YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Crews

lines on the record: 191
first: 2021-11-28
most recent: 2021-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Extraordinary. I mean, also, when you think about like professions, like. Ask an Afghan, what does he or she do for a living? And what has it done in the past? I mean, the answer is one gets shoe salesman, task cab drivers, surgeons, all in one guy.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fluent Russian, fluent in German, fluent Turkish. They know Dari, they know Pashto. They've gone to university or sometimes they haven't. And yet, I mean, I like the category of the Popular and intellectual. The intellectual who isn't formally educated necessarily, although, of course, that's represented too, especially increasingly now with the generation of going to university all over the world, Stanford, MIT, everywhere, Africans of war represented there. But just being, I don't know, having kind of worldly knowledge that is not limited to a province, to a village, to a hamlet, but sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not because of Again, not because of some fairy tale story of curiosity wandering the globe out of Some sense of privilege, but out of necessity, out of survival of having to adapt. And it's really.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They used to sell stuff at Starbucks, and that's all complicated and embarrassing. And his translations are very much disputed, where you have people being like, there's some awful roomy translations, and there are. Also, a lot of speaking of the internet, there are lots of fake roomy quotes You know, like Rumi said, Always be your best. We didn't say that. I mean, that's kind of so like that. The cool thing is, I mean, I think you can read Rumi as a religious thinker, but you can also read Rumi as a... In an Islamic sense, but you can also read them as a kind of spiritualist, as someone who, or an ethicist or moralist. And so I think that's. I like the lens of Rumi as a gateway to Afghan ecumenicism and cosmopolitanism, the theme I keep emphasizing of meeting actual Afghans who were actually”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, did they see him Yeah, I mean, so again, it depends. I mean, some people will be militant and say the audience can have him. He's ours. But they also say, you know, he's... You could say, again, he's like a Rorschach blot. I mean, he's a Sufi, he's a Muslim, he's a Central Asian. He's Iranian, he's Afghan. He's a Turk. I'm trying to think of the analogy, but he's something special to everyone. So I guess I would not walk into that conversation and claim that he's one or another, but it's a cool thing. But I'm glad you brought that up because that's a good way of seeing. Seeing something that Afghans, I mean, we live in our conversation with Afghanistan and say, okay, roomis everyone Madonna helped make them famous in the United States for better or for worse.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, everyone owns Rumi. I guess that's a. I mean, that's going to get me in trouble with certain Afghan fans of Rumi who want to see him as an Afghan. I would say.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's not always what it looks like at first. Yeah, exactly. There's layers. Where power is. I mean, that's definitely, I don't know. Yeah.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like generosity and the kind of that's real. I mean, that's a cool thing and that's amazing. Going on to superficial things, but all that, the warmth of hospitality and of wit and humanity, I mean, that's what we don't see viewing the place just through war and geopolitics and the moving pieces on the map and stuff. And that's hard to see when there are gaps in language and religious tradition and all that stuff. And then being open to the fact that people do things differently, and the gender dimension there is important, right? They're kind of. Arguably, each culture has a kind of gender january that's different, and so I think it's helpful to have humility in thinking that some Afghans will do something differently. But then you'll also have Afghans who say.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really have to pay attention, it's a game. Focus The whole thing is just a beautiful mess. I mean, there's a funny TikTok video that went around that I got from some Afghan acquaintances that was, he's an Irish comedian kind of highlighting Irish and German natural stereotypes around hospitality. And this Afghan woman said, you know, I didn't know that the Irish were just white Afghans because the whole hospitality, like politics of refusal, you don't take something that's offered to you the first time. the culture of receiving a guest. Americans aren't, I mean, that's not, you know, that's not always, I mean, they're different, they're regional cultures or that's a thing. There's whatever, but it's, I mean, the...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the humor thing is that's so much our visual imagery is about like this sad place and dower or whatever, but the, I mean, socially, again, I'm going to engage in some stereotypes about generalization stuff, but just the... The Afghan friends that I've come to be close with and really love, I mean, the humor, there's so much there of common stuff of like. When I go to Ireland, it's one of my favorite places, and just like the I feel a sense of pressure, like the humor all around me all the time. I feel like there's something between Ireland, like Ireland and Russia with the humor stuff where it's like you got to be on your game if you want to be, you know, so it's I feel like the intensity”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's called the Book of Kings. The heroes and villains are the staple of conversation and poetry. And like Russians, I mean, the resort to literary references and speak is something that Americans don't