Guerrilla History - History as Propaganda, & Moving Beyond Capitalism w/ Lee Camp

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we present something a bit different than usual!  We recently appeared on Lee Camp's program Behind the Headlines to discuss history as propaganda, moving beyond capitalism, and much more.  Here, we provide a roughly 50 minute introduction to the topics and reflection on what we discussed with Lee before we include our interview on Lee's show in its entirety.  A very fun interview, be sure to check out Behind the Headlines if you enjoyed how it went!  You can also watch the interview portion (though not the reflection/intro) on YouTube. Lee Camp is a writer, comedian, podcaster, news journalist and news commentator.  Among other things, he was noted for hosting RT America's weekly comedy news show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp before RT America was shut down last year.  You can keep up with his latest work, including new episodes of Behind the Headlines at his website leecamp.com.  You can also follow him on twitter @LeeCamp. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You wouldn'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 Gorilla. History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims

to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by my usual co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm really doing well, Henry. It's good to be with you. Nice to see you. Also joined, as usual, by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing quite well. Happy to be here. Yeah. So what we've got today for the listeners is a bit different than what we usually have. We're actually going to be releasing the audio from another show that we all appeared on as guests.

And it was a little bit interesting because we were kind of interviewing each other over the course of the of the interview, which listeners, you will hear the interview in its entirety very shortly. What we want to do is just introduce it here. So last week we appeared on Lee Camp, the comedian, Lee Camp's new show titled Behind the Headlines, which comes out from Mint Press News. And we talked about a bunch of different topics. Like I said, we kind of interviewed him at parts and he interviewed us at other parts. But it was a really fun time and we want to just introduce some of the topics that we talked about and have a little discussion about what we were discussing and things that we perhaps would have liked to dive into more. I know that from my perspective, it was really interesting to talk with Lee. I'm not a big comedy guy, but I actually did watch his Redacted Tonight show on RT for several years.

And so it was really interesting to get to be on the show. And interestingly, we were actually supposed to appear on Redacted Tonight. This was something that we were working on in February of last year. And unfortunately, right at the time that we were supposed to go on the show, the entire Russia, Ukraine situation began to unfold in RT America and it's entirely went down in flames. So we didn't get the opportunity to appear unredacted tonight, but we finally did get to meet Lee Camp. And it was a really fun time. Brett, why don't I turn it over to you for your initial thoughts on, you know, getting to talk with Lee and some of the topics that we talked about during

the course of the conversation? Sure. Yeah, it was wonderful to be able to talk to Lee. I don't know if I watched Redacted back in the day. I mentioned like 12 years ago when I was washing dishes at a pizza place. I used to listen to a various podcast that he was on. So I'm not exactly sure what he was doing that long ago, but I remember hearing his clips often. And I used to listen to this podcast. I think it was called like the best of the left. And they would have clips from random, like progressive folks of various sorts, commentators. And I think that's where I heard him initially. But either way, I love the two main topics, sort of that we were supposed to cover on this, on this episode.

episode, which was history used as a propaganda tool and how the retelling and warping of history serves certain ideological interests. And then the other thing was how to move beyond capitalism, how will it happen, how might it happen, what needs to happen for it to happen. And so I think we had a good discussion there, but there's a point on each of those topics that I kind of wanted to touch on that I never got the chance to. And with the history as propaganda, you know, I went into a kind of a longer spiel about Mao and how he's thought of and, you know, this labeling of communist leaders as dictators, even worse than Hitler, which is pure fascist propaganda. And one of the things I didn't get quite a chance to sort of juxtapose is like the vision of somebody like, you know, Winston Churchill, who, you know, for all intents and purposes, was a hardcore racist, a white supremacist, engaged happily in acts of genocide. and if he just had left-wing politics would be remembered today as an absolute monster.

But because he had right-wing or center right at the time, politics, he's remembered as this wonderful hero. And, of course, the mythos of World War II comes into play there too. But juxtapose how Churchill is remembered today by people in the West compared to Chey and Fidel. Like, Chey and Fidel are, you know, in my estimation, holy heroic people. Like, you know, not even like some of the messiness you have to deal with with Mao and Stalin. And it was like, it's so clear that Fidel and Che were heroes. And they remembered as these barbarous, genocidal, homophobic for some reason, you know, people that are just monsters.

And a person like Churchill is raised up as a hero. And I think that's just another example of how these figures are remembered and warped throughout history to serve certain interests. And then when it comes to beyond capitalism and how to get beyond it, I talked about how crises happen, how there's a, you know, the global South will likely be a cat. for a new renewed socialist international movement. The Imperial Corps, led by the United States, will be obstinate in its attempts to stop and squash those movements. But one thing I didn't get to say, and this attaches to our role as people living in the Empire or, you know, here in the U.S. living in the Imperial Corps, is that this whole process is going to require U.S. hegemony weakening throughout the world. If there's ever going to be the rising of socialism in the global south that can spread internationally, it's going to have to come hand in hand with not only a battle against the capitalist imperial world, but a real reduction in the hegemonic domination that the U.S. Empire currently has around the world. And so for here living in the United States, that's obviously going to translate into anti-imperialist activity, rhetoric, education, and trying to push back against the story that the U.S. tells about itself.

from within the belly of the beast as a sort of way to help assist and foment movements around the world and the weakening of U.S. hegemony. So those are just two kind of smaller points that I wanted to add into those bigger points I made during the interview. But overall, I was very happy with how the interview went. Yeah. And I will just mention that you will, of course, listeners hear the entirety of the comments on those two topics.

So just keep Brett's comments in mind in terms of orienting those comments within the context of the conversation that we already had, which you will be hearing after this part. Adnan, let's turn it over to you now. What were your thoughts on the interview and the topics that we discussed? Well, it was, you know, a really fun conversation, an interesting one. I think we covered a very important topic about the use and abuse of history, its use in propaganda, and how narratives of history are so important for grounding our present sense of our identities and the political possibilities and implications of that. And I think we also had a really good conversation about this topic of nationalism that is a big myth-making in history or historical narrative making

that has a deleterious effect on our ability to really understand materialist history, class politics, and the avenues toward liberation. So I think it was a good basis for beginning to think about some of these issues, and I really appreciated Lee's interest also in turning the conversation to, well, you know, once we understand some aspects of, you know, history as propaganda and have some tools to debunk that and replace some of those false narratives with more accurate and effective ones, you know, how will this aid us in kind of getting beyond capitalism or finding some kind of, you know, revolutionary situation to transform the world. And I think that's exactly the reason why we started this podcast. So I enjoyed

the chance to think about that and enjoyed the discussion. I think Brett made some very important remarks there about, you know, the global South. And he's added now to about the importance of you know, resistance through history in the imperial core. And I just wish that we would have had a little bit more chance to talk actually about the ways in which history can serve as liberatory. And I was thinking a little bit, because we focused a lot on the distortions of history in this conversation, because we started with, you know, thinking about it as propaganda. And just examples of how we can use history to understand the world we're in,

in better ways and how that can aid us as a weapon in the struggle for liberation as a counter to the propaganda. And one thing is Brett talked about Winston Churchill. You know, he's really just more a symbol in some ways for British imperialism, you know, that isn't really accounted as, you know, the great scourge in human history that it has been. I mean, there's been so much cultural absorption, especially in the Anglophone world, in the English-speaking world of the history of the British Empire as somehow sort of positive because we've inherited some of its culture. And there even were like actual propagandists, I would say, people like Neil Ferguson, who during the era of the Iraq War were writing books about the history of the British Empire that tried to frame it as a liberal. empire, you know, for most of its history, but that unfortunately maybe near the end, there were some unfortunate things that happened saying Kenya, et cetera, in the 50s and so on.

But when it was at its sort of peak as a liberal empire in the Victorian age, it was contributing to, you know, building of infrastructure and improving the economies of, you know, the colonies and so on and tried to sort of sell this as a way of encouraging the United States. to be a liberal empire and justify its unipolar aggressive wars in places like the Middle East in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so you can easily see how deadly such propaganda is. So actually documenting how horrible and terrible and devastating the consequences of British Empire are and have been, has been a huge task, particularly, for example, by Indian historians who have countered these narratives, the subaltern school of history, anti-colonial forms of history,

are absolutely crucial in, you know, liberatory struggles and liberatory state formation, you know, to really remember, you know, that history and to not believe the propaganda that makes, made colonial subjects feel as if they were inferior, that they didn't have a history, that they couldn't be modern and that they had to accept their position as subordinates to a superior ruling kind of class. And that has been proven so dangerous, you know, in the period of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. And the legacies and effects of that are still with us. There's a constant need for education, you know, through this kind of sense of history as liberation. So I would have liked to have talked about some more of those kinds of examples of how history has been used to rehabilitate and decolonize, you know, the mine, decolonize society and aid people in their struggle for liberation.

But that's a huge topic and something that hopefully we'll cover a little bit more as we do, you know, in our episodes on guerrilla history. Yeah. Just echoing those sentiments, it's worth keeping in mind that history is written by the imperialists. So this is something that listeners of guerrilla history intuitively know. This is things that Lee Camps listeners also intuitively know is that history is written by the imperialists. One thing that I want to just add into this conversation that we didn't have a chance to during the interview is that there's then two tendencies that we have. that we have as a result of history being written by the imperialists and people intuitively understanding that. Some people intuitively understand it, but they don't give enough active thought to it.

So even though they understand that the history is written by the people that we really are opposed to in just about every other way, when they read it, they kind of put that out to the back of their mind. they take on some facts or statistics or whatever, uncritically, and then only at the end of the process that they remember, ah, yes, this was written by an imperialist. I don't agree with his end project, but they still take on a lot of the narrative that was put in there subconsciously. The other tendency that we also see is that we have in some people a knee-jerk reaction to calling everything a conspiracy or something along these lines.

We've talked about we have an episode on conspiracies. Now, that episode was focused more on right-wing conspiracies, but we do have a tendency within the far left to think that everything that is written by imperialists is inherently a conspiracy or is inherently written for the explicit purpose of undermining arguments of members of the left. Neither of these two things is what we should be doing. We have to go through piece by piece, consciously thinking, this was written by an imperialist. Is there an ulterior motive here? Or is this just something that is being reported by somebody that I think is a terrible person?

