Guerrilla History - Sanctions As Siege Warfare w/ Manu Karuka

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

This episode of Guerrilla History is a continuation of our Sanctions As War miniseries (check out our earlier episodes from the series if you've not already!).  In this episode, we lay out some very interesting historical and analytical parallels between sieges throughout history and modern sanctions regimes.  A fascinating conversation with a great scholar and committed anti-imperialist, you don't want to miss this!  Be sure to also stay turned for more installments of our Sanctions As War series! Manu Karuka is Assistant Professor of American Studies affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. He is author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, a great resource for political education!

You remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. 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 Huckamacki, joined as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing? I'm doing well. It's great to be with you, Henry. It's always nice to see you. I know we just recorded another episode before we did this, so it hasn't been that long since I've seen you. But as I said, said in a Patreon exclusive one time, I can't take my eyes off of you at none. I can't get enough of that. All right. I also joined by my other co-host who I also can't get enough of

Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. Again, long time. Well, not really a long time. Short time. Lots of C. Lots of C. But that's good. That's good. The more, the better. How are you doing, Brett? I'm doing good. Happy to be here. Absolutely. So before I introduce our guest, I just want to let the listeners know that this is another installment of our ongoing sanctions as war series. So for listeners that haven't checked out the introductory episode, and at this point, when this episode comes out, we'll have already had one case study come out. This is a series built around the book Sanctions as War, which is edited by our friends

Emmanuel Ness and Stuart Davison is really a tremendous work. And we're running this mini series to help us understand conceptually what are sanctions, sanctions regimes, and the effect that they've had in. various case studies. Even though we've started running the case studies at this point, we wanted to go back and talk with Manu Karuka, hopefully I got the pronunciation there, right, Manu, about his section in the book, Hunger Politics, Sanctions as Siege Warfare, really a tremendous chapter and something that we thought would be very valuable.

So we are joined by Manu Karuka, Assistant Professor of American Studies in the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Barnard College. author of Empire's Tracks, Indigenous Nations, Chinese workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. Hello, Professor. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for inviting. Happy to be with you. Absolutely. So I'm going to turn this over to Adnan now, as he's our resident medievalist. And I think that Adnan, you probably have a much better introductory question than I could possibly muster up. Well, it's just thank you so much for coming on.

I found this a very fascinating study. And of course, as the medieval historian, I was intrigued. by your evocation of siege warfare and how it has contributed to modern sanctions. And the title, of course, is hunger politics, sanctions as siege war. And so I just wanted to first talk and have the listeners understand a little bit about how you understand and analyze what siege warfare is all about, the sort of political. how its techniques are designed to prosecute war against a civilian population. And above all, I think I was really interested in the point that it is really with the start of colonialism and imperialism that we see this kind of legitimating in colonial war, the targeting of civilian populations. an example that you give, for example, of de Tocqueville rationalizing French colonial war against

Algerians in the course of the conquest and subjugation of Algeria in the 1830s. So I was wondering if you could just evoke a little bit, what is siege warfare, what makes it unique and specific, and what particularly those elements are that allow for the targeting of populations, how that's done, so that then when we talk about other phases of this rise of total war, we can understand it better. Yeah, sure, thanks. I mean, if we think of siege warfare or sieges, we're thinking of, let's say we're imagining a town or a city that's being held under siege. The town is probably circumscribed by walls.

So there's a population that's inside the walls or the walls of the city. city. And then the people who are laying the siege, the attackers, are surrounding the walls of the city. They're preventing water or food from coming in. They're preventing emissaries or reinforcements from coming into the town. And they're preventing weapons and, you know, ammunition, you know, reinforcements of that kind as well from coming into the town. You know, in the culture of Europe, you know, maybe the paradigmatic siege would be the siege of Troy and the Greek armies on the shores for years waiting to break that siege. So the way the siege works is that there's everybody inside that town or everybody within the walls is subjected to this military

attack to this. If we think of siege as a military technique, everybody inside the walls is subjected to this. Everybody suffers this together. So in the siege of Troy and in some of the Greek dramas that were written out of that story, a lot of the stories take place about the Trojan women and their experiences or the elder Trojans who can't fight. Maybe they were warriors when they were younger, but they're no longer old enough to fight, or maybe the priests who aren't warriors, but they have other social functions. The siege affects all the people of Troy in that story. Sieges work this way by affecting all of the people within the besieged area. And there's two kind of directions for the people inside the siege. They're kind of trying to

outweigh their attackers. They're hoping that they have the food stores and the water. And maybe they can harass from the walls of their city. They can go and harass the attacking camp. But their hope is to outweigh the attackers, to stay unified and wait until the attackers leave. So, you know, at this point, when the, when the, when the, when the, when the Iliad starts, the Greeks have been there for years. You know, they've been away from their families. Their morale is sinking. And it's not really clear. Are they going to be able to stay much longer? It's kind of a crisis on their side. So, you know, it could go that way.

