Guerrilla History - For Palestine & Liberated Texts w/ Louis Allday

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

In this outstanding episode of Guerrilla History, we have another installment of our Sources and Methods series, and this time with the terrific Louis Allday.  Here, we bring on Louis to discuss Liberated Texts and the work that is done within that project, as well as the recently released special edition of Ebb Magazine, For Palestine.  We loved the conversation with Louis about preserving and spreading under-appreciated and supressed sources and books, Kanafani, solidarity with Palestine, and more, and we are sure you will too!  Be sure to check out the links we are including to the work Louis does for more! Louis Allday is a writer and historian. He has a PhD in History. He is the founding editor of Liberated Texts, a book reviewing and publishing project dedicated to reviewing and (re)publishing works that have been neglected, overlooked or suppressed in the mainstream since their publication. In July 2022, in collaboration with Ebb Books, Liberated Texts published the first English language translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. Louis is also an editor at Ebb Magazine.  Follow Louis on twitter @Louis_Allday 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? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. History, a 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 Huckmanaki, joined as usual by my other co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing really well, Henry. It's a pleasure to be with you. Always nice seeing you. We have an excellent guest and a really fascinating conversation ahead of us today. But before I turn it over to you, Adnan, to introduce once again our Sources and Methods series, I would just like to remind the listeners that they can help support the show, allow us to keep us up and running and making episodes like this by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter to keep up with everything that we're putting out individually as well as as a show at Gorilla underscore pod.

That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. We're also on Instagram. I guess I should probably mention that every once in a while. Our Instagram handle is Gorilla-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Score History. If you're on that app, give us a follow. Adnan, I'm going to turn it over to you before I introduce our guest because this is a continuation of our sources and method series. So can you let the listeners know a little bit about that series,

and then I'll introduce the guest. Sure, avid listeners will recall that we've started a series where we look at document collections, archival materials, the sources, the primary sources that historians use to analyze the past as the evidence, as well as methods. So how some of these theoretical orientations, and approaches to history, whether it's oral history or what dialectical materialism is and so forth as a kind of nuts and bolts toolkit for listeners so that they can engage in

guerrilla history themselves and to highlight important collections of documents and resources that might be of interest for people. So today we're going to be talking about liberated texts. And I think it's a real fitting inclusion in this series on sources and methods. Totally. So as Adnan mentioned, we're going to be talking about liberated texts. Our guest is Louis Alde, who is a writer and historian. He's founding editor of Liberated Texts, which is a book reviewing and publishing project dedicated to reviewing and republishing works that have been neglected, overlooked, or suppressed in the mainstream. He also is an editor of Eb magazine and kind of spearheaded the recent four Palestine issue, which is absolutely

terrific and we're certainly going to talk about that in this conversation as well. Hello, Louie. It's nice to have you on the show. Hi, Henry. Hi, Ednan. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I don't actually listen to podcasts that much, but yours is one of the few that I do actually listen to. Ah, not just saying that. That's high praise. Honored. We are both. both big fans of yours and honestly this conversation is long overdue, but we're happy to have you on the show now. So I'm going to open the conversation by asking a very, I guess I kind

of already summarized the answer to this first question, but what is the purpose of liberated texts? And I have to say, just as a funny anecdote in asking this question, about a year ago or so, I had been asking around if there was any people who were interested in starting a kind of collective project together of finding previously published or unpublished works, particularly from oppressed people in the global south, in order to either translate it into English and then release it in English or just republish it. And somebody had said, well, you know, Louis Alde is doing this literated texts. And I looked and I said, that's exactly what I was planning on doing. So you saved me a lot.

of time by doing it yourself, Louis. So what was the purpose of liberated texts? And can you tell the listeners a little bit about it if they're not already, you know, followers of the work that you do there? Yeah, sure. I mean, as you already summarized, in essence, it's very simple. It is a book review website that has now kind of branched out into actually publishing. It's not a book review website for, for new or, you know, newly released books. On the contrary, it's largely for old books and books that have been underappreciated, overlooked, misinterpreted, untranslated, in some cases, you know, actively sabotaged or, you know, coming up in some way, or just more broadly because of, you know, structural limitations within the capitalist publishing world.

And yeah, it's about drawing attention to things that have suffered that fate, but also are relevant to the to the current moment in some way so not necessarily just you know this is an interesting book that didn't get so much attention more well this is a very interesting book that didn't get attention and it is relevant to X, Y and Z and you know I'm sure we can talk through some of some examples of that and my kind of where the idea came from

developed over time in my in my head through kind of a few specific things and then a more general feeling and the general feeling or the general realisation rather was and this is probably going back four or five years maybe a little bit more

was the realization that most of or if not most many of the most enlightening and compelling and often succinct as well things that I was reading were were in some cases decades old and remained extremely relevant and were in many ways superior to things that had been written on the same topic

in the decade since, even with the benefit of hindsight and greater knowledge of what had transpired. So, I mean, this is a very small example. I mentioned the first review that I wrote myself, the Liberate Text, was a book written in 1965 called Zionist colonialism in Palestine by Fayyazir. So he's writing even then before 41967 and he identifies the inherent expansionism

of Zionism and the threat that it posed to other Arab states, not just to Palestine, you know, before the occupation of the Golan, before the occupation of the West Bank, etc. And so extremely pressing and extremely succinct and powerful analysis. And one thing I should say about all these books, us putting them on the website

is not to say not to kind of claim that these were somehow unknown or you know completely unknown and overlooked and kind of taking credit for you know uncovering them or to use these kind of you know lots of cliches that are often used in archival work of like digging or you know blowing the dust off you know we're not saying we're not reinventing the wheel necessarily

but the common thread of these books is that they remain relevant to things that are still happening right at this moment and they have not been given the readership and intention that they deserve and should have. Sometimes for directly nefarious reasons, others more just like I say, general structural limitations and issues. Some of the specific things that kind of push me towards this idea

are one big thing was my discovery of what was revealed in the Church Committee in 1975, which was an internal U.S. investigation into, quote, mispractices of the various U.S. intelligence agencies, largely their internal activities, but not solely. Or at least that was the spark for the investigation. And to summarize, reading some of the findings of the Church Committee, what was reported in that was the enormous extent

of CIA control over book publishing and distribution it's mainly talking about the 1960s and I was amazed frankly at what I was reading and it goes into some level of detail about the influence that the CIA have and I think in some ways you could say extended beyond control and beyond the influence and became control in some senses

I just read just a quick summary of the committee's findings they found that the CIA could this is I'll be quoting get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any US influence by covertly subsidising foreign publications or booksellers get books published which should not

be contaminated quote unquote by any overt tie in with the US government get books published for operational reasons regardless of commercial viability initiate and subsidise indigenous national or international organisations for book publishing or distributing purposes and stimulate writing of politically significant books

by unknown foreign authors either by directly subsidising the author if covert contact was feasible or indirectly through literary agents or publishers and something that really struck me about this information was that of the over a thousand different titles that had been produced, subsidised or sponsored by the CIA up until the end of

