Guerrilla History - Dissecting the American Empire in 2022 & Beyond w/ Danny Haiphong

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

In this special crossover episode of Guerrilla History, we collaborate with friend of the show Danny Haiphong and his show The Internationalist Transmission to discuss US imperialism, the Russia-US tensions, "patriotic socialism", and the necessity of anti-imperialist politics.  A very fun conversation! Danny Haiphong is a journalist acting as Contributing Editor of Black Agenda Report, Co-Host of The Left Lens, and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China!  You can follow Danny on twitter @SpiritofHo and support him and his work at https://www.patreon.com/dannyhaiphong  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 den, Ben, boo? 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, everyone. This is Danny Haiphong, and you are two. tuning into a special edition of the internationalist transmission.

It's been a little bit, but I am joined by Gorilla History, a podcast that I've been following for a while, and which I really do respect. So I have them on with me today. We're going to have a pretty lengthy discussion on a whole bunch of questions that you all have had for us, and we're going to dissect the American Empire, past present and future now that we've entered this new year. And so I'm going to actually just kick it too, given that this is a special collaboration to Henry from guerrilla history to introduce the podcast. Hi, Henry. Hello, Danny. It's nice to finally meet you. I've been a

fan of yours for a while. So it was really a pleasure to have you invite us onto your show and to do this collaboration with you. Just to briefly introduce guerrilla history for listeners of yours who perhaps aren't familiar with our show. This is the guerrilla history podcast. We are a show that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history. We look at things from a global anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist perspective through history to try to make sense of some present events as well as the forecast into the future. So a show that, you know, knowing your work, if people are following you, they probably would also like guerrilla history. And just to briefly introduce myself, I'm Henry Huckamacki.

I'm one of the co-hosts of the show alongside my two other co-hosts who are joining us here, Professor Adnan Hussein, who's a historian and the director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, and Brett O'Shea, who is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. So, hello, guys. I'll turn it over to you if you want to say anything else to introduce yourself. And then we'll give it back to Danny to get us into the conversation. Yeah, nothing much to say. Then I'm happy to be here.

Very cool that we're doing a collab like this. Overdue. This is going to be a lot of fun, I think, and I'm really delighted to meet you, Danny, and followed your work on the Black Agenda Report and elsewhere. So this seems like a natural collaboration and looking forward to the discussion and conversation. So thanks for inviting us on.

Thank you. Thank you all for coming on. Yes, this is going to be fun. so let's just get into a question that someone submitted because we're going to be going back and forth. And I think this question is very important because I've noticed this too, and it's very astute for this person to notice this. But under Joe Biden, the Joe Biden administration, if we're going to talk about American Empire, it seems like the left or what calls itself the left in the United States appears to be drifting rightward, and that's the

question. Why is this happening? What can explain this phenomenon? And I think it's great to have you all on because we can talk about this historically, and we can also talk about the role of empire in this historically, and we can also talk about what's going on now and what does it mean for the future. So in my opinion, I mean, basically, I'll just open it up and say that with, this question, it's quite obvious that the Democratic Party has this role in the United States when it comes to the left, left politics, especially for the black left, labor movement, anti-war left. But we have like a general report called it the graveyard of social movements, where the Democratic Party uses its vast resources, its relationship to capital, and it's

a huge influence among these movements to essentially send them to a political graveyard. and co-op them. And I think that is at play here. But I think there's also something else at play here where this empire is in such a decrepit condition. It is really crumbling. And I think that there is kind of this political stagnation going on where we had this wave of social democratic sentiment with the Bernie Sanders elections, the squad, these kind of forces in the Democratic Party moving a bit to the left, but still remaining firmly in the Democratic Party camp. And now that that has happened and things are not necessarily improving for people, there hasn't been a movement that has pressured real concrete change, right?

the direction is still the same. Conditions are worsening for working people both here and around the world. And I think that has caused a great amount of disillusionment, which then allows for even, I think, farther right ideas and even just so-called liberals and Democrats, those ideas to become part of the nexus of left political thought. So you do have, I feel like, a lot more libertarian tendencies, especially during COVID, which has been quite startling to see, right, this kind of negation of COVID as a problem. And I think people are really tired of it. And so they talk about it as something that just needs to be, you know, we just need to get over it. People need to go back to work. Look how much vulnerable people are suffering. And vulnerable people have

definitely suffered under COVID. But that doesn't negate the fact that the government, that the system has neglected people and has essentially left people to die and has also used this as an opportunity to plunder in loot and exploit to even greater degrees, which you don't really hear about all this back to work, back to work stuff because working people are suffering. You don't hear about how actually working people are suffering, whether they're working or unemployed. They're just suffering more because of the disruptions of the pandemic and because there is no collective public action that is helping protect people and helping people meet their

needs. So that's generally not spoken about. But I do think that there's just this overall level of decay and stagnation and a lack of focus that can be partly attributed to the Democratic Party. But I think it really is part of this whole duopoly in the United States, just having no answers for a moment that is so crisis-ridden. And at the only answer, We have gotten, and we can talk about this more as you guys jump in, is the only answers we've got is war, right? I mean, we're getting more war now, these threats of a possible global confrontation with Russia over Ukraine again, really over a rumor, it seems like, over a rumor of a so-called invasion, but now we're at the precipice, and it doesn't seem to be letting up as much as both Ukraine and Russia are literally begging the United States, are saying, stop. You know, this is just not the direction to go in. But it's both war here and around the world.

So you have the Russia case, but then you also have just more militarization. You have a larger military budget. You have Joe Biden calling for increased police budgets. You don't have in the United States any semblance of a so-called welfare state or anything that can help improve the lives of the people. And I think that situation amid a pandemic and an economic crisis and then the fact that trillions are going to war at the same time just means that even in prior crises you had the possibility of let's say Bush during the Bush years during the

invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, leading into the economic crisis. You had the capacity to scapegoat and say, oh, that's all Bush and that's just Bush's wars. But we just had Donald Trump where Donald Trump was seen as this incredible evil, and, you know, he was indeed in evil. He did everything the ruling class wanted him to do, and more so in some situations. And then you have Biden right after that, right after this huge scare campaign over Trump, now you have Biden who was supposed to restore things in normal. And nobody even knows what that is anymore. So I think that there's a lot going on.

But I want to kick it to you guys about that question of why do we think the left is going to the right? I think those are the material conditions in part that explain some of it. Yeah, I have a lot to say, but I kind of want to be clear about the question because, I mean, the left, when you use a term like that, I mean, you're talking about a lot of different formations. So can anybody that give me an example of what exactly they mean by elements of the left moving, right? I mean, I know that there are elements of the left that have done that, but I'm just trying to get at the questioners, like, the core of what they're asking. Does anybody have any clue exactly what they're talking about here? Well, I wonder. Danny brought up COVID pandemic policy. That seems to be an interesting area where there's some division. You know, I know, Danny, you've done a lot on China's zero COVID policy and how this seems impossible to contemplate for policymakers in the West, Europe, North America. and that they characterize the difference as, you know, you have to accept on some level that we're going to have a lot of people die because we're not going to have an authoritarian sort of system.

So drawing some kind of a distinction there ends up also feeding the critique of the actual measures that sometimes are taken, not significant enough, not effective enough in U.S. and Europe. of lockdowns and there's been, you know, lockdowns and other kinds of, you know, the vaccine mandates and so on. And it seems that there is one segment of the left that has joined, you know, what we might normally identify as a kind of right position, which is you've got to get rid of all of these infringements upon liberty. They're just causing harm, increasing the inequalities and so on. and that this is a kind of PMC, you know, centrist, corporate program. And, you know, that seems, you know, some people who are fully on the anti-imperialist sort of left are also taking positions like that that we would identify with the right wing, typically. So that's one way in which some of the spectrum is being scrambled by contemporary conditions.

And the fact, I think, as you pointed out, that there's so much confusion. The current establishment doesn't have answers. And, you know, it's facing conditions that are pretty unprecedented. It's failing to really address them. And as a result, there's a little bit of, you know, a scramble about, you know, where's left and where's right in terms of these responses. So maybe that's one example of some drift towards the rest.

right. And I think it's just generally an interesting issue. I mean, and to think through what are the implications of positions you take on pandemic policy. Where do those really align? What is the proper, if there is such a thing, it's just the proper left position. Yeah, I see that. Okay. Yeah, a couple of things. One is like the inherent libertarianism and individualism in American culture that actually doesn't just arise on the right, but it arises all throughout the political spectrum. We see all the time people even on the so-called radical left, basically putting up individualist or libertarian ideals as if they are more or less left wing. And it's not to say that they can't be, but it's just to say that that is a pervasive cultural value stemming back from colonialism and

the frontier and just this very American libertarianism that is pathological when it comes to anything that needs to be done on the collective level. And the left is by no means. sort of safe from that. There is also the question, though, of the crisis and how the ruling class and the state react to crises. And it is very clear that from the beginning of the pandemic here in the U.S., the government basically said, you're on your own. We might send you out a few checks every few months, but like nobody's coming to save you. Nobody's even actually going to try to help keep the numbers down or really anything at all. And then you have the blue and red state patchwork where you know maybe a blue state locks down completely but it's surrounded by red states

that refuse to and then so there's no real way to do anything on a national level and then maybe you'll even have a counter reaction so because red states are being so irresponsible blue states want to be the exact opposite and maybe sometimes you know go a little too far in that direction but there's certainly i think also online right there is clear evidence that if you play into this anti-vax narrative right left or center you'll have an audience and there's this careerist element I see on some on some aspects of the so-called left again we're using that weird term that it's clear to me that what they're doing is they're chasing an audience they're chasing more money they're chasing more downloads and subs and numbers and that comes before anything else and so they

could become obsessed with this stuff because it so easily translates into more subscribers and thus more money so there's that careerist element as well so those are those are just just some, those are some initial thoughts, but generally as the center falls out of American politics, which it completely has, the center of American politics has actually lost mass legitimacy, can no longer solve our problems. And then so what you've seen historically is the right and the left rise up to challenge a decaying center. And in a far right-wing society like the United States, even elements that are so-called left will still have this inbuilt reactionary nature to them, this inbuilt hyper-libertarian and individualism in them

that comes out, particularly when there's pressure put on the society as a whole, which we're certainly seeing now. So those are some opening thoughts, I guess. If I may follow up, I think that the libertarian kind of inbuilt ideology of the United States as a whole, Brett, I think that that's a very astute observation. I think that that's absolutely correct, that both right, left, and center, there is generally an ingrained libertarian ideology, individualism, you know, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, even on the left. That ideology was ingrained from a very young age. It takes active, active thought and active work to dispel that narrative from yourself over the course of your life, right? Because we're taught that ever since we're in kindergarten or

preschool. So that's something that we actively have to work on. I think that another thing, though, that this is just to kind of advance the conversation a little bit, although feel free to jump back if any of you want to address more deeply on that previous point. If we're talking about the rightward shift of the left, I think that there is many ways in which we can say that the left in the United States is not shifting to the right because it was never truly on the left to begin with. And this is something that, again, this is not to call out every person who is on the left in the United States. I had somebody right in after we did our last episode

with Emanuel Ness talking about the Western left saying, well, you know, there are good leftists in the West. Yes, of course. We're not saying that every person on the left is bad. Like, we're all originally from the West. You know, I live in Russia now, so I guess technically I'm not in the West anymore.