This is what the people who are under siege are trying to do. So they need to maintain their unity, and they need to maintain this kind of patience. The attackers, on the other hand, they also have to be patient. They're trying to outweigh the people inside the walls of the town, the walls of the city. They're waiting until they run out of food or water until they start starving. they're waiting until disease breaks out horrific suffering and they're waiting for division and disunity to break in within the walls of the town so eventually somebody opens the gates and invites the attackers in can you give us some relief we need we need some water we need

some food we're dying here and so on both sides siege works you know in a way you know It's a long-term form of warfare. It requires patience on both sides. On the side of the attackers, it requires patience in unity on both sides. On the side of the attackers, it requires unity to stay mobilized, to continue the threat. And on the side of the besieged, it requires the unity to hold out, to wait until the attackers can leave. right so you're pointing out that there is a kind of cultural and political dimension to the contest outside of just these direct military confrontations it's a very political circumstance and breaking of the siege as often as i think you alluded to you know if you can get somebody to break down in the besieged city and try and lift the siege by inviting the attackers in or cooperating with them so that it'll be it'll be over um that's kind of how it works. Yeah, thanks so much. I think that has some resonances with the kind of

political dimensions of sanctions in our own day. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's incredibly helpful, of course, to analyze sanctions in particular through this conceptual lens of siege warfare. And it really helps, you know, understand what sanctions actually do, how they're actually impactful through that concept. So I really enjoy that. And in your first subchapter entitled siege warfare in the bourgeois state you start off by saying quote siege warfare like colonialism persisted across the transition from absolute monarchy to the bourgeois state so can you kind of walk us through the role that siege warfare played in the you know creation of the bourgeois state as we know it today it's a really interesting story about centralization of power um and siege

warfare i mean even if we go back to the iliad it starts out with uh you know there they're greatest warrior being upset because the king has taken one of his slaves for himself. And this sets into motion the entire story there. What we see with the history of modern siege warfare, there's great advancements in artillery, fortifications, and siege techniques where they're using gunpowder, cannons and new kind of directed ways, focused ways. And this maps out onto the period of time where you have the concentration of power in absolute monarchies, right? And I think that's kind of a long historical transition where we see the rise of the bourgeoisie to eventually capture state power, right? Part of what's happening these monarchies are taking huge debts, taking out loans from leading merchant houses, merchant families, guilds, in order to fund

their armies and in order to undercut the rest of the aristocrats. So there's a kind of disciplining over what we might think of as the dispersed power of the aristocracy and funneling that and concentrating that under the crown, under the monarch. Then over time, this transition takes place where in France with Tocqueville in Algeria, yeah, the monarch actually of course overthrown and the bourgeoisie rises and captures power. I think there's something really interesting about how siege warfare, especially in the modern era, given the weapons that are used, the techniques, the questions of logistics, all of these require a certain centralization of power. This can play a progressive role, as in the breakdown of aristocratic

power. And then it can also play, you know, a really horrifically violent role, as it did in, you know, experiences of colonial in the Americas in northern Africa. And, you know, siege itself is a technique of warfare. So it also, in the modern era, we can say siege itself has class content, where it has an imperial or anti-imperialist content. Maybe that's something we can talk about later. But, you know, there are imperialist sieges and they're anti-imperialist sieges. There are sieges that are run and perpetrated by the capitalist class,

and then there are sieges run by people's armies. And they look different. Or even in our time, if we think of sanctions, we can think of calls that operate through civil society rather than through governments. One thing that I want to just nail down a little bit more because I think that it's one of the key components of this entire series of sanctions as war and siege warfare fits nicely within this, is that, and we mentioned this in the introduction. So listeners, if you haven't heard this already, you know, you should go back and listen to that introduction that we did for this work and this series is that one of the problems with a lot of anti-sanctions movements is that they focus on the efficacy of sanctions, whereas they don't focus on the fact that these sanctions are, in fact, intended to harm innocent

populations. This is, of course, the same, just, you know, the same logic of seizures. And as you pointed out within your chapter several times, you know, basically from the beginning until the end, that when we're talking about these imperialist sieges anyway, not these anti-imperialist sanctions against apartheid or, you know, BDS in terms of Palestinian liberation, but in terms of these imperialist sanctions, imperialist sieges, the explicit goal of these are to harm innocent populations. And that is their method of achieving their goal. So I know that, I mean, for many of guerrilla history listeners, that is already going to.

to be fairly well understood, but just in case there's some people that haven't really put that much thought into that, would you be able to go into a little bit more depth on the siege component particularly, because we haven't talked about, you know, siege warfare, particularly much within the show yet about how this is the explicit goal and how this is, you know, carried on throughout history, like from the very first sieges all the way to modern day sanctions regimes. Yeah, sure. I mean, one thing I think that becomes clear when we look at sanctions as a form of siege warfare is the way that sanctions are continuous with other forms of warfare. And that's something maybe we can pick up later. But to this question of, you know, where sanctions and sieges are directed. You know, one place we could look, would be Woodrow Wilson.

