Guerrilla History - Sources and Methods - Psychedelic Remote Viewing w/ Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on a returning fan favorite, Prof. Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, for an episode on sources and methods within history - including discussion of a method Brandon dubs psychedelic remote viewing. This conversation is certainly one that will please those interested in HOW history is done, and how we should view various sources used within historiographic analysis!  It sounds super nerdy, and it kind of is, but we're sure you're going to love the conversation!  Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt is a historian at California State University, Stanislas.  You can (and should!) get The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq from Stanford University Press.  He can be followed on twitter @HunnicuttWolfe Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bin-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to utilize the

lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined, unfortunately today by only one of my usual co-hosts. Today we have Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada with us. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you, Henry. Yeah, always nice to see you. Unfortunately, we're not joined today by our other usual co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast, but we're definitely looking forward to having Brett for the next conversation with us. Now, before I introduce our topic and our guests today, and we have a fabulous guest,

returning guests, and actually the guest from one of our most popular episodes to date, I just want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show, keep us up and running, and able to do what we're doing by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. with Gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. All of the contributions that we get there are really what allow this show to continue. You can also keep up to date with what we're releasing by following us on Twitter or whatever Twitter

is called at the point of time that this episode is released. It seems to be changing. And who knows with the erraticness of the person running Twitter or whatever it is called, what it'll be named when this episode comes out. But you can follow us at Gorrida. Rilla underscore pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. Now, we have a fantastic guest today.

I'll introduce the guest briefly, and then Adnan will introduce the series that we're in. We have returning Brandon Wolf Honeycutt, who's a historian at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of one of my favorite books, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy, Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq, which we have a really great episode on. And like I said, it's one of our most popular episode. So, hello, Brandon. It's nice to have you back on the show. Well, thank you so much for having me on.

It's a real honor to be here with you both. Absolutely. And today we're going to be having a very nerdy episode that fits into one of our existing series, sources, and methods. Now, Adnan, you were the person who proposed that we have a series on sources and methods. So why don't I have you remind the listeners what this series is all about? Sure. I mean, I think it's actually just very fundamental and basic to doing history and thinking about history, to have a sense of what are the sources that people use as historians, as guerrilla

historians to try and interpret it and understand the past? And then what are some of the methods that we use to, you know, make meaning from, draw conclusions and use these sources as evidence. And so it seemed that it's worthwhile occasionally to look up from the specific histories that we're discussing, the ways in which history is informing current events or questions that we're discussing and talking about on the show to think, you know, in a disciplined fashion about what are the sources for us that we want to use and preserve? And also what are the methods and approaches that we as guerrilla historians need to employ and the key kind of questions and concerns around those, the challenges that we have when we're trying to interpret the past

for the purposes that we have, which may be different from others' use of the past, which is, you know, to inform our contemporary struggles for liberation, for social justice. So we've had a couple of episodes in the past that focused more on collections of sources. Listeners should go back and we talked about the Black Liberation Army publication of some of their records and archives in volume one by Rookery Press. And of course, we also had a wonderful discussion about black communist women's political writings with the co-editors of that, volume. So today, it's appropriate that we turn towards actually thinking about methods. And that's what we wanted to bring on Brandon back since he's had some interesting, not only in

the work that we discussed, the paranoid style, it was very interesting on the kinds of sources that it used. And we had touched upon some of these kinds of questions. But to stimulate us, He shared with us an appendix about some of the, you know, kind of key questions that you have to bring as a historian to working with government documents, particularly, you know, CIA documents. And it reminds me very much of our very first conversation and first episode on this show with Dr. Vijay Prashad on his book, Washington Bullets, where he talks about, assassination, you know, histories, histories of assassination and the U.S. imperial derailing of liberation movements across the world, particularly in the global South. And in fact, the very document that starts off this appendix that you shared with us, Brandon, about, you know, the study of assassinations from 1954, the CIA team working on Guatemala.

And this, you know, kind of drew up. up this sort of working document of, you know, approach to it was something that he, you know, has used and mentioned. And we had a little bit of a discussion about using CIA and Department of State, you know, documents to understand what was happening, you know, over the history of the empire's disruption of global South movement. So this is a wonderful chance to come back to that kind of a conversation. And, you know, the key point that you raised, you know, with this document is that they mentioned, the authors mentioned that no assassination instructions should ever be written or

recorded. So do you want to tell us a little bit about the paradox that this creates then to, you know, historian who's trying to document the history of these assassinations when there is a written document produced by the government that itself says, don't talk about assassination? Yeah, it is a paradox. And I think maybe the source of the paradox is that writing is a very useful mechanism, right? It serves a certain bureaucratic purpose or end. You have to write down instructions. Not everything can be, you know, committed to, you know, memory or communicated orally. So I think a certain amount of paper is going to naturally be generated. But most of what is

important or out there is not going to be generated or written. The most important documents are never written, right? The most important information is not necessarily committed to paper or things that are written committed to paper are, you know, committed in such a way to maintain what they call the plausible deniability. And I was just reading a book on the 1953 coup in Iran. And it said, you know, the line in there was from the CIA study themselves that the president really didn't want to sort of have his name ever used or invoked in any of these discussions. And so they are actually even saying, yeah, the president knows what's going on and is informed and is, you know, ultimately accountable. But I wish I could remember the exact line that's in the CIA report,

but it's essentially saying he wanted to make sure there was no paper trail. But there again, it's the same paradox, right? You're committing to paper that you don't want, you know, that you don't want any sort of any sort of paper trail. And I think for the most important, they are successful at that. see there's a bit even a difference in the the source types like the CIA does not make its records it's under no obligation to make its records available to the public so there's nothing from the CIA on the coup in iran in 53 or or this or Iraq in 1963 uh in theory the documents in the CIA's internal records its operational files from the 1953 coup were destroyed in the embassy in in the early 60s when they there's a new book by Matthew Connolly called The Declassification Engine,

which really kind of talks about the ultimate act of powers, the destruction of records, right? Think about Dick Cheney in the 2003 war. There's just nothing. He came up through the 1970s through the church committee and the prying eyes of the Senate. And his lesson out of that was, never record things.

Don't do what Nixon did and make tapes. And, you know, these things, these technologies that you think are a sword that you can use to cut down. down your enemy can be a kind of a double-edged sword. And so I think we fool ourselves. The illusion of transparency, you know, conceal so much. And so we have something called the Freedom of Information Act. And we think, oh, okay, after, you know, 30 years, the State Department makes its records available. And then if they decide to withhold something for purposes of national security, you can go through this sort of bureaucratic rational process whereby you can request the document

and then you can go through an appeal, and eventually the state will sort of divulge what it didn't want to naturally divulge. And it's like, no, the state is not going to, you know, make available evidence of its own criminality. It's going to destroy any record that, you know, portrays it in a negative light. And even those sort of struggles are those very earnest people who are filing the mandatory document review requests and freedom of information requests and doing lawsuits and going after the state. Department's foreign, you know, it's official record and saying you left this out, you left that out. Ultimately, if the state says that's a threat to national security, we can't release it. They don't release it. And so you're only, you're confined to operating within the bounds of, you know, what the state wants to allow into the historical record. Yeah. And so

that poses problems for us that want to take a critical dispensation towards the, towards the the past and not simply just reproduce the Washington's view of the world. Right, right. I mean, there's a huge, I mean, set of different levels in questions involved here in records, record keeping, archives that this opens up because it isn't just a matter of gaining access to these documents. And you pointed out that the destruction of these records is often a major kind of move of power. And it just reminds me of historic cases of the destruction of documents in the past. I mean, the Mongols, for example, were quite known for, you know, basically they're just ending states and creating their own state and their own reality. So there's so much gets destroyed, even in peasants' revolt.

So sometimes also destruction of records are a counter move against the state. So we had an episode where we talked about England 1381. And recently I've had the chance to be thinking about it and talking. about it. You know, one of the things that the revolters did was, you know, attack the records for the collection of tax records at the Treasury in the Tower of London in a very meaningful and directed way. And so there is a kind of contestation going on about these institutions and practices of power where clearly history is very important to maintain, you know, a certain version of history, a certain documentary approach to characterizing history.

