Guerrilla History - Sudan Today - The Sudanese Revolution & Its Psychic Aftermath w/ Mohamed Khougali & Ruehl Muller [Pt.2] (AR&D Ep. 16)

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

In this episode of our African Revolutions and Decolonization series, we are once again joined by Mohamed Khougali, author of Politically Unconscious: The Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution, and returning guest host Ruehl Muller, to continue our discussion of Sudan's history, its revolution, and today we focus on what is happening today in Sudan.  An extremely important episode, be sure to listen and share!  Also, if you have not already listened to part 1 of this conversation, Sudan's History Through Independence & the Destruction of the Sudanese Left, be sure to do so before listening to this episode. Also, referenced in this episode are three older episodes we also recommend checking out, Jose Maria Sison - In Conversation with Comrade Joma, Migration as Economic Imperialism w/ Immanuel Ness, and Burma's History & Rohingya Tragedy w/ Carlos Sardiña Galache. Mohamed Khougali is a Sudanese socialist who was part of the Sudanese revolution of 2018-19. He is currently residing in Germany where he and his wife founded the Black Radicals, an anti-racist group informed by the Black Radical Tradition. He also continues his radical psychological practice, where you can reach him (notatherapist.de).  Also be sure to follow his instagram, Black Radicals!  Ruehl Muller is senior lecturer/associate professor at the Institute of Creativity and Innovation at Xiamen University in China, and the editor of the fantastic Building a People's Art: Selected Works of Trường Chinh and Tố Hữu (buy a physical copy or download the free PDF from Iskra Books). Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember Dan Ben-Brew in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, names to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki.

Unfortunately not joined by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada today. Adnan is still on the road, but hoping that he will be back for the next conversation. In any case, we have a very interesting episode and a continuation of one of the most recent episodes of guerrilla history for you today with two returning guests. But before I introduce what the topic is and who the guest and guest host are, I'd like to remind you listeners that the show is entirely listener supported and listeners. funded. We don't do any advertisements or take any money from other investors other than our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. So if you

appreciate episodes like this, you can support us there and allow us to pay our platform fees so that we can keep putting out episodes for you. With that being said, as I mentioned, we have a continuation of our previous discussion with a returning guest and guest host, that previous discussion that I'm alluding to, and if you haven't already heard it, I recommend going back and listening to that first. It's titled Sudan's History Through Independence and the Destruction of the Sudanese Left with our guest today, Muhammad Hujili. I'm going to say it the way that we discussed last time, Muhammad. Muhammad, it's nice to have you back on the show. You are, of course, just to remind the

listener's author of Politically Unconscious, the psychic aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution How are you doing today? I'm doing very good, and I'm excited to be here and continue this important conversation. Thank you for having us. Yeah, absolutely. It was a terrific conversation last time. It was just shy of three hours, and we didn't even get halfway through the questions that I had prepared for that conversation. So we'll see how long we go today.

But we are also... Go ahead, Muhammad. No, I was just going to say, what the listeners don't know is before those three hours, there was like an hour perhaps or our conversation, like beyond the podcast episode as well. So four hours in total. Yeah. And what the listeners also don't know is that we've already been talking for an hour in 10 minutes before we hit record on this conversation.

So we'll see how long we can go before probably my guest host falls asleep because he's a few hours ahead of me. Ruhl Mueller, senior lecturer and associate professor at the Institute of Creativity. and innovation at Shaman University in China, editor of Building of People's Arts, selected works of Tron Chin and Tu Hu. Ruel, it's nice to have you back on the show. How are you doing today?

Always good to be here. Like you say, I'm trying to stay awake, not just because of the time difference, because like you've said, we basically had a whole podcast even before this one's even begun. So let's see if I have anything left to say after this. Well, in any case,

it'll be nice to see your, a sleeping figure in the background, if nothing else. So with that being said, as I mentioned, our previous discussion took us through Sudanese history through the period of independence and also talked about the destruction of the Sudanese left in that post-colonial space. But there is so much more to talk about just to lay out what we're hoping to get through in this episode, listeners. we're hoping to get through post-colonial, post-independence Sudanese history,

talking about what is happening in Sudan today, which obviously is getting into the news a bit, though not nearly as much as it should, which of course is what we're trying to rectify, at least in part here today. And then also talking about questions of psychotherapy in the context of Sudan. And I'm thinking we're going to end on a little discussion of editorial work and, you know, if you have projects similar to this, what you can do about that.

But Muhammad, I'm going to start it with you. As I mentioned, the previous conversation, we talked about Sudanese history through independence, and then we talked about the left specifically and what happened to the left and Sudan post-independence. But can you take us more generally outside just the confines of the left and Sudan in that immediate post-independent space. You talked last time about, you know, some coups that were happening and strong man rule. What was the political trajectory of the country like in that post-independent space? And what would you say are the key turning points within that

kind of early to mid post-independence space that set in motion the, the, the a trajectory that led to where we are today? Great question. I think this is the question that I ultimately try to answer in the book through the short history that I provide. Last time we left off after the destruction of the left with Jeffield and Nemei. So just a brief recap for people who haven't seen the last episode. After independence, basically, the Communist Party of Sudan was successful.

by not making, by not colluding, let's say, or like not being in coalition with bourgeois or mainstream political parties or sectarian parties that also wanted independence. They said that if our sole focus is independence, then we're going to neglect other things such as like being within the working class, feminist liberation movements, peasantry movements, student movements, and so on and so forth. So they sort of broke off with one of the major sort of parties that was calling for independence and focused on establishing themselves. This was very good and it paid dividends because immediately after independence,

while they didn't play a major role. And even not only did they play a major role, immediately after independence, there was a liberal and sort of conservative party coalition that was. that was later co-opted with a coup by Abu. You can hear more by the details in the first episode. And this coup, this Abu dictatorship, basically, it made sure to criminalize the Communist Party of Sudan. So there were clandestine activities by the communists.

And, you know, they continued and the strategy of being with the working class and so on and so forth and not sort of engaging with, you know, what phenomenon, would call basically the post-colonial nationalist or elites of the bourgeoisie class. This paid dividends because, you know, Abu the dictatorship was overthrown in the 60s, and this was a great moment for the left because in the mid-60s. This was a great moment for the left because actually the communist and the Communist Party leadership and the Communist Party members, they played a significant role in the outstanding. of that first dictatorship period of Sudan, the dictatorship of Abu.

And they weren't successful, however, in controlling or, like, taken hold of the transition period to democracy, because those same sort of bourgeois elites or, you know, the sectarian elites or whatever you want to call them, basically mobilized their militias to, you know, destroy the transitional government, which was. were, you know, included many communists and rearranged it to, you know, make sure that the Communist or the Communist Party was not in that, you know, in that, they didn't have like high representation during the inter-transitional period. I replaced it with their own people.

The success of the Communist Party was after that when elections did take place, they found that in places where they did run, they got something up to like 20% of the votes, which is if you can imagine, imagine in the deck for a decade, you've basically had to work on the ground. Your activities were made legal, you know, the mainstream sort of political classes. They don't like you didn't engage with them. They didn't engage with you. There was of course animosity. But still you were in the working classes and you still, after being criminalized for a decade, you're able to reach 20%. That's quite an impressive feat. So that's where I stop off last time. And then to ask you a question, Henry, you know, about the, what happened

afterwards and the important turning points in Sudanese history that led to this moment, I trace this basically to 1973. I think many people, when they talk about the history of Sudan and how it led to the common moment or significant moments in Sudanese history, they trace it in different areas. But for me personally, I think this is one of the most, I think for me to understand what's going on today, or to understand what was going on during the revolution as well, 1973 was a very important turning point. After the relative success of the Communist Party, it didn't gain office, of course, it didn't hold office, but the people that did hold office were these sort of mainstream elite parties. The problem was,

Since the 1960s to the late 1960s, the mid to the mid-1960s, since the mid-1960s to the late-1960s, these mainstream parties sort of could not really manage Sudan in any proper way. And there's a very schizophrenic sort of moving like ministers from one place. The inflation rose really rapidly and, you know, like a lot of turmoil. well. In 1969, there was a coup, and I think this is the power we talked about last time, by a guy called Jaffer and Nemeari. Now, Jaffer and Numeri was sympathetic towards the, there was a complicated relationship that you can visit, that you can visit in the previous

episode between him and the left. But basically, Jaffer and Nemeari was in power since 1969 to 1985. This is important to remember. For our purposes, the reason why I think said during his reign and during his sort of dictatorship, 1970, 1973 was the year that, you know, there was the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War,

which is basically the Israeli army or the Zionist entity, devastating the Arab states. And so what we see when, like, you know, mainstream history talks about, like, how the Arab states, you know,

reflected or responded to this by, like, having like boycotts or like by divesting from like western nations and so on and so forth. But what we're, what we, what we don't see is like where they have invested, where they've sort of funneled in the money to. And here Sudan was integral. And so, you know, for the Arab states, after the devastation of this war, they're like, okay, we can't trust the West or we can't trust, you know, these, these global minority countries. We're going to try to create, to sustain ourselves. We're going to try to create a breadbasket. This breadbasket, this breadbasket was Sudan. Now,

shed lots of money was sort of invested in Sudan, billions of dollars in that time's money. So, you know, quite significant sort of money was coming into Sudan. Now, you can say that this is, for example,

is something positive, you know, money flown into like a country that's just, you know, being colonized, you know, they can sort of arrange their affairs, they can invest in certain things. But the problem is when you have the policy of creating, you know, basic foodstuffs and like cash crops as a sort of industrial model or like I call it industrialization through financialization, what you do is you

don't really, you know, complicate the production process. So you don't build your own factories, you don't sort of upskill your own workers, you don't try to have like a strong manufacturing base and so on and so forth. What you do essentially is try to enclose huge swathes of land to have like, you know, to produce one kind of crop. These swathes of, these huge swathes of land, basically, you need to kick out those people who used to farm there. But not only that, you don't industrialize necessarily, but you bring in like this big

sort of technologies to this land in all the first. for it to, in order for you to basically farm and excavate, so farm and harvest and and so on and so forth. And so what this is basically what this investment, these billions of dollars did. And to understand it, why this was important for the history in the book, is because in order for Numeri, the dictatorship at the time, to facilitate this, he basically continued what the British or what the colonialists sort of started

which is capitalist property relations he would go to like these farmers who have been living in this land for generations whose you know understanding of property and property ownership of this land was different than what Numari sort of had in mind

so Numari would come in and be like okay show us your deeds and obviously a lot of farmers they wouldn't necessarily have deeds and their ownership to land was not as stuck. You know what I mean? And sometimes ownership of land could be, for example, I don't know, this person doesn't have a son or like it'll be distributed based on like the social relations, what I'm

saying. So for example, if this person has many kin or a lot of sons or a lot of the, I don't know, children or cousins or uncles or whatever, they might be like allocated to the bigger farm or like they might negotiate with other people for bigger farms and vice versa, if not. And these kinds of things, you know, But it was more dynamic. It was more sort of, social relations did a big role in like establishing ownership.

