Guerrilla History - Dogmatism and Reading History w/ Alexander Aviña

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History,  we have an informal discussion with our friend and comrade Alex Aviña about the dangers of dogmatism when reading history, and much more! We love these slightly more theoretical conversations, and we know many of you do too. This one fits very well with many of the Sources and Methods episodes we have released, so be sure to check those previous episodes out if you are new to the show! Alexander Aviña is associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University and author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside. Alex's website is available at alexanderavina.com, and he can be followed on twitter @Alexander_Avina Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

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

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckmacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. It's been a long day. It has been a long day. This is the third episode that we have recorded without ending the recording. So we have been recording for many hours at this point, but I'm still happy to see you here. It's always a pleasure. Our third conversation of the day. Third conversation of the day,

we're not getting tired yet. I started tired, but I'm getting energy as we go. We have a terrific guest again with us who's here for the second of these three conversations that we've had today, Adnan. But before I introduce him and the topic at hand, I'd like to remind the listeners that They can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that we put out individually and collectively by following the show on Twitter at gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-I-L-A underscore pod. As I mentioned, we are joined again by a returning guest, not only returning for probably the seventh or eighth,

time of the show's history in general, but also the second time in this recordings batch that we've done today. Adnan, we have Professor Alexander Avina once again. Hello, Alex. It's nice to see you again. Hey, guys, it's great to see you again. Thank you for having me. Yes, hopefully you didn't miss us too much between the zero seconds since the last time we saw you. It was tough. It was tough. I know, I know. Well, we've got a really great topic for this conversation, one that I've been stewing on for a while. And after a certain point, I just realized, well, you know, I have these historians that I'm friends with. I should just bring them together and put the topic before them and see what comes out of the conversation because

it is something that I've been thinking about for a while. This is the topic of dogmatism in reading of history and historical analysis and why we need to be against dogmatism. in order to have a proper analysis of history. So what I'm trying to say here is that I've seen a tendency, and I know, Alex, we talked off the record earlier, it is not a tendency that is unique to the left. This is a pretty universal tendency. But there is a tendency among those who read history and analyze history to find certain individuals, groups, or movements that they associate themselves with politically or otherwise.

And when they do that, they tend to almost slip into this dogmatic view that this individual, this movement, this group were doing something that was correct, you know, correct as could be construed in, you know, a binary world of right and wrong. And that when they then do analysis of the material conditions at the time, the historical events that were at play and actions that were taken, their judgment is often clouded by these kind of dogmatic views about the person or individual, and that leads to fairly frequently bad readings of history and bad analyses of history. So what I wanted to bring you two here together for was just a conversation, you know, you're both professional historians, about this tendency, whether or not it's something that you see as well and how you see that impacting historical analysis and scholarship and not just scholarship but just general understandings of history. Alex, I'll pitch it to you first since

you're our guest. Well, I think I'd be interesting to hear from you, Henry, like how you're defining dogmatism in this situation. You know, when you're trained to become a professional historian, right? You were told that we're supposed to be guided by the sources, right? So we're supposed to research and find these primary sources that then we read, we analyze, and they become the foundation for the type of narratives that we produce subsequently based on our close reading of text of primary sources that thankfully in the last three, four decades within academia has expanded beyond just like state archives and state produced documents to include things like, like oral histories to include other disciplines that have a lot to teach us,

like anthropology, archaeology, et cetera. So for me, as a historian, letting the sources guide me is one of the things that always come back to. When I teach an entry-level methods class for freshman students at my university, and that's one of the themes of the class is like, where are these sources taking us? But that's not enough, right? as we were talking off air, you know, one of the intellectuals that has really been influential for me as in my training as a historian, it's not even a historian, it was Michelle Rolf Trujell, who was a Haitian anthropologist, because he gets us to think about not just the sources and where the sources are leading us to, but he gets us to think about the means of production of those very sources, right? So he gets us to think about how sources are created, what sources are considered. valid for then to be used to create historical narratives. He gets us to think about archives and

how archives are put together. Basically, he's getting us to think about how none of these things are neutral. So from the moment of inception, from the moment we design our research questions and then go off and try to find primary sources to kind of back hypotheses, power operating at every single moment. So to speak of something like objectivity and history and the production of history is is a fantasy. It's a dream, but not an actuality. And this is something I think that academic historians, we should have resolved this question decades ago, but it still pops up once in a while about the objectivity

or the lack of objectivity in history. In connection to your point or to your thinking about dogmatism, Henry, I think basing your narrative and your arguments and your conclusions and your implications on your careful analysis of primary sources, of secondary sources is one way to try to avoid becoming dogmatic in your positions about certain historical figures, historical processes. I think as historians, we still need to be more honest and upfront about what sort of conceptual and analytical frameworks we're using

to understand and organize and analyze all these primary sources that we're using to then create narratives. And sometimes the frameworks that we use, you know, there's a long legacy of people using those frameworks in a dogmatic way and really depriving these frameworks of their creativity, of their full potential, right? And, you know, as someone who I would consider myself to be a bad one, but a Marxist historian, Marxism is a conceptual and analytic framework to understand how things work. It's not about, you know, we understand that in trying to explain and understand how things have happened in the past, we devote a lot of attention to material practices

and material structures, right? So how do we understand those? And Marxism is a way of understanding the world, understanding the past. But if we don't, if we miss contradiction, if we miss complexity, if we miss nuance in the past that we are digging around in, then we're really depriving these frameworks of their full potential

in service of, I don't know, I mean, that's why I'm thinking, I want to go back to you, Henry, so you can talk about what you mean by dogmatism. But I always start with another premise, which is we have a window into the past. We don't have unmediated, unfilter acts to that past. And I still think a lot of our colleagues are empiricist in that way, that they think that we do have some sort of unfettered, unmediate access to the past. If we can just find that primary source that's going to reveal an uncertainty. I don't know. I think for me, the conceptual frameworks that I used like Marxism

or the works of people like Michelle Rof-Trio have taught me to be a lot more humble, a researcher, and to be a lot more attuned to these complexities and contradictions as things that make up the past, right? Not things that should be discarded, but they should be embraced because that's how we are here, right? We are here because of those contradictions and complexities of the past.

