Guerrilla History - Burma's History & Rohingya Tragedy w/ Carlos Sardiña Galache

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on journalist Carlos Sardiña Galache to discuss the history of Burma/Myanmar and the tragedy of the Rohingya people.  Given the recent coup and subsequent violence perpetuated against protestors, we feel that this is a vitally important interview to orient the events within the overall flow of Burmese History. Carlos Sardiña Galache is the author of The Burmese Labyrinth: A History of the Rohingya Tragedy (Verso Books, https://www.versobooks.com/books/3152-the-burmese-labyrinth).  He has also published articles in a variety of outlets focusing on Myanmar, including New Left Review, Jacobin, Time Magazine, the Intercept, and the Asia Times.  All of his articles can be found on his website (http://carlossardina.pressfolios.com/)  You can follow him on twitter @CSGalache. Henry has also conducted two interviews with Carlos on the David Feldman Show, focusing on the recent events in Myanmar.  You can find those interviews (which should make good supplementary material) here:  Interview 1 (starts at 4:04:30): https://youtu.be/jwgygIWJyV0?t=14670 Interview 2 (starts at 1:16:40): https://youtu.be/-1n4KjXIeHU?t=4600 Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.                              

You don't remember Dinn-Vin-Vin? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims

to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by my co-hosts, as always, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm well, Henry. Great to be with you. It's always nice to see you. And I'm also joined by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace Podcast. podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you on this fine early morning recording? Hello. Yeah, I'm doing great. Excited for this conversation. Yeah, it's going to be a great one and very timely as well. So our guest today is going to be Carlos Sardinia Galache,

who's the author of the Burmese Labyrinth, the history of the Rohingya tragedy out from Verso. Highly recommend everybody picking it up. Now, of course, this is timely because of recent events in Myanmar, where there has been a military coup and protesters are being killed by the dozens or even the hundreds now. We're recording this on March 29th. Last Wednesday, 114 protesters were killed in one day alone in Myanmar by the military coup government. And so understanding the past, understanding the history of Burma

is very important to understanding the dynamics that are at play right now. And only by understanding the history, are we really able to get a full picture of the war? what's going on now, which is why I'm recommending to everyone to buy the Burmese labyrinth and read it because I know I speak for myself when I say before I read the book, my understanding of Burma slash Myanmar's history was limited to, well, at one point, they were colonized by the British, and then they were a military dictatorship, and Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize, and then they had their problems with the, you know, ethnic

cleansing against the Rohingya, and I knew some of the details about the ethnic cleansing and whatnot. I mean, I was doing my undergrad at the time, so I was relatively involved in activism and whatnot surrounding that issue, but I didn't understand the deeper context of the country and of that crisis. So this book really did highlight a lot of it for me. I don't know, guys, what did you think of the book? And, you know, did it help you understand the current context of events more? Adnan, I'll start with you, and then we'll go to Brett. Well, I did not know. I'm sorry to say that much about Burmese history. Of course, I'd heard about the Rohingya crisis and the ethnic cleansing of them. But this really helped a lot. I thought this was an excellent survey, not only of contemporary events and the setting, but then it went, and it was organized in an interesting way. First, it presented the situation around the Rohingya, what had happened fairly recently in this last decade to set up

the key sorts of points and questions, but then used history by going back to the pre-colonial and colonial era to help explain why ethnicity, why religion were functioning in a particular way in the national identity or lack thereof in some ways, you could say, of this country. And so it really helped make, you know, things much more sensible. But what I would say about the most recent events is that it's not completely clear exactly how the military coup fits into this, this story of ethnicity and religion in some ways in terms of the national identity. that seems to be a more abiding kind of problem of modern history in this, in this region. So I wouldn't say that there's necessarily, I think you'll understand a lot about this country, which you will need to do because I think events will continue to unfold.

But I found this a very well-written story. It really covered the transformations of colonialism, what colonialism, actually does and how it reorients the previous conditions of a society that has had lasting significance in the post-colonial era. And so it reminded me so much of the stories and histories of other fragmented post-colonial nations that are left in a really precarious situation that are ripe for ethnic, ethno-national conflict in places like Africa, other parts of the British Empire, like Eastern Africa in Kenya, Uganda, where they moved a lot, the British moved a lot of populations as part of their colonial endeavors. And then that ended up leaving long-lasting

problems for, say, the East Indians of East Africa. And so there was a kind of similar sort of problem here. But I was also quite amazed at how fragmented the country was with so many post-colonial national kind of independence resistance movements that you never hear talked about in the media. And it really suggested the fragility of this national identity, which perhaps explains some of the instability and the military sort of coups because a coherent national culture never seems to have been forged as a result of the way colonialism reshaped the importance of ethnic identities into political identities. Yeah, I think that that was a very good summary. Brett, why don't we get your thoughts on this work and how it relates to the current events?

And then we'll wrap back to talking a little bit about the history after that. But I want to focus first on how this relates to current events within Myanmar. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. In order to understand the present, you must understand history. And that's no less true here than it is anywhere else. I particularly want to echo Adnan's point about colonialism's history with regards to conflicts between ethnic groups and so much of the dysfunction happening in global South countries all over is this is a function of this previous cutting up of territories to serve colonial interests and simultaneously creating, often consciously, creating situations inside countries that inherently made them unstable

in order to benefit colonialism going forward. This also happened in the Middle East as well, where their French and British empires, you know, cut up certain countries like Syria or Lebanon, specifically so that they would be so infighty that they would be weakened and unable to unite against colonialism writ large. And so just that tension and that historical trajectory

of colonialism feeding into either consciously or not ethnic identities and conflicts and then playing on them going forward for its own benefits. And then when they want to walk away, they just sort of pat their hands, walk away from the situation, and then blame it on the people as if they had no role to play or it speaks to some dysfunction in that culture or whatever. But again, I think, you know, this is all of us come from the same point of view of not understanding the history very well of this, you know, this country. And I think that's going to be true for 99% of our listeners, but the two things that you've probably heard of if you're listening to this show and don't know

anything about Myanmar, Burma, and the history is the genocide of the Rohingya and of the recent coup. And so those are two little flashpoints that I think most people will be at least vaguely familiar with that are doorways into understanding this broader history. And the name says it all, you know, the Burmese-Labrins. It is, it's gesturing at the utter complexities of the ethnic content. the religious conflicts, the history, and the ongoing crises. It is an incredibly and particularly complex situation. And I want to just dwell for a second on the depravity of the Rohingya crisis.

This is a crisis that's been going on for decades. I know we were really focused on it four years ago or so, but this has been something that's been going on for decades. In 1978, there was an operation that forced 200,000 Rohingya out of the country and into Bangladesh's refugees between 2012 and 2015, another 100,000 were forced to Bangladesh's refugees. And then, of course, in 2017, during the big, again, ethnic cleansing genocide, call it what you want. I think both terms are quite apt in this case. 700,000 Rohingya were forced out of the country as refugees or killed.

Between those three, you're looking at a million Rohingya that left. that's well over 90% of the Rohingya that were in Myanmar at any given time are now outside of the country living as refugees and those that are still inside of Myanmar are living as internally displaced peoples in camps that the conditions are absolutely atrocious and in Carlos' book he outlines just how bad the conditions are in these camps for these internally displaced persons as well as in the refugee camps in Bangladesh for the people who did flee the country. And the conditions are absolutely shocking. This is the entire population of this ethnic group that has been in Myanmar, despite what many

in the country want to believe, for a very, very long time. These are not invaders from outside. These are people that lived in Myanmar for decades or centuries. And I'm sure that we'll talk about this in the conversation. But the depravity of the situation really is shocking. and this is something that I did know going into reading this book. I did know about the Rohingya tragedy, but yet I didn't know just how depraved it was until reading this book and being able to connect the historical context with the current context of what was happening to these individuals.

So this book really was critical for me and being able to piece those two things together and really get a deeper understanding of this crisis. I don't know if either of you want to say anything about the Rohingya tragedy or else we can just talk about, you know, maybe a little bit of the things that we're looking forward to picking through in the history of the book. I guess Adnan, I'll start with you, take up however you want, whether you want to comment on the Rohingya tragedy or some things that you're looking to get out of the historical context in our conversation with Carlos. Oh, and just before I turn it over to you, in regards to the recent events, the coup events, I'm just going to to direct the listeners to two interviews that I've already done with Carlos, perhaps three by the time this episode comes out on the recent post-coup events. I conducted those on the David Feldman show and I'll include the links to those in the description of this episodes that you can easily find those and listen to those for the current context, basically the breaking news. But what we're going to be doing here in this episode is looking at the history of the country and the Rohingya tragedy. That way we are able to understand the current events better. Adnan? Well, I did want to echo that, you know, I did know to some extent about the scale and

extent of the refugee crisis and the ethnic cleansing tragedy. But this book really does document and vividly portray, as you were saying, Henry, the really gruesome and heart-rending details of the human crisis. And when we think of them just as statistical questions or problems and numerate the numbers. The impact is great, but it doesn't hit home at the level of genuine sort of human empathy with the actual lived experience. People are suffering and undergoing. And this book definitely captures that in a very humane and empathetic way. And so that is definitely something that probably listeners have not necessarily really grappled with or grasped. So it's a good reason to pick up this excellent, very well-written

book, very comprehensive and sober analysis while at the same time conveying these really important and powerful experiences of suffering and oppression. In terms of what I would like to think about and talk about a little bit more is really understanding the intersections between how ethnic identities were formed. We tend to think of them as long-lasting and, you know, existing in time immemorial in the same way and shape. And what history is really studying history allows us to understand is that they might have different dimensions or have take on new meaning. And so this is something that in the colonial era, these ethnic identities came to mean different things as a result of British colonial policy.