But even if you gain access to these, ones that have been preserved, there's a logic to how and why they were preserved and what they reveal, as you're pointing out as well, is that, you know, I mean, if they really tell you the story, then they might not actually exist. They may not have been preserved in that way or they might be destroyed. And what you gain access to can be redacted for national, security or preserving, you know, the impunity of certain people who are removed from accountability. And, you know, even the way they characterize, this is something I think that

you got at in this in this account of sound and unsound methods, is that, of course, the very logic through which they see the world and recorded and put it into records is also something that isn't the reality. It's a perspective on the reality. Certain ways of framing that reality, you know, even in records that are preserved, a census, a police report, you know, these are not neutral, even tax records. These are not neutral documents that just transparently reflect the truth of reality in written form. They are interpretations. They are instantiations of power, you know, acting in the world. world. And so even those kinds of things that we think of as the documentary bedrock sources that we would use as evidence are themselves invested in social and political relations that aren't neutral and don't just reflect what happened like there's some, you know, as if there's some omniscient way in which we could actually see what was happening. So anyway, that seemed like a very important kind of suggestion. Yeah, Henry.

I just want to add into that. So you're mentioning that these sources are not neutral. They're inherently not neutral and they cannot be neutral because they're being produced within a system that is not neutral. They're produced within a system that has a vested interest in maintaining itself and perpetuating itself into the future. So even when we find documents that are critical of components of the system that we're operating within, that system still has the explicit goal of perpetuating itself.

And so they may be willing to expose certain things that go wrong within. in that system, but these documents are not produced with the intention of changing said system. These documents are produced within that system, within the confines of that system, and under the assumption that that system is the correct system, maybe there's things wrong on the edges of that system, but the system that we're operating in is the system that should be perpetuated going into into the future. And it's worth keeping that in mind because practitioners of guerrilla history as a method,

and this can go to anybody who's listening to this show. anybody who is doing their own historic analysis, practitioners of guerrilla history are practicing a history that is explicitly aimed at toppling the system that we're operating within. And so when we're relying on records that are produced within the system with the goal of perpetuating the system, we have to keep in mind that these documents cannot be neutral and these documents have to be interpreted in a way that we understand that they're being produced in a way to perpetuate the system or to support the perpetuation of the system, even if they are critical documents. And I think Brandon in his appendix that Adnan had mentioned earlier that Brandon you sent to us, you do a really good job of showing that if there were documents that would be or if there are actions that would show the depravity of the system that were. operating within, those documents would never see the light of day. Because the people who are in

charge of overseeing what documents get seen or what documents are even produced, they of course have the same interest in perpetuating the system. And that has to necessitate the usage of alternative methods of analyzing events, analyzing things that we have to understand in a way that we know that those documents that would really shine the light, they never get produced in the first place. And even if there are documentation, they're not going to be released for us because the forces that be understand that those documents could be used in a way that would undermine the system that they are explicitly trying to perpetuate and continue. And so that appendix was really nice. And you know, you propose this method psychedelic remote viewing, which is a really,

you know, it's a fun term. But also I think it's a really important method. So just to add on to what have non said, it's important for us to keep in mind the goals of the people who are producing the records or not producing the records and what we have to do as people who are operating, want to operate outside that system and are directly opposed to the system that's producing these documents. Yeah, a lot of really great points that you make in there. And I think one that relates to both of your comments there is the idea of a limited hangout, like the idea that, you know, the first time I think the State Department published or released its official record of what happened in 1953. There's basically no evidence or maybe there's a little slight.

Yeah, maybe the CIA did something, but it's not in there. Then the historians get angry and say, no, you falsified the record. You have to include one or two documents and say, okay, maybe there was a role the CIA played there. And then, okay, we've told the story. And they keep doing these little sort of limited hangouts, these little like, you know, hold out a little piece of it so that you have the feeling like, okay, now we've sort of divulged everything. And it's like, no, the point that you're both making is the full story is not even in the records because it wasn't preserved in the first place, let alone what you choose to disclose to the public. Okay, so now you've, you've chosen to disclose something to the

public. And in that appendix and in the book itself, you know, the real sort of conceptual touchstone I kept coming back to as Michelle Rolf Trujillo's, you know, brilliant, silencing the past. And I think maybe the silencing the past piece will kind of help the get to what I was trying. It was kind of tongue in cheek, the psychedelic remote viewing concept. And what Trujillo says is, you know, when you think about how to analyze documents, you have to analyze on four levels all at once. You have to ask the question of who created the document and why. So whose perspective is being represented. And then there's a million different documents that are collected from, you know, Columbus's diary entries or whatnot.

But then who preserves that document and puts it in an archive and puts it in a file with a filing aid and a finding aid and a in a categorization. And then there's the question of, okay, well, who are the historians who pick up those documents and start to create narratives about them and tell stories about what happened in the past? And then the fourth and the ultimate level of power is, well, who are the image makers, the movie makers, the narrative makers? What are the meta-narratives, right, where we take all these sort of historical narratives that are produced by, you know, practicing historians and create some larger sense of meaning about what the, you know, in his case, he's talking about the meaning of 1492 or whatnot,

but, but, um, so how do we, how do we reverse process that, that, uh, how do we reverse engineer that process of, of, um, you know, silencing or, you know, uh, producing the historical record. So what do I mean by, uh, psychedelic remote viewing? You know, partly it's a, uh, I'm playing upon, you know, I'm using, there's a sort of, um, apocalypse now metaphor that I'm using, like the Colonel Kurtz, like using the methods of, you know, going so far into the methods of your enemy that you kind of see the world through their, their eyes. And I was trying to sort of make fun of the, the most extreme sort of CIA method. So I'm talking about like the Stargate program where apparently the Pentagon put all this money into like hiring people to, you know, stare at

goats and see if they can make their hearts stop or engage in remote viewing, put people in these, in these rooms and imagine, you know, where terrorists are hiding in the alleys of Somalia or something, and the sort of really out there type of stuff. And then they even have that major in the Marine Corps talking about using microdosing, using, you know, micro doses of LSD in order to better draw the connections between Saddam and Osama or whatever kind of causal and logical connections they're trying to draw using these, what they're calling performance enhancing drugs to, you know, increase your productivity in the hours with which you can review the documents and look at this newspaper clipping and that newspaper clipping and put it all together into a

seamless web, right? So I was kind of making fun of them for, you know, employing these kind of methods, but then saying, well, if it's, if it's good enough for the Marine Corps, then maybe I can employ those similar methods. Maybe I can sort of put myself in the, in the psychically occupy the paranoid mindscape, right? Like I can kind of put myself in the minds of a forestall or whoever it is and kind of imagine the world through their perspective. So how do you, you know, how do you do that? And most of the time when we hear historians talk, they say, well, I can't get in the

minds of my subject. I can't go to intentionality. I can't go to their, you know, I don't know. All I can do is analyze their actions and what they said and what they did. I can't get inside their mind. And I said, well, why you're not worth your salt as a historian if you can't inside the mind of your subjects, right? If you can't empathize or if you can't see the world through your historical subjects at standpoint, then what are you doing?

So I guess one way that I tried to do that is try to get inside the mind of my subjects was working through the like narratives of, you know, biographies, trying to get a sense of where people came from, how they evolved through the national security state, what postings they had, which embassy they were in at which time, and you start to sort of put together these chronologies and say, oh, okay, well, that's maybe how this person, you know, interpreted the events on the ground in Iraq in 1963 or something by trying to kind of, like I said, get inside the minds of my subjects and see the world through their standpoint, which means kind of taking my own subjectivity, my own historical interpretation, putting it in a box and saying,

I'll come back to that later. Let me just sort of view the world through the mind of this paranoid subject for the moment. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because, well, firstly, we will have to at some point come circle back to all of those crazy experimental approaches of the military. I definitely want to talk about that. But for the moment, let's go with this question that is really, you know, was something that I've thought a lot about and also reading your piece that really stimulated this kind of question here about the problem of intentions, right? Right. So, you know, you've just said that most historians do say, oh, I can't get, but that's also a bit of a bit of a dodge by some of them because sometimes they kind of do, even though they're not very explicitly acknowledging. There's a lot of assumptions that they do have to make in order to interpret tell the story. They make choices about what they're going to emphasize, how they're going to approach this. So, you know, there's a little bit more than just this. you know, perspective that we get from Ranka and everyone is John just about it and cynical, you know, about it and we've gone to post, you know, modern kind of approaches.

