate speculators, they're all just seeing this as the next frontier. It's the next big land grab. And it's not unlike how Tel Aviv, like all of the Mediterranean seafront property in Tel Aviv, was bought up after the Nakba and turned into these luxury hotels and turned into these clubs. These huge money-making ventures. We're seeing the same thing attempt to pan out in Gaza. But I don't think it'll be successful. I don't. No.

Alex Aviña: As our friend Justin Podur always says, they have to win the war first. Yeah. I mean, I think thinking about the literature on disaster capitalism, right? In this instance, we have to maybe coin a new term as genocide capitalism. But that's not a new thing, right? As you mentioned, this is— if we think about the, you know, at this— if we think about it in the lens of, like, Manifest Destiny, right, this is not the first instance or possibly the last instance of this type of, you know, settler colonial process of pillage and accumulation and plunder.

Taylor Miller: Yeah.

Alex Aviña: I think that's what— one of the interesting things, I think, for me reading your series is that, again, you go from a very particular instance with this Gaza pier, and you allow us to kind of think about what the infrastructure of US empire looks like globally. And you take us from Gaza to the Eastern Mediterranean to Jackson, Wyoming, right? To think about what kind of physical and financial and military infrastructure US empire requires. To do the type of things that it did for over a year and be fueling and arming and fully supporting this genocide in Gaza. And, you know, I think a lot of this is not new, right? I think that's another interesting thing that comes out of your series, that this is— you have a part where you write— where is it? You write a part where you just say, this is— we consider this Gaza Pier as a microcosm of the larger ongoing process of pillage. In a way, this process goes back to like, what, 1492? It's— if we go huge, if we go to a global historical scale, it's that the technologies are different, the context is different, obviously, the language is different, but the actual process of violence, of pillage, of displacement, of conquest, of genocide is a very old one. Yeah. And I keep thinking about this, right? I keep thinking about not just having read your series, but something I've kept thinking about since October 7th is how— I don't know. I think I've read many articles and I've watched many videos where people have tried to explain why the US is so deeply— why the US and why the Biden administration has been so deeply committed to full— it's to fully genociding the Palestinian peoples. And I don't know, maybe you have an answer, right? I think you provided us with an answer, right? The shareholder. It's very, you know, it's very Rosa Luxemburg, right? Militarism as a province of capital accumulation. But if we step back and think about it, you know, over the course of a century or 2 centuries or 3 centuries, as you do, right? By using terms like Manifest Destiny, This is a long, long process of quote unquote Western conquest, settler colonialism, and pillage that that has been ongoing for centuries. And I don't know how to. I don't you know living you know watching witnessing what these horrors. I'm trying to as a historian. I always just like I guess as a historian, I I fall back to to history as a way to kind of make sense of it. But even that, even what I just described is not like fully satisfying to me to fully think about why the why in all of this. And I think one of the one I think one of the great attributes of your series is you provide a really clear answer to the why, right? And this is the shareholder perspective. This is the the the capital accumulation perspective. But I wonder if you have any more thoughts in terms of the why of all this. Why this ongoing deep US commitment to genociding Palestinians in Gaza, to genociding Lebanese in the southern part of Lebanon? Like what? And now, and then stuff has broken out in other parts of West Asia. Like what do you think the why in all of this is? It's an easy question for you to answer.

Taylor Miller: Oh yeah. I think the why is That's right. That settler colonialism is always ongoing, you know, and that it's a process and that it's never complete, right? And if it were complete, I think then it would start to, like, devour itself or something. But no, I lean into how important this all is to the shareholders of it. And I— like I said, I'm not a military analyst, but I'm also not an economist. And so I guess I'm, like, not I'm not a lot of things. What am I?

Alex Aviña: That's a good thing.

Taylor Miller: But I'm not— and I'm not a historian, and I'm not this, and I'm not that. So what am I? Why am I even here?

Alex Aviña: Another good thing.

Taylor Miller: Why am I even here? Why do you keep inviting me on? I don't know. But I think that— I think that we have to, of course, factor in all of the history that has brought us up to this present moment. But I think that we have to— Never lose sight of the next frontier. And like the, the, the, that, you know, they moved from Gaza towards Lebanon as if, you know, that either of them ever fully stopped or started, right? It's like all, all of this continuum of plunder, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. But, and of course across the West Bank and of all of, all of Palestine, you know? And so there was never like a formal start and never a formal stop, just as there never was a formal stop or a formal stop in Afghanistan.