And we also need to not slip into, okay, I can't ascertain whether this is an actual thing or not. So therefore, because it was written by an imperialist, it must be false. neither of these are very constructive routes to take let's say that's not how you should be looking at history and that makes it easier for people to do propaganda because either one they're able to slide the propaganda in under your nose without you thinking critically about it or if you have that knee-jerk reaction to calling everything a conspiracy it turns off other people from listening to you because you're the person who cried conspiracy theory so that's just a little bit of a warning. Of course, it's worth noting that the imperialists are going to lie

very, very frequently, but don't have that knee-jerk reaction to it. Otherwise, you are going to turn off less of the politically and historically acute people. Adnan, you have something that you want to add? Yeah, just on that, I mean, I think a related point is that history isn't information that you know or don't know. It is also analysis and critical analysis of the causes and consequences, the changes and the continuities. There's so many elements in having good historical consciousness that I think is predicate for having good political consciousness, you know, like being able to analyze the political situation effectively.

And so, you know, one thing that I think is important is perhaps having a better sense of the methods. And this is why it's, you know, history can be a tool, is looking at sources, at evidence, at learning how to interpret and analyze them so that you can draw good conclusions from them that are based in material reality in being able to read histories critically with, you know, access to contextual information, but be able to pose questions even to the histories that you read to, you know, be thinking through these, these topics and issues. We can't just take things on authority either side. You know, you can't dismiss all authorities because they're implicated in the imperial, you know, projects, some of the best sources. I mean, our very first episode was a good conversation about Washington Bullets with V.J. Prasht. And what he did was he collected a lot of the sources that come from CIA, declassified CIA and State Department documents that themselves, when, critically read and analyzed reveal much about the story, you know, that so that it's not

this, you know, kind of mystery is when you have these documents and you can read and analyze and think carefully and piece through, you know, what's happening, why it's happening and what its consequences are, then you can grasp, you know, reality, which is what the purpose is, is to really grasp reality so that you can change it. You can't change it if you don't understand it. So that's another dimension of it. I think that's very important in thinking about what the role of history is and how propaganda is to be dissolved.

It's partly through a critical acumen and finding and using sources to analyze and deconstruct these myths, what they've left out, what they've distorted. You can't do that unless you actually, you can't read it just by, you can't do that just by reading a counter narrative unless you're accessing sources of knowledge and information that are the evidence around from which these historical narratives are built. So it's a very important kind of issue, I think, that you've raised there. Well, and just to lay down, yeah, just to lay down a couple things on what you're saying, I'll provide two different things that have come out from U.S. government sources to show how one is

outwardly facing and is intended for propaganda purposes. And the other one, despite coming again from the U.S. government, undermines the U.S. government's position on these things. So about a week or two ago, I want to say it was the Federal Reserve at St. Louis. So this isn't like a historical document. It's something that just came out. But I want to say it was the Federal Reserve of St. Louis just released a paper that was looking at defense spending. or, you know, you could think of it as military spending in various countries. They had the U.S., Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, I think two others. I want to say that there was six or seven.

I don't have the report at my fingers right now because it just popped to mind with you talking about it, but none. But what they had, they had a graph that kind of went viral with this. This graph showed military spending as a proportion, I want to say it was a proportion of GDP. over time. And what they had is it looked like China had overtaken. If you just look at the graph, it looked like China had overtaken the U.S. in military expenditures, which if people have been, had two had two acts. Well, that's exactly the point of none. That's, yeah, exactly. So if you just look at the graph itself, it looks like China has overtaken the U.S. in terms of military expenditures. And these other countries are actually pretty close to the US. But what they did is they had two different

y-axis. One y-axis was military expenditures by the other six countries on the graph. And it went up to like $350 billion a year or something like that. And then the other y-axis was only for the United States. And it went up to about a trillion dollars a year. So on one y-axis, it goes three times as high despite being on the same graph. And it's not evident, you know, it's not abundantly clear just by visually looking at the graph itself that the U.S. is the only country that's using this, this y-axis that goes up to one trillion. And the other ones are all going up to like 350 billion. So if you're thinking that it's the same number on the Y axis, like basically every other graph and human history would be, you'd say, oh, it's weird. You know, these other countries are overtaking the U.S.

military expenditures when reality could not be farther from the truth. But this report was released for the public. That's a very important thing to note is that, and this graph particularly was tailored for the public. You know, they wanted people to look at it and think, oh, geez, look, China is ramping up their military expenditures. Their military is going to be bigger than ours. That's scary.

We have to increase military funding here in the United States. But the other thing that we can use, and this is, again, the U.S. And the CIA, no less, you know, one of the most odious institutions in human history, not just in terms of U.S. institutions, but of any institution in human history, the CIA is way up there for being among the most bad. This was a report that came out. Again, I don't have it at my fingers because it came up to mine during your discussion, Adnan, but it was a paper that came out an internal document in about 1952 or 1953, I want to say. And it was eventually declassified and you can read it now.

It's a very short thing. Looking at the quote unquote totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. So of course, what were Americans told at that time and today is that Stalin made every decision in the USSR. It was an absolute totalitarian nightmare where one man made all of the, he held all. of the power in the country, and anybody that disagreed with him would be disappeared. This is the dominant narrative. This was the dominant narrative.

And surely this will continue to be the dominant narrative, despite efforts, including my own, like on translating this Lissurdo book on Stalin. Like there are people that are trying to push back against this hegemonic view. But inevitably, this is going to be the hegemonic view. The CIA very explicitly states in this document. And if people are interested, if I forget, just tweet. at me and I'll send you the document or screenshots to the document. But it very explicitly says reports of this being a totalitarian system in which one person makes all of the decisions and

there's no room for dissent are completely false. This system is far more horizontal than most people realize and that this is not just government by dictat. Like there is actually legislative processes that are going on in a very robust way. And there is a lot of debate that's taking place. The CIA knew this. If there's anybody in the U.S. that would know this, it would be the CIA, right? And they did know it. But this was an internal document. It didn't come out until decades later. And even when it came out, you know, once in a while, somebody like me will put it on Twitter and it'll get whatever, a thousand likes or something like that. But it is not in the popular consciousness and it was not intended to be. It was a complete internal document.

So these are two different ways in which organizations that are working within the United States government can do different things. Outwardly facing for pure propaganda purposes or inwardly facing. That inwardly facing document is very useful for analyzing the Soviet Union. In terms of American sources, you actually can't get much better than what the CIA is able to collect, you know, outside of going through Soviet sources. That's about as good as you can get from that era. But it was not intended for the public. So we have to be able to look at this and just and not just say, oh, it was the CIA. There's some ulterior motive here. No, this was a legit document. This was something that was internal. This is what the evidence was at that period of time,

at least according to the CIA within their internal documents. So it's really interesting to just put that wrinkle on it. You know, you have to think who's the audience. Is there, uh, some, some motive behind this document? And what are, what are we trying to do with it before just saying, ah, the CIA is a terrible organization. Let's put this report in the garbage. No, you have to read it. You have to think. And so think. That's, that's my message. Brett, you haven't talked in a while. Anything you want to add in here? Yeah, just really quick on the military spending graph. I mean, I saw like graph two. Absolutely absurd that anybody would do that. And it, almost certainly has to be in bad faith that you would construct a graph so consciously misleading

as that. But one of the things I think about with regards to the insane U.S. military spending is how the Pentagon has failed every audit it's ever been given. And there's like 20 trillion dollars that are unaccounted for, which leads me to believe that the numbers, even the insane high numbers that we know go into funding the U.S. military are probably actually noticeably lower than they really are in real life. I'm sure there's black budgets. I'm sure there's monies, wages and moving money around to certain clandestine intelligence agency operations or whatever that are never on the public record. And so, you know, however big that military spending is, is even probably bigger than that in reality. And the other thing, just kind of adding

on what Adnan and you were saying about, you know, reading history, I think you got to critically engage. And I think you have to read and investigate broadly so you can build that context that Adnan was talking about. If you just read one text, if it's good or bad or somewhere in the middle that's fine but it's such a narrow window of understanding and there's very little broader context you have to understand that text in relation to other texts so i think by reading and investigating broadly even beyond your tendency um and even reading people you outright disagree with all over the spectrum can really help build up much broader context that makes you much less susceptible to various forms of nonsense and you know a historical revisionism etc but also of course

the important thing here is that no one person can do it a alone. This is where communal knowledge is so essential. You know, no one person has the brain that has all the information in it, but in our organizations, with our comrades, even amongst people who we might not even be organizing with, like on, you know, Twitter or in a context like this, we can bounce off each other, learn from one another, stay humble. Hey, I heard this. What do you think? Somebody else, you know, gives their knowledge and feedback. And that's, I think, incredibly important. And so that's, again, hedging against anybody saying, I personally know, you know, people on Twitter, who would just want to make everybody wrong and show how right they are and how much they

individually understand those are ego games you got to let go of and then the very last thing I would just say about conspiracy theories is I think you know this move to conspiratorize everything which we've seen on the left as of you know very recently and just historically has also been true one of the things it does is I think it deepens disengagement and disillusionment because everything's a conspiracy and and it's almost like a omnipotent sci-op all the time you know there's no clear people to fight and it just seems like they're so well organized they're holding the puppet strings of everything that what can we possibly do except be online and talk about how everything's a sci-up and so that conspiratorial mindset really eats away at

people's willingness to be engaged and willingness to come together and try to fight because it seems like we are fighting the masters of the universe you know who are shadowy and control everything um one example is the iranian protests right I saw a lot of people on the left immediately jump to this idea that women in Iran protesting, you know, reactionary treatment of them is immediately a color revolution, immediately a sigh up. Now, do I think the U.S. and its allies see that as an opportunity to go in there and start poking and prodding around and exacerbating things, of course? But would I want to take away agency from Iranian women who are legitimately feeling as if they are oppressed and legitimately grassroots organizing to face a relatively very, reactionary, you know, fundamentalist government? Of course not. Does this mean I need to start puppeting and regurgitating every negative thing the U.S. has ever said about Iran? No, but it also

means we have to be reasonable and we also have to be on the side of people fighting legitimate oppression, even in countries that are under assault by the United States. And how we do that as people living in the Imperial Corps, we can deeply debate about. I don't think it needs to be your main focus as somebody living in the Imperial Corps. But I also don't think we need to strip, you know, millions of Iranian women of their agency and their legitimate grievances against the Iranian state and call it all a Sa'op and call it all U.S. color revolution. I think that's very lazy thinking as well. And that's just one example, of course.