But nonetheless, historians still are quite wed to the idea that there's some sort of discipline, transparent kind of way we can use the evidence to get at something like how it actually was or at least do our best, even if they're less kind of confident about the truth of it. and they're willing to bracket, you know, kind of people's intentions and say that's, that's opaque to us, but nonetheless, we are going to say what factually happened and what we can talk about. But, you know, so my question would be here is, you know, is like, well, how much for dialectical materialists do the intentions matter if that's something that we want to kind of engage and investigate? And the reason why I'm thinking about this, This is, you know, a recent discussion that was had that are like so many discussions when talking about American Empire and other, you know, bad actors in the world and, you know, these kind of moral kind of discussions that are that are made. But one that happened that's relevant to, you know, a topic you work on, which is a discussion between Anderson Cooper and presidential candidate Cornell West,

interrogating him on his position, you know, looking for and encouraging peaceful diplomacy to resolve the Ukraine-Russia kind of situation. And, you know, he raised this kind of question about Putin, his intentions, understanding him as a historical actor, saying, well, he's a, you know, kind of terrible figure, a monstrous figure, kind of like we heard about Saddam. and, you know, look what he did in Grozny. Could you possibly expect, you know, there to be a chance to have good faith discussion or negotiations with somebody who did something like that, you know? Like, and Cornell West's response was like, you know, that's what states do. That's what empires do.

And we should know about that because look what we did in Afghanistan. Look what we did in Iraq. Look what we did in Libya. look what we're doing all over the world. And immediately Anderson Cooper had to say, you know, as if he was shocked and surprised, how could you compare what we did in Iraq with, you know, Grozny? And kind of floated this other sort of senses like, you know, Putin intended to go and kill all these people in Grozny and level a city and subject it to this extreme violence.

We didn't intend to do all of this killing, you know. And, you know, Cornell West's response was like, you know, half a million people. I mean, and if actually, it should really have been a million or, you know, some other estimates are ultimately the Iraq War killed two, two and a half million Iraqis, you know, with all the consequences over the 15, 20 years of it. But the point was is that he could not possibly see a comparison. And I agree, there is no comparison. You know, the Iraq was so much worse than what happened that it is ridiculous. to compare. However, this question of intention was so important to the exoneration of the imperial perspective. And so I wondered, you know, one analysis would be, well, look, the results are speak for

themselves, you know, from a materialist perspective, we don't care about the intentions. In the end, the devastation speaks for itself. And, you know, you judge and you hold accountable those who are acting with violence for the consequences of that violence. You know, so there's a few different levels of that in there. And I thought, you know, you work in this area. So what do you think about this whole question of intentions and trying to see the mind, the intentions, get into the mental scape of the imperial perspective or the statist perspective? How and why should that matter? How can, how does it maybe matter? You know, for a dialectical materialist analysis of it. Where do you come in on this? Yeah, that's a great question. Let me think about this. So I like, I think maybe not originally from Nome Chomsky or anything, but I'm sure, you know, basic, you know, approach to ethics, right? You know, intentionalism or consequentialism. Like is, is it more important that you have a pure intent or is it more important that you consider the likely

consequences of your actions? I think Chomsky was talking about the, you know, the context of George Bush and the Iraq War. Well, he didn't mean to mislead the people. His intentions were sincere, you know, Gertes says, you know, you don't deceive the world, you deceive yourself. So it's like, wait a minute. So who cares what George Bush thought he was doing? Because his false consciousness is not really like what matters here. The likely consequences of your actions are what's more important. So I think there's an important point there to say, on one level intentionality doesn't really matter. It's, you know, the the likely consequences of your decisions, your actions are what really matters. But I do think on another

level, intention does matter. Because in my book, what I tried to show was that, you know, what they tried to do was so much worse than what they actually did, right? That we can sometimes get so hung up on the evil that the United States did that we forget about the far more evil that they tried to do, that their intentions, right? What's the Latin term, the Latin term for like malintent, right? Evil intent. And you have this idea that this is real key to criminality is that when you have a, when you have a, you know, ill intent is the motivation, right? So I think that it's kind of getting at those ill intentions are, I mean, maybe it's case specific and you have to get into the particulars of it. But when you come to individual intentions and consciousness, I think it's important to know that sometimes people aren't fully aware or conscious of the kind of motivations and drivers for the decisions that they make.

And so it's really important to situate an individual, maybe that's the dialectical materialist point you're making. It's, it's important to put someone's intentions and consciousness within a kind of broader context and what that person's worldview is and what their intentions are are really only just part of the story. It might enrich the story to know where they're coming from and what they're trying to do and how they understand the world, but that's not the whole story. That's their little partial piece of it.

And we want to get a bigger part of it. And when it comes to that, you sort of Cornell CNN piece, right, like there's this weird act of psychological projection that goes on, you know, a great historian, Everandah Rahmian once wrote a review about the 1953 where you talked about the myth of benign intent, where you only assume other states are power motivated. They're always Machiavellian, you know, so you go through the record and you find all these instances of, you know, George Bush or Dick Cheney saying that Saddam Hussein is, is, is, is, is most. motivated by desire to control the oil. You know, bin Laden wants to control the oil. You know, everybody is motivated by the want to control the oil, but not us. We want nothing to do with the oil. So you always sort of project these kind of, you know, these kind of, you know,

base motives on others, but somehow preserve your own idea that Putin is, you know, trying to intentionally, you know, has this base motive, the sadistic motive to inflict pain and damage on others. but if that happens on the United States side, well, that was a unintended consequence or, you know, that wasn't the intention. So it's all, all kind of fraught, right? As far as, but it depends.

I would kind of come back to, depends on the particular situation, the particular historical actor, the particular decision and intentions, and maybe think about intentions in more specific. Yeah, well, yeah, I like very much that perspective that you know you also want to look at these you know intentions or trying to get into the mind of somebody a historical actor from the past insofar as that's possible but you know

the way you get into somebody's mental universe is because you have to understand their social universe and those kind of structural limits and possibilities that are framing, because, you know, I think this is something the Marx was very good on and really innovative on was thinking that ideas, you know, aren't themselves abstractly operating in history. It's that they emerge and become effective within the context of certain, you know, they're produced and have and circulate, you know, in certain contexts that are meaning. And I think it's similar to looking at the kind of figures that you're trying to understand and that you, you know, want to be more ambitious than the false humility of certain, you know, perhaps historians who want to say, oh, well, I can't understand, you know, the inner workings. In other words, I don't want to take on the responsibility of trying to really figure out what was going on and why I want to limit my analysis. You know, we need these techniques. But we're not. looking at them just as abstract things to understand the inner soul of somebody that's very

hard, you know, from a different perspective for its own sake, but it's part of this dialectical relationship between actors, people making their history, but not the conditions in which they make it. So you got to know, well, you know, why are they trying to make the history a certain way? You have to know those conditions and see that as a dialectical relationship. And I'm very interested in, you know, I work on a much more remote period. And I am very interested in, you know, the medieval, you know, world in trying to understand people from that time. And I think it does require a real act of imagination because, you know, if the past is a foreign country, you know, this is one that's around the other side of the globe. You know, it's very far in temporal and cultural sorts of terms.