1967, only a quarter of those were in English. So what we have here, effectively, is the CIA running a multilingual global publishing industry. And the committee stated that sometimes the authors were aware of the CIA's involvement, and other times they were not. And it actually gives a specific example. So one of the liberated text reviews is a book by Edgar Snow. and it specifically mentioned that the agency, i.e. the CIA, produced a number of works about China that was specifically intended to combat the sympathetic, this is a quote, the sympathetic view of the emerging China as presented by Edgar Snow. And there's a quote that says, as an official stated, an American who reads one of these books,

portedly by a Chinese defector, would not know that his thoughts and opinions about China are possibly being shaped by an agency of the United States government. So you had books supposedly written by Chinese defectors that are essentially just written by the CIA. And, you know, obviously, and I should say also as well, this kind of cultural, cultural activity of the CIA during the Cold War is, you know, very well documented cultural Cold War by Francis Stona-Santis, among others. See, the idea that the CIA accumulated this incredibly influential,

position in, you know, publishing globally the idea that it accumulated all of that influence and control and then just hacked it up and, you know, turned it all on his head at the end of the Cold War is laughable, obviously, you know, these things were continued expanding, refined, you know, altered to fit with new technology. So that was one thing. Another specific thing was coming across the CIA's internal review of Klaman and Krumen's neo-colonial and then subsequently reading or seeing in an interview with Encruma's kind of close, confident, and literary agent in June Milne, her speculating, and she'd be in a very good position to kind of make an educated guess, her speculating that the reason, or kind of the final straw for the reason for the US coup against Encrumel was the publishing of neo-colonialism. the CIA's review of that book and in that book I should say

which was published I think in 1960 yeah 1965 it was reviewed by the CIA internally towards the end of 1965 and Krumer was

deposed in the CIA in February in 1966 so literally two or three months later and that internal CIA review was sent, among others, to the CIA's covert operations department. It's not called that, it's got some generic name, but it is the COVA operations department in Africa. And the review says, you know, this is being sent to X, Y, and Z, including covert operations in Africa, or whatever, to action in whatever way that they consider appropriate.

And within three months of that review being sent and criminal was deposed. um so these were some of the kind of like historical um and i wasn't necessarily specifically looking for these things even these were these things that i was kind of coming across in any kind of indirect ways um and then i suppose kind of to bring it more to the contemporary what made me really begin to think about the ways in which this was still very relevant because i know obviously some people would argue the way in which people taking information the importance of books

has changed and subsided since the 1960s, 1970s with the internet, social media, etc., etc. Because actually that's one thing I wanted to say, which I didn't get around to saying. There's a quote from the head of covert action at the CIA

from 1961. Right. And you've considered on your website, site, which when I read it, I thought, wow, this sounds kind of quaint and yet quite interesting. So the quote is, books differ from all other propaganda media, because one book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium. Books are the most important weapons of strategic long-term propaganda. And so obviously, I acknowledge this is 1961. Many things have changed in the, wow, more than 60 years since then.

But then what made me kind of think about this from a contemporary perspective was the dozens and dozens and dozens of extreme, and that's just as a modern example, of extremely bad books that have been written about Syria since 2011, which essentially are the State Department position on Syria, but from a supposedly leftist, quote unquote position and utilizing, you know, kind of leftist terminology but are essentially regurgitating the official U.S. position on Syria. And that's not to say that I'm saying all of those books are kind of. Oh, no. Some of these people are willing to do this propaganda work for free, just because they're deluded. Exactly. I'm not saying all of that means it's a kind of

nefarious plot by the CIA, but it shows me, one thing that I was especially compelling to me was the line about they will subsidize things regardless of commercial viability, because there are some things I think, who is buying this? And, you know, there's one moment sticks in my mind. I went to, this is probably five years ago now, I went to a very large bookshop in London called Foils. It's like a really famous bookshop. It's a good bookshop in some ways. And I remember looking at the Syria the one on Charing Cross Road. Yeah, one on

Chars Cross Road, yeah. That's right. Yeah. It's usually a kind of historic bookshop area. There's not actually many left there now, but that's one of the main ones there. It's been less than at least the 30s, I think. You know, the fact it even has a Syria section tells you the kind of

the amount of stocks and the size of it. And there was barely a good book I could recommend on that shell. There was supposedly a big range of, you know, opinions that it was almost all dire. So that was definitely something in my mind when thinking about this. And actually, ironically speaking to you guys, another thing that was on my mind was Verso's refusal to publish Lesotho's book about Stalin. Oh, I have a bit of experience with that, Louie.

Yeah. Which I'm so happy has now been. corrected by you guys and I'm really happy that that project has been successfully successfully achieved and you know I mean you've spoken about this at a link but you know the reaction to even your question was just so unbelievably telling and actually I mentioned that that book and the refusal to publish it in my introduction to the to the volume one published reviews of Liberated Text So I'm very happy that that has now been rectified.

But anyway, to get back to the point, I think there were, like I say, there was a number of combination of specific things that I kind of realized and noticed combined with a broader realization that many things that I was finding most informative, most powerful and most principled and useful were things that not only were not recently written but were definitely undenowned and underappreciated and for example, things that I didn't come across in years of my further education ever.

It was only through my own reading or through Twitter or through kind of non-official informal learning environments that I came across them. Yeah, I hope that gives a kind of idea of the rationale behind it. Yeah, well, I mean, it's also the sort of rationale of what you're countering, you know, the fact that clearly there's been suppression and there's been, you know, kind of hostile reviews. In fact, that's actually a really funny story-chilling story about Nekrumah,

but the reason why I find it humorous is because for a long time, you know, people would characterize, for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on, the satanic verses as, you know, the great act of malevolent literary criticism, you know, but in fact, actually, you've got the CIA that's running a kind of global publishing, you know, a covert global publishing and reviewing. There are, you know, that's one thing I forgot to say, actually, that the findings of the church committee, they not only talk about publishing, they specifically talk about the role of reviews.

and the CIA was very, very aware of the role of reviews. And in a kind of, in two ways. One, to get a book attention, to get the ideas and the arguments of a book attention, you get it reviewed, for example, in the New York Times. If you don't want it to be reviewed, you want it to be completely ignored, you kind of engineer that, or you engineer Hitchell reviews that be legitimized. I think probably in a way, the most. damaging things just for things to not be reviewed at all because then it's like they don't

exist especially pre-internet where the main way that people are going to find out about things is reading reviews and they they point to a specific example where a book written by someone for the CIA was reviewed in the New York Times by someone working for the CIA especially literally book written by the CIA being reviewed by someone paid for and arranged by the CIA punished in the New York Times And again, you know, I don't think that the function of the New York Times has really changed since whenever that was, you know, mid to late 60s. You know, we know what the function and rather than New York Times is and that's still largely remains the same. So, yeah, it was this kind of slight coincidental things that I was coming across and then kind of trying to understand them or the relevance, enduring relevance or not of them.