What Nemer did was basically saying that, no, we need a deed to your land. So you need to show us what's going on. How should we, you know, how do we know this is yours? And, you know, acclaim or acclaim to this land, obviously the farmers didn't have it. And so en masse, they were expelled from the areas of which they used to sort of farm. when they were expelled, it wasn't just enough. The expulsion wasn't just enough. But like the farming itself required the destruction of the topsoil

with like these big machines that they brought in. And, you know, when you destroy the topsoil, so for the farmers who didn't have as much capital to bring in these technologies, they couldn't really, you know, they couldn't find subsistence, basically. They couldn't like farm the land as they did before. And so, you know, and there's a certain, you know, for farmers, for example, it was much cheaper for them to destroy a plot of land,

like a huge plot of land, and move on to the next one and destroy it and so on and so forth. It was like the cannibalization of land itself, you know, through this accumulation of like wealth and circuits of accumulation led, leading to the Gulf countries who wanted to create a bad basket. And I think the reason why I started,

I'm just one last time, but the reason why I started here is, you know, during the revolution and after the revolution, specifically in 2003, during the civil when the civil war started, there was a lot of talk

about, like, you know, the UAE playing like a huge role in what's going on in Sudan. And I wanted to understand how far back does this go?

It just happened in 2023. Did it happen like during the revolution? Was it like in the past decade or so? But like when you look at it from this angle

and, you know, the development of, you know, the industrialization through financialization of Sudan, you see that even the emergence

of the, a capitalist class under Numeri happened with the circuits of accumulation linking it to basically the Gulf countries. So like this link goes much further back than, you know, 20, 23 with the way the UAE, but you know, with the Gulf countries after the Yom Kippur war. One of the things that you alluded to was Numeri's relationship with the left. And the word you used here was complicated. And you did talk more about it in the first episode. So I don't want to completely retread to that old. ground since you did cover it.

But after we had our discussion, a couple of days later, actually, randomly this analogy hit me or a comparative analysis of a different, different continent, different situation. But it's from something that I had read about back in 2020 because it was one of the first guerrilla history episodes. I think it was episode three or four of the series and of the show and listening. that have been listening since then we'll know we have like 360 episodes or something like that. So we're talking a long time ago. But before I explain what this random thought that just struck me while I was walking to work one day was,

I like you just briefly, and again, the longer story in episode one of this conversation listeners, can you remind the listeners of the way that Numeri rhetorically described? his politics and the way that he oriented himself and the actions that he took vis-a-vis the communists in the country. Yeah, for sure. I mean, Numeri rhetorically described himself as a socialist as, you know, belonging to the same tradition as Jamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and this pan-Arab socialist sort of revival, which was also not just in Egypt, was in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq.

and across the West Asia and North Africa. The complicated relationship to go through it briefly was when he first sort of, when he took power through a military coup, he didn't view the communist as his enemies. And he basically abolished or sort of tried to abolish all political parties, not abolished them, but like made them, you know, criminalized them basically. But he did allow the communist to work. You know, like it was unofficial work and, you know,

they didn't have as much repression, but there was much more leeway for the Communist Party of Sudan than other parties. Now, for the Communist Party of Sudan, like I said, I mean, you can like that talk about it in the first episode, but basically there was three factions. There was one faction that completely, which Abdul Khalik Mahjou, you know, someone that, you know, is an inspiration for me personally. Abdul Khalik Mahjou basically came out and said, you know, we can't work with this because this is dictatorship and, you know, we need to stick to our principles. It's supposed to be ruled by the majority, not all about the minority, you know, and stuff like this. Then there was another faction that was like, well, actually, you know, expediency, right, like this person, you know,

he's in office now, we should be working with them so that we can achieve our socialist goals and so on and so forth. And these two factions clashed, creating one third faction, which, you know, ultimately sort of was fed up with this sort of, this clash, would suggest, you know what? We need to even overthrow Numeri himself and create. our own and then from there we can we can we can we can negotiate now the first faction of the Khaliq Mahjub's faction was categorically against us you know but you know there was discussions around it but he was categorically against us the Communist Party of Sudan did not agree you know this is like a complicated part of

Sudanese history if some people say that you know it was green led by the Communist Party some people say it doesn't but I'm from the school similar with others Tarah Ismail as well may he rest in peace who say that it was in the green part didn't green light anything but nonetheless there was a coup by the

communist to overthrow a Numeri that was very short-lived but yeah and then Numeri took over afterwards and then after this coup basically when Numeri took over it the coup was foiled by Egyptian and Libyan forces with the help of some say Western

intelligence to bring down the airplane that was taking the the two communist co-conspirators of the coup over over Libya but after the coup was foiled a numeri went on a mad one and started you know kidding

decapitating and otherwise we're pressing the left and this was basically the the I think people agree and generally historians agree this was you know the the destruction of the left in Sudan at the revival of which what were yet to see.

Yeah. So just to summarize and you'll see why I had this random thought come into my head then. Numeri was a dictator that came up through a coup. He was a military guy, claimed that he was a socialist, had some relations with the communists, although not working relations, but some relations with the communists. And then after some events, you know, killed most of them. This reminds me very much of Burma. And the episode of guerrilla history, again, listeners, it's like episode three or four of

guerrilla history back from either 2020 or early 2021. We had Carlos Sardinia Galache to talk about his book, The Burmese Labyrinth. And eventually, I'll probably have to remaster that episode and put it back out, try to fix the audio on it because we're a little bit more advanced now than we were back then. In any case, what happened is that after Burma's colonial period, there was an election that brought in a civilian government. And this civilian government was comprised of a broad swath of left-wing parties within the country, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League. And they were broadly supported. As I said, they won popular elections.

and then all of a sudden there was a military coup. And the Tatmadad, the Burmese military, Kamsun, gets rid of the leaders that were elected and runs as a military dictatorship for the next 26 years, 25 years. I don't remember exactly. It's something like that. But what was the rhetoric that they used at that time? It wasn't, you know, we're this strong military dictatorship.

They called it the Burmese way to socialism. And they said, that their program was a socialist program. But at the same time, they completely repressed the communists within the country, to the extent where the communist movement in the country was basically destroyed over the course of the next 25 years. So again, here we have a military dictatorship that rhetorically says it's a socialist-oriented military dictatorship, although they didn't call themselves a military dictatorship, but very obviously was, rhetorically running as socialists,

not really challenging these sorts of property relations and the economic structures of the country. And again, listeners can go back and listen to that episode. I hopefully will remember that I should update the audio and put it back out on the feed so it'll be at the top of the feed instead of at the very bottom of it. But you can listen to Carlos Serdini Galachi talk about the way that the Tatmadah, the military dictatorship, actually ran the country in that time.

And also talk about how they oriented themselves to the communists who were very popular in Burm at the time, because the communists were the ones who were fighting in the, you know, first in the anti-Japanese resistance during World War II. And then in the anti-colonial resistance after World War II up through independence. And those were the same sorts of people. Maybe not in all cases the exact same people, but the same sorts of people. but the same sorts of people in the parties that were associated with them that were present within the civilian government that was overthrown by the quote-unquote socialist military dictatorship. So obviously the context is quite different and it's not exactly the same as in the case of Sudan. But, you know, that just struck me that we have this rhetorical socialist military dictatorship that came up through a coup that, you know, overthrew a government.

one of the contexts is that the government that preceded the coup was absolutely different in the case of Burma and in the case of Sudan, as we discussed in your previous answer, Muhammad, as well as in the previous episode. But the way that these socialist military dictatorships organized and oriented themselves to the communist movements within the country and the result for the communist movement within the two countries, somewhat similar. And that's why it just, like I said, randomly struck me while I was walking to work one day. So one of the things also that was happening in Sudan at this time was trying to deal with kind of regional questions. And we're talking not only in the period of Numeri, but also in the dictatorship that preceded him. They were dealing with these, again, regional questions within Sudan. So the southern question of Sudan was already being looked at, and I'll have you described, of how these two periods were looking at the southern question within Sudan.

But then also the West began to be an interesting point as well. And again, I'll have you discuss that. But these two situations that were being, again, quote unquote, looked at, and I'll have you talk about how the South and the West were being looked at in different ways. those actions at that time develop and continue through all the way to the present. So if you can talk a little bit about those regional questions within Sudan and just a reminder of listeners that Sudan is even today after the 2011, a separation of South Sudan, independence of South Sudan and Sudan, even today's Sudan is a massive country.

And before South Sudan's independence, Sudan, rather, was an absolutely massive country. which we cover in the previous episode as well. But can you talk about those regional questions that were being looked at in these two periods, Muhammad? Absolutely, absolutely. I think to understand the regional questions, we need to understand how central role, racism and race plays when it comes to capitalist property relations.

I think, you know, people who understand this history would understand that they would be familiar with, you know, capitalist property relations, when it was implemented, for example, whether it's early days in Ireland and in the Americas or in colonial times in Sudan and elsewhere, race played a significant role in understanding how to develop these lands. You know what I mean?