And so you do have to challenge your kind of imagination in certain ways. ways. And unlike, or rather like the situation where you're working with classified documents, recently maybe declassified or hard to access or non-existing documents because they've been destroyed or were never produced in order to preserve powers operations, that when you're working with a remote period of the past, likewise, you don't have a lot of material to work with. And you have to kind of draw these inferences and use whatever is available and create. creative ways to get at what their meaning may be and be humble about it by saying, you know, we may not be able to know, but why not take a risk and propose what you can? And that's definitely

the case when you're working with people from the 12th and 13th century. And another kind of component that I'm reminded of in this context is what we started this conversation with about how records, documents are and archives are produced, you know, with, you know, under certain circumstances, they're not neutral documents. And this is even more the case, you might say, in an era where literacy is not widespread. The functions of a state are not the modern state, but they're just starting to learn how to keep records and documents. It's mostly the church that has the kind of monopoly on literacy and is serving the state sometimes, but also their own institution that has its own kind of logics and interests. And so you have this kind of

problem of, you know, how do you understand and study dissenters because they are characterized as heretics? The best archives that we sometimes have, you know, on people's religious viewpoints and dissident ideas come from, you know, interrogation under torture as a result of the inquisition, you know, like, so what does one do with these records that are produced from a brutal exercise of violent power? You know, we always hear this kind of, you know, Point that, you know, intelligence gained from torture can't be relied on, you know, and people, you know, will say anything. And yet the, you know, this doesn't prevent, you know, police powers, military powers, surveillance, units from always employing, you know, violent methods and mechanisms to produce knowledge that people like Michel Foucault have, you know, done some brilliant discursive analysis of, you know, about the relationship between torture and truth. that actually reminded me in a little way with this kind of counter reading that you're talking about with Michelle Rolf Trujot's perspective on kind of reading against the grain and analyzing how records come into being. What are the counter histories and the discourses that you have to, you know, kind of gain?

And also, you know, very famously, I think even, you know, work like Natalie Zeman Davis's fiction in the archives. You know, what produces these kinds of records and how you read against them? how you reverse engineer on these. So I wanted to kind of turn maybe more towards that now about the actual specifics of the methods of your psychedelic remote viewing. And also maybe now is also a good time to get back to talking about some of these zany experiments, but what we actually might take from them that were conducted by the military. I mentioned, you know, you know, inquisitorial proceeding. That's in some ways a little bit also like these attempts to use power to produce knowledge and truth that were deployed by, you know, violent

institutions like the state, like the military, like police powers as well. Actually, I want to sidetrack us for one second. And Brandon, you might be able to tie this back in regarding the remote psychic viewing and get to the question that Adnan had just proposed. but I want to push back on something that Adnan said slightly. I don't actually think you disagree with this Adnan. I just want to, the way that you framed that I want to push back a little bit on. So when you were talking about certain historians saying that they don't want to get into the minds of their subjects and that it's kind of like a faux modesty, that might be the case for some, but we have to look at this, I think, from more of a class conflict perspective.

So when we're looking at how when that argument is utilized, it's never utilized when we are demonizing figures that are operating outside of the system or in a countervailing system. And I'm just going to use an example that I've obviously been looking at a lot recently, which is Stalin, due to the Lucerto translation that we just did. how many historians that have written works on Stalin, of course, 99.9% of them being extremely negative portrayals of Stalin, how many of them have been afraid to get into the mind of Stalin and propose intentionality for certain things that have happened, regardless of whether documents were available on that certain topic? So just with the example, and of course, in the book that we translated, there's a million examples, but one that commonly comes up in popular discourse is the so-called Holodomor, the famine. And almost always, when we have historians that are talking about this period of time and the famine that took place in the Soviet Union, there is some sort of intentionality placed on the decision-making of Stalin to say Stalin intentionally was trying to starve Ukrainians specifically, which actually there's documents that go against that point,

which are laid out in various sources, including that book. But even if we look at the areas that are the hardest hit by that famine, it's not even the Ukrainian autonomous socialist republic. It was Kazakhstan was significantly harder hit than Ukraine. And certain policies, yes, impacted Ukraine more negatively than other regions of the Soviet Union. But there was also policies that were in place at the time that, actually favored Ukraine versus various other Soviet republics at the time. But despite that, despite there not being any available documentary evidence stating that

there was some sort of intention to starve Ukraine, that is always placed on Stalin, is that there was some intentionality. This is just one example. Of course, just think about any of the portrayals of Stalin that you've read, and you'll see intentionality placed on all of his decisions, regardless of whether there's actual documentary evidence of that, it taking, you know, being the intention or not. The reason I bring this up is because when we see historians saying that they don't want to get into the minds of people, it's always not getting into the minds of people with the

intention of opposing the system. So, of course, Stalin, and I'm just going to use this example again, but again, just fill it in with any person that's demonized by, you know, the imperial historiography. They are not afraid to get into the minds of people who are operating outside of the capitalist world system or are opposed to the capitalist world system. But when we're talking about somebody like George W. Bush, who of course was leading not only the leading country of the capitalist world system, but the leading imperialist power as well. We have historians who are afraid to get into his mind and talk about intentionality because talking about intentionality would require them to focus on the class. conflict and a class perspective of it, you know, when you're leading the United States and when you are working in service of empire, you are working for the preeminent role of the

United States in the world system, the subjugation of people abroad, and working in defense of a certain class within the United States and subjugating those abroad in service of that class within the United States. Like that is your project to get into the mind of the person at the head, so George W. Bush in the example that we were using, you would have to call into question the decisions that were being made from the class perspective, which is something that most historians do not like to do. They like to completely put the class perspective aside and ignore it. Only when it's somebody who themselves is operating outside of that dominant capitalist world system or is working against that capitalist world system.

system, are they willing to get into the minds to ascribe intentionality? And the intentionality is often ascribed without any actual documentary evidence and oftentimes with evidence to the contrary. So that's not to say that I think you disagree with that ad non, but I think it's important that we that we consider that when we hear people, you know, historians saying, I don't want to get into the mind of my subject. Why is that? And oftentimes it's because they don't want to take the class component into their analysis because their subject is operating in defense of a certain class and operating in the interests of that certain class. And by getting into the mind, they would have to examine that, you know, class dynamic.

And they don't want to do that. You know, most historians don't want to do that. Historians like you and Brandon do, but most historians don't. So, yeah, sorry to get a sidetracked a little bit. I just did want to add in that little bit on that point. Oh, I think that's very helpful points. Yeah. No, I appreciate that, Henry. Yeah, very insightful. But now I've kind of, I think I forgot what you posed a question before that adon. Oh, yeah, just, you know, maybe about this kind of problem of how to reverse engineer.

what is the actual kind of methods for kind of avoiding exactly what Henry was talking about, this kind of imperial sort of historiography, you know, what are some of the techniques we can think of for actually figuring out the value of, you know, these intentions and this perspective in psychedelic remote you know viewing yeah so kind of to henry's point that the term i was searching for a moment of mens rea right when you're knowingly doing something wrong um so i think henry's point is well taken that when you're adverse when you're thinking about your adversaries it's very easy to say oh well they have this very malevolent intent and they're they're motivated by all the wrong all the wrong reasons um but then when you're when you're talking about a subject that that you're

sympathetic towards talking about imperial historians or whatnot then and there's something that's maybe morally suspect or or morally questionable then you say well i can't really you know i can't really you know transgress and get inside their mind and know why they ordered this particular decision or that particular decision and and so um i think there's more i think to henry's point there's a much more um you know liberty taken in ascribing you know um malevolent intentions to to your enemies, whereas you'll cover for. You know, I'm just engaging with this book about the, you know, about the Iraq War. And it's all about George W. Bush's intentions and how we had the best, this Leffler book

confronting Saddam Hussein. And it's very much about, you know, the noble intentions of the Bush administration. Yeah, they made some mistakes along the way, but their intentions were good. And so it's very, you know, deeply committed and invested in this idea of, well, whatever, you know, hell may have come, at least the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the way, the way, one way I worded, it was, it was, like, reverse engineering the, uh, the pros of counterinsurgency, right? That these documents, and I'm using a lot of state department records, like, or at least in the book, you know, I used a lot of State Department records, but really what was useful to me and that was a kind of methodological coup

was that I got access to the British Petroleum Archives. And so that's a private, that's a private, private, you know, actor and was, so looking at what happened in their sort of day-to-day country file, which is basically just a newspaper keeping track of political events and translating what's going on in the Iraqi press and just sort of, you know, keeping track of which factions are up and which factions are down and which way the dynamics are going. That's all preserved in the, from the company's perspective. So I have access to the corporate perspective through the, through its company archives. I have, you know, through obviously mediated and imperfect, I have access to the State Department's perspective,

you know, the Iraqi perspective, the Iraqi nationalist perspective, not so much. Or at least you have to, you know, use different methods to get the, you know, there. So how to kind of get at what actually happened or what really happened. I think one of the things that Trujillo makes in that book is that every society, every culture has some, you know, felt need to distinguish between, you know, history and fiction, between things that really happened and things that are, you know, poetic or literary or mythical, you know, mythical truth versus sort of, you know, historical truth. So how do we get at, try to get at what happened, right? And I think there's a certain amount of modesty, epistemological modesty that might be called for.

