Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
![Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - Soviet Sovereign Citizens image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=54,quality=85/image-files/609cc5cfa0f17908a21fb6a5/5989cbc0-f98c-43d6-a1ea-60dd2e5f63c9.jpg)
Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - Soviet Sovereign Citizens
31 Plays4 years ago
In which Josh and M entertain the patrons with a little talk about Soviet Sovereign Citizens.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Conspiracy Bonus Episode
00:00:08
Speaker
It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy patron bonus episode. Hello and welcome to the people who are fan of racist writers from the early 20th century podcast.
H.P. Lovecraft: Racism and Modern Adaptations
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm talking with a fan of racism, Mr. Josh Anderson, to talk about the most recent racist podcast on the BBC, The Whisperer in Darkness. Josh, tell me how much you love racism.
00:00:37
Speaker
Not too much. Really? Well, I mean, as a white man, I do benefit from institutional racism, so there must be something to it. That doesn't make sense at all. We're talking about H.P. Lovecraft. Famous author was very racist, and it does come through in his writing. It does. And the thing is, what's great about modern adaptations of Lovecraft is actually getting rid of the racism, as we saw with the wonderful Nick Cage film Colour From Space.
BBC's Lovecraft Adaptation as True Crime
00:01:07
Speaker
Now, we're talking here about a new BBC podcast, The Whisper in Darkness, which is a sequel to a podcast from earlier this year, The Curious Case of Charles Dexter Ward. There's a helicopter flying overhead, but we just came to have to cope with that. Just gives it a nice conspiratorial feeling. Now, we listened to The Curious Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which had the notion of taking a Lovecraftian story
00:01:34
Speaker
and doing it through the lens of a true crime podcast. Now I think it's fair to say it was a good adaptation but also a piss-poor true crime podcast. Yeah, I mean partly it's sort of
00:01:51
Speaker
The setup involves these true crime podcasters finding themselves sucked into this weird world of mysterious cults and so on and so forth. Yeah, I thought it did what it did well. But it never actually sounded like a podcast, did it? It sounded like a scripted drama pretending to be a podcast.
Charles Dexter Ward Adaptation: Cults and Twists
00:02:10
Speaker
Yeah, but that was OK. And so the reason why it's good for us to talk about is if you're not familiar with the case of Charles Dexter Ward, it's a story of basically man discovers his ancestor was a wizard who could bring people back from the dead.
00:02:25
Speaker
Bring people back from the dead, brings his ancestor back from the dead, his ancestor kills him and takes his place, and then people have to sort of unravel what's happened and defeat the evil wizard. The podcast, rather than just being an evil wizard, gets this whole sort of cult angle going on, and the particular wizard was sort of a leader of the cult, but then there's this Mesopotamian deity and cultists all over the place and so on and so forth.
00:02:54
Speaker
so that they sort of expanded on the story and I thought by the end it got a little bit like at the end where without getting too spoilery it sort of finishes with you finding that yet another character was actually working for the cult all along and when you think back inside does that really make sense that that character was with the cult all along because like he came to them didn't he? I didn't quite buy that.
00:03:19
Speaker
And, but yeah, but it was nevertheless a very good listen. They sort of took benefit of the podcast format in a few interesting ways, like having when sort of one of the researchers is walking through this, what's basically the evil wizard's secret underground lair. There will be sort of mysterious chanting and otherworldly noises, which she doesn't hear, but get picked up on the podcast and stuff like that. It's sort of they had some nice effects.
00:03:46
Speaker
And so now they're doing Whisper in the Darkness, which if you're not familiar with the H.P.
Whisper in Darkness: Alien Abduction Themes
00:03:52
Speaker
Lovecraft story is sort of about essentially alien abductions kind of, but instead of being little grey, me and its otherworldly beings from
00:04:01
Speaker
Pluto or something like that. From beyond the stars. From beyond the stars. But they've tied the two together. So now they sort of get another case of this guy who sent a whole bunch of messages saying, oh, no, I'm being harassed by these aliens. And then eventually one say, actually, ignore what I said. Everything's fine. And then disappears. And as they look into it, they start immediately seeing connections with the previous case. And so they sort of tied there. They seem to be tying the two completely separate Lovecraft stories together.