It can be straightforwardly in a sense that, you know, not just the deeds belong, you know, give us the deeds, but choosing which populations can develop land more efficiently. this was, you know, purely a racialized, this was a racialized category, you know, or seen through a racialized category. In Numari Sudan, it wasn't, it wasn't, it was the same case. It wasn't too dissimilar, right? So, for example, the places where we talk that were sort of these big,

ways of land sort of were enclosed and basically stolen, there were places that have been harvested and has been farmed for generations, right? Naturally, right? I mean, human beings are a migratory species. And so, you know, you migrate to the places in which, you know, you can cultivate and you can create sort of social structures that sustain life and so on and so forth. And like there's an ecosystem that has been building for basically centuries, right, with the complicated social relations on top.

And now, you know, when someone like a Nemer comes and you want to like, you know, a let's say, I don't know, lemons or I don't know, wheat or whatever it is, you're going to go to the place where basically it has become most opportune for you to, you know, produce wheat in these areas. Obviously, areas that are populated, it might not be as urbanized or might not be as populated as like, you know, sort of urban centers and stuff like this. But there are still people who've, you know, basically farmed the land for many generations. These areas, basically, you know, when you see it, it is outside of the capital of Khartoum, mostly, and it's in areas where the people of those areas have, for the most, for the majority

of the time, are increasingly become racialized. There's a racial category, and identity, the racial identity sort of becomes cemented as an ideological justification to basically kick them off the land. You know, there's, you know, the history of this is, it might be a little bit complicated. But for example, one of the things that we should understand is Numeri was the first person to start something called Al-Kashna. I talk about this briefly in the book. Al-Kashya basically means that the armed forces would come, go around these urban centers like Khartoum, and literally go into like neighborhoods of like

West Sudanese people and South Sudanese people, take them, put them in like the backs of like the vans and the backs of like pickup trucks and literally dump them outside of Sudan. Right? And so like this racialized process is on top of like the land dispossession. The land dispossession Obviously, the one we're talking about,

we have to understand it within that particular history. South Sudan, like we talked about in the previous episode, had already been this, you know, had like a, was a two-tiered, was run through a two-tiered system when British colonialism was there. It was deeply sort of, there was major disparities. The main ones that you can see, for example, maybe in education, but even in like, not just South Sudan, but even West Sudan, By the time the British had left, West Sudan had something like one maternal ward for, you know, a huge population.

And I have the, I have the figures in the book, but something like for 300,000 students, it had like one school or like two schools. Like it was very, very, like they did not put any, like, social reproductive infrastructures or like schools or, I don't know, maternal clinics or something. they didn't invest in it as much as, you know, the north. And so the development of the north was much more rapid and obviously the centralization of power being in like the north, you know, meant that they sort of accelerated their, not just modernization or Iran, you would see it, but they also accelerated their accumulation of wealth in northern Sudan.

As I mentioned in the previous episode, every single government of Sudan had to tackle with the question of South Sudan and West Sudan. Now, when Numeri sort of, you know, put forth his industrial policy, his industrialization through financialization, which was basically creating a new class of Sudanese people, one along, you know, people who were importing these franchise technologies like, I don't know, caterpillars and stuff like caterpillar and stuff like this, And those who basically took the raw material and traded it abroad.

These are the two types of capitalists that he's created. What it means is there is no sort of prospects for the working classes, the agrarian classes. So now is mostly an agrarian country. So the people who were previously relied on their agriculture and their farming basically were dispossessed. After they were dispossessed because there was no sorts of programs of like upskilling and industrializing because industrializing happened through financialization. this meant that these people had to wander off into like, you know, urban centers.

And naturally, right, I mean, like, for example, you know, this is, you know, in capitalism, this is a story as like, as old as capitalism, basically, where you might want to send your oldest son or, you know, your children or whatever to urban centers for them to find jobs. And then, you know, they will send back money. Like, till this day we have it. Like, people go to, like, I don't know, the Gulf countries, to make some money and then send it back to people in the global majority.

And so that's the story of Sudan, basically, when they were dispossessed. They had to go to urban centers like Khartoum. The problem is of Khartoum, they didn't find any work. They didn't find any job. And these are people who were increasingly with, like, them not finding, like, jobs and work. And being domestic workers, the only form of this informal sort of domestic industry, the reason why I say is informal is because you don't get a contract. when you're a domestic or when you work in like these sort of precarious jobs

because they're not set by a contract and because you're dependent on your boss or you're dependent on, you know, the person who employs you to send money back to your family, you're in a very vulnerable position. And you find people during forced, not doing, but forced and oppressed in, forced to do things of our, you know, a beyond the remit of their agreed, you know, verbal contract or whatever.

But very, very sort of abusive practices, sort of follow suit. Beyond this, the racialization becomes much stronger, much, much, much, much stronger. And the people who are most dispossessed and the people who are, you know, feel this acutely, like I said, because of the colonial history, are people from South Sudan and West Sudan, right? Numeri deals with these populations, like I said, by basically, kicking them out of these urban centers or the urban center of Kharton. But it wasn't just Numeri. This practice was continued.

Like I said, these things have to happen in tandem with the intensification of racialization. And so we see this sort of practice happening, and, you know, after Numeri, until Numeri ends office at, or he's kicked out or he's overthrown in 1985. And in 1985, there's another replay of it. Sudan, which is basically the same mainstream elites take hold. They gain, they won democratically. And this is the third sort of democratic period of Scylini's history. Basically, they, you know, they're unable to fix the problems of society at that time. And in 19, almost like

clockwork, similar history. In 19. 189, almost 20 years to the 30 years. But since like 1960, 1960 and then 1989, 20 years, the exact same thing happens. Another coup, and this time is Omar al-Bashir, which is the, and then he gets ousted by us in 2019, basically. Yeah, and we'll talk about that in just a second. And I want to bring up one other episode that we've done in the past and connects with something that you mentioned. And I think it'll be useful for the listeners to listen to as well.

About two and a half years ago, we had our relatively frequent guests. Although he hasn't been on the show in a while, I'll have to get Manny back on. We have our friend Emmanuel Ness, Manny Ness, came on two and a half years ago to talk about his book, Migration as Economic Imperialism, how international labor mobility undermines economic development in poor countries. You were talking about remittances that were being sent back when Sudanese people would go to work in the Gulf countries and, you know, send some money back home. We have an episode, again, about two and a half years ago, but if you just Google the name of the episode, and I'll try to remember to put it in the show notes, but I'll probably forget listeners,

but the name of the episode is migration is economic imperialism with Emmanuel Ness. I highly recommend listening to that episode. It's about two hours long. And I also highly recommend checking out that book because Manny's book is really terrific. But with that out of the way then, you do talk about the two successive coups that happened in the 1980s. But these coups don't come out of nowhere. And as you had alluded to just before, the economic situation was deteriorating towards the end of Numeri's time. And a lot of this is connected also with this. fact that you had talked about where there was a reorientation of the agricultural sector

to be entirely focused on cash crops and the fact that the economy was going to be very reliant on cash crops. And as the listeners, I'm sure know, in the 1970s, there was a commodity crisis where commodity prices were dropping globally. And if your economy is predicated on cash crops, well, guess what? your economy now is not worth nearly as much as it was before. So with the increasing economic problems that Numeri was facing, he began to have more and more resistance come up to him, which also resistance that was present within the military.

With that in mind, that these are the kind of economic conditions that were in place in the early 1980s, late 70s and early 80s, can you tell us a little bit more about why these military coups took place, the one in 85 and the one in 89? And then you mentioned the main character for this next component, I guess will be Omar al-Bashir, who came in the 1989 coup. If you can introduce who he is as well, that would be great. Yeah, for sure. First of all, Emmanuel Nassiz's book.

I cite in my book as well as a fantastic read. Yeah, I mean, for example, the fundamentalist part, right? I mean, to understand it, for us to understand it, we have to understand that when your economy or like when your industrialization policy depends on basically, basically is financialized. So what this means is instead of sort of upskilling or, you know, creating major projects and like, you know, a major sort of housing projects or major, I don't know, industrial projects and so on and so forth, but rather it becomes sort of paying, I don't know,

like basically through, you know, financial speculations, but also like paying for certain things or for certain services. So like, for example, you have the things of crops being sent abroad and you're going to get money for it. And sort of, this is how you sort of see yourself as developing economically. It didn't just affect, you know, like I said, like we talked about the effects of how, you know, the agrarian, agrarian poor or the agrarian workers, for example, were affected by this pattern. But also we have to understand that since you're not really building anything, it also

affects the military itself. So you're not, you're no longer industrializing because in this sort of industrializing of like, you know, having like these projects, these national projects, this four, three, five-year projects or whatever it is. Instead of having, when you don't have that, you're not just de-industriizing everything, but also the military itself becomes de-industrialized. Now, once the military, so this is important for like our later conversation when it comes to Ahmed Bashir, once the military is sort of basically not industrialized and like, you know,

is becoming weaker and weaker and doesn't have as much hold. And your entire sort of, you capture the state, basically, or your entire sort of legitimacy falls on top of the military, then obviously your legitimacy and your power is somewhat yearly or, like, gradually sort of degraded. That's foreign, uh, fraud in the memory. And so, you know, of course there were political forces underneath, that sort of precipitate, you know, that helped in like,

the ousting of Numeri, but this structural element of it should be understood, I think, a little bit intimately, which is the power in which he rested was sort of slowly, you know, being eroded. And this you can see through, like, political decisions that he made, you know, towards the end of his tenure

or the end of his reign, which is basically, you know, he started, I don't know, quite schizophrenically. At first he was against, like, certain political actors and then later on he became, you know, sympathetic towards certain political actors. And so now because he couldn't rely on the military as his base support as much, he had to do politics. And in doing politics, like, he had to engage with, like, certain, you know, popular movements

and certain elites and so on and so forth. And in so doing, basically, you know, it's sort of, you know, you're no longer sort of, you can't command the entire sort of state or the entire country solely through the army, but you have to do these negotiations. And, you know, this sort of weakened his power. And in 1985, basically, you know, he was overthrown and the popular, let's say, the mainstream parties took, took office. like I said again exact same thing that happened in the mid-1960s till the late 1960s which were the same parties and sometimes even the same players of those parties also held high office they also didn't have a solution towards the economic problems the reason why they didn't

have solutions for these economic problems was because those same elites profited from the financialization that Numeri started. So they themselves would have, you know, being like major shareholders or like been like parts of like these trade agreements or whatever, which basically

asked for cash crops or you know, you were sort of had a certain percentage of like an enclosed land and like, you know, yep. So basically or like you had like a dealership of like a certain automobile

company from the West or whatever it is. They also benefited from it and they didn't see necessarily a problem with capital itself or they didn't see the problem with that form of like, you know, capital class formation. And so they didn't have any answers to the situation. And the people saw this, you know, it was very transparent to most people.