I think at one point, not towards the end, but at some point I did a control find and look through my manuscript for the number of time that I said possibly, possibly, apparently, plausibly, you know, used all, you know, appears, seams, all of these kind of qualifiers to say, well, we don't really know what happened. And sometimes the sort of positivism, an empiricism that, oh, well, you know, we know what happened because it's in the documents. It's like, well, no, we kind of don't. And so let's have some modesty when we think about, well, this may be what happened. And this isn't 100% sure.

We're not 100% sure about any of this. You know, this is just, you know, one kind of venturing into the speculative realm, right? It's got to be more. And I think that actually connects to what you're talking about when you, the farther back you go in history and the fewer documents are available. the more inference you need and the more, you know, speculative nature because you're trying to piece together 1381 and you have this, you know, fragmentary record. And so you have to engage in a kind of more speculative. And I think in that medieval and ancient history, there's a little bit more modesty as far as saying, well, we don't really know exactly what happened. Maybe this happened.

And if this is the way it played out, then that's how we'd make sense of this particular pot chart. And that's how we'd make particular sense of, you know. And so having, being okay with there being some ambiguity and not necessarily having the whole story, whereas, you know, a lot of historians, especially university published historians, will really want to stay away from anything speculative or any, if you can't nail it down and say, this is exactly what happened in a kind of Ronkian sense of, you know, this is what really happened. Then you leave it out. And it's like, well, you know, no, I think it's okay to kind of, you know, spin out. well, one scenario, maybe it turned out this way or maybe it turned out this way or maybe it was something different and kind of, or maybe some combination of those three, but being open to the possibility that we don't have the whole story. We don't, and we can't get the whole story.

And so let's try to imagine what might make sense. Let me throw out. Oh, sorry, let me just throw out one inflammatory statement and then you can disagree with me as much as you want. But on that last point, and I feel free to say this. because I, unlike you two, I'm not a professional historian. But I would say that with regards to historians generally not being willing to do speculation or not being willing to make claims that there is not documentary evidence available for, again, they'll ascribe intentionality to people that they don't like. But for most claims, they won't ascribe, they won't make that speculation if there is not an. actual like physical document that they can cite for it. I would claim that this is in part because most historians that are operating within

the imperial core are not actually practicing history. They're practicing imperial stenography. This goes back to the earlier point that I had made and that you had been talking about brand and that when we're looking at what documents are available, we have to consider who makes these documents that we're trying to cite and who makes these documents available and who decides which documents that were created in the first place are made available. Without doing that speculation, all you're doing is repeating what, again, that imperial power

that you're living within has made available for you to analyze and then put out yourself. It's a very selective bit of information that they're putting out. can analyze it in various ways, but obviously that is not the entire story. And so if you're relying specifically and solely on what is released to you by, let's say, governmental sources or people who are operating on archives that are opened by the government within the Imperial Corps specifically, you're not actually doing historical analysis so much as analyzing what the Imperium is making available for you, which is for me a form of imperial stenography. You have to go beyond those sources in cases when you know that there is something that's

happening that is not documented. You can't stick only to what they're presenting with you without it just being stenography. So again, feel free to disagree with me. I'm not the historian here. I just wanted to make that inflammatory point to stimulate some discussion. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say that, well, let's take, for example, another great guest who we've had on multiple times, Dr. Gerald Horn. Okay. He's tilting against

the main presumptions and narratives in American history and has found, I think, in many ways that a narrow kind of approach to all the conventions of academic history are really a straight jacket for being able to actually engage with the real significance and importance of the histories he's interested in for contemporary liberation struggle, for really kind of understanding how today we need to deconstruct the whole project of white settler colonial, you know, society. And so, you know, what you're saying has the real truth there, you know, Henry. I'm what I would say is that also there. there are a lot of nuances in how a complex kind of professional organization supported by

large, you know, kind of important institutions in society that are engaged in the reproduction of society's elite, you know, which is one function of the university, you know, as well as, of course, maybe provide the certain kind of variety of skills that are needed in kind of capitalist consumer society's management, you know, so, you know, that's a whole complex process, and that means that there is quite a bit of latitude within the historical profession, as long as you adhere to certain of the conventions and constraints. And I don't think that those are terrible and bad. I mean, I think you want to have some sense of rigor. You don't want, you know, no evidence and pure kind of mythic ideology, which is in some sense what we get from like kind of

much of American self, you know, understanding is based on very slim kind of evidence from the earliest period as mythic, you know, creation. And, you know, a lot of great academic history has, say, in the U.S. history has undermined some of the kind of basic narratives. But it doesn't necessarily shift or change the sense of our past as profoundly as we might imagine. despite all of the evidence, despite of all the truth and the discussion, which is partly why somebody like Gerald Horn, you know, is trying to write from our approach and from a perspective that really challenges those conventions and those narratives so that it actually gets into the culture to shift our sense

of who we are and what we can recover from the past and what we can learn from the past. So I think there's a full range there that needs to be kind of dealt with at different levels You know, but one thing I wanted to reflect on from what, you know, you were just saying, Brandon as well, is it's almost as if why I like medieval history or, you know, kind of remote paths where you don't necessarily always have a lot of sources of information is that you can't convince yourself that the documents tell you everything. And that's one problem with modern history is that there's so much information that people think that they don't have to read these documents as critically as, you know, as, you know, one might if you had so few that you had to reconstruct from fragments is that you get the kind of sense of the story, the story being told through documents and even kind of complex counter histories. But reading the evidence, because there's so much evidence, the real issue is, you know, what do you leave out? what do you emphasize and so on because there's so much available for you to kind of look at and because it's closer to your own time and your own society when you're doing say 20th or early 21st century history you can kind of carry a lot of the presumptions that you as a historian living in your

reality in your social world maybe you were you know alive during these events you have your own consciousness and you have this kind of sense that it's all very similar And so you bring these presumptions that you understand what must have been going on and you can support it with some, you know, of the news reporting and journalistic accounts and, you know, some government documents and so on. But I would say that what you were suggesting in your piece, Brandon, is in some ways also a little bit more radical in the sense that I've also always felt we don't understand everything about our own social reality. So how could our sort of analysis, you know, that's limited? We are limited. Like you don't know everything. You have your own perspectives.

You're not, you know, you don't have the full experience that you could say and explain that this is the whole story ourselves about what's happening and transpiring. We're always trying to catch up with the moves and the changing, you know, context and conditions of events and all of that ourselves. how would we sort of fantasize, it seems to me, that our sources, you know, our figures, even if we had access to everything that they were, you know, aware of, that they fully understood everything about what's happening in their society. I mean, there's just too much of a kind of fantastical desire to believe that there's an omniscient truth that we have access to. The question is, is like, well, how do we get outside of just having a kind of subjective, epistemologically, you know, confused situation where we can't really make meaningful articulations from a kind of dialectically material, you know, perspective, but maybe one that is also enhanced by a sense of the dialectic between subjectivities and consciousness and, you know, material realities and social conditions that actually gives us. us, you know, access to resources for our struggles to liberate ourselves today. I think that's,

you know, kind of the key question. You're really getting at some kind of, I think, important suggestions here that maybe we could explore a little bit further as well about what, you know, what this kind of remote viewing or other forms. You know, one way it reminds me a little bit of something that was a fashion, you know, in the 50s, Eric Erickson writes, young man Luther, you know, like, and they start this trend that actually didn't, you know, didn't become that popular, but was kind of an interesting, you know, period, maybe in the 50s, where historians started adopting psychoanalytic, you know, theory, psychoanalysis, and sort of doing what they called psychohistory. And I had certain kinds of insight, but of course was also subject to quite a lot of the

distortions of Freudian psychoanalytic, you know, assumptions from his sort of theories and practice. But there's something to this sense that to make the history meaningful, to get insights that go beyond just what the fallible documentary or limited record may be able to expose and show is that you have to use some techniques for interpretation. And there's a lot of possibilities there. But, you know, maybe that's some stimulation to say that, you know, these things have been tried. They aren't always successful. But that doesn't itself mean that there isn't a problem that needs to be solved. And we need to look for creative, imaginative ways in which we can engage this history for our own purposes. Just quickly, I agree with everything you said

at non. And I want to make sure that it's clear. I wasn't saying that there should not be rigor. when we're doing history. And I'm also not saying that we shouldn't heavily base our analysis on document like actual documentary evidence. I was simply trying to, I know you understand this. I'm just clarifying this for anybody who's listening.