And so I'll be interested to talk a little bit further in elucidating how fluid and capacious senses of self and other come to be hardened and politicized. And how and why that happens, because that seems to be when you have. these tragic ethnic conflicts is when new ideas about ethnic identity seem to emerge that we think existed for all time, but actually these political problems are products of history. So that'll be very useful to excavate that. And I guess the other thing that's interesting is just to try and understand how the contradictions of national identity worked specifically. to exclude the Rohingya from being able to have a stable place.

And why and how that is, I think we're living in a period where there's an awful lot of fear about migrant populations. We're living through an era of a great global refugee crisis. And even in our own country, the discourses, in our own countries, the discourses about the dangers and threats of foreigners and of immigrants and of being illegal immigrants is a powerful political discourse that's used to exclude and aggrandize certain kinds of interests. And so it's interesting to see how important that was to this story as well and thinking about how this is a global phenomenon that we're witnessing and dealing with

about immigration and migration. And on the left, I think we really have to think, think very carefully about how we can have human solidarity beyond the way in which nation states are restricting and excluding people to think about, you know, humane values globally. Brett, I'm going to turn to you for the final thoughts on anything that you want to say, but I'll have you basically lay on the table any other final thoughts as well as what you're hoping to get out of this conversation. maybe that wasn't, that you want to clarify from the book during the conversation that we're going to have with Carlos, and then we'll get right into the interview for the listeners.

Sure. Well, first, you know, just echo what Adnan said. I think that's an incredibly important point and deserves to be emphasized. I guess the only thing that I would add on top of that is just the deep personal interest I have given my engagement with Buddhism. And, you know, it's very interesting because, you know, in the West, we sort of understand religious conflict, certainly in the Abrahamic traditions, you know, Jewish people versus Muslims versus Christians, that all makes complete sense. And then with like Modi in India, we definitely

understand what Hindu nationalism can look like, right? So then when people in the West, often people with only a vague understanding of Buddhism, hear about something like Buddhist ultra-nationalism or a genocide being led by Buddhists, it is very, strikes the person as inherently sort of odd in a way that other religious conflict might not seem. odd. But I think that's a reminder that the ideologies of and the religious impulses are situated historically, socially, and politically. And every religion has a political spectrum in it. Every, I mean, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism have a left, center, and a right. And those can move and shift depending on the socio-political and economic climates in which they're operating.

Another interesting connection is Burma and history specifically with Buddhism is incredibly crucial to Buddhism being introduced to the United States. In the 60s, like the big people that brought over Theravada Buddhist traditions, which we now call Vapasana or even more pop culturally mindfulness, right, comes in large part from a few people in the 60s, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Cornfield, Sharon Salzberg, who went over to Southwomen. East Asia, but specifically Burma, did long meditation retreats, learn Buddhism from Burmese teachers, and then brought them back. So the IMS, the Insight Meditation Society, and the whole mindfulness sort of craze in the U.S. has direct links to the very history that we're going to be discussing in this episode. So I would like to explore that as much as time allows, because I don't want to get too far afield. I want to explore some of that in the upcoming conversation. Well, on that note, and by the way, Brett, that was a very profound statement.

And I want to thank you for bringing that up. I really do think that that's quite important in this story. But let's turn over to the conversation with Carlos now. We'll bring him in. So listeners will be right back with that interview with Carlos Sardinia Galache, author of the Burmese Labyrinth, the history of the Rohingya tragedy. And we're back on guerrilla history. Now we've gotten through the introduction of talking about the history of Burma and what we're looking forward to in this conversation. And now we're joined by the author of the Burmese Labyrinth,

the history of the Rohingya Tragedy, Carlos Sardinia Galache. Hello, Carlos. How are you doing today? Hi. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. And I've interviewed you twice before on the David Filcher. Sheldman show talking about recent events in Myanmar, and I really enjoyed both of those

conversations. And I think that it's a very important, it's a very important topic given that we're not really given a lot of extensive coverage on what's happening in Myanmar here in the West. But as we were saying in the introduction segment, to really understand what's happening now, it's very important to understand the historical context of the country. And your book does a very, very good job of that. But assuming that a lot of the listeners haven't read your book yet, and listeners I would definitely recommend going out and picking up the Burmese Labyrinth, why don't I turn this over to you right now, Carlos, and allow you to lay down the groundwork of the history of Burma. So maybe take us all the way from pre-colonization by the British, all the way

up to the present, just in broad terms, and then we'll dive in a little bit deeper with questions after that. Yeah, basically you want me to sum up the second part of the book. Yeah, exactly. And it's a very good section of your book. But yeah, let's hear your elevator pitch for it. Okay. Well, I think the first thing we have to understand about Burma is that Burma, prior to the colonial invasion by the British, didn't exist as such. Didn't exist in the shape that we know today.

And even the ethnic groups that now form part of the British. Burma, weren't exactly there in the same shape that they are now. Before the British arrived, Central Burma was a collection of very unstable kingdoms that dominated by what we now call the Bamar majority or Burm and majority. And then in the outline areas of the country, we had different stateless, such as the Rakhine, which was a kingdom on its own, and different communities, like the ancestors of the Kachin, the Karen, the Shan, the Chin, and so on and so forth.

The different ethnic groups that are now regarded as national races in Burma. Now, that changed when the British arrived, the British basically conquered Burma in three states. stages in three different wars, one in 1824, the second one in 1853, and the third one in 1884. And basically what they did was to unify Burma as a political entity for, the territory that is now known as Burma for the first time in history. But they did it in a very particular way, because at that time, the British were. doing two kinds of government,

what they call direct government and direct government. So in the outlaying areas of Burma, I'm thinking here of Kachin, of what is now Kachin State, Shan Estate, current state, not Rakhine, Aracan was part of central Burma, that was in direct rule. That is, the British rule through local elites from the ethnic groups living in those places.

Whereas in central Burma, they had direct rule. So at the same time, you can say that the British had a centripetal effect on Burma, in the sense that they unified Burma, but at the same time, They had a centrifugal effect in the sense that they separated very, like very hardly the different groups in Burma through this difference between direct rule and thyroid rule. And they also did another thing, which is that they solidified the ethnic identities that. were already kind of present in Burma, but we're not so watertight. Let's say, and there is a good example of this in Edmund Lich,

the anthropologist's research, for instance, regarding the Shan and the Kachin. basically you had a different different social systems and depending on what social system you adopted or what a polity you migrated to you would be Shan or Kachina and you would change your ethnicity maybe even even in your own life or at least in a couple of generations or one generation but that that was stopped by the British who basically through the modern state technologies, especially censuses, put everybody in very tight ethnic boxes. So that explains a lot the ethnic conflicts

that have pledged Burma ever since independence. Because not everybody was fighting for independence in the same way. And the British also put some groups against each other, like, for instance, recruiting soldiers from what they call the martial races from the Atlans, meaning especially the Kachin, the Karean and the Chin. So that created a lot of resentment with the Bamar majority who were not recruited at all. I mean, there were some Bamar soldiers, but very, very, very few.

And at the same time, the British is another thing, that they included Burma as a province of the Indian Empire. And that meant that Indian people could migrate to Burma quite freely. and that created a lot of resentment too because the British had been longer in India they had more lawyers in India for instance they had more administration staff and they

imported a lot of administrative staff for the colonial state apparatus from India to Burma which created a lot of resentment among the local population, especially the Bamar, towards the Indian immigrants. And the consequences of these are seen up to these days. Then in the first decades of the 20th century emerged a nationalist movement,

which was mostly Bamar, was mostly by the majority, and was mostly separated. from other kind of nationalist movements, like the Kachin, the Rakhine, the Chin, the Karin, and so on. So there was not a single unified nationalist movement which included all the ethnic groups. Albed supposedly the idea of the Bamar was to create some kind of all-inclusive nation. But there was always this element of Bamar,

supremacism, which was very weak at the beginning, but grew stronger, especially after independence. Now, all these tensions between different ethnic groups came to a head in World War II when different ethnic groups took different sides. So, for instance, the Bamar, led by the father of independent Burma and son, who also happened. to be the father of Ansan Suu Kyi at first took the side of the Japanese this is alone and complicated the story

why they did that but basically they took the side of the Japanese in order to get rid of the British but the Karen the Kachin and so on they took the side of the British

in Rakhine also happened the same in Rakhine their Rakhine people took the side of the Japanese, the Japanese invaders at the beginning of the war, but the British armed the Muslim population, the Rohingya. So what happened is that in World War II, there were clashes not only between Japan and Great Britain, but also between the Bamar, the Bamar army led by Yangsan and the current guerrillas, and more specifically in Rakhine State, between the Rakhine majority, the Buddhist majority of Arakhan and the muslin minority, the Rojija.