And I'm not saying that, you know, the dictatorship of al-Bashid came about like as a, a as a natural outcome of this. But simultaneously, it wasn't like, it wasn't as if there was, sometimes when there's a dictatorship to a popular government, people will be out in their street. You know what I mean?

People would try to defend like the democracy or like the parliamentarian system. And, you know, like a good example, recent one would be like maybe, maybe, I don't know, there's maybe, maybe there's maybe, maybe I was going to say like Turkey, but maybe that's not a good example. But basically, you know, there's people would,

but for Sudan at least, like the situation with these elites was very terrible with these mainstream parties was very terrible. In 1989, basically there was another coup from a person that was also part of the parliamentary period of Sudan, which was, National Islamic Front, which was led by Hassan Abderabi, basically

Hassan Abtrabi, which is someone who might not be as familiar to the Western audience, and Omar al-Bashir led a coup in 1985 that sort of ousted the mainstream parties at the time and basically held office till 2019. Now, what they inherited at that time was, like I said, a very very weak army. Simultaneously, on the southern side, there was a very successful coup that was mounting by a character named John Geren, and they needed to sort of crush this because this sort of rebellion by John Geren wanted to call for a unified secular Sudan and with, you know,

democratic rights for everyone and equal participation, including for people of South Sudan, who who have been like historically neglected and exploited and so on and so forth. This was dispel trouble obviously for the incoming dictatorship. And because the government was or because the military under Numeri was sort of not industrialized and was degraded. And because they were used to like, you know, services and like, you know, the financialization. What happened was basically they stole people from the street and forcedly inscribed. conscripted them into a sort of a paramilitary style, you know, army.

It wasn't directly underneath the official army, but it was like, it was called the People's Defense Forces, PDF. And so the People's Defense Forces, for example, was a separate organ to the army, but under directly Omar al-Bashir and Hassan At Trabi, let's say Omar al-Bashir at the time, that was somewhat separate. from the army.

It's important to remember this here because I think sometimes we tend to think about the paramilitary in Sudan today with like the RSF and so on and so forth as maybe like a recent manifestations and so on and so forth. But in fact, paramilitaries, not just in Sudan, but historically under capitalism or something that was, you know, it was, you can find it anywhere

whether it's like German soldiers in France. It doesn't matter. But you can find them basically across, in capital's history, capitalism's history. Sudan was no different. They created the paramilitaries to solve the problem of a weak army, and basically this paramilitary, this PDF,

the people's defense forces, was, you know, canon father. They were successful, but they were unsuccessful at the same time. They were successful in sheer number. numbers, but this policy itself from a new dictatorship was the most unpopular policy because it directly affected the, you know, the majority of Sudanese people. Yeah, but it helped at least to maintain or mitigate the rebellion that was coming out from South Sudan. So mitigate the

rebellion that was coming up in South Sudan, but not permanently, obviously, because as we see, there is now two countries where there was once one. Now I know that I'm jumping forward in history a bit, but I'm hoping that you can fill in the gaps here, Muhammad, and I'm going to actually bring up two disparate questions, but it'll allow you to kind of track the way that Omar Bashir's government was orienting itself within these regional questions

that we have talked about that were questions that were being faced by and dealt with. and dealt with in parentheses here by all of the governments of Sudan previously. You mentioned that this rebellion was being put off in South Sudan, but listeners will know that in 2011, South Sudan becomes an independent country, and this is still during Omer al-Bashir's reign in the country. So the first regional question and historical dimension to the regional question would be,

how does it go from Omar al-Bashir dealing with the rebellion that was taking place in the south and kind of quelling the rebellion to a couple of decades later there's now a completely separate country where the rebellion that had been put to bed once was taking place

and the second question the second regional question that we were talking about earlier is we could talk about Darfur specifically and the situation within Darfur during the reign of Omar al-Bashir. So there's this question of cultivation of Arab supremacy within Darfur, why that happened, how that happened, and the results of that intentional strategy and how that is connected with what then succeeds that. So there's these two regional questions that we can kind of trace historically,

from that early period of Omar al-Bashir's reign towards when Omar al-Bashir no longer is leading the country. But there is quite a bit that happens in that period and it'll be interesting to understand what are the political dimensions to the way that that unfolds and how that will help us understand why it unfolds the way that it does

in these two different situations. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the question of Saasadana is really a long history. really, really complicated. But to say to focus on the character of John Gannon, who we left off, John Gerdin was a very strategic and

very important figure for the National Liberation Movement of South Sudan. He was a revolutionary that sort of commanded the rebellions of South Sudan basically through

he was the spirit of it, both in, you know, rhetorically, but also practically. He would go in the front lines of all the places where there was like, you know, skirmishes and like fights between North and South Sudan. And he had like major control of basically the different groups, not the strategies, but he was the one that brought the different groups within South Sudan under like one banner of like, you know, national unity under a secular sort of system and so on and so forth. he is the major figure

South Sudanese sort of independence sort of rises and falls with him now you know like it's very rare especially as a Marxist for someone to say that there's a figure that's this important but for the South Sudanese I think you know he he himself did put a lot and sacrificed a lot for this

cause right a lot of details happen and of course the northern, I don't know how much details we want to get into this, but the northern, the, I remember earlier when I said there was someone called a Turrabi and something called an Omar al-Bashir, they were the heads of, Al-Turabi sometimes is seen as the spiritual head of like, you know, the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, but both of them were, you know, played significant roles in this, in this dictatorship. In fact, later on for an interview with El Jazeera, Hassan Ottarabi went on to say that he was the one that orchestrated

the coup and in fact it was completely random that they chose Omar al-Bashir. He was just the second highest serving member in the army that belonged to the National Islamic Front basically or these kinds of organizations. In the late 90s, Omar al-Bashir and Hassan Uttarbi, who these two figures, like I said, sort of were the heads of like the dictatorship, split. Now, in their split, sort of, you know, the Hassanot Rabi created another political party to sort of, you know, for whatever, the political ambitions, of course, and so on and so forth. But one of the moves that are important to understand South Sudan was he then, to go against the current,

I have to remember that the dictatorship was completely, you know, sort of very savage towards the people of South Sudan. He went into negotiations with John Geren, who was the rebellion from South Sudan. He went to negotiations with them, and things were starting to sort of look somewhat bright, and there was like a consulatory tone. And this was also for Altarabiri,

this cost him some sort of political, political let's say clout because you know Sasadan were seen as like the main enemies Sasanese people

but nonetheless there was negotiations going on and this was in the early 2000s and then in 2005 Jongan gets assassinated or people say it's unknown

his pain crashes basically funny like oh not funny but for me, personally, a relative of mine was on the plane that was sort of behind,

like the second plane behind him, like escorting them, and that one surprisingly didn't crash. But anyways, his plane crashes, and, you know, there's, I don't know,

people speculate whether this is done by, like, secret services or whatever. But nonetheless, Jonga and dies, what's it called? Suddenly. Or, you know,

yeah. This puts a, huge, this is a huge, like, devastating moment for, you know, national liberation movement of South Sudan. The second person in his command was a guy who was the current president of South Sudan, which is Sir Fakir. Now, Sir Fakir, you know, he didn't command as much power as John Geren, and his vision, or like the vision later became corrupted.

it because Zhonggaden had such a strong sort of determined well and had a strong part role to play in this national liberation. He didn't just want liberation for South Sudan. He wanted all of Sudan. Like for him, this, it should not, it's not separate. It's both these countries or now these countries, they shouldn't be separate. But after his death, al-harmu, I may he rest of the peace. after his death, basically the question of like, you know, these negotiations went on and so on and so forth.

I gave into like too much details. And basically in the early 2010s, there was a referendum, a vote, and the vast majority of voters, of South Sudanese voters, basically voted to split and have their own independent country. And so that's where we are today. it's difficult to say whether this is something that it's still the will of the people there was not

I don't know like it's difficult to say for me personally this is my personal opinion the history what the north of Sudan has done to the south of Sudan is in itself a very very sort of

disturbing violent barbarous act of you know continued destruction, dispossession, and so on and so forth. And I completely understand, of course, the will for people to separate from that, of course. But I think I also share in John Gannon's vision of United Sudan of equal rights and representations for everyone.

To answer your second regional question, which is how does this relate to West Sudan? We have to understand that, you know, to create South Sudan as the enemy, especially when you're conscripting people into this paramilitary organization that's closely tied to the military, you need to,

you need to racialize the South Sudan, the South Sudanese in, you know, quite strong terms. Not that they won't racialize before, but you sort of see them now as like an enemy within, you see them as sort of like, you know, trying to destroy the identity of Sudan. You see them as like sort of, you know, like all these tropes, all these racialized tropes.

And so you racialize them, basically. And this is exactly what the South Sudanese, this is exactly what the North Sudan did to South Sudanese people, the northern country, but also it took root. You know what I mean? This is something popular discourse in Sudan as well. Now, because you can see the desperation of the government of Sudan. the dictatorship of Ormada Bashir, because they had to conscript people, they could not afford to have another rebellion from elsewhere.

And so they sort of, you know, directed their, you know, their sort of racial and destructive sort of targets, not just to South Sudan, but to West Sudan, because they know West Sudan is also historically dispossessed, you know, a place and any rebellion from there would cost them dearly because it's, it's very populated and, you know, it's a huge place. And, you know, if there's rebellion from there, they can get like help for, if, you know, people to help them, they can get like help from Chad, from Libya, from South Sudan. And if they join forces, this would be very destructive. And so preemptive

just to add in one piece of information, Muhammad, can you, you mention that West Sudan is kind of a different place and a huge place. Can you talk about there's an ethnic dimension as well that's in place within Darfur when you compare Darfur to the northern part of Sudan where the government is located? And we're going to talk about this kind of racial politic that takes place. So understanding what the ethnic dimensions first will be useful. And then please continue with your excellent explanation of these dimensions. For sure, for sure. I think I mentioned is, you know, I go through it in a book in quite some length.