00:04:31
Speaker
via this sort of this weird cult that appears to be permeating things. Now three episodes are out online. Is it making sense? Are we doing some kind of sponsored content? There's no sponsoring here at all. We're just interested in a particular kind of thing. And I have to say I'm enjoying it, but my same complaint about the last season, it still actually doesn't sound like a true crime podcast.
00:04:54
Speaker
No, no it doesn't and it's interesting like in the the first story they sort of they have the setup of this mysterious benefactor who of course ends up being part of the cult who keeps sending the money to investigate so they sort of he keeps sort of yanking the chain and drawing them into it. This time they're just kind of doing it on their own and there seems to be less reason for them to immediately get sucked into it all
00:05:16
Speaker
And of the first three episodes, especially the third one has a bunch of what I could only really describe as cliches when it comes to sort of mysterious culty activities. Underground car park rendezvous with mysterious speakers. That I thought was particularly ridiculous. So we'll see, I don't know.
00:05:34
Speaker
Oh, and also it almost completely invalidates the end of the previous podcast, but maybe that's going to be a setup for something else. Yeah, because that's actually a major plot point in episode three, is a warning about... What's interesting for us from a conspiracy theory angle is they're making heavy reference to the Rendelschirm incident. And number stations.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yes, so now we've talked about number stations on the podcast before. We've not really talked about Rendlesham. Now, Rendlesham is the British Roswell.
Rendlesham Incident in Whisper in Darkness
00:06:10
Speaker
It's a early 80s UFO sighting that actually took place between two Air Force bases in the UK.
00:06:20
Speaker
and is taken to be the most credible UFO sighting in UK history and is associated with a large number of cover-up theories as to what really happened at the time. So I'm thinking
00:06:35
Speaker
By the time we get to the end of Whisper in Darkness, which will be sometime early next year, we should do a Rendlesham story and then for the patron bonus episode, talk about Whisper in Darkness and how they leverage the Rendlesham stuff for that particular story. I like your thinking.
00:06:57
Speaker
So do I. That's why I live in my own brain case. That's
Soviet Sovereign Citizens vs. Freeman on the Land
00:07:01
Speaker
a good idea. But that's not the topic for today's episode. Today's topic is sovereign Soviet citizens or Soviet sovereign citizens, which is kind of a Freeman on the land theory. Now, going back through our list of actual topics, we've talked about Freeman on the land and sovereign citizen movements.
00:07:24
Speaker
We never actually devoted a entire episode to that weird phenomena, but or phenomenon. But today seems like a good time to talk about the Soviet equivalent. Yes. So if you if you don't remember when we've talked about in the past and you're not familiar, sovereign citizens or freemen on the land, which I think seems to be the more the more British.
00:07:44
Speaker
I mean, they are ever so slightly different. So Freeman on the Land is the specific maritime law version. The sovereign citizen thing is just the general, the laws of the land don't apply to me because hypothesis. So it's basically people who kind of think they've come up with the cheat codes to society. People who reckon they've found
00:08:06
Speaker
loopholes which allow them to not be bound by the laws of the land and often this comes along with the belief that the government, the laws of the land are actually illegitimate and it's only because we're sort of deceived or tricked in some way by the government that we believe these laws apply to us and if you really know what's going on and if you do things right and play by the right rules then the laws don't apply to you and you aren't liable for taxes or
00:08:35
Speaker
to pay your utility bills and so on and so on and so forth. And indeed it's interesting the Wikipedia entry on the sovereign citizen movement and it's always good to refer to these things to get an idea of what people would generally believe about
00:08:51
Speaker
a thing, refers to it as a loose grouping of American and Commonwealth litigants, commentators, tax protesters and financial scheme promoters. Because there is a bit of grift involved generally. Good old Wesley Snipes was one of those grifters. That's why he spent several years in prison.
