Guerrilla History - Guerrilla History Pilot

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 guerrilla history. The podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use

Starting point is 00:00:35 the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki, joined by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. Hi, Henry. Great to be with you. Nice to have you here. And Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. Hello, happy to be here, excited for this project. Yeah, it's great to have you and I'm glad to be starting it with both of you. So today we're going to be launching our podcast, guerrilla history, which is really exciting for me because too often there's a lot of proletarian history that's overlooked in mainstream media and even in independent media. So here we're

Starting point is 00:01:25 going to try to bring light to a lot of these subjects. But before we get into talking about what our podcast is going to be going forward, perhaps let's get an introduction to who each of us are for the listeners that they know who's talking to them. Adnan, you want to begin? Who are you? Oh, well, you summed up at least my institutional affiliations. I'm a historian, and I teach at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. And I'm actually a medieval historian by specialty. So I focus on Muslim-Christian-Jewish interaction. So it's far removed from some of the current sorts of histories we'll be talking about. But I've always had a great love and interest in the way in which the past can inform contemporary understanding for social justice,

Starting point is 00:02:15 struggles, and activism. So I'm really delighted to be involved with this. And in my, you know, free time and outside of the work that I do professionally as a historian of medieval Europe, I'm engaged in various kinds of social justice movements in my community and helping people understand more about the Middle East. And so I run a program called Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project at Queen's University that tries to do a lot of public education about the Middle East and Islamic world to deal with the questions and problems about Islamophobia in the community. And so I often like to use history as a way to ground those kinds of analysis of those kinds of issues. And so that's the kind of project I see this podcast being really

Starting point is 00:03:06 useful for. As I understand, this isn't the first time you've done a project like this. You previously had a project called Radio Bandung. Would you like to talk about that briefly? Oh, yes. I had a radio show for a while that I think is a real precursor to what I hope this will become and even grow into a more successful sort of survey of history. It was called Radio Bandung and it was on the local, you know, Queens University, CFRC College radio station. And I did it with a colleague in history. And we tried to basically talk about third world, anti-colonial, anti-racism. movements for social justice, worker struggles, and we would interview people who had written books about history in the 20th century and have a conversation with them and then try and think about ways in which this history

Starting point is 00:04:02 could be relevant to our contemporary situation, both to understand it but also to transform it. Great. Brett, I've been on your show before, Rev. Left. You've been a guest of me on the day David Feldman show before. Who are you for the listeners that perhaps aren't familiar with you? Yeah. Well, my name is Brett O'Shea, and I run two podcasts currently.

Starting point is 00:04:26 One is Rev. Left Radio, which has been on the air for almost four years. It started right after Trump was actually elected. And it actually grew out of organizing efforts on the ground through a basically working class collective of people coming together in the wake of not just the Trump election, but the rise in far-right sort of agitation and organization in our community as well as around the country. But we had some prominent fascist and neo-Nazi types who we came together to organize, to create a front to work against and to out to the community and just to give the community heads up, keep track and tabs on these organizations

Starting point is 00:05:05 and try to give people the necessary information to keep themselves safe. And that evolved into a broader organizing effort, and part of that organizing effort was to do political education. And so RevLeft came out of that, and it was initially just supposed to be like a local thing, but once you put it online, it can fall into anybody's hands. And before we knew it, we had a national and then an international audience. And then from that, we created a secondary podcast really focused just on political theory texts. So reading and explaining those texts that a lot of people on the left like to talk about

Starting point is 00:05:40 and argue about, but few actually sit down and read much less. understand and we wanted to fill that gap so we created red menace with my co-host alison escalante and between these two shows which focused on different things but are obviously related we've built up quite a base of listeners and then when i was approached about you know doing this third podcast really focused on history which is already deeply an interest of mine i jumped at the chance so yeah that that's basically who i am and where i come from yeah and i've i've been a big fan of both of those shows that you run for a long time pretty much since both of them have started and they've really taught me a lot and I'm hoping that this new project can basically do the same for other people by bringing perspectives