But to briefly state it's generally speaking, the identity of Arab and African, you know, groups is throughout the history, it's always sort of peaked. And the identification, people's identification with these groups peak. and then they plateau, depending on the political context and depending on the structures of domination and so on and so forth. Now, because, like I was saying, that the northern countries

or the northern, the northern Sudanese government of al-Armeread Bashir sort of wanted to preemptively like crush any sort of rebellion from that region, they decide they decided to employ and decided to basically uplift and put in like positions of power, the most Arab supremacist people in that region.

Because they said that if we were to racialize and to create this Arab supremacy and to like these people who might otherwise be sort of, I don't know, random figures or, you know, people who don't have as much power, they said that because if we racialized us, as Arabs and them as Africans, and we promote these Arab supremacists in position of power in West Sudan, they're going to be more loyal towards us. And so what you end up with this sort of racialized policies,

you end up with like basically North Sudan taken away all the weapons from even the police force because it was racially or ethnically mixed or racially mixed. and literally giving it to these Arab supremacist groups, you know what I mean? And so, and systematically they were employ people or, you know, positions, people in positions power who are like real fascists, basically. You know what I mean? And so, you know, what that happened was basically this brought about

the most sort of destructive forces in West Sudan. We hear, I think, you know, people here in the news, Darfur in 2003, 2005, what some people called 21st century's first genocide. The reason why there was such indiscriminate sort of destruction of Darfuris and people

from that region is because they have literally been these fascists have literally been empowered. And later on we will see to the detriment of the northern what's they called dictatorship of Al-Ware-Bashir's dictatorship.

And so, like, just to go back a little bit, so basically it's, if there's any rebellion from West Sudan, this would, you know, equal to major the devastation to the northern, to the northern dictatorship. So they sort of moved, sort of included the racialization of like the African to, like, suit the intentions or like the well or, you know, the prospects or the, the, the vision of like domination from the, what was it called dictatorship, and they promoted Arab supremacist fascists. And this led to like the devastation of Darfur basically that we hear about in the early 2000s.

Yeah, and talking about the early 2000s, you mentioned that people might have heard about, I'm sure many of the listeners are familiar with what was happening in Darfur in 2003, 2005. There's also a word that I'm going to put out there that listeners will also surely have heard at some point, but many listeners may not be as familiar with as they would like to. And that word is Janjaweed. So you mentioned the RSF earlier in the conversation. We'll hold off on the connection between Janjouid and RSF for now, because we haven't gotten to the revolution yet. But when this word junjewid comes up, who slash what were the Janjewid?

And can you talk a little bit not only about who slash what they were, but remind the listeners about what did happen in 2003 to 2005? So the word gingerweed basically refers to the people, these Arab supremacist or a group within these Arab supremacists who basically used to go into villages on horseback and, you know, they used to have like these war, war calls and like screaming and, like, you know, making a lot of noise and stuff like this.

And they would go inside these villages and basically devastate, kill, pillage, murder, rape, like, you know, just the most atrocious. And I'm sure people who are, you know, who follow Sudanese, going on in Sudan today, they would see sort of images even today from, you know, West Sudan about people who are, who suffer, unfortunately, a similar fate. This practice was by the, this practice was known by the people, the people who commit these practices were known as the

gingerweed in the late 90s, early 2000s. Yeah, so that's what we know as the gingerweed. where they came from like I said earlier right like when you sort of when your racial policy sort of becomes in the state and racial policy becomes like fused and you empower these you know fascists basically this is what you you get the most extreme forms of people I mean just to put it into context for listeners in the US today you have the ice age like the Trump administration basically giving

welfare sort of contracts to ICE basically, which is basically a subsidized welfare system for fascists. Same thing in Sudan, which is the northern government

subsidizes, brings them weapons, you know, gives them power, you know, resources and so on and so forth for this fascist. Same thing. And what you do with it, like we see today with ice and there's many things that are not reported, it's just devastating, you know,

taking people from, you know, the middle of the night, taking them like countries that they've never been, you know, and all these kinds of things. In Sudan, you know, what you see is perhaps even more devastating with the rape and the killing and pillaging and so on and so forth. And so, you know, this group of people, for example, this group of people in 2000 and the reason why they sort of the period that we heard about 2003-2005

the genocide is because you know to respond to this violence there was rebellion essentially came from West Sudan there was a couple of groups that sort of led the rebellions one of the one of the more famous groups sort of was associated with dictatorship itself ironically enough with the group that split from the Hassan Aturabi's group that split from Omr al-Bashir's group they were associated with that but they felt that they no longer could rely on this national Islamic front to sort of to stop the violence basically

and so there was rebellions from these groups and other groups and you know the government of course This was the thing that they feared the most, you know, rebellions from these areas. They even more doubled down on, you know, their support of like these fascists so that they can quash any sort of revolt. And that's where we see the, you know, what some people call the 21st century's first genocide. The complete question of these revolts, which were not just military. In fact, predominantly it wasn't like, you know, armed men.

It was civilians that they sort of destroyed and raped and pillaged. And so this is this is what the gingerweed is. And yeah, I'll leave it out. Yeah. And I mentioned that we're going to talk about some connections between the gingerweed and the RSF. The RSF, of course, does come into existence before the Sudanese Revolution. But I think I want to talk about the Sudanese Revolution first because the RSF is very relevant when we talk about what's happening today in Sudan. So with that in mind, I'm going to

turn to talking about the Sudanese revolution. You mentioned that Omar al-Bashir goes out of power in 2019. But in your book, you describe the Sudanese revolution as an irrational revolution. And I'm wondering if you can talk about not only what happened, you know, how did Omar this year get removed from power and what were the forces that were at play within this revolution. But what do you mean by irrational revolution and why that particular framework matters for understanding what we will talk about in terms of what's happening in Sudan today? Yeah, I mean, the term irrational revolution is a concept that I've been thinking about even more so recently, maybe I can write something about it.

But basically, to answer these questions almost like in tandem, you know, there's certain things that we do or that is demanded of us to do because it seems rational and we're told that it's rational. So, for example, if any popular movements anywhere basically, or in the same global minority demand for like reinvestment in housing, for example. You see, you know, immediately the central bank of that country coming in, or that state coming in being like, oh, we can't do this because it's fiscally impossible and like, you know, it's not the right time and we just came out of research. There's all these

excuses that it sounds, it deploys the language or, you know, the ideology of rationality to depoliticize it, to be like this is a natural thing, you know, we can't do. this, even though if you ask the vast majority of people, they'd be like, I don't buy it. That's bullshit. What do you mean? Like, we don't have money to buy houses, but like, we have money to do this and these other things. But, you know, even beyond this, like, maybe like a more intuitive example today would be

like with AI. I think a lot of people like might be in their company, their boss might be like, okay, we need to have like these AI, whatever software is come in and, you know, we're going to. I don't know, this is going to get us a lot of revenue and it's important for the business. And you don't, like, you know what's going to come, right? And you know, like, this, even though it's not a major trend. But like, you know, for example, that AI is going to do really crazy, like, just, it's not going to do as good of a job as you're able to do. It's not going to outperform.

It's not going to do, like, anything interesting, except maybe in, like, menial sort of tasks. and some mini all sort of tasks. But it's given down, it's like almost, it's not political. It's just a rational thing that we have to do. But we know, for example, anyone who's engaged with AI, for example, it takes more time to fix what AI has produced than if you have produced it in the first instance. But we follow this idea, this, this, this, this, you know, idea of,

okay, it's rational, it's apolitical and so on and so forth. we don't believe in my opinion I think the vast majority of people don't really believe it and they can see it and they engage with it and they know that

you know well this AI thing is basically rubbish it doesn't produce better art it doesn't do anything any of these kinds of things but you know we still act as we believe these

these rationales or like this sort of rational claims about you know the nature of technological development fiscal responsibilities, you know, the political climate not being ripe enough for us to do major sort of housing developments or like, you know, state housing and so on and so forth, all these kinds of things. An irrational revolution is...

Now, the reason why, before I get to the irrational revolution, the reason why we sort of don't believe it, but act like we believe it, is because for anyone who's working for, you know, these fucking asshole bosses knows, you know, very well that if you go to your boss and be like, no, actually, I don't want to, I don't want to like train AI. You know, I don't think it's a good idea to have AI on the thing. You're going to be met with the violence of capital, which is basically, you know, okay, bro, you can go find another job on the street.

Or if you're not, if you, you can't, there's no real mechanism to go like to, you know, the back of England, let's say, and be like, yeah, I don't care about. your fiscal policy nonsense, I want to have a more ambitious sort of, you know, welfare system that, you know, provides for a lot of people, all these kinds of things, whatever. You will be, there's not even an avenue to express this, but even if you express it, you will find the discipline of capitalism knocking at your front door, even if you're like, let's say, a socialist party or something like this. The reason why we act, even though we don't believe it, we don't believe it, but we act

if we believe it, is because we know once we stop the act, we're faced with violence. And this is what I mean by an irrational revolution, which is a revolution that starts at the moment of capital sort of property relations. As soon as capitalism hits us, like there is this instinct to go against it. An irrational revolution is to commit to it, to be like, yeah, actually what you're talking about is basically bullshit. I had no longer believe in this capitalist sort of tourism, such as history always progresses forward. If I do the right thing at the right time, my children are going to get better life outcomes, for example, like a progressive fisticography. I no longer believe that capitalism has the ability to, like,

enfranchise everyone into like a welfare system. I no longer believe that capitalism can even be civilized by liberalism, and I no longer believe in liberalism. When you come towards that, then a revolution erupts, you're going to come against the violence of basically what you might call capital. And that's what happens in the 2019 revolution. For us, maybe perhaps me personally, for various reasons,

like, you know, my family is educated in what to do, even though I committed class suicide and stuff like this. But basically, you know, there's a lot of, like for a lot of us, we knew basically that our situation was not going to be as good as our parents. And we knew that the government or the dictatorship basically did not have any answers. And for us, we wanted to enter into this, you know, irrational revolution. Irrational because, you know, it's really, it's, we're calling it what it is. it's not actually rational to believe in these things, it's actually irrational,

but it's also irrational for us, because we know by saying this, we're going to get into a violent situation of like state repression, death, destruction, and all these kinds of things. And so like I was saying, you know, 2018, 19, we basically were like, yeah, okay,

we no longer believe these claims. We don't, we no longer believe like, you know, the state is going to, I don't know, help us with like food or with like bread prices, with schooling, with housing, with this, with that, whatever it is, we're going to basically, we're going to directly, you know,

head on sort of engage with it and then see what comes out. And of course, this wasn't, it started off from protest, protest, protest, until it became like a full-blown rebellion. But that's what I meant by the Irrational Revolution. I want to make one small note for the listeners before I continue the questioning. We're not ignoring Rule listeners. Rule is having some internet problems right now.

