TRANSCRIPT - (Ep. 49) Sanctions - What they are, Why we use them, and How they kill.
Note: I am no professional transcriber. I have done my best but there may be small mistakes here and there, or just me cleaning up a poorly worded sentence; also many typos. Thanks for not holding this against me. ✌️😊
Let’s talk about sanctions - what they are, what they tell us they are meant to do, and what they actually do…
But first let me include something here - we won;t be talking much about Russian sanctions, I don;t think. Not because they are any different, in fact the sanctions imposed on the Russian people are pretty brutal. But rather I didn’t want this to kind of devolve into a Ukraine-Russia episode, plus it was planned in a certain way - then the invasion happened.
So while I won;t be beating the Russia-Ukraine war drum all episode I did want to mention it and we should keep how this applies to Russia in the front of our minds as we move along.
OK, So, exactly what ARE sanctions? Well, I’ve found a few different definitions, none of them wildly different, and they all agree on the basic premise..
Sanctions are, essentially, nothing more than commercial and financial restrictions placed upon one nation or group of nations by another nation, group of nations, or even an international organization. The goals of such actions are numerous but the most common goal, in the most basic sense, is to get a country or government to make some sort of change.
Some of the most prominent sanctions are things like restricting trade of certain types of goods, often military or industrial - on the industrial side we might think of preventing an oil producing country from importing replacement parts for its wells as an example.
We might even see financial restrictions like what we are seeing right now with Russian sanctions as they’ve been removed from the SWIFT system of international banking.
Sanctions may even come in the form of a trade embargo, either of a specific commodity - perhaps oil again, or even an extremely broad trade embargo of nearly everything.
But even in the most extreme embargo situations things like medical supplies and food staples are often allowed through, at least technically. So, now that we all have an understanding of what sanctions are, at least in a general sense, let’s talk about the WHY of sanctions.
The widely pronounced reason for sanctions is to convince a regime in control of a country, to make some sort of change. For years in the United states we have heard about how some country or another is undemocratic for some reason. Authoritarian even.
So the US then sanctioned other countries to convince them to become democratic.
Sanctions can also be to stop something as horrific as a genocide or stop a war. At least nominally. And I’m sure we will hit on the hypocrisy of a bunch of these statements in a bit but let's give a little generosity here for now.
This IS, in fact, the argument that the government makes - that these sanctions are meant to change the minds of some foreign rulers and get them to be more democratic.
But here’s the thing, and it’s really the thing I want people to really take from this episode, no matter how long it goes on for…
This is not how these ghouls want or expect these sanctions to work.
Their goal is not to change the minds of presidents or other leaders, it is to degrade the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable human beings in the targeted country. It is to cause suffering so immense that it inspires the citizens to rise up and overthrow the government, fairly elected or not.
And this is worth lingering on for a few seconds, I think.
Policy ghouls are telling us, in a sort of passive voice sort of way, that if we just impose sanctions on this other country then they’ll be nicer.
That’s what they tell us.
What they do is begin to starve, debase, degrade, torture, and murder poor people in a bid to create internal resentment.
And I’ve talked about this in real life before and nobody ever believes me. I guess they just don’t believe that the people in charge are that out and out cruel.
So I want to read you something, it’s from a memo from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester D. Mallory to his immediate superior, Roy Rubottom, and it was about a potential embargo aimed at Cuba
If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
To bring about hunger and desperation…
And somebody had the gall to ask me why I speak so badly of these absolute monsters a while back.
It’s because of shit like this.
Cruelty as policy.
And for anyone thinking that was out of context I’ll have the full memo text up on the youtube video if you want to check that out when it’s ready…
In fact line item 6 on the memo said this as well
The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.
The goal then, as we see, is to impose sanctions and make the common people suffer in a bid to get them to revolt.