And that created a lot of resentment that basically survives to this day. So then eventually, Burma was independent in 1948. Aung San was assassinated a few months before in 1947. And Aung San was probably a more conciliatory. guy than many of the people that came, the many Bamar leaders that came after him. And he was a man with socialist leanings, who was willing to accept the descendants of Indian immigrants as Burmese citizens and so on. But he was killed.

And we had a few years of democratic movement, government, sorry, between 1948 and 1962. In 1962, Nguyen, one of the comrades of Aung San at the beginning, but also a political rival, who was at that time, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, took power in

a coup d'etat, and basically he inaugurated 50 years of military dictatorship that took different shapes. What Aneguyen did was to deepen the inter-ethnic clibages in Burma.

He initiated also a series of racist policies against the Rohingya who were recognized during the first years of independence. and basically he created the notorious citizenship law in 1982, the citizenship law that would be used to strip the Bohindia of citizenship. And he basically initiated a project of Bermanization in which the central power of the government, of the Bamar majority, was imposed on the ethnic minorities. which is something that already had began during the democratic period,

but it got much worse with Newin and successive military governments. So basically what the military did was to impose a very racist ideology in which only the so-called national races are to be regarded as bona fide citizens of Burma. these national races are defined as those who were in the Burmese territory before the first Anglo-Barmes war. Now, this is problematic for a variety of reasons, and one of them is, as we said before, is that Burma didn't exist back then. But also, many of the groups were not really kind of formed as political slash ethnic entities, So basically, this notion of national races is reading backwards of identities that are very present now, but maybe we're not as present during the pre-colonial period.

So that's what Burma is. Burma, I define it at the end of the book, not as a country, but as a biosenosis, taking the war from a very nasty and right-wing Spanish philosopher, but we don't need to get into that, Gustavo Bueno. Basically, a biosenosis is like an ecosystem in which, which depends on certain equilibrium between different species, right? The original comparison was with Europe, and I think it's kind of adequate to Europe,

in which there is this certain equilibrium between different species but it's equilibrium based on the struggle of the different species against each other. And that's the unity of Burma

as a country, not as a imagining community of people who all live together in Benedict Anderson. words. It's just a country that has been always been at war, precisely because of this imposed unity by the Bamar majority. That's a wonderful sketch of the arc of history. I guess one question I wanted to ask you about that earlier period in some ways is to flesh out a little bit of the consequences of

the colonial how that changed these ideas and understandings of ethnicity. And that is just to clarify that in the pre-colonial period that you were mentioning, where there were multiple statelets contending with one another, how would you characterize so people can understand the way ethnicities worked in those polities? Because were they mixed polities where the dynasty may have a particular ethno-linguistic identity, but they would rule over and govern over a mixed society with different ethnic groups. And how does that go, how does, how does, how do that operate then?

And what does colonialism do specifically besides the categorizing in censuses and things like that to really firm up and make rigid this kind of basis of ethnicity? There were ethnic classifications before the British survived in Burma. The war was divided between different Lumios. The Burmese war that basically means type of people. There were different lists up to 100 groups and so on. But ethnicity was not a political category. Right.

The kingdoms in central Burma, which were dominated by the by the country. the Mamar, mostly, but at some times you might find a shan king as the ruler of the kingdom. We're not worried about ethnicity. They were worried about universal claims of rule, taken from Buddhist cosmology, basically. which means what they call a righteous leader. So as long as you were a righteous leader who funded the Sankha, the Buddhist community and extended Buddhism as much as you could in the land,

you were accepted as a ruler. Of course, that was very much inferior and the universal pretensions were not always. realized in fact, of course. But that was the ideal of the Central Kingdoms. So people would adhere to different kings

because they were seen as right rulers, not because they were seen as members of this or that group. So for instance, you would have Mon, another ethnicity, fighting alongside

a Bamar King against a Mon king and and vice versa because ethnicity was not a political a political category at that time and also what you had in Burma especially in central Burma was a very very big plane where it's very sparsely populated where you as a king would want to get control over as many people as possible to build your big construction projects to the glory of yourself and Buddhism and so on. So you couldn't be choosy about the ethnic groups that you would take under your rule. Now, when the British arrived, they, as I said before, they separated groups, but they not only classify them. They actively impose policies that, for instance,

made very difficult to trade between one groups and others. And they gave different roles to different people. Like, they had all these racialist ideas very much invoked in the 19th century in, you know, in Victorian Britain, in which, you know, you have much more. racial races, but you have the Bamar who were regarded as somehow lazy, childish and canyon and not up to hard work and so on. So they pretty much divided the population and made a division of labor and an economic division, which was made along this ethnic racial lines. And that contributed to solidify. the ethnic groups that we have seen today.

And it must be said that it was also kind of also something in which the groups themselves participated because these groups started to realize that they lived in a modern world in which nation states categorized along ethnic lines were the rules of the game. So they started to make political demands in the name of ethnic groups.

In a way, you can say that in Maxim terms, I wouldn't bring this analogy to far, but you might say that it was somehow that the ethnic groups became changed from any groups in themselves to ethnic groups for themselves, that is conscious of their own potential, conscious of their own political power and so on. So it was partly the British, of course, but also the ethnic groups started to speak the language of nations. And that was the rule of the game when the independence arrived, which had been developing during the British period. So I'm going to follow up here. And I think that this question is going to set up Brett well to talk about religion. But you write in your book that during the 1920s, monks were actually at the vanguard of the anti-colonial movements and actually laid the groundwork for a really nationalist movement. And you follow up by saying that these political actions by monks actually goes against the monastic laws, but the British had gotten rid of any sort of authority that could have policed that, which allowed for there to be monks that were really driving for. this political movement, then you write about the, you could say, the first martyr of Burmese

nationalism, and I'm going to butcher the name, but U-Otema, something like that. U-U-Otama, U-Otema, okay, would you be able to talk about how the role of these monks and how the role of this martyred monk, U-Otima, really did foster a sense of nationalism within the country and how that was important for the independent struggle that followed. Well, as I said before, the legitimacy of the old kings of the old rules before colonial times was based on the of being patterns of the Buddhist religion of the monastic community and also on building temples and building pagodas and so on. And also, the Buddhist monks were very much in charge of education in pre-colonial Burma.

What happened is that, obviously, the Buddhists couldn't claim this source of legitimacy because they were not Buddhist for starters. So the Burmese Sangha, the Barmese Buddhist community, felt that the new rulers didn't have legitimacy, not only because they were foreigners and they were, you know, they imposed the rule by force, which is something that anyway had happened before with every single kingdom, but because they were not patronizing the Sanjah,

the monastic community. Now, the British also were not very respectful of, certain customs in Burma. And as I mentioned in the book, one of the first, we can say, proto-nationalist movements, was against the British,

because the British didn't take off their shoes whenever they entered Apagoda. Something that is considered still extremely extremely respectful to enter into Apagola with your shoes on. And that was one of the first mass movements against the British rule in the 20th century. Now, the monks had this idea,

the monks fostered this idea that to be Burmese is to be Buddhist. And as most of the other religions in Burma had, actually most of other religions had arrived before, but in very small numbers before the British. But after the British, you had many more Muslims, you had many more Christians coming to the country and so on. So they started to develop this idea that religion and nation are inextricably joined.

But this is actually much more complicated than that, because Uotama, who was Rakhine, by the way. Uwotama was a guy who advocated for unity with his name against the colonial empire. Uwotama was a guy who traveled to India, who at some point met Gandhi, who traveled to Japan. He was a cosmopolitan man. A little bit like all these people that, I don't know if you have read this book by Benedict Anderson under three flags, which talks about this... do you know, these networks of anti-colonial resistance against the Spanish Empire between Cuba and the Philippines, but also with other people from the British Empire and the French Empire.

So you can say that UOTama was part of this loose network of international anti-colonial resistance. So he was advocating unity between different religions against the common enemy, the British. but that's something that is quite forgotten of this telegraphy now what am I just seen as the you know the first national one of the first nationalists and what happened is that

yeah as you say the monks are not supposed to be involved in politics they are not supposed to be involved in worldly matters they are supposed to be involved only in their own spiritual betterment and the spiritual betterment of the community they serve. But the reason that they made

was that under the conditions of British colonization, we cannot work well enough for the spiritual betterment of our community. So in order to work well for the spiritual bettermen of our community, we need to get rid of the British first. And that's a political issue is regrettable, we have been involved in political issues, but that's what we have to do. But that created, and I think in many cases, as in the case of Uotama unwittingly, that created these union of religion and politics that has been so important in subsequent history of Burma. And that's incredibly interesting. And so much of this story does revolve around the interplay of different religions, specifically of Buddhism and its relationship to other religions. You've

talked a little bit about the cosmology of Buddhism, about the idea that to be Burmese is to be Buddhist. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the ideology of Buddhism in Burma and how it relates to the ideology of nationalism. And then maybe talk a little bit more about the specificities of tensions between other religious groups like Christians, Muslims, etc. Well, Buddhism in Burma is Ferrabada Buddhism, which is usually more traditionalist than Buddhism, the other great range of Buddhism. From Mahayana, stemmed as things, you know, same Buddhism in Japan or the kind of Buddhism that they practice in Tibet, like the Dalai Lama.