He'd made this barnstorming tour across the United States to explain the proposal of the League of Nations. And in a speech in Indianapolis, it's a really well-known speech he gave, he explained the kind of tool of sanctions, of an international blockade. And he was raising in this instance, this was, Germany would be the country that would be sanctioned,

sanctioned and he said you know this is it's it's a terrible measure it targets the civilian population of the target country and it does this in a way the intention is to isolate that civilian population economically and politically from the rest of the world in order to exact you know either military or political aims the way sanctions have worked out as siege warfare and I know some of the other pieces in the collection address this much more directly head on. I mean, sanctions deliberately target, they work. They deliberately target the most vulnerable members of a society. In a way, some of the language might be familiar to some of us living a couple years into the pandemic in the United States, for example, people with preexisting

conditions, infants, elderly people, people in hospitals, people who need surgery, people who need medicine, not necessarily really intricate or defiant medicine, but medicine that they need to survive to deal with chronic illnesses. People who are at risk, more at risk when they don't have access to food, at risk of malnutrition, severe illness that's triggered by hunger. Sanctions deliberately cause, they work through withdrawing food,

withdrawing water, withdrawing medicine, and increasingly we're seeing withdrawing electricity, other forms of energy, all of these. And what they produce, what they leave in their wake is, you know, a horrific scale of death. Now, a place over a long time frame, you know, a siege is different than a marauding band of people who, let's say, run over the walls of the town and slaughter everyone inside. A siege might take place over a few months, but the net effect is the same.

So it's a really kind of slow and agonizing form. really torturous form of a collective death of collective murder. Yeah, absolutely. And I wanted to get back to something you mentioned in the last answer, which is this dichotomy between imperialist and anti-imperialist sanctions. Certainly when we think of sanctions in the modern era, it's synonymous with imperialism. We think of what the U.S. in particular is done to Cuba, to Venezuela. I mean, the list is infinitely long. But I'm really interested in this dichotomy and this idea of anti-imperialist sanctions. So can you kind of break that down for us? Yeah. You know, I think there are a few ways to look at this. One is, what are the

institutions where these sanctions are being, you know, are being raised or levied? When Ian Smith declared the independence of the white supremacist Rhodesian regime, you know, this was immediately discussed in the UN Security Council. It was discussed and seen and recognition recognized as an illegal act. And within the United Nations, there was an international campaign of sanctions against the illegal Rhodesian regime. The United States government at the time

carved out exceptions to the sanctions, which allowed it to continue trading with the Rhodesian regime for decades, grabbing the resources, grabbing the resources and thereby, you know, bringing some kind of economic lifeblood into that illegal regime. So in that case, this is the world community, the United Nations, you know, raising these sanctions. And it's the United States illegally breaking those sanctions. And those, I think, can be really clearly counterposed to the unilateral sanctions that the United States,

state's government has placed over, I think now it's well over one-third of humanity. So these are all sanctions at the U.S. government itself plays with no international standing in no international body. So that's one way we can see one example of an anti-imperialist sanction, one place we could look institutionally where we might see that set of politics being worked out. With the recognition, as Woodrow Wilson said, this is a terrible remedy, right? This is a terrible step to take. In the case of Rhodesia, it was the world community coming together and saying, this is a white supremacist government illegally announcing its sovereignty. This is a step that we need to take internationally because this is such a terrible,

a terrible situation that they've opened up. Another example of an anti-imperialist siege would be, for example, the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bienfou, which is just a siege. What's really interesting about this example, and there are other examples, the Vietnam forces, so Dian Bian Fu is in a valley,

and these French military forces were housed in this valley, it had strategic importance, and removing the French from this valley, would have strategic importance for removing the French from all of their Indo-Chinese colonies. The Vietnam forces gathered at the base of the mountains outside of this valley, and they had these huge artillery pieces, and they disassembled the artillery into small pieces, and they carried them up by hand, broke them down, and carried them up by hand, reassembled them at the tops of these mountains,

these mountains, ringing the valley, and then they started shelling the French forces. If you just think of the mechanisms, the amounts of people that takes, the kind of collective, you know, the collect human strength, but also the unity that that took. And then also the question of technology. This wasn't like, you know, really super advanced, you know, vehicles that were able to drive up the mountains. This is just people being able to carry up. the pieces with their own strength. It tells us something about the nature of people's warfare and kind of the tactics, the unique kinds of tactics that are used and become possible in people's warfare as

compared to imperialist siege warfare, which, you know, rain down from the size. It involves artillery that, you know, it's either drone warfare in recent times or these are Navy ships that are hundreds of miles away that are firing missiles, very, very different approaches to warfare. So I think for maybe for us, when we're reading history or reading the present moment, we can look to where the institutions, where the sanctions are being announced, through what mechanisms? How are the sanctions actually on the ground? What kind of weapons are being use? How is the siege being laid? And we can, you know, have some clues to the nature of these sanctions or of these sieges. Are they imperialist sieges or do they serve any kind of anti-imperialist?

I'm going to hop in for one second before Adnan, you get the next question. Just to let the listeners know that if you want to hear more about the Battle of Jin Ben-Fu, we have a great episode entirely devoted to that battle with Comrade Luna from Vietnam. So, Definitely check that out. Anybody that's interested in Dien Bain Fu, just go to the guerrilla history feed wherever you get your podcasts and you can listen to the whole thing. I think it's about an hour and a half long talking about just the battle. So a really interesting episode and highly recommended that you go and check that out. Adnan?

Oh, yeah. I just wanted to pick up in the article. Also, you have a section where you discuss how sanctions fits into a larger complex of hybrid war. And in particular, I was really fascinated with something that I've had a chance to chat with people on the Red Nation podcast, Nick Espos, about the continuities and connections between strategies of counterinsurgency and settler colonial warfare in the side of indigenous peoples on North America, particularly in the U.S. and later War on Terror sorts of techniques. And you made some connections there as well about how these are related to one another. And so I just wondered if maybe you could expand a little bit on what you see as the interconnection here between this settler colonial history and forms of warfare developed there and these more contemporary

kind of sanctions regimes as well as how that sanctions regime can fit within hybrid warfare. Because we often think of the sanctions as very non-military and disconnected, but you're making the point that there are actually a lot of interconnections. Maybe you could tell listeners a little bit more about what those interconnections are. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. There are a lot of interconnections and even the coordination we can see. They're clear coordination. So there's a military historian, John Grenier, who's written a book called The First Way of War. And in this book, he's describing or laying out in his analysis of history of North America, a distinct way of fighting war that emerged in North America.