And I think that what you say about using it as an, using Marxism as an analytical framework is showing that you're not taking some dogmatic view of events, people, because you're using it as an analytical framework, you're not using it as, I guess, the result of your analysis. Like, it is the method of the analysis. So what I'm, what I'm trying to say, and I guess I can't really explain what I'm trying to say super well, which is why I was bringing you here. And, you know, this is kind of like an informal conversation to help me think through this. But, you know, dogmatism shows up in many ways. You talked about objectivity. And of course, objectivity is, it's entirely false

within analysis. Like, one cannot be truly objective. Also, the sources cannot be objective. If we're talking about the production of the sources, the cataloging of those sources, the utilization of those sources, none of that is objective. People can try for something that is akin to objectivity, but there is going to be inherent biases present in each step of the creation and cataloging and analysis of history. So at least at some point along the line, there is interpretation that's taking place, which is taking you away from an objective reading. People that insist that there is some sort of true objectivity. That is a dogmatic view in itself and a falsely dogmatic view because there

cannot be objectivity for the reasons that I just laid out. And I'm sure that you can, you know, explicate that much more, you know, in a more nuanced way than I can. But also what I, another tendency that I have seen many times on the left specifically. And again, I'm not trying to make this like dogmatism on the left because that is not what I'm thinking about. like we have this problem more generally with people trying to look at at the past, but operating within left circles as I do, this is just what I encounter the most frequently because these are the people that I'm surrounded by.

One of the things that I see is that people have their own ideological predilections, and when they look into the past, they find groups or individuals that fit their ideological predilections. You know, they adhere to the same ideological tendency of the analyst. And I'm not talking just about professional analysts. We're telling anybody who's looking at history and deeply thinking about these things. But what we see from many people is that when they see an individual that has a similar ideology to them, there is a tendency to believing that there is some objectivity to that.

individuals written or spoken word about the justification, the reasoning behind actions that were taking, instead of doing what you were discussing, Alex, using this analytical framework of looking at material conditions, looking at the historical sweep of history that led up to that moment and how that influenced the material conditions at that period of time, looking at the contradictions within a society, contradictions between pressure that was exerted on a society by external forces. In many cases, I see people discarding these analytical methods that we should hold as our tenants for historical analysis

because the person that they are analyzing is somebody that they ideologically agree with. So let's just take somebody who I know that we are all fond of, Thomas Sankara. If you look at every decision that Thomas Sankra did and looked at a justification that Thomas Sanker had for a decision, if you just stop your analysis by saying, well, what he said must be the objective truth of the situation, that is bad history, even if we agree with Sankara more generally, and you are going to miss a lot of contradictions that are at play and perhaps even errors in certain decisions that were made by this person that we would agree with. So it's this dogmatic, like, throwing aside of the methodology because you agree with this

person that I see some problematic tendencies with individuals on the left. Similarly, if you hate somebody, like, let's say, I don't know, Winston Churchill, one of the worst people of all time. I mean, it's true. He's one of the worst people of all time. If we look at Winston Churchill and look at something that he said or his justification for a decision, we could just assume that he was lying because he is a terrible human being. That's objectively true. But if we just have this reaction to think, well, he must be lying because he's a terrible, you know, sack of human filth, again, this is not, this is not historiography.

This is not how you analyze history. You have to actually do the work. And so, like, is this dogmatism definitionally? Maybe not. But I do see, like, people adhering to some sort of ideological, dogmatic view that prevents them from carrying out the sort of historical analysis that they otherwise would with somebody who, let's say, they didn't have any information about or a movement who they were completely unfamiliar with and didn't know the ideological predilection of.

I don't know. If you have any thoughts on that or Adnan, maybe we should bring. you into the conversation. Well, sure. I mean, I think we'll have a lot to say in so many threads to pick up on here to grapple with a complex problem of methodology. And I should say from the outset that this is a wonderful conversation to have that I regard as part of our series on sources and methods, you know, as something we've been trying to have some reflection on in equipping people with ways to analyze the past, to make and study and research history themselves in a more educated and productive fashion for their own activism and social struggle. So this

is a bit of a primer in that same kind of vein. And I think there is a little bit of a difference to keep in mind here between kind of professional research of history in the academy and the conventions and habits and training that's relevant there and the idiom of expression and so on. that, you know, might value objectivity, you know, in certain ways or distance and be concerned about dogmatism and method and so on versus maybe more public and popular use of history, identification with history, and the kind of learning from history that might serve as precedents or what one celebrates in a public political culture and so on. And those are kind of different matters and the role of a kind of dogmatic or ideological orientation can be kind of

different and function in different ways in each of those. And it's worth distinguishing. But I think the main point that I, well, one of the main things that Alex said that I really like and I would have definitely wanted to highlight myself is that humility is a very important and undervalued kind of ethic and quality in history, writing, and historical claims. I mean, if we are just a little bit less decisive and maybe even sort of self-assertive and arrogant about what one could know and be a little bit more humble about the fact that the world that every time and every place has been extremely complicated and rich and textured and various, that you should be cautious about what you want to claim.

about, you know, the past, about others, about other cultures and societies, and that goes a long way into making more useful the insights that you have because you're, you know, kind of, you know, concerned about not, you know, claiming things that you can't justify. But overall, I would say for people on the left, historical materialism absolutely requires a non-dogmatic approach. I mean, that's the whole reason why Marx. was able to cut through so much of the ideological obfuscations of the discipline of political

economy. Capital is a critique of political economy because they saw it as a very ideological mode of trying to explain reality, or at least manufacture a sense of reality and how the world works. And what he was concerned to do was to try and grasp things in their real terms, which wasn't a simple sort of task by any means. It isn't that there is an objective reality that's easy to grasp. We are living in a world of ideological obfuscation. Our involvement in our society, in our culture, you know, introduces all kinds of ways in which, you know,

it's very difficult for us to really fully understand even our own world that we're a part of. How do you expect with the limited resources and the limited forms in which the sources of evidence that we have available to us about the past, how would we expect that we could just so easily, you know, unravel those complexities and really see reality? So that's why historical materialism, you know, is very anti-dogmatic.

What's kind of ironic is that the conceptualization that Marx and subsequent thinkers influenced by him who were more involved in philosophy, conceptualization, and theory, within this tradition ended up in some ways creating a sense of conviction that sometimes accludes people actually looking at the evidence and being able to revise some of their conceptions on the basis of new material and new knowledge. So scientific, you know, kind of socialism is supposed to be something that's eminently revisable in its conclusions and

its assessments because you're trying to look at the evidence, not in a sort of just empiricist, simple empiricist way. You have these interpretive capacities to work through the complexity of things, but you're supposed to actually care about what reality says and be open to revising. And I think a lot of people sometimes aren't. They think it's a kind of a one-size-fits-all tool that they can impose upon the world. And that's not at all what, you know, Marx, was himself engaged in, nor what, you know, we should be. And that means sometimes we might disagree with some of the specific conclusions that Marx came to when talking about industrial societies in Europe in the 19th century, without it meaning that you are somehow kind of abandoning

this tradition. It's just that, you know, a lot of global South experience, people in like, you know, non-Western societies, you know, in the 20th century, you know, you have to pay attention to some other structures and experiences to actually apprehend the world, the world that we're living in. So I think this propensity sometimes for heroes and movements and a kind of secular hagiography that we might have about great figures who are inspiring, it's important to have those identifications. It's important to feel like, you know, there are inspiring examples of struggle. It doesn't mean that, you know, everything they did or said is absolutely to be reproduced in our own, but it is important. And that's the difference I see between maybe a