In, you know, I was probably having these conversations and thoughts around 2020. And, you know, obviously, just to say again, I fully agree that the role of books has changed and shifted and perhaps in some ways declined since then. But I still think they can have. They still grant a certain kind of authority for an agenda setting, you know. Exactly. You can have the popular journalistic article or. view out there that people might actually read, but they take it seriously because, well, there's a good book or an important book on it, and that gives it a sort of authority. So it's

still to have it. But I think you're right that perhaps, you know, there has been, you know, updating of the use of technology in propaganda. And of course, I mean, it's a common, I think it's been understood for a while now that things like Reddit and Wikipedia, these are projections of Deep State, you know, it's been hacked from the very beginning. Some of the earliest Redditors are clearly CIA people, big editors at Wikipedia. So they have ceded, you know, these forms, and there's a continuity between the era of the book that you read that great quote about how these differ from other propaganda media and how important they are. They still do differ from all other

propaganda media. The role the way in which they differ maybe has changed. But now it's kind of that authority to say, well, there's three or four books on Syria that are bounded in the range of opinion

and that helps set the debate so that there's nothing that can be said outside of that. Exactly. It's frame. They're extremely useful for discourse control and manipulation and yeah rightly or wrongly they do grant

kind of access and authority to the authors as well so you know for example you've got a book coming out you'll be invited on X, Y and Z podcast you're you know it's kind of it's not just about whether people read the book or not you know obviously people still do read books

I don't I'm not I don't know why there's people who you know thinks people literally just don't read at all anymore. I wouldn't do what I do if I thought that. But it's not just about whether the book is actually read or not. It's more broad than that. And actually with that in mind, one of the things that I hope to achieve with all the liberate text reviews is even if the person then does not go on to actually read the book, they still got something from it. Because, you know, for a variety of reasons not everyone is going to read the books that they read the review of, you know, ideal

scenario they do. But hopefully, and I think we've achieved this generally, the reviews are also kind of standalone, you know, they're like review essays. That's right. I mean, and in fact, I actually want to talk a little bit about the reviews. It's very interesting that you do publish these reviews. And what I've noticed is that these are not just disinterested evaluations of the book and its ideas in some kind of a vacuum, the way at least critical journals, you know, that are arbiters of taste and so on, attempt to affect. These are quite interested. They are attempting to connect the work to some question that's relevant. So I wanted to take an example. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about how you know, what the purpose of these reviews, you know, are and how they balance in some sense an appreciation for the historical relevance of the work as a document of its time and what it might say to us today. In, for example, the review that you have published on Pentagonism,

okay, so I'm forgetting the author who is the author of Pentagonism. the review of the book well the book Juan Bosch Yes Juan Bosch that's right so this was reviewed you know

by Tyler Poisson yeah and I mean it seemed quite an interesting work because it's somebody wrestling with changes

in capitalism and imperialism and the relationships between those things, which I think is perennially important and significant in the 20th and 21st century as a nexus for trying to think through, you know, how is our world being made and unmade and what's the relationship between these forces? And particularly in late, well, in whatever stage we're in, I don't know, but, you know, American Empire now is clearly so dependent upon what, you know, China. Kamski called military Keynesianism. And that's, in some ways, it seems like what Pentagonism is about, although there's other dimensions of it, which is that, you know, Ukraine funding, you know, all the funding that's going to Palestine, these are all being recycled by U.S. arms manufacturers who have, you know, have facilities and employ people

in almost every congressional district in the United States. And so it's a complete laundering of funds, basically, to supercharge a military industrial complex by fomenting, exacerbating, conflicts, chaos, military adventures abroad. And it seemed that Bosch was pretty attuned to dimensions of it. So I wanted you to comment perhaps on, you know, what was the idea behind resurrecting the significance and importance of this work and what the review or what the review is meant to do for us today as readers, how are you liberating this text, I guess, is the question.

So one thing I should say is that this was not, and this is one of the, I think for me this has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of this project. I didn't commission this. Tyler just emailed me. And that's happened now several times. You know, some I was kind of soliciting reviews from people or thinking, oh, I know this person would be great to review that. But increasingly, and in the case of this review, this was just a kind of cold call essentially from Tyler. Like, look, I want to, there's this book, I want to write about it.

This is why. And for me, that was amazing because I had never heard of this book, which was. And that's always interesting to me. well, just the number of books like this. And to honest, I'm really honest, I don't think I'd heard of one boss, Shiva. So that was kind of amazing to me. Like, I have not heard this book. I've not even heard of this guy.

And I'm sure that was probably true of quite a lot of people reading it as well. And I think in terms of Tyler's review, it's not to say that Bush got everything, everything right. and that his analysis has been kind of entirely vindicated, but more so, A, it's fascinating that this book was even written and who it was written by. B, it's incredibly interesting that it's so virtually unknown. And C, actually, it's very interesting he was wrestling with these things and he did get some things right.

the thing that comes to my mind when you mentioned it about kind of contemporary relevance was Bosch's concern with the prospect of a US war with China and how the US was kind of he could see that on the horizon and he's writing I think that book was in 1968

and actually let me just let me just get up the review because I remember there's a quote in it Well, it may have appeared that Nixon going to China derails its prediction, but of course there's larger forces of that. Exactly. Exactly. And I think this applies to all of the books as well, actually. It's not reviewing it, even if it's a positive review, is not to say, you know, this book from 50 years ago predicting everything and got everything right. Well, you know, it's not simplistic like that. You know, books getting certain predictions or certain analysis. becoming irrelevant or being, you know, not everyone, for example, I think was as prescient and exact as Fayyazir was in many ways. I mean, it's one thing that made me laugh about, you know, there was quite a lot of fanfare in the last few years about certain human rights

organizations officially calling Israel apartheid. It's like Fayyazir and others were writing that in the 1960s. And actually, you know, if you specifically using, the word apartheid and also saying well actually it's worse um so forgive me if you know i'm not excited the imperialist NGOs that belatedly started to call it apartheid to kind of gain some of the legitimacy but anyway i i i'm going on to no i think it's a great point because of course people who are engaged in liberation struggles during that period of time were always engaged in comparative analysis of colonial settler colonialism and drawing analogies and saying our struggle similar in this way and so on. So it was natural actually to make those connections. And it's only

really because of the success of the anti-apartheid struggle and continuing commitment by the empires for supporting, you know, Zionist settler colonialism, that that connection was actually suppressed for a long time before it gets resurrected and rediscovered. So you might say that that was a suppressed, you know, in the same way that you've been talking about some of these other texts, this sort of suppressed insight. But just to go back to pentagonism, I think this was, I think this might have been one of the first that was like really just not solicited, not someone I knew, someone just contacting and saying, look, there's this book that I read and I couldn't believe how unknown it was and I really want to write about it. And I thought immediately of liberate texts. And that is kind of exactly what I wanted it to fulfill. Because, you know, so many people have that one book or one or two books. I mean, do you feel like, okay, it's not new, so I'm not going to, I can't submit a review to it in the kind of normal places.

But this book needs to be read by people and this book is interesting for X, Y, mindset reasons. And that's kind of what I want to liberate text to provide a platform for people. And like you alluded to, it's definitely not in the vein of academic journal or let's say the typical academic journal reviews. Which, you know, not always. Anything I say about, anything negative I say about academia is obviously not without exception. But, you know, the kind of typical, quite dry, quite like you say, disinterested, quote unquote, objective reviews typical of academic journals, that's not what we're interested in. And actually once or twice I have turned things down because they've just felt like, you know, that could be published anywhere.