To make a very, very, there is an analogy between being Catholic and being Protestant, but we cannot take that analogy too far, so maybe I is better I don't go that way. But let's say that Theraba Buddhism is more based on ritual, on doing rituals right, whereas as a means for salvation, whereas Mahayana tends to be more about accident, which doesn't mean that Therabad is not about axi or about the acts that you commit. Now, Buddhism in Burma, as I said before, is a strong legitimizing force a political force during pre-colonial times and even now.

And it also means, Bodhisim also relates to the idea of karma and that also has political consequences. Because roughly, you can say that if you had karma, you will have a good situation. So if you are the king, if you are a rich guy, for instance, that means that you have good karma. So sometimes this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like if you are, for instance, in pre-colonial times, the guy with the highest karma and better karma

and the best karma was the king. So if I go and I manage to defrawn him and take power myself, automatically everybody is going to say, oh, yeah, actually he's the one with karma. So, and as there were no clear rules of succession, that's very much, very often the way that the kings were replaced. So in the eyes of the Buddhist community in Burma, to have a good Buddhist ruler is very important because according to the Buddhist cosmology, the concept of Dharma

or Dharma which you can translate as both as universal order but also as morality is parliament so there is this belief that if you are

a righteous ruler then the country at large, the nation at large will go well and that's a little bit of the idea with Ansan Suu Kyi, that Ansan Suu Kyi is seen as a righteous potential ruler now, not ruler anymore, she's seen as a righteous ruler, and if we have this very highly moral ruler, the country will go well. And she's even considered a bodhisatt,

by someone who could attain salvation, but chooses to stay on a to spread Buddhism and spread the Dharma among the population. So this cosmology is very important, but what happens is that it clashes with other religions because, of course, the muslins or Christians are going to have completely different ideas. Now, what happened during colonial times is that many of these ethnic minorities

were not Buddhists before, were animists. the Karen, the Kachim, the team, and so on. And for the missionary, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the missionaries going to Burma was much easier to convert to Christianity, people from animism than it was from Buddhism. And basically, they converted most of the ethnic minorities. And that created another cleavits between ethnic communities, right? because as Buddhism is so political important, these other people who don't share also religion are somehow not from the same policy as us.

And also this sense of having a different religion, Christianity, also foster a sense of, identity in those groups. And that also contributed to the ethnic divisions that we see now. So we've talked about the ethnic divisions. We've talked about the religious divisions and how those have kind of driven history. But I want to have you discuss class. Let's have a class analysis.

After all, as Mark said, the history of all here two existing societies is the history of class struggles. So there is a class component in here that was driving Burmese history that we, you briefly touched on, but I think it's important that we don't view this solely as ethnic divisions and racial divisions and that we do take a look at that class analysis as well. So can you do that for the listeners? Yeah. Well, the thing is that class depended very often on ethnicity as well, right?

Because, for instance, the money lenders in Burma, when the British arrived, were the Chetlaas, who are an ethnic group for Southern India. From Southern India, yeah, from Southern India. And that created this idea that different classes were different ethnic groups, which is not exactly the case. and you have also Bamar elites and other ethnicities elites, but it's kind of hidden, you know, beneath these ethnic divisions. But during the British time, the British colonial period, it was very much the case that there was roughly overlapping between class and ethnicity. Now, after independence,

that changed by the league. And basically, the higher classes were Bamar. And many of them were, especially in the last 30 or 40 years, many of them were of Chinese heritage. But there is also an inter-ethnic class alliance between the elites of different ethnic groups. So, for instance, one of the things that the Burmese military government managed to do after 1988, when they got rid of this Burmese way to socialism of Nguyen,

was to co-op the economic elites of the ethnic minorities, the Khashin, the Karin and so on. basically because the most of the ethnic resources, sorry, the natural resources are in the ethnic minority. So the central government, the military government wanted to take all this, to take as much as of those natural resources as possible. And they disown in correlation with the local elites who use some. were part of the ethnic minorities, majorities in those areas. So, for instance, in the 90s, after several decades of civil war between the ethnic armed groups and the Tatmadot, the Central Army, there were a series of ceasefires and kind of unofficial

these fires, in which there was no political settlement at all, but there was a kind of economic settlement with the elites of these certain minorities. For instance, in Kachin State, do you have the Jain

Mines in Pakand, or do you have the huge timber business? And usually is Bahamara controlling the bulk of it, but some in the Kachin elite, taking some small piece of Dubai.

So in that way, for many years, the wars subsided a little bit. So there was also a kind of class of class struggle between the ethnic minorities

themselves, or I wouldn't say classes struggle, but I would say more discontent among the, for instance, the poorer Kachin, because they saw the elites during those seaspires, they saw these elites as selling out to the Bamar government.

But it didn't really go to fact. But at the same time, there was an intra-class conflict in these minorities because some businessmen from those minorities benefited from that and some others not. So, economy is also a very important factor. The thing is that with these ethnic divisions, the government, the military regime has basically subdued in form of interclass, interworking class solidarity between different energy groups. And that hasn't existed. there is an incipient alliance between the working classes of different ethnic groups now against the most recent military group.

Well, with all of that as the broad context, which is useful to help us explain, you know, what some of the modern conflicts are. I wondered if we could come to talking a little bit, now about what the sources of the Rohingya crisis in particular are and how and why they did not fit into the way in which there was an ethnicization of politics and the way in which a kind of Burmese nationalism was constructed such that they seem to have there might have been certain eras where there was brief periods where it was a little bit better for them but nonetheless it seems at every stage in the modern history,

since especially post-independence, they have been somehow left out of and been an excluded group. I'm wondering if you could go into a little bit, who are they and why do they seem not to be able to fit into the narratives of Burmese nationhood in this modern period? Yeah, well, the problem with the Rohingya is that their history

doesn't fit very well with this conception of ethnic national races that we've mentioned before, which is a very restrictive conception in which the borders of Burma are regarded as an eternal given that we're already there and from time in Memorial and so on, which is not absolutely the case. So the Rohingya are a group that struggles between two walls, which would be the Burmese world and the world

and the Bengali world, the world of Bangladesh. So as they, the problem with the Rohingya is that when you divide Burma so strongly with the rest, and you read that back. as we mentioned before, as you get into really, really strange misconceptions. So for instance, the Shan, and I don't want to go far away from the Rohingya, but for instance, the Shan are Thai, and they kind of consider themselves brothers of the Thai. and actually it could have been perfectly the case

that what is now Shannon State would have been part of Thailand if history had gone differently and the same with Rakhine Rakhine's there was this anthropologist which I quoted before

and I quoting him again he described Burma as a border area between China and India and meaning that it takes it took things from both not as a completely separated entity

self-closed entity and Rakhine or Arachan where the Rohingya lives is also a border area between the Burmese and the Bengali world and throughout pre-colonial history that didn't matter most kings

kings were Buddhists but they would adopt Muslim names. They would include the calima, the profession of faith in their coins because they had a lot of muslin subjects.

And actually the borders between Rakhine and the kingdoms in Bengal were quite fluid. Sometimes the Rakhine king would conquer up to Chitagon and the Bengali kings would conquer up to what is now Situ. It was part of the

same cultural world. Now with this With this solidification of ethnic identities, with this solidification of nations as political constructs that came with the British, it solidified the idea that the kingdom of Paragan was Buddhist, was Rakhine, was purely something else than Bengal. Many Rohingya, many ancestors of the present Rohingya migrated to O'Aracan during colonial times. But these were not people different from the muslims that were already there. And as we said, it was a continuous area, basically, Bengal and Iraqan. But they made this, you know, this division.

This is a strong division that on one side of the Nath River is the Bengali wall. On the other side is the arachanis, Burmese, Barmese wall. So then the Rohingya were straddling these two walls. Actually, in the same way that the Rakhine were straddling the two walls, but from the other side, from the Bamar side of the border of Aracan. Right? So the Rohingya were regarded as somehow a different group when the British arrived, because they classify them differently.

They never used the world Rohingya, the British apparently in their senses. They never used the world Rohingya. And there is a good reason for that, because Rohingya just means Iraqanism. Right. I was going to ask about that because it seems like it's a designation in the, you know, Bengali sort of language of indicating people, especially Muslim people, in Arakhan, right? Yes. And Rakhine and Rohingya are actually very very.

similar cognate words. It's like, you know, you know, Deutsch versus, you know, Deutschland versus Germany, you know, or something like that, two different words coming really from the same idea. Yeah, yeah. So the Rohingya didn't have any need to assertance or it's as a different group, right? During colonial times, they were just living there. There was not a real border between Aracan Estate and Bengal

because everything was part of India anyway. So they didn't have any particular need to say we are Rohingya. But the name Rohingya appears very early on in Francis Buchanan and a kind of explorer who visited Burma in the late 18th century. So the Rohingya were just there.

They were Muslims in a multicultural, multi-religious kingdom called Arakhan, dominated by Rakhine kings, the Buddhist kings, who most probably had, as their ancestors, both people from the central land of Burma and from Bengal. I mean, everything was mixed, right? So it was only when this nationalist movements emerged that the Rohingya started to be an issue. And it was only then that the Rohingya, around the 50s, started to assert an identity as a political force. political instrument. Now, if you go to the Kachin, for instance, the name Kachin itself is an excellent. It's not how the Kachin's called themselves. And the Kachin include very different groups. And only the 20s a Kachin identity as a nation political movement and so on, they started to consolidate. Now, what happens with the Rohingya is that they arrive slightly related to this

ethnic nationalist politics, right? So as they arrived a little bit later, let's say in the 50s or so, maybe in the 40s, their Bamar and Rakhine nationalists say, oh, this is an invented name. Well, you know, all names are invented in a minute. I mean.