But, you know, we're all from the West. But what we're saying is that there's no real organized, true left in most Western states. And one of the reasons, and I highly recommend Danny's listeners, if you haven't checked out the episodes that we've done with Emanuel Ness recently focused on the Western left, we have two that came out within the last couple months that, you know, we talked for probably two hours

just on the Western left between those two episodes. So if you want to deeper dive into that conversation, just check those out. But really one of the things that we can say that much of what we would consider to be the left in American political discourse was not true. left on was the anti-imperial question. You know, there was some brief stages in American history where there was an anti-imperialist left, like during the late 1960s and early 1970s, where there was the SDS movement, for example, which was an anti-imperialist, you know, get us out of Vietnam movement that was kind of a functioning left, although on a relatively small scale, but there was an anti-war, somewhat anti-imperialist movement going on at that time.

But for the most of American history, and again, just focusing on America, since that's kind of where the conversation is right now, there isn't a cohesive anti-imperialist movement within the West. So you can say that at times of crisis, like apparently now with Russia imminently going to invade Ukraine, and I do have a lot of things to say about that as somebody who lives in Russia, and believe me, I will talk about them if you want me to. but at times of crisis where it looks like there is going to be a conflict that the United States is going to be involved in a lot of people who are nominatively on the left they show their true colors of not being anti-imperialist and it's not a right-word shift as much as just saying that those people were never truly on and an anti-imperialist left it's just that until that moment came where the moment requires you to come out full-throat as an anti-imperialist, those people who were never anti-imperialist to begin with,

they failed to live up to the challenge of the moment, and that's when it appears that there is a right-word shift. But in my estimation on those counts, they were never really on the left to begin with on that anti-imperialist question. Yeah. Really quickly, this, I'm sorry, yeah, the anti-imperialist aspects is incredibly important. And what's the positive side of being anti-imperialism? It's being pro-internationalist.

And with the COVID crisis, we've seen how the imperial world order and how it's separated the globe has acted as the sort of shape, the form in which the entire distribution of vaccines would play out. And so we see, you know, Western countries like the U.S. having insane surpluses, these huge corporations not releasing their intellectual patents to allow other countries to develop their own vaccines. And we see this vaccine apartheid rising. We see that where there's parts of the world where you're not giving them vaccines, variants are going to continue to mutate and spread and create, you know, problems back here in the West. And so we can see that our problems are globally tied together. And you can look at something like Cuba, you know, this small beleaguered country choked to death for half a century or more by a brutal embargo. And it is producing vaccines for its people and for the rest of the world in a really unprecedented way, trying to, trying to do what the West should be doing but is not doing. And so on that, on that front alone,

you could just, you know, tip your hat to Cuba and say, what an amazing accomplishment that this society, against all odds, has been able to do. And look with the U.S., 90 miles north of it, with all the power in the world, all the money, all the ability to do this, dominated by corporations and their interests won't even release intellectual patents during a global pandemic crisis and you know among many other things that is one little inkling of what's coming with climate change because climate change is also a global problem that can only be dealt with through global cooperation which means the dismantling of this imperialist world order but there you know the powers that be are not going to do that and so climate change is also going to be filtered through this

exact sort of sphere of imperialist dissection of the entire globe and so we failed the pop quiz of COVID. And I don't see any way that we're not going to, at least initially, brutally fail the final exam of climate change. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, definitely I see that. I mean, Cuba, I think, has something like five vaccines and a vaccination rate now of over 85% of the population. It's something incredible for a country, as you said, Brett, which is under U.S. sanctions. It's crippled. I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost over these past 60 plus years. I mean, it really is, I think, an indictment on how much. And I don't even want to say the empire has failed in this case. I think the empire has responded. I think the United States responded and its allies

responded to something like COVID exactly how it was supposed to respond because it is designed and built to protect profits. It's protect profits of not everyone. It's really designed to protect profits of the rulers of those who actually own capital, not those who may have some small business over there or who may have saved up some money over here. No, we saw during the COVID crisis, there was a massive redistribution of wealth. And a lot of people picked up on that. I think one thing I recognize is that those who were on the Bernie Sanders, so-called left, we could call them, but I would more so-called them social Democrats or liberals, right? People who were on that spectrum, they became critical of Bernie Sanders and some of them. There was like splits

everywhere. Some became critical of Bernie Sanders in the squad because of a perceived failure to do what they said they were going to do. But then as the going got rough, Right. I mean, this crisis has been really challenging. I mean, we've literally had the U.S. pirating supplies, basically going around bullying the world during a global pandemic while redistributing wealth upward at an unprecedented level in doing what it has been doing since 2007, 2008, which is pumping money into finance capital just to sustain it, just to ensure that their profits do not fall as there's speculation and as their activities and exploitation just run roughshod over humanity. So as that was happening, there was really no answer, right? And this is why we get into this question of, well, what is the left? Well, if there is no organized left, if there is not really an organization that could, preferably, in my opinion, call itself communist, then what direction do people have? And it has led, I think this lack of direction has led to so many different

opinions that have fallen on the libertarian spectrum, Brett, that you were talking about, all of this COVID stuff. Now we're all into this like anti-lockdown stuff and we're going into like, let's all get back to work and school because Omicron is mild. And I don't want to talk too much more about COVID because I know YouTube is kind of crazy about that stuff and they might actually stop us. But nonetheless, this is just one example when really what you've had, even on narratives like Russia Gate or something like that, what's happening with Russia? Well, during Trump, you had very few people on the so-called left really criticizing Trump's foreign policy, his imperialism, right? And now that Biden is in office, there is even more silence,

I feel like on this issue because now you have a lot of these folks who support Bernie Sanders, AOC who support the social Democrats, these kind of sort of lights in the darkness within a holy corporate party that now like AOC can go on television and say, hey, you know, I totally support what Biden is doing when it comes to Ukraine and Russia that that's actually a threat. and we need to counter Russian aggression, right? All of these Cold War talking points can just be accepted and digested. And I think that is such an indication of how there is no anti-imperialist left or pro-internationalists left. And there's actually a lot of resistance to it, I think, because the way that reality is right now, and I guess we can shift into like what is going on around the world, the way that the world reality, the political situation is right now, it really requires some difficult positions to be taken that really counter and fly in the face of everything that the United States and everything

that the Western imperialist order has been, and it will always be as it's currently constituted, even with just COVID, right? I mean, we really needed to do something like what China did, and that could not happen because most people in the United States, most people in the West, look at China as the quote unquote sick man of Asia, as a bully, as an imperialist country, as an enemy, an adversary. But even just on questions like what's going on in Ukraine. Like it really takes a lot to say, well, we need peace. And what are the forces asking for peace right now? It's not the United States. It's not their allies. You know, we need to side with those forces that are asking for that. So that means you have to kind of stand on the side of

perhaps Russia. And these things are just seen as anathema. And I think a lot of it is because of racism. A lot of it is because of the crisis situation. It's hard for people to sometimes see what, you know, ahead and to be able to look at things clearly when a crisis is afoot. But I think these factors play into this right-word shift in kind of this clinging onto, I mean, I talk a lot about American exceptionalism, but really clinging on to what people thought they knew and what people thought was good. Like even this whole notion of COVID, a lot of this is based on freedom and individualism. And these are things that people want to hold on to on the so-called left in order to sometimes forward their careers or sometimes just to comfort themselves because

they don't really have solutions to these massive problems. And so it's just a lot of spitting in the wind. But I'll give it to you guys to comment. You know, the ruling elite on both sides of the major political party divide have been stoking for a long time with the help with the media on the right, left and center, anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda for such a long time that it's really what it does is it lays the groundwork ideologically for people to immediately side with empire whenever anything like this is about to break out because if you're a liberal you spent the last five years being convinced that Russia helped get Donald Trump into the White House that it was sort of like a coup and then you look and then you look over and then

the empire says hey Russia you know that evil evil Russia they're doing this thing to re Ukraine we got to stand up for freedom and democracy and you'll have a lot of liberals give them the thumbs up In Trump's era, liberals in the mainstream media, for example, hated him until he started bombing Syria. And then they all of a sudden they said, hey, now he's finally acting presidential. So, you know, the entire conversation is shaped by empire. And it's shaped with the incentives of empire in mind. And people all across the political spectrum just slop it up. And it's always a way also to deter from the real failures of the American ruling class.

Under Trump, blaming on China, it's the China virus. You know, ramp up anti-Asian hate crime. It's all their fault. And therefore, it takes away the fact that, you know, the Trump administration and the U.S. government was a complete fucking failure and allowed hundreds of thousands of its own people to die with little to no help whatsoever. But look over there, scary China. And then the same with liberals on the Russia side. And liberals also slop up the, you know, the genocide narrative of China as well.

So they're primed all across the political spectrum to take the side of empire when something like this happens. And that's the importance of anti-imperialism and trying to get out an anti-imperialist narrative that dissects the shit and shows how this ideological groundwork is always being made, always being made anew, always being reified, and how that always leads eventually to these conflicts, the profiteering of the military industrial complex, et cetera. So that's an important piece of this as well, particularly when we're talking about anti-imperialism and huge chunks of the American so-called. left moving rightward in the face of empires you know desires henry i want to get your opinion what's going on in russia right now since you're there what's the mood like because we should talk about this crisis this is this is really on the order of the day right now i mean it's a daily news story and things have escalated quite quickly yeah you say things have escalated quite quickly and that's true if you limit what you mean by escalation to media narratives within the

West. Yes, the media narrative in the West has escalated extremely fast. Things really have not escalated here in any way, shape, or form. I will throw a caveat that I, you know, haven't been out on the streets in the last week because I have COVID right now. But don't worry. Everything's fine. Just, you know, if I seem like I'm a little bit slow, that's why. At least I'll blame it on that. Who knows? But in terms of what's actually happening, we have a mobilization. of troops in Russia close to the Ukrainian border. Now, this happens every year. There's always troops mobilized inside national borders.

It would be like having troops inside of Texas, American troops inside of Texas. Is that really some like egregious offense to have American troops inside of Texas? Does Mexico say, you know, there's an imminent threat every time that there's, you know, an influx of troops into Texas or New Mexico or Arizona? I mean, those are all close to the Mexican border. And this happens every year. You know, troops move around. They do drills.