professional historian's role or task and how that can and should be translated into social movements and active struggle, is that it still is important to have those connections, identifications. Without them, I mean, history isn't very useful to us. It still needs to be something that you have clear convictions about and that you have commitments in. But that doesn't have to mean that it occludes you from being open to learning and revision. If you don't, then you don't learn from history. And the whole point for history and, you know, for this podcast, really, it takes the philosophy that, you know, the past is a resource for our struggle. It's not just what forms the conditions in which we are in, but it also, you know, informs the

ways in which we might carry out liberatory, emancipatory struggles now and in the future. And if it is to be a resource, that means it has to be actually understood. And if you're dogmatic, it means that maybe you don't understand its complexities, and that can lead to, you know, continuation and perpetuation of the same sorts of errors that we need to be learning from. Because I'll tell you, the elites, the capitalists, they seem to learn and adapt quite quickly, you know, to the world that is in order to dominate it, in order to subvert our struggles. So we have to be equally kind of nimble and updating in our sense and appreciation of the world. So those are just some kind of like thoughts on what we were talking about before. Which is that there is a balance of, you know, a professional historian might need to approach things in a certain way. But when this is taken into the sphere of struggle, it's not all bad to have identifications and commitments and to feel supported in that. But when you want to use history, you know, to actually inform your struggles, it's important that you're actually apprehending the world and not just an image, you know, that's projected.

A nun, it was, I really like that you said that, you know, well, I took this away from what you said. It's important to have an ideological framework. And of course, I certainly do. And it's important that we are able to look for maybe not heroes, but people who we can take inspiration from in the past. That's, of course, something that everybody does and something that I do and something that certainly all of the listeners do, but to not look at them uncritically. And I also really appreciated that you talked about, you know, historical. materialism is a scientific method and people are revolutionary forebears can and did uh can and did revise their analysis when more information came in look at marks talking about where is revolution

going to take place for almost his entire life the analysis was going to be in the most advanced capitalist countries and then at the very very end he started to think well maybe russia could be a place that it could be in. Is that making him, you know, calling himself incorrect? Or is he just revising his analysis based on the given information that he has? That doesn't make, you know, him a bad analyst. It just means that you're utilizing information that you have. Or let's look at Lenin in the early experiments in the Soviet Union. The transition from war communism to the new economic policy was certainly a transition. We definitely could say that. And then, of course, Stalin ended the NEP with the Great Break in 1928. Are these saying that they did the wrong thing?

Or are we saying that changes had to be made because additional information was being made, that they could then incorporate into their analysis within their ideological framework? I think that experiences like this, and of course, there were problems with each of, you know, these analyses, which is why revisions were made and why changes were made. that is what happens when you are trying to enact policy in the case of, you know, the economic policies that I was describing or analytical predictions is that you make a prediction or you enact a policy, you accumulate data and information, you analyze that using the analytical method according to your ideological framework, and in our case, historical materialism, and then you revise your prediction or revise your policy and then take in more.

information in order to conduct further revisions until you have something that is, you know, looking like something that would be fitting within your ideological frame, but is also a product of analysis of the objective material conditions and objective realities at play. I think that that's something really important. And that's something that ability to say, well, you know, we can look at this information. We kind of realize we have to do something. else, that is going to prevent you from being dogmatic in your decision making in your analysis, the ability to say we need to do something different because the information that we're coming in is contradictory to what we are doing at the present time, given the present

conditions. Yeah, I think, you know, this, if we're talking about historical materialism, it's not necessarily designed to immediately provide answers. It's designed to help us critically interrogate the way the world is and why the world is the way that it is, right? So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a particular way that helps us kind of think critically about the existing and past status of things. So in that, in that sense, it is a, it's a way of critique, right? It's a way of, you know, Marx's letter to Rouge, right? We have that famous quote about ruthless criticism of all that exists. Right. But if you

keep like reading the rest of the quote, it's like ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just a little afraid of conflict with the powers that be. So there's an openness, right, of this system of critical and radical interrogation of material reality that I think it's at its best. It's open. It's unpredictable. But it gives us a way to think about why these structures and why these processes and why these individuals existed and acted in the way that they did in particular context, right? And then we have, you know, people who, again, thinking about historical materialism and Marxism,

then you have people who outside of a European context, who are inspired by this method of thinking about the world, who, when they apply it to Algeria, when they apply it to certain parts of Africa, you know, to paraphrase Fanon, you've got to stretch it a little bit, right? You have to modify it within the context that you are using to analyze.

someone like Mariattegui in Peru, who went to Europe during World War I, learned about Marxism, went back to Peru and he's like, what I learned about Marxism in Europe is not matching up to the historical and actual reality in Peru. And he, he, and then engaged in this really creative intellectual process of seeing, you know, what happens when you re-contextualized this way of thinking about and analyzing the world in a Peruvian context. And we get, you know, these amazing ideas about Inca socialism. about, you know, a way of, he basically Latin Americanized Marxism in a way that most accurately reflected what actually happened historically in Latin America, in contrast to what happened in Britain in the 19th century or Western Europe in the 19th century. At bottom, these are open, creative processes of critical reflection and interrogation.

And we, to go back to something that Adnan said, right, if we approach this with humility, with intellectual humility, we can't go wrong. Right. And I think that's what this is partly about. I think we're not necessarily trained as professional historians to be intellectually humble. If anything, when we're in graduate programs, we're trained to stake out our ground to show how brilliant we are to create a little niche for ourselves. They're not necessarily asking you, one, to create camaraderly relationships with your other fellow grass students. You actually have to push against certain incentives to create community. And two, they're not teaching you how to be humble intellectually. historically. They're actually asking you to be very bold in making claims because then that's going to state your place within the field and that's going to make you unique and that's what's going to allow you to get a job. But I think it's a really, it's a, for me at least, it's probably the most valuable ethic that we can practice as historians because that will really guide us. It will allow us once again to follow the sources. The sources are the ones who are supposed to guide

us in terms of how to think about things on a broader level, right? You know, I have this, just to give one example from grad school, I remember my very first year, my resources and sources and methods class as a first year history student, we had a very arrogant French historian come in and they said, you know, whatever theory you guys are reading, you need to throw it in the garbage. What you should be reading right now is Walter Benjamin. He's all that matters. and I remember being really angry about that

because at that point I wasn't reading Benjamin I'm reading other Marxists, other leftists, right? And I was like, you know what? I'm going to show this professor, I'm never going to read about Walter Benjamin. Years later, I go to the field and I'm doing oral histories in southern Mexico trying to do this dissertation on peasant guerrilla movements