And to make this deeply sick and twisted depredation even worse is that it disproportionately affects those who were -already- marginalized in the affected country
We can start with women and children, of course, as sanctions often do things like reduce both actual medicines AND the ability to repair and replace key health infrastructure, and it also affects the availability of food and even fuel to run electrical plants and, just as importantly, it prevents replacement parts for key infrastructure like electrical plants, sewage, sewers, power lines and so on.
But it also goes a lot deeper than women and children.
Think about the already marginalized - the indigenous populations, the internally displaced, the homeless, the poverty stricker, migrants, refugees, and the disabled and diseased.
The sort of aid that these people need is almost never delivered even despite the existence of humanitarian exemptions in the blockades.
This becomes particularly perverse when the sanctions are placed by the UN and anyone on the security council can object to any particular humanitarian aid and effectively veto it. To top this insanity off, they don’t even have to justify their objection and the security council refuses to even tell the suppliers of this aid exactly why it was rejected.
Perhaps France felt like the tubes that the corn came in could be repurposed into weapons manufacture and thats why they rejected it. Maybe the US just didn’t think some item met the humanitarian exemption. Maybe some important portion of the the fax was unreadable…
And maybe that corn could be put into bags instead of tubes, and maybe with some small change that one item could be made to be definitely humanitarian aid, and maybe that fax could have been re-sent and all of these issues could have been cleared up and people could have gotten help.
But the people in charge are not interested in helping the common people, the poor, the unfortunate.
No, their goal is the exact opposite, they want to deny these people food, dignity, and happiness until they attack their fellow countrymen.
And this is no secret. Even the United Nations itself admits it.
Sadly the UN actually recognizes the danger these marginalized and vulnerable people face under the very sanctions they, themselves, impose upon them. Even more sadly, the UN continues to impose the sanctions and their only response to the self-diagnosed horrors that they impose on these vulnerable lives is to monitor them. Yup, just to watch them and take notes.
One of the world's cruelest sociological studies ever conducted.
Another sad, and related, reality of sanctions is that they often exacerbate the very issues which we are told they are meant to ameliorate. Doubly sad is that this is on purpose and done for optic reasons.
Let’s look at Venezuela as a recent example.
Sanctions froze more than $17 billion worth of Venezuelan assets, and they prevented the sales of billions of dollars worth of trade credits, and prevented the country from restructuring its foreign debt.
Venezuela also saw a severe drop in oil sales due to these sanctions which helped further crater the economy.
The Trump administration put sanctions on the country and over two years they recorded over 40,000 extra deaths which would not have happened otherwise while nearly half a million more people struggled to find quality healthcare and were put in danger
The New York Times and Forbes described these sanctions as “not having much effect beyond the simply political” and that the sanctions were quote/unquote “limited”
How in the hell can anyone in the media say that freezing 17 BILLION dollars in assets is either limited or only political? You’d have to be either a liar or too stupid for your job, there is no other option there.
For a more recent example, let’s look at Afghanistan…
But I do want us to keep in mind what I said about Venezuela and what I’ll say here about Afghanistan because I will want to circle back and tie them together in a bit.
So in Afghanistan where the United states waged a destructive war for mineral and business rights while decimating the country's wealth and pulled out a few months ago the afghans face starvation due to US sanctions imposed once they left.
The united states froze 9 BILLION dollars of Afghanistan's currency and cut it off from all world banking rendering the country broke and helpless. It can’t even operate its central bank or access any sort of foreign banking to help itself.
In the latest reports I can find, somewhere between 90 and 98% of afghans aren’t getting enough to eat and are approaching true starvation levels of food.
Between January first of this year and MArch 22nd, about 13,000 afghan babies born in that period have died from malnutrition and hunger-related diseases and complications.
In other words, the united states has murder 13,000 babies with their policy choices.
That means that roughly 10%, that is 1 out of every 10 babies born are killed by these sanctions. And who knows what sorts of developmental problems this will cause, or atr what astronomical rate they will occur, down the line?