The troop buildup that is happening right now is smaller than the troop buildup in the same location last year. That doesn't mean that there wasn't this narrative last year either. As I talked about on a different media appearance recently, it was on the David Feldman show where the same question came up. If you look at the media narrative every single year. we have the exact same headlines. So this is something for the listeners to do if you are bored. Just go into Google, type in Russia, Ukraine, invasion, and then limit your search results by year. So like if you type it in just into Google regularly, you'll get all new results because that's how the algorithm works.

But if you limit your results to like 2019, you'll find articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian that say imminent invasion by Russia into Ukraine will happen at any. time now within the next month or two. And then a couple months go by, nothing happens. The media story fizzles up. Go to 2018. Look, same thing. 2017, same thing. Every year. The difference is that right now we have more media talking about this story than than usual, which is interesting because like I said, the troop buildup right now is smaller than the troop buildup that there was last year. So it's interesting as to why that would be. And I, you know, I can speculate as to why that would be. Perhaps it's because Biden is the president right now and not Trump. And maybe it's because there's a major surge of COVID right now. So there needs to be some media distraction of how

many people are actually becoming ill because of COVID right now. There's a lot of reasons that it could be. I can't say why. If you're if you're asking about what the feeling is here, though, again, with that caveat that I haven't been out in the street for the last week, people don't care people don't care about ukraine you know there's not like this uh we've got to invade them we've got to take over this part we've got to take over that nobody cares nobody could give a rip about ukraine there is no there is no uh willingness to go to war right now none there is no feeling that they should be going to war there is no feeling that they need to annex parts of ukraine right now to you know achieve some of the glory of the soviet union or anything like that none of that

feeling is present here. And Ukraine is willing to admit as much. We have the president of Ukraine saying, hey, U.S., there's no invasion imminent. We have the Minister of Defense of Ukraine saying there's no invasion imminent. We have many of the speakers of their parliament saying there's no invasion imminent. We have independent bodies within Ukraine, independent military like analyst. There's one that I'm drawing a blank on the name of, but it's led by their former minister of defense who did an And they found that the buildup of troops right now isn't sufficient for an invasion at any point in the next couple of months, probably not at any point in 2022 at the very earliest. You know, that's a full year saying that there's not going to be an invasion from this independent body led by another former minister of defense of Ukraine. Why is it that the country that actually would have a vested interest in saying, hey, we have an invasion coming, please help us, send troops, send weapons.

they say, U.S., why are you stoking these tensions? Because really, the tensions are going up. If I look in the Russian media right now, which I have some media tabs open, there is discussion of an imminent invasion. But it's all U.S. and NATO are stoking fears of an imminent invasion. It's not anything about there's tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Neither one really cares right now because neither of them feels that there's going to be an invasion. It's invented by the media right now, as it is, every single year. Just for whatever reason, right now, it's being more lapped up than usual. Perhaps somebody has some ideas of why that would be, you know.

But like I said, for the first couple things that hit me, maybe it's because Biden is the president versus the last few times it was Trump. Maybe that's why the narrative is sticking more. Maybe it's because we're in this huge wave of COVID and they need to distract from it. I don't know. But the feeling and all indications outside, you know, if you look at any media outside of Western media, look at Ukrainian media, look at Russian media, look at anybody else's media, there's no imminent invasion. There's no indication that that would happen. If it did happen, it would be a major shock

to literally everybody because there's no evidence of it right now. I think part of the answer to your question too is after the withdrawal of Afghanistan, the whole military apparatus is making a pivot eastward, specifically for China, but also for Russia. So after you've spent so many years and piling money and having troops activated in Afghanistan, now you're out of that, you know, that the beast is searching around snarling for the next possible field of battle and conflict. So I think that's not the entire part,

but that plays a role as well. And then the whole thing, I mean, like even Germany is like, fuck off with this shit. Like Germany won't even allow people to use their airspace. Yeah, exactly. Won't even let them use their airspace to get weapons over to the, you know, like to get American weapons and whatnot over to Ukraine.

So again, this is also part and parcel of the sort of decay of the American Empire is that it's losing its ability to coalesce its allies when it wants to. And NATO, it's also worth mentioning. I mean, NATO was a product of the Cold War. NATO was meant to contain communism. And so, you know, the fact that we're, you know, 30 years out from the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO, you know, which again, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I think it was the Berlin Wall, actually, it was promised to Russia.

that the U.S. would not move NATO's boundaries one inch to the east. And so just another example of America, you know, doing what it would never accept any other country doing to itself. But it is losing legitimacy. It's losing its allies. The whole world is waking up to American aggression. Ukraine, Russia, parts of the rest of the world are saying this is nonsense. This is being amped up by the U.S. The U.S. doesn't have the power to create these scenarios like it used to. And I think that is another example. of this long, slow, protracted decay, which is not to say that American imperialism will get nicer or softer or pull out of places. It means, as we've talked about many times, that there actually will be an increase in urgency and desperation and a lashing out as the empire itself realizes

it doesn't have the capacity to do what it used to do even 10 years ago, you know? If I can jump in very quickly before I let Danny and Adnan get in, just because Brett, you brought up something that I meant to mention myself, but slip my mind, is the withdrawal of Afghanistan. And this is something that we've talked about in, again, I think the last conversation that we had with Emmanuel Ness on guerrilla history,

the military is used as an outlet for capital glut. And it's also a way for profits within the United States to be privatized within a very, you know, select group of hands. So we just pulled out of a 20-year war, right? You'd think that the defense spending would go down. But somehow we still managed to increase defense spending after we get out of a war that lasted for 20 years. We're at peacetime. Defense spending is going up. It's like that the amount that we were spending, you know, $730, whatever, billion dollars a year is like a retainer

just to keep the military. And that any time that there's a whiff of any sort of conflict globally, we have to invest even more into it. You know, the 730 is just like, ah, yeah, that's just to keep the standing military. But if we have to do anything, we actually have to invest more. And that's for a few reasons. Again, military is an outlet for capital blood. But listen to that conversation that we did with Emanuel Nests for a longer explanation of that point because it would take a little bit of time to do here. But NATO was also another significant point. NATO has continually creeped closer and closer to Russia. It's very funny that, you know, there was this agreement between Bush Sr. and Gorbachev that said that NATO was not going to expand to Russian borders.

And what do we see every year? There's an eastward expansion of NATO. There's more bases that are built on the border there. There's more countries that are being negotiated with to join NATO. You know, and one of the, just as a funny aside, the Soviet Union actually tried to join NATO. I think in 1990, 1989, 1990 as like, hey, we're not your enemy anymore. And this is just a purely defensive organization. Why don't you let us join?

We can help with defense. And the U.S. said, that's not what we meant by defensive. We mean like offensive defense and, you know, we have to have somebody to be offensive against. And then the last thing before I shut up is I had just seen, I want to say either this morning or last night, my time, that there had been some communications between U.S. officials and Chinese officials to say, you know, China, you have to put up some pressure on Russia over this imminent threat of your, you know, supposedly imminent invasion of Ukraine. And I find that hilarious.

My friend and comrade Nomania from anti-imperialist net was like, yeah, just look at the U.S. talking to China and saying like, yeah, let's team up. That way then we can focus on you afterwards, but we don't have to focus on you right now. Like we'll be friends for the next couple months. And then, you know, after you, whatever, sanction Russia, do whatever the U.S. is trying to negotiate China to do against Russia, then after that point, then we can fight. But in the meantime, we can be friends. for a little bit. I find that hilarious. And I would really love to see the conversations that are going on

about that within China right now, within the government of China. Like, what do you, hey, Ji, what do you think about this proposal by the Americans to gang up on Russia right now? It would be very interesting to see the conversations happening behind closed doors there. Yeah, I think that's absolutely hilarious. I mean, this idea, hey, you know, let's invite China into our new rules-based order. And this is sort of pretty hilarious stuff, but a lot of great points made by both, by all three of you. I guess, you know, one point here, it seems, that's useful is picking up more on the changes that have reshaped the U.S. economy in the neoliberal age and the apparent paradox of increased investments in, you know, military, spending while we're seeing also at the same time expansion of U.S. military involvement abroad or extending bases and presence and through some of these military packs.

So we were just talking about the rationale for NATO has clearly changed and dropped extending NATO, you know, in part, I think is about selling U.S. arms and U.S. military expertise and the parts and the advisors and the training regimes and the security. These all, when you're in NATO, you know, you have to have some kind of consistency of equipment and command structures and coordination. And this is all essentially a monopolization for, you know, U.S. capturing these markets for the only export we have, which is violence and the means of violence. it seems in the post-Cold War period. And you see also what happened with that AUCUS agreement

where the Australia, US and UK coming together for some kind of defense pact. This is a real resurrection of the same kind of machinations geopolitically that we saw at the start of the Cold War with the U.S. going to different regions and trying to create Ciotto as a model that it would impose like it had, NATO. So the Manila Pact, basically, the Baghdad Pact of 1956, again, trying to organize

West Asia into a U.S. umbrella. What I think has changed is that might have been genuinely geopolitically oriented. What's changed is that those threats really don't exist in the same way. This is about making sure that there is a market for U.S. military, you know, manufacturers and making sure that everyone has to use this. And that's, in fact, you know, what we saw even with Alcus, there was this agreement ended up meaning that they would buy U.S. nuclear submarines and not the French, right? And the French were very upset about this agreement that led to canceling, you know, their order, order from one of their nuclear subs.

So I think that's one point to keep in mind. That's the way to rescue the economy, you know, that's been reshaped very much like Israel's economy. Israel's economy is like a microcosm, it seems, of the U.S. economy. It's like lots of high-tech surveillance and military and arms manufacturing. One thing you had said at the outset of introducing this, Danny, I think, was important, which is about the crumbling character of the U.S. empire, it's over-extension. it's reorienting just in this kind of way of enhancing its military sales and so on, that seems to me that while we might be happy and encouraged in some level

by the fact that the U.S. can't extend its power, can't even get its own allies to be on the same page, is that that's also where it is most dangerous, it seems to me. And we saw this, I think, after 9-11, that there were a lot of calls at the time that the U.S. is going to have to be in the post-Cold War era, the policemen of the world, and the single hegemon, and it's going to have to be like the British Empire was in the 19th century, and people fantasize that it could be a liberal empire. You know, people like, you know, Neil Ferguson, you know, advocating that, though always with a sense of pessimism that, well, you know, you Americans are just not as committed as we Brits, were. And so you need to be the world's hegemon, but you probably won't do it because you're solipsistic and inwardly oriented. And that's too bad because the world needs, like, the U.S. to be the imperial colossus. But that is that that's when it starts getting involved in a lot of

these wars of choice, you know, on some level, like Iraq and messing around in, in Libya and so on. And these have all really backfired. They've all been failures. We've had 20 years of failure of the global war on terrorism to achieve any sorts of aims. And instead, it's just drained and weakened the U.S. even further. So even that attempt to re-energize empire in the face of it kind of crumbling has just accelerated, I think, but also made far more unstable. And I think domestically, there is an important point as well, is that the horizon of expectations of people have just declined. I mean, people in the high point of the Cold War, at least domestically, they felt, well, you know, you could have a good middle class life, you know, union job, you know,

one single income, you could have a middle class existence. That is not on the cards, you know, anymore whatsoever. And when you have people who have been raised to think America is the greatest country in the world. And they're told that it's the wealthiest. It's a superpower. But you're not seeing those benefits. And you're also seeing that the evidence is of decline and contraction and of disorder and chaos. You know, there's a lot of angry people. You know, there's a lot of angry people who are going to leverage the one advantage that the U.S. seems to still more or less have, which is not its economy, it's industrial base or anything. It is just its military force. And so I think that makes it a very dangerous and unstable situation, to be honest.