Carlos, I'm going to follow up here. so as we're talking about right now kind of tangentially but I really want to dig into this specific point the wider society of Myanmar views the Rohingya as foreigners as people not from the area and I'm going to read out two quotes from your book which are very incisive and they're from interviews that you conducted with individuals high up individuals in Myanmar and listeners this is my pitch for you to pick up the book because this is some excellent journalism right here. So you were talking to the second most important person in the NLD, which is on Sung Suu Kyi's party. And you brought up the crisis in Arakhan state, which is where the Rohingya have been traditionally. And he said,

the problem there is created by foreigners, the Bengalis. That is a problem we have had for a very long time. All the people in the country regard these people as foreigners. They are Bengali. who cross to this country overland and by sea and by river. Then later on you have another quote from the Executive Secretary of Aracan State. And again, you bring up the brutality that was occurring in the area. And he said, yes, exactly. And he says, we have to protect our national interests. And those Muslims are not part of them.

We don't care about what outsiders think. We must protect our land and our people. Humanitarian concerns are only our second priority. And these are interviews that you conducted, and I want to commend you on getting those quotes from those individuals because it's very important to the story. So using that as a basis for this explanation of why is it? So again, we've been touching on it,

but I want just very specifically, how has this viewing of the Rohingya as foreigners influenced the perception and really the lack of care against the of the brutality against them? And then can you just briefly explain how you dispel and you dispel that myth, that they are foreigners in your book? Can you briefly explain how you dispel that myth and how that myth has contributed to this issue? Yeah. There is this idea that many Rohingya, if not most, and it's a very prevalent idea in Burma, are illegal immigrants from what is now Bangladesh, before 2017-1, East Pakistan, right? Now, even according to the law, most Rohingya, even if they have arrived during colonial times, they are not illegal immigrants. according to Burmins law, whoever arrived before independence is entitled to Burman's citizenship,

even according to the 1982 citizenship law that was used to strip the Rohingya of the citizenship. So according to that law, actually, 99.9% of the Rohingya would be citizens of Burma. So the problem is that there is certain fuzziness and certain, there is a blur there between considering illegals, those who arrive before and after independence. So many people in Burma think that actually if they arrive during colonial times, they are illegals and they are not. there's also of course the fact that they were many ancestors of the Rohingya who were in Burma before colonial times and they mixed with all of with the with the ones who arrived in colonial times and now it would be impossible to distinguish with who right but the fact remains the same even according to Burmese laws those who arrived before independence are not

possibly regarded as illegal immigrants. Now, they claim that there have been massive influxes of illegal immigrants after independence from what is now Bangladesh. Now, I was wondering, is that true or not? So I took different censuses, the different censuses that I had available, the last census made by the British in 1931,

actually there was a, they started, to make another one in 41, but was interrupted by the war. And the census in 1993 and the 2014 census. And I compared the population growth of the Rakhine community and the Buddhist community in Rakhine and the population growth in the Muslim community. And it was not so different, actually. There was not a big difference.

And the difference that there might, could also be viewed to higher birth rates among the Muslim community, which is quite likely. So let's say that maybe perhaps the percentage of illegal population among the Rojillojia is tops 5%, something like this. But they are regarded as by the fold as illegal immigrants because of this conceptual, this kind of conceptual slippage between those who arrive during colonial times and those who supposedly arrive later. So the way they are treated the factor by the Burmese state is as illegal immigrants by the fort who have to demonstrate. that they are not legal immigrants. In a way, they are treated as guilty and less proven innocent.

And what happened with the 1982 citizenship law is that it gave nationality, if it gave citizenship to all the people who would be, who were already citizens according to the previous citizenship law. So, but what the Burmese military did, and they didn't do immediately. They did it in the early 90s, was to take all of these documents, telling them, okay, we are going to change from the citizenship you had before to the citizen,

according to the new law, you give us all the documents. So they stripped them completely off the documents. So now they cannot demonstrate that they are entitled to citizenship because they don't have the documents. Because the very same guys who were supposed to give them citizens, are keeping the documents and assuming that they are not entitled to citizenship. So basically, like summing up, is yes, many Rohingya, perhaps even more than half of them, are descendants of people who arrive during colonial times. That's perfectly legal according to every existing law in Burma.

And all of them should be entitled to a full citizenship. And, but the famous influences of illegal immigrants, that's a completely fake story, that's fake news, that's a completely false reading of history. So now that we have a really good conception of the history and the complex political situation that goes into this, can you just sort of catch us up and talk about the specific atrocities being perpetuated against the Rohingya community? in the last several, several years. Yeah, well, everything started in 2000. Everything started a long time before. Everything started in 1978.

That's, you can say that's the turning point for the Rohingya. When Newin, the general in power at the time, longed preparation supposedly to detect illegal immigrants. They actually detected 1,000 or something. like this. But it was conducted with such brutality, torching houses, killing, shooting at people, raping women and so on, that up to a quarter of a million went to escape to Bangladesh as refugees in Cox's Assad. And that started a kind of cycle of displacement and returning to Burma, but never as citizens that had lasted up to the democratic transition,

the so-called democratic transition initiated by the military in 2011. In 2012, there were really nasty waves of intercommunal biomes between Buddhists and Muslims, in Narokine between the Rakhine and the Rohingya that displays a lot of Rohingya from the homes, a lot of Rakhine to internal displacement camps. Everything started with a story which was taken completely out of proportion about three Muslim men who support.

supposedly raped a Buddhist woman. And that was widely publicized in Bacan state at the time. So that provoked a massacre of 10 Muslim guys in the southern and the state, and then retaliation by Muslims against Buddhists in the north, a huge clash between both communities, in which the security forces took the side of the, of the Rakhine, and there's evidence of some involvement from Rakhine politicians in Stoking the Flames and, you know, organizing moors to attack Muslim quarters.

So, up to 120,000, probably more, probably 150,000, around 150,000 Rohingya were put in internal internal displacement and camps, which in this context, basically, is an infamism for concentration camps. And they continue. So as the political transition proceeded, the Rohingya became like the common enemy in Burma. Like the scape goals for everything. And most people in central Burma, probably they had never, ever heard about the Rohingya before. And of course, they had never met, 99% of them, they had never met a Rohingya, because Rohingya, because of the policies imposed on them, had been confined to their own villages in northern Rakhine state.

So, but there was a very virulent campaign of propaganda against the Rohingya during the transition. So in 2015, when Ansan Suu K won the elections from the first time, Rohingya were not allowed to vote for the first time in history. So they lost their political bosses were. So what happened is that at that, and also around that time a little bit before, the human smuggling networks that took them to other countries, particularly to Malaysia, were dismantled by the Thai and the Malaysian security forces. So that was another way out that it was close to them. So that explains the emergence of another group called Aracan Rojidia Salvation Army,

in Barcelona that attacked the security forces for the first time in 2016. And they organized coordinated attacks against nine different police outposts in northern Iraq. And the reaction of the armed force was predictably brutal. basically indiscriminate and completely unroposional. They just went on a rampage against Rohingya, the combatants or civilians in the villages. And up to 80,000 fled to Bangladesh at the time. Now, that was only a preview,

a kind of rehearsal of what happened in here, But when ARSA attacked again, some security forces positions, and then the army went on a real rampage. Like, they completely close off the area. They sent the most brutal divisions in the army, the 99th, the 34th, the 77th. I'm not sure about 707. never mind the 99th and the 33rd for sure and basically they tortured villages they kill the scores of civilians including children and nobody knows but what they managed to do

was to push out to bangles around seven seven seven 100,000 people, which means 90% of the population of northern Rakhine, and we up to 60% of the total of India population in Rakhine. So at that time, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Minam Lime, the guy who stays the Kuleta on 1st February said, so it was to the fact that the armed forces, the The Bengali is a name that, the name that they use for the Rohingya, implying that they are in Bengal, had become an unfinished business that we had to finish now.

So it sounds a lot like a final solution, isn't it? And basically, they managed to get rid of most of the Rohingya population, either mostly expelling them, but also killing perhaps up to 20,000 people. Now, for these operations, the Dorma stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice by the Gambian. And Anne Sanchich went and defended the operation. as a legitimate anti-terrorist operation and in no way a genocide and in no way a cleansing and so on and so forth so basically see defended the military and well and this is a different story but now the military have returned the favor putting her under house arrest and, you know, dismantling the government.