and these people are articulating very interesting ideas of how they conceptualize the past in very non-linear ways. right in very non-capitalistic progressive ways they think about you know they're they're telling me versions of historical movement that are cyclical that is cyclical or they're talking about for them moments when history actually stops right when the disappearance of their loved one when the military disappeared their son or daughter they would tell me you know for me time stopped it hasn't progressed since that day that i learned my loved one had been disappeared and i have spent 30 years

awaiting their return even though they know that person is most likely dead At the same time that I was in the, you know, collecting these oral histories, I've, by chance, read Walter Benjamin's on the concept of history. And I started to see how my sources, these living people's articulation and definition of what history is and how time moves was very close to how he described the movement of history and that really short but dense and brilliant piece that I forced my first year students to read and I feel bad, you know, it's, I'm probably like punishing them, but it's such a rich, dense piece. And then that's just to give an example that in that sense, my sources, my research led me to certain theoretical frameworks that helped enrich how I understood what these people were telling me, what they were telling me about how history moves, what structures history, and how, you know, how they experience their everyday lives in a moment of, you know, in that instance, of immense state repression. So that's just like one really specific example of how, again, if we are intellectually humble, ethically humble when we approach our topics and our research, we are going to be led in unexpected but very productive directions because in the end we can't, like history is just what we think of history in the past in and of itself is almost like a constructed reality, right? Like, so if we're not, if we actually want to get at something material and that actually happened in the past, I think we have to maintain that ethic of humility to recognize that we're only going to capture a very small sliver of that.

It's an important one. It's a significant one. It's going to be mediated through a variety of different ways from sources to our own personal experiences. But it is nonetheless something that's worth rescuing from the condescension of posterity to paraphrase E.P. Thompson, right? Like, it matters. And that gets us to the question.

why we do what we do anyway. Like that's what I ask my students. Why are we studying history? What's the purpose of it? Why are we trying to, what are we trying to learn from it? Can we learn from it? And inevitably I'll get a student who says,

well, we want to learn from the past to avoid repeating the mistakes. And I'm like, okay, let's talk about this. And then that leads to weeks of discussion about the utility of the past or what we identify as a past or what segments of the past are considered valid and legitimate and others are just buried. keeping that idea of openness and contradiction and creativity alive for me is one way to avoid falling into dogmatic traps. Not anything that you want to add on that.

Well, just that that's sort of a beautiful kind of high end to history, you know? I mean, that's what makes studying history so wonderful to my mind is that it is absolutely stranger than the biggest fantasy or science fiction novel that you can come up with is like it's weirder and more strange what actually

happens, you know, the sort of stories are actually, you know, so much more compelling than ones that you could make up. And that's the kind of richness of human experience. And yeah, somebody who works on a very

kind of obscure world of the pre-modern, you know, that doesn't kind of fit very well into kind of progressive kind of notions of history, that if you want to take it seriously, you know, it's either just all irrelevant because it's what we had to escape, you know, in order to become modern and enlightened and all of that. Or you value it, and sometimes people who value it are romantic. you know, kind of committed to, you know, very conservative sort of senses of identity, you know. And so there's a real issue there. So, and sometimes I kind of wonder, okay, what is it that I actually find attractive and interesting about pre-modern history? Because I'm not somebody who thinks that it's just

a irrelevancy, but I also don't think it should be romanticized, you know, for kind of a sense that I think we see a lot, for example, on the, you know, kind of modern right wing is really investment in kind of free modern medieval history as when the world made sense before, like, you know, kind of all these terrible things that happened like democracy or, you know, gender rights or, you know, all this kind of stuff that a modern, you know, kind of conservatives find so deeply threatening and disturbing and confusing about modern life. I'm not, in either of the camps. So what is it, you know, that that attracts me and compels me? Well, part of it is also just the, the stretching that you have to do in the same way that if you want to theorize and

understand kind of non-Western, you know, society is coming out of and struggling against colonialism and you have to, you know, kind of stretch marks, you know, to make sense of these, of these worlds. Likewise, you have to really stretch. If you want to still think that these are human beings, how can you understand them when their world is so different? You have to really exercise your imagination to make some kind of connection and to see them as human beings who are products of their society as well as shaping their society and as agents somehow and not just prisoners of like, you know, superstitious beliefs and so on, but as complex people navigating a world that was difficult, you know, to understand. So I like that aspect of it because

I think it helps train you to really deal with uncomfortable and difficult problems, you know, even today and to look at people who are very different and to say, well, there's something that they have and that they understand. And even if they oppose what I view or, you know, you got to, you know, even if you want to make change, you have to understand and have some empathy with people who seem really different from you and have some way of kind of communicating and bridging that gap. And so I think that, you know, far histories require you to do that in the same way that anthropology does, you know, like the past is a foreign country, you know, and you want to defamiliarize. You know, the worst is, and I think the worst dogmatism is when

you have a presentist bias in history where you think and don't think, don't see those mediations and challenges of understanding and just assume well you know um it must be kind of easy to understand or explain them either explain them away because they're different or you know assume that it must be exactly the same as me and you know so those are both the two sides of a dogmatism you know that you that can occlude your understanding and be really unhelpful and uh so i that's one thing that i like about the challenge of really trying to understand and the end of the end ethics that come with it is then that you have to really exercise your empathy and imagination to make sense of things. So that's some of what Alex was just saying that kind of inspired

some of my interests in the premodern past is that it is that kind of a challenge to make sense of that I think is healthy for political analysis and cultural and analysis in the contemporary world. I think that in addition to humility, the second ethics is empathy that you mentioned Adnan is empathy. That's the, I think those are two of the guiding ethics that we should have as historical researchers. And you're exactly right with everything you said.

Although I, I will disagree with you on one thing or not. I think what you focus on in pre-modern history is more important than ever. One of the, you know, as happy, you know, I started teaching in 2009 and one way that I thought I could reach American students who had been, you know, conditioned by eight, nine, 10 years of war on terror stuff was what I started my, you know, one of the ways I would start my history of Mexico class was to start with Al-Andalus. And to give them a vision of, you know, they went a historical vision of what happened in the centuries before 1492 on the Iberian peninsula that would challenge what they thought they knew about Islam, uh, that had been

completely shaped and conditioned by post 9-11 life, everyday life in the United States. And I think it's really important, right? And to go back to Benjamine, history is not moving in a linear progressive way in which things are always getting more advanced, more progressive, better in the future, right? It's way messier than that. It requires struggle, right? I still, that's where we go back to historical materialism. What drives history? One of the things that drives it is struggle, a variety of different struggles, but as we would say, class struggle, right? But pre-modern history is still really important. I'm just going to read this tweet from the Israeli minister, foreign ministry from late May.