Yes, it is, I think it is a dangerous situation. And one thing I want to go back to something that Henry asked almost is like what could have prompted the United States at this moment to shift its focus back onto Ukraine? Why now? Why is this rumor just circulating all over the U.S. corporate media and the Western media about an invasion? You even had the U.K. come out and say, oh, yeah, we know that it's going to happen. There's going to be an invasion. We're getting ready to punish Russia for that, right? It almost seems to be like this big club, this big imperial club is sort of all coming together. to latch on to this. And so why now? And I really do think that one of the big reasons for this is

right around the end of 2021 into January 1st and new year, Joe Biden's approval ratings were in the tank. And they still are. They're not really improving. We don't know what this next quarter will bring in terms of those numbers. They're dubious numbers nonetheless, because it's almost part for the course for U.S. presidents to experience a sort of highs in the beginning, lows in the middle. But this has been only one year. And he has reached an extreme low of, I think, one third of the United States sees him in a favorable light, which it's very low. That's 33%. And so I do think that played a huge role in this shift to look toward Russia as this aggressor, this bully. And there are other global conditions that I think supported this. One thing that may not

be directly connected, but I think it's very related is that Beijing is about to hold the Olympics and the so-called diplomatic boycott campaign was an abject failure. Really, you only had a handful of Western states agree to not send their diplomats. Then you had the United States actually file for 18 visas to, for State Department officials to attend the games because they needed to be there for security reasons. Now you even have embassy employees saying in Beijing, who are employed by the State Department saying that they're going to leave because of pandemic-related issues, right? Trying to continue this scaremongering campaign, but without acknowledging the fact that it's failed. All the central, there's about five Central Asian states, including

Kazakhstan, their leaders are going. You have over 30 countries, their heads of states and officials, including Vladimir Putin, will be going to the games. There's an overwhelmed confidence, I think, in China right now. And I think it's hard for the Biden administration to escalate its attack on China at this moment, given how vulnerable its own administration is right now. And that's why I think we've seen somewhat of a shift where the United States at the tail end of 2021 was actually engaged in what I thought were very unproductive talks in terms of substance, but significant in the sense that the U.S. was actually, engaging in conversation, not just we're going to wage war with you, we're going to be

aggressive with you, we're going to propagandize and attack China, but actually having talks between trade representatives, between high-level diplomats. And it all kind of shifted when Meng Huang Jo was released from house arrest. I think that was in October, which was a huge victory for China, because China had saved the course and a lot of people, anti-imperialists, that saved the course and talked about how that was such an important issue and such an example of U.S. overreach using their extra legal policies like sanctions to literally hold a CFO of a major corporation around the world in-house arrest for three years. And when she was released, it seemed like things started to shift away from the U.S.'s hand. And now I think, and you hear this in the way

that U.S. officials talk about Russia. There's this, unlike China, where it's really difficult to do anything but project this kind of super villain, villainous framing onto China, that China is like this super boogeyman and it's just all bad. It's stealing everything, jobs, patents, you name it. But with Russia, there's this dichonomy. where Russia is seen as this huge aggressor elsewhere, but Biden and others constantly say Russia's nothing. Russia's economy is small. Russia doesn't, Russia can't even produce energy as well as

it thinks it can. There's like this arrogance. And I think part of this shift back to Russia is that the United States does think that Russia is, especially among the Democrats, they think Russia is more vulnerable. Russia is easier to target, easier to contain. And, And I think what we're seeing is that the United States really doesn't have any cards here. The United States can't really admit Ukraine into NATO right now because of how horrible that would look in terms of the narrative. You're calling Russian aggressor, but yet you're literally trying to admit a country that's right on Russia's border, which you also happen to sponsor a coup in 2014 within and literally create immense crisis and destruction in that country because of that coup. But then there's also, I think, this fact that despite Russia's overall, Russia's smaller than the United States, economically much smaller, much poorer, much less developed.

But still, the United States doesn't really have anything to offer its own allies. It can't offer Europe anything in the way of energy. Look at what's happening to the U.S. capitalist economy. Inflation is skyrocketing. The cost of everything is going wildly. up. And even before this so-called inflation crisis, Russia was supplying 40% of all of Europe's natural gas. Like, that's not going to change because Russia can offer a much better price for that than the United States ever could, given just where the U.S. is geographically, given how the U.S.

economy is shaped. And given that as we saw with this whole Kazakhstan crisis and how U.S., like Chevron and these corporations are in Kazakhstan, super exploiting people, tens of thousands of workers were actually on strike during that period because they lost their jobs just on a whim. But that wasn't really covered as part of this unrest. But the fact of the matter is that the United States is just looking to plunder and Europe is not looking to be plundered by its so-called ally. So it turns to Russia and says, well, we can, you know, we can do deals around energy

and that's not going to change. So I think the U.S. is really, really isolated right now. And the more that it does these things, the more that it ramps up aggression, these strange innuendo and rumors about Russia's so-called invasion that's coming, the more really actually does push the world away from the United States. And I think that's a huge part of this contradiction where the U.S. truly, I think, the ruling has truly believes in its heart and in its mind that it is. doing everything it can to maintain hegemony. But every time it takes a step forward in that way, it seems like things crumble. I mean, the president Zelensky, his comments are just so damning. And so I think it just takes the wind out of the sales of Biden's campaign in Ukraine and toward Russia that, you know, I think the whole goal of trying to improve Biden's approval ratings and also trying to, as Brett was saying, shift the geopolit.

political lens and the geopolitical mission of the empire toward the east, it really is damaging to that. And I think that this makes for a really interesting period because I think the only word I can think of when I think about these things is stagnation. Like the empire, it goes, it goes forward, it goes backwards. But really, it just stays where it is. And the danger for us is that that still means things materially get worse, that people suffer more, because when the empire stays the same, the destruction, the wars, the exploitation, that also stays the same. Danny, let me just say one thing very quickly. Since you mentioned Russia and you mentioned leverage of the United States and you mentioned

energy, let me just tie those things together very quickly. So as you mentioned, the United States is trying to exploit this media narrative that they're putting out there regarding Russia in the supposed imminent invasion of Ukraine, which, as we've already discussed, is really, it appears a media fabrication with no real evidence behind it. However, a few days ago, the United States seeing that they have very little leverage and actually trying to advance any sort of goals that they have within this media narrative, they put out the idea that perhaps they would try to pressure Russia by preventing Russia from utilizing the swift international banking system, banking network, which I mean would be a huge, huge thing.

So what did Russia say? They said, okay, if we are not able to use the SWIFT system, we're going to prevent the United States as well as all NATO allies of the United States from using Russian oil and natural gas. And as you just mentioned, Danny, a huge amount of the natural gas used in Europe, much of it being NATO allies, comes from Russia. Now, I then seen immediately after that news came out that Russia said, well, if you're going to not allow us to utilize the SWIFT system, that we're not going to allow you to utilize Russian natural gas. A bunch of Western liberals, not even necessarily leftists, it's just liberals. We're like, oh, Russia, they're acting like a spoiled child. It's like a kid saying, you know,

you cheated in our game of pickup soccer. And so, you know, he picks up the ball and takes it home with him because he doesn't like being called out for breaking the rules. That analogy makes no sense here because, again, there's no real concrete evidence that there's anything that's going to happen that the United States is claiming. And the United States is suggesting that they're going to preemptively exclude Russia from using the SWIFT international system, which is a huge, huge deal. Russia should probably try to have some sort of recourse to dispel any sort of preemptive exclusion from the SWIFT system.

And what sort of Velvich does Russia have? Their natural resources, of course, as we've mentioned, Europe uses a lot of Russian natural gas. That is a very sensible solution for trying to push back against this insane idea of excluding Russia from the SWIP system. Just imagine those of you who are listening from Western countries if the shoe is on the other foot. Imagine your country is being accused of something or being accused that you will do something. This is like minority report now. Imagine that you're being accused that you are going to do something. And then you're going to be cut off from, you know, whatever system you rely on.

Imagine that, you know, we said you are going to, you know, break into your neighbor's house and steal their turkey. I don't know, something. And therefore, you're not going to be able to take out a loan from the bank and you're not going to be able to use this specific bank to pay for, you know, whatever, your mortgage. Would you not try to leverage anything that you could? against that sort of preemptive, punitive measure. It's very, very sensible. And that's not to say that, you know, Russia's totally in the clear on this issue. I am not advocating that viewpoint at all.