So, yeah, that's the recent history of the Rohingya. There have been attempts, half-fated attempts to sign agreements with Bangladesh to repatriate the 700,000, actually one million Rohingya in Bangladesh because of previous refugee crisis. it is evident that the Burmese don't want them back. And they basically set up a plan, like they set up two processing centers in the border, and they would say that they would be able to process 300 people each day,

which means that would take me in years for all of the Rohingya to return to Burma. So basically, in the eyes of the, of the, of, of, of the, of the Burmese military and the Burmese government, the unfinished problem of the Rohingya is being kind of resolved now, I guess. Well, despite from their perspective resolving the Rohingya problem through these violent and exclusionary means, as you pointed out, there's still instability in the government. So, you know, if we look from the contemporary perspective,

the failure to really challenge the national races ideology and theory hasn't necessarily led to the stability and integrity of, you know, the nation state here in this context. So I'm wondering if you have any further comments you want to make about contemporary developments with the, you know, military coup and what is happening in Burma now and how you connect it. with the problems that you studied in this history? Do you see a continuity with those issues, or how else would you look at the situation of the Burmese nation in this context? Well, it's very difficult to say what is going on now. For the status, I have to say that as many other people,

I didn't expect a coup right now. I don't think many people expect it, except maybe people in government. Well, what happened after solving the unfinished business of the Rohingya is that immediately the Rakhine, the majority in the country, turn against the military. Because they were united the Rakhine and the Bamar government as long as they had the common enemy there, as the Kenya. But actually, the Vakain resent Bamar domination from the center. government as much as the Kachin or the Kareen or any other ethnic minority. So about one year and a half later, the Arakan army of Rakhine of non-nationalist groups

who had been operating in Kachin returned to Rakhine and started a very business war with the Tatmado that lasted for two years. And that connects with the coup. The coup happened, and it's seemingly unconnected with that, but I think there's some connection. The coup happened on 1st February, three months after the election that gave another victory to once and so cheap. And the obvious reason was that the military was complaining about electoral fraud and so on. and basically I think that the military were angry at San Suu Kyi because she and her party because they stood up to them

like okay we are playing to your tune for all the transition and now you want to rob us the election results the only thing that we can claim ourselves fuck you we are not going to accept that so the military was was like, okay, you just stood up for us, just enough for us, to us, we are the guy with the guns.

We take the power. But I think an element that also rankled in the military was developments in Rakhine State as well. Which was the fact that shortly after the election, the Burmese Army signed an informal ceasefire with the Arrakhan Army in Rakhine State. And actually, the Ansan Suu Kyi's government cancelled elections in many places in Rakhine, because of security reasons, because of the world.

And actually, the Arakan army kidnapped three NLD candidates. So, shortly after the elections, the Tadat and the Burmese army signs a kind of a kind of ceasefire with the Arakan Army, their biggest enemy in the last two years. And the Arakan army is a statement saying,

okay, we demand elections in the whole of the country, including the places where they were canceled by the NLD because of security tourism. And the Tatmao, the Bahamistan army, say we support that.

We support holding elections in the hold of the Khaii state. And the Arakan army then goes and releases the three candidates, the three MLD candidates, they had kidnapped. And the NNB basically completely ignore the request of the Alkan Army and most crucially, the, the, the, the, the, the, the army.

Now, I can imagine the generals getting really pissed off because of that, really pissed off because they signed a peace agreement with their worst enemies and the civilian government doesn't even listen to the woman. So I can imagine their thought process at some point going like, who does this woman think she is? We have to put her in her place. And I think beyond the,

on top of the conflict around the election results and about the possible fraud in the elections, the situation in Rakhine was a huge, factor compound intentions between. Now, most ethnic armed groups, ethnic armed groups in Burma,

have supported the civil disobedience movement and have condemned the military take over. With one crucial exception, the Aracan army, the Aracan army who has just

sign a peace agreement with the military, haven't said anything. There was one news report from Reuters a week ago. They interviewed one Iraqi army spokesman, and he made a very big, a very vague statement saying they condemn violence and they stand with the people and they are going to continue fighting for Rakhine people. And the AMP, the Arakan National Party, who was robbed of his victory because he couldn't, go to the elections in the post last November, they have accepted the military junta. Actually, some of some members of the A&E are members of the junta in Rakhine.

So Rakhine is the only state, the only region in Burma where there is no civil this movement, except for a few protests in the south where Rakhine nationalism is not so strong. So, the coup has elicited a lot of protests, a huge disobedience movement from the Bamar herdlands of the country. But most ethnic minorities and most ethnic armed groups have supported the civil disobedience movement, with the sole exception of Rakhine. Now, I don't know the reasons for the Arakan army to. not to join the civil disobedience movement. And I think it could be tactical. They've been fighting for two years.

They might be exhausted. They might be trying to recruit and reinforce to, you know, reinforce their own forces to join the civil disarrison movement later on. I don't know. But as a citizen stands now, Rakhine nationalism has aligned itself again with the Bamar military junta. So as you can see, loyalties and partnerships and alliances

are very fluid in dormice. It's very difficult to, you know, to make an prediction with what might happen. Brett, before you jump in with the final question of the interview, I just want to clarify a couple things that were brought up in that last answer for listeners that haven't read the book yet and again go out and get the book and it'll make

all of these things very clear. But you mentioned the Arakhan army. That is the Buddhist nationalist militia group in the state that the Rohingya were from. But it was the Buddhist nationalist group from that same state from the Buddhist ethnic group of the state that the Rohingya also were from. You mentioned the Arakhan National Party, the

ANP, that is the political party for the Buddhists in that state. The NLD, yes, yes, exactly, not the Rohingya. The NLD National League for Democracy, we brought this up earlier. That's Aung San Suu Cheese Party. And the last thing that was brought up in that answer that I just want to make sure everybody's clear on. When you mentioned the Tatmadah, that is the military of Burma. So there you go, listeners.

Everything in that answer should make total sense. Now, Brett, take us out to the end of this interview. If I didn't explain certain things that I took for graduate. Sure, sure, sure. All right. Well, earlier in the discussion, I can't remember if it was actually even pre-recording. We discussed you mentioned the fact that you might write this book a little differently given recent events. So I was hoping as a wrap-up question, how would you have written this book differently given recent events and why exactly?

Well, I think I overstated and I think it was reasonable to do it at the time. the strength of the partnership between Nelson Suu Kyi and her party, the National League of Democracy and the Generals during the transition. I think I overstated how close they were. Because at that time, it seemed they were close. And I think that I overstated it because one of the reasons I overstated it, and I'm not trying to justify it myself. Maybe probably, I was probably wrong on that.

One of the reason was that if the Transition has shown something, is that ideologically, the NLB, the Anseltsuchist Party and the generals, are much more aligned that we could have thought before. So I think I probably made a mistake of understanding this ideological alliance as a power alliance. And it goes without saying that the coup is not about ideology. I don't think the coup is about power. It's not about Aung San Suu is taking the country in a direction that ideologically we don't agree with. No, because ideologically, Seychelles, basically there are four things, four main institutes in Burma. as I see, in contemporary Burma. One is national identity,

who is Burmese and who is not Burmys. And that is basically, there is a consensus between the NLB and the military on the national races ideology, that is only national races are actually entitled to citizenship, which excludes to Virginia. There's the issue of the older ethnic minorities who are indeed regarded as national races,

but there is certain Bamar supremacism from the majority that they should be somehow subordinated to a centralized state, and Aung San Suu Kyi has demonstrated that she, I mean, she talks about federal Burma, but actually everything she does is pretty centralized. and the other issue is the economy is the economy and both are neoliberal

basically. Both have and you will never hear answers to talk about where you see with policies or you know social justice or anything like this no. So ideologically they are pretty much

online. The only difference, the only ideological difference, a strong ideological difference. I can see between them is that Ansan Suu Kyi wants the military to be subordinated to the civilian government and the military wants the civilian government subordinated to the military. But once they have power, whoever it is, they are going to do basically more or less the same. It's not that, you know, they are going to take the country in a different directions. So, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, it's a power struggle between

An San Suu Kyi and the NLD on one hand, and the Tatmadot and the Burmese army on the other hand, led by Minam Line. Now, everything seemed to go very well when I was writing the book in this partnership between them, right? And San Suu Kyi wanted to change the constitution. It was the only things he was protesting about to put the military under the control of the civilian government. But the constitution is kind of shielded by a series of conditions that make it very, very difficult to amend, but she was not going to manage to do it. So anyway, you know, she can say whatever she wants.

The constitution is virtually unchangeable. So, you know, in a sense, the coup is completely uncold, is completely uncalled for, even for the Tatmaos, the Burmese Army, own interest. The system was working pretty well for them, and San Suu Kyi was, you know, not a real threat to them in any possible sense. So we don't really know why the coup is, that has happened. Nobody knows because nobody really knows what's going on in the higher records of an military. But, of course, after the coup, I would,

I wouldn't have stressed so much this partnership between Nancy and the military that I may have over-stressed, I mean, seeing it from now, I might have over-stressed a little bit in the book. So probably when there is a second edition, there will be some kind of new chapter explaining all this and, you know, updating the book. well that's a very good note to end on i'm looking forward to when there is a second edition of the book because i really enjoyed the the book it taught me a lot uh i talked in the introduction about how little i knew about burma before reading your book so um thank you for writing it it was very important and and understanding the history is certainly important for understanding the current events and for seeing what the future might hold so again And our guest today was Carlos Sardinia Galache, who is the author of the Burmese Labyrinth,

a history of the Rohingya tragedy out from Verso books. Be sure to pick it up. Carlos, thanks for coming on. How can our listeners find you in the work that you're doing? I'm on Twitter. C-H-G-A-L-A-C-H-E. And whatever I write or whatever I do, I always post it in Twitter. I used to work for the FNus Agency, the Spanish National Agency,

but I quit my job two months ago. So now I'm going back to writing in English, which is something I haven't done for the last two years while I was working for the Spanish New Agency. So I expect to write a little bit more in English now that I'm absolutely managed. Well, we're certainly looking forward to reading that, the new information that you're writing in English.