This is one of those things you read online as a professional historian. You're like, this is a crime against history. Something needs to happen. So this happened because Spain recognized Palestine as a nation. And the response of the foreign minister of Israel was to tweet this. In response to Spain's recognition of a Palestinian state and the anti-Semitic call Spain's deputy prime minister to not just recognize a Palestinian state, but to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea, I have decided to sever the connection between Spain's representation

in Israel and the Palestinians and to prohibit the Spanish consulate in Jerusalem from providing services to Palestinians from the West Bank. If this ignorant, hate-filled individual wants to understand what radical Islam truly seeks, she should steady the 700 years of Islamic rule in Al-Andalus, today's Spain. incredible that is history matters at the very least to push back against that type of weaponization absolutely i mean and this is kind of what i was mentioning about um the sort of still or was thinking about the selectivity of its deployment you know and also how we have to attend to the way it can be used and i guess i should say abused because

that's the great example that you gave to reinforce and mobilize certain kinds of, you know, power, positions of power today and to protect kind of certain kinds of status today and certain kind of idea of community and belonging and identity that is reinforced by certain visions of the past. And so you're absolutely right that kind of what sent me into medieval was kind of this like interest in like you know the difficulty of trying to imagine a world that's very different and thinking also that oh you know won't none of it will be relevant and who wants to be embroiled in all of these kind of this is you know when I was a very young person be embroiled in all of these kind of sectarian and political and contest I just want to go back

and kind of try and wrestle with like you know these kinds of other issues but you know as it turns out, the kinds of things I was interested, it became increasingly relevant because of the way in which they were mobilized, the way in which people were kind of thinking about the so-called clash of civilizations and the kind of histories that were implied there of inevitable necessary conflict between peoples. And it pushed me to, you know, really kind of say that, you know, one doesn't want to say that Alondoulos is itself, um, or the model for interreligious relations, but it is important to destabilize the idea that there's only one way in which people can relate to one another. And it must be this

conflictual, impossible to have multi-religious or multi-ethnic societies. But to say, no, we have other narratives that we could draw upon. So I do think that it is helpful and it is useful. And it actually kind of connects the two previous conversations I've had today with Henry which is that, you know, the kind of roots of Islamophobia, which I went to this conference recently, you know, my perspective is you really have to take a long d'uray look at how this has been produced in Western forms of identity and community, who's in, who's out, the belonging, and the way in which anti-Semitism, this is something that the Israeli ambassador, I wish they knew and understood better, is the interrelationship between anti-Semitism and Islamophism. phobia in medieval Europe and subsequent kind of reinforcing of that over the ages that only Zionism severed by suddenly adopting all of the kind of tropes of anti-Semitism as what needed to be, you know, kind of transcended, you know, by actually aligning and associating with European colonial supremacist civilization by engaging in a settler colonial project, which is the only way to escape. anti-Semitism was to go and become like crusaders and colonialists against, you know, indigenous peoples elsewhere against the Saracen, you know, enemy. And so it's, it's so useful to have that kind of capacious historical sense of a long duet because we do need to contextualize

things in their moments, but we also need to see, well, you know, how have these been part of longer structures that get repeated, not because they inevitably have this force, but because people find renewed investments in invoking and perpetuating those structures of difference, of power, asymmetry, and so on. And I think it just helps to have a long sense of history to draw upon, partly because what the forces we're fighting against also try and root their kinds of sense of what's natural, what's normal in this kind of long sense of connecting them, either to ancient, you know, Raul, and Greece, and this is our heritage, and it's always been, you know, kind of opposed to the east, you know, or, you know, in this kind of crusader mentality

that, of course, as you were pointing out, is something that I'm interested in is so connected with the way in which the global war on terror was imagined, you know, and the categories that really that it used. So I'm so glad that you said that because it pulls me into not just the methodological abstruseness of the pre-modern, but actually also how like the uncanny, it becomes very relevant to the contemporary and resurfaces in ways that, you know, wouldn't, you know, follow a kind of simple logic, you know, if you didn't follow these different moments of suppressed histories, of re-invoked histories of trauma and oppression in the way in which they function. In all of that trauma and oppression breeds contradiction. And those contradictions, unless they are

resolved, will fester under the surface in some cases at the forefront and others. But those contradictions, and in many, you know, that's what's driving history, the contradictions within the society, whether that's between the classes within a society, Whether that's contradictions that are present from, you know, some oppression that was taking place under a previous society, that the society then had some sort of transition, but hadn't grappled with that oppressive nature in some way. That contradiction will still be present and will then color decisions that are being made will color the way that society is then perpetuating itself even under this new system, this radically different system. those contradictions will still be there unless they are dealt with directly. And I think that that's something that also has to be borne in mind whenever we think about this history

and why taking a long-dure approach is really important is that these contradictions arise as a result of things that happened in the past. They perpetuate themselves through time, and the contradictions that are in play today did not necessarily begin today, but they are a result of that longer history. That is why we have to understand the longer history. If we don't, we can't understand the contradictions that are present now. And if we don't understand the contradictions that are present now, we don't

understand anything about what's going on now. So I think that that is really, really important, Adnan. And by the way, since you mentioned that Islamophobia conference that you were at, just to mention for the listeners, that's a Patreon episode that we just recorded your reflections on the conference that you were at. So if you're wondering where that episode is and, you know, didn't find it on our general feed, it was a Patreon episode, just a short little thing. Right. And the other component, just the last point, the second kind of way in which this kind of

question of dogmatism, you know, relates to a previous conversation we had together and with Alex, is that, you know, we can't treat history and the way we identify, you know, which is exactly what I was. talking about the problem of this kind of clash of civilizations and the way in which right-wing mobilization of history is being used to exclude others and pit groups against one another is that we can't treat history like football supporters, you know? I mean, that's the thing is that that's how dogmatism really comes in. It's okay for football to absolutely, you know, like despise your opponents and to, you know, think that they're evil and the devil. But, you know, that's because

It's a game and, you know, it's sort of, it's something that we can use to kind of disconnect and unravel like real politics and real kind of sense of community in this sort of, you know, entertaining way. But like when we actually treat peoples and cultures and, you know, the histories behind them, the, the ways. way football fans treat their their opponents i mean that's that's where you get uh you know into into danger well i know don you raised devils because you're an arsenal fan and you know arsenal and manchester united have a very very fraught relationship with one another anyway i'm not going to get into football listeners that episode already came out a couple weeks ago you know the one that we recorded today but that one already came out you can go back and listen to that if you want to hear about football but i what i do want to say before i turn it back over to alex is you know you you are right that too many people

view history and historical figures and historical movements as themes and that there is some inherent goodness or evilness rather than these are individuals or these are movements that are products of the social system that they come from with the contradictions that are present within that society, with the material conditions that are present within that society. They are not inherently good or bad. They are a product of that society. Now, again, We do have to have some ideological frameworks that we can understand whether or not these people are believing and they're fighting for the same kind of future that we are ourselves aiming for. And we can agree or disagree with certain tactics and analyze them differently based on the material conditions that we analyze, that they perhaps were also analyzing or that they didn't even perceive at the time. but we do have to understand all actors within history as products of the material conditions

and not some inherently good or bad force. That is super, super important. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, those are all great points. I would just say, you know, to highlight something that Adnan said about Long Duray, the value of Long Duray approaches to history, it's also, it's dangerous. you're going to be like Professor Gerald Horn, trying to find the origins of racial capitalism. We're going to end up in the 1,200s, like Cedric Robinson when he was trying to find the origins of East European notions of difference in race, right?