We should base our analysis on documentary evidence. I was simply making a provocative point that when people are afraid to make any speculation outside of evidence that is being presented to them, that that

that is what can lead many historians, most probably most historians within the imperial core to be imperial stenographers, not to say that we shouldn't have rigor and we shouldn't use sources, but simply that if you're going to, you know, use only the documents that are made evident to you by the imperial power. And then your analyses happen to align with, you know, perpetuating the system again, that that is the stenography. That's not history. That was the more or less the point that I was making just in a needlessly provocative way because, you know, that's the kind of person I am. Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness for that. Yeah. Maybe one thing I can add to that, too, is the idea that I think, you know, these hegemonic

discourses aren't always totally hegemonic, right? I think that's one of the points in Trio's silencing the past is that they're always kind of material traces of the past that are left behind that sort of evade or lie outside the scope of the hegemonic narrative. And so you find a pot chart or you find a, you know, a brick at the alamo or something. And it doesn't really fit. It's an anomaly. It doesn't really fit within the, you know, metanarratives that are dominant at the particular moment. And so I think it's important to kind of pay attention to those, you know, to Henry's point about rigor, about we want to have this based on some empirical base, some material, you know, reality. And so one thing that I found, I actually, you know, I wasn't really,

I did get my undergraduate degree in history, but I had, I was a community college transfer. And so I basically got to UC Santa Cruz and had a real sort of quick, quick tour through. And by the time I got to the UC, I really wasn't interested in following the sort of the chart of what you had to take to get your major. I kind of picked my classes based on like wandering through the bookstore at the beginning of the semester and saying, well, these books look good. I want to take this class. And so I sort of took everything. I ended up sort of gravitating a lot towards like world system sociology and some area studies and Latin American studies and was kind of all over. And the idea when I got to graduate school of sort of grounding myself in just what these documents said, it was the foreign relations files and just sort of like, I was like, this is crazy.

I could be reading, you know, high theory or social theory or, you know, I could, this idea that I was kind of looking at these quote unquote musty documents that are as we're all kind of saying here. you know, biased towards the imperial core and going, this is not entirely satisfying. And I kind of came across the idea that you can only say what you can find in the documents. And that was seeming like a limiting principle. But at a certain point, I found out that the other side of that coin is that you can say anything that you can find in the documents, right? that you can sort of turn those rules on their head and say, well, okay, well, if you're going to black out this paragraph, then I'm going to imagine what's in that paragraph. If you're

going to black out whose name is in this, then I'm going to imagine. I'm going to play, you know, madlibs here. I'm going to try to fill in the unknown portion as best I can. And to that sort of material traces of the past that sometimes contradict our own expectations, I wasn't to you're super excited about the historical methods when I first got to graduate school. I thought, you know, this is very limiting. You know, I can't, I can't get at what happened in 1963 because obviously the records don't exist because it would be evidence of the state's criminality. And so that's not going to, but the farther I got in the process, especially once I got to

the arc, you know, actual, you know, physical archives and digging in old boxes and finding documents that didn't really fit within the, within the paradigm or didn't really, um, uh, conform to my own expectations or even my own ideology and saying, oh, this is a puzzle. This doesn't, this piece, or a better metaphor, this piece doesn't seem to fit in the puzzle we have in front of us. Where does this piece fit? How do I make sense of it? And so I kind of became, I use this in some tongue and cheek, but I became kind of a born again historian, right? I really got into these documents. Wow, these documents can be really illuminating or they can they can sort of highlight perspectives that I didn't find in the secondary literature.

You didn't find in the, you know, available materials. And so I do want to stay grounded in the documents. But as that one issue that's coming up as I work on a new project about the Iraq War is that Matthew Connolly calls post-1973-75 the digital dark ages, right? because in 1973, they shifted from paper records to electronic communications, electronic record keeping, right? And that one, and they also, so that means you can generate a lot more paper, but you can also disappear a lot more paper. And so there's the 404 file error, not found, whole, you know, whole archives that have been deleted. And in his book, he goes through and he finds some rather, you know, suspect areas.

I think one is like Kissinger talking to the Syrians before the Syrians intervened in, Lebanon in the mid-70s. And in these critical three-month periods before I think he identified like three moments, the archive is just deleted. The file can't be found. You know, the files were corrupted. And so as the documents shift to electronic, it becomes easy to control find and find the word you're looking for.

But it also becomes easy to control alt-delete and delete the things you want to get rid of. And so normally in history, you have what's called the 30-year rule. After 30 years, the documents become available, right, with limitations and redactions and whatnot. But they're so far behind the 30-year rule that they're not even pretending that they're going to catch up. They've stopped. They said, well, we don't know. Once you start generating that volume of paper and it becomes so easy to overclassify that there's no system of making the documents available and coherent and intelligible.

And they've, you know, there have been, I think, 12 documents, official documents released on U.S. U.S. Iraq relations since 19, since the Carter administration, since 1977, there are only 12 documents available. The foreign relations, the Office of the Historian and the State Department is obligated by law to provide an official account of the decisions that the state made and its deliberative processes and it's evidence that it made. And, you know, like they're under a kind of rational bureaucratic obligation. know, to provide some account to the public about how they made their decisions. And there have been 12 documents. There have been like $7 trillion spent on the U.S. you know, occupy, you know, various military engagements in the region since the 70s. And there are 12 documents to explain that.

So one of the points you're making is you get into the modern era that we're overwhelmed with documents, right? But on the same time, the official records are not made. available. And so how important is that they're not making the official records available? Can we can we go around them? I do think it would be nice to have those official records, right? That you get a sense because the historical actors don't know what's going to happen next. And so by reading those documents in real time, you can see the way that they're, you know, apprehending the world and making their decisions and anticipating what's going to what's going to come. And so the fact

that those documents aren't available is interesting. Matthew Connelly in that book I keep referencing, he has a line in there, something about like a state that doesn't keep or maintain or make available the records of its conduct in the world is like, you know, a person in an advanced stage of senility where they don't remember like Alzheimer's, a state that has a kind of a kind of a social Alzheimer's disease where there's a kind of, and I think, you know, maybe as we start to talk about the Iraq war, you know, in the future, it's like I think we're in. that area where um or i don't know maybe we're in a whole new area where it doesn't matter whether the state makes its records available because we have wiki leaks or we have um i don't know what what material basis do we have to to make sense of the past i mean obviously we have the oral histories and the interviews and the self-serving press accounts and whatnot um but those internal deliberations those agency to agency communications what the cia is staying to the state department what the State Department is saying to the Treasury and

and they're back and forth, those can be really helpful as we think about how to construct the context in which, you know, events transpired. And so it's an interesting moment where so much of the record is not made available in recent years. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it'll be interesting how to overcome from your perspective in doing the historical accounting and analysis, how to overcome the known unknowns and the unknown knowns that Donald Rumsfeld in his great postmodern moment described in terms of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, that same, you know, that's a very interesting aspect of this is the metaphor between, you know, kind of military and intelligence and historical investigation and detection, you know, like there's a lot of, analogies to that process and, you know, raises the whole question about the ethics of historical, you know, investigation and how it's done. And, you know, are we sort of reproducing the kind of power perspective and the violence that's there, you know. But I think also this, this other, you know, kind of issue that you're pointing out here about classification is interesting and whether or not this digital,

era, both enables and occludes certain kind of knowledge and awareness of these things. It's why I think WikiLeaks was such an interesting and important phenomenon here, just because it was, you know, records being declassified, you know, per force being declassified by being leaked. That was embarrassing and humiliating. itself an interesting thing that that point about uh and i will definitely have to read this connolly book i haven't read it so that that sounds very intriguing about you know the way in which um the archival and documentary functions of a state are absolutely significant for its logics and almost kind of consciousness um um you know this is a very interesting