I think that that's a way overly simplistic view of that. But for people to say, oh, yeah, Russia is being a petulant child by saying that they're going to exclude natural gas from being sent to NATO countries because they're being threatened with being cut off from the SWIFT system. that's insane people need to just think for a second like really just put one passing second into thinking what you would do if the shoe was on the other foot and this was being suggested to happen to you a preemptive punitive measure to prevent something that hasn't happened yet and there's no real concrete evidence that it even will happen yeah yeah Brett go ahead yeah I would like to this maybe move the conversation in the direction of of you know thinking about how empire affects us here at home, right? Because we obviously see $700, $800, $900 billion every single year being funneled into the military apparatus broadly, but also like private defense corporations, etc. And we often hear a lot of like anti-socialist rhetoric being like, you know, we're against redistribution of wealth. But I think it's really important to remember that capitalism is already a redistributive

system. It, as it machinates, as it operates just in general, it shifts wealth and resources from the and middle to the top. And one of the main ways that America is doing that right now is through precisely the funding of this military apparatus. Because what is the funding? It's taxpayer dollars. So you and I, and we all go to work every day, we generate income and then we pay taxes to the government. And that government takes that money. And instead of, I don't know, investing it in housing and solving the homelessness crisis, in health care, in infrastructure, and education, and relieving or offering debt relief for its people and doing literally anything, it shovels money into the pockets of private defense contractors. This is a radical redistribution from the bottom

and middle public funds, taxpayer money to private entities and corporations, which then go out into the world and either sell their weaponry, which destabilizes regions and the entire planet, or actually engages one-on-one with these proxy conflicts or direct conflicts. So being against the empire and being against its narratives is part and parcel it's an essential feature of having any positive vision for here at home whatsoever right left or center i don't care where you are on the political spectrum if you think that the u.s should use some of the enormous money that it generates not only not just from siphoning from the global south but i'm saying just the money that is generated from like working class americans in the imperial core um you want to put some of

that money towards like solving any of our myriad ever growing ever and enlarging problems here at home, it's going to require us to dismantle huge chunks of this military industrial complex and its apparatus. Now, both political parties are beholden to this stuff. These corporations are funding most politicians at the national level. In both political parties, this is a huge part of the overall donor base. So then you have to ask yourself, what can the Democratic Party do? I mean, the Democratic Party is not a vehicle for change. It is one of the main obstacles for change and the corporations like like the defense contractors big pharma etc are funding that party so what we have to do if we want to seriously take on empire is also

take on both political parties and and if we want to convince other regular americans who might not be as educated on global affairs the average american certainly isn't very well kept up on like you know you can't even even after decades of war in afghanistan and iraq the vast majority of Americans still could not find them on a map, you know, let alone ask them to find Ukraine. So, I mean, I just think all these contradictions are adding up and something has to give in one direction or another. The ideology of empire is also falling apart because for the longest time, liberal and conservative defenders of empire would assert that maybe not use the language of America

being the world's police, but more or less saying that, you know, American hegemony is important because it actually stabilizes the world. It prevents the rise of noxious political formations like communism, et cetera. And for a while, especially during and at the end of the Cold War, enough people, especially in the global north, bought into it, enough governments bought into it, that that could more or less continue to power them ideologically or give them some sense of justification for what they're doing.

But that entire apparatus ideologically is falling apart. It's very clear that the U.S., far from being an agent of stabilization in the world, is precisely the opposite. If not just from the fund, you know, America is the number one world manufacturer and seller of weaponry. Anywhere that there's an authoritarian or, you know, fascist or military dictatorship government cracking down on its people, it's American weapons that it's using. Every time Israel decimates, you know, swaz of its Palestinian second-class citizens or invades Gaza or whatever, it's American funding and American weaponry that goes into it. We give billions of dollars to Israel every year. Just here, take it.

Meanwhile, people at home are suffering. So we really have to tie this critique of empire in with the immiseration that people all across the political spectrum are feeling at home. And I think we can make more progress convincing everyday Americans by doing that than just talking in these, like, you know, traditionally Marxist terms about anti-imperialist struggle, et cetera, which falls on deaf ears for a lot of the average, not the people listening to this show, but average American. Americans like my mom or my sister or something, they're not going to understand the complexities of the Cold War and its aftermath, right? But they do understand that they can't fucking get health care for their kids or they can't go see a doctor without losing, you know, three months paycheck and tying that together is one of our duties, I think. Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on Brett's analysis of the domestic scene. I think if we think about this tilt towards more

militaristic language and a posture in international affairs, whether it's against China or it's directed at Russia. And I was quite interested in your points about the reason why they might have to reorient away from China right now with, you know, the Olympics and so on. It just does recall to me that in some ways, the emergence of China onto the global stage geopolitically was with that Beijing, you know, summer Olympics, you know, a decade or so ago. And it just created so. much anxiety in, you know, Western establishment that China could pull off something on the grand scale like that. But in terms of coming back to that domestic agenda, this is happening when there's no build back better. You know, you have a Democratic House, you've got a Democratic

Senate, you've got a Democrat in the White House, and yet this system is so sclerotic that it cannot even get through, you know, the infrastructure agenda with some of the domestic programs that would actually benefit working people to some extent. Obviously, the bipartisan bill is just a giveaway to, you know, that other, you know, socializing, you know, the risks and privatizing all of the profits by having government invest and give to corporations. I see that with the military. We see that with, you know, so Bechtel would get all this money. Wonderful. That doesn't help anybody, right, with that infrastructure bill. But the ones that would have been designed to, you know, raise a standard of living of people and put in, you know, programs in daycare and

these kinds of things, you know, that is not being accomplished. And it's hard to explain politically how it is that two random senators, you know, can hold up the entire political establishment. Obviously, you know, this is just the game that's being played. And so, So I think there is this tilt towards, you know, looking for war or at least militarism to distract away. A typical gambit in some ways that historically we've seen is how do you bring people together since we can't find common ground and move the domestic agenda forward. But I don't think it's working. And I think that's a key difference is that for many of the things that you were talking about, Brett, I just don't think there's much of an appetite. People are not interested,

you know, in this, but also there's a lot of disillusion outside of the narrow media and political establishment with the whole Russia gate situation. You know, this is not going to galvanize people on the right to join, you know, behind Biden to face against, you know, face Russia. I mean, there may be nostalgia in Russia for the Soviet Union, but there seems like among policymakers there's also nostalgia here for the Cold Wars that they could galvanize and bring, you know, most of the left and the right, or at least, you know, what we would call, you know, the Democratic Party and the Republicans together around confronting the Soviet Union and communism, that's not working anymore. And particularly, it seems a very poor choice to choose, you know, Russia after

Russia gate, you know, who's going to believe that? And Ukraine, after all of the, you know, floating of corruption and Hunter Biden and all, I mean, who's going to think that there isn't, that there is a clear case for the U.S. to confront Russia in the Ukraine. After politically what's been happening, I just don't think it's going to work. It's not going to be convincing. But what we do see is that the Democrats have essentially absorbed the neocons of the early 2000s. That's the move that's been made politically in reshaping, you know, the domestic landscape is that all those neocons are now here and they're saying, oh, you know, wouldn't it be wonderful if, you know, we have William crystals floating the idea that Kamala Harris should go on to the Supreme Court and that, you know, Romney or, you know, somebody like this should be the vice president. We have a unity government, unity between what and what, you know, the corporate neocons just closing ranks. I mean, that's really all the Democratic Party in its establishment, you know, is, is really reflecting. And so it is a real disappointment to see that, you know, progressive, elected, you know,

officials, I wouldn't call them real left. But, you know, even a liberal, progressive wing of the Democratic Party doesn't find, you know, the wherewithal intellectually, politically to oppose this and push the agenda, the domestic agenda. The fact that that's not happening, it's very, very telling. It's also how brain dead the ruling class is to think that what we need, like you talk about like we need like a centrist democrat to run with like Liz Cheney and like do the no the center is what is failing it's precisely the corporate center in both political parties that is being delegitimized and that both sides on the right and the left are decreasing believing in it's to double down on that and to try to bring together the two like obnoxious

the most corporate centrist weirdos from each party to like form a new party it just shows how fucking lost they are they don't understand anything they live in their own echo chambers. They live in this wealthy beltway up around Washington, D.C. They are fucking completely disconnected in both political parties from any real life struggles. And that comes out in these absurd ideas of like, we already have two corporate centrist parties. The answer is not a third corporate centrist party. It's insane. Right. I guess, yeah, I completely agree. I guess the one caveat to that, you know, failure of this to actually galvanize any support that I would suggest is that when you were saying, Brett, about how, you know, in order to have change,

we really will have to see the dismantling of the military as the behemoth that absorbs the resources and is the, you know, way of funneling so much, you know, money into private hands, is just that in some ways, interestingly enough, in the neoliberal era, that's the one part of U.S. society and U.S. government that actually is reminiscent of the vestiges of a welfare state. I mean, that's all that they have left is if you are poor, your options are, you know, really join the military. If you want to go to college and be able to pay for it and not be under debt, you know, you want to advance in a career or get technical education and skills that may be transferable to some of the health care. Yeah. And if you want benefits in health care, that is the only place where, you know,

in this system. So that is one roadblock. It's hard to dismantle that one. That's one of the only avenues that poor people have for advancement in this society because of the way we've structured things. Wow. Yeah. Those are all very good points. I mean, at this point, I think was it you, Henry, who brought up capital glut? I mean, that's the situation that's going on with the military industrial complex. I mean, that if we want to call it a quote unquote market, right? The weapons manufacturers, the big military contractors, they are also overstretched right now. They are running out of places to settle, occupy, to build bases in, to ultimately fuel even more and more profit. I mean, this is happening across the capitalist system, right?

You can go to any sector, and that is the story. but when it's the military that is in question, then that means, well, what is the impetus that will fix that situation and the only catalyst for that is war, is the threat of war? And so I think that plays a huge role in this so-called great power competition strategy is that China and Russia really do provide ample opportunities because of just the massive land base. that these military contractors see as, okay, well, Guam is there. Well, you know, Ukraine is there. You know, there's all sorts of opportunities to increase to really dump. It's really just dumping. It's dumping these old weapons. It's dumping a lot of this waste onto weaker countries, countries that were destabilized because of the fall of the Soviet Union. And one thing I wanted to bring up in relation to the domestic situation, its relationship to the international is, you know, I think

we're in this kind of epical scenario right now, like to the 2020 to 2050 kind of era where you had the fall of the Soviet Union 91 up until now. And now we're seeing this huge shift happening where COVID, these economic crises, all of it, the stagnation, the incompetence and the outright maliciousness and violence of the military state. I think all those things together entering 2020. And now as you also alluded to, but this final exam of climate change on the horizon where there's already consequences

being played out with all of that. This rise of China, China will be a bigger economy than the United States very soon. You know, and then you also have Russia and China getting closer, a multipolar world being developed, and the U.S. and its Western allies and even its junior partners

and other parts of the world, they're growing at snail's pace. They're incurring crisis. I mean, look at Saudi Arabia, mired in a Vietnam-like war, invaded Yemen, can't win that war, literally wasting all sorts of money, weapons, and damaging its own infrastructure, whatever infrastructure it had on that conflict, that brutal conflict that's killing so many people and leaving that entire country virtually in a humanitarian crisis, all of this, I think, speaks to this period where, like, reform is, is not really possible anymore. And I think that's something that people on the left, because we're all products of our historical moment, and we grew up in an era where neoliberalism was the reform, where this, like, end of history, that was the reform,