do. European countries don't do but the fact that everyone's got to know this character everyone knows this reference the wordplay the linguistic finesse in multiple languages is you know a major value of Afghan storytelling as an outsider I'm scratching at the surface of the surface yeah but there's a difference”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work is between Australia and Afghanistan, but he also had to flee. I mean, he was doing some work in Kabul, but it's an extraordinary kind of visual language that he's adapted that has been shown all over the planet now. He's got some of his work as a New York galleries, is in Europe. He's been shown in Australia, but he talks about migration in a way that puts Afghans and Hazaras at the center, but is totally universal about our modern crisis of all the mains people who are displaced across our planet and he attempts to kind of speak for some size of them in a way that like everyone can get. I mean, the visual imagery experts will know that it's from, you know, like the Shah Nameh, like an ancient Persian epic that Iranians were attached to, that Afghans were attached to, that people can quote at length that has mythical figures of good and evil that kids grow up embodying their name, the names of the characters that are”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's, I mean, we do have resources to humanize. I mean, you know, some of your people will know Khalu Husseini, who's Afghan American, he's done his stuff, but there are a number of novelists and short story writers who do cool things. I think that another tragic aspect of this moment is that those people have now pretty much had to leave the country. So there's a visual artist I would highlight for you named Kharam Ali is a Hazara based in Australia who does extraordinary work in blending a tradition of Persian miniatures with contemporary political commentary”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the snapshot of Afghanistan that she wanted, and obviously there's so much more where they're great writers and musicians and, I mean, music is a huge thing. I mean, poetry, all these things are great. So she found it, you know, I hear you. I mean, it's a kind of a taboo subject, but. Thought the American students seeing it really identified with these women because they're just so real. And so, you know, young people trying to find like, I mean, relationships that are universal in circumstances that are very difficult.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All professed innocence. Some are like, I'm guilty, but they're guilty for reasons. In one case, one woman is guilty, she's in prison because it's a way to exert pressure on her fianc ⁇ to finally marry her, you know? Yeah. So, you get ethnicity, you get kind of Romeo and Juliet things where their families don't like each other necessarily, but they find each other. You have questions of love, money, clothing, furniture. It's beautiful. I mean, there are parts with it. I remember showing it in class. There was a wonderful Afghan student who was, I think, a Fulbright at the ed school at Stanford. And she's a genius. She's amazing. It was awkward for her because talking about young women having sex and stuff, and it was just, it wasn't.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a great snapshot of the post 2000 world that the Americans shaped a lot of ways. And it's about a women's prison. And it's incredibly revealing because it's about young girls and what they want. Well, not just young, but young, teenage, and then some middle-aged people who are accused of moral crimes ranging from homicide, which one woman admits to, to having sexual relations outside of marriage. And so it shows in a way continuity with the previous Taliban regime and that women are imprisoned for things that you wouldn't be in prison for elsewhere and that Islam McLaw operates as the kind of judicial logic for these punishments. But in letting these women kind of speak for themselves, I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, I don't want to give too much away, but women make ranging choices in this film that land them in this predicament.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as an outsider, I hesitate to make any grand statement, but I would say, listen, let me know. There are a number of documentary films that are incredibly rich that will offer your listeners of viewers a snapshot. So there is Afghan star, which really brings you to the homes of... Set of people who want stardom, they're artists, they want to express themselves, some want to push political boundaries, cultural boundaries. Those women who gets into hot water for dancing. But you realize that, I mean, I mean, they love art, they love music, they love poetry, they love expression. People want to care for their children. They want safety of their families. They want to enjoy what everyone enjoys. I think it's very humanizing portrait. There's another great documentary film called... Love crimes of Kabul.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expand your imagination is by, I mean, obviously delving into your fields of engineering and the sciences and robotics and artificial intelligence and all that rich landscape. But also, we find this in film poetry, literature, I mean, just the kind of stretching that we need to do to really educate ourselves more fully, right, across the spectrum of everything humans need to imagine, to reimagine security, so much of what we talked about today. I mean, so much of our security is affected by others' perception of their insecurity, right? which unleashes a whole web of emotions.