Consider this - If this much starvation and this many dead babies and this much human suffering were caused by a natural disaster money would flow in to aid these people.
But because its caused by sanctions, nobody does anywhere near enough to actually help all of these folks because to do so, to save lives, to relieve the pain
and suffering, WELL, that would directly oppose the united states and, most importantly for the ghouls who run this country, it would counter the entire point of these sanctions themselves - to make poor people suffer and die.
These deaths and this pain and this inhumanity are not unforeseen symptoms of a well-meaning policy - they are exactly the point of US decision making.
The situation is so dire in Afghanistan that selling kidneys has become not just an option but often a necessity. I found this article in al jazeera and… it’s just heartbreaking….
A mother sold her kidney for $2,700 dollars because her children had no food and were being treated for malnourishment but that fix wasn’t enough to ride out these sanctions. As of the end of February her husband was beginning the process of founding a buyer for one of his kidneys.
From the article… and please pardon the pronunciations…
On the outskirts of Herat lies Sayshanba Bazaar, a village made up of hundreds of people displaced by years of conflict.
Known as “one-kidney village”, it’s where dozens of residents have sold their organs after word spread among destitute families of the money to be made.
From one family, five brothers sold a kidney each in the last four years, thinking it would save them from poverty.
“We are still in debt and as poor as we were before,” said Ghulam Nebi, showing off his scar.
What in the fuck are we doing to these people?
Another man in this story spoke about how he sold his kidney in desperation but now regretted that he could no longer work due to the constant pain and the inability for him to lift anything of any significant weight, due to a less than stellar surgery.
Also from the story
Mother of three Aziza, meanwhile, is waiting for her opportunity after meeting a hospital staffer who is trying to match her with a donor.“My children roam on the streets begging,” she told AFP, tears welling.
“If I don’t sell my kidney, I will be forced to sell my one-year-old daughter.”
If you’re still not angry and trying to convince yourself that what we are doing to afghanistan is in any way a righteous move, then, friend, you need to take a step back, re-listen to these past couple of minutes and re-assess.
That probably sounded cruel and judgmental - well I guess it just actually WAs those thing, right? but I don;t understand. I still love you but I just don;t get it.
OK, so I’ve depressed myself now. It’s heavy shit, isn’t it?
And I find that for many, the impulse to sanction a country comes just as easily as the impulse to go to war with it.
Right?
Like, war is this brutal, death bringing catastrophe… but let some foreign nation do something wrong and half the country is on their chairs screaming for a war that they won’t fight in and will only watch from halfway around the globe. The other half of the country is screaming “No, just kill them with sanctions!”
Starvation not bullets is the new peace chant I guess.
Neither side realizes that they’re washed with the blood of innocents as they scream their violent urges to their leaders.
This is absolute insanity. Like right now, right now, right this very moment there are people penning op-eds and tweeting about a no-fly zone in Ukraine That would lead to a war with Russia. And right at this very moment just as many people are calling for the same sorts of murderous sanctions that will kill so many Russian civilians.
Well like i mentioned in the beginning sanctions have already started in Russia. Trade embargoes, removal from the global SWIFT program and so on. Russians are already feeling it. The elite Russians aren't, they'll be fine, but the poor will suffer what they must just as they always do.
So alright, sorry, I got a little sidetracked there. I wanted to tie together the thoughts I had on Venezuela from years back and Afghanistan now and the string to tie that together is a secondary result of sanctions.
A president like Trump puts crippling sanctions on Venezuela.
A president like Biden puts crippling sanctions on Afghanistan or Russia
And then those economies collapse and both of these shit presidents, both of these monstrous, evil, heartless, sociopathic, power mad ghouls stand up and say something like
“Their economy collapsed because they aren’t democratic enough.”
Which is, of course, a bald faced lie. It is in fact a lie which is so obvious and so wrong that it is told without concern for their ethical implications, in full disregard of those who have been affected.
And you know what’s even worse than these lies? These obvious lies, these lies which they aren’t even trying to mask?