We have to stay tethered to reality. I think combating nihilism is a really important point. And it's something that I actually brought up during the interview. So I won't hit it too heavily now because listeners, you'll be able to hear it in about probably an hour from now it'll come up but we have to ensure that when we're thinking about how to get to the next phase of society obviously if you're listening to this show and this isn't the first time that you've listened to it you would understand that none of us are in favor of capitalism and we would all like to move beyond it we can't have a nihilistic a feeling of

you know it's impossible to do it but we also shouldn't have that feeling that we have to wait for systemic collapse in order for there to be an opportunity that just gives you an out. It gives you an opportunity to say, I don't actually need to organize now because it's not possible now. We have to wait for societal collapse and then there is a possibility and then I will be able to do something or just, you know, magically it'll come to fruition that we're going to supersede capitalism. Of course, these are very counterproductive.

thoughts to have you have to keep in mind that it is a constant struggle you have to constantly push against capitalism you have to constantly push against imperialism it may be the case that there needs to be some major collapse before we finally supersede it but without laying the groundwork for it now even if there is some sort of societal collapse you're not going to magically end up with socialism on the other side you do have to lay the groundwork now and you do have to try to speed up that process as much as possible. Even if you're thinking that collapse is necessary to move beyond capitalism, if you don't have the groundwork laid in place and you're just waiting for it to happen,

even if you do somehow miraculously end up with socialism coming out of the back end, by not doing the organizing ahead of time, you're going to allow for that collapse state to exist for much longer and cause immeasurably more suffering than you would if you were ready to just step in. So, you know, try to force capitalism out through whatever means you think are necessary. Like, you know, this is stuff that needs to happen within your own organizing. We're not telling you what to do. That's not the purpose of this show.

You know, but you have to be ready. You have to push, push, push, push. if you can affect change, affect change. But you must be ready for when the opportunity does arise because you don't know when it will happen. And this is, you know, Lenin 101. There's decades where nothing happens and then there's weeks where decades happen. If you're waiting for that one, that one two weeks where something can happen and you're not ready to seize the moment, you're not going to seize the moment. There is not going to be the ability to move decades in human society in the course of weeks if you're not ready for it.

You have to push and push and push and be waiting while pushing. Be aware that there is going to be periods where nothing seems to be happening, but continue to push. And only in that way will you be able to seize the moment, seize the day, and allow decades to happen in the course of weeks. Adnan, why don't I give you the final thoughts as we wrap up and then turn it over to the listeners to listen to the interview that we did with Lee? Well, I don't have too much more to add.

I think that's a really good introduction to the episode, to the conversation we had with Lee. And I think in some respects, we've taken, you know, our thinking in different directions and a little further. But an interesting conversation. I think, you know, my conclusion is just fundamentally that I think an understanding of history proves to be very, very important. We're dealing with a rapidly changing world. Now, it may not be that. things are happening that propel us towards real change, but we're entering a period or are in a period of a lot of transition. Whatever neoliberal capitalism has been, it is crumbling. It is not

able to meet its needs and sustain itself after it's ravaged the globe for the last 30, 40 years. And we're seeing responses and we're seeing pushback. We're seeing forces. organizing against it and fragmenting this particular, you know, form of order in the world. And not all of it's going to be good. It could be very, very bumpy. And, you know, in order to really understand and deal with it, we have to have good historical and political education and be, as you were just saying, Henry, organizing and thinking very carefully and learning. And I think the other point that I want to underscore that I really appreciate from Brett is also understanding that we do have a community of people, of comrades. We're not always going to agree on absolutely everything. And I don't think history

should be for the people of the left a huge arena for contention because there are multiple perspectives. It's really what conclusions you draw from because any of our previous movements we can learn from, either learn from what they did or learn from what they didn't do, learn not to do what they did, et cetera. There's like lessons to be learned. So the history is very important, but it's important for our future. It's important for what direction we go now. So having endless debates, I mean, you know, I saw just recently on Twitter that there was a, you know, kind of debate, you know, somebody said something, you know, about how, you know, Stalin had nothing to do with the left. I mean, you know, real socialist would never, you know, accept anything that Stalin

did. And then, you know, somebody who was a Marxist, but, you know, decided to take the humble position of like, well, I don't feel ready to debate Stalin, you know, yet. And that person ended up getting more, you know, attack for not like standing up and, you know, defending Stalin, you know, from other from other people and you know having some humility what you can and what you can't you know discuss what you need to learn more about you know enlisting the aid of of comrades and also having fruitful discussions do you want to have a discussion debating that to no end or no purpose if it's not going to you know generate a sense of what is what are the needs of the political moment i mean we don't do this we don't engage in this historical uh inquiry you know

purely for the sake of just learning more about, you know, what happened in the past. The whole purpose is, is we want to think about it in ways that we can use for understanding our world now today. So let's be comradly. Let's understand what the purpose of this is and be humble. I think it's very important. We're going to face so many challenges now. We're going to need every one of us to be committed, to be encouraged by one another, to face, you know, what I think is a difficult future. I mean, we've talked about climate change. We've talked about, you know, conflict in the world. All of this is getting worse around us day by day. So the best preparation here is both educate oneself and also have the right attitude and approach. That is, if you want

to build a better society, you could start by treating the people who you mostly agree with, you know, well. That doesn't mean you can't have good discussion, clarify, distinctions, try and make your case, but let's do so in a way that's productive rather than polarizing and fragmenting, because that's historically been one of the left's biggest challenges is actually organizing collectively. We're supposed to be good at that. We believe in that. And yet when it comes to actually practicing it, we're not often capable of bringing one another together to actually take advantage of moments when they arise, as Henry was saying, you know, when those moments were weeks, you know, could be decades worth of change, you have to be prepared

and ready for it. And you have to have the right attitude about working together to achieve those those big changes that we all want. And just one other thing. And I'll turn it to you, Brett, one other thing that I want to raise is that we have to also know how to communicate with people that either aren't in our specific tendency, but are susceptible to being swayed. And we also have to be able to communicate to people that don't have the same theoretical grounding that we do. So this is always something that's interesting to consider when you know that your audience is going to be a little bit different. So on Lee's show, I know many of Lee's listeners are guerrilla history listeners. I've heard from several of them. But many of Lee's listeners are

listeners of his because he's an anti-imperialist comedian, not because he is doing deep, deep dives in history. They may enjoy his deep dives into history, but they're not following him because of it. So tailoring your message to your audience is very important. And knowing what to say and what not to say with a specific audience at a given juncture in time, right? That's very important. So talking with some of my progressive family members, did I raise the Stalin question on day one with them to try to radicalize them? Of course not. Like, you know, it wasn't like, hey, you know, ex family member. I won't say who they are. I know some of them listen to this. But, you know, hey, ex-family member,

Stalin was a very important person and led one of the greatest achievements in human society, whether you agree or disagree with all of his decisions as immaterial. You have to acknowledge that he was a great leader and accomplished many great things, including the defeat of Nazi fascism. Is that the first thing I said to them when I was trying to radicalize them? Of course not. That would have been idiotic. Like, that would have been the fastest way to turn them off from any radicalization for a long period of time. So you do have to be cognizant of who you're talking to, know what their priors are, and then slowly work through them.

And eventually, you can't have these conversations with these people. Like, believe me, I have, but you have to be able to get from point A to point Z without cutting off the route by trying to jump too far in one step. So that's actually something that I think that Brett is particularly excellent at. I think that Rev Left, especially, and this is not to say that you're not doing it now, Brett, but the early days of Rev Left are like the perfect pipeline to take people from being progressive, like soft left people and really shifting them in the leftward direction. Those early Rev Left episodes are just beautiful for that purpose.

And I still send some of the early Rev Left episodes to people that are, you know, we're trying to radicalize more. So somebody like Brett really does know how to communicate with these people. And I encourage the listeners to think when I'm communicating with people, is it the smartest thing to jump in and like be very aggressive and, you know, go for the things that I know are going to rub people the wrong way if they haven't been conditioned for it first? Or is it good to kind of maybe push some, you know, soft theoretical ideas to them before jumping into some little bit more concrete history?

and then talking about specific movements, you know, do consider that. It is a very important thing for us to be able to communicate with regular people. And now, Brett, now that I've, you know, extolled your virtues, you can close us out and then we'll get to the interview. Yeah, well, thank you very much. And I really appreciate those kind words. And I would just say one of the things that I try to do is to listen to people.