Right. The reform was, all right, welfare, state, socialism, all of that, that's done. We're in capitalists, we're in a kind of capitalist healthscape forever, right? A forever healthscape under capitalism and imperialism. And now we're seeing the ruptures of that. Now we're seeing that come undone. We're seeing the world become much more complex, visibly complex to so many more people. And I think that's why we're seeing so many fissures happening, people being mobilized to, against China and this new Cold War, the same thing with Russia. And it's serving this role, in my opinion, of lowering even further the expectations of working people within the imperialist orbit. Because not only did working people at this point, especially the younger generation, grow up in a time where there was no, there was at least visibly so, a socialist block and alternative to look towards the labor movement had been decimated. The communist movement has been purged and suppressed in so many ways. With the absence of all of that, both domestically

internationally, I think we are seeing now people going in so many different directions in response to domestic conditions, which are intolerable for so many more people. Because we know that our capitalism, there is always a super exploited segment of the population. There's always a reserve army of the unemployed. There's always people making too little to even survive. There's always racism, white supremacy, state violence. But now all of these contradictions are becoming so sharp because the empire doesn't really have, the American Empire's allies, they don't really have a strategy. They don't have the capacity to change in a manner that can stabilize things. And I think that's why we see so much incoherence. And I think that's why we see such a

viciousness toward even things like the Bernie Sanders campaign, which was really kind of a watered down version of the Occupy movement because it did not have a base in any kind of protest movement or collective action. It didn't even call for anything except electing more political officials to basically enact an Occupy like program. It didn't really confront power in any sort of way, but you still had the Democratic party establishment, the neocons that you were referencing Adon, you had them all coming to the defense of the ruling class in order to squash and destroy the capacity of anything like the Bernie Sanders phenomenon from having any real impact. So I think domestically, the war machine is serving

this purpose of lowering expectations, putting people's eyes on a scapegoat, many scapegoat. Many scapegoats as many as possible and also in the material sense just fueling the super exploitation of working people because as you said Brett we're not getting anything build back better uh you know you guys mentioned build back better it's not coming down the horizon you're not going to see the massive investments in green energy you're not going to have a fully green winter Olympics like in china he'll never have that in the united states and and a main reason for that is because the United States is very invested in militarism and very invested in expanding its empire at all costs because kind of like in that movie, don't look up, it's a do it now before, you know,

it's all gone. It's the short-term outlook. It's the capitalist outlook, especially in the face of crisis. Yeah. And just to bounce off that, because I think that's a really crucial point. It's something I wanted to touch on in this conversation. And I actually tweeted about this the other day about the Bernie Sanders thing. And we should remember, you know, Bernie Sanders won like the first two or three primaries, and that nobody has ever won the first two or three primaries and then went on to lose the election. It's very clear that behind the scenes, the Democratic Party apparatus, the DNC, their donor class, and Obama himself all helped to coordinate a walkout of the centrist, keep Elizabeth Warren in, you know, keep hammering Bernie for his supposed, you know, sexism or whatever while we consolidate behind Joe Biden. It was very obvious it was a plan. And liberals after the fact will pretend like, well, once you hit South Carolina, you know, the black vote stood up and said, no, Bernie Sanders, we want Joe Biden.

And that's such like a bullshit story to tell about what actually happened. But regardless, I think the main point here that I love stressing lately is that the only way for the U.S. ruling class and the U.S. government as a whole to regain mass domestic legitimacy, alleviate so many of its internal tensions and prolong itself while still being able to maintain. its basic empire and basic class structure would be to aggressively build social democracy here at home. Maybe step back a little bit from the imperialist aggression on like the very public way that they're doing it. Funnel that money back home, build people up. You could prolong the American state and the legitimacy of the two major political parties for decades if they would do that. But the ruling class as we know is not a is not a monolith. It has many fractures within it. It's ultimately searching short-term quarter-by-quarter profits over everything

else. It cannot plan for its long-term, let alone or even its medium-term, you know, capacity to survive and prolong itself. There's that basic irrationality at the center of capitalism and at the center of the American ruling class that they won't even allow a tepid social democracy that is almost still right-wing compared to most other countries. I mean, even in Latin America or Europe, Bernie Sanders is, you know, centrist, center-left candidate at best. But even that is way too far. And as you said, both political parties and the talking heads from both political parties had to team up and destroy even that, even though that is like the way that it could prolong itself and maintain this legitimacy. It's actually very, very sort of like funny and absurd.

And it says a lot about the incompetency of the American ruling elite in particular. And I think it would also boost its legitimacy abroad. Like, you know, if it turned away, from being super aggressive on the international front just for a little bit, you know? It could still be operating and funneling its military apparatus the whole time, but to stop like this Ukraine and China nonsense for a bit and refocus on building up its shit at home.

I think a lot of like European countries would be like, hey, America coming to its senses, it's not as insane and chaotic as we thought, blah, blah, blah. But the important part, and I think you got at this Danny, is that not only will it not do that, it literally can't do that. You know, the state has been so hollowed out domestically it can't even pass basic infrastructure it can't you know it can barely get tests to people during a global pandemic after being in it for two fucking years like it can't and it won't do that but it's clearly if you're being strategic and you're like invested as a member of the american ruling elite how best do we prolong this shit for the rest of my life and maybe my kid's life you go in that direction but like i said it they can't and it won't so what's going to happen is this continue contradictions at home are going to intensify we're going to see something

like, I don't know if it's going to be a civil war, but like, you know, the troubles in Ireland, low level proxy conflict, destabilization of institutions, a lowering as an onset of expectations all across the board. I think COVID was really the ruling elite's way of saying so much, like, you're on your own. Climate change, you're on your own. Like, don't even, don't even expect anything. Like, we might send you a check smaller than we promised you once in a blue moon, but

like, do not expect that this government is going to do anything for you. And a whole generation of people are growing up with that, with that reality. And so what that means ultimately is that something's going to crack here at home. It's going to be devastating. It's going to be brutal. It's going to be violent. And it's actually going to undermine the legitimacy of the ruling class and their continued existence, you know, more than anything else. And so it's that irrationality that's just like mind boggling.

Historically speaking, I think you could say it's the way FDR, you know, managed to save. capitalism in America. These folks have not even learned that basic lesson to suggest that, you know, throw a few crumbs, put in a few programs to at least keep this structure going. I think it's so short-sighted.

And I think that's the historical kind of comparison that instead of imagining and recognizing, well, not imagining, recognizing that we are in something like global crisis where the only way to

extend this system is to make these big investments in a green new deal, you know, in health care for everybody. The basic social democratic sine qua non for a dignified life, they won't even give you that. Yeah. Henry, do you have anything you want to add? Well, I mean, I guess I can just hop on to that last point. And I'll try to be brief because I know that we have listener questions and we've already been going for almost an hour and a half. We haven't taken any of them yet. But, yeah, Adnan mentioned that FDR really did save capitalism in the United States by doing these massive investments and things that genuinely and generally did make people's lives better.

Now, the question can be raised of, you know, how, you know, racially equal these policies were instituted under FDR. The answer is not very. we can question the motivations behind these policies and I think that in large part it was as you know in trying to save capitalism rather than to try to move us into a new stage of capitalism or anything like that I think that those are all fair things to say but we also have to just look at the stupidity and this is kind of I'm just going to be a little bit more harsh than Adnan was on his last point the absolute stupidity of the American ruling class the American political political leaders, because we know that we have this capital glut. And I'm just, yeah, mentioning it again. Again, you can go back to the conversation with Manny Ness. If we want, I have some quotes from a book about capital glutton, you know, things that

are historically how it was dealt with. It's in my hand, basic principles of Marxism, Leninism, a primary by Jose Maria Sison, who founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, folks, if you haven't listened to it yet, we have an episode with. comrade Joma on guerrilla history so absolutely we should check that out but in any case we have to deal with this capital glut we know that we have to deal with this capital glut otherwise the contradictions inherent within capitalism come to a head very very quickly and the whole thing comes crumbling down now what we were doing in the past in order to deal with this capital glut one we

had you know world wars that that did use up a lot of it but also during the New Deal, a lot of this capital glut that was developing even then, and we're talking about during the Great Depression, yes, there was still a capital glut developing at that time. The capital glut had a release valve in the way of major investments in things like unemployment, infrastructure, all kinds of things like that. So we were doing, we being the United States, we're doing productive things with this capital glut that we had to release. Nowadays, the only thing that we're doing with the capital glut, because we don't have

things, you know, except for examples like Guam and Puerto Rico, we don't have colonies in which to, you know, try to push our capital glut onto and the ways of loans, investments in the colonies, which, as Comrade Joma points out in this very short book that everybody should pick up, actually ends up accelerating the contradictions within capitalism because, yeah, it's a temporary release of capital glut, but you always end up taking more in than you put out. And so therefore, you have a larger capital glut after that money comes back into the imperial core, as it were. So what the U.S. and what other places have done in the past and what the U.S. is doing now is trying to relieve this capital glut by investing more in the military.

That's why one of the reasons, if not a primary reason, why we spend so much in the military. And this is something else that Comrade Joma points out in this book. And I'm going to keep telling people to pick it up because it's like 150 pages. And yeah, it's very concise and very helpful for people that are putting their toe in. And I use it as a like explainer for people because it's it's very short and very easy to chew on. But he uses the example of Vietnam as a way of the U.S. relieving some of its capital glut. But because they're using that capital glut, that surplus capital on completely,

non-productive things like the military. You're investing it in bombs that blow up and then, okay, that was the end of that. That's how you start to have inflationary crises and things like that. The capital glut could be let out by investing in things like healthcare. That is a productive thing that the U.S. could invest and use up some of that surplus capital and help the people. We have bridges collapsing all over the place in the United States. We could invest in that and make bridges that actually stay upright when people are on top of them. Kind of a useful thing. You know,

you want your bridge to stay together when you're on top of it. That is a useful investment of surplus capital. Now, these useful investments of surplus capital aren't changing the economic system. That's not a transition out of capitalism. That's just to say that our leaders in Western imperialist countries are so, particularly the U.S., are so stupid that even if they want to, to save the system of capitalism, that is a way that would be very, very obvious and useful to do so.

You're reducing the contradictions within capitalism. You're reducing that surplus, unused capital glut within the system and making people more happy with you as a result because you're investing in things that actually materially affect people's lives. They're too stupid to even do that. Instead, they invest in bombs. They invest in planes that don't work, F-35. They invest in all kinds of of absolute garbage nonsense, militarized. Now they're pushing it onto the police forces and hyper-militarizing the police forces across the United States. I mean, how absolutely brain-dead do you have to be to think that that is something that's going to get somebody on your side when you could be doing the exact same thing and saving capitalism, if that's your goal,

which it's not ours, but, you know, the politicians, it's theirs. That would be a good way of doing it. But they're too stupid to even do that. Anyway, that's the last. thing I'll say on that point. So in the interest of time, I think we should do maybe like 10, 15 minutes to end on some of the questions that folks had in the chat for us. One of the earlier questions, I know you all have commented on it. I have commented on it. I saw it. I didn't, I can't really pull it up. But someone asked thoughts on patriotic socialism. I know you all had thoughts about this in the past. I wrote about it. I will say this. There's been a lot of silence about this lately. I feel like it was almost like this internet phenomenon. And now there's less, I don't know if

there's less passion for it or maybe the arguments against it just one out, which is I tend to think that's the case. But given that there's a silence on it, but it is a legitimate trend, you know, and it is rooted in history. I don't know if you all have thoughts about it now, given how it had this internet moment, so to speak, not too long ago. Oh, was that three or six months ago? Yeah, well, we talk about right-wing shifts on the left. I think that is certainly one example of it. I think it is ultimately sort of a failed project, and a lot of the people behind it

aren't really taken super seriously on the more principled anti-imperialist left. I think they sort of, they show the weakness of their own position when they just talk and try to try to extend this idea. I mean, I've worked in fast food kitchens. I've worked all the shitty jobs you can possibly imagine with like, you know, lower working class people my whole life and never once were any of them patriotic. Like, you know, if I'm trying to like get together the colonized people of the U.S. or get together the lower working class of the U.S. to think that I'm going to do it by appealing to what is now a holy right wing sort of thing, which is the American patriotism, I'm flying the flag of imperialist and capitalist and white supremacists and slave owners.