He ended up in like Ireland, the 1200s. When I was researching my first book, what dissertation turns in my first book, I was looking at the history of these guerrilla movements from the 60s and 70s. I ended up in like the 1700s trying to figure out why these peasant demands keep coming up over and over and over again. pretty stable despite different changing historical context right so but that's the you know so and then it's probably better that you started with the pre-modern it saved you a lot of time and then you can kind of go the other direction and it's it's probably easier than for those of us who started as modernists and then swimming around in the 1600s trying to read handwritten documents um having to get special training for it the only other point i was going to make is

and this is what i also tell my first year students and is um the powers at B want to make us believe that things are immutable, that things have existed, the present arrangements of exploitation and oppression are, have been the same since time and memorial. But if we can historicize structures of power and oppression, that means they have a past. And if they have a past, we can change that shit. And we have plenty of existence that we, historical examples that we can cultivate and learn from for methods about how to change our present conditions of exploitation and

oppression, right? So, I mean, so I think it's always just to teach, and this is something that we should all be doing, you know, as public work. If something has a past, that means it can be changed. And it has been changed in the past. And those are the type of histories that you guys cover on this podcast, right? A different world is possible. It has been possible. And people have fought and died to make that world possible on the notion that things could be changed.

And if something, again, has a past, that means it was made and it can be unmade for something. better. Yeah, I think the episode that we released today is a great example of that. We released the episode today with Jamima Pierre on Haiti's Empire's Laboratory. So if we just look at Haiti as a case study, the history of slavery in Haiti, it comes from somewhere. And those contradictions arise as a result of processes that took place in the past. People had the willingness and the daringness to try to change that understanding that those were processes that were perpetuating themselves. And if they came from the past, they could be changed in the present. And guess what? They succeeded. But then similarly, the Western imperialists

saw, well, we previously had slavery in Haiti, and then they overthrew that in the past. we can also change this for our own purposes and continuously since then and it's what we cover in the episode with like I said Jimmy and Pierre, Haiti is Empire's Laboratory, which will be out a few weeks before this episode. So go back and listen if you haven't already, probably three or four weeks before this one. The point is, is that you're absolutely right, Alex, that understanding where things within, we're processes. I guess I should use a little bit more formal word than things. I'm struggling. This is the end of a 15-hour day for me. So the fact that words are still

coming out is a good sign. The fact that processes can be understood in their origin in the past and can be understood as a process that extends to the present also gives hope that these processes can then be broken moving to the future, but we also have to recognize that our enemies can also have a similar analysis to this. They can understand processes that are opposed to their interests as coming from the past and something that they can try to change. We cannot rest on our laurels and say, well, because that was something that we changed in the past, it's going to inevitably remain forever. That is not how our enemies think. We should not think that way either.

Never, never become complacent with where we are right now. We always have to be fighting for a better future and solidifying the gains of the past. Benjamine has a great line from that on the concept of history piece that I referenced earlier where he says, not even the dead are safe from the enemy and the enemy never ceases to be victorious. So yes, they learn, they are also learning and they usually are way more organized. and way more class-conscious, aware of their interests and how they've worked and obtain those interests. So, yeah. So, yeah, it works both ways. So as historians, I think, well, the type of historians that we are, I think we have our work cat out for us. Absolutely. I love that line

about even the dead are not safe. But I think that's the perfect conclusion is that we have lived otherwise. People in the past have lived otherwise. We can live otherwise. And the point of history, you know, is not just to study it, understand it, but is to change it. So that's what that's what we have to do. And, you know, so let's get busy, folks. Yeah, I don't real, I don't know how long this conversation has been going on for. Like I said, I, between my day job and the three episodes we've recorded today, it's been 15 hours for me today. I've lost track of sense of time and space, but I have really enjoyed the conversation. What I do want to close with is I'm going to ask each of you to address the audience

and assuming that most of our audience are not professional historians. And I do know that we have a lot of academics who are listening, but I want you to address the non-professional historians how they should be approaching their reading and analysis of history? What are your, I don't want to say tips because that kind of like almost infantilizes what you're going to say in some way. What are your recommendations for someone who is passionate about history and wants to understand where our current reality comes from, but perhaps doesn't have that rigorous academic background in history, but they are passionate about it. What are your recommendations for listeners like that?

Listen to guerrilla history. Hey. Okay. Okay. But what else? What else? I mean, that is a great starting point. I will admit. I mean, that's a really, that's a, that's a challenging question. I mean, one thing I would ask, actually read, right? I mean, there's a, there's, there's, there's a podcast are great. Like, I think, um, I love listening to podcasts. I've learned a lot from podcasts. I've learned a lot from these podcasts. And I would, you know, use, if people are listening to podcasts but not necessarily reading, then use those podcasts as kind of an introduction to authors that you, you know, you should be reading if you're interested in certain histories or certain political movements, et cetera, right? So I always tell my first year students, you know, if you find a history book that looks interesting, go and read it, but do your background research on the author. you know who wrote this book where you know how were they trained where were they trained

you know what source of sources are they using to create and that that's all that always will be a revelatory exercise um to kind of determine not just what that history book is about but the approaches that are used to reconstruct that history and i i think that might be one way to kind of separate the good stuff from the not necessarily as good or productive stuff depending on your political motivations or non-political motivations when it comes to reading history. But I would start with authors. I would start with authors and read what a particular favorite author is and, you know, look at their footnotes. I know historians were like, we fetishize footnotes.

We have to as part of our training. But those footnotes are guides. They will show you other stuff that you could be reading that might be just as important or just as interesting. But I think one of the great challenges we face as professional historical is how to reach a broader audience. How to reach audiences beyond our small, esoteric, professionally trained group of people. How to not really necessarily care what that group says about our work? I know it's really difficult for us because much of our career is based on that. But how do we cross, get beyond that and start to address general audiences?