He's in the chat with me. But we'll try to get something from Rule perhaps later on. But we are very much not ignoring him. But Muhammad, you know, you took us through this concept of the rational revolution and why the Sudanese revolution you conceptualize as such. But what is the outcome of the revolution? Now, I know that it was only, you know, seven years ago now. But as with all of these sorts of major historical events that happen outside of the Western world, let's just say, they're very poorly covered in the media. So listeners, I'm sure,

were aware that Omar al-Bashir was, you know, taken out of power. But the way in which the revolution unfolded and what the aftermath of it was and continues to be, it is almost not covered whatsoever within the Western media. So for those that are within that silo, they may be unfamiliar with how that happened. So can you talk a little bit about the outcomes of the revolution, and then we can talk about what has been happening since that moment, which, you know, there's a lot, but we'll try to compress it for the listeners. For sure.

Now, I mean, this question itself is part of why, you know, I sort of, I did the research for the book, which is, you know, it's like it's correct, but commonly we say that the revolution, because we weren't ready, the revolutionaries, though we didn't have, you know, a vehicle that carries our interests as revolutionaries, as working class people, and so on and so forth. This is why it didn't lead to the next step and it wasn't successful to be carried on. But it's not just enough to say that there was no left,

when there was no like organizing mechanism, that's libertarial or whatever at the time. And so this is why I get into like, you know, the history of the left in the book. More directly, to answer your question, after the revolution, after the ousting of al-Bashir, there was naturally the transitional period towards democracy. Now, some people came out during this period

and were sort of claimed to be a representative of the civil administration or the civil sort of government of Sudan. and they represented the side or the revolutionaries or the people who no longer went to the dictatorship or like a military rule, they wanted a civilian rule. So they claimed. I don't know.

I don't think this is a right. They couldn't claim this. They didn't represent us, basically. They sure as hell didn't represent me. So these people came out as a representative of their revolution. And then you had the sort of the military as the

other side, and then between them, mitigating them, you had the UN and these international organizations, but mainly the UN. Now, for the people who represented the civilians, they had a reading of history. Remember in 19, when I mentioned earlier, in the 1960s, mid-1960s when there was the revolution of the communist, the problem with that revolution, or what they saw the problem with that revolution was that the communist had too short of a period to transition from the dictatorship to democracy. And because it was too short, basically the, they called it too short, the election, the mainstream sort of parties, send them militias in the street and basically co-opted the transitional

government and kicked out all the communist. Now, this transitional government, the civilian, thought to learn from these communist's mistake by saying that instead of having a short one, we should have a very long sort of transitional government so that we can do a couple of things. The first thing is we're going to basically suspend and confiscate the belongings and the wealth and the activities of the dictatorship and the elites within the dictatorship in Sudan

who had basically levers of power and of the state in Sudan. And second of all, it gave them time because they thought that if the elections happened immediately, it's just going to bring back those same dictate. They didn't have trust in the people to vote for someone who's not, you know, allied with the old regime because the old regime had a lot of sway in certain regions. And so they wanted to work, you know, to basically I don't know, to work simultaneously

and have like a longer transitional period to ensure that the democracy that was going to come, the elections that were going to come is going to bring about sort of more favorable outcomes and not, you know, people who are, you know, allied with all dictatorship. This was the detriment

because then they were like, okay, in order for us to do this, we need to sort of give something to the military because it basically had levers of the state at its command. And so they were like, okay, let's go into like, let's basically split the governing of the transitional period, 50% us, 50% new guys, 50% the civilians, 50% the military.

And when they did that, basically, they lost the trust of us, the revolutionaries. And so they no longer sort of commanded or like had sway within like the revolutionary forces, as much as they did when they didn't do this, when you know they were standing with us in the streets and so on and so forth. Because what we saw was basically they themselves,

you know, enriching themselves, you know, giving themselves sort of like nice cars and stuff like this. But also beyond this, like doing random things like, oh, confiscating people's belongings, who they suspected were part of like the previous dictatorship, which if you say something like that to, you know, a guy who's life or a family who's, life has been devastated by years of financialization,

that all you want to do is like, it's like, that's not my, that's not my, okay, cool, like it's aesthetically, it looks politically pleasing or whatever, that you're against corruption or something like this. But this isn't, it doesn't do anything for me. And so it slowly sort of became not as popular. And the military and the paramilitary sort of took note of it and slowly, slowly started to like, you know,

push the limits of, you know, the agreements. And basically it saw that it can, you know, tread all over the civilian administration with basically very little outcome or very little sort of backlash. And yeah, and then basically in 2023, this culminated in the complete sort of the war that we see today, but even before 2023, like they completely just bulldozed the whole when I say they're in the military and the paramilitary the bulldozed the transitional period

and you know I think I would say with the help with the civilian administration as well or the people who claim to be the civilian side of the administration which you know you bring up the civil war that really breaks out in in in 2023 that is a very good

connection for the point that we were making earlier about the RSF and the connection with the juncture weed because of course the RSF is one of the forces within the civil war. So I should mention we keep talking about the RSF. That's rapid support forces. So Muhammad, I mentioned earlier that the RSF actually formed earlier. Formally they formed in 2013.

But as we just said, the Civil War breaks out 10 years later. Can you talk a bit about the way in which the RSF forms and? again, these connections between what was the Janjaweed and what is the RSF, which is, you know, one of the major forces within the Sudanese civil war as we see it today. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, you know, to go back a couple of questions ago, during the period of extermination of Darfur from like 2020, 2002, 2003, 2005, now after that period, because they've, achieved, you know, the objectives by quashing any rebellion or, you know, basically, maybe not caution completely, but like significantly reducing the rebellion from, or the resistance from West Sudan. The gingerweed was rewarded quite handsomely. You know, it was given like the mountains that have gold in it, that, you know, is exploited by the hours of today.

it was in charge of, you know, certain important borders for Sudan. It was even the head of the January back then, Musa Hilal, was also sort of given a, he was part of the, you know, sort of parliament. Of course, it wasn't a real parliament. He was all correct. And he was promoted to a certain military position and so on and so forth. but Musi Hillal for the destruction that

he's done he saw the administration in Khartoum he knew that he was an integral part in maintaining its dominance and its domination and his jimony

and for him so you know his ambitions became his appetite sort of grew and his ambitions became larger he was even you know talking about for example

when Bashiri steps down maybe he's going to be the new head of Sudan. You know, like, he was sort of, like I said, his appetite, and his ambitions were becoming larger and larger. And this, the central, you know, the dictatorship of Omar Bishir, to them was unacceptable. They still needed to maintain Arab supremacy and, you know, to quill any sort of rebellion, but they needed to do it in a way without this person, Moses Hilal.

and you know the way they did it was basically like you said in 2013 they promoted a relative of his which his name is himetti who we're hearing the news today instead of musa hillal and changed you know the gingerweed and you know refined the image of the gingerweed into basically the RSF the rapid support forces they called the RSF the rapid support forces because it was meant to be like, you know, these support forces that were to protect the dictatorship, to protect the president, Omar al-Bashir. And, you know, yeah, they were basically, they were called on for whenever there was like protest in Khartoum, these people would come.

They would be deployed to basically destroy and kill, if necessary, protesters in the capital and elsewhere. And I think one of the interesting things. that we see like ripples of today is just like Musa Hillan and the Jinjewid had ambitious ambitions to overtake the basically the national the National Army Omar al-Bashir. Today the RSF also you know we under Himiti similarly had the motivations or the ambitions to take over Sudan and over the national destroy the the National Army and basically be the new rulers, even though there were a subsidiary of,

you know, the came out of like, you know, were subsidized by the National Army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, the SAF. It's important to say this because if we look at it, you know, abstractly, we see what happens with financialization policies as we see all over the world. once finances speculation takes root, it immediately starts to, you know, destroy, not just self-cannibalize, you know, the state itself, like cannibalizing of the certain elements of the state,

but has like, you know, very dark consequences towards, you know, the country itself, which is, you know, something maybe, can talk about later on. Yeah. And, you know, I'm cognizant of the fact that we've been going on for almost two hours already. And I still have a couple of really big conceptual questions to ask, you know, once we get

out of the news and history section. So with that in mind, I do have to ask, we were talking about the RSF. Can we also talk about who is supporting? the RSF. And when I say supporting, I mean that in in various forms, you know, militarily, financially, diplomatically, et cetera, because these, when you, when you discuss who the RSF are and their connections with the Janja Wheat, it would seem strange to people that there is any sort of support for them coming from outside of the country, but nevertheless there is. So understanding not only who is supporting the RSF, but also why they are supporting the RSF in this conflict is really

important. And then as you finish discussing the support, both in terms of who and why the support for RSF is taking place, if you can give, I guess, something of an explanation of what the state of the civil war is today, that would be probably, you know, bring us to the point where we can get into these kind of bigger conceptual and psycho therapeutic discussions as well. For sure. I mean, like right now, I'm sure which, you know, many, many of your listeners and many people who have heard, the people who support the RSF is the UAE, the country that supports the RSF is the UAE. And it supports them diplomatically, militarily, logistically, logistically, financially, and otherwise. There's a lot of angles in which we can take this.