People don't want a lecture. They want a back and forth. And then finding out what's actually relevant to them. What happened 80, 100 years ago in some country, they've never been to is not relevant to the struggles they're giving through right now. So that's a good way to sort of orient yourself. What's relevant to them and then am I actually listening as well as just talking because nobody wants to feel like they're made to feel dumber and being lectured to by somebody else. But the last thing I would say, just because

Adnan mentioned it about neoliberalism coming to an end, I do believe that the neoliberal era is coming to an end. The big question here is, as we've seen every single time in the past, capitalism has found a way to reinvent itself to readapt. And every general of Marxists are convinced, or some of them are convinced that it's right around the corner, the collapse is imminent, how could it possibly continue on? And every single time capitalism has found a way to reinvent itself and prolong its life. And so we should be thinking about that. What comes next and how might capitalism re-fortify itself for the next several decades? But one of the interesting ironies of capitalist history, what I consider to be late capitalism

right now is that the mode of production it replaced feudalism the longer we allow capitalism to go on it's seeming the more it comes full circle and replicates the insane inequalities and utter rationalities of the very system that it overthrew feudalism and so capitalism ironically is seemingly bringing us to a neo feudalist endpoint and i think there's a deep irony in that and so i personally don't see how it reinvents itself after the neoliberal period period. I think it is late capitalism. I think the inequalities and irrationalities are becoming ever more obvious, especially with advancing technology, artificial intelligence, et cetera. But because it's happened so many times in the past, we have to kind of humble ourselves a little

bit and say, how might it, you know, reinvent itself and what could our responses be to it or how could we preempt this attempt to renew and reinvent itself? Those are all important questions at this juncture. very important things to the listeners to think about and on that note listeners will now turn over to the audio of the interview that we did with lee camp on his show behind the headlines which again is hosted through mint press news if you're interested in watching the video version we will link to the youtube uh version of that interview in the the podcast description box whatever you call it the show notes uh and also we will link to lee camp

website in the show notes as well. So do check those out. I encourage you to listen to his show Behind the Headlines, and I hope that you enjoy the interview that we had. So listeners, here you go. Hey, folks. Welcome to Behind the Headlines.

This is our interview series. I have an incredible guests for you today. really excited about this one. This is the hosts of the guerrilla history podcast, and I'll introduce them in a moment, but I wanted to explain that we're doing something a bit unique this week. We're going to do kind of a co-interview where they're interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. We kind of go back and forth. We're just going to, we're just going to bat the ball around and see what happens. And I feel like it'll be a really fun and exciting way to do it. I hope you enjoy that.

But to explain a little more, guerrilla history podcast is an outstanding podcast. Maybe many of you may already listen to it. But if you don't, it involves three co-hosts, immunobiologist Henry Hukamaki, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio is Brett O'Shea.

And Grill History Podcast is what I would call a correction of global history, setting the record straight for the activist left, and it uses, as they say, the lessons of history to analyze the present, and they always do an excellent job of it. So we figured, why not get everybody together and do it as one big joint thing, and I hope you enjoy it. So let's bring them all in. Henry Adnan and Brett, welcome. Hello, we. great to be with you lee yeah it's a real pleasure thanks for thanks for doing this uh you know as i was explaining that i haven't done one like this before but uh i think it'll be pretty cool and pretty fun and i i don't know if uh if if you guys wanted to introduce anything i know you

you may uh since this is also going to be uh your interview i want to allow you to do that so yeah i guess just briefly i'll i'll just pitch with the show is for everybody in case they haven't already checked out guerrilla history. So as Lee mentioned, we're a global history podcast. We call ourselves a global proletarian history podcast that really focuses on movements and people. And we are looking from an unabashedly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist lens to really reframe the contextualization of history to really get into that nuance in some cases or go to places that people don't even typically hear about. So we have members of the Communist Party of Kenya that'll come on. We had Comrade Joma, the founding chairman

of the Communist Party of the Philippines come on. We've had guerrillas with the Red Army faction in West Germany, and we also have academics like Gerald Horn and Richard Wolfe come on. So we really have a broad swath, but the overarching theme is anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism and centering people's movements. Yeah, and you guys do an excellent job of it. Well, I guess I'll start out with the first question, and I know it's insultingly broad, but I figured I would start broad, and then we can narrow it down. I wanted to hear your view on how history, if you could explain, how history can be used as propaganda and how we're seeing it being used as propaganda in our world today. And I know that's broad, but I think a lot of people that may be

They're not, you know, weren't big history buffs in school, think, well, history is history. And, you know, it just is what it is. But it's obviously far more complicated than that. Well, as a professor of history, I confront this problem a lot that what people think history is from what they've absorbed broadly in the culture is always, you know, a mixture of a myth that includes, genuine historical details, but placed in a kind of framework to convey a certain ideological message, or it's selective because whole aspects of people's experiences and important developments from the past are simply left out or ignored and marginalized. Or, you know, it's a kind of disinformation sort of game. And I think, I guess to sort of frame the whole,

problem, I would say history is so important because it's what grounds our identities as people, you know, your own biography and family history, but your community, your society, your nation, all these kind of collective ideas of affiliation and connection that we have together also have their histories that are told about that, that give it some kind of meaning and shape. And so the kind of history that's told how it's framed in shape is so important for who we understand ourselves to be. And that's why it's such a contested ground. That's why CRT is such an important kind of discourse on the far right in the United States is not because it's some legal theory about critical race ideas and how they're applied into legal institutions,

but because it's a broad way of framing the problem of not wanting other histories told about the United States and accepted in the education system. It has nothing to do with CRT itself. It has everything to do with history. And so that's why it's so important. But where it's used as propaganda, I think there's so many, you know, examples of this today. We are dealing with in information society of the present, with disinformation, misinformation, and the same happens in articulating history for the reasons that I said, that it can be used to ground people's identity and it can also be used in war propaganda, for example. So in the Ukraine situation, you know, this is a complex place that has a long history.

It's a divided society and culture with different languages. You know, it's kind of a strange country that is divided in some ways by east and west, by its connection to Russia, but also by its connections, historically speaking to Poland and parts of what we think of as Eastern Europe and the old Austro-Hungarian empire and so on. It's got a very mixed and divided history. And what we're told when it comes to nationalism, which I think is the real big problem with where use and abuse of history takes place, is that there's only one particular kind of identity that's being included in this vision. of what is Ukrainian history and the idea, you know, that there are Ukrainians who, you know,

have different affiliations somehow can't be reconciled into this concept of Ukraine as a nation because it's supposed to be one people, only the Ukrainian language, only one certain kind of history. And as a result, you have things that are left out or altered. And, you know, this is part of what fuels the nationalism and, you know, what's left out so often from our, you know, understanding of this history is like the World War II experience. I mean, it's being invoked to say Putin is like Hitler, we can't appease, and to invoke that, you know, dimension of it. And yet the other side of the same World War II history is being suppressed that there is a tradition of far-right ultra-Ukrainian nationalism that saw itself as, you know,

needing to expunge the Poles, the Jews, the Russians, and, you know, we're dealing with those legacies. There's no way to actually figure out what's happening in this situation if we don't take into account a fuller and more complete picture of that history to then deal with how it's being used in the present in order to come up with, you know, a much better analysis. So I think that's a great example of history being used as propaganda. Yeah, and I think that the nationalism aspect is a great point because I remember hearing that it was a quote from someone who lived in the Donbass region and they said, you know, we don't view, you know, this particular family said we don't view ourselves as Ukrainian. We were living here and then people put a border there. And at first, the border didn't matter much.

People went back and forth all day long and we have family on each side. And then the border started to matter more and more. And then one day someone said, well, you're a Ukrainian and your family over there is Russian and you hate each other. And that's what nationalism does. It divides people, puts people together who might hate each other. And we're supposed to believe that everyone within these precise borders are one thing. Yeah, no, absolutely. And another thing nationalism does, of course, and especially with the telling of history,

is obscures the role of class. So if you can, in America, for example, we're all Americans. We're all one family. That obscures the role that the elite and the capitalist class, the owning class, has over the working class to say nothing of the poor. So nationalism always obscures class. And so we should be on the left very suspicious of various forms of nationalism, especially in the imperial core. But I wanted to give a couple examples to what Adnan said about the way history is used as a propaganda tool. One of the obvious ways, just for any American, is just the telling of American history as if it was an inevitable path of progress. There were some ugly parts in the past, but more or less we've overcome them. Maybe we're still overcoming the last residues of them. But progress is baked into the cake, and we're all one family, and things have gotten much, much better. And that's a story that is very soothing to people who are elite or people who want to believe

that story, who are comfortable enough to be able to enjoy that fourth grade history. sort of story we tell about ourselves. But another really big example I wanted to put on the table, and this might lead well into Henry's response, is the way that socialism and communism are equalized with fascism. Now, we know on the left, whatever your thoughts on communist movements are, socialist movements are, we know on the left that that is the world historical movement that fought fascism upon its rise during its reign and ultimately ended it. It was the Soviets who marched into Berlin, who liberated the Holocaust camps, who fought fascists in the streets in Germany, you know, German leftist, German communist, fighting fascists in the street as they were rising out of the Weimar Republic.

But what we see today, and you can go on any forum, you can Google this, and you'll see something like this, a Brutels dictator list, right? Who are the worst dictators of the 20th century or of all of history? You'll always see communist and socialist leaders lumped in with a Hitler, for example. In fact, if you go onto Google and you search the worst dictators of the 20th century, Hitler will be like three or four, and Stalin and Mao will always be number one. Now, really quickly, I don't want to get too deep into this, but just on the Mao front, right? You know, Hitler has an ideology of genocide. He wants to use industrialization to slaughter the scapegoats that he views as the problem, right?

Jewish people and then some other subcategories, marginalized communities, etc. the goal of communism even with all of its flaws is about equality about justice about ending class hierarchy in the world and so you look at something like the cultural revolution that was a low level civil war within china right everybody that died in that conflict is laid at the feet of Mao Mao is responsible for all of these deaths that's like laying the deaths of six hundred plus thousand Americans in the civil war at the foot of Lincoln and saying Lincoln is responsible for 600,000 deaths. And then with the great leap forward, this is an attempt by the Chinese communist, of course, to let the masses participate in the revolutionizing of their society. People died, mistakes were made, errors happened, but that was never the intention of anyone. And so when you place communists next to fascists, you are playing the fascist game of saying the people who are most vociferously against fascism, who are willing to fight fascist every step of the way, are just as bad as the fascists themselves.

And that is just one way in which history is contorted and warped to fit a ostensibly liberal program, because liberals don't like that far left either, but it actually ends up feeding into fascist propaganda. Yeah, and just to hop in on that point, in terms of history as propaganda, Brett lays out some really great examples. And before I hit another concrete example, I just also want to mention something that you said, Lee, about people from the Donbass or other regions like this

that didn't necessarily see themselves as Ukrainian. They were just people there. I mean, I have a concrete example of this myself. My wife is Crimea and Tatar. She was raised in Crimea. We now live in Russia. I know you always opened your old show with, you know, you're a Russian asset because you were being hosted by RT.