Starting point is 00:06:23 that they otherwise wouldn't be exposed to and bringing those things to light so that people can really digest this stuff that they never would come across otherwise. So I guess I'll introduce myself briefly now. My name's Henry Huckimacki. I'm a graduate researcher of immunobiology. So a little bit divorced from what you would expect in a history podcast, but I've been an activist since my undergraduate days and deeply involved with, you know, the left and advocacy and have had a deep interest both academically as well as personally in political science, international affairs and history for basically as long as I can remember. So this is really what you could consider a passion project of mine, even though it doesn't necessarily fall within my academic

Starting point is 00:07:16 discipline. So we may have episodes going forward that do tangentially mention science. I know we had discussed potentially having an episode coming up in the future about the history of pandemics as well as how that influenced society, because that's something that a lot of people don't really think about, is how these pandemics have influenced society. So those would fall within my specific academic wheelhouse. But primarily what this podcast is going to be is looking at movements throughout history and to take lessons out of those going forward. But before I get you two to talk about what you would like to get out of this project,

Starting point is 00:07:59 what you would like the listeners to get out of this project, I think let's hit some interstitial music. we'll get our thoughts together and then we'll come back and we'll talk about what we see this podcast being as well as why we think that the listeners

Starting point is 00:08:14 should be listening to this podcast and what we hope that they get out of it. So we're back on guerrilla history. Now we've introduced their selves, myself,

Starting point is 00:08:35 Professor Hussein and Brett, And now let's talk a little bit about what we see this podcast becoming in the months to come, hopefully years to come, and what we want our listeners to get out of it. So who wants to get their perspective out there first as to what they want this to become? I can start off. Yeah, just quickly. I think it's incredibly important for anybody who wants to understand the present state of the country. of the world, which I think a lot of people are struggling to understand. It's essential that you

Starting point is 00:09:11 study history. But the way that history is studied obviously diverts in different ways. We all know that the general sort of cliche that history is written by the victors, or in Vijay Prasad's new book, he says, history is often written by the stenographers of power. And so what we get handed down to us is a version of history that really comes from the ruling class's perspective in most cases. And even when subversive, even revolutionary movements are described, they're almost always described, at least vaguely from a perspective that's not wholly their own. It's from the perspective of in the time those who opposed them. And so I think even when I think about political theory, which is something that's very close to my heart, something

Starting point is 00:09:56 we do on Red Menace, which is these deep dives in a political theory, when somebody comes up and says, where should I start? You know, I'm almost, you know, always tempted to put them in the direction of studying history first because i think almost equally an understanding a really firm understanding of history is um it really equips you intellectually and critically with the knowledge necessary to understand things even more so than just political theory in a vacuum now ideally political theory and history combined give you a really good understanding of things but i think history might even be in many cases at least um even more fundamental and so you know doing that history and doing it from the perspective of the most oppressed, from the perspective of the

Starting point is 00:10:40 proletariat, of the colonized, I think is useful, incredibly useful work that you don't see enough of. And to come to the table with that explicit perspective, I think is what we hope to accomplish here with guerrilla history. I think what Brett raised are some really fantastic and important points about the value of history. What I imagine in some ways, the episodes of this podcast being or performing in a way are sort of field reports, field intelligence from the terrain of history in doing these reconnaissance style history, which is a concept that famous Canadian historian of the left, Ian Mackay, sort of termed as a way to guide a kind of counter history that doesn't just do what Brett mentioned, the stenography of power.

Starting point is 00:11:33 but actually provides a kind of usable understanding of the past as a kind of intelligence report to aid activist and movements for struggle and change for social justice. And that's how I imagine and understand history can and should be understood and studied as a resource that is available to us, both to learn from, but also to understand our world in order to really assess the powers and the array of forces and how they're mobilized and organized where their weak spots are, you need to have a good resume and understanding of history, how that has changed, and then also to take inspiration from some of the struggles, whether successful or not, that we should be in solidarity with, that we should learn from in order to understand how we can adapt

Starting point is 00:12:30 knowledge to our present and contemporary social struggles for freedom, liberation, equality, and justice. And I think another important point is that we really do imagine this as a global sort of history. That is, we're interested in the third world, in worker struggles and movements all around the world over the last few centuries that can, tribute to the way in which this globalized world connects our struggles. We have to understand the interdependence of our struggles. Too often, we take just a local or national perspective in our history and in our struggle. And I'm hopeful that if we learn from the patterns of revolutionary struggle and change around the world, that we will be much better equipped to provide