I think it's an open question. I think podcasts have been one way to reach and address broader audiences. to write for broader audiences in non-academic settings is another way. But I still think that's one of our main challenges because we've ceded that ground to charlatans for too long. And, you know, people want history, right? Regardless of what people talk, you know, certain figures in the media say about humanities, this and that, it's been my experience that people are really interested in history

for a variety of ways they want it. We just have to help guide them in terms of where they should be finding. that history and who should they should be you know careful of in terms of approaching it yeah you know it's almost as if you had sat in on that patreon episode with ad non and i one of the things that we were talking about in there is how a lot of academics will do all of this rigorous and important work to publish a paper and then they're excited if 80 people read it uh right you know our cost 50 dollars the article will cost 50 dollars right yeah exactly and our you know are are less popular episodes get 100 times more downloads than that, you know, our more popular ones get much more than

that. And, you know, it's interesting to think about how much work is going into those and how little there is on engagement with popular audiences with that work. And that was something that we reflected on in that episode. But then also, as you mentioned, podcasts should not be, for somebody who is genuinely passionate about history. Podcasts are a great starting point, but we don't bring on guests like you were Gerald Horn so that you can listen to Gerald Horn talk to us for an hour and a half,

and then you don't have to read his book. No, Gerald Horn's been on the program three or four times to encourage you to read his books. We don't bring him on, so now you don't have to read the Conner Revolution of 1776, the Conner Revolution of 1836, or what was the other one that we talked about on the show? the dawning of the apocalypse. Did we talk about that with him? Yes, that's right. So, you know,

we didn't bring him on for those conversations and other miscellaneous chats so that you don't read those books. No, we want to engage a popular audience with the ideas from those books and hopefully encourage you to read them because they are incredibly important work. So, Alex, that's, that was a great reflection of yours. Yeah, I think the onus, honestly, though, is more, the onus is on academic historians more so than it is on the audience, right? And I think we're not just historians that we should be translators. We're translators of, let's use our academic training and research and writing and translate it to two broader audiences, right? So I think the work is on us, I think, as academic historians. I would also agree with that. I just don't see it

happening to the extent that it needs to happen. So, you know, we do our best to try to bridge that gap, you know, how successful we are is up for debate and the debate probably wouldn't go very well for us, but we are doing what we can. But you're absolutely right that the professional historians do need to do a lot more in terms of engaging audience. People care about history. You know, we wouldn't have the amount of listeners that we did if people didn't care about history. And we talked about really weird, esoteric topics, but there's no engagement. Anyway, I need to get off my soapbox and turn it over to a nun. What are your recommendations?

Well, I mean, I do think people are very interested in and invested in history. A lot of what people do actually read and consume in media are stories about the past, and they find those very interesting and compelling. I'd say one danger or one issue for really understanding the past is that sometimes these narratives, kind of occlude the important analysis behind them. Like, you know, it may be interesting, at least that it's something people haven't heard and it's surprising and it causes them to rethink some of the presumptions of the transmitted past that they've received in other aspects of popular culture, the kind of national narratives

and basic kind of consensus and the things that they got up in their schooling. about their country and so on. But it doesn't necessarily go too much further than that. And that's why I think it's important. Some of these podcasts, some new documentaries that are, you know, more connected with actually showing sources and how you might interpret and understand them, things that make a puzzle out of how you try and make sense of the past are a little bit better than these kind of just finished narratives, you know, of things to kind of crack open that process.

that we're making history, we make history by our engagement with the past and what kind of narrative. But those things we can't just take as a given. A lot of people have a very naive understanding that whatever it is that's told about, what the story is about, that's history. And there's so much more to it. And it's much more engaging. So I think it's useful to maybe have one kind of, if you're going to read anything to read

some kind of like global sort of history survey. I don't have great ones to recommend. You know, I loved Eric Hopsbaum's kind of series of Marxist historian and he, you know, had three, four volumes about modern history, age of revolutions, age of empires, age of extremes. But I think it still was a little too Eurocentric, you know, for today. to really make sense. So I hesitate to say, oh, just go, you know, get that to at least have some broad framework and interconnections. There really is a need for a new, popular kind of global history of the modern world that should be written. Maybe Alex knows one that, you know, I don't work in the modern history as much, but if you have a record. There is, you know,

there is, I read a people's history of the world, which, you know, obviously is cribbing off for people's history of the United States. It's a part of the same series. It wasn't written by Howard Zinn. I'm forgetting the name of the author. But if you are looking for something that is not Eurocentric, you are going to be sorely, sorely disappointed by that book. It was written by, if I recall correctly, a European Trotskyist. And so when they say a people's history of the world, it's of the world in terms of length of time and not geographical span, because Because the coverage, I mean, the coverage of Africa was so, so appallingly sparse. And then, of course, the narratives, any time that there was a group that was in favor of, I'm using air quotes here, listeners, Stalin's Soviet Union, if there was a revolutionary group operating in the third world that was allied with Stalin's Soviet Union,

the author had ideological problems with that group and therefore would denigrate them or ignore them entirely. So that book frustrated... Exactly. That book frustrated me so much because the promise was there. And as you start the book, you're thinking, ah, you know, they're going way back. They're talking about some different locations.

But then when you start to get more towards the modern part of the history, it slips right back into that same, same problem that you were just describing it now which is why I wanted to hop in with that is that it's a relatively new book it's exactly what you would be looking for but the problem is so profound with that that I don't have any better recommendation but it's really really sad maybe maybe a different way to start then is to start small and to start with some personal connection to a particular well that's that I mean yeah that's what my recommendation was going to be is like it's useful to have that but But practically speaking, I can't give a recommendation.

But I would recommend everybody get involved in local history and public history sort of project. Or family history. I mean, that's another reason why people are interested in family. I mean, a lot of history is finding out who we are, like, where we come from. So that might be a really powerful way of beginning the search. That's, yeah, that's right. Like start with things that are close to home are relevant to you. I mean, I would like to turn it from

because I think a lot of family history is a little I don't know, whatever. It could be a good starting point. For some people, it really isn't. A lot of people, it is just a sort of self-aggrandizing of lineage and, you know, kind of conservative. Oh, yeah, we don't want that. It's a community and so on.

So, but what I would say is like, do local history, get involved with a local history project and include, you know, kind of oral history and include people, you know, about articulating their needs, you know, you have places, you know, new immigrants, their experience. It's part of the history. We did a fun thing because we had a colleague who does a lot of local Kingston, you know, history, which is the town, the small city that that I live and teach in typically. And, you know, he's a Jewish historian, but Jewish Canadians. And but he was interested in, you know, we're the their Jews in Kingston and what's their history. And I also started coming across like people of Syrian background. And this is during the era of 2014, 2015, you know, the great Syrian refugee, you know, kind of question. And so we held like a public forum based on research that he and his students, because he incorporated it in one of his seminars where they did local archival

research about trying to put, you know, to put together a more, you know, kind of public history research project on Syria's, you know, on Kingston's forgotten history of Syrian migration, you know, like this is not just something completely new that's happening, but there's been, you know, people who came in the late 19th and early 20th century to North America from this region. We did a whole thing on how and why, what were the kind of push factors, you know, people having to leave and migrate, and then what were the pull factors and what were their experiences here? And, you know, there's a whole history of Jewish peddlers. but there were Syrian peddlers. And so there was also a way of articulating kind of the way in which Jewish and, you know, kind of like Middle Eastern history are interconnected in, you know, the way in which they were marginal and suppressed peoples in, you know, Europe and its settler colonial societies that was a very different counter history to the way it was being talked about. I think it was really illuminating for people. And there's things like that that we could be doing that are also things that translate into forms.