00:09:13
Speaker
they didn't need to send takes. And I mean, these are based on, yeah, the Freeman on the Land stuff, there's weird interpretations of maritime law and claiming that they take president over real law and various other reasons for believing that society is illegitimate. But they're either misunderstandings coupled with a bit of wishful thinking, coupled with
00:09:37
Speaker
just plain poor information. They kind of come across as the whole. You know, there was that thing in England, I think, where people for a while seemed to believe, well, some people would believe that police officers aren't allowed to perform their duties unless they're in uniform.
00:09:53
Speaker
And if a police officer isn't wearing his hat, then he's not fully in uniform. So there used to be this urban myth that in England, if you could knock a police officer's hat off, he was powerless to do anything against you. Oh, my God, I lost my hat. Which obviously, in reality, if you knocked a policeman's hat off who was trying to arrest you, he would arrest you both for the thing he was going to arrest you for before and for assaulting a police officer.
00:10:16
Speaker
But it's sort of that kind of writ large that expanded out to the idea of society. And it turns out it's not unique to the English-speaking world. No, there is a Soviet equivalent here. And so these are people who believe that basically the legal writ that turned the USSR into a whole bunch of post- or ex-Soviet republics, including the foundational document of the Federation of Russia,
00:10:44
Speaker
was illegal and thus only USSR or Soviet laws still apply.
Belief in USSR's Legal Existence
00:10:52
Speaker
So in particular, there's this document dissolving the Soviet Federalist Social Republic, which was signed on December 25th on Christmas Day 1991 by Boris Johnson. Those Russians, they don't respect Christmas. It's the original war on Christmas. We haven't done one of those episodes for a while.
00:11:12
Speaker
kind of petered out a bit. I mean it pops up every year but people don't seem as enthusiastic about it as they used to be, I don't know.
00:11:18
Speaker
Well, there's a war on Christmas theory occurring in Australia at the moment with Angus Taylor, who we mentioned about the whole discussion about the Lord Mayor of Sydney and the expenditure being spent by Sydney. And apparently he was dorming at Oxford with Naomi Wolf at the same time.
00:11:43
Speaker
and Naomi Wolf was leading a war on Christmas in the dorms and Angus Taylor defeated it and Naomi Wolf was going yeah I was at Oxford
00:11:54
Speaker
two years before you were, I was back in the US by the time the story occurred. I also love Christmas. This is all a lie. Oh well. Anyway, yes, so this was done on Christmas Day 1991 by Boris Yeltsin, who was the president at the time, and they claim that this is illegal for some reason. I don't quite get the full reasoning behind it, but essentially they say the USSR, you know the episode of The Simpsons where they're like,
00:12:21
Speaker
The USSR, we thought you guys broke up, and they're like, that's just what we wanted you to think. And then all the tanks pop out and Lenin starts running around saying, must destroy capitalism. They're kind of like stage one of that. They seem to think the USSR never actually legally went away. And therefore, all these ex-Soviet states
00:12:41
Speaker
are illegitimate and so therefore you're not bound, they're Soviet sovereign citizens, they are citizens of the USSR which still exists and not citizens of Russia or Ukraine or Crimea or the various other, I can't remember what all the ex-Soviet states are, but basically those are legal fictions and the only thing that counts is the USSR.
00:13:05
Speaker
Actually, this makes me think of a rather interesting story from ancient history. So the Athenian democracy voted itself out of existence to allow Sparta to take control of it. So the Athenian democracy made up of the best man and only the best man of the population of Athens one day voted to stop being a democracy and to impose tyrants to allow Sparta to take control.