Why does the UAE support this? The UAE basically has to be, it has to be, it has to, to be, it has to be understood that for the Gulf countries in order for them to maintain and have basically slave armies of workers to create their mega projects and so on and so forth, they require necessarily the destruction of West Africa, West Asia and North Africa, basically. And so, you know, we can see that way because like, like you said, you know, some people might be wondering and be like, well, you know, how can anyone support this sort of, you know, barbarous and murderous, you know, militia? And the answer is, you know, quite simply is like whenever there's destruction in these regions, basically you have to imagine that it's very beneficial because you get cheap laborer out of war-torn countries that go to the Gulf regions, basically. Now, for me personally, what I do in the book, you know, I don't overdetermine this, meaning that, yes, it is very true that, and it's something that we need to push, you know,

fight against, which is the support of the UAE of the RSF, the rapid support forces. But we need to look at it if we want to really tackle this, we need to understand that the facilitators of this relationship between the RSF and the UAE is a relationship between the capitalist classes of these countries that have been going on for decades. It didn't just happen with the UAE and the RSF, but it's something that's been happening, which has been cultivated by the capitalist classes of these countries,

for decades. Like we have to remember a sense, basically in 1973, what I mentioned, you know, the new, you know, the emerging capitalist classes of the time till this day have worked in tandem with establishing basically circuits of accumulation with not just the UAE, but with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries more generally. And it's not just in Sudan, in West Asian and North African countries, you know, the capitalist classes were formed and the circuits of accumulation ran through or basically, you know, are placed in.

the Gulf countries. Adam Hine is a great resource to understand these circuits. But basically, you know, we have to understand it in this light because if we stop the relationship between Hemeti or between the RSF and the UAE, it's not like everything is going to go back.

It's not like everything is going to be like really good and amazing and that's it. We have to understand that the first instance, these relationships, these predatory relationships, were established by the capitalist classes of these countries in the Gulf and in North Africa. Yeah, I'm not sure if I asked completely your question, but, yeah. No, you nailed it. But the other point, I guess, then, is, you know, where is the Civil War today?

What is happening in terms of on the ground, you know, like, what is the field of play within the Civil War as things stand? And again, we're recording at the beginning. of August, 26, for anybody who ends up listening to this later. You know, the same devastation that was only the same, but similar devastation that was happening to the West Sudan, all these years leading to like the genocide in 2003-2005, has visited the places where it was not supposed to have been visited, you know, this violence. By that, I mean, the violence that happened. in the West and in the South were necessary to maintain the dominance of Khartoum and the center.

So the Khartoum said literally depend on the violence of these areas. Now, it was never supposed to come to Khartoum. When it came to Khartoum, what you find was the destruction of Khartoum, where the Civil War happened in 2020, 2023. it not only destroyed Khartoum, but the entire infrastructure of social reproduction of Sudan collapsed. All of it. Education systems, health infrastructures,

logistic routes and like, you know, electricity and power grids. Like everything came crumbling because Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, was itself what was supposed to be sort of, you know, the castle on the hill, or was supposed to be protected, basically. And so this rippled, like this had rippling effects. Today, what we're seeing basically with the Civil War is what used to be possible in Sudan before is no longer possible. How people reproduce themselves today is significantly much more dangerous and much more costly

and much more sort of difficult. And that's just the logistical aspect of it. The human cost of this war is untold. It's the worst catastrophe that we have today with dozens of millions of people displaced internally and abroad, the number of like destruction, rape, killing, murder, caused by this war is untold, the vast majority of it is done by the RSF. And the RSF now is claiming to, you know, claiming some regions within West Sudan.

It's like bargaining chips or, you know, basically strongholds. And in these strongholds, you know, the devastating and the destruction that sort of they, that they do on people in those. in those regions in West Sudan, you see the clips of them every once in a while. It's really, really, really horrific stuff. You have people who basically the most, I don't know, treatable of diseases, it cannot be treated anymore and people suddenly die of like things that you can just find a cure for in any pharmacy. And so on and so forth.

It has rippling, devastating effects that, you know, the numbers speak for themselves, but they're not even representative of reality because, you know, it's just impossible to tell how many people's lives are devastated. For example, I give this example before, my cousin, you know, because they were like now had to move from Kharton to another place and they were cramped in like one room, but he also simultaneously had to find a job. So like he left a house, he had three children and just, one of his children was just playing with his elder siblings, and he fell inside like a water tank and basically drowned.

He was one and a half years old. And these are the cost of wars that are not counted because, you know, being kicked out of your house, trying to find jobs, not being able to be there for your children because you need to make, you need to provide some food, shelter, some resources that takes up your time. and not being there for your family, that can be very costly, especially in, like, dangerous situation, and so on and so forth. It's really untold the devastation of this war.

I think if I can add something, if my internet is permitting, that although these massacres and this violence, you know, is happening in Sudan to Sudanese, it's worth noting that, that, you know, this conflict extends way past Sudan's borders. You know, like, okay, we know that the UAE's involvement, but, you know, there's drone strikes from Ethiopia. There's U.S. military contractors that are arming the RSF from their bases in Somalia. You know, the RSF has bases in Somalia in Libya, in Chad. I think at this point the RSF has more foreign bases than China. So it's the conflict has, has.

overlap the borders across the region. And I think there's still very much this localized view of this conflict. And this is, again, quite a common thing for quite a common like misconception with African conflicts, you know, where as if they're confined

to these small little regions in the middle of nowhere, this little desert here or this little jungle here, But like if you look at Congo, how many players are even involved in that one? Even, even I don't know. It's, and so these, we have this misconception that this war and suffering is so small and localized. But the system that's keeping it going, the greater like machine for lack of a better word, it's far extends past the region. Yeah, I'm glad that rural your internet held out fine for that.

And I think that that was an important intervention and something that, you know, mentioning Congo and how many players are involved there, even the Congolese people I talk to are unsure of in terms of all of the players that are involved within the conflict that's taking place in Congo and the way that even the politics is being influenced within Congo. We recently had on this African Revolutions and Decolonization series on guerrilla history. We've had four, I want to say, episodes on Congo between talking about the history, talking about extraction and talking about the current situation.

We've had, I think, four episodes, each of which were at least two hours long. And even after that eight to ten hours of discussion with experts from the Congo, you are left understanding that the system, this machinery that you mentioned rule, is much more. massive and much more difficult to understand than even you thought could have been possible as somebody who does study this. Because at the end of the conversation with experts from Congo, we had the Democratic Republic of Congo's former representative to the United Nations on our show, who of course is a professor and analyst of political economy and Congolese history as well. He was on the show talking for

almost five hours going through the history, going through the current situation in Congo. And at the end of that, you understand that despite his almost unparalleled knowledge of the situation, he would admit that even he cannot see all of the forces that are at play there. So thinking of these conflicts as being localized, sequestered and isolated because they're taking place in Africa in a country that, you know, unfortunately less than 10% of Americans could point to on a map that's just false. These connections, this machinery, the imperial machinery that's at play here, it's it's robust and it's much more robust than I think that anyone could manage to get. through in a single discussion, even if they were able to fully comprehend it on their own. So an important intervention rule, just to, you know, underscore that point. But Muhammad, of course, you have the opportunity to respond to anything that you would like to. But also, I want to bring in

this psychic dimension, the psychotherapy, psychotherapeutic dimension as well, because as the listeners will have noted in the book that we're basing this conversation off of, both this conversation and the previous ones, so we're about five hours into these discussions, is called politically unconscious the psychic aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution. And we have only just finished talking about the history and the Sudanese Revolution and haven't talked about the psychic dimension of it at all yet. So in bringing us to this moment where we now have gone through the history, can you talk about what the psychic aftermath of the Sudanese revolution is and why this was the dimension in particular that you decided to follow within your book?

Of course. Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. But to reply to responsible things that one, and you mentioned, I think, you know, we do need to think about it in very dynamic ways when it comes to like these imperial forces. I think for two, we need to think about them that we need to concentrate on the internal dynamics that's going on and the external simultaneously without over determining one over the other or perhaps, you know, maybe, yeah, we're not over determining one over the other. Because I think for Sudan sometimes when we think about it's exclusively forces from the outside that influence what's going on inside that are negative. We sort of try to imagine like, oh, before this, everything was cool and like we lived in a utopia. of course it was not like I tried to mention in this history,

the destruction of the West and the South were, you know, something that I think. But also if we just try to say that this is only African or like only Sudanese problems for Sudanese people, we also miss out the, you know, the capitalist class solidarity and circuits of accumulation that has allowed these imperialistic, you know, sort of dimensions to flourish. So I agree with both of you. For the the psychic dimension of it.

I think during a revolutionary moment was by accident, you know, one of my friends told me since, you know, I was a therapist if I was able to, you know,

help him with something. And, you know, one thing led to another, then it became one therapy session with one person, then like a client, then two, and so on and so forth, it sort of snowballed into a practice inadvertently, you know, like almost

accidentally. And I think the reason why is during a moment of revolt, the classical sort of secularism of therapy was not very fruitful. When I say secularism, I mean like the division between the personal and the political, for example. You know, because, we were in an intensely political moment in Sudanese history. You know, many people, you know, I mean, everyone today, for example, many people might be listening and be like, yeah, of course the person is like political or like, you know, the psychological is influenced by social factors and political factors and so on and so forth.

We can't attach it. But, you know, there is ways in which the mainstream psychotherapeutic practices, the humanist tradition and the behaviorist tradition sort of try to mitigate or try to to sort of sanitize the political from the psychological. And this was just basically not possible during the Siddiniist revolution. And when I ended up doing it's basically creating a new psychotherapeutic modality, which is called Parks of Psychotherapy, that relates the political to the social.

And by, you know, sort of, I don't know, like, you know, it was also out of a frustration, it also came out of the frustration of, like, the mainstream perspective. or mainstream modalities, the humanist and the behavioralist, because the humanist, for at that time, the humanists, for example, have like this sort of self-actualizing mechanism that's driving their therapeutic practices, because people are supposed to be prosocial, because of a certain anthropocentric understanding of, and simultaneously the behavioralist sort of had a very, they saw reality as an at a mosaic of Atomistic facts, you know, that you cannot, you don't, you know, because reality and, you know, humans are like a, basically mosaic of like atomistic facts, you need, you can, you can alter them mechanistically or mechanically, mechanically. But both these sort of, both these sort of trends for me, you know, like the critique in them and like many people have critiqued them. before me, they just weren't intuitive. And especially during a revolutionary moment,

we became a little bit more experimental, myself and the clients, where we developed this practice psychotherapy. Yeah, modality. Yeah, really important. But I'm wondering if you can talk just a bit more about what that psychic aftermath of the revolution has been. Yeah, for sure. I think it starts off.