Now you're a Russian asset because you're talking to somebody who lives in Russia. Sorry. But in any case. I don't think I'm legally allowed to speak to anyone in Russia. I don't know. Sorry to break it to you. In any case, you know, my wife's, I guess it would be her great aunt. She calls her her grandma because there's no distinction in Russian. She was a partisan spy for the Red Army that was tortured and executed by the Nazis when she was 20 years old. She was from the area of Crimea. She didn't see herself as, you know, Ukrainian or Russian. She was Crimean and she was a member of the Soviet Union. They were all fighting for. for the same proletarian cause and against fascism. It was only later on that these national borders became distinct that there was any issue.

And it's important that people understand that when we look at referenda results, you know, there are independent observers that went in and looked at the referenda that took place. And yes, there were some abnormalities. There were some, you know, techniques that may not be super savory. But the vast majority of independent observers found that up, of 90% of people in Crimea wanted to be part of Russia. And this is the experience that we've heard. But turning towards another concrete example in terms of history as propaganda, it also

allows me to pitch a project that I'm working on. We're in the final stage of editing a new translation from the original Italian of Domenico Losortos, Stalin, history and critique of a black legend, which takes this on exactly in terms of how propaganda can be used to skew the narrative surrounding either a movement or in this case a specific figure and then be used as a cudgel against a political movement that would be associated with this person. So communism is always beaten down as it's Stalinist. Well, Domenico Lassardo does a very extensive job in this work, which will be available for free as a PDF or low cost as a print edition for anybody who's looking for it.

It'll be out in a month or two from peaceland bread in their imprint Iskra books. So just look for that or I'll tweet it out when it's ready. but chapter five of this book nails the example that Brett mentioned of conflating Hitler with Stalin exactly. Chapter five is the erasure of history and construction of mythology, Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters. And it's just this tour de force completely taking apart this narrative. Now, I know that we've talked on this topic for a while, so I won't go into taking apart this. I will just direct people, hey, you're going to have a free PDF as a resource from peaceland bread in about a month or two.

Again, just keep your eyes peeled for that. But we do have these concrete examples of how propaganda can become hegemony and hegemony, then through narratives, can skew the perception of history and skew perceptions of movements, which actually brings me up to the point that I want to ask you, Lee, in terms of our first question for you, censorship. You know, we're talking about propaganda and media narratives.

Censorship also plays a big role in this. And I know that this is something that you experience firsthand. So, you know, what are your thoughts on what we've kind of been talking about? And then also bringing in that that angle of censorship and your personal experience with that, you know, how do you perceive this censorship regime, this media regime, this hegemonic media narrative that we have? How does that impinge people's understanding of real events? Yeah, well, thanks. And of course, it's the censorship we've seen in the United States is incredibly important, important to the ruling elite to have their view of the world,

the one they're trying to put out to be front and center and make sure there aren't too many competing viewpoints out there. I think the U.S. kind of does censorship better than perhaps most countries in that, the vast majority of it is not deleting someone or, in my case, having my YouTube channel banned globally, the Redacta Tonight channel banned globally. That type of thing is done as kind of a last resort. You know, it's when the earlier attempts, the white blood cells of the ruling elite have failed in their attempt to attack the infection. And they ultimately will do something that blatant. You know, if you go to my

YouTube channel just says banned in your country or whatever, can't be viewed in your country. But in general, most of the censorship, the vast majority, is done by the corporate system that, of course, runs our media. But, you know, we live in inverted totalitarianism. So it's the corporate states that also owns the media. So in many ways, U.S. media is state media and people just don't realize it. But most of the censorship is these journalists and, you know, at times, especially you can factor in a comedian in there as well. But for the most part, journalists or reporters or people that are presenters on these shows, they wouldn't have gotten to that spot. And the same, much of this goes for Congress as well. You know, they wouldn't have gotten to that

position that they're on CNN or some of the biggest platforms in the world unless they had shown throughout their early career that they were willing to just put forward almost exclusively the talking points of the U.S. Empire. If you go again, you, if you go again, that if they've been beating against that on their way up the way up would stop the ladders would be removed from the from the steps would be removed from the ladder and uh and you don't hear of them so i'm sure there are many in the earlier stages that are purged and you know that largely was happening to me in my comedy career i mean i i had been a successful in that i could make a career touring comedian but i was essentially never offered positions on television even you know five

minutes on the late night shows, despite the fact that I was headlining the comedy clubs in New York City and, you know, doing all of the things that you would expect to have that be the next step of my career is, you know, Comedy Central and stuff like that. But I got very few of those chances. And so the system was working correctly. It was stopping someone who was outside of the Overton window, who was anti-capital, anti-imperial, from getting a larger platform. But then RT kind of fucked up the equation for them. And I ended up with a TV show on national and international television. And eventually, you know, for a long time, they just did it with shadow banning that kind of subtle suppression that many people didn't even believe us when we'd say, I became

shadow band on Facebook, which was my main platform used to be, in 2016. And back then, people didn't believe us. What do you mean shadow band? What do you mean people aren't seeing your post? So you're just not as popular as you used to be. But it was, it was, it was, quite obvious and but eventually even that small amount of influence that i guess r t was still having r t america uh was too much and they and they shut it all down and banned along with banning my youtube they banned my uh podcast from spotify which i've now renamed the lee camp show so that it could be on spotify so they haven't banned that yet but uh yeah so it's it's you know it's it's a long process of kind of uh in a way self-censorship but i guess

it also is censorship by the by the entities that purged the people that might be pushing outside the Overton window well just to hop in with a very quick quote before I let you go Brett or at least a paraphrasing of a quote this is a very famous quote from Noam Chomsky this is from sometime in the 90s I want to say and by the way listeners we have an episode with Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad you can find that on podcast feeds anywhere but this is when discussing you know media and censorship in the media and narratives in the media, the interviewer said to Chomsky something along the lines of, nobody's telling me what to say. I'm not getting narratives pushed

on me. And Noam Chomsky says, you know, I believe you. I believe that nobody's giving you instructions. I believe that what you're saying, you're saying with the utmost conviction. But I also firmly believe that you would not be sitting where you are right now if you didn't believe these things. Right? Go ahead. Right. It's kind of like when people would ask me, even when I was at Redacted tonight, when John Stewart was leaving, then when Chevronoa was leaving, they'd say, oh my God, Lee Camp is the obvious choice for the Daily Show. Now, I know plenty of people don't believe that. But I always found that funny when a fan would say that, I'd be like, you still don't understand how this system works. I'm not on anyone's list for the Daily Show.

You would have been a much better host, I just have to say. But I just want to say really quick before I get into my point about censorship bouncing off your point, Lee, I used to listen to you like 12 years ago. I was washing dishes in a pizza place in my early 20s. And I remember listening to you on Progressive Podcasts. And I know you had your own little shows at the time. So it's kind of surreal 12 years later to be talking with you. But you go back.

And I really appreciate your work for a long time. It was influential on me. But I did want to say, yeah, of course. I did want to say just an interesting little point about the censorship is lately, especially as of late, especially during COVID, it's the reactionary right that claims this mantle of being silenced. They're the ones that are the most loud about being shut down and being censored. And often they're censored for like racial slurs or denying science or just, you know,

not ever really challenging power in any substantial way, like misgendering a trans person just to be edgy. And then you get banned and then you play the victim forever. But it's people who are, I don't know, fighting for Palestinian rights who challenge U.S. imperialism on a, mainstream platform who actually have a class critique, those people are on the left and they're actually challenging power. And one of the strategies that the liberal center uses to silence that is this horseshoe theory, this attempt to unite and say that the far left is the same as the far

right, right? A horseshoe sort of goes around and bends towards each other. You go far enough left, you end up on the right. And so while everybody is sickened and repulsed by the far right, proud boys, fascist, Nazis, for the liberal centrist, they can say, well, these communists, these socialists, these anarchists, these anti-imperialist progressives, you know, they're actually, you know, they're quite the same. Bernie is like just like a Donald Trump because they can't take our arguments head on. They can take the rights arguments head on because it's conspiracy nonsense, it's racism, most people are repulsed by it.

They can't take on the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist critique. And so they must instead tar and feather us with the horseshoes. theory, saying we're more like the far right than anything else, and that alone is oftentimes sufficient. But it's often the people on the left actually challenging power that actually face real consequences for their views, not those on the right, although the right have been much better at claiming to be the victim of censorship. Yeah, it is, you know, and I suppose I have a particular fascination in the comedians who claim to be censored. But it is funny that the the ones who people point to is, oh, they've been deleted or blocked or banned,

and I'm not talking about the ones who sexually assaulted people. I'm talking about the ones who supposedly were deleted or canceled for things they said. Most of the time it's not true at all. They point to Joe Rogan or Dave Chappelle, and I'm like, these people are on the largest platforms in the world. They have $100 million deals, and they've been canceled? How have they been canceled? Meanwhile, I, you know, am much smaller, and I literally my YouTube has been deleted.