That's not really what we're kind of interested in doing. And, you know, that's not to say that they need to be opinionated for the sake of it, but more it's clear this is someone that is writing with an investment in whatever it is. They're writing about not just out of kind of curiosity or academic ambition or interest. So I think that's kind of something that unites them all in the authors. Well, speaking of reviews, I know that you're talking about how reviews often are very important for getting a work in front of people, whether that review is positive or negative. I mean, we see this phenomenon in many different spheres. We see it in politics all the time. Of course, there's the age-old expression that any news coverage is good news coverage, whether that news coverage was positive or negative. Populists have been utilizing. that time immemorial. I mean, the whole point is to be able to get people to carry your message. And

even if they're slandering the message that you're saying, it still helps that get in front of people. Donald Trump, obviously, being an obvious example of that, he just says the most outrageous things that he possibly can because the news can't help but then to cover it. And then that gets his name out in front of people. Not that he needed to help getting his name out in front of people anyway with all of the money that he supposedly has. But this isn't like unique to Donald Trump. It's not unique to the current day. It's not unique to the political sphere. It's very important that we just recognize that having the name of something out in front of people is very important for people to have the ability to engage with that. So to just use a specific example and I don't

want to make it about myself because I mean, who cares? I've talked about the Stalin book too many times on the show already. But just to use it as an example very briefly, when we first put that book out, it was number one in the history category on Amazon. You know, who would have thought that a book? Now, I know that we've talked about this before, but for listeners who haven't listened to the episode about the Stalin book, it's not, Stalin is like a case study in the book, and it's a case study that runs the duration of the book, but the underlying message is not about Stalin the man. It's about narratives, which is much more universalizable across socialist and communist left movements. These narratives are constructed. Anyway, that's a conversation

for a different day. The point that I'm making is that when the book first came out, it was number one on the Amazon bestseller list in history and political ideology. You'd think that having a book with the name Stalin on it that was doing pretty well, even though we were giving the PDF, F away for free and still are, the fact that enough people were picking it up physically that it would be up number one on that category on Amazon, you'd think that we would have gotten all kinds of written reviews about it, and you'd think that most of them would have been negative, obviously. It's nice when you get negative reviews about things that you agree with ideologically, because most of those things that would have been written negatively about

the book are just outright false. We've talked before about how that book was slander, in that email that we referenced earlier, Louie, it's not an academic work. It's got over 1,000 citations in it in text from over 300 sources. Most of them are anti-Stalin. He uses the same analytical method he does in these other acclaimed works, which were published by publishing houses, not only like Verso, but by Verso. You know, so to claim that this book is not of academic rigor, whereas they publishes other books happily and quite some success, you know, that's

strange. But if they put that out there, it allows you to say, look, here is their claim. It's not academically rigorous enough. Well, okay, here's a rebuttal to that. Look at how many citations are used in here. Look at who the citations are from. It's not Molotov. It's from, you know, the rapist on Epstein's plane. Of course, I'm referring to Montefiore. But, you know, that's an example. We didn't get any reviews other than from, if I recall correctly, Freedom wrote so Socialist Organization, which is a relatively small socialist party in the United States. Their news publication put a review out of it. And I think there was a Morning Star article that came out of it. But while they referenced our names, I'm pretty sure that they reviewed the old

translation of the book. And they didn't do any advertising on it. And those are the only two reviews I've seen of the work since it's come out. Which seems strange, considering that the book was doing quite well. And, you know, I still have people tweeting me all the time saying, look, I picked up this book. It would be great if they gave us negative appraisals because it allows you to rebut those appraisals. When somebody goes out there and says, look, this is a whitewashing of Stalin. Well, it just shows that you haven't read the book because it is not a whitewashing of Stalin. We've talked about that ad-nazzi. I mean, the whole point is not about Stalin. It's about narrative. And if you don't acknowledge that, it shows that you haven't

read the book. Anyway, too long on that specific example. But the point is, is that reviews are important because getting those reviews out there, if it's a positive review, it encourages people to read it. If it's a negative review, it gives the author or people who are invested in the narrative of that work the chance to rebut what was being said in that article. But what you said, Louis, towards a little while ago, kind of the most subversive thing that these compliant organizations can do. is just ignore the work totally, even when, again, it's doing relatively well. And so think about in 1965, how many reviews of neocolonialism were coming out in mainstream

publications when we know that that was one of the most groundbreaking works on that field of the time. We didn't have reviews coming out in that, but reviews were being developed in-house for the CIA to utilize. So I think that that is review. are a rather important part of informational warfare as are books, as you mentioned. Everybody knows that the news is slanted in a million different ways, but people are much more willing to take books at face value. Now, I know I haven't thrown a question out there yet for you, Louis. I'm just kind of ranting, but I do want to say that, you know, what you did say about reviews and how it's important that you get that out there is really important. And I really appreciate the work that

the berated text does in reviewing these older works that otherwise would go underappreciated. So what are some of the reviews that have gotten particularly, you know, nice response from people in terms of, oh, I had no idea that this work existed, but this review encouraged me to check it out for X, Y, or Z reason? I mean, before I answer the question, just to say, yeah, I mean, I completely agree. One of the most effective and damaging techniques is to just basically make. sure things aren't reviewed, which obviously disproportionately affects things that are published by smaller publishing houses that don't have, you know, massive funds for publicity, because

it just makes it very hard for those books to make any kind of impact. And there are some, there are definitely some books that we've reviewed that I think had basically never been reviewed before. In many cases, you know, after years. they just get quietly released, no one really picks it up, and then they just kind of sink. And then there's a kind of like, there's a kind of arbitrary time span where a book can be kind of considered new, you know, maybe a year, maybe a little bit beyond that. And if it doesn't get reviewed in that time, it just kind of fades. So that's definitely another reason why I felt that something like liberated text would be

useful. To your question, I think one of the, to use a recent example, actually, a book that me and an amazing writer and comrade called Samarada Sadeh wrote in October, towards the end of October, I think, was a review of a book called Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany. The cover says that it's written by Fardis Yahya, but Fardis Yahia was a pen name for someone called Ferdas Blub. And this book is kind of also a good example of the fact that many of these reviews are interesting, not only because of the book and the content itself, but because of who the author was

and a kind of broader context of them and the book's production. So this was a book that was published in 1978 by the Palestine Research Center. And the Palestine Research Center was established by the PLO in 1965 and was essentially the PLOs. Well, it was in the name, the PLO's Research Center. And they produced incredible, really rigorous research. publications for decades. And in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, the centre was completely looted, kind of wholesale, very deliberate.

The whole archive, the whole library, the whole copying equipment, everything. And then it was later bombed as well. But four years before that took place, this book was published. has Zionist relations with Nazi Germany. And like I say, the cover says Farias Yahya, but then inside it actually says Farnas Yehyev is Farris Glub. And Farris Glub is an incredibly fascinating character because he was the son of Glub Pasha.

And, okay, that was going to be my question. I was like, Farris Glub, is he some relative of Glob Pach? So, yeah, okay, fantastic. So Fadus Glub was Glubhasha's son and anyone who doesn't know who Glapasha was Glapasha, real name John Bagot Glub, called Pasha because he was the kind of archetypal

British colonial military officer in the Middle East who led the Arab Legion what became the Jordanian military. If anyone is particularly interested in him I'd recommend reading colonial effects by Joseph Massad which is about the formation of Jordanian national identity but looks a lot actually at Glompassian his role

because it was actually quite significant because that identity is so linked to the military of which he created, basically. So his son, real name Godfrey, named after the first crusader king of Jerusalem, of course. He very quickly got referred to as Faris, and actually that name was given to him

by the ruler of Jordan, whose name is just, Oh, Abdullah. Abdelah the first, the Emir of Transjordan, who his dad worked with extremely closely for years. He gave him the name Theris. And he was actually born in Jerusalem in 1939, so he was born in Palestine. And then he had this very idiosyncratic specific upbringing, where he was essentially raised in Jordan

in an overtly militaristic environment, Arabic speaking, Blabash spoke Arabic, Glapasha was an evangelical Christian, but to encourage kind of esprit de corps and, like, you know, camaraderie with his troops. He would fast during Ramadan. He was, you know, he was in some ways at least, even though he was a kind of extreme orientalist in a lot of ways. He was, to some extent, kind of immersed in Arab Islamic culture, and Faddis grew up in that. A full biography is kind of, well, I don't know a full biography, but we include a fairly lengthy biography in the review, but probably don't need to go into it too much.

right now, but through a very fascinating and convoluted kind of journey, Bardists went on to become not only involved in the Palestinian cause in the sense of writing books, acting as a kind of translator, a journalist, a volunteer, an aid coordinator. I actually discovered mainly through Arabic sources that during the the Civil War in Lebanon he actually fought with a number of different Palestinian

factions and he was a fighter basically and was actually even involved in kind of running some kind of like revolutionary security training program for one of the factions in Beirut and actually prior to that prior to the 60s especially in the 50s

in the early 60s, he was very involved in campaigning against British imperialism in the Gulf, especially at Oman, and even spoke at the UN kind of attacking Britain for its colonial practices and use of

torture and stuff in Amman. And they came across these amazing foreign office documents of bemused foreign office officials realizing he was their mate, Glopash's son, and just be completely baffled, like what is going to what it's going on.