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't unimaginable that you would use an airplane as a weapon. And the Bush administration kept saying, no one had ever heard of this. Who would do this? Like, well, not a lot of people do this. And then, you know, at that very moment, my wife was teaching the Joseph Conrad novel, Secret Agent, which was about a conspiratorial organization that wanted to bomb, actually, in retrospect, it was kind of suicide bombing because I think they tricked this guy into doing it, but they want to bomb the Greenwich Observatory for some obscure political purpose. So that's an instance in which, you know, the novel, right, to go back to our kind of humanities pitch, right? I guess my point was that, you know, as you mentioned, we need humanity, transparency, but also imagination, right? I think part of”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lack the amount within our security apparatus to think this was even possible, right? When you think of the simplicity of having a $10 lock on a cockpit door, could have blunted all this. Again, I'm not saying either the time or in hindsight that I am omniscient about all this, but I've just been living in Germany the year before, and there was a plot there that this guy was hatching from Germany to blow up the mausoleum of Ottiswork and Ankara with an airplane. And so if you kind of dig.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that's great. No humility. I mean, we need humility, accountability, honesty. And yeah, studying the past is an important way to do that. I mean, to learn from past mistakes. And obviously, there are sources of inspiration and courage. And we can take some kind of sustenance from that too. But also learning from how not to do things, right? Analogies are never like one to one. I mean, we talk about Vietnam. I mean, I think many Vietnam veterans would say this is like deja vu. The visuals of the couple airport and of the Saigon embassy were not the same, but close enough to people which juxtapose them, all that's ran up. But I would just ask people that over analogizing is also a kind of path down making errors of judgment and comparison. sameness But it's stretch. I mean, I think like 9-11 itself, I think the idea that”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yesterday they did a quick review. I'm not an expert on drone strikes in their aftermath, but those who looked at it more closely said it was basically whole cloth taken from what the US government has been saying after all these strikes, reproducing the same language and basically pointing to technical errors, but denying that there were Any procedural mistakes or flaws? Or is this kind of, they found little ways of acknowledging things that go as planned, but we follow policies essentially. And that's it. It's not a crime. It's a way of not even saying, you know, we screwed up. And it's kind of the legalese that suddenly makes a war crime not a war crime. That reflects, I think, refusal to take accountability.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all the things you highlighted, I mean, accountability is part of that, right? I mean, we need. Honesty, openness, and then acknowledgement of mistakes. Humility is the key to all learning, right? But also, I mean, you think just the headline from yesterday, the horrible drone strike, which was really the last kind of American military action on the day that the US was, I think, mostly departing from Kabul wiped out an entire family, mostly children. The US acknowledged that, yes, this was not the ISIS bombing outfit that they thought it was.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our far right group is going to save the nation. Sorry, the main point I wanted to speak of was that I think the serial, well, there are many, many carnal sins, if you like, but if you go back to our analogy of all the exits, I mean, what blocked some of those exits was an absence of truth and transparency. The lying. And so, I mean, this is no secret to anyone whose father's, but the And you think that's the general mistrust of government mistrust of authoritative authority across the board, of professors, of economists, of Scientists, doctors, right?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the context of recent elections, that we're the party who will defend you against these Afghans who are going to be coming from this. So what I've tried to emphasize in talking to different groups about this moment is that it won't be confined to Afghanistan or even the region. I mean, obviously, malnutrition, hunger will send Afghans to neighboring states. Where the European right is resurgent, this has been a gift, right? To say that the Afghans are coming, the brown-skinned, they're Muslim, they're uneducated, they're going to want your women, and they will take the odd sexual assault case or the odd whatever dramatic act of violence that. Happens numerically in any population, and they will magnify that to say that.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The veteran angle is one when you have people who feel betrayed. I mean, they have been fodder for the far right in other settings. I mean, Interwar Europe is very much about mobilizing disillusion veterans in the name of right-wing fascist politics. If one thinks too of this moment of really increasing xenophobia, our immigration debate is now talking about whether or not Afghans should be permitted at all in the United States after 20 years. And I think immediately the response in Europe, which I followed to some extent, you know, focusing on Germany, because it was really ramping up deportations of Afghans, leading up this collapse. And now they have been a lot of right-wing center-right politicians in Germany have been watching all this with an eye to using it to their advantage for a domestic German audience to say,”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. I mean, I think if there's one theme that jumps out to me in thinking about this moment, I mean, if we recognize that we live in a kind of crisis of democracy in the United States and in other countries that have long been proud of their democratic traditions, if we see them being under assault from certain quarters, I think military