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: But, like, again, that ruination and the remnants of it and how that occupation is still so very much there, and that there is everywhere, you know, that there is in the footprint of all the 800-plus bases. But something that's so chilling to me, if I'm not an economist and I'm not a this and I'm not a that, maybe I'm OK at, like, analyzing the visual, you know? And maybe before I was anything else, I was a photographer.

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: A photographer, maybe. But I look at these images on their website, on Fogbow's website especially, or on the Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation's website, which is kind of like the umbrella for Fogbow, if we will. The umbrella in the flood. Their website, their new website, ever since I put out my October piece, they have— and I'm just going to toggle to it for a second— but they have only 2 projects. They have a current project, and it says in very small print, Active Gaza, right? And then there's like this really shitty fogbow sign that was like printed on 8.5 by 11 or 8.5 by 11 paper with their logo tacked to a wall with some like nondescript Arabic graffiti and then like some nondescript bags of something being delivered. So I really encourage everybody to go to this website. But so that's their current project, their active project. And then Upcoming just says other projects, and then there's like this big like satellite view of like who knows where, like kind of a desert, maybe part of the Suez Canal, maybe part of the Bab-el-Mandeb. I'm not really sure. But like the other projects is like the anywhere, you know? But that anywhere is the forever in forever war that we're locked on this hamster wheel of, right? And so like. Again, that's why there has been no formal ceasefire yet. That's why there has been no state-run, state-led initiatives to actually end this barbarity, because it translates into trillions of dollars of profit. And so, I don't know where this is going besides total ruination. And Andreas Malm writes how the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth. Like, I think of how the tectonic plates are heaving from the weight of, you know, X amount of nuclear bombs dropped, or, you know, the equivalency of X amount of nuclear bombs dropped on Gaza, and like what that means for the planet, right? This planetary genocide, it's planetary ecocide. Because for us to fall into that linguistic trap or that aesthetic trap or like that very like repostable, shareable trap of like— Yeah. Like, you know, this is only happening in Gaza, or this is only happening in Palestine, as if white phosphorus is, you know, the damages wrought by it could be contained by a border, you know, or as if like a pier that, a chunk of a pier that's floating off into the Mediterranean Sea isn't also causing, you know, planetary devastation, you know, or as if like all the other chemicals that are being dropped and all the ways that the water are being Waterways are being poisoned. And now these thermobaric bombs, you know, like Hosam Shabat and Anas Jamal are reporting about how people, Palestinians, are being vaporized, right? I've especially seen an uptick in that just in the past weekend. We're seeing this vaporization of human beings. But like, as if there aren't also planetary implications for that. Like, every single Palestinian that has been slaughtered is a life world, is somebody's universe, is many people's universes. But like this concurrent destruction of the universe, like settler colonialism has no end. And so like that's where we're headed. And maybe that's why like everything is a border and everything is a trigger, and now everything is like the psychic intrusion, you know, to put it in, in, in Tankie Therapy's terms, because like it all is— like it's all part of this grander puzzle that is ultimately just going to destroy us all. Right? Like, it is. And so, how do you resist that? How do you resist planetary annihilation? I don't know.