And listeners, just as an aside, as I mentioned at the beginning of the interview, I interviewed Carlos twice on the David Feldman show to talk about the recent events in Myanmar post coup. If you want to find those, those are episodes 12, 15, and episode 12, 20. You can find the time codes and whatnot in those episodes. So be sure to check those out if you want to hear my conversations with Carlos about the recent events and really diving more into that. So, Carlos, thanks for coming on to the, onto the show. And, uh, it's what invited me. Yeah, absolutely. And I look forward to talking with you again. We'll try to bring you back on Feldo show again soon to talk about the recent events. Anytime.

Great. Take care. And listeners will be right back with the wrap up. Well, listeners, we'll be right back with the wrap up. back. Adnan and Brett, that was a great conversation that we just had with Carlos. I've had the pleasure of interviewing him a few times before, and every time I interview him, I always find his analysis so incisive, really cutting to the core of Burmese history and Burmese society contemporarily. And I find these conversations with him very enriching, and I'm sure that you

both did as well. Brett, I'm going to turn to you first on kind of what the key takeaways from the conversation were for you that we just had with Carlos. The key takeaways broadly is something that I really love about this show and what we focus on, which is the history and then the legacy of colonialism. I think that's incredibly important. And this is another sort of episode in which we do the deep dive and really parse out how that history is inseparable from the present. I also enjoyed the tying together, like this almost Fanonian point made about how race and ethnicity dictates and shapes class in Burmese society, which, you know, Fanon says in the colonial context, this is often the case, and that, you know, plays out and is very true in this situation as well.

And then also, you know, to note at the end there that, you know, Carlos has close friends that are at this moment hiding from the coup government. and trying to stay safe. Many of them, as he mentioned, were journalists. So this is an ongoing situation happening right now. It's a crisis. It's playing out of multiple atrocities. And it's sort of taken an odd turn.

Even him with all of his deep understanding of the situation, it just gestures at the complexity, you know, didn't necessarily see this coming. And it's still sort of hard to understand, given the context of everything he knows. So I think, again, that speaks to the complexity and the nuance of the situation. So overall, I just found it incredibly fascinating, specifically about, as we all mentioned in the intro, a country and a history that we all didn't know too much about.

So I learned a lot, absolutely. Adnan, what were your key takeaways from this conversation? And then perhaps after that, we'll have a little bit of a conversation back and forth about maybe future things for us to look into regarding this topic and what we're going to be looking for in the current events? Well, firstly, I just wanted to say I thought the interview was tremendous. He has such a command of this history as a journalist. I was really impressed the kind of analysis, not just of the current political situation

where he's gone and done reporting and spoken to people, but how he was able to integrate that rather effortlessly with very sophisticated analysis about the historical conditions and changes that have led up to this period. I mean, you know, the book is really wonderful. I still want to emphasize you've listened to this. This should wet your appetite to really go to the book and dive in because in addition to narrating the history in greater detail, he also really used a lot of very interesting, social scientific, anthropology and sophisticated ways to interpret the changing nature of ethnicity and theories of nationalism, particularly in the third world, how they're imagined communities. But he differs with Benedict Anderson's view. And he pointed that out in the

interview as well, that this isn't a real imagined nation. They don't really seem to imagine it as a nation in that kind of commonly shared sense of identity that can be constructed. And that's his conclusion. And we see that that's perhaps part of the reason why, despite the scapegoating of the Rohingya as this group that could be anathematized as not fitting into, you know, the national identity of this nation because of their religious and ethnic differences and being characterized and demonized as invaders from outside or illegal immigrants who are a threat to the society, that despite the brutal and bloody, you know, so-called solution of that problem, like they've been essentially eliminated now, that, nonetheless, you have a very unstable society because they haven't confronted the real problems of nationalism. And I think that's another interesting question. Sometimes national liberation like Phenon, you know, Phenon in the 60s was writing about the importance of national liberation and the kind of idea of a national culture to free yourself from colonialism. But the post-colonial

condition, we can see the ways in which nationalism as an idea or an ideology can lead to some, you know, terrible asymmetries of power and problems that can even lead to, you know, ethnic cleansing and so on. So I was very, you know, after that conversation just reminded of the dangers of extreme nationalist ideas and especially if they're yoked to not only a sense of ethnicity, but also religious difference. You have a recipe here for various I guess, harnessing of sort of certain kinds of energies that can be very, very destructive and dangerous in the way that they want to exclude people. So, you know, that was, I think my takeaways are just reminders of those forces.

And that, you know, if we're going to have true equity, justice, and community, we have to have a humanism that goes beyond narrow ethnic differences and doesn't participate in the kind of zero-sum game, you know, that seems to be imagined in this idea of national races that are legitimate and those that are not in a way of configuring, you know, political community. Those political communities have to be more expansive and ground on a more universal basis of human dignity and rights and justice. I'm just going to pitch out something from the book very briefly. And then I'm going to bring up another point that I'd be curious as to your, both of your perspectives on. So firstly, it's very important to note that while there is a lot of analysis going on, both in this

interview and in the book, Carlos, as Adnan and I just said, is very incisive with his analysis. He cuts very deep, both in historical analysis as well as contemporary analysis, but yet this is still a very human story. And in the book, that's really brought out multiple times about the sheer depravity, and I'm going to keep using that word, of the situation. And I mentioned earlier that he included stories from a refugee camp and included stories. He also included stories from firsthand accounts of these massacres carried out of the Rohingya. And they're so instructive to get those firsthand accounts as to what the situation is really like.

And it really does give you a glimpse in that you can't fully comprehend until you get those personal accounts. And I think that that's, it's so important. And I'm going to, just before this episode drops, I'm going to go on our Patreon and do a reading of both the, first-hand account from the refugee camp as well as the firsthand account of the massacre. So if you're hearing this now, I'll have just uploaded that on Patreon. So if you're on our Patreon, be sure to listen to that. If you're not on our Patreon, it's a great time to join. But those accounts really are important for drawing out the sheer depravity of the situation.

Numbers alone can't do that. It's these personal accounts that do that. Now, the second thing I want to bring up, and I'm curious as to both of your takes on this, as Adnan said, it's very important to understand that this isn't a single ethnic nation. It's a very multi-ethnic nation. And there's been conflicts between many of these ethnic groups. And this is something that Carlos brought up in the interview, but it's even more extensively laid out in the, in the book, there's been dozens of

insurgent ethnic groups throughout the country's history, especially post-colonization, where they were basically all shoved into one country. And up until the present, there's still ethnic conflicts occurring in the country. Just they're armed conflicts on both sides,

whereas the Rohingya, other than one or two small times where there were militant Rohingya, groups that were rising up. At most points in history, they were basically turkey shoots where the government would go in and massacre Rohingya individuals. And the question is, is how do you combat that? It's easy to say that, well, there was a lot of Rohingya, if they all would have taken up

arms, they could have fought back, but that's ignoring the entire weight of the situation. That's ignoring the fact that all of these. Buddhist groups in Burma, Myanmar, were firmly pitted against the Rohingya people, both the military government when they were in charge and again now are in charge, as well as the civilian government when the NLD was in charge under Aung San Suu Kyi, regardless of who is in charge, those two different groups, both the pro-democracy civilian government, as well as the military and the military government, they were always united. in their hatred of the Rohingya.

They were always united in their loathing and their will to get rid of the Rohingya. And it reminds me of, I mean, of course, to a much more brutal extent, at least, you know, in contemporary days to what Walter Rodney wrote in the groundings with my brothers and in the necessity for black power in a multi-ethnic society. And he writes that black power is not incompatible with a multiracial society where the individually counts equally, because the moment that power is equitably distributed among several ethnic groups, the very relevance of making the distinction between groups will be lost. And the question is, is how do we transcend those ethnic and religious divisions between these

groups? And at this point, it seems like it's going to be completely lost because the Rohingya have been almost entirely exterminated from Myanmar's society writ large. So I don't know if either of you folks want to respond to that, give your thoughts on that, but it's something that I'm kicking in my head. When we face atrocities like this, how do we analyze that and how do we transcend that? I feel that's a rhetorical question because how we can answer that. I mean, hopefully through studying a lot of cases where we look at this and understand historically the roots of these sorts of animosities and also recognize and realizing that certain choices and decisions in those histories have sharpened and created these conditions. It was very

instructive to lead to the second section of this book that goes all the way back to the pre-colonial period starting in the 9th century and, you know, traces a little bit what a kind of plural sort of world this was and how, of course, there's, you know, kingdoms forming and, you know, fighting with one's neighbors, but these weren't the sort of vicious elimination as genocidal sorts of hatreds. You know, they were cases where a particular ethno-religious dynastic grouping may rule over others, but it's a multi-religious and multi-ethnic kind of community or polity, and that politics wasn't organized around conflict. like because of ethnic or religious difference. And we may think of these as, oh, these must be

age-old hatreds. But in point of fact, something transforms in the colonial period and into the modern period that politicizes these identities and their differences in new ways. And that, it seems to me, is the real tragic circumstances, that we're dealing with the legacies of that in modernity. So we really need to think about what is the nature of nationalism? What is the nature of the nation state and how it tries to organize, you know, unless you have a, you know, a free and equal society that is able to grant everybody full human dignity and equality, it seems that you end up having the use of various ways of organizing your claims upon the state or within the state vis-a-vis other groups. And that's just a destructive, you know, that's just a

destructive zero-sum way in which modern politics seem to have been organized under the nation state, under neo-imperialism, under the post-colonial world of late capitalism. So it's really insoluble to think, well, how could one solve this sort of situation? You know, when we look at them as episodic kinds of incidents or cases. But if we look at it more globally, I think, you know, we can understand that this is the problem of, you know, asserting political identities in ethnic and religious terms rather than, you know, trying to find ways where we can improve and bolster looking at them in human terms and understanding those economic forces and political forces that, that approach. press and divide us. Yeah, there is no, I mean, that is the question, right? And there is no, a nice, concise answer.