defeat is yet another addition to all the aspects of this that you mentioned. I mean, the fact of military defeat is a giant match that you're throwing on this fire, potentially if we think of its legacies and other post-war environments when”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, at a human level, I feel horrible for those people who may not have agreed with everything they had done and their choices in life, but I respect the fact that many good people went out of the best intentions as young people to do the right thing and make things right. And I respect that. And I've met enough to know that there were people who saw the gray and complexity. And that's all you can hope for. We don't want a generation of disillusioned veterans. If we look at the other postwar moments, and this is kind of a post-war moment where I think we need a conversation with American veterans about what they've gone through and what They still have skin in the game, you know, because their personal connections and of their histories.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've seen their relationships. I mean, they've seen phone calls in the middle of the night from people who they entrusted with their lives who they know are going to be targeted. I mean, some have already been killed. They've seen the, I mean, I think just, I'd imagine just ideologically and professionally what they believed in and what they sacrificed for has vanished. And I think that's. That's bad. I mean, historically, thinking of some of the precedents you were thinking of, I mean, if you think of”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I feel I have very mixed feelings, and you know, it's. I don't know a ton of veterans, but Mitch and I've topped my share and have a student now, and they're suffering because they look at the sacrifices that they made that I didn't make. I mean, American society didn't make the sacrifices. I mean, men and women lost limbs, they lost eyes, they lost lives. There's been this, of course, quiet epidemic of suicide among veterans. I've heard some stories the fact that the State Department is seeing a similar surge of suicides because they see their adult life's work.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, I mean, other historians, US historians, which I'm not formally historian of the United States, but we can go back to talk about Vietnam, we can talk about lots of Cold War and post-Cold War engagements. And I think we need a reckoning about how the United States uses military power, why we devote so much to our military budget, and what could be available to us if we... Had a more sensible view of the value of military power, of its effectiveness. And I think we're really to hammer home that this was a defeat. I mean, I think there should be accountability. And if you, and this could be a kind of opening for a kind of bipartisan conversation, because if you are a kind of American militarist. I mean, you have to look at the leadership that got you to a place where you defeated by men wearing sandals firing at K-47s, right?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, definitely. I agree. And yeah, there is the Meltustrial Complex component, which is huge. And there's also, I mean, speaking of government leadership, it's also, I'd say, the imbalance of power within Washington. I mean, the Pentagon used this moment We'll beginning in 2001, I think, to assert its authority at the expense of other institutions of national government. I mean, the State Department diplomacy has become a shadow of what it was once capable of doing.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Newsstance as a counterterrorism outfit that it will get recognition from all its neighbors. It will get recognition from Russia. I mean, already with the evacuation of the airport, the United States was collaborating with the Taliban against Islamic State and openly talking about the Taliban as if they were partners in the security operation. And then Al-Qaeda remains present in Afghanistan.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. If you look at it to that. I mean, if any Afghanistan and then invading Iraq didn't end, Al Qaeda, it didn't end terrorism, right? It didn't end. Really deflate these ideologies entirely. If you like, you could say there were. To discrediting of certain kinds of ideas. But in fact, I mean, look at the phenomenon of suicide bombing. I mean, it spread. I mean, it was never an Islamic thing. It was never a Muslim thing. Some Muslims adopted it in some places. The circuits of knowledge about how to do these kind of things only expanded with the insurgencies that emerged in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then they kind of became connected. And then they became to the president. I mean, the Islamic State is the best thing that happened to the Taliban ever because it's on the basis of its supposed.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those decisions you make are in some ways a continuation of empirical hubris, right? So you're not really out of empire yet. You're not really contracting empire for those who are living it. But I think it's also, I mean, maybe I put it this way. Be careful what you ask for. You know, I mean, I wanted the U.S. out of Afghanistan, but I wanted there to be a political settlement. I wanted, you know, I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, right? I wanted all kinds of things to be different, right?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like levels. Right. I mean, I would continue to disagree with Alferson, so I'm still working out where I am and what this moment does to kind of, I think, qualify my understanding of the past and to, I think in a moment of humility, I'm partly reacting to the kind of, you know, as you put it, I mean, the idea that this is like a good thing that American power has been defeated here. I mean, I do think American power should contract. And I don't think, and again, if I had to create a tally sheet of what the Americans did in the US, I mean, I mentioned the American University of Afghanistan, right? It could have done that without invading the country and killing people. I've not now become an apologist for empire. I'm not now a mini person. But ending empire is, I mean, how you...