It's just, it's already a lost argument. I think the people on that side are overwhelmingly, you know, I personally see them as overwhelmingly like white dudes. And I think a lot of them have a conception in their head when they think of the working class as like a white guy with a hard hat on. And so maybe that guy's a little more conservative socially that's appealed to the working class through this American patriotism. shit. But in reality, the working class in the U.S. is multiracial, is many different genders, many religions, many different political perspectives. And very little traction can be gained by going in there flying American flags. I mean, fascists now fly American flags. You know, like every right-wing fascist rally that you see in the U.S., you are 100% guaranteed to see

the American flag waving. There's nothing to be gained by trying to go over to those people and say, hey, we like the American flag, too. I mean, it's nonsense, it's reactionary, it's chauvinist. It comes out of a very white male-centric view of the working class, and it's ultimately a dead end, and we'll see, we'll see, it will never work. It's been tried before. It hasn't worked. It won't work.

Go ahead, keep spinning your wheels in the mud and see what happens. But yeah, it's an absolute, it's absolute silliness in my personal opinion. I'm never waving the flag of my capitalist overlords. I'm just not doing it. Yeah. I mean, it absolutely was just an internet phenomenon. As Brett, you mentioned, this has been tried in the past. You know, the CPUSA tried doing this before. What was the result? It was an utter failure and so much so that they expelled the guy that was the head of the party that was pushing for it. Bill Browder, you know, he was pushed out of the party because of how stupid the strategy was back then. You know, I was that hard, that white guy with the hard hat on. Like when I was in college, I did seasonal work as a manual laborer, fixing roads, you know, taking care of the city's parks. You know, I messed up my back doing that.

Like, that was me. I was with all of those people. I'm from a town that's all white, literally, like, is one of the whitest places you'll ever see. And the people that I was working with, you know, they fell into basically two camps. people. One were like somewhat liberal, not, you know, super socially liberal, but somewhat liberal because they were in a union. It was a manual labor, you know, working for the city. So they were in the city's union. And then we had these very conservative, religious, white, you know, your typical, what you would picture when you hear Trump voter, right? And a lot of them were

Trump voters. So they really fell into these two camps. And you could see this clear distinction, all of the people that fell on the conservative side of the argument all had American flags and some Confederate flags, despite the fact that it was living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, like literally, I have a Canadian accent. These people have Confederate flags on their trucks. What is this? But those people all had American flags on their vehicles. And the people who were, you know, maybe even socially conservative, but they were voting for Democrats because of their union ties, they didn't have American flags on their things. You know, they weren't super patriots. Like, uh, maybe if the United States, maybe they were in favor of the Iraq war. I don't know.

You know, many of them probably were. Most of the United States was. That was a very, very popular opinion when the Iraq war started, um, in large part because of media disinformation, but that's a different story entirely. The point is, is that when you have these people that are claiming to be patriotic socialists and they're they're trying to push the American flag. What is the goal? The goal is to try to get these somewhat conservative patriotic people onto the side of what socialism? How? How are you? What are you trying to connect with these people on? You say, okay, these people are patriots. Let me wave my flag and that'll bring them onto my side. What other things do you have in common with them? Maybe you say, well, this person wouldn't

be averse to universal health care. I mean, that's a pretty popular opinion in the United States. If you're settling for universal health care as you're rallying cry, are you really trying to convert the person to socialism? Because universal health care into itself is not socialism. Universal health care is not what we build a socialist or communist movement around. And that is what? The only thing that you might try to get in common with them other than the American flag? It's a very, very strange strategy for trying to actually advance a socialist cause.

What you really seem to be doing is trying to push for some sort of like red-brown alliance that is married to American patriotism and perhaps one or two other issues that socialists and, you know, some conservatives might agree on like universal health care or something like that. Like it's a very, very strange position to take. It's not a winning argument. Historically, it was not successful. And really, the main reason that it was being done was because it was getting people views on YouTube. It was getting people likes on Twitter. The people weren't actually going out into the street with American Flags and like talking to working class people and saying, join a vanguard party and like, you know,

we're going to institute a dictatorship of the proletariat. What do you think about that? This isn't the work that these people were doing. They were waving their flags on Twitter. They were putting on American Flag onesies, dying their beard, red, white, and blue. And, you know, they were doing it for likes. They were doing it for views on YouTube and they were doing it for the discourse. They weren't doing it to actually advance any sort of socialist movement.

It was a deeply unserious movement. It was entirely rooted in the Internet. So in summary, it was stupid. Well, I don't want to take too much longer on this. Maybe I'll throw in another question and then Adnan, you can jump in. But I just want to say that there's just a few things reflecting on this that I just want to point out. One, it seemed to always be rooted in sort of electoralism and posturing around that.

So I think the working class here is totally and entirely viewed within the voting, so-called public, on both sides of the political aisle. For example, you will hear commentators who are patriotic, socialists or socialist patriots or whatever, they'll cite this poll that happens every year around whether people are proud to be an American or not. and it usually pulls way, you know, it's usually a super majority, it's usually a very large majority of people who are polled. But these are the same people who will then question polls about, let's say, the U.S. elections, for example, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were having it out and it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win, that the thing about polls is that they're very suggestive and that they do not take into account the actual class character of the United States.

How many, I mean, I consider myself a working class person. I've never taken a damn poll for anything, for any sort of Pew Research poll or anything like that. I don't know about you guys, but never has happened for me. No one that I know has ever done that in the workplaces that I've been in. I have actually literally known very few people who are that involved, because usually you have to be very involved politically in terms of the two parties. you have to be very kind of like card-carrying Republicans and Democrats to really be engaged in

those things. So usually what you get is sort of an idea of what the duopoly thinks and people who are very impassioned about the duopoly. And of course they're American patrons. Of course they're because they're American exceptionalists. And they have their own contending views of what will make quote unquote America great and why it's already great under their stewardship and rule. And so I always found that to be so disingen. especially now that we are in this era of the so-called white working class and disillusionment and all this posturing about it. But in these same places where this so-called white working class is being dispossessed of agency and all of this, usually just Trump voters as

characterizes working class white people, you forget that most places like, let's say, in the Midwest, there's a lot of cities that are majority black, majority working class. And their opinions, are their opinions ever taken into account, have their voting activity, their, what they, what they've done over the course of history to try to assert their political agency and, and also to, you know, to struggle to survive under the system? No, it's always just, it's, it's like this white makes right kind of worldview that also negates history. And it was just ridiculous to have conversations and debates with people who, and I actually lost a lot of supporters. I don't know why so many people who supported.

me thought that I was like some sort of patriot, but I guess they thought so because I was very much forthright that you can't negate history and call yourself a socialist or revolutionary or communists. You can't do it. You have to acknowledge the fact that the only reason capitalism exists in the United States is because of slavery, white supremacy, because of indigenous genocide, and how those things are ongoing and how there are modern manifestations of this that have actually caused among real people an actual disillusionment and what everything about this country represents and it makes no sense if you talk to real people and if you do and one of the questions that we had was what's the important of organizing outside of the internet or outside of on the online space and

I think the importance of it is that it's really about education what Mao said you it's not just books that teach you what the world is all about. That's not the only form of education. You have to be rooted in the people. You have to be rooted in what's happening in the real world. And patriotism, American patriotism, seems to be way far away from being a legitimate form of struggle for any sort of positive thing that we could be fighting for as a class, as a movement. So I'll just leave it there.

And the question I wanted to throw in Adnan, when you get your, so you can come in is, what should be, somebody asked, what should be our position on Russia and China right now? What should be the position for the left, I'm guessing is what they're saying on Russia and China. How should we approach what's going on with those two countries? Huge question. It probably be the last thing we ask, to be honest. So go ahead. Oh, well, on the first question, I'm an internationalist. So that's it. That's really all I need to say, I think, in addition to what has been said. But if I was pressed a little further, I mean, what does it mean to be anti-American, which is I think really what the question is about, is people wanting to immunize themselves from the charge politically of being anti-American, because that seems toxic somehow. Well, I do want to change America. So, yeah, there's a lot of things.

things that you have to say that need to be changed. And I do oppose U.S. empire, you know, abroad. So, you know, if, if guilt, if you want to say somebody's anti-American for those things, you know, that's okay. If you're an internationalist, it doesn't matter that much to you. On those other questions, so following from that, I mean, obviously, I think for the left in the U.S., and this is a real question about, you know, we've been talking about it. There seemed to be so many definitions, what is the left, how do you define it, given that, as you pointed out, from the very outset at the start of this conversation, Danny, that, you know, we don't have an organized left that has, like, say, a political party or, you know, that kind of structure

as a, you know, a communist party that's really vibrant or functioning in that, in that way, what is our obligation? I think our obligation is to, restrain U.S. Empire. That doesn't mean that whatever other countries are doing globally is always something that you would support, but you are responsible for your countries. So if you want to be an American and you want to be proud to be an American, you have to inhabit that political identity. That's your citizenship. You are responsible for your government and its policies abroad. So you have to try and promote peace, resist empire, restrain, U.S. intervention abroad.