So that's the kind of the hymn and why it's fascinating that he wrote this book. But then the book is also just fascinating in and of itself. Did you what I say say about that? Yeah, I just wanted to say before you tell us about the book that I hope you're going to write something more substantial about this God-free Farris glub. This sounds fascinating. You should. Well, yeah, I kind of, when I'm going to find the time to do so, I. don't know, but actually me and someone have spoken about writing a biography potentially

because it is absolutely fascinating and it's this extremely compelling, you know, obviously personal story, you know, father and son and, you know, there's lots and lots of layers to it. And actually, I should say, just if anyone's wondering, he's not alive, he died in an accident in Kuwait in 2004. But I actually managed to track down and meet his son. I met his son in maybe last year actually maybe 2020 no I think it's 23

and that was fascinating and not necessarily in a bitter way but his son definitely made it very clear that the cause came first in Fardis's life

which is very fascinating but yeah to go back to the book so the book is it's a very short book it's under 100 pages and it's obviously a topic that is become or actually not become

because it even was when Ferris was writing about it extremely if not impossible to write about about being labelled anti-Semitic some kind of slander taking place

and actually to kind of try and preempt that criticism something that Glob did is he only uses, and you know, this approach could be, could be criticized or critique, but he only uses quote-unquote Jewish sources, which is, you know, it's not necessarily an ideal or, you know, it can be criticized, but he, and he says explicitly, I'm doing this because it's so hard to write about this topic without being labeled anti-Semitic and X, Y, and Z. So I'm only going to use Jewish sources, both Zionist and non-Zionists. And what he does in a very succinct, again, you know, one criticism perhaps could be that it's at times too succinct and, you know, kind of makes slightly two sweeping statements.

But what he does extremely well is show the historical context that demonstrates how Zionism as both an ideology and a movement is fascist, essentially. And he shows that through initially talking about the shared kind of philosophical underpinnings of Zionism and fascism and specifically Nazism and then explains how that philosophical, that those shared philosophical positions actually then led to actual material collaboration between the Zionist movement and the Nazi party in Germany. And, you know, I probably don't really need to elaborate in a whole host of ways about the way in which that is relevant right now in terms of discussions of Zionism, in terms of the relationship between Zionism and fascism, and specifically Nazism, the contemporary role of Germany and all of this. So it's incredibly relevant. It's very short, it's very powerful. and for me there probably wasn't that much by the time I read it that probably wasn't that much in it that I didn't already know but there's something about the way that he packages it all together

and writes about it that I still no actually that's not true there are some things I didn't know but it's also it just leaves you with this very profound feeling of so one thing he does which is very moving is he he very much acknowledges the Jewish resistance to the Nazis but he shows how that resistance was never, even though individual Zionists did occasionally take part in those activities,

it was never on a organizational, institutional, systemic level. Zionism never supported and aided the Jewish resistance. And on the contrary, at multiple junctures, prioritized the land. And, you know, there are numerous explicit votes on this, where their Zionist leaders are explicit that they choose the land i.e. the colonization of Palestine over Jewish people

and there are several kind of absolutely shocking quotes about that that choice basically. And again to take it back to what you were saying, Henry, about reviewing. I don't think this book was reviewed anywhere ever really.

I found a brief mention of it in an article by two Israeli academics about 20 years ago where they group it in with Palestinian reactions to the Holocaust and they kind of just completely dismissive about engaging with any of its

arguments and imply that it's Holocaust denialism just really shame this and actually you know that that could you could argue that Glob's decision to only use Jewish sources was maybe pointless because it didn't actually you know it didn't change the way that the book was treated but having said that would

I benefited from it because he uses a number of anti-Zionist Jewish sources people like Moshehman Nuhin who I hadn't heard of before and I learned a lot from subsequently doing more reading about him I think one of the most compelling things about the book is that actually some of the most damning things that he references he references explicitly Zionist sources and yeah I mean that I think that's quite any, and I think when I've most recently checked, I believe that that review is now, even though it's only been out a few months, is the most read review so far, I think.

The last time I checked, I think it had like something coming like eight or nine thousand, no more than that now, I think. So yeah, there is, and I think the, you know, the reasons for that are maybe obvious, but and actually the full book is available online. it's very easy to find and it's also been unofficially re I only found out recently unofficially reprinted i.e. not a kind of official republic edition but it's been reprinted by some I think some Albanian communists in Canada and who else of course yeah right but yeah so I think the club review is quite indicative of this kind of

combination of definitely overlooked fascinating contexts and biography of the author, which is also like extremely underknown. And also one very fascinating thing to say about, about Phyllis Glob himself is that he overtly identified as Palestinian. from his perspective he was born in Palestine and he was Palestinian and I actually managed to find someone

who was friends with him in Beirut in the 1970s and interviewed them and he confirmed that and said yeah he always considered himself Palestinian and you know I never really just the personal interview was also Palestinian and said I never really I never questioned that

and he was completely enough to be fluent in Arabic to the extent that you wouldn't know he wasn't Palestinian and actually just another kind of thing on that during the Nakhba a number of orphaned children

were left at the glove residents and at least two of those were adopted by Finister's dad so he actually grew up also with two Palestinian adopted siblings

so point being it's an absolutely fascinating life story and at certain times he was quite a quite prominent kind of activist and organising figure in a lot of ways but he's almost virtually entirely not known I would say you know I think that's changed maybe to a little bit now that we've wrote this and I found a reference to him in a Guardian article from the 1960s and it's just completely scathing and patronising about him and you know obviously if his politics were different he would he could very easily have been celebrated as some kind of see you Lawrence yeah exactly you know he's kind of yeah Lawrence Lawrence of Arabia if they were an anti-imperialist revolutionary not a imperialist and so yeah it's fascinating on multiple levels well louis you know you had mentioned that the mention of this work that you had found in a you know you know you had mentioned that the mention of this work that you had found in a you know article was a shameless hit job by Zionists. It's just worth mentioning that Zionism and Zionists is and are shameless at their core. So, you know, that is to be expected. But I do want to turn,

I mean, we could definitely talk about that work for quite some time, but I do want to turn to another incredibly important thing that liberated text did, which was releasing a Kenifani's on Zionist literature. And this is incredibly important for a few reasons. One, just to have that work available to people, but also because too many people only knew, well, too many people didn't know Kineffini at all, but the ones that did primarily knew him as a novelist and not as a political writer, which this work did a huge, huge service to rectifying that misconception of his, you know, body of work. in the West particularly. And again, I mean, still far too many have no idea who he is at all in the West. And this work didn't change that. But the people who did know him almost invariably knew him as a novelist and not as a political writer. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit. And I know that we're already almost at an hour. We're not even halfway through the topics that we

wanted to hit. I'm sorry, Louie. But can you talk a little bit about Kennefenny, who he was, I know most of our listeners will know who he is, or was, I should say, because our listeners are not the average Western person, but I'd talk a little bit about who he was, about this work and why liberated texts in Eb magazine, which, you know, collaborated on the publication of it, why you thought that it was so important to get this work available to people in the West and English and make sure that this legacy of his. his work, his political writings were able to be carried on to a new generation. Yeah, thank you, Andrew.