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On. I mean, there's lots of agency in that moment as there's now in what's happening in Afghanistan. But I think the capriciousness, I mean, the ability to act as if you're... Your political decisions about people's lives. Or something that can be made in secret that can be made willy nilly, they really are beyond the accountability of those who are actually going to live with consequences of Shifting the cards on a deck in a way that decides who rules and who doesn't.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say this is a, you know, I mean, it's, I mean, I'm a critic of empire. I mean, colonialism is a political phenomenon that stays with us. And I think we need scholars to point to the way in which it still works and still does harm. But it's part of being an empire that you can just get up and leave a place, right? That you can remake its politics on one day. And then because it fails to advance your agenda at one moment, you simply walk away. I mean, you know, we can point to other moments. I mean, 1947 on the subcontinent, you know, the way that the British withdrew played a significant role in mass violence that accompanied partition. It wasn't all the actions of the British that dictated that. There were lots of actors who chose to pick up the knife to kill their neighbor and someone.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Past inequality and the legacies of legacies of violence and destruction that live on. I mean, living in the Americas. I mean, look at, you know, we're all on stolen land. We're all in the sense living with the fruits of genocide and slavery and all those things that are hard to come to terms with, right? But the last few months in Afghanistan, in thinking about empire, I think may be more humble when I read people who say, to put it simply, have taken some joy in this moment. saying like, well, the Americans got kicked out of Afghanistan. You know, if you're against empire, this is a good thing. This is the kind of victory of anti-colonial.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That aren't visible, right? We should be thinking about that should be known to us. And as scholars, we can hopefully play some useful role in showing effects that aren't obvious initially. So Empire is a framework to think about this. And so you think about evading foreign countries. Obviously, if you're a scholar of empire, you've seen what that looks like. And that's horrific, right? You look at things like racism as one of the ideological pillars of empire. You know, that's horrific. It must be critiqued. It must be we must be educated against. Some of the, you know, gender exploitation of empire is also something to highlight to rectify and so on. To be moral beings, we need to think about”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much of my teaching and the themes of my research have been about empire, how big states work not only on big territories like the Russian Empire and Soviet Union stuff, but the way in which power often is projected beyond those boundaries in ways that we don't see. So this is where things like neoliberalism or just, if you want to take capitalism or just things that the idea of humanity or of liberalism or of humanitarianism, ideas that move beyond state boundaries are all things that we think about as affecting power in some ways that often harm people, right? So I think part of, as I've seen my job so far is to think about building upon the work of my people in grad school and scholars that have affected me. I mean, we're all concerned with how power works and its effects and trying to be attuned to understanding”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be a story like me, and my job is imperfect, my profession is deeply flawed, right? But as I get older, I'm like, their fear and fewer historians actually like, you know, want to hang out with and stuff. So it's like, I'm not offering myself as like a model for anything. But whether you're, you carry the mail or you're a brain surgeon, whatever. I mean, I think it's a way of civic engagement and a way of ethical being in the world that we need to familiarize ourselves with. Because if you're an American or if you're from a rich country, you know, you need to be aware of your effect. on an intact world. You can't say anymore that you don't know or care what's happening in Afghanistan or really circle the globe and point to a place. I mean, we're all connected and we're all, we have ethical obligations. That's one place to start. But I would just say this, and this is, I'll offer a self-critique, and that is...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us beyond my moral and intellectual capacity. I ought to say this. I mean, looking at, again, looking at it from my home ground as the university and I think of the intellectual ways of thinking that I think students should develop for themselves as citizens, right? And maybe that's the way to start is like historical thinking. I mean, these are all, and I try to tell people, you know, if you want to do robotics, computer science, be a doctor or whatever.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The symbol of voting with your feet is quite powerful. I mean, there's a huge swath of society that doesn't want the system and is literally living in terror about it. Naturally, women, you know, I mean, especially women of a certain age, I mean, they feel like their lives are over. I mean, there is an epidemic of suicide. They feel betrayed. And some people have done some good things in getting people out. The U.S. military vets have been at the forefront of working to get out people that they know they owe. But the U.S. government doesn't want these people. I mean, they have created all these obstacles to Allowing a safety valve for people to leave.