This is before the United States. This is in, let's say, the earlier phases, pre-United States phases of colonization and settlement. The first way of war involves irregular forces. so militias and irregular forces that move out and target specifically

the food sources and the homes, the towns or the villages of the civilian populations that they're attacking and the civilian populations themselves. So the first way of war is a way of war that targets civilians for death, massacre,

destroys their homes, and destroys their sources of foods. let's say burns down their fields of crop or poisons them. This is something we can see. Grenier writes about this with the Pequot Massacre in New England. All the way, you know, we can see this, of course, the whole rainbow of chemicals that the United States launched Vietnam, that poisoned land.

We can see this in Iraq, the first phase of the U.S. war against Iraq, where immediately in the days before the U.S. bombing, it initially had military targets and then it expanded the military targets to include things like electrical generating plants, water treatment plants, hospitals, all of this was reported in the U.S. press at the time. So it expanded from, you know, from more narrow military targets to these civilian targets. The sanctions then that were placed on Iraq after that war made it impossible for all of that infrastructure to rebuild, to the, to the sanctions. be rebuilt. It made it impossible to rebuild the electrical generation. It made it impossible to

rebuild the water treatment for people to get water. It, you know, pools, the hospitals had been destroyed, had been wrecked. Most of these had been built in the decades since the 1958 revolution that booted out the British. And so there's a real, there's a direct continuity across time in the use of irregular forces that are targeting civilians to targeting places where they live targeting the sources of their food and then also over time I'm sorry also in in terms of the techniques so the sanctions in the case of Iraq hit really hard right after the air war right and they they go together and if you again if you think of siege see warfare this the besieging forces

One of their main tools is artillery. And so in this case, in the first phase of the U.S. war against Iraq, this is the air war. And then that gets lengthened and continued by the sanctions regime. That's fascinating to link, yeah, the air war with artillery in that. And also, it just reminded me also that, of course, the war of military invasion was preceded also by years. and years of sanctions after the first Gulf War that Iraq suffered under. And then you have a second round after warfare. And so it's sort of war, actual military war is really, you know, a component that's integrated in different phases of this long sort of war, you might say, on the Iraqi people. And that

the sanctions almost after military invasion are almost a result of, you know, resistance. You know, it's almost like a kind of continuation of the war to shift it because resistance has pushed the imperialist military attack, you know, into a different level. And so sanctions do different kinds of things vis-a-vis this war and accompanying the counterinsurgency component when resistance emerges. So that's a very great example, I think, illustrating those connections. Yeah, absolutely. I would like to move on and ask a dual question.

In the text and the essay, you make a really interesting point about the imagery of the fasci's, kind of where it comes from and how it's connected to imperial power, which I was hoping you could just kind of touch on because I found that interesting. And the second part of the question is just like a broad question that you mentioned in the essay, which is the effects of imperialist siege warfare on imperialist society. So you have the fascis and the U.S. political imaginary and then the effect back home of imperialist siege warfare. And if you could touch on both of those, that'd be awesome.

Yeah, those are great questions. And I think, you know, in these ways, this kind of perspective could be valuable for us in the United States right now. So Fashis, when you look at, there are manuals of siege warfare. I mean, all this stuff is written about, going back a few hundred years, it's codified. You know, it involves like equations. You know, how do you equate, how do you target a place on a wall or how do you account for you use of ammunition? You know, all kinds of things like that.

So there's mathematical aspects to it. There's an analysis of the different phases of siege warfare. If you're going to lay a siege, what phases you need to plan for, which I think in interesting ways we can see reflected even in sanctions in this form of siege warfare. And Fashis come up in these manuals of siege warfare. This goes back to the time of the Roman Empire. The term comes from Latin. Fashis are bundles of sticks that are cut.

So let's say, you know, let's say there's a town surrounded by walls and there's an army, let's say, it's a Roman army. They've marched on this town and they're planning to lay a siege. The soldiers spread out, they fan out, and they gather cut down wood and trees from the surrounding area. And they cut bundles of sticks all into the same. roughly the same shape, the same length, and then they tie these sticks together. And these sticks are called fashis, and they use these are almost like bricks. So they use these to reinforce and fortify the trance that they build.

So the first phase of a siege, according to Alfred Thayer-Mayan, who was a military theorist who taught at West Point, the first phase of siege is cutting off access to the outside world. And the second stage of the siege would be for the attackers to raise fortifications. And then raising the fortifications, they start to cut in and enable the approach to the walls or the place that they're putting under siege. So there's all this stuff about, you know, how do you cut the fortifications at what angle compared to all this technical kind of stuff. Well, what they would do is build these trenches.

They'd dig out trenches in the land surrounding the walls, and they'd reinforce those trenches with these bundles, these fashis. The interesting thing is that these fashis reappear in imperial symbols. We can see it all over the place. In the United States, we can see it. I think it's on the seal of the Supreme Court. We can see it in the Congress. It's just a bundle of sticks that are tied together.