I mean, one thing I'll do, A, to try and keep things a little bit short and B, just to shamelessly plug, I've written quite a lot about Kenneth, and if anyone is particularly if they're hearing about him for the first time or don't really know that much, I wrote something that you can read online on Mondo Weiss. called a race against time, the life and death of Alasan Kenafani. And I discuss exactly kind of everything that you've just introduced there. And what is kind of amazing about, or kind of was amazing for me personally, about that piece is that, so Kenafani was assassinated by Mossad in 1972.

And in 1973, his wife, Annie Kanafani, wrote this incredibly moving tribute to him, which is kind of part remembrance, part biography. It has artistic works of his. It has extracts from his writing. It has letters to her from people like Josh Habash. It has a letter written from his son, Kanaffani's son, to him after he had died. And it's an incredibly moving document.

And I read that probably in about 2015, 2016 and that's when I realized the extent to which I had I had largely thought of Kenafani as a writer of fiction. You know, I knew PFLP, you know, I was aware of the more political side but I don't think I had read anything by him at that point and reading that profoundly moving document kind of made me realize the extent to which I had not seen the kind a full kind of fanny. And so I started to read his non-fiction

in Arabic. And one of the things that I read was on Zinist literature. But what was amazing is that having published on Zynos literature and having formed a relationship with Annie, his widow, who's still alive, and his son and daughter, Annie

and Fayas, I was asked to write the introduction to the republication of Annie's tribute to him, which was like for me, just this kind of amazing cyclical thing that I was in essence asked to do that, at least in part

because I had published or edited and published the On Zionist literature, translation by Mudd Nishib. But I only did that because I had read that tribute by Annie. And to speak to Onzine's literature specifically,

I mean, I was kind of blown away when I initially read it. It's this kind of furious, urgent desire written in the wake of the Naxi in 1967 to try and understand how not only as Israel won so hugely and militarily and politically, but also on a kind of narrative level. How has the Zionist narrative been so successful and where are its roots in literature and how can we understand and combat them? And actually, in the introduction he says, you know, this is, this is all been, I've done all of this on the basis

of one principle to know your enemy. And I kind of almost got goosebumps when I read that because obviously within, within five years of that, that enemy had killed him. And definitely explicitly part of my desire in publishing, you know, it can't do all of his political writing, although I do know, unfortunately, not by, not by us, but I do know a collected political writings is actually forthcoming. Someone else has been working on that, which is fantastic. You know, I'm not territorial. I just wanted to be out. But definitely, explicitly, part of my motivation in getting that translation out there was to get people to rethink their idea of him. Because like most revolutionary since his killing, he suffered this kind of like be-fanging, slightly liberal

reframing, you know, people that supposedly love him taking hands. heinous positions that he would be the first to condemn. And also as well, something I did have in mind is there are lots of Palestinian and other Arabs in the diaspora who's written Arabic is not for various reasons

is not strong. And so even though they might be aware of him in that political way, just on a linguistic level are cut off from it. And so that was definitely part of the kind of my audience that I was thinking about as well. I could go on, but in the interest of time.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's a wonderful evocation. I encourage people to check out the review on liberated texts and also to find the book because it has been translated helpfully for wider readership. Of course, you know, in this context, it just makes me remember Rafat Alari, you know, of who taught literature, Hebrew literature. on that same principle that you have to really understand

this society of your oppressors and their culture and their mentality and of course is also somebody who produced literature but was also a political writer and was assassinated. So we just have this kind of pattern here. I actually wrote a piece for

electronic intervada kind of directly comparing. Comparing, okay, makes sense. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not a parallel. Well, I mean, your site for liberated text has quite a lot of content

You mentioned the recent the Glub-Faris Glob's work on Zionism and Nazi Germany and Rassan Kanafani's work and quite a number of other pieces. Obviously, this is the moment to talk a little bit about Palestine, but you've also put together a magazine issue of Eb, Eb magazine on Palestine. What can you tell us about what you tried to do there as editor of this special issue? So the first thing I'll say is that we had already had plans to kind of launch a physical magazine.

And then I don't remember exactly when, but I think within a day or so of October the 7th, I suggested that we dedicated to Palestine for obvious reasons and, you know, can I be the kind of, can I edit it, basically? And then it just kind of came about in a very organic way. I think, you know, as I think we can all understand, especially, well, I mean, still are, but especially in the immediate aftermath of October the 7th. And as the genocide started, it was such a intense emotional period. that we, I didn't even have an opportunity to kind of issue a formal, you know, call for papers or it was, it just happened in this kind of very natural organic way that someone said, oh, I want to write about this. I thought someone for something this and then it all just kind of began to

fall into, to place. But I think what unifies certainly was my intention and I think I can speak for everyone else involved. What unifies the content of the, of the, of the, of the magazine is, or is a number of things. I think one is to place what is happening in the broader historical and political context. And, you know, the material reality of the situation, not this kind of abstract, often vague notion of Palestine that gets evoked, I think, in a lot of Western solidarity spaces that unfortunately I think is often

is divorced from the reality of the situation basically so it's a desire to place that what is happening really in the context that is needed to fully understand it it's to support the right

of the Palestinians to armed resistance it's to place the Palestinian resistance in the broader context of the Axis resistance of what that means and what's happening. So, for example, the interview added the Balman side is a lot of it is about that. There's also some archival material. So, for example, there's a very relevant and compelling extract

from an interview that Mahmoud Darwish gave in 1982, which actually links back to the Palestine Research Centre that I mentioned because he's speaking just after the Israelis had destroyed and looted the Palestine Research Centre and he speaks about the Israeli war on Palestinian culture basically and how it's part and parcel of the Zionist project and how there's this amazing line about how we're not surprised rather than butcher it let me actually just get it

he says he who steals the land does not surprise us by stealing a library and the library here he's referring to the Perchstein Research Centre. He who kills thousands of innocent civilians does not surprise us by killing paintings. And he who destroys a whole homeland does not surprise us when he destroys a wall on which we hung our paintings. I could go on, but it's a very useful extract for contextualizing and understanding the devastation of educational and cultural institutions that continue to take place in Gaza right now.

And actually, there are quite a lot of parallels between Israel's campaign against Lebanon and Beval, specifically in 1982 and the devastation of Gaza. So yeah, I mean, there are obviously unbiased, but I think it's an extremely

powerful and I think useful group of a group of writings. But yeah, I think what it hopes to do is capitalise on the opportunity that I think has been presented by these events and by this genocide to move people even you know i'm not

castigating people necessarily but you know many well-intentioned people but to move them away from a slightly um at times patronizing and detached attitude of sympathy for the palestinians to one of a kind of informed political stance born out of empathy and actual solidarity and considering them as, you know, rational, political actors and armed resistance being part of that spectrum of resistance as a completely legitimate part of that spectrum of resistance. And that's saying that I interviewed a Palestinian writer and academic called Abdujad Amur.