Alex Aviña: Yeah, I mean, I think that's the question. You've provided answers to that in other of your writings, right? When you're thinking about the military-industrial complex in southern Arizona and, you know, preventing the The circulation of military munitions and goods that are produced in southern Arizona that make— that eventually make their way to West Asia. Yeah, no, I think that's the question. I think there's people on the ground engaged in some of this work, right, in West Asia, trying to prevent this. And this is one of the things that's most maddening to me, talking about psychic intrusion. Like, the lines are so clearly drawn for me. Yeah. That sometimes it's really difficult for me to talk about this with. I mean, that's one of the reasons why it feels good to talk to you all about this because like I feel like I don't have to explain myself. Like we all know that the lines are clearly drawn between those who are fighting to defend their community, their people, their life worlds, their their country versus those who are using weapons that vaporize kids and that assassinate. That are using drones that play baby and animal sounds to force people to come out of their homes, and at which point they are sniped, or the systematic targeting by Israeli snipers of Palestinian children. Like, they're so systematic that you can't deny it, yet there are people out there who deny it. Yeah, I think— I don't know. I just think that thinking about how this getting spreading this right and I think how to to get more folks just talking about the U.S. to see how clearly drawn these lines are and maybe if you if we go on polls like we're getting there but as we've seen over the last year or so institutions in the West institutions in the United States are not going to go down without a fight and they're going to go down taking a lot of us with them, as we've seen with just, Taylor, in the spaces that you and I occupy at university campuses, and to see how universities reacted to pro-Palestine protests on campus last spring, right? And we still have students who are suffering the consequences of that. They're still being punished by these feckless, cowardly universities. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think of Every— and this is something we've talked about on Tankie Therapy, in chat groups, in the event that we just had at ASU— every new day brings a new horror. And as a historian thinking about the newness of this, but also the— it's not that new. Again, the technology might be new, but this has been going on for a really long time, right? And even the language that you dissect in your article series, right? This forever war of civilization, that they just using the civilization barbarism dyad is already a marker of how old this, this, uh, this conflict has, has, has existed for across different, uh, spaces around the world. Um, but yeah, I don't— when you mention the, the, the— when you mention those examples of, of, of long genocide, those are the things that I can't think about. Like, I'm glad that you can. Because when I start thinking about the long genocidal processes, like ecocide, like stuff that's happening at the cellular level in the bodies of Palestinian victims, like that's the kind of stuff that really throws me into desperation. Like I can't handle that because we don't know, we will not know a full accounting of it for a while, even though it's like this, like it's this amorphous thing in the future. Like we know there's something horrible there. But it's kind of difficult to see the outline or the shape because of how horrific and genocidal its impact is. And at the same time, there's people on the ground fighting to defend their lives, their communities, their loved ones, and their countries. And I don't know, I just think that the coordinates of struggle are very clear to me. And one of the things that— and that's one of the, I don't know, I think they were clear. I think they were clear to many of us before October 7th, but they've been rendered even more clear, more crystal clear, if that's possible, if I'm messing up metaphors, to see the performance of an absolutely genocidal presidential administration like Biden's and what they've done. And I think with your 3-part series on the Gaza Pier, I think you provide a really strong microcosmic example of the horrors that this administration has committed over more than a year.

Taylor Miller: Yeah. I mean, thank you for reading that and sort of downloading it like that. I've kind of gotten to this point where I'm like only thinking about it— I'm thinking about it at a systems level, of course, and I'm thinking about like how is my alma mater or my university implicated in all of this, right? And, you know, how are— My students implicated— we had class yesterday, and one of my students' friends was passing through. They live in LA, and they were passing through Tucson. And we were making small talk before class. And small talk is like massive talk, right? It's genocide talk, because I'm not going to avoid it to make anybody comfortable at all. Like, I'm past— I was never in that place, but now I'm nowhere near that place. And so, you know, with this 20-year-old student, or however old—

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: And he goes, yeah, I was, you know, I was part of the spring encampment at UCLA, and the cops beat the shit out of me, and I was in the hospital. Do you want to see my scars? And this was like right before I was walking in to give my second-to-last lecture of the semester. And the entire semester has been about connecting ecocide here with ecocide there, you know, through all these—

Alex Aviña: Yeah. Oh.

Taylor Miller: Various forms of the border industrial complex. And I just— I started weeping. You know, like, how do you— how— we're not— the world has seen this and felt this and moved through this, but we have not. Like, our bodies have not. And so, I— there are so many moments that I have of just, like, utter weakness and despair and hopelessness. And, like, I know that people are doing the good work, and I'd like to think that Yeah. Maybe I kind of am, too. But it's like how— you know, and I think that I talked about this really briefly in our last chat, that like in the spring semester, my students were texting me as the University of Arizona was deploying chemical munitions on them. And they're like, thanks for preparing us, you know, for this. Thanks for teaching us about CS gas. I'm like, well, that wasn't why I did that. Like, I wasn't I wasn't hoping you would get gassed, but like, yes, this is all part of this, you know, global destruction, right? And then to like, to see the scars of this and to think about it as a mother, which I'm never not doing, and to think about it as an educator and a community member, and just to think about, you know, how the scope and scale and speed of atrocity across Palestine, and then also—

Alex Aviña: Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Miller: The ways in which it's felt and experienced here, too, you know, for Palestinians in the diaspora and for accomplices who are trying to say, no, enough. And just like these lasting scars, you know, the scars on the flora and the fauna and the scars on our bodies and the scars, again, cellularly and in the uteruses, you know, and in the hairs of the children that are graying already, right?