The worst thing is that so many of us just believe them all. We just believe them.
These lies are… just so brazenly lies… Like these people stand you out in a downpour and tell you it’s not raining and you smile and put the umbrella away. And then you spend the next week justifying being soaked to the skin and justifying why you believed the lie.
And now at this point… I don't know I got carried away I guess and maybe lost the thread a little so sorry about that. This stuff just makes me a little upset.
OK, so let’s skip these next few notes here because I;m all confused where I was and I’ll probably just repeat myself and I'll just go on to the next big question here.
Do sanctions work?
And I mean even considering what we said about the lies the president tells us and policymakers tell us and the reality of sanctions, whether we take the best version or the worst - do sanctions actually engender the change which they are supposed to?
Short answer - Almost always, no.
What? All of that, all of the starving people, collapsing economies, immense suffering, crime, selling kidneys, all those dead babies… and they don;t work?
Nope.
In fact, they often create the exact opposite reaction as the one they supposedly aim for.
Let’s say you have an authoritarian ruled country and you say ‘boy we’d sure love those people to have more freedom’ and then you roll in and cripple their economy.
What do you think is likely to happen? The authoritarian just says ‘oh boy these people im oppressing are being hurt, let me just give up my power!’?
In fact these are the places LEAST likely to succumb to sanctions. They are already usually relatively segregated from global trade and economic attacks just drives them deeper into the arms of friendly countries and just causes the pains we talked about before for the populace.
But, as we mentioned a few times, these pains are the actual point of sanctions, right? The idea is that this suffering will drive a populace to rebel against their leaders, right?
But here’s the thing - people aren;t that stupid, uneducated, or cut off from information.
When the situation in a country suddenly collapses and people begin to suffer immensely, those same people start to wonder why it is happening…
And the leaders of that country are MORE THAN HAPPY to tell them that the reason why is economic sanctions put upon them by the united states.
And the people, even if they don't trust their leaders, they can actually verify this with google or whatever apps they use.
Crazy right? You start to starve and you google why and the result is “The united stages is starving you”, so who do you hate? Probably the people preventing food from being shipped to your country.
Even in a super repressive country where they might be reluctant to distribute news that isn’t pure propaganda they will not be shy to flood the country with foreign news stories about what a sanctioning country is doing to them.
In fact far more often than not imposed sanctions results in a sanctioned populace rallying around their own countrymen and it simply generates hate towards the outside sanctioning country, usually the United states.
Studies by Wood (2008) and Peksen and Drury (2009) both found that
...sanctions lead to a significant increase in the use of repression and political terror by target regimes in order to stabilize the political environment and suppress dissent.
Sanctions lead to a decrease in overall physical integrity rights, increased economic and political discrimination against minority ethnic groups, and a deterioration of public health conditions in target states
Sanctions rarely, if ever, change the actions of a regime, that’s just the reality here.
If you google articles about this, or even academic studies, a lot of them - if not most or nearly all of them - will say something along the ,lines of “Sanctions inadvertently make things even worse rather than creating change” but I’m arguing that these sanctions do exactly what those who impose them know, expect, and want them to do - cause human misery amongst the most vulnerable people in the country being targeted
Let’s take a look at a few popular examples of sanctions supposedly working and talk about the errors in thinking that lead to this terrible take.
Iraq in the 90s… Sanctions decimated Iraq's economy and lead to horrific suffering of its people.
By the end of that decade more than a third of Iraqi children were malnourished. At the end of the decade the red cross was reporting that the Iraqi economy, once a bright star of the region, was destroyed.
And nothing changed. Saddam Hussein didn’t care, he always got his money and never wanted for food or medicine, but millions of Iraqis suffered immense hardships.
It was this suffering that Leslie Stahl asked Madline albright about, who just died and fuck her she's burning in hell if it exists, here it is…
Audio clip
It… was… worth it. murrica.