Like, it's, it's, it's, but they're better at playing the victim. And, you know, so that, that point gets pushed around or whatever. Well, that politics of victimhood comes back to our previous conversation about how history can be used as propaganda and distorted. I mean, when you think of it, really one of the constitutive elements of far right political things, is historical grievances against some imagined community that has suffered these unfortunate or terrible injustices and oppression. And you look to, you know, the 20s and 30s, and especially after the, you know, Great Depression, you know, Nazi ideology was developed principally through this idea of Germans being victims because of the war reparations and the final, you know,

you know, treaty agreements at Versailles and so on. And so this idea of being the victims, oftentimes ignoring others who have been, you know, who suffered as a very exclusive, you know, narrative of historical grievance that then fuels a politics around it of, you know, vengeance and a grievance. And sometimes the analysis can actually hit upon some of the existing, inequalities or abuses of the system. I mean, of course, everybody's suffering under capitalism today, you know, corporate capitalism and wealth inequality, but you find that there's this skewed and distorted

analysis of those conditions to, you know, kind of exaggerate the victimhood of people on cultural bases, on, you know, these kinds of social and cultural orientations and practices, rather than the material conditions, you know, of corporate America and capitalism and the abuse of workers, you never find any of these right-wing media hosts or people who are talking about what's happened to America in the last 30 or 40 years talking about how we need more of a labor movement. They're never in favor of labor unions. They find this sense of grievance that might actually sometimes, sometimes it's totally fictive and in a distorted history. And sometimes it's built upon genuine, you know, conditions. But instead of actually having a materialist analysis of

these conditions, it goes to this level of culture. And that's one thing that I wanted to say about history as propaganda is that when it is purely idealist in orientation, and it just picks up on those kinds of ideas and cultural dimensions, it's very easy. for it to distort and reverse, you know, reverse, you know, the actual power relations that are taking place. And that's partly what it accomplishes, as Brett was saying, nationalism and nationalist ideology, is fundamentally a kind of anti-class viewpoint, you know, and kind of, you know, creating a sense of community and identity that erases class differences as illegitimate, as historical, you know, objects of analysis to really see how is our society working.

And so I would say, you know, one of the reasons why we created guerrilla history podcast was not only to confront the propaganda by analyzing it, but to promote an idea that a more liberatory approach to history is one that is internationalist rather than say nationalist, is humanist rather than particularist, and is materialist. and is materialist rather than idealist and sort of clouding things through the sense of cultural or social, you know, differences or issues and ideas, but rather to clarify the forms of solidarity that we actually should have by analyzing these struggles from a materialist and a global internationalist perspective. And we hope that by doing so then people can find

those affiliations and those connections to, you know, forge a different path. That's the hope and the idea because I think history, as I had said, is so important in our sense of identity. It's kind of what we take for granted is the narratives of who we are. And if we don't change those and start not only change the narratives that we have, but also start thinking about these things in a different way, materialist and internationalists, I think, you know, it's going to be very hard. to make genuine progress. And really quick, just to chime in on that. One thing the right does really well is this two-fold strategy.

One, the right-wing populism, right-wing, you know, aggravation, agitation, it's always geared towards taking your eyes off those with actual money and power in most cases and aiming your ire and hatred for the unsavory conditions we're living in, towards the most marginalized, towards the most vulnerable. But when the right does attack the elites, right, this anti-elite discourse, you'll often hear on the right, it's not the owning class. It's not the military-industrial complex. It's a certain subsect of the ruling class, basically liberal cosmopolitans.

They don't have a problem with capitalism, with imperialism, even with the basic structures that create the very problems they're reacting to. They scapegoat to keep their eyes off the people with real money and power, especially on their side, and then they posture as anti-elitists or that they actually have a critique of those in power by simply taking a subsection of the elite, the liberal elite that don't agree with them ideologically, and then throwing conspiracies, whatever, you know, they eat babies, whatever else nonsense can come out. But that anti-elitist posture, especially when compared to the center left, who doesn't talk like that, can be alluring to people who don't like these conditions, but don't have a full understanding, don't have a material. materialist analysis of history, how class plays into this, et cetera. And so it gives them an outlet for their anti-elitism. But while they do that, it pushes them to the right.

And it makes, I don't know, stuff like the LGBTQ community puppets of the liberal elite, right? So then you can hate the LGBT community, even though they have no power, because they are tied up with the liberal cosmopolitan globalist elite. And these are their foot soldiers, right? And so that's the way I think the right co-op's anti-ruling class rhetoric, but then strips it of its actual bite and serves their purposes. And most of their examples of the global, you know, corporate elite, they're really focusing on industries of the culture, the culture industries and social media companies. And so it's, I'm not saying that these social media and Hollywood aren't important and have a major effect. Of course, they actually make a lot of propaganda. as well, and we were talking about censorship and the way in which this is a ground to be

contested, you know, these platforms on social media. But they ignore the real productive, you know, elements in society that are driving the economy and inequality. They don't focus on the really the heads of global corporations, the fossil fuel companies, the, you know, military arms manufacturers and the surveillance. It will essentially never hear. hear Taco Carlson say something about big ag or usually even big oil or any of those. That's right. Well, not to mention the exploited masses in other countries. This is one of the reasons that we also run guerrilla history is we can focus on these

other regions and talk about how imperialism from not only the United States but in the modern day, largely the United States, of course, historically there was many other epochs of imperialism, but how imperialism, neo-colonialism, settler colonialism, all of these different concepts come together to exploit and extract value from people around the world. These are narratives that you do not hear in mainstream discourse in the United States or in the developed West more generally. If you did, people would have to come to grips with the fact that even though, you know, yeah, they don't like these cultural elites in their country, it's the capitalist class of their country that is not only holding them down, but is also

much more exploiting and holding down the people elsewhere and that their relative position is actually much better than these people that are being exploited in other countries. We've talked about the labor aristocracy on our show many times. I'm not going to get into that right now. I just wanted to chime in with the fact that even in places like the United States, people that are thinking a little bit beyond the typical, it's a cultural elite,

when they start to think about who's owning the corporations within this country, they still fail to make that connection with exploitation abroad with their material benefit due to that exploitation that's taking place. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think I'll jump to my next question, which I guess my first one was excessively broad about the past, and I'll switch to excessively broad about the future. I want to know what your, what you guys, what your view is on how, And, you know, you don't have to have the answer, but maybe just some ideas on how to get beyond capitalism.

And does it require a societal collapse, or could it be an evolution to a better and sustainable structure? What does that look like? Because I know there are debates on this, you know, some believe that you build up what you want to see, such as, you know, democracy in the workplace and things like that. and then it will evolve into getting beyond capitalism. And then others believe that that won't do it. So I'd like to hear your take. I would say the first thing is that it won't be a natural evolution from within capitalism itself. You can't just build enough co-ops and then quantity becomes quality and all of a sudden we have socialism.

What it will always require is a fight. And we can kind of look back over the transition from feudalism. to capitalism to see not only is it a brutal process of changing one mode of production to another, but it's also a protracted one. It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen in the context of one collapse. There are pushes forward. There are retreats. But I think the difference here is that while the transition from feudalism to capitalism was happening, there was pretty much nobody with a meta perspective on the modes of production and how they evolved. They didn't necessarily see themselves as fighting for the next mode of production. It was sort of more

organic, whereas now because of critical theory, because of Marxism, because of a historical understanding of history, we can kind of see ourselves as living at the end of this mode of production and pushing for this new mode of production, which I think is at least psychologically probably different than the transition from feudalism to capitalism. But I will also say that with climate change and just with the nature of capitalism itself, crises are inevitable. And every time there is a crisis, a big crisis, whether it's national or international, in the capitalist system, there are opportunities. It's not always the opportunity for full-on socialist revolution,

but there are opportunities to advance our claims, advance the ball for our class, get in the streets, etc. But ultimately, because, and this links up with the labor aristocracy, because we're in the imperial core, and I don't want to sound like a crazy third worldist here, but I don't necessarily think that the transition from capitalism to socialism is going to be catalyzed. and the impetus happening in the imperial core.

I think what's more likely is the global system of capitalism mixed with climate change continues to create more and more crises that are more heavily felt in places without the resources to deal with them. And those people having less to lose and not having so much of their wealth built on the exploitation of others will likely move in a more socialist direction out of self-preservation and rationality. And that will create an interesting global context, maybe another split like we saw during the Cold War even, where the imperialist bloc, led by the U.S., is doing everything that can to prevent the rise of a more or less organic revolutionary movements, movements, plural, throughout the global South. But the important thing is it will always be a fight, and we can never, ever soothe ourselves into thinking.

We can do it through a form. It's an evolutionary process. We can't fool ourselves into thinking it's determined and that it's going to happen. And importantly, I don't think we can fool ourselves into believing that a collapse will lead to socialism. If we have a brutal collapse in the U.S., maybe multiple climate change disasters happening at once or a complete great depression reboot, right, a complete economic breakdown, because of the ideological positioning and posturing of the average American, because of ideological hegemony, I don't think the people's first response is let's hit the streets and create an egalitarian society. I think fear is going to

kick in. Reaction is going to kick in. Splitting up between, you know, races or religions is going to kick in. There's going to be brutal fascist movements. And it could very well go more in the direction of barbarism than into the direction of socialism. So I don't think that we should we should fetishize collapse as being the impetus. It certainly opens up opportunities, but it also opens up opportunities for the far right. Look at Weimar Republic after, you know, World War I in Germany, there was a much more robust communist movement in Germany than there is in the United States right now. And they had good leadership, good structures. They were embedded in the unions and they still lost. And so I think that's a humbling historical reality that we're going to

have to, we're going to have to wrestle with and deal with. And I think in the meantime, we have to get as prepared as we can for the many crises that are inevitably heading our way. I was hoping you'd just say recycle our plastic bags. Yeah. Well, Brett really, I think, made some excellent points there. I mean, I think the first thing we could say, though, is that it seems like in some ways, some people analyze the situation and would suggest that we are moving into a transition to something else, whatever that else is going to be.

And although we know there have been different stages and histories within capitalism, that it has adapted and changed. I think we're at a point where, you know, there are some pretty fundamental changes taking place and nobody really knows what is post-capitalism going to look like. You know, some argue like Yanis Varifakis that, you know, we're already really past capitalism and we're in some other formation

that's a lot like feudalism in its structure, but of course it's in a techno-modern, you know, way with this, you know, new technology and where we're providing data on ourselves and creating value simply by, you know, sharing, you know, on social media and so on. And that, you know, there's some transformation that's happened where the power is really in the hands of a few who don't need markets.