Starting point is 00:13:28 the kind of solidarity that's necessary for these to be successful and to contribute to a truly global moment for social change. Yeah, I agree entirely with what both of you were saying. I think that unfortunately the way that history is taught, at least in the United States, far too often boils down to when something happened and where something happened as opposed to why something happened and how that event influenced the future going forward. So what's really key for us here is not just to focus on dates and places,

Starting point is 00:14:05 but for us to take lessons out of these events that we can apply to analyzing current events, both within the country that the event that we're talking about, happened in as well as globally, as Adnan just mentioned. For example, and it's something that we've, mentioned Vijay Prashad before and just a teaser, he's going to be our first guest. So for the next episode of guerrilla history, Vijay Prashad will be the guest. In his new book, he mentioned quite rightly that the Carnation Revolution in Portugal wouldn't have been possible without the

Starting point is 00:14:41 anti-colonial struggles against Portuguese colonial power in Africa. If you were only looking at those anti-colonial struggles, you wouldn't necessarily tie them into the Carnation Revolution. And if you were only looking at the Carnation Revolution and Portugal itself, you wouldn't necessarily be looking at those anti-colonial struggles. So to really go in and dive deep and be able to look at these events, not just, okay, this year, this event happened in 1974, the Carnation Revolution happened. Yeah, understanding the dates is useful for putting a timeline together of what happened and when things happened. But that's not the full picture. You really have to have this interconnectedness between events, cause and effect, to be able to understand history and to be

Starting point is 00:15:27 able to actually utilize history, because as we know, understanding history is good, but using history to affect change is really what the key is. So I think that it's important that we take not only a global perspective, but really look for these lessons. Again, some of these movements that we were talking about, proletarian movements across the world, especially in the third world, which is where I think that we should really be diving deep into because those are the most overlooked movements in contemporary history literature. We need to be looking into those events and taking out what the good was from that movement, what the bad was from that movement, what the ugly was from that movement. Why did they succeed? Why did they fail? What

Starting point is 00:16:14 could they have done better? What did they do? That was unexpectedly good. Because when we take those lessons out, we not only can see how that event affect other events in the past, but we can take those positive lessons from those events to utilize trying to move forward ourselves and to try to avoid the negatives that they face that they didn't potentially foresee in the past. So I think that that's really the key when we're using history is to be able to really get lessons out of it, not just to be able to see what happened and where it happened, but to really get that understanding of this was good, this was bad, this is something that could be tried. Adnan?

Starting point is 00:16:58 Well, I think that was a great example to use about the relationship, for example, between anti-colonial struggles for liberation in Africa and their consequences on a fascistic regime in Europe, in the case of Portugal. And I think it's also those connections. As you say, a lot of the third world histories or the histories of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are typically less focused on when we're talking about the history of the left.

Starting point is 00:17:30 it's really important to see that these struggles are common and that there are links between what happens there in our world and what happens inside Europe, North America, and so forth. And that's why I think the Malcolm X quote from the bullet famous speech of 1964 is such a perfect way of encapsulating guerrilla history and the reconnaissance reports we want to offer because Malcolm X himself was using history at that moment. It had been nine, ten years or so since the Battle of Diem Ben-Fu, and he tells his audience, do you remember Die M. Ben-Fu? And they immediately react in this way.

Starting point is 00:18:16 Why? Because it's a moment that illustrates a point that he's trying to make, that is a historic lesson, that it is possible to defeat the colonial powers, that they are weakening and to give people a sense of hope and inspiration that their struggle could matter. Because one thing that happened a lot in the African American freedom struggle in the United States is that people would focus on the fact that they were a minority, a racial minority in white America and that the system was too strong and that it would be impossible for them to struggle for freedom in an aggressive and in an uncompromising way. They imagined very often that we had to lobby and appeal for the power structure to open