Eventually Saddam fell… not due to sanctions but due to a mkilitary invasion lead by the united states…
We can go back a little further in time to two african nations which were supposedly successfully sanctioned.
The first is rhodesia, a white supremacist state at the time and which is now known as zimbabwe.
Rhodesia declared its independence from britain so that it could maintain its white-minority rule. The united nations imposed a relatively strong embargo on Rhodesia which lasted for over a decade but failed to engender change.
Rhodesia eventually fell but not to sanctions but rather to a concerted rebel guerilla war heavily financed and supported by the USSR and other surrounding countries.
The other big African supposed success story was south Africa, another white minority ruled country under the brutal apartheid regime.
This one here might be the single most cited situation where they say sanctions worked… but lets look into it a bit.
Sanctions started in 1962, but they were fairly weak because they had huge carveouts for products that western countries wanted - which is kind of self defeating, right? Diamonds, gold, and other important minerals weren’t covered, and this was a lot of the south african economy. Not only that but the sanctions pushed South Africa to develop self suffcient food systems, energy systems, and even turned them into arms exporters.
The sanctions didn;t even discomfort the white rulers but they did cause huge amounts of suffering amongst the oppressed black population of the country.
In fact I’m going to read you this part of an article or paper which I honestly lost the citation to which talks about what happened due to these sanctions in a few sectors
Facing an embargo on energy imports, it developed a world-class system to make oil from coal. Once dependent on arms imports, it ramped up production and became a net exporter. And, for all the pressure and cut-offs, South Africa was still able to develop its first nuclear device in 1982, and by 1989 it had six bombs.
The sanctions just made south africa more independent and more wealthy. At least the whites population and leaders anyway
But to the point here, the apartheid government began to fall in the early 90s, after a full 3 decades of sanctions.
But were the sanctions the cause?
No, they weren’t. The real cause was a huge change of internal politics culminating with the release of nelson mandela, and probably even more importantly, the fall of the soviet union and the berlin wall.
The problem we are running into here is that There is a large error when deciding whether or not sanctions have actually “worked” and that error is considering ‘force’ meaning that the sanctioned country was attacked or invaded by the sanctioning parties as sanctions ‘working’
The error is that people see Country X get sanctioned for some reason - lets say being undemocratic - and they are sanctioned for a decade but don;t budge. And then the sanctioning body sends a military force into country x to force a regime change. Many observers and studies actually count this as a “successful” outcome for sanctions.
The reality is that this is not a success - the military invasion was what forced the change, not the sanctions.
And I think that this sort of failed thinking is incredibly important to keep in mind whenever somebody says sanctions work and they roll out some large percentage of success. They arent actually citing sanction successes by and large, they are citing military interventions, global political power shifts, or some other factor for the change they see. They are making a sort of correlation error.
Let me also throw in here the biggest failure of them all for american sanctions - Cuba
I hope we remember the memo I quoted way back in the beginning and consider this: The embargo placed on Cuba by the US has caused untold pain and suffering on many people on the island. All in a purposeful bid to degrade them to the point of rebellion. But like I just said, people know the cause of a lack of trade and lack of financial opportunities on the global stage - The united states.
The embargo and sanctions has been going on for what 60+ years? Even the UN general assembly is horrified by this ongoing action and has repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted to end it.
But, you know, America answers to nobody at all with their reign as global hegemon.
Stated US goals have still not been met. Total failure.
Or total success maybe since the point is to make Cuban people suffer.
Right now the US has official sanctions against 6 nations, as far as I can tell - NK, Cuba, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Russia and none of them have worked.
The US has sanctions on quote/unquote ‘individuals’ of 21 countries in total, and this is a bit more nebulous because most of these sanctions on “individuals” are not REALLY individuals - they are on groups of people.
Groups tagged with terms like “Those people responsible for undermining democratic elections in 2020” or some other vague terminology to allow the broadest possible sanctioning.