But I think Adnan gets at some of the really important core issues that these problems revolve around, one of which is the separation of all humanity into nation states, right, as a sort of the stage of historical development that we're currently in. And as part and parcel, perhaps even with the capitalist mode of production, nation states, are something like the form that political structures take under a global capitalist regime. And so, you know, you might have to, as many states have, start with the nation state. But there's something, there's something problematic about the nation state inherently. That doesn't solve all of the problem, but I think it is part of the puzzle of why these things happen.

I mean, this, you know, you can talk about ethnic conflict. I mean, Israel, Palestine, you know, the U.S. and countless groups around the world, these are ongoing intractably seemingly intractable problems and I think part of part of it is just the overall social political and economic global systems that we're living in and trying to transcend them I think is gesturing towards something like a solution to some of these more specific problems but impossible to say yeah and I do want to state that I knew it was an impossible question that I was giving you I'm really just you know here for the dialogue back and forth try to kick some ideas around. Hopefully it spurs some thoughts in the listeners. But yeah, I was well aware that there was no good answer to that question. But I do think that the things that you said were beneficial to keep in mind when thinking about how to resolve this issue. And I also think that it's important to keep in mind what we discussed briefly with Carlos, but which is even more fully fleshed out in his book that in a lot of these cases, it's bad historical analysis or

false historical analysis that contributes to these these conflicts so of course one of the things that drives and again this was in the interview but it's worth putting our finger back on once again one of the things that drives the conflict between Burmese society writ large and the Rohingya people as an ethnic group is this false history that they're foreign invaders coming from Bangladesh you know relatively recently to try to reap the spoils of of Myanmar because, you know, Myanmar has such a rich society that everybody would benefit from if it wasn't for these darn Rohingya out in the western provinces. But as Carlos shows, it's false.

It's a false history, but yet that is the history that the people in Myanmar use as justification for a lot of these completely abhorrent measures that they're using against them. And so I think that keeping in mind that a true understanding of history, as well as these things that you both have been bringing up, are going to play at how we can address this issue. But of course, there is no true, you know, resolution to it that we can come up with just between the three of us. This is something that as a society we need to undertake. So any last thoughts from either of you guys? I guess I'll turn to each of you for any last thoughts, perhaps, on recent events or whatever you want to say. Adnan, we'll start with you. Brett, we'll finish with

you before we wrap up this conversation. Great. Yeah. Just as a last coda, I think this is an interesting component in a history of seeing also how anti-Muslim discourse can circulate globally and have both local residences meanings, but also attach itself to the kind of global war on terrorism and these kinds of, you know, reality of the post-9-11 world that make it possible for states to suppress, you know, a local Muslim group because they can attach it to a wider legitimizing struggle against terrorism. And so this is one case we see that. We also have seen, of course, in other parts of South Asia, where this will be the case, you know, in India, for example, with Hindu nationalism. And it did remind me a lot these issues about citizenship laws and constitutional

manipulations that disadvantage these vulnerable peoples. It reminded me quite a lot about recent events that have taken place in Kashmir with, you know, establishing a new regime that is going to incorporate it as a state more fully. and basically violate certain provisions of the original constitution that created India and Pakistan after the British colonial period. So we do have continuing problems, I think, with the legacies of British colonialism globally, but this also is an interesting story to fit into the larger component of the world after the collapse of the British Empire and hotspots and problems that, you know, Israel, Palestine, you know, Ireland, you know, parts of Africa and, of course, Indian subcontinent. So it's interesting that we're studying this.

This is one episode or location within, I think, a larger, broader global story that I hope we'll do more with in future episodes. So those were just the kind of last thoughts about going forward. there are some big narratives that this specific history can fit into, and I'd be interested in looking at other places and histories that also contribute to that larger analysis or those larger narratives. Yeah, the last thing I would say is just pointing to something that was sort of covered in passing in the interview, which is the idea that because of the deep traditionalist strains of Theravada Buddhism, that karma itself is used as a natural of the political system, that if you're born rich and powerful, it's because of previous lives

and the karma that you've accrued has allowed for you to do that. And if you're poor or, you know, you're a member of a vulnerable or marginalized group, that's also your karma. And I just think it's important to note that that idea does exist within Buddhism, but it's also contended with within Buddhism. There are much more nuanced takes on karma itself. And there's also a really interesting conflict between the Buddhist conception of anata, no self, which is basically say that nothing in the universe has a substantial self core that separates it from everything else in the cosmos, and how that can relate possibly to the idea of karma between lives. There's a little bit of tension there.

If there's no soul, I mean, there's no self, much less a soul, how does it get translated from one lifetime to another? So I think I might actually want to do some philosophy of Buddhism, work on Rev. left working through those nuances because I think it's really interesting. But once again, as in so many religions, you see religious ideology being used to naturalize a system. And I thought that was at least worth pointing out. And it pushes me towards a final thought here that will end on.

And hopefully this will encourage listeners to buy the book if we haven't already convinced them of the necessity to read the Burmese Labyrinth for understanding all that's been going on in Myanmar. But you mentioned karma, Brett, and it brings up something very specific that Carlos brought up in the book that was quite shocking. And you mentioned how religion can be used to advance what a governing body wants to push anyway. And Carlos in the book at one point brings up how the military dictatorship instituted forced labor in the country. And their justification for that was that by having people do this forced labor building infrastructure and whatnot, they were allowing those people to improve their karma.

And that was the justification for enacting forced labor all throughout the country was to improve the karma of the citizens in the country, which of course it serves two ends. One is to provide justification for doing it. And two, it provides a, it provides a barrier between the people being able to rise up together and say, no, this is absolutely insane because what are you going to say? Now you're having to fight against religion as well as a military dictatorship in order to fight this inhumane, forced labor that was enacted across the country. So this book is full of interesting tidbits like that that you're not going to find anywhere

else if it's not for reading it in here. so on that note I'm going to wrap this up I want to say thanks to both of you and of course thanks to Carlos as well I thought that this was a tremendous episode and I do want to encourage you to pick up the book because

it it's very profound and it was very incisive so do pick up the Burmese Labyrinth but Adnan why don't I turn to you now and have you tell the listeners how they can follow you on social media. Well, listeners can catch up with me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And I'd invite listeners to check out my other podcast called

the M-A-J-L-I-S. You can find it anywhere on the usual platforms. And especially if you're interested in the Middle East and Islamic world, you might find some of that content quite interesting as well. And Adnan, just briefly, what were some of the recent episodes that you've had of the Mudge list? Of course, keeping in mind that we're releasing this about a month after we're recording it, but what are some of the things that the listeners can find if they go there? Well, we just recorded an episode with Michael Ferguson who studies Ottoman history, and his particular interest is on the African descendants, African community, in Ottoman Izmir, in the late 19th and early 20th century.

absolutely fascinating history that very few people have heard about. So that's one episode. We also had a panel on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of anti-Semitism. It's working definition. And I brought together a few people who are specialists and scholars of the Middle East who are concerned about the way in which it may limit the possibility to actually do research and teaching. on the Middle East that's historically accurate and responsible in describing the nature of the region if they cannot actually describe, you know, Israel's policies and activities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, for example. So that's an episode where we talked a little bit

about those kinds of issues affecting the study of history. So those are some of the episodes we've had recently. And we'll be having one coming up that I think people should check out, which is about another podcast about the tragic story of Suleiman Fakiri, who died in custody in Ontario, was brutally beaten to death. And his family has been conducting a campaign to seek accountability and justice for solely. And so we'll be talking a little bit about that tragic and disturbing story in the context of a new podcast about his life. and the fate of the struggle to, you know, seek accountability for his treatment. And I want to commend you for the work that you've been doing covering that IHRA definition of anti-Semitism on the show.

You've had a couple of episodes on that now, and they're very important. And I'm really looking forward to those recorded episodes coming out. And listeners, I hope that you'll be checking those out too. We lost Brett at the very last minute here. so I'll just tell you his information. If you want to follow Brett, you can find him on Twitter at Rev Left Radio. And you can find all of all three of the shows that Brett does as well as all of the Patreon information and whatnot at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck1995.

You can find me on Patreon covering public health and science at patreon.com forward slash Huck1995. And you can find our show, Gorilla History, on Twitter at Google. Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod, and support us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And hopefully if you're on our Patreon, you'll find that reading that I did from the Burmese-Labins just before this episode comes out interesting

and enriching to the discussion. So until next time, listeners, thanks for listening. Hope that you learned a lot. Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.