a kind of orientation here, I think, to think of. And it shows also how much is invested in control over records, knowledge. I mean, we know doing Middle Eastern history, like these states were very loath to kind of allow access to anything, you know. And just the idea of that there are records somewhere was, you know, kind of seen as like a power, keeping things secret, you know, was a way of asserting kind of power. and so forth. And these whole contestations about classification and over classification, transparency and then even the myth of what transparency really reveals are so interesting, you know, in this context. And it even comes to things that are in the news now about like, you know, why is there such a to-do about Trump and these, you know, kind of, you know, know, misplaced documents. It seems so trivial and from one perspective as clearly just a political

that, you know, fabricating some kind of political basis for, you know, undermining for political reasons, you know, Trump's presidency or ability to contest a future election and so on. But I would argue there's a lot more kind of at stake in these panics, you know, that the elite have about guarding and preserving the boundaries of the state's knowledge, who's in the know, who gets access, how this access should be policed, and dealt with us just absolutely fundamental to the constitution of power of a state. And I think that's what your reference to that, you know, Connolly book seems to suggest is, you know, if you think about it, what are the origins of these states? The states, you know, exist when you can keep records, particularly

initially really about like you know who should be paying you how much tax this is like the fundamental you know thing but then it expands to covering other areas or arena arenas of control control begins of course with where I can extract these resources but then you know as these systems develop become more sophisticated society becomes more sophisticated you know preserving records and knowledge about how to you know kind of keep track of people It's absolutely vital to the logics of states and statecraft. So if we're, you know, thinking about how do you, how do you kind of resist the state? How do you imagine, you know, forms of political relations and structures in the future, you know, that would be free, that would be equal?

You know, we're also going to have to think about, like, well, what does it mean to have privacy and records and, How do we know one another? What do we keep? What don't we about knowledge? I think that's going to be a big question. It's not just this kind of, I don't know, you know, question of the, it's not just a nerdy question, I guess I'm saying, to get back to.

Yeah. You know, Henry's point at the very beginning is like these methods are actually very important. Yeah, I actually took some, I took some solace or, It was actually kind of heartwarming to see those images of actual boxes in Trump's bathroom or wherever the hell they were. Like, if there still are paper records in boxes that are valuable enough that people might hoard them or me, you know, or kind of like, I thought we had kind of moved into a totally digital age where,

you know, I guess Obama looked at everything on an iPad, you know, didn't really use paper documents or, right? So I guess the idea that there are still records out there that, and who knows who knows what's in there, but that there are still documents that can be considered significant enough to try to withhold is interesting. And back to that kind of the Connolly one, he uses, he's actually kind of doing like a Weberian sociology of secrecy. He makes a few references to Weber talking about like the way that bureaucrats will try to preserve the bureaucrats and the know want to preserve their power because they have acts, you know, because the knowledge of the documents is. their source of power within their various, you know, bureaucratic situation. And in one place in there, I think it's a, it might be a Weber quote.

I forget who he's quoting, but he says, you know, secrecy is the first refuge of incompetence, right? It does multiple functions, but it also helps conceal the stupidity and, you know, in idiocy of the decisions that you make, you know, you try to maintain secrecy over all of that. So, yeah, a lot of interesting angles here as far as, you know, secrecy and record keeping and how we make sense of the past and where we're going with it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that we've got time for about two questions left. So I want to ask one, and then I'll let Adnan ask his last question.

So the question that I have is, you know, this program, guerrilla history, is aimed towards activists aimed for, for other guerrilla historians. What we want to do is we want to be able to use history to analyze the present, be able to utilize those lessons in order to build a better future. And while it may not be the sexiest thing in the world for most people to think about like historical methodology and historiography, these are, of course, very important things for us to consider when we are trying to analyze the past in order to, to take lessons as we move forward.

So my question, Brandon, is why is this so important? Like, how do we use, how do we think about our methods and methodology of analyzing history in a way that we can therefore use those lessons to build a better future, to build our movements to affect the kind of societal change that we know that we need to see? And that, you know, the majority of the listeners are going to be in the same kind of mind as to how we should be moving forward. You know, how are we utilizing these lessons?

What kind of methods do we have to use in order to analyze that properly to get the right lessons in order to then utilize them in the proper way to actually affect the change that we need? Well, I think it's a great question. And I think you're tossing around some possible titles for the episode and something about, you know, nerdy history methods or something. And it's like, my question is, is this only of interest to people who are actually trying to construct historical methods? Is this something that's of a broader interest? Maybe this is for the Patreon stream.

I don't know that this is a, you know, if people, what's the broader interest in how history is made and how we come to it, right? I don't know, but I do know that they are defunding universities, right? Because universities are, you know, the sites of critical consciousness. and people thinking in critical ways about the past and looking over what's going on on the basis of documents, and history departments are being systematically defunded because it's not serving that original function.

I think, you know, Adnan was just talking about, you know, how the origins of historical record keeping begins, and you're going back to, like, church records and tax records in the very early forms of it. But I think, you know, Wallerstein has talked a lot about, like, the development of the university system and how history branched off from philosophy and other sort of fields of knowledge. And the earliest sort of practice of what we would call modern professional history with the advent

to the early modern universities was, you know, four or five or maybe six European states keeping track of their wars with each other. Like that was the function of history, even like, you know, wrong. A lot of what he's doing is, you know, talking about the way that, you know, diplomatic records. And so historically, the university exists in theory to serve, you know, capital and empire and the state, but that's not really the way that it's worked out, right? You know, especially in the 1960s in the face of the anti-war, anti-Vietnam war efforts, you know, the universities become a key sort of locus and infrastructure of dissent. And as I think historians have elaborated increasingly critical consciousness and have kind of challenged the dominant narratives of the past and the dominant accounts of how the state acts and why it acts, that it can't be separated

from the idea why they want to kill universities in general and history departments in particular, right? You know, there are a lot of, you know, numbers out there about how, you know, university enrollment itself is down. And then the history majors and study of history, well, if it doesn't make dollars, then it doesn't make sense type of, type of logic that the, so I think, I think they're very smart to go after history, like they're doing in Florida right now. History is the most dangerous science, right? I mean, it really is, I think, it inculcates a kind of critical consciousness. And so, I'm kind of a historicist in the sense of I like to kind of go into the documents, go into the period, and just kind of think about it in its own

terms. And I think even if you can't draw a one-to-one connection, okay, well, you know, studying this particular peasant revolt in 1381 or, you know, this war in 1215 or whatnot, even if you can't draw a direct utilitarian connection between that and an actual real-life ongoing political, social struggle, even if it's not a one-to-one direct relation, I do think that it forms the zeitgeist or it's part of the larger kind of ambient atmosphere in which people are making sense. of their current realities. And so I think a lot of my approach, you know, even like in the last book I wrote, was kind of just to tell the story in its own terms and then sort of trust that, you know,

some insight or some something maybe invaluable that can be applied without necessarily doing all the legwork myself of saying, okay, well, this is how this. We want to nationalize Exxon Mobil and decommission it. Here's a blueprint. The Iraqis did it. We have to follow what they did. Like, maybe you can draw out those, those connections, but it's a, you know, this has come up in the, in the discourse within the discipline of presentism. How much do you allow your present concerns and your present, you know, needs to shape, you know, your agenda as you, as you do the historical work?

And I don't know if I have a great answer to that. You know, I'm in an act of faith all summer long, I've been throwing myself in, to this project about writing about the Iraq War of 2003 without any guarantee that anybody cares like a war 20 years ago. Like, have we moved on? Like, there were two weeks in 2023 when it was the 20-year anniversary. And so there was a round number to it. So suddenly it was topical and interesting.

And then the next scandal came. And then, you know, so we have this kind of like digital herd mentality where, you know, kind of attention shifts so rapidly that I don't know. I think you have to kind of do your historical work, put it out into the world and not necessarily know how it's going to affect or change the world, but maybe, you know, have some faith that it will, even if you can't identify specifically the causal mechanisms by which it does that. That's certainly fair enough, you know.

I mean, there isn't probably a very clear one-to-one correspondence. with a lot of the important work that we might do to give counter-narratives in history and actual particular struggle. Sometimes there is, and that's beautiful and wonderful when historical knowledge and information really informs people's decisions on how to approach struggle. But I would say just overall, in one of the motivating perspectives for guerrilla history and for encouraging guerrilla historians, you know, is going back to just the way in which historical consciousness is so important in being able to envision radical possibilities. I mean, the whole point is history could be otherwise, the future could be otherwise.