They don't, you know, they control the markets. Like the market isn't really a space where this kind of classical capitalism is taking place. It's all pure monopoly. And I heard it called plutonomy where it's kind of like what, the finances of the bottom, whatever, 50 or 80% don't matter almost at all. And it just becomes the money of the ultra rich is what's, I don't know, holding the structure together. Right. And also like, you know, with automation and less dependence on labor, you know, eventually or ultimately when they've squeezed everything they can, you know, there are surplus populations, you know, that, you know, they just don't want to be responsible.

for, as it were. And so, you know, that vision of really apocalyptic kinds of ugly movements and violence and instability is certainly a very real possibility. I mean, it's happening in various ways already in people's lives in the third world and so on with the disasters of climate change, with the effects of, you know, neoliberalism. But I think one thing that we're seeing also that I think is a predicate and prelude to some potential change is this multipolarity, you know, on the geopolitical front, you know, having different kinds of powers within the global capitalist system makes it more unstable. And although it doesn't itself mean that those will turn into the socialist future of, you know, equality that we all hope, it does mean that there are those opportunities.

I think that Brett was mentioning because it undermines the purely controlling neoliberal dominance that the United States and Europe, basically the Anglo-European kind of world has dominated for the last 30, 40 years. So there are going to be some, you know, opportunities. My fear is, however, that those right-wing forces seem to have organized themselves a lot more quickly. And you see the rise of neo-fascist, ultra-nationalist, far-right movements emerging globally, whether it's Hindutva in India, whether it's, you know, in Eastern Europe and Hungary and Poland with the anti-immigrant kind of politics that has fueled far right there, that the populism and reaction that we're seeing, you know, okay, Bolsonaro just lost.

But those forces have not gone away there either. So there's been a real international mobilization of ultra-nationalist far-right. And the strange thing is, is that there may be ways, just as they were during the kind of access powers, where, you know, competing racial imperialist ideologies, nonetheless still found a way to work together and make a compact, you know, that despite the way in which you would think that ultranationalism should mean that they don't affiliate with other nations and, you know, look only to their self-interest. But they are capable, it seems, of seeing some kind of broader alliance, of fascistic sorts of forces.

I mean, Bannon, you know, was trying to create something like that, you know, with the Trump sort of thing. He was imagining, hey, we could really bring in, you know, Russia as a kind of conservative country that stands against this. you know, CRT type, you know, neoliberal, cosmopolitan, globalist, social justice, social identity elite, they stand with us. And they're also Christian. We could create a kind of Christian. It was like basically updating Samuel Huntington's clash of civilization's theory and trying to apply it to geopolitics for the far right, you know, in the future. That's what he was looking for, it seemed as a kind of, you know, isolate China as the big real problem, which is also what Huntington says, I mean, in the Clash of Civilizations. I really think actually a Clash of Civilizations, that book is sort of like a handbook for the kind of right-wing intellectual envisioning of the future, really. And interestingly enough, again, it is based on a fundamentally bizarre form of history. is that he invokes these ideas of culture and their development as separate so-called civilizations

that have to be hostile to one another, that have no way to really cooperate and work together, is fundamentally grounded for him in their separate histories. And so they've taken the sort of playbook from that where he identifies the Islamic world, and we saw this with the global war on terrorism as sort of a kind of clash of civilizations that people wanted to kind of frame this as, and China as the real, you know, as the real kind of problem for Western, you know, so-called Western civilization. And that's what I fear is that there are some sort of far-right affiliations, even among these different ultra-nationalists that are reacting against the neoliberal globalization of the last, you know, 30, you know,

or 40 years. And the left has not really started thinking as internationally with how we would affiliate our social movements, how we would work and show solidarity for workers around the world. I mean, if Brett is correct, and I think he had a good, great point, if conditions will be so bad and the opportunities may be in the global South, you know, what is the responsibility then for people of the left in the imperial core? What should we be doing? We have to think, about that, I think, about how we can assist and engage with those movements. Because maybe it won't the structure of capitalism and the forces that we would have to deal with. We're not in a position. We're not so organized to be able to take on, you know, the capitalist elite

in our in our countries in Canada, United States, Europe. But what can we do to promote, to affiliate, to connect, to support, what are our responsibilities as well? You know, if we think internationally rather and globally, rather than, you know, just in our own national context, what could we do? Just to pick up on that briefly, and I will be brief because I really could talk about this topic alone for an hour, but I'll try not to. But I think that Brett and Adnan are both saying very, very important things. And I just want to add one little rink. into it. So when Brett says that crisis is inevitable, crises are inevitable, this is something that we know. There are cycles of crisis baked into the system of capitalism. We've seen this

time and time again. Sometimes we have a movement that tries to supersede capitalism. Other times the reaction to movements manages to hold together capitalism for a little bit longer. It really depends on what context you're looking at. I also think that a non-talking about looking at different contexts internationally is of critical importance. You can't just think, okay, the context of me living in the United States, not me, but you and Brett, the context of me living in the United States is going to be the same as somebody in Kenya. No, it's very, very different.

That's why we have to take on board what are these revolutionaries and these thinkers in different places trying to theorize as their way of superseding and going beyond capitalism to the next phase of human. society. We have to take that on board and think, given the situation that we're in, how do we promote that? How do we promote national liberation struggles worldwide? You know, how can you do that from your context? I know, I mentioned that we had interviewed Kamrad Joma, the founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines before. We asked him this question. His response, which he said was all hypothetical, although Kamrad Joma sadly

passed. So he probably, you know, he would be willing to say we can scratch the hypothetical part of it at this point was for people that have technical knowledge of weaponry to transmit that technical knowledge to the the communist guerrilla movement in the Philippines. You know, is that what you want to do? You think about it, but you have to consider, you know, what can you do, given your background, your expertise, to be able to aid these movements that will help us get past capitalism. But the one thing that I really want to add in more than anything else on this topic, and I think that it's probably the most critically important thing for people to take out of this conception of what do we do to move beyond capitalism is that I agree with Brett entirely that you can't reform your way out of capitalism. You can't just say more co-ops, more co-ops, and poof, all of a sudden it's socialism.

But I also want to highlight the fact that you cannot wait for a collapse. this is something that people that are very nihilistic may have a tendency to do, and also people that don't have a conception or don't have the impetus to do anything in their own personal lives to try to push for superseding capitalism. If there's no external force on them, they're not going to have the impetus to push against the society, to try to move to a new phase of society. We cannot wait for collapse. There are crises, but we cannot wait for collapse.

Instead, we should be looking for points of rupture. And you can read that as revolutionists as you want. And of course, I'm not saying that I'm a thought leader. I'm not telling you, you know, we have to be doing protracted people's war or socialism in one state or permanent revolution or some sort of anarchist conception of how to move beyond capitalism. I am not the one who's going to be telling you what the correct route of action is in each individual case. That is for you to do in your organizations and in your political parties. But what we have to understand is that we do have to find these points of weakness. We do have to do what we can to cause that rupture.

And then, as Marx famously said when he was looking at the example of the Paris commune, you can't just take the ready-made state machinery and think that you can utilize that for socialism. No, you have to then fundamentally transform society for socialism and on the route to communism, a stateless, classless society. So again, put that notion of waiting for collapse out of your head because it just allows you to get rid of any sort of impetus on yourself in terms of the necessity of you to actually do anything. You do have to do what you can. If you don't, we are never going to get there. You have to think of what you can do in your situation.

Yeah, all excellent points. By the way, I don't mind going 10 minutes over if needed, but I don't. I don't know if we wanted to jump to one of your questions. Yeah, I had a question for you. It really kind of picks up on this. I mean, Henry was just talking about how we have to do what we can within our own sphere. And, of course, we mentioned why we started guerrilla history is because we think, you know, historical knowledge, real historical knowledge, you know, can be a weapon, can be an organizing tool, can be a weapon in class struggle. But, you know, you're somebody who comments on the news and does so as a comedian as well.

And so I was kind of curious, you know, from your position, how you see your show contributing to that same outcome that we're all, you know, interested in seeing a fair or just or world. And how do you distinguish your kinds of comedic critique of news and politics from some of the others? and whether it has anything to do with being more connected with or aspiring, you know, for it to be inspirational to activism and activists. Yeah, thanks. So I think part of it is you never know, and you know, this goes for comedy, but it goes for everything. You never really know the full ramifications or ripple effects of what you do and what you put out there. And, you know, luckily, we now live in some level of information revolution, even if they're trying to shut it down, where you can influence, you know, thousands and often millions of people and, you know, never meet any of them and never really know how it ends up.

Apparently, I helped inspire Brett a little back in the day. So, you know, those kind of things I am very aware of and, you know, keep me going when I'm being. being, you know, I'm having my TV shows canceled and the such. But, yeah, I do think, in terms of my particular style and what I do, you know, there are different styles of comedy and some of them may have political messaging in them to some level, but I don't think they're actually changing many minds. You know, a good example, and I think it was one of the best written comedy shows to ever exist. and I loved it was the Colbert rapport.

In terms of comedy writing, it was some of the best that I think ever existed. And yet I don't think it actually changed many minds because right-wingers could watch it and kind of not get the joke or just enjoy the snarky lines about liberals and liberals could watch it and think everything's a joke

and nothing really needs to be changed. And Colbert in interviews has said that he never really wanted to, influence people. And that kind of upsets people to hear that he didn't want to change things. But he kind of was just doing comedy. And he ended up in the political comedy realm. And, you know, I have times in my comedy where it's more or less satirical. It's more or less taking the opposite of what I actually mean. But if I do that too much or too fully, I don't think it actually informs people. And so I am very aware of that.

that may actually decrease the number of viewers, but I don't actually care because I want to have some impact. And so I would often, you know, I would do a long, you know, 10 minutes at the opening of redacted tonight on a topic. But then in the last, you know, 30 seconds, I would make it very clear what my point was in case there was anyone out there who was still thinking that my satirical lines might be genuine and, you know, maybe he really thinks we should. to bomb the world because it will be a nice fireworks display or whatever. So I am aware of the fact that comedy can be, can sound like it's making a point and actually change little to no minds.