If you think, if you go and look, if you think, the image of the eagle that's in front of the shield, and there's kind of these sticks underneath the eagle. The eagle's got its wings spread out. Those sticks are fashis. So it's really interesting. It's just a tool. It's like a screwdriver or a hammer that you would use,

except this tool is used specifically for laying siege on places. So it's interesting what that suggests. Now, of course, fashies etymologically is linked to fascism. And the idea, you know, that Mussolini put forward in his rise to the power, that all these separate fingers on the fists can be strong and united when they join into a fist rather than an open hand. It comes from the same principle. And so in our moment, I think there's very specific ways to be attentive, not just to the symbols and what they might be evoking and try to imagine that. but actually to see links with specific political programs, specific forms of organization,

and their relationship to different factions of the classes that are controlling the state, that are controlling policy, that are advancing these policies of sanctions, you know, these horrifically cruel policies of sanctions on other parts of the world. So, I mean, that's one way to think about fascis, and it opens up a whole set of conversations, I think, that we could think about together,

where we see these fashis and what is suggesting to us, these symbols. In terms of the effects on the besieging society, let's say in terms of the effects on the United States, siege warfare, because so much of it in the modern era has to do with breaking walls, breaking through fortifications, the counterpart to siege warfare

is the construction of fortifications that can withstand these kinds of attacks. So the French kind of military thinker behind modern siege warfare, the two people. There was a Dutch person and a French person. Bobin was a French person. So he developed all of these siege warfare techniques that the French military would use in its conflicts.

He also developed a whole system of fortifications, and he oversaw the building. of a whole series of fortresses in France. And those fortresses actually held until the Nazi invasion, until the Blitzkrieg. They held until that point. You know, there's a technological shift, let's say, that those fortresses were no longer able to withstand.

What this suggests is that there's a kind of dialectical counterpart to siege warfare, and that's fortifications. The two go hand in hand. And fascis you can think of as a system of fortifications. And so we can track this in U.S. history. The times where we see explosions of sales are times where we see also a fortification of U.S. politics, let's say the political conversation, but then also institutionally, you know, the makeup, the structure of the U.S. government. One of the things I look at is the development, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. after 9-11.

I mean, this happened really quickly. It was really rushed. There was no real debate. It was just like, oh, you know, now there's this Department of Homeland Security. And all of the functions are routed under the Department of Homeland Security. And if you remember, 2001, the US was in recession.

You know, there was all this. And immigrants were being targeted for layoffs and for deportations, not only in the war on terror as a function of the war on terror, but also as a function of this recession. Part of what Homeland Security does is bring established TSA and bring, of course, the whole theater of airport security begins then.

And it lays off pretty much the entire airport security workforce up until that time. It would be immigrants. You would go fly through airports in different parts of the US, you'd see different immigrant groups, but it was immigrants and they got laid off because TSA now had stipulations.

had to be a US citizen to work with TPSA. There are other things. INS, the Immigration Naturalization Services that it existed before, now gets folded under ICE, which is a new bureau that's housed under Homeland Security. So a complete restructuring of the US federal government. It's a huge expansion of the budget, and huge expansion of the functions

of the federal government. And it's happening just in a matter of weeks after September 11th. So there's a way that this fortification, I think, works in tandem with the siege warfare or with the sanctions, right? And there's something, sanctions in a way, they seem so immaterial.

Let's say to the people in the United States. It just, it's, it seems immaterial where you're blocking off trade or you're blocking off the ability of investors to invest in a country and what is often no off lost is the horrifically you know the ways the horrific ways that these policies become material in starvation and mass starvation you know in in a scale of unnecessary death that you know is really horrific to contemplate and that goes on stretches on

for decade in the case of Cuba for example but another way that we can see these becoming the These policies become material are the changes within U.S. policy itself. And we can see those are borders. We can see those at places like, you know, borders, airports, the restriction of certain classes or categories of people living here from certain categories of jobs. And then the budget, the budget itself. Yeah, I just want to quickly follow up on that. You mentioned that sanctions are often seen or interpreted as sort of immaterial.

And I would even say, and I assume there's some agreement here, that they're presented as like a nonviolent alternative to violent warfare, when in fact the violence is very much there. And it's actually worse in some ways because it's targeted specifically at not only civilians, but vulnerable people in need of food and medicine in particular. So presented as nonviolent and in some ways is more violent than anything else. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, this time, if we go back again to the first Diyadh War, the one with Bush, with Daddy Bush, that this is happening at the time that there's also a rollout of this

spectacular televised rollout of what's presented as smart bombs, bombs that can only hit their intended sites. Patriot missiles. Missiles that can protect countries from missile attacks. This is all really great for investors in Raytheon. But then, you know, almost immediately these, the claims of these weapons are, the lie is shown when the smart bomb fall on a school or if it falls on a bomb, a civilian bomb shelter.