00:13:35
Speaker
and many people at the time went, you can't just vote your democracy out of power. You're acting undemocratically at that particular point in time, so you're no longer acting as a democracy, which means you're not actually democratically representing the people, which means it's an illegitimate vote. But the joke was on them, because after the Athenians got bored of tyranny,
00:13:58
Speaker
they voted themselves back into being a democracy. And you can kind of imagine Soviet sovereign citizens going, the Athenians can vote themselves in and out of existence, why can't we just go back to being communists again? But yeah, I mean, it seems like it actually seems a lot bigger. Maybe that's just because it's a bigger area with more, there's just a more larger population in general. So we're going to get on to the fact that
00:14:24
Speaker
certain utility companies are respecting this. The shorthand for this is, Russia's in such a deleterious and dilapidated state economically,
00:14:39
Speaker
that it kind of has to be treated seriously because the entire economy is teetering on the edge of collapse anyway and anything which makes the collapse faster is something that people want to avoid.
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, but I think also that exact, that's exactly why this has become more of a thing in the first place. People, the economy is rubbish. And people are like, oh, this sucks having to pay all this tax and all these power bills and stuff. I really wish I didn't have to. And then someone comes along and says, you don't actually have to. They've just tricked you into thinking you do. But really, you're a citizen of the USSR and therefore you're not bound by any of these laws. So you don't have to pay your power bill.
00:15:21
Speaker
and you don't have to pay your taxes and so on and so forth.
Selling Soviet Documents: A Sovereign Citizen Market?
00:15:24
Speaker
And so it's been a very attractive message to a lot of people, to the extent that, yeah, we've seen lots of people, people have been refusing to pay their utility bills and then getting their power cut off. Or only paying it in Soviet currency, not Russian currency.
00:15:40
Speaker
getting the power cut off, but then restored and so on. But it's got to the extent that in some cases, there's been so much money owed to power companies that the governments have basically said, you've just got to forgive this debt, dude. It's not going to, you're not going to get it back. And there'll be riots if you try to do something about it. Because you've been cutting off X percent of the population, and that's actually quite big now. So we're talking about figures of billions of rubles, tens of millions of dollars.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yes, so they've just kind of had to eat it. But yes, as we talked about the grifting before, so there have been lots of people who are making money out of this. There are people selling USSR documents, USSR passports and driver's license and so on. Now I should point out...
00:16:23
Speaker
If the USSR is still a functional system of governance in Russia, shouldn't have to buy a passport, it should be issued by the appropriate authority. Anyone who is buying a USSR passport, thinking the government of the USSR is still a functional entity, does appear to be an idiot. Yes. But there are a lot of such idiots, if that's what they are. There are various sort of unions within the Soviet states,
00:16:52
Speaker
some of which have tens of thousands of members. Some people have been looking at the people in charge of them who claim that, well, I'm not making any money out of this, it's all coming out of my own pocket and so on, but then that's questionable in some cases.
00:17:09
Speaker
But yeah, there's people there, on the internet has been responsible possibly for the resurgence of it, the development of it in any way.
00:17:24
Speaker
So apparently the internet, you know, allows these theories to spread and it gives people a platform. There are various YouTube channels of people, you know, sort of driving around in their car and getting pulled over by a police officer because they don't have proper license plates and them saying, well, actually officer, I was a citizen of the USSR, as you can see from the sticker on my windscreen. And here is my USSR passport and my USSR driver's license.
00:17:50
Speaker
and basically being Sarah from the labyrinth and just saying, you have no power over me. And generally the police officer is like, okay, you just go away now, please. And it works for them.
00:18:06
Speaker
It's a little bit, it would be a worry if this would have become a much more widespread
Sovereign Movement: Russia's Success vs. West's Failure
00:18:12
Speaker
thing. Now, what's interesting about this from the perspective of Fremen on the land, sovereign citizen stuff, is that whilst this isn't working in the US, the UK or El Toro, New Zealand, because it has been attempted here, as you point out, it is actually working in the USSR, slash
00:18:30
Speaker
Federation of Russia. So it's fascinating that a movement which has failed to work in America is actually working quite nicely in Russia, which I think goes to speak to the fact that America's infrastructure may be in a fairly bad state,
00:18:49
Speaker
But Russia's so much worse, so, so much worse. But the conspiracy angle is fascinating because, of course, Soviet sovereign citizens are of the firm belief that the Russian Federation knows it's an illegitimate government. Yeah, that's where these things come from. I don't know so much about the Soviet sovereign stuff, but the freemen on the land things are all about how
00:19:16
Speaker
It's sort of like how the government will trick you into, once you consent to, I often talk about in terms of contracts, once you consent to enter into a contract with the government, then they've got you and you have to play by their role. So they have to be very careful to not enter into a contract and so on. That's why they want to separate their legal identity from their personhood.