And that's something that we spoke about. And that came out of saying the hero responding specifically to something written by Adam Schatz in the London Road. Right. That was an amazing piece by Abdul Jawad. So I encourage people who aren't familiar with that exchange to read that and then read your interview because it's a very deep reflection upon this kind of key question that came and framed a lot of the way the left was talking about this issue. They just went with this Adam Schatz kind of while we have to really distinguish ourselves and our movement from what happened on October 7th and we can't fall into this, you know, glamorization of resistance. And it exactly parallels these kinds of debates and discussions that were happening in the 60s and 70s when there were liberation movements where certain sectors of the left felt it was absolutely crucial to distinguish themselves somehow from genuine solidarity with the, resistance has taken place on the ground. So I really appreciated that piece by Abdul Jawad and your discussion with him that really

reaffirmed and developed the response to that kind of knee-jerk, safe position that was being taken and that really in some ways constrained left response in the first couple of weeks. And I think it was actually one thing. I think we didn't there's not a piece specifically in the issue that looks directly at October the 7th and the kind of Israeli narrative

but there's kind of references to it here and there and I think those references have been massively vindicated since the publication of the issue whereby almost every element of that narrative has completely fallen species you know the most extreme

for example you know the beheaded babies and that obscene atrocity propaganda but you know there's a mass rate you know they've all those stories have fallen to pieces basically um and that's yeah it's like 1948 all the myths that were told in that time period it took quite a long time to disprove these and people didn't believe the Palestinians you had to wait until the Israeli new historians finally authenticated and legitimated you know the evidence well I mean in this case it did take some time but I think the process because of people like Abdul Jawad because of the electronic intubada, Mondeweiss, cradle, you know,

Gray Zone, et cetera, reporting quickly on this, as you say, I mean, these narratives collapsed, you know, with the weight of genuine evidence being, being marshaled. And so I think this is a very important issue. I want to say also that I very much appreciated that if you purchase it, a pound of every issue will be donated to the Palestine Action Legal Defense Fund, a very important organization doing what it can in the belly of the empire to slow down the Israeli war machine and the complicity of societies like Britain, the United States in the manufacturing of weapons that are directly going to the killing of Palestinians in the genocide in Gaza and then the West Bank.

So that's another reason, you know, you'll learn a lot. It's a great issue, but then you're also helping support. And there's actually a piece by someone called Liam Dohti, a Palestine Action activist. He's written a piece about Palestine action and what they're doing and why people should get involved and why it's so important. Yeah, you know, one of the things that actually, the last question that Adnan asked and the last answer that you had, Louis, completely took the words out of my mouth in terms of what I was planning on saying and the next question I was planning on asking. But just before I ask my next question, I just want to reflect on the fact that, as

a non-set, it's great when institutions, organizations, publishers are willing to say, look, we're going to put our money where our mouth is. We stand in support with Palestinian people and people who are taking direct action in conjunction with the Palestinian liberation cause and we're going to, you know, contribute some money. Just as a kind of shameless plug, guerrilla history wrote the forward for an upcoming collected historic documents of the PLO,

which is coming out from ISCRA books around the time that this episode will be coming out, actually. It's slated for release on March 30th, although we're recording this about a month in advance, so it may shift a day or two. but it's related for it advertised in the issue yes yes I saw that that was historic documents for the PLO and historic documents

of the PLPR both in a full page spread that was very generous of you Louis but the point that I'm the reason that I'm shamelessly plugging that is that all of the profit that comes in on that historic documents of the PLO text is going to the Middle East Children's Alliance and I think it's a great thing that ISCRA is doing again shameless because I'm now on the

editorial board of Iskra, but it's great that we are, you know, putting all of that profit that's going to come in to Mecca. But the next question that I wanted to ask, Louie, now that I've got that, you know, digression out of the way, is, you know, you talked about how that Ed magazine issue can help people understand the situation that is going on. But also, I think that there's two other perspectives that we have to think about in terms of not only that Ebb issue, but also the work that Liberated Texas is doing more generally,

that institutions like Ebb are doing that we have been trying to do with contextualizing the history of Palestine, the history of movements within Palestine, the history of the genocidal relations, settler colonialism of the so-called Israeli state against occupied Palestinian territory. I think that it's really important that we also think about the perspective of what does the future look like and then also dispelling myths not not these like very silly

myths that we've talked about with the media saying there's beheaded babies or oh they found a baby in the oven oh wait that's just a repackaging of something that actually happened in the Sabrash until a massacre is against Palestinian babies but you know we're just going to report it

as if Palestinians are doing it to Zionist occupiers without evidence you know we've talked to about media false representations of this of this situation about this history with tar alami listeners go back and listen to that conversation if you haven't already it came out in about early november i want to say so not that long ago can find it but i think that in the in the western left as well as particularly in liberals but even some broad swaths

of the western left there's still so many misconceptions about the reality of what is happening in Palestine, what has been happening in Palestine for a hundred years, as well as the reality of what is going on today. So, Louie, how can we utilize the type of material that that Eb magazine issue had in it, that liberated text puts out, the reviews that liberated text puts out, republishings, you know, things that, again, shameless plug, that we have been trying to do, How can we utilize this material to try to conceptualize what the future should and will look like, as well as how we can utilize this material to help reframe what people think and believe is the situation, the objective situation, which is frankly false, and it has been what has been fed to them in this informational warfare that we've essentially been talking about since the beginning of this conversation.

So kind of those two prongs. Yeah. I mean, so like I said, we don't necessarily, I mean, there are so many layers to that because obviously there is a need to push back on the extremely egregious mainstream narrative and the layers of propaganda inherent to that. But I think there's also a need to talk to and to essentially propagate people who are already, you know they would for example consider themselves pro-Palestinian or pro-Palestine but they are in such a way that like I said is kind of disconnected from reality

material reality on the ground and is too often based on kind of a feeling of sympathy for Palestinians when they're victims and you know and that's not to say that sympathy is a it's an understandable emotion to feel to some extent but I think what what I think needs to happen more and more and I think is happening I definitely feel it is happening

because of because of the the genocide in the last you know now almost is it five months I think a lot of people perhaps in some ways maybe more than ever before have had their eyes open to this but it's about

moving people away from sympathy for victims to actual solidarity with resistance, basically, which is obviously a key distinction. And obviously that ties in directly with the propaganda against the resistance that wants to portray them all as, you know, maybe killing savages. How we do that, I think, you know, it depends exactly on which audience and who you're trying to to convince

in terms of just to speak to a specific element of your question in terms of the future I don't think I mean I certainly don't view it as my role to kind of think what the future looks like but from a kind of so for Palestine

but from a solidarity perspective what I do think is important is that moving that switch away from sympathy to actual solidarity and empathy is going to be vital when the tide turns. And I, you know, I do believe the tide is going to turn. And Israel is in a very weak place. Despite the devastation and the ongoing devastation and the dominance of Israel in some ways, I do believe

that Israel is in a very, very bad place. And it doesn't have solutions to numerous internal external contradictions that it faces. And so I think one thing, if you want to talk about the future and having an eye on the future from a solidarity perspective, we need to start thinking about how is that going to look when the Palestinians are not just victims. And we've had a kind of a short glimpse of what that could look like through October the 7th, where a lot of our swaves of people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian

immediately believed or more or less believe the Israeli narrative and immediately moved to condemn that resistance. And so, hopefully, through greater understanding of the resistance and through the historical context and through greater awareness of the extent of propaganda, which hopefully a lot of people have learned now because of the last few months, I mean, I'm not going to be too optimistic on that front. But that people will react in a different way,

whether it's the Palestinian factions, whether it's Hezbollah, whether it's others who will actually go on an offensive how will that be greeted and treated amongst the Western Solidarity movement? I think that's definitely something

because obviously that's in the future that's not at the forefront of my mind, but that definitely is something in my mind and I think that will be aided by and just so for example also in the issue is my review of Fayet's book, because I think that's very compelling that you had,

you know, someone writing this stuff in the 1960s that is still so unbelievably accurate and compelling about the nature of Zionism and the nature of the Zionist state. He's been so vindicated. Yeah, I don't know. I've actually really answered your question because I think it does depend to some extent on what audience you're talking about. But I definitely think and this definitely fits in with a lot of the stuff you guys are doing as well which is to move people away however strongly they may feel emotionally but move people away from this kind of abstract Palestine into you know and so I think one of the one of the people that or one of the groups of people that are suffering the

most emotionally right now is they do care but all they can see is kind of absolute devastation they can't see any hope in the resistance whatsoever. They either ignore or completely dismiss the access of resistance and they don't have any faith or any understanding of the broader regional dynamics so all they see is absolute despair. And I think it's incumbent upon us who are not suffering in that direct way to not give in to despair and to be able to have that broader perspective. But unfortunately I think in a lot of cases that doesn't happen.

And, you know, I don't think a single magazine issue is going to solve that, but I think that's the rationale for a lot of stuff that I do and try to do. Yeah, absolutely. I think that you summarized that really well, and much better than my question was, of course, real change is going to take place from the Palestinian liberation movement itself. And you being pretty explicit on that is very important. I'm not claiming that the magazine issue or this show are going to make a substantial difference in the, you know, the fight for Palestinian liberation. My, the reason that I brought up the Western left and Western liberals is because they are so backwards on this issue that they are very easy to, or I should say, it should be rather easy to make some change with them.

It's much easier to make and much faster to make these changes with these groups than it is, you know, against the genocidal entity from where we are. But of course, as you... I really do think a key part of that is normalizing supporting the Palestinian right to arm struggle and armed resistance. You know, that course. After Safe al-Aquodz in 2021, I wrote a piece arguing that, basically. That is also included in the habit should.

Because I really think that should just be a complete default position for anyone. It shouldn't be arguable. not a year he's a completely uncontroversial basic position and of course currently it's not but just completely anecdotally on that front a friend of mine who is a good friend of mine but I would say he's kind of kind of a liberal

he unexpectedly mess with me a few days ago saying that he had read that piece of mind and how profoundly moved he was by it and he wishes you know he wasn't He thinks everyone should think that now and he wants everyone to read that piece. And I was just, I was very surprised. And, you know, that's just, and I've got a couple of friends. I'm going to have to share it with them in that case.

I mean, I think, you all have them. I have been told by people that that it's very useful from that purpose. And that is kind of what I wanted to do with that piece. It kind of goes through and, you know, I hope dismisses the various, criticisms or rejections on it you know whether it's because it's pointless or because it's this or because it's that I kind of go through and try so well no actually

and also as well it's like it's ultimately one thing I find interesting is that some people respond very defensively to that argument as if what I'm saying is that BDS and various other things don't matter whereas actually what I'm saying is they're all legitimate and all part of the same struggle

those others, including BDS, are going to be, let's be kind and say less effective if there is not actual armed struggle. And it should, and as you said, Henry, it should just be completely standard that that is supported by anyone who is seriously considering themselves in solidarity to the Palestinians, almost amongst the reasons for which, because that's the position of the Palestinians, as far as we can tell from polls, even recent polling. Armstrong is deemed completely legitimate and supported by the Palestinians themselves. And so who is it from, it's not the place of someone external to that, claiming to be solidarity in solidarity with it,

to then explicitly condemn or oppose it, you know, on the contrary. 100%. So, yeah, just to summarize that, then, you know, we have a role to play. the role of true liberation is going to take place in Palestine, but we do have a role to play. And this is a funny anecdote, you know, from the show is kind of history for listeners who may have listened to the very, very end of the episode that we did with Comrade Joma. We asked him a similar question. I see Adnan is laughing. He's muted.

So listeners, you can't hear it. But he knows exactly where this is going. We interviewed Comrade Joma, founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines. and, of course, we stressed more or less the same thing that, you know, liberation of the people of the Philippines from the oppression of capitalism and Western imperialism is going to take place through struggle in the Philippines. But we ask, what is it that comrades in the West can do to show solidarity with those struggling in the Philippines? And Comrade Joma, and I'm going to try to quote him as closely as possible, he said, now hypothetically speaking, those of you who have knowledge of weapons systems and other advanced technologies should find ways of transmitting that to the Philippines and the Communist Party of the Philippines and the NPA, hypothetically speaking, of course. So what I took from that, you know, that completely hypothetical suggestion. And again, we're going to stress, listeners, hypothetical, is that while liberation is going to take place at the site of struggle,

even those of us far removed geographically from struggle do have roles to play. Unfortunately, I don't have knowledge of advanced weapon systems so that hypothetical really does remain hypothetical for me, but there are things that you can do, even if it is something as small as BDS, but do try to find ways in which you are able to play some role. Louis, there's a lot more that I would like to discuss with you right now, but we did promise that we'd get you out at this time, but how about we'd bring you back sometime in the relatively near future to continue this conversation and a lot of other avenues that we had

planned and hoped to talk with you about. Yeah, I'd be honest, it's been a pleasure. Great. So, Louie, can you let the listeners know where they can find you, your excellent work, liberated texts, the ebb magazine issue that we've been discussing, all of that? The ebb magazine is ebb-hyphen magazine.com. Liberated text is liberatedtext.com. I guess the main way to keep you. track of what I'm doing or saying is I'm on Twitter at Louis underscore all day. Yeah, and if you're able to buying a copy of the air issue, would be very welcome. But most, if not all of the material, it will also be, is already or will be on our website.

Terrific. And of course, that'll all be linked in the show notes, listeners. So be sure to click on all of that. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other excellent? podcast. You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan, A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and check out the M-A-J-L-I-S. If you're interested in the Middle East Islamic World, Muslim diaspora culture, and so forth. We've got probably, I would say, an episode coming out each month. Look forward to an episode with Nuri Ghana about his new book, melancholy acts, defeat and Arab cultural critique after 1967.

Sounds fascinating. I'm looking forward to listening to that. As for me, listeners, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck1995. As we mentioned earlier, we have that historic documents of the PLO book that we wrote one of the forwards to coming out at around the same time that this episode will be dropping. So be sure to check Iskrabooks.org. Pick that up, as I mentioned, all of the profit from that book are going to be going directly to the Middle East Children's Alliance Mecca. So if you didn't already have a reason to pick it up, there is another one to pick it up. In terms of supporting the show and allowing us to make more episodes like this, you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history.

That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. and you can follow us on Twitter at Don't follow me on Twitter if you're looking for the show at Gorilla underscore Pod G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Score Pod And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.