The immateriality, the immateriality, the supposed immateriality of sanctions is a really horrific way that this whole policy works. If we go back to the concept of the fascies, there's a kind of coarsening I think of the humanity. I don't know how else to put it. There's an appeal to the humanity of people in the West. We're pursuing these policies, and this is especially the case from the 90s forward,

we're pursuing these policies in the name of human rights. The appeals are made, let's say, to the, you know, what we would think of on the surface level is the good parts of our humanity, our empathy, our compassion. And it's these appeals to these parts of ourselves, collectively, that are being used to starve children to death, to have people die from asthma, you know, to have people die from diseases,

that it's absurd that somebody would be dying from such diseases in this day and age, slowly starve out whole communities, whole towns, remove even the possibility, of children going to school because there's no electricity, you know, to keep the school going. Shut down the electricity in hospitals over a whole region over the course of the week and let the people in those hospitals just rot to death, right? It's horrific, and it's being done in the name of compassion. It's being done in the name of claims or principles of human rights.

There's a real coarsening that results from that. It's interesting if we go back to Voban, that French military engineer, the supposed genius of siege warfare, one of the slogans that he's remembered for that I quoted in the essay is, more powder, less blood. They're figuring out ways to use the cannon and direct where it fires in a kind of mathematically precise way. And the idea is that, okay, we're going to use more weapons, but in the end, less people will die.

I mean, we could trace this back to Hiroshima, Nagasaki. the horrific alibi that still stands in the United States that these crimes were somehow justified. Somehow they cause less death to use these kinds of weapons. So I think there's a connection in the policies, in the approach, the kinds of appeals that are being made. And I think for those of us living in the communities that are laying these sieges, the attacking cases,

the attacking communities, it really should give us pause to think about, you know, what is the effect of this on our kind of collective language, our collective capacity to speak in terms of compassion, to speak in terms of empathy. If we can do this to children in another country, you know, how does that, how does that affect? We can do this to people, you know, living with just chronic illness. and force them to die, how does that affect the conversation within this society? You know, what's happening to us in the midst of this pandemic? I think there are really strong connections between the impasses that we face and the violence internally within the United States with these kinds of policies that are being pursued outside of the U.S. borders. But you know, Manu, these sanctions do cause less deaths. It's just that they cause less deaths only in the besieging country.

And frankly, this is all that matters to the populace of the besieging countries. They really have this immateriality, you know, ingrained within them. They don't understand. They can't comprehend the suffering that they are causing as a result of their government's actions. You know, I'm living in a country, one of the most sanctioned countries in the world right now, but one that's been able to get through these sanctions quite remarkable. well, given the scope and scale of the sanctions. Russia has managed to do fairly decently through these sanctions. But despite that, I can see firsthand how every aspect of life is impacted

by sanctions. I cannot, even despite living in one of the most sanctioned countries in the world, I still cannot comprehend the scale of the suffering, the scope of the reach of the impacts of sanctions on countries that do not have the resources and the ability, the relationships, the military might, the resources, to be able to withstand sanctions in the same way that this country has. You know, places like Cuba, which are isolated, you know, they're an island and in the ocean with very little in terms of natural resources other than sugar cane, you know, what do you do if you're completely cut off from the rest of the world? The scope and the scale of suffering as a result of sanctions, I cannot even begin to.

to comprehend, but I am always thinking about this to try to comprehend it. And I know I never will. But I know also that most Americans are not able to even think about this, much less comprehended. They don't even think about it. So this immateriality that we've been discussing, it's a really pernicious aspect of sanctions because like you said, we know that sanctions don't save lives. The thing is, is they just shift the balance of how where lives are lost to the scale is tipped towards the besieged country and away from the besieging country. And unfortunately for the populace, like I said, really, that's all that matters at the end of the day is that they're not the ones that are impacted. And I mean, we've seen time and time

again through history that governments are willing to take actions that seem nonsensical until you consider that it's all about what the populace feels themselves at that moment. The decision in terms of the grand scale of things, in terms of justice, or in terms of, you know, overall economic security of the country or, or military strategy or whatever, a lot of these things don't make sense unless you consider that there's some decisions that would get mass pushback from the populace. And I know that I'm sorry for rambling on too long before I even get to my question, but one thing that we're seeing here in Russia right now is, and hopefully I don't get, you know, somebody coming in through my window after.

saying this, but one of the problems that we're seeing with this special military operation is that there is very few actual Russian regular military on the front lines. It's mostly the militias from the republics, the Denedsk people's republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, as well as mercenaries like the Wagner Group. One of the reason, and the problem is, is that these troops are not necessarily as motivated, and they're also not as professional, particularly in terms of those militias. And so there's a lot of problems from the Russian perspective as a result of this. The reason that they're not putting the conscripts on the front line is because they know

that there would be mass pushback if they did. So they're seeing worse results on the battlefield than they would have if they made a different decision, but they're constantly having to think what is the populace going to think about this. And this is sanctions and, you know, as a form of siege warfare, are much the same. We don't see that impact at home. So we can brush our hands and say, not our problem, our people here will be okay with that. Now, that's just a comment.

If you want to add anything to that, you can. But I also want to turn us towards the psychological impact. So this is all on the psychology and the impacts of people on the besieging country. But we also have to think about the besieged country. We've talked about material impacts on the besieged country, but I want to talk about the psychology. And you have this interesting phrase. which I really like, the unity of the besieged, where, well, instead of me explaining it, Manu,

I'll just turn it over to you so you can add anything you want on any of those things that I put out there. But I'm really curious to have you explain to the listeners, this concept of the unity of the besieged and why this may be important for us to think about when we're analyzing the impacts of sanctions on people as well as outcomes of sanctions regimes. Yeah, thank you. So, you know, on the question of the apparent immateriality of sanctions, It brings to mind a quote from from Biden that I that I quote in the essay when he was vice president after the NATO destruction of Libya where he said, you know, this was, you know, however billion, however many billion dollars the U.S. spent and no casualties, you know, which is imagine saying that in public. And he says, this is how the U.S. will be fighting wars in the future.