00:19:37
Speaker
And so they'll send back government notices and power bills and so on with no contract written on them and so on. And they seem to think that if they speak the right words, if they behave the right way, then the government can't touch them. And unfortunately, the few times this has shown up in court, they basically try to have their way and the judge just says, don't be so bloody stupid.
00:20:00
Speaker
And it doesn't go any further than that. It seems like at least some of them seem to expect that if they stand up for their freemen on the land type rights, then the court will say, oh, yep, you've got us. You've got us here. We're going to have to let you go because you know the secret rules. I mean, we force the other people to go to prison, but you said the magic words, you go for it. Unfortunately for them, that is not the case. No.
Impact of Soviet Sovereign Citizens
00:20:20
Speaker
And so that's Soviet sovereign citizens. Yeah. It's an interesting story because it's kind of the opposite of what's happening with Freeman on the land stuff in the West. In the East, it turns out you can get away with this.
00:20:37
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it does seem to be, as you say, a feedback sort of thing where you have a poor state of infrastructure and governance, which leads to resentment, which leads to these sorts of things, which ends up making it harder to govern and maintain infrastructure.
00:20:55
Speaker
So there you have it, Soviet sovereign citizens. Now the thing which I quite like about this is that technically either of us could actually buy a USSR passport. Technically I suppose, yeah, given that they're just a thing. Yeah, so
00:21:11
Speaker
Maybe you want to buy yourself a USSR passport. It's of no use to you in any way, shape or form. You can't travel with it. But at the same time, having a Soviet passport, having a Soviet passport and then never telling anyone about it. So it's found amongst your figs when you die would be brilliant. It's like when my grandfather died and we discovered that he had joined the Druids as a young man. Good for him.
00:21:37
Speaker
So my grandfather had a, and I still have it to this day, a druid membership card, which was basically the Freemasons that Catholics could join at that particular point in time. We have no idea he ever actually did anything with the druids, but I guess my grandfather was a druid. You heard it here first.
00:21:55
Speaker
Sounds like an insult. Your grandfather was a druid, but actually just a fact. No, just a fact. Just a fact.
Conclusion: Light-hearted Anecdotes
00:22:02
Speaker
Well, there we go. That is the end of this patron bonus content episode. Yeah. Entirely free of news updates. And you've got the hiccups. I do have the hiccups, yep. It's because you're feeling guilty about last week. Ah, not really.
00:22:16
Speaker
I've sublimated all my guilt. I love a guilt-free existence. But yes, next week we should be able to record at the usual time, in the usual place, for how much longer? We'll see, what is it? It's the first week of December. Probably got a couple more episodes to go, don't we? I'd say so. Before things, people start going on holiday and all that wacky Christmas malarkey. Look at me talking like Joe Biden. No, yes. There'll be no malarkey on this podcast. No malarkey. Fine.
00:22:48
Speaker
But yes, so we'll have a few more this year, but not this week because this is the end of this episode right now. Now, as usual, we love you. We cherish you. We want you in our hearts. In fact, I had a heart transplant the other day to put one of you inside of me. It did not go well. I'd have my heart put back inside. Turns out you just can't fit a full human being inside another human being's cavity. Sight isn't there yet. No, but one day,
00:23:16
Speaker
One day, one day we'll miniaturise you and put you in our hearts. That's a threat. Inject you directly into our veins. That's what will happen. Yes. So soon you'll be inside of us. Oh, you'll be so inside of us. Right. This has taken a disturbing turn. So I'm cutting you off and I'm just going to say goodbye. La di vidaile!