But it can also be very important in changing minds if it's done correctly. So I think that that's part of what makes me a little different than a lot of political comedians but the other thing is there really just aren't that many people in america doing what i do i mean and i won't speak for other countries maybe it's the same for other countries as well but i always expected when i was started doing more left-wing comedy that oh i'd have just scores of people that i was competing against to be the the better one but there just aren't that many there's plenty that do a little bit of politics there's plenty of comedians you know thousands with five minutes of trump jokes or whatever but in terms of actually getting at the

the deeper core issues actually getting to what capitalism is or getting to the details of our endless wars and things like it it's almost non-existent so you know with a exception of a handful and so i you know that's good for my career it's terrible for the world that there aren't more people doing it well one thing i did notice in the in the comedy space and i'm certainly no expert on comedy but i do enjoy it as a as a fan is the the the the comedians that have right now huge shows that are the most successful you can think of i mean joe rogan uh you can think of dave chapelle you can think of bill mar right millions of people in their audiences millions of dollars in their pockets and chapelle is an interesting version here because

there was a time when chapelle through comedy although it wasn't explicitly political it was cultural it was social right it was saying something about american racism of course you know his his sort of a breakdown in the industry and fleeing to Africa in part was because some of the white people in his audience didn't get the irony. They were taking it seriously like a right winger watching Colbert. Like this is just like Bill O'Reilly. You know, he didn't. And so he had a sort of crisis. But now you see them and you see what happens when they get incredibly comfortable money-wise. This happens in music too and hip-hop and other things. They get so comfortable. And now what is there, all three of them? What is their biggest gripe about the, what's

the biggest problem in the world for all of them, it's wokeism. Because when you are so comfortable, when you have millions and millions and millions of dollars, your family is set for generations. You are completely extracted over time from the real issues that working class people face. And of course, they have these huge platforms. They obviously had some talent to get to where they are. I'm not trying to take that away from them. But because they're so cloistered, they're so comfortable, their number one problem in the world is like people's pronouns and like blue-haired kids on college campuses and that just and they have a huge audience and then you have like people making 30k a year thinking wokeism is the biggest problem in america right now right and so i don't know how that

dovetails precisely with what you're saying but it does go to show at as people's class position moves they get away from the real issues that that impact regular people in the streets and they can get off into these very cloistered conversations about things that ultimately are not that serious and are not that important yeah i i think that's absolutely true. And you're right that he did used to have more interesting and important points to make on race. And often with black comedians, they're often not called political comedians simply because they're black. But I would say, I haven't watched his stuff recently, but I would say someone like Chris Rock was very much a political comedian. And when he was

influencing me, I'm talking his specials back in the 90s. He was saying some very important things such as, and you know, I was young enough at the time that I didn't, I thought this was a joke. I didn't realize just how accurate he was being, but he was taught in Bigger, Blackery had a whole bit on how they'll never cure AIDS because the money's not in the cure. The money's in the, he called it the comeback, but the money's in people just getting by. And that's how you keep funding your drugs and keep making money. And it's absolutely true. I mean, now we have the actual proof, a leaked memos for. from Goldman Sachs telling their top investors not to fund single, you know, gene therapy,

like single use or whatever cures because there's no continued revenue stream. So it actually was 100% accurate. But, but yeah, I think you're right that they often get so removed from it. And the other thing is, I don't know what they're, when you get to that level of comedy, I can't speak to it. I don't know what the people around them are saying. I mean, you can have a whole brand specialist that will tell you, oh, well, this bit, you know, that'll alienate you with A, B, and C.

And this is a little awkward for, and so it's possible that things are actually removed from from specials, comedy specials, et cetera, because it could alienate people. And most of these guys know where their bread is buttered. And when they don't, there's another step to extracting anything that might, you know, alienate or push away the corporate elite that are paying their checks. I remember I read the book. It was after John Stewart quit the Daily Show and they put out a book on the inside the daily show. And, you know, some of it was fascinating.

But the most fascinating thing in it to me was one page where they discussed the fact that there's an actual member on staff whose job it is, if they're going to insult any corporation that's connected to the show, which, you know, Viacom owns A, B, and C, so basically every corporation somehow connected to Comedy Central, if they were going to say anything that would alienate or insult any of them, this person was job was to call up that company and, you know, whoever the press person is or whatever, and try and convince them that it was fun to be made fun of on the Daily Show.

And the implication was, if they didn't get the approval from something like Walmart, they couldn't tell the joke. and some of the time the company said, sure, sounds fun, but plenty of times I'm sure they didn't. And that's how you control the narrative. That's how you make sure that there may be a light joke about Walmart. There's not going to be an in-depth analysis of how Walmart

destroys towns, you know, on a daily basis. So I guess shall we? Well, I guess one quick thing, since you mentioned HIV and, you know, curing it is not where the money is. As you mentioned at the beginning of the show, my training is actually in immunobiology, even though I'm not in the field of science at the moment.

And, well, I'm much happier for it to be quite honest with you. And people know me for doing guerrilla history and not because I was an immunobiologist. But within the last week, the state of Tennessee just announced that they would refuse federal grant money regarding HIV AIDS. So every year, Tennessee gets about $10 million in federal grant money for testing, prevention, and treatment of HIV AIDS.

Now, we have to understand HIV AIDS, people, some people still have the notion of HIV AIDS from the 80s and early 90s where it was essentially a death sentence. And, you know, it was like the silent killer. And one day you'd find out you had it and then you would write your will because you were essentially going to die after that point. this is not the case anymore um you know testing is pretty darn cheap and if you subsidize it it's free prep is a thing that exists is very successful this is preventative treatment so pre-exposure prophylaxis uh this is something that is very cheap very effective and again you can subsidize and especially if you target it towards communities that are most at risk for contracting HIV treatment is relatively successful these days.

AIDS is by no means, a death sentence at this point. But what we have to remember is that who suffers predominantly from HIV and AIDS? It is the most marginalized communities. And the people that are going to be suffering from these diseases are the people that would benefit the most from having federal funding and subsidies for programs like this. Anyway, I know that that wasn't really the point of the last conversation. I have very little to add. I'm enjoying it.

I mean, I'll go out and say, your show is the only comedy show I pretty much ever watch. So I am not the expert on comedy. But I can say this with regards to HIV AIDS. But the speculation now is that some of these other right-wing controlled states may do the same thing. And the question, I'm not going to answer the question for people, but think, why? Why are states like Tennessee and potentially others going to just say, no, we don't want federal. grant money for testing prevention and treatment of something like HIV AIDS, which if you do these three things, you have virtually nobody dying from it. Why would you cut this federal

funding? Why would you just refuse it? Say, no, I don't want this $10 million to earmark it for these vulnerable populations. Why? Think about it, audience. Yeah. Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this as as I think someone said we easily could have done two or three hours but I really appreciate talking with you guys and I appreciate you taking the time and everybody definitely has to check out guerrilla history podcast and yeah I don't know if there's anything else you want to tell people on where to follow your work yeah I'll have my co-hosts also tell people where they can find them on Twitter but I will just announce that you know you can find Guerrilla history, wherever you get your podcasts.

Brett has two other excellent podcasts. Adnan has another podcast. We just launched a spin-off show as well. You can find all of our work linked on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore Pod. If you type it with only one R, oftentimes it doesn't come up. But I want to encourage the listeners particularly, if you're going to jump into our catalog, we have an ongoing miniseries called Sanctions as War, something that is really

overlooked, especially in the Western, even Western left, we don't talk about sanctions, nearly enough. And I know that this hits me particularly as I live in Russia, which is one of the most sanctioned countries in the world right now. And we are seeing impacts of it, even if not as severe, as many thought that they would be. But our sanctions is war theory takes a theoretical look at sanctions and also is doing installments on case studies. So, you know, Cuba, we just put out one on China. we have all kinds of case studies and we're going to be coming out with more.

I think the next one that we might do, oh, we'll have Iraq coming out next week and Zimbabwe sometime shortly thereafter. So if you want to check out something and you don't have like a specific guest in mind, you know, oh, Richard Wolf was on there. I want to check that out. Sure, if you have a guest that we've interviewed that you want to check out, go for that. Otherwise, I would recommend starting with the Sanctions as Worth series and you might find some interest in that, particularly the fact that it is really, an international perspective. Brett and Adnan, how can the listeners, oh, and I guess Twitter for me, you can find me at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995, guys.

Yeah, I'll just start and say thank you so much, Lee, for having us on. Love talking with you, love all your work, keep it up. And honestly, I love the audience as well. You've cultivated a really wonderful audience. I was kind of following some of the comments, very smart people. You can find everything I personally do at RevolutionaryleftRadio.com. That's all three podcasts and socials and everything else. I want to ditto. There's really a lot of fun. Great to meet you, Lee. And also a great audience. I've been watching the YouTube chat. So a lot of fun. I love the chat always on a good show. A lot of great conversation happens there. So kudos. And hopefully the show gets bigger and better all the time. People can reach me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Hus-A-I-N. And again, it was just a real pleasure. Thanks so much, Lee.

Thanks so much, guys. I'll see you down the road. All right, folks. There it is. Hope you enjoyed that. The guys from guerrilla history pod, such a pleasure to have them. Folks, what we do here with buying the headlines

is completely funded by you. We have no sponsors or anything like that. It's all down to you guys. And whether you want to see this continue and, you know, see great guests like we just recently. mentioned Richard Wolfe. I had Richard Wolfe recently. Stella Assange, Julian Assange's wife, recently Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink. All of those great people have been on, and that's just the past couple weeks. And that's all at YouTube.com slash behind the headlines.

You can now, this is new, you can now click the join button next to where it says either Mint Press or behind the headlines. On YouTube, you can click the join button. And I think it's 499 and you'll get a bunch of hold on i had it here somewhere you get a bunch of cool cool shit if you uh sign up you get loyalty badges and emojis member only chat rooms prioritize comments and followed back by mint press news among other things so that is a new way that they are helping uh fund this show and keep this going so you can join there you can also join patreon dot com slash behind the headlines and i will see you tomorrow I'm talking to Jingjing-Lee, great journalist for CGTN, and she also has other shows as well.

She's hugely popular, and she's going to be talking to us about China and the propaganda against China. And, yeah, other than that, I will see you soon and keep fighting. You're going to be able to be. Thank you.