These individual sanctions are, in actual practice, sanctions against actual countries.
The united nations, NATO, the IMF, The world Bank, and numerous other ghoulish covens of the morally bankrupt international order impose their own sanctions - mostly against broadly defined individuals again, but also against countries. The sheer number of these sanctions made it hard to count, not to mention that they are often levied by committees and sub committees which makes it even harder to track down.
But the reason why I mention all those groups is because they are all either just flat out controlled by, or so heavily influenced by the united states, that they are in actual effect actually controlled by them.
The power of the united states is nearly totally unchecked, so all of those international roganizations and groups of allied countries sanctions, those are in all reality united states sanctions.
I didn’t want to leave without mentioning that. This is pretty much all our fault.
So as I let this subject drop, mercifually for you dear listener, I;m sure, let me just recap some bullet points
Economic sanctions lead to an increase in the poverty gap and deprived sections of the population feel the most impact.
For the most part sanctions fail to achieve their aims and elites manage to negotiate the adverse effects to a far greater level than poorer citizens.
Sanctions worsen wealth inequality and impact ordinary people more than whatever the leaders of these coin tries were doing
.
Sanctions tend to harm rural and non-industrialised areas more, as resources are refocused toward political power centers and industrial areas
Sanctioned regimes point out that the negative effects on the economy are from the sanctions, aka an outside attack, to prevent the population from revolting.
The negative impact that sanctions have on economic growth affect women, minority communities and other marginalised groups to a greater extent.
Sanctions have a significant negative impact on the living standards and humanitarian situation of the population in the sanctioned state.
Poverty is used as a tool in Sudan to control the population and blame is placed on those who enact the sanctions.
Sanctions impact access to humanitarian aid which leads to less aid getting through which exacerbates poverty.
The results of sanctions - namely economic hardship, misrule and conflicts,, manifest and defeat the supposed purpose of the sanctions.
OK, let’s officially wrap this up…
Sanctions harm millions to tens of millions of people or even more depending on where they are being placed against. They lead to death tolls that often outpace the rates that would be found in actual wars, if we can believe that.
Yet they very rarely work for their supposedly intended purposes.
Policy goals are never met by these sanctions and the policy makers know this. The vast majority, if not all sanctions enacted by the united states or under their watchful eyes, are done for no bigger reason than political appeasement at the local level. Presidents enact sanctions to mollify voters in other words, not because they actually work.
Our political leaders desperately want to appear bold and brave and decisive and sanctions are a way to do that while also having virtually no impact on their own citizens. They don;t have to send little billy off to war, they frame higher prices as our patriotic duty, and they use their heavy sanctions as something to run on with whatever hawkish wing of their party demands blood for their votes.
cynically they will then enact these sanctions which destroy the lives of ordinary citizens in the target countries and then wax poetic about how much they care about those same people whos lives they are choosing to destroy.
All of the theories of how sanctions will lead to regime change or really any change at all are spurious at best.
People living under a tyrannical regime who are suffering horrors, they face immense challenges in throwing off the yoke as it stand before sanctions. After sanctions the situation is even worse - they are more deprived than before and even less likely to collectively resist - not only that but now the enemy has become not just bad leadership, but a foreign adversary.
Another version of this is that the elites of the sanctioned country will revolt and overthrow the current leader
But this misses something incredibly important - by definition these elites benefit from the current system and by who is in power. Why would they risk that?
The third is that final and ultimately cruel theory - that by making the lives of the poor so bad that they actually rebel. Part of this theory is that by causing economic hardship and loss that the sanctioned country will no longer be able to pay its security forces. But again, this misses a crucial point - the leadership knows this plan and literally the last thing it will stop paying for is security. In fact many studies have shown that internal security increases many times over to protect their status, even to the point of allowing unaffiliated militia style death squads free reign in territories too far from the power centers.
The cruelty never ends with these ghouls
Sanctions are cruelty. Sanctions do not work.
Sanctions are murder.