solidities and connections between people to advocate for, you know, resources and rights together by taking an interest in their local community and its histories and documenting those things and documenting, you know, how people have come there and things like that. So that's my sense of a great way to get involved practically in historical inquiry and research and understanding that then you can expand. But it actually translates into things that are meaningful and relevant and connected to struggle and demands and political demands in the here and now. You know, I had just something come into my head when I was thinking about a history book that you could recommend to someone. And what I realized

is that rather than if I was talking to somebody who is interested in history but is not already involved in history. Rather than giving them a history book, I would probably encourage them to read some books that would help them understand the processes that create history or create the contradictions that then drive history. So I know I had seen this thing on Twitter, like what one book influence your political thinking more than any other? And I said, well, it's hard to pick one because I always try to inform what I'm reading for. from things I've already read, but to that jump to mind, that would be very, very high on the list would be wretched of the earth and how Europe underdeveloped Africa.

I think both of those would be great suggestions for, again, showing some processes that are at play, but I think there's other things that you could show to people. So just to plug ISCRA, we have two books that are coming up later this year from Torkelous, and one is a republication of an old book from the 70s, and another one is a brand new Torkel-Lausen book on unequal exchange, you know, looking at how processes between imperialist countries and underdeveloped countries are driving various processes within those societies. But then, you know, how Europe underdeveloped Africa might be a bit much to give to somebody who is not involved with history already.

So Walter Rodney is still like my favorite. So I would just say, give somebody the grounding with my brothers because that book, is about as accessible as you can get and really will engage people and will help them understand some of the processes that are at play and will probably encourage them to start looking at actual history then and trying to draw the connections between the analysis of how these processes come about and what drives these processes and then looking at historical events using this analytical framework. So that's something that jumped to my mind. mind. I don't know if either of you have anything to say about that. Do you think that that's a

reasonable route to take with somebody that isn't involved in history? Definitely it's helpful to give them the frameworks to help us understand the world. We're in the past and so on. But I think this kind of question of documenting history and being actively involved in recording, preserving studying history in a practical local level is something that would go well with those things. If you think of it, look at even, you know, of the wretched of the earth. Yes. You know, one of the most interesting chapters is colonial war and mental disorders. I mean, this is basically Phenon saying, I'm also involved in this historical moment.

And I want to sort of kind of take cases and document. what's happening to people, and he had a really interesting analysis that is often ignored there that I think is one of the more valuable parts of Wretched of the Earth that is basically almost like a kind of oral history documentation type project of the cases that he was dealing with, you know, provides amazing insight. If we think about that today, you know, we were talking about, you know, in a conversation recently, And, of course, you know, we're always been talking on this podcast over the last like seven, eight months about, you know, what, you know, was happening in Palestine and, you know, kind of solidarity with Palestine is this history. This is quite a momentous time of activism that's taking place. And people should be conscious of trying to kind of record. And even from if you think about it, it's been going on eight months. I was just thinking the other day. I have forgotten what my headspace was, you know, in October, November and December and what we were talking about and how we were discussing things and what was being said on the demonstrations and who was going to these and how we were trying to Oregon.

That already seems like because so much time has been passing and so many things have been happening is that we need a sense of like, well, okay, what's happened over the course of this year? Where are we? We need to document. We need to engage. We need to keep track and keep records and use that. That's part of our resource. So even in small ways, we could be doing things like keep the flyers that, you know, we're passed out, keep the photos of the different signs and the placards and use those to think,

where are we? Are we still saying exactly the things? Have we progressed? Are we adapting to new things that are happening in the course of the struggle? If we're not, why not? like what do we need to be thinking about? How of our tactics? Are we still just walking around with the same signs going from point A to point B? You know, or are we kind of progressing and developing new techniques of mobilization and of making our demands and of, you know, protest

and so on? These are all helpful things to do. You know, it's part of our own sense of documenting our history, being engaged in keeping those sources and analyzing them because those are valuable for our struggle and our developing consciousness. So I think some theory would be great to open up our minds, but then everybody should be a guerrilla historian. This is my main message, is be a guerrilla historian. And that means taking an interest in your active engagement in the history of the times you're making and of the past that is usable and valuable to you in the struggles that you're involved in the locations that you are unless you have something to add Alex I think that that's a great way to end the conversation no that's that's a great that's a

great way to end that's I told I wholeheartedly support ad nun's proposition there we all should be guerrilla historians that's great all right on that note then Alex can you tell the listeners where they can find you and more of your work well thank you for having me again guys on Twitter at Alexander underscore Avina I have a website that I haven't updated alexanderavina.com

and I write a newsletter once in a while for foreign exchange that so yeah we'll link to all of that in the show notes of course and listeners if you haven't already you should go back a few episodes and listen to the recent episode that we had

with Alex about Palestinian solidarity football, Copa, America, and the Euros. Yes, all of those things are in one episode, and yes, they are related. So check that out if you haven't already. At least if you're interested in football, go back and check that out. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other excellent podcast? Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N.

And the M-J-L-L-I-S were less frequent than guerrilla history. about a few interesting episodes. If you're interested in the Middle East Islamic world, you know, do check us out. We're on all the usual platforms. Maybe Spotify, since that's the host, is the easiest place to find us. But, you know, check out the M-A-J-L-I-S. And I just want to say again, thanks so much to Henry and Alex. What a wonderful conversation. I wasn't sure, okay, is it going to just be abstract, you know, kind of dogmatism? What will we really say? But, you know, we went on for a while here, and I found every moment of this very fascinating and stimulating, and it kind of led me to think through a lot of issues about how we think about history. So a great sources and methods conversation for people.

And I just want to thank you both for, you know, wonderful, you know, provocative stimulation. Yeah. Absolutely. I agree with that. Coming in, like I said, I had this kind of question that I had been kicking over in my head. And while we certainly didn't answer the question, we went quite a ways and a deeper understanding of this question, as well as opening up a lot of parallel modes of thought. And I will mention that, you know, Adnan mentions that the modulus is not as regular as guerrilla history. It's hard to be more regular than guerrilla history.

We've foot out an episode, what, probably close to 100 consecutive weeks, Adnan, without missing a single week. I think we've got to be around 80 or 90 at this point. We might be pushing 100. I haven't counted in the last two months, but it's been a long time and it's been a lot of work. But that being said, the mudgeless, despite being less regular, is no less worth your time in subscribing and listening to

because I've learned a lot from Adnan's other podcast. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995-H-U-C-1-9. You can help support guerrilla history and allow us to continue making episodes like this and releasing episodes every week until I die by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually as well as what the show is putting out by following the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. Next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.