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now, what do we have for it? And the people who had a stake in that system, imperfect as it was, have been desperate to leave. And so this, I don't know how much people wear this, but I'm a scholar. I work in California. You know, I have friends. I edited a journal on Afghanistan. And, you know, but I'm not a politician. I'm not a soldier. But people assume that, you know, Afghans have been desperately trying to reach me and anyone who is kind of on the radar as an American to help get them out. And that's the kind of like.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, holding to the timeline, I mean, the Biden people did not need to hold to the Doha Agreement that Trump had signed. I mean, every American president writes his or her own foreign policy, right? So the Biden administration acted as if, and they tried to convince us that their hands were tied and that it was either this or 24 years of war or some absurd kind of false alternative. But I think that's important for American audiences to hear that like you came here to experiment you came here to punish you came here to kind of reassert your dominance at the world stage to work out the fear and hurt of 9-11 that we talked about, which was so real, you know, and palpable. And so important for American politics since then, like you did, you worked out your problems on us, on our territory.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20 years, like she asked you, Why did you go to war in our country? They say, why did you do this to us for 20 years when this was never about us? You never asked us if you wanted to come. You never asked us what you wanted to build here. You'd ask us when you were coming and you didn't ask us when you were leaving. You just did this all on your own. And we tried to make the most of it. And then you pull the rug out from under us at the 11th hour and return to power partly by diplomacy. It wasn't at the end just a military loss. I mean, it was a series of diplomatic decisions. I mean, the idea you asked about alternatives, I mean,”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But symbolically, it's very important that they rejected being mobilized politically, voting as a husar or voting as whatever. And of course, there were communities who wanted to vote as that ethnic community. But there are also people who said, you know, let's put a kind of civic nationalism first, one that accommodates, I think, pluralism in a way that rejected a kind of majoritarian politics of one ethnic group dominating the thing. So all this stuff was quite interesting. I mean, women were asserting themselves across multiple spheres. Of course, it remained patriarchal. Of course, there were struggles. Of course, there was violence. Of course, there's no utopia. But the door on all that shut on August 15. So to go back to the quote that I wanted to offer from this student, now professor, was that, you know, in trying to make sense of this, and you mentioned the tragic arc here.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I call it a public sphere in the classic European sense. The Afghans made of their own. And again, it wasn't Americanization. It wasn't imposed. It was something that Afghans built across generations, but really with a firm foundation among youth who wanted importantly a multi-ethnic Afghan society, you asked about Pashtuns and that kind of stuff. And a lot of that language in recent years was they were aware that the US-backed government was playing ethnic politics and trying to kind of put people in the blocks and mobilize people based on their ethnic identity. And there was a younger cohort of people who said, you know, we are Afghan. And it was interesting social media stuff where people would say, I am Hazara, but I'm also Tajik. I'm also Uzbek. I mean, it was a way of creating a multi-ethnic Afghan national identity that embraced everything. I mean, very utopian, you know, super utopian.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“African religious landscape became very pluralistic. Lots of young people wanted a different kind of secular politics. But the old guard who wanted the status quo and wanted something that they'd fought for in 1980s tended to still get American backing as the political elites. They still tended to monopolize political power. So all stuff was happening in different ways. I mean, the Americans established this American University of Afghanistan, which is, I think, one of the best things the U.S. did there. And I regret that the U.S. didn't fund 20 more sprinkling them across the country, making them accessible to people because it was, you know, again, it wasn't an engine of Americanization. It was just opportunity. And so the thirst for higher education is really extraordinary. It was never, never really met. The U.S. tended to put money in primary education, which much of that too was fraudulent. But so you have all this interesting dynamism. You have the arts. You have a critical space.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that it Period of 20 years. Beautifully said, and so. But now, but now look at us now, it's now November. And so this whole. And I wouldn't say I wouldn't cast the last 20 years if we're looking at all the achievements. I wouldn't put them in an American tally sheet like this is something we should pat ourselves in the back for. I think that much this happened actually against what the Americans wanted. I mean, the kind of free thinking, democracy wanting, I mean, even like, you know, we can point it on the religious, go back to the religious sphere. I mean, the...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source