And, you know, we don't, you know, we take, we can take some kind of inspiration. from, you know, from previous experiments in radical equality and in resistance, in knowing that people have followed up certain path of struggle that we can be, you know, picking up on, learning from, and so on. So, I mean, I think it's very important, even if there isn't always a direct one-on-one correspondence. I mean, you know, Marx is, theory was a theory of history. And that's why it's such contested ground. That's why, you know, there's this panic around CRT is because they don't want certain narratives of American history to be undermined, questioned, to view and understand the past differently because it has direct

implications for the present and especially the future. What, you know, if we question some of those truths and verities and mythologies, then that means we're open to different radical possibilities for the future, for reorienting, you know, where power lies. And that's why it's so dangerous. And that's why historical consciousness is, I think, just so necessary for struggle, for liberation now. So, you know, there's a great Canadian historian. Ian McKay, he wrote this a very good book, I don't know, maybe a little bit over a decade ago now called Rebels, Reds, Radicals, Rethinking Canadian Left History, which may not sound like that's the most important kind of national historiography for the left to learn from. But he is a great historian

who found some really wonderful kind of approaches and stories there that certainly are important for Canadians. But, you know, even beyond, I think methodologically, he's He said something important about what he called reconnaissance history. That is history as a form of reconnaissance. Maybe you don't do all the academic history of just one precise kind of question in one particular context. But you go at it with some questions of how can we learn and understand, you know, something about the struggle for women's rights and, you know, and radical possibilities from our past so that we can. think about it for today. And so he proposed an approach to history that was like doing a field terrain, you know, kind of scan. You go in, you're looking for certain things. You know, you need the

evidence, but you're also going with targeted kind of questions and viewpoints of things that you need to know. And bring that back, you know, and make a report, you know, and that's kind of how I think, you know, guerrilla history, what it's trying to do is reconnaissance history, is, You know, we can't always answer every question, but we need to go back, look at the past and arm ourselves with what's valuable. And it's, again, this kind of military intelligence sort of analogy is that, you know, if you're working on, you know, combating the state or being successful in a struggle, you know, for social justice in a campaign, so on, there are certain kinds of information from history and analysis of history that you could, you know, use, perhaps, that might be valuable. And that's what we need to do is train guerrilla historians to find that what's valuable for them and to, you know, resist some of the narratives about history that are meant

actually to squelch even envisioning a different possibility. And we know another past is there because we haven't been told about that past and another future is possible. Yeah, being able to imagine a different future, I think that's a great point there and, you know, kind of a culminating point. One thing that came to mind as you're speaking there is that my wife teaches, I think history maybe is upstream of politics, is maybe one way to think about it, is that, you know, my wife teaches seventh and eighth grade history, world history, U.S. history, and she's been involved in kind of trying to develop some curriculum for the district. And I sort of hear from her the stories of the way. And I sort of hear from her the

stories of the way. I mean, they're not talking about anything that's specifically topical, because especially seventh, eighth grade, you're not getting anything that's recent history whatsoever. But just hearing the way that, you know, connections are made and light bulbs going on and the way that, you know, students studying history, remember they're talking about the Aztecs and the ballgame or whatnot, but just sort of like creating critical consciousness or just kind of creating, you know, historical subjects can imagine a different and better future. Like you're saying, it doesn't necessarily have the one-to-one correspondence to a particular. you know, ongoing political struggle. But it's about making or helping to form, you know,

well-rounded, you know, fully conscious historical subjects. And so whether it's the specific methods that professional historians are involved in. But, you know, those professional historians, they train the teachers and the teachers teach the students. And I think that just the study of history is maybe overlooked in the importance that it, we would, say citizenship training, but I think that's problematic because of the politics of citizen and who's a citizen in where I live in the Central Valley of California, you certainly can't or shouldn't assume everybody is a quote-unquote citizen of the United States, but more like world citizenship, right? This idea of being a active, the playwright August Wilson, you have to

know your history, then you can have a purposeful presence in the world, right? So even if it isn't like informing you on a particular, you know, historical struggle at the moment, It's just kind of like how you construct your worldview. And then once you have a worldview, a more full and complete worldview, then the particular pieces can find a place to fit within that. And so that's kind of what I think of what hopefully this kind of critical history can contribute. Well, I think that that's a great note to end on. And I know that we were joking that this was going to be called something like nerdy methods episode or something like that.

But I know I really enjoyed this episode. but I guess I'm just a nerd but I hope the listeners also enjoyed it and got something out of it. I think that it's a rather important topic even if it is rather nerdy in nature. So thanks a lot. Again, our guest was a Brandon Wolf Honeycutt,

who of course is the author of the paranoid style in American diplomacy. I highly recommend everybody to pick up that book and just a tease before I have you tell the listeners how they can find you, Brandon. We've already confirmed with you that we're going to be bringing you on again in the nearer future to talk,

talk about that period at the start of the Iraq war. So that will be more of a typical guerrilla history episode where we focus of a period of time in a region of the world and talk about, you know, the historical events and the things that were going on in that place at that time, the forces that were at play. So that will be happening soon. And I am really looking forward to that. So listeners, be prepared. Brandon is going to be back with us again very soon.

So Brandon, how can the listeners find you? online and keep up with your latest work uh well i did twitter we're still going to call up that whatever the childish billionaire that's in charge of things at the moment uh you can find my handled there i i'm not super active yeah i'm okay uh you can find me there um but uh mostly you just can have to wait it took me 20 years to write the first book so um who knows how long it'll take me to get the next one out. So you can find some snarky comments on Twitter here and there, I suppose. Otherwise, I should have this book. The next book is going to be called House of War, Oil, Arms, and the Bush dynasty in Iraq. So who knows how long that'll

take me to complete, but I am reading and writing away on that, and someday we'll be out there and I'm sure there will be a Twitter link to it. Yeah, absolutely. So we'll chat a little bit about the early stages of that project right now. And then we'll talk again when that book comes out. We'll certainly talk about the book itself when it's ready to go. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcast? Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan, A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N.

You can also listen to my other podcast on Middle East Islamic World Muslim diasporic topics called the Mudgellis, M-A-J-L-I-S. That's on all the usual platforms. And I'm starting to encourage people to look at my very inchoate embryonic website adnanhussein.org because I'm trying to start doing a little bit of potential writing there. and also running some online courses as a follow-up to a course I did last year, formation of a crusading society. One thing I very much would like to do, and I've been mentioning, is kind of guerrilla history, basic training.

So that does look at kind of sources, methods, approaches, different schools of history, and kind of give a bit broader background to the kinds of discussions that we were just enjoying. I certainly was enjoying today. and, you know, look for news about it there. And, you know, perhaps I'll be able to get some of our historical guests who take an interest in some of these subjects to come on for guest sessions or something in the future. So look for it at adnanhoussane.org. Absolutely. And, you know, regarding methods and sources and things like that, Adnan, I think you and I are going to be getting together very soon to talk about your field of study and the methods.

and sources that you use within that part of history for a Patreon episode and perhaps little series. So listeners, again, I'll read it. I'll tell you how you can find that on Patreon in just a second. So stay tuned for that. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-1995, the new translation of Stalin, history, and critique of a black legend by Domenico Lassorto, that's Salvatore Engel de Mauro and myself translated and edited is now available for pre-order. And actually, at the

time of recording, it's listed on Amazon as the number one bestseller in history and in political ideology, which is kind of weird considering it's only been available for like two days at this point. But maybe in the last two days, it's the number one pre-ordered book in the history and political ideology sections on Amazon. But in any case, get your pre-orders in. your libraries, the higher up the algorithm, we can move that thing. The higher the chances that that'll come up when people search for Stalin as opposed to things like, you know, the Epstein friend Montefiore or things like that. So, you know, give a hand.

Call your library. And you can find Guerrilla History on Patreon. Hear those Patreon bonus episodes and help support the show by going to patreon. dot com forward slash guerrilla history, gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up with the latest from all of the hosts and the things that we released from guerrilla history by going to Twitter or whatever it's called whenever this episode comes out by looking for at Gorilla underscore pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod.

So until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.