Starting point is 00:19:05 itself up. And what Malcolm X was arguing was that this power structure is weaker than you think, and we need to have affiliations and lines of solidarity with contemporary, anti-colonial, anti-racism struggles around the world and imagine ourselves as part of that struggle. And when we do that, then we will feel emboldened to take political action in our own context. And that's the value of history that he saw. Remember Diem Ben-Fu, and as he pointed out, asymmetric war was brought these great powers to their knees and accomplished amazing things. So we need to take some inspiration from history, and that's the purpose, I think, of these sorts of episodes is to guide

Starting point is 00:19:54 the same kind of activist political thinking based on historical analysis. Let's remember, D.M. Ben-Fu. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And I think what we're all getting at or we're all saying in different ways is also indicative of a general approach, which I think we're all going to take, which, you know, can roughly be realized as a dialectical method, which means that we view history as being connected with everything else around it, right? You have to understand the history leading up to an event to understand that event. We don't understand things like so much bourgeois history does, which is almost as static, as Henry said, names and events,

Starting point is 00:20:32 sort of decontextualized from everything happening around them. So one of the dialectical methods is to understand that everything is deeply related and to understand something. You have to understand its relationship to everything else, that everything is cause and effect, that everything is analyzed through the internal contradictions of a given movement, society, culture, et cetera. And then finally, that history doesn't happen in this linear march of progress. Rather, it happens in ruptural leaps from the status quo to new forms of life.

Starting point is 00:21:03 Even if those forms of life are eventually rolled back by reaction, they represent a jump forward in history. And so we view history as that, not as some static, linear set of events. and names. And I think understanding history in that way gives a much more robust understanding generally of the world around us. And I think that's something that we're all aiming at. And we all come from three different backgrounds. So we'll have three unique perspectives on everything, but we're united in the fact that we're seeing history from the eyes of the oppressed and we're applying this sort of dialectical method to understand it more robustly. Yeah, exactly. And one thing that I want to point out just as an example of what Brett was just talking about, things move and leaps

Starting point is 00:21:47 and then sometimes they're rolled back by the forces of reaction. Perfect example of that is colonialism. We were talking about anti and decolonial struggles throughout history. Of course, back in the 60s and 70s, we had a lot of successful decolonial struggles. But just because they had these successful decolonial struggles doesn't mean that we don't have neocolonialism now. And that's something that if you're only focusing on dates and places, that doesn't give you a full picture of what's going on. If you say, okay, Thomas Sankara came in and that was their decolonial struggle, apartheid in South Africa fell, you had the People's Republic of the Congo, you had the Algerian independence movement. You had all of these things that occurred that really were successful decolonial struggles. And if you only were focusing on that event in isolation, you would say, okay, these places have been decolonialized.

Starting point is 00:22:46 And now they're independent. The people in their country have the say over what they do. They're sovereign. They don't have any external forces. But that's not how history works. As Brett said, as we have this leap. We have this decolonial leap. And that is a major event for the people in those countries.

Starting point is 00:23:05 But if you don't dive under the surface as to what happened afterwards, the same. see how that was rolled back, you don't realize the neocolonialism and the struggles that the people in those countries are still facing today. And in many cases, increasingly so, because the forces of colonialism, they've taken a different form than they were in the past. But that doesn't mean that they're any less pervasive than they have been in the past. They just have different methods of operating. And so by taking this dialectical approach to looking at history and being able to understand that not everything is static, not everything slowly transitions over time, we can realize that what is happening on the ground in these places that we're looking at

Starting point is 00:23:51 is not necessarily indicated by a individual event. And I think that that's a really important thing that we're going to highlight within this show is that one successful event or one failure isn't the end of history. Unlike Francis Fukuyama, there is no end of history. History is always changing. There's always a struggle and there's always counter struggles. And by understanding these, we can really get an idea of what's truly happening and not just this blob of broad understanding of what's happening both within a certain area as well as globally. You really have to dive deep and look beyond what is necessarily just on the surface. Well, that's what's so fascinating and wonderful about studying history

Starting point is 00:24:42 is that basically anything and everything that happened before could be part of one's analysis. So one can go into the history of events to really understand whether they were transformative and if so how. So you think of the French Revolution as a very transformative event that changed a lot of structures, but yet also at the same time you have to put it in the context of a longer, you know, period of transition. So, you know, this is one thing that I think is so fascinating, for example, about

Starting point is 00:25:13 Marx is the way in which he combines. And I think, you know, Brett mentioned that political theory, economic analysis should be combined with history. And I think that's something that, for example, Marx really tried to do was, you know, use history as the evidentiary basis for analysis that would lead to developing some kinds of theoretical and conceptual understandings about how societies work and operates so that you have a dialectical understanding of how transformation can take place and needs to take place. And so I think we may sometimes find that it's really fruitful to talk and go deep in a particular event that seems very significant.