And so there's a sense of this immateriality, no cost, or if the cost is, you know, more money to weapons manufacturers or to the Pentagon budget. But no cost in terms of lives, apparently, in terms of human life casualties. It's a crazy thing. There's a connect, I think, with Biden, you know, after the military with the apparent military withdrawal from Afghanistan, right? And this is, you know, this huge embarrassment, you know, it's seen as a really wrong move in polite conversation. But it's also seen as that this is the end somehow, that the U.S. is, you know, withdrawn its military actions in Afghanistan. It's betrayed. It's its local partners. It's ashamed itself on the world stage. But yet, what does the Biden administration do immediately afterwards?

It freezes all of the international reserves of the country. And so, you know, you have literally a whole country of people who are starving, who the United Nations, you know, warns. This is an entire country that's facing starvation in weeks. And that's not seen in the United States. It's not discussed at all whatsoever. It's as if the war is all. over. There's no more, Afghanistan no longer exists. And yet the war continues. It's just changed forms, right? The weapons have changed forms. The offices from the war is being coordinated, they've shifted. But yet the war continues. It's in a different form. And I think that's something sanctions, seeing sanctions as siege warfare, it can help us see the continuities, the coordination with other offices, you know, so that war is being coordinated not just in the Pentagon and the

the CIA, it's also being coordinated in the Department of Energy, in the Commerce Department, in the Treasury departments. These are really important sites for U.S. war aims, for how the U.S. has been fighting wars for the last three decades, if not longer. Could you remind me of your last question, your last point? Unity of the besieged. Oh, yeah, thanks. Yeah, so this is something, I mean, you know, so I'm speaking to you from the United States. Let's say, when the Trump administration launched this attempt to replace the Venezuelan government

and then, you know, and then, you know, just create out of thin claw or on a whole claw, create this new government. And then assert that internationally, the assets of the Venezuelan government should actually be under the control of this new government that the U.S. that was created in Washington, D.C.,

in the United States, people are responding. You know, what's the response? You know, what do we do to this? How do we speak to this? And there's a sense that the Venezuelans who have been suffering these sanctions from the United States, what is there for us to say, stay strong, stay united, or go for this politician instead of that one?

try to negotiate this way, we're not starving. We're not being starved to death. We're not having, we're not facing a situation where we are needing to book emergency medical procedures and there's no electricity in the hospitals because of, because of the workings of U.S. international policy. There's something, these sanctions are intended to break down the unity of people who are suffering, who are facing not just the prospect of starving to death, who are actually starving to death. You know, the title of the essay is hunger politics. And one of the things I'm invoking in that title is the Nazi war plans in the attack on the Soviet Union. They call it the hunger strategy. And the whole thing was to overrun, capture the grain belt,

the fields, the agricultural producing areas, and control those and use local populations to grow the food, and then take the harvest and move that harvest to Germany so that Germany could never be isolated the way that it had been, you know, that Woodrow Wilson talked about at the end of the First World War. This would enable Germany to continue fighting a war, not to have to shut down at any point. But another part of this, the hunger plan, the Nazi hunger plan, was to starve out the Sydney's. So, of course, there's the siege in The horrific siege of Leningrad. If we, there's so much you can read and look up about what people went through in that siege.

And this was a political attack. It was explicitly a political attack against communism. It was to eradicate communism, to destroy communism by starving people into breaking, into disuniting. We can see the preferred option of imperialism over the last few decades and we can see this in Yugoslavia, we can see this on the African continent, we can see this in Asia, and we can see pushes, moves toward this in Latin America as well. The preferred political outcome is secession of targeted countries to fuel and feed secessionist movements so that larger countries break up into smaller countries that then can be all the more easily

divided, conquered, controlled, and the resource. is captured. Siege or sanctions as one form of siege warfare plays a unique role in fostering these conditions for secession. It's also known and known by theorists of siege war and historians of siege warfare that some of the major techniques historically in seizure warfare involve treachery, involved treason, scycraft. All of this is, you know, these are primary ways, principal ways that besieging forces have sped up, hastened the end of their siege operations, hasten the situation in which the people under siege, you know, they break up their unity, and some of them open the gates, allow the attackers in, you know, for desperate relief,

or maybe because they've sold off, you know, they've sold off for their own personal interests. So I think this is something we can see in U.S. policy and NATO policy over the past few decades. And I think this is one of the ways that sanctions are working in the world today. Yeah, I'm so glad that you mentioned that element of those techniques. I think we mentioned when we first began our conversation about siege warfare, that they're often broken by these sorts of betrayals or undermining that unit. and just reminds me, as a medieval historian, for example, the famous of Antioch, which is sort of even more than Jerusalem by the Crusaders was, you know, capturing Antioch. And very famously, you know, that was broken by one of the watchtower people basically being bought off by the crusader besiegers, Bohem, and, you know, they open up the gate.