And we can do that by opposing militarism vis-a-vis China, no cold war or hot war with China, and try and negotiate some arrangement with Russia for security in Eastern Europe that all parties can be happy with instead of trying to force the situation through previous coups and color revolutions, as we've done, we need to oppose all of those things. And not because I think very often, we think your position has to be comprehensive and take the right position. There's a lot of complexities in the world. I'm not sure I can understand enough to always figure out absolutely everything that's going on in every corner of the world and have my clear position that I can defend on but what I can defend is extending U.S. empire, undermining sovereignty of other countries,

and imposing the neoliberal regime around the world, I'm opposed to that. And so that's my obligation in the U.S. as a U.S. citizen. That's my job is to oppose U.S. empire abroad. And, you know, Lenin said it best. He said, the socialist of another country cannot expose the government and bourgeoisie of a country at war. with his own nation, and not only because he does not know the country's language, history, specific features, etc., but also because such exposure is part of imperialist intrigue and not an internationalist duty. And I think that really echoes what Adnan is just saying, like,

you know, for example, I can't have any influence on the internal politics of Russia. You know, I don't support fucking Putin or the oligarchy in Russia or the social structure of Russia by any fucking means, but that's not my job. I have no impact there. What I do is I have an impact in my own fucking country. I understand what my own country is doing around the world. I understand why it wants to go to ward with Russia. And I have to educate as many people as I possibly can on that front. And hopefully that education is a first fundamental step to the sort of organization that can actually go on the offensive against elements of U.S. imperialism or at the very least tie up the U.S. state here at home such that it doesn't have the ability

to so easily lash out around the world. So that's the whole, that's the whole game I think. And that's the principled internationalist perspective. Yeah, yeah, I definitely, I'll give it to you, Henry, after this, but I'll be brief. Yeah, I mean, I think one, the position must be first and foremost, and this I think will build the broadest kind of movement is to oppose any kind of warmongering against Russia and China. That needs to be first and foremost on the agenda, any political movement, any social movement, any class struggle that is interested in this question must, I think, take that up first and not do any kind of mental gymnastics to try to deviate from that. And I think what you said, Brett and Adnan, is like, yeah, we can't have this attitude

of, well, it's just as important to oppose what's going on in Russia or China or anywhere else for that matter as it is to oppose what the U.S. is doing. Again, as Brett was saying, we do not have the, we don't have impact there, nor do we have information that's reliable. I mean, we literally have a ruling class in the United States that lies to us all of the time about these countries, about any so-called adversary around the world, and as well as our own material reality that we're facing here. We cannot just wholeheartedly accept that. And then I think, lastly the position should also be well with those two points in mind we need to also when we are at an advanced stage whether it's individually or collectively start listening to people like ourselves

shameless plug who are actually trying to do some real study and investigation on what's going on in other countries around the world to get a real global perspective so we do not make ourselves out to be asses on the world stage and i went to china with a lot of asses I can say that, who just do not know how to behave and did not know how to understand what's going on in other countries and how to have respect for people's self-determination, their sovereignty, and also respect for their achievements, which people have sacrificed so much for, whether we're talking about all the great things Cuba has done, all the great developments China has done. We have to get to a point where we're able to acknowledge

those things because it's the only way we can understand the world situation. in its totality. But I'll kick it over to you, Henry. And maybe we'll have just the last word after that. Yeah, I'll try to keep it brief that way. We do have time for something else. So I'm going to skip talking about exactly what the question was about because I agree with everything that all of you have said. So anything that I would say exactly on that question would be just reiterating the point. What I do have to say just perhaps as an addendum and something for the listeners to think about themselves is, you know, a lot of the problems that we're talking about, a lot of the tensions between the United States and China, the United States and Russia, the United States

and everybody is a result of, one, American imperialism being ingrained in the mindset of political leaders as well as most people in the United States, right? That imperial mindset is present. That's something that has to be combated. But something that I think also is, is contributing to the reason why we're seeing so much of it these days is because the United States has gotten used to being the hegemon in the world, having this unipolar relationship with the rest of the world. And now it looks like it's at threat. So for the longest time, you know, even during the Cold War where a lot of people try to claim that, you know, there was this, this duopoly of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States, even at that point, even though

that there was a legitimate rival to it at the time, the United States still had something of hegemonic status globally. I mean, they economically were much stronger than the Soviet Union. Militarily, their military was much bigger than the Soviet Union. You know, their relationships with countries around the world, they had much stronger relationships because there was far more capitalist countries and countries that had a kind of a neocolonialist relationship with the United States than there were within the socialist bloc, right? So even when, there was a legitimate rival to the United States, it was still something of a United States hegemon with the Soviet Union kind of nipping at its heels. Then after the fall of the Soviet

Union, the United States really was the hegemon with no real rival, right? The United States was able to think of itself as the bully in the school ground and everybody else was its punching bag. They could take anybody's lunch money anytime that they wanted it. They didn't have to worry about getting punched in the nose. Because everybody else was a little runt. Well, it turns out that not everybody's a little runt anymore. You know, China's been eating their vegetables. They've been eating their spinach and they're growing muscles. You know, Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union was incredibly weak, they've started to, you know, pick up a little bit of steam. Putin, despite all his flaws and despite

the hyper-capitalist nature of the economy here, they're in a much stronger position than they were in the early 90s. Anybody that denies that is an idiot. We have other countries. India that is growing. We have other countries that are starting to form coalitions with one another that, you know, could again legitimately be considered, even if not rivals, other centers of international power. In the United States doesn't like this. You know, the far, the runts in the school ground, they have these muscles now. If they try to take the lunch money, they might get punched in the nose. And when the bully gets punched in the nose, they don't know how to respond to that because for a very long time, they didn't have to deal with anybody that would challenge them

in any way. So they are going to start lashing out. They're going to start, you know, becoming even more brutal against people that they think that they can beat up on. And this is really what we've seen, you know, in the last 25, 30 years, the United States is starting to act even more erratic than it had previously because it got used to the status as a unipolar hegemon on the global stage. And now there's legitimate challengers, China, India, Russia, other blocks of countries that are starting to ban together. And that worries them. And so we have to consider that a lot of the problems that we're seeing globally, a lot of the tensions that are being stoked globally, are a result of the United States losing its role as a hegemon on the global stage. And we need to look at these other powers.

We, of course, want them to act principally. We want them to act justly, right? Talking about China, you know, other countries that could be legitimate other centers of power globally. We want them to act in a fair way on the global stage. But would it really be the worst thing in the world if the United States was not the unipolar hegemon as the school ground bully? What if there were just a bunch of people hanging out on the school ground together, you know, having conversations about things without somebody thinking that they could just, you know, reach into somebody's pocket and take what they wanted anytime that they wanted it? while these people are growing up, yeah, there's going to be tensions, but would it really be the worst thing in the world if there were other people that were the same size as that bully where

they could have constructive arguments? That's something that we should probably be pushing for in my estimation. Well, I think this is a good place to conclude on those comments. Thank you, Henry. So thanks, Skrilla History. Thank you all for coming. Do you all want to say some parting parting words. I know this will go up on your pod as well. So thank you to all the guerrilla history listeners as well, you know, when you listen to this in the future. But anyway, I'll kick it to you guys if you have any closing words. I would just say thank you very much for doing this collab. We're, you know, we're comrades in spirit. We're engaging in a very similar project. So this is a natural unity between us. The last thing I just wanted to say really

quickly, just going back to the patriot socialist thing, is just to say that also, given all this talk about imperialism, flying that U.S. flag, what does that do to our comrades in other countries? What does that do to our comrades in Vietnam, the working class in countries all over the world that have been obliterated with that flag flying over the invading forces, right? So that's just another reason where it comes into conflict with our internationalism and our anti-imperialism. So I just wanted to make that point clear. But yeah, I love and solidarity to everybody out there that listens to this that is on the same page with the anti-imperialist struggle and we'll continue to do as much as we can over at guerrilla history to equip people with the

historical knowledge for them to better understand the present. Yeah, I just want to also say thank you so much, Danny, for inviting us on to join with you in what I thought was a really wonderful, an interesting conversation. I loved it and learned a lot. So it was great. and I know that we didn't get to all the questions of everybody, a bunch came in late. You know, we'll just have to do it again sometime and keep those questions. I hope to see you all again soon. And do come on to Gorilla History and check it out. I think you folks will enjoy it and everybody has to.

It's a must. You must subscribe to, you know, and read Black Agenda, you know, and you've got to be. listening to Danny's show here. It's terrific. So thanks, thanks again for having us be a part of it. Thank you. Yeah. And just final note from me. First of all, if folks are interested more in that talk of, you know, challenging the U.S. as a hegemon, again, I'm going to point to the same episode, our recent episode with Emanuel Ness. That was the other topic. We had two topics in that episode. The Western left was one of them. And China as a potential arrival to the U.S. message hegemonic status. So if that is something that interests you, find that same episode.

It's like three episodes ago now on our podcast feed. Danny, thanks for having us on. Like I said, been a big fan of yours for quite some time. So it was really humbling for me when you reached out for us to come on to the show. I was really, you know, I was very proud of myself for being invited here. I'm not going to lie. A little bit of a, you know, humble break there. people that are listening to this I'll just say how you can find me and then I'll let my co-host say how you can find each of them on social media

and whatnot and then Danny you can shift us out however you want if you're interested in anything that I have to say which you know no worries if you're not you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995 that's H-U-C-1-995 and I also really encourage you to support guerrilla history

on Patreon if you have have the financial means to do so. It helps make the show sustainable. And, you know, the more people that we have signing up for it, it allows us to do more work with it. So if you want to see guerrilla history continue to grow like we have over the course of the last year, really, please do sign up for our Patreon, even a, you know, a couple of dollars a month.

If a bunch of people do that, it means that we're a very sustainable show. So we would really appreciate that. You can sign up on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's a G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow the show on Twitter by looking for at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, Gorilla spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-S-Pod. So Adnan, and then Brett,

why don't you tell the listeners how they can find you on social media and your other podcasts that you do? Sure. You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Hus-A-N. And you can check out my other podcast that I host called the M-A-J-L-I-S. It's on all the platforms and deals with Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim-Di-Sporic experience. So if you're interested in any of those topics, check it out.

We just had Arun Khundani talk about the global war on terrorism. I think it was a brilliant conversation, mostly because he's a brilliant scholar. And, you know, do check it out. The muchless, M-A-J-L-I-S. You can find me at Revolutionary Left Radio.com and check out our other show, Red Menace, where we really tackle political philosophy and political theory, work through essential texts on the Marxist left, and now we're even getting into reading fascist literature to try to understand the intellectual underpinnings of fascism.

So we're moving into doing a Schopenhauer and Nietzsche episode coming out any day now, and then we're going to follow it up by reading Julius Avola, one of the forefathers of modern fascism. so if you're interested in those theoretical deep dives check out red menace well thank you all guerrilla history for coming you can find a lot of the information that was said about how to follow gorilla history subscribe in the description of the video you can support this show the internationalist transmission uh you know in the description as well there are ways you can do that but this was a great conversation and hopefully we can have more in the future and one last thing about patriotic socialism

Stop comparing the United States with China and in oppressed countries. It's just ridiculous. This idea that the flag is sacred, just like it was in those countries. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Colonialism. The struggle against colonialism abroad, the struggle against imperialism abroad has no equivalency to what the American flag is, what it represents, and what patriotism is here in the holy settler state of the United States of America. But on that note, good, you know, good afternoon, good evening, good morning, wherever you are, take care, and we'll be back again soon. Peace out. I'm going to be able to be.