Starting point is 00:26:02 Sometimes it may be more important to talk about larger-scale processes, like, for example, the sort of decolonization wave that takes place in Africa through the 60s and early 70s, for example, and to have some sense of how did this all work together,

Starting point is 00:26:21 not just as isolated individual cases of national liberation, but how did it change the world as a whole? looking at structural kinds of issues. And I think, you know, between those things, between events and these larger processes and structures, there's so much to learn and to understand. And it's really just a question of scale when we talk about these issues. You can learn so much from looking very closely at a local event. And you can also understand and appreciate history on a larger global level of what are the forces and processes that define a particular period or a particular movement.

Starting point is 00:27:01 And I think each of these are useful and everything in between. Hopefully, in different ways in these episodes, will equip us to analyze and understand history across that scale, from small scale events to larger global processes. Yeah, and I think one of the other benefits that you get from doing a deep dive of history, especially in a way that sees everything is connected, is that you begin to see yourself and your own life as a historical product. And you start to realize that you are situated within these historical processes, whether you wanted to or not, you're dropped right into them.

Starting point is 00:27:40 And to start understanding your own life as an outgrowth of history and then to understand that we are the vehicles through which history manifests, that we actually have some agency in the direction that we can push history, I think is incredibly ennobling and incredibly sort of reifying, at least for me, you know, it connects me to something much bigger than myself, and that is something that at the very least is interesting and at the higher levels can be really existentially almost fulfilling in a way when you understand yourself consciously as a product of history and then as an agent that can go about changing it and push it on new trajectories. That's an empowering thing.

Starting point is 00:28:17 That's right. I mean, we are the makers of our own history, but we don't make the conditions in which we make that history. And so that's the dialectical condition that we have to understand history in order to realize, well, what is it that we can change in our time as agents? And what do we inherit that we need to work with?

Starting point is 00:28:40 So I think that's a really important point, that it really helps us situate ourselves in our contemporary struggles for social justice to make a better world is we have to really understand where we are and how we fit into history. Yeah, excellent.

Starting point is 00:28:55 I mean, I agree with everything that both of you have been saying, and I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into this project with the two of you. For these episodes going forward, we're going to be having guests in them, who are experts either academically or in terms of activism on the ground for specific events, topics, the like. And we'll be bringing them on to get a deep dive into these different events, and then we'll be trying to piece together the bits to try to come up with this overview of how we should have viewed these events and the lessons that we can take out of them.

Starting point is 00:29:29 So thanks for showing up to this introductory podcast episode. As I told the listeners earlier, and I'll remind them now, the next episode that we have will be an interview with Vijay Prashad talking about his book, Washington Bullets, which is just out. So if this is the kind of history that you want to be listening to, Make sure to stay tuned because that's going to be an excellent interview. I'm sure that VJ is just a wonderful person and a wonderful interviewee. So Adnan Brett, thanks again.

Starting point is 00:30:03 This was great. How can our listeners find each of you on social media? For me, you can just go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. It has both of our shows, Red Menace and Rev. Left Radio. It has access to our Patreon, our Twitter, everything centralized at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. You can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain. And that's H-U-S-A-I-N for those wondering. It'll be in the show notes, I'm sure, but just to get that out there.

Starting point is 00:30:32 For me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. I also have a Patreon where I write about public health and science. It helped me get through this pandemic myself. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Huck-1995. And for this show, if you want to follow us on social media, go to Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-L-A-U-L-A-U-L-A-U-L-A. And our Patreon is available.

Starting point is 00:31:06 Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, same spelling, two R's, two L's. Thank you both very much. And we'll get together soon to talk with Vijay Prashad about his book, Washington Bullets. Take care. I'm going to be able to.

Guerrilla History - Guerrilla History Pilot

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