And that's how they managed to break this long siege of Antioch. And so the analogy there, I think you're mentioning, it's interesting to see that, you know, the way in which human rights discourse can sometimes be appropriated and spurred, you know, to foment a kind of disunity. I mean, of course, we're all in favor of human rights, but the context of a besieged community, you know, some of these fissures are, of course, useful in breaking kind of the unity when these sort of sanctions regimes are being imposed. how that is being manipulated and so on. So that raises the question for those of us in the besiegers community, you know, how do we understand, like, you know, that the best way to lift a siege is when, you know, the besieging army is forced into, you know,

paying a cost that they can't tolerate or, you know, an army, you know, that is in solidarity with those who are, in the siege, the siege comes to attack from outside the besiegers and it lifts the siege. So I'm wondering if with that kind of metaphor, how would you counsel this being helpful for us in thinking about solidarity, counter, you know, countering these imperial forms of siege warfare in the modern world? You know, what can we do? How do we express that sort of solidarity to help lift the siege? I think that's a great question. That's, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the organizational question. So that's, that's the question. I think there are two things I'll venture. One is the, if we look at specific to sanctions, what the coming period suggests and what oppressed working class, poor people within the besieging communities need to prepare for. And Europe, I think we're seeing this play out in the UK and Europe as we speak now or in the coming months, but we'll see it in the U.S. too.

Sanctions are a specific kind of weapon that revolve around the control of international trade and the dollar, right, is the mechanism of international trade and the U.S. reserves as the safest kind of repository of international, you know. international reserves. That's all broken down. The more that tensions have been used, the more that's broken down. It's a weapon that actually has weakened itself. And it's a dangerous weapon because ultimately in the end, what this is leading us to is it's hastening the end. It's a dangerous weapon for people in the United

States because it's hastening the end of the U.S. dollar as the international medium of current of exchange and what that means for working class people in the US for poor people is that you know the dividends of imperialism that have funded things like our ability to pay rent as expensive as it is our ability to buy eggs and milk our ability to get to work and and clothe ourselves all of that is going to become much more expensive and really out of reach. It's going to cause, you know, some real political crises in an intense way. The ruling class is unified and organized, and it raises the necessity for organization and unity and coordination among the working class and the dispossessed and oppressed

communities within the U.S. to prepare for that, that eventuality. I won't predict when it's going to happen, but that eventuality as sanctions get used. So that's one. I think that's a direct material interest in developing a critique of sanctions, in developing a critique of siege warfare, and in developing ways to materially force disunity among the besieging forces. The second, I think, is maybe more of a principle. principle, but I think it should be a guiding principle, and that's the principle of reparations.

And reparations can begin, if we think of John Conyers' bill, to study reparations for slavery. Reparations we can understand in the first instance as an act of political education, collective political education. And so there would be a study of reparations, the reparations that the U.S. owes for its sanctions, its siege on, you know, for having besieged countries and communities in the third world in the global South over decades for the deaths and the suffering that it's caused. I think these two things go together. So this principle of reparations, this real discussion of what form those reparations will take, need to take, tied to, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the further development of unity and coordination of the working class, of the poor, of the oppressed. So I would say those are two things that come to mind. Well, a great answer, and I have to say a great conversation. We're going to wrap this episode up of guerrilla history. Again, another installment of our Sanctions as War mini-series. And I really do think that this conversation was enriching for that series. So, again, listeners, if you haven't already listened to the introduction of this series, which was a great conversation with Manny Ness and Stuart Davis or the case study that we recently put out on Yugoslavia with Gregory Eilich, both great episodes in their own right.

And I think that combined with this episode, listening to the three of those together as well as the subsequent case studies that will be coming out after this, it is a very, very important series for us to focus on. It's a very important text. And again, you can find this specific chapter that we're talking about, hunger politics, sanctions as siege warfare in the book, Sanctions as War. Our guest once again was Professor Manu Karuka, assistant professor of American Studies in the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Barnard College. Thank you very much for coming on, Professor.

It was a really great pleasure to talk to you. I hope that you enjoyed your time here. Is there anything that you would like to direct our listeners to as we let you go? No. I thank you for the resources that you're putting out. I've benefited from them myself, and I'm really happy to join me. Thank you so much. We really enjoyed the conversation, and it's a very important piece that gives a different

analytical way of thinking about sanctions that we've benefited from, and I'm sure our listeners and readers of the book will gain a lot out of. So thanks again so much for joining us. Yeah, definitely. So on that note, then, Brett, how can our listeners find you and your other excellent podcasts that you do? Everything I do can be found at Revolutionary, LeftRadio.com.

Excellent. Highly recommend checking that out, everybody. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcasts that you do? You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain-H-U-S-A-I-N. And check out the M-A-J-L-I-S podcast of Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project at Queens. And if you're interested in the Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim diaspora, Islamophobia, these kinds of topics, we deal with them regularly. So check out the M-A-J-L-I-S.

Also highly recommend that. I listen to every episode of both of your shows, and I gain a lot for both of them. So it's really a pleasure to be able to do this show with you. Listeners, as for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-F-E-R-N-N-N-N-N-F-E. You can follow Gorilla-H-E-R-R-I-L-L-L-A. Subscribe to our free newsletter. to get caught up on all of the latest things that we've been doing as well as reading

and listening suggestions picked by the hosts of the show as well as former guests of the show by going to guerrilla history.substack.com. Again, gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A. So guerrihistory.com. And you can help keep the show running by donating to us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.