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: You know, 3- or 5-year-olds who already have gray hair from the stress, like, as if when the bombs start— stop falling, that will just end, or like things will immediately get better. Like, yes, they will. But also, like, we have no idea what's ahead in terms of the pain and the scars. And I think that, like, we need to make space for that. We need to nurture and cultivate radical patience for people who are moving through these horrors in so many varying degrees. And then we also need to know that there's going to be so much work ahead in terms of healing bodies and the land too. And I think that that is elemental to the struggle. Yeah.

Alex Aviña: Yeah, I think the colonial boomerang is definitely going to come home, or it has come home already. So I mean, that's one thing That, that is, uh, on the, the immediate horizon. I keep thinking about this article that came out in Haaretz a couple days ago of how there's like a nationwide shortage of sedatives for people's pets who are, um, these pets who are, you know, so anxious because of Hezbollah bombing, uh, attack, you know, the way they frame it. Um, versus— I just thought of that when you were describing, you know, kids who are 3, 4, 5 years old whose gray— whose hair is turning gray because of The absolute horrors that they're living through is, again, to me, that says it all. To me, that those— the lines are clearly drawn in terms of where we should be and what we, you know, we should be supporting the national liberation and self-determination of Palestinians. And this is something that, I don't know. I don't know. Or—

Taylor Miller: Yeah.

Alex Aviña: That should be the minimum, right? And that's what we, in our own little way, are trying to, I don't know, provide insight for or provide some sort of perspective in support of and solidarity of. I mean, I think of the tangi therapy that you referenced, Taylor, just to reference Justin Podur again, when he talked about feeling shame. Yeah. I think that's that was really yeah like that that's it's a really strong emotion the way he characterized it and and it's something I think that many of us have felt but also struggling to not allow that to be a paralyzing agent almost because I think it can be. Or it can't— if we delve in it, it can be counterproductive, right? So even, I don't know, in our own small ways, I think we can continue to do really important work. And I think your article series are in that vein of solidarity and intellectual and political work that essentially, as we try to raise political and social consciousness of folks in the entrails of the belly of the beast that we currently inhabit, I mean, I think that's—

Taylor Miller: Yeah.

Alex Aviña: That's the immediate responsibility, one immediate responsibility that we have living here.

Taylor Miller: Oh, absolutely. Yep. Yeah. And I guess just to sort of—

Alex Aviña: But it is a constant thing.

Taylor Miller: Yeah. And just, and, you know, we're talking about, I'm constantly talking about psychic intrusions here today. And like you hear, you can maybe hear the Union Pacific line in the background. And, you know, you think about the Maersk campaign, the Mask Off Maersk. And I think about, you know, the shipping containers where Yeah. Where there have been Palestinian bodies dumped, right? Like these shipping containers that are a mass grave. And like, it just— there's nothing that's not haunting me right now. But I was guided— I am guided throughout these 14 months and, you know, longer, because of how I've been researching the occupation, but guided by rage, but then to also add in or to name shame. You know, I didn't have that word. Like, of course I know shame. I felt it in other ways. But like, to feel this sense of shame for not doing enough or not being able to stop this, or like knowing what's needed to happen to stop this, and then like that concurrent powerlessness, I don't know. So it's like holding the rage and the shame feels like at any second—

Alex Aviña: Yeah.

Taylor Miller: I'm just going to bubble over, which I have at times. Um, but I think that part of our challenge is to continue to channel that into the most productive ways possible. And, you know, for some it's writing, for others it's moving. Whatever it might be, go do it. Like, go blockade everything, you know? Yeah.

Alex Aviña: Thank you so much, Taylor. Keep writing. Keep taking my random emails and texts because I really appreciate your support and solidarity. And I think that's, as you mentioned that before, that's also really important to build community. And I'm really grateful that we've met and that we've kept in contact and that I think I really appreciate and I'm deeply grateful for your camaraderie, for your intellectual work, and for your friendship. So thank you so much for for talking with me today, and I can't wait to continue reading more of your future work.

Taylor Miller: Thank you.