It's sometimes it's difficult to talk about this, because immediately you sort of get into very deep philosophical questions. But at the moment of revolt, right, one question that sort of stuck with me that informed that this practice of psychotherapy or the psychotherapeutic modality that I developed is basically how do we understand our agency? And, you know, perhaps one important question,

which is, you know, before we understand our agency, how do we know what society is supposed to be or how is society in a way that is legible to us? And the reason why I asked this, the reason why we asked this, or the reason why sort of, you know, this experiment was carried out in this way or like the psychotherapeutic experiments carried out in this way was because obviously we were in a moment where we didn't know what the future was going to bring. Like, you know, it wasn't like, oh, tomorrow I'm going to wake up at 9 o'clock or 8 o'clock, going to go to work at 9 o'clock and, you know, come back home at 5 or whatever.

We're in a moment of revolt. We wanted to know what's going to happen next. And so the question of agency, what we're going to do, how we can build and how we can shape the future was a very important question to us, not just politically and socially, but also psychologically. And so for the practice of psychotherapy in itself, you know, it was, you know, this was one of the, you know, for us to understand this. We need to understand, you know, what reality was like.

and how do we understand reality as such? Because you have like within the therapeutic traditions, generally speaking, generally speaking, you have two sort of outlooks, which is either man is influenced by society or society is influenced by man. So either man completely has the, or humans have the ability to create reality or society, or society sort of influences how, you know, humans are being. And I thought that these two things were somewhat the first one, which is humans creating society. At our moment was quite difficult to substantiate because obviously we were in a moment of revolt, but we couldn't will our way into a utopia.

There were obviously dynamicists and mechanisms that sort of limits our, you know, liberatory horizons. this is a matter of fact, you know. But then simultaneously, we couldn't accept the fact that, you know, society creates humans. Because as a matter of fact, we actually revolted against like an order. You know, we revolted against the regime. And this, the regime, even though we knew nothing of the regime, the vast majority of us, in fact, maybe all of us,

were younger than the dictatorship itself. Sudan is a very young country. we still revolted against it. So, yet, so, you know, these two things were a little bit inadequate, like these psychological concepts or psychotherapy concepts. Practices psychotherapy, for example, split them, or took from critical realism, and split them, basically. They said, okay, we need to, we can't,

these two things need to be understood completely differently, and in order for us to understand them completely differently, what I did was theoretically in this modality would suggest that society and humans have different ontologies or are different in nature. You know, they don't relate to each other. However, we reproduce ourselves through society and in so doing reproduce our society in itself. And what this allows us to do is to find a cleavage of agency by saying that, you know, we have some sort of freedom to determine what comes next,

but within the cycle of reproducing ourselves through reproducing society. And how we understand this basically is through the control of what society is while we're reproducing it, making psychotherapeutic sessions themselves, not just what certain psychodynamic therapy might say, reflections or experience or what might some people say in the humanist tradition self-factualization or what, you know, behaviors might say is like mechanistically sort of, you know, tinkering with emotions or behaviors in order for you to change different patterns in your life

and so on and so forth. But rather the therapeutic, you don't collapse theory into the session, but you produce theory out of the session and in so doing you create scientific theory sort of producing therapy sessions that you can strew yourself in reproducing the world and in turn the world itself

and how you can change the sort of emerge from cycles of social reproduction in that sense if that makes sense yeah that's really great Now I have a couple of, I guess, orphan questions that we're going to put in here at the end of this conversation to wrap us up, you know, hopefully in less than three hours, but we'll see how this goes. One of the questions that I have is somewhat divorced from what we were just talking about, but it's something that I think is particularly interesting and it's something that I really wish that we had Adnan here for. one of the things that you're very critical of in your book is the term Islamist as an analytical category.

And you argue that it infantilizes political actors by portraying them as pre-modern. You also acknowledge that, for example, Altorabi's National Islamic Front was fundamentally reactionary and that their quote-unquote Islamism functioned as ideological cover-firm. for neoliberalism. So I guess what I'm wondering is how do we criticize reactionary Islamist politics without falling into the Orientalist trap? Is there a way that we can take them seriously as political actors while still opposing what they stand for?

I think like, like there's a couple of ways to ask this question. But, you know, I would say, I mean, the category of Islamism is unnecessary. unnecessary as an analytical category because it's not like something that's universal so it's not like okay let's start from this angle right some people might say for example identifying with something fundamentally changes you in in the reality that we exist but of course or changes even the reality that you exist in just by identifying as something right but of course all of us share the reality in which he exists in today. Like I'm talking to people,

not that are figments of my imagination, but people who share the reality in which we exist today. Just because even, like this is like to take like people who even they themselves call themselves Islamists, for example, for example, by claiming that I am certain something, it doesn't abstract me from the reality in which I exist. And the reality that we saw,

of analyzed today, at least as Marxist, at least as Marxist, we know that we live under capitalism. We have theories of how capitalism functions. We understand sort of, you know, popular forces within capitalism and, you know, that operate in certain ways. And we have name for, we have name for like these social forces that operate in certain ways. And we analyze them, right? Well, I would say for the vast for the vast majority of it, you know? And, you know, these categories that we have, I think, you know,

they are sufficient, we can add, we can add on to them. But the word Islamism or Islamist or whatever it is is added on, and this is not just my language or this not just my theory or whatever that I think, but also, you know, people who have done really great work on this, like whether it's like David Miller or, I can always forget her name, Deepakumar, I think Deepakumar, who've done excellent work on this, or, for example, Islam and blackness, who've done very, very good work on this.

You know, the concept of Islamism, it doesn't make sense because you can say it and you can say, I don't know, fundamentalist, religious or whatever and so on and so forth, but you'd have to apply it sort of generally and you have to apply it in an analytical sense that determines that, I don't know, like this sort of Weberian understanding of reality or of society where, I don't know,

religious ethics plays a determining role on how capitalism unfolds. Now, I think, you know, Weber is, I don't agree with someone like, with a lot of the things that he says. I think is more polemic, and you know, you can take some examples from his work, but it's just not an analytical category that is meaningful as like the Marxist analytics. So first of all, as Marxist, you know, whenever you hear the word, Islamist or whatever,

either, I'm sorry to say for scholars out there, it's just laziness to describe something that you're just unable to describe, to be honest, or like, you know, you just haven't put in the effort to describe. And for the vast majority of Sudanese history, you hear this word, Islamist, Islamist, Islamist, I don't know what it describes. You know what I mean? Like we can talk about the topic about, you know, what they try to mean and stuff like this, but it's a long conversation that amounts to basically, you know, we need to create a special category for these people because they're so unique to our current situation that we can't understand them and so on and so forth. which essentially orientalizes them and essentially calls them pre-modern and acts like, you know, basically ideological cover to continually either portray them as either victims or perpetrators or in need of saving or not outside the categories of humanism or whatever it is. And I think it's quite poor and it's used.

even by liberals and even by some Marxist in various sinister ways. In my opinion, it's a sinister end when you look at what they use it for. But also beyond that, and this is something I must say for me personally sort of pisses me off so much. I'm going to try not too hard on the thing. Look. Go hard. That's what we do on this show. Go hard.

Okay, look, today we would not have a vibrant radical left anywhere in the world if it isn't for the anti-imperist resistance done almost exclusively in the global minority in West Asia and North Africa by people who self-consciously identify as Muslim resistance. But not only that, if we didn't see the destruction of Muslims in our screens, literally, the radicalism of any leftist, you know, anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian in the global minority, is literally built on top of the crushed skulls of Muslims. Not just today, any radical movements in the global minority, any radical movements across the world, have retained their radicalism by literally not just supporting, but also by seeing the devastation of places such as Gaza and Palestine in today's context.

Ten years ago, it was a little bit more than that. It was the Arab Spring. If it wasn't for our sort of sacrifices and the comrades that died along me, alongside me, like protesting or revolting against the... the dictatorships, the tens of millions of people in Tunisia and Sudan, in Egypt and so on and so forth, that stood up against the dictatorship. You would even have a radical element within the Occupy Wall Street. Not only that, even if you go back in the 1960s, the radical elements of the anti-war movements

supported directly and got like, you know, the radicalism from the destroyed skulls of not just Vietnamese, but also the Algerians, the anti-colonians, who are more. mostly Muslims. I think not only that. If we even go back the most meaningful work that Karl Marx himself has done was basically advocate for the freedom of the African Americans

in America towards the end of his life or some of that time. Those slaves or their ancestors at least a third of them were Muslims. Islam has been a thorn at the side of capitalism or Muslims have been at the thorn of the side of

capitalism since its very inception from the transatlantic slave trade till the resistance today. If Karl Marx was alive today, he would have to give two rakat to Allah because he was the Muslims that retained his radicalisms, not academics in Marxist academics in the West or whatever. And it pisses me off so much whenever you go to like this, right, right, radical circus, like, ah, but you're religious, you can't think. It's like, bro, you know, what the fuck are you talking about without the, like literally today, without the images that we see of the destroyed bodies of Muslims in Gaza, frankly, we would, like, left would just be, Marxism itself would just be an obscure, you know, sort of, and, and the other, the other sacrifices

would be an obscure discipline in the academy, quite frankly, you know what I mean? So, like, when people use these terms and stuff like this, just remember, like, and it's just you're using terms that are literally produced just so that you can other people who capital have been trying to get rid of and destroyed that relate to blackness itself since its inception. You know what I mean? And I think for any radical Marxist or left movement or whatever, it has to be a little bit wiser than that.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you went hard on that answer. I have two final questions for us. One that will bring kind of the discussion. of Sudan specifically to a close and then one about kind of publishing and editorial things that I think we can provide a bit of an optimistic point for the for the listeners to close out the conversation. But first, you know, we have discussed the history at length. We've discussed the current situation in Sudan. Now, we have listeners all over the world. I can see

the statistics in terms of, you know, we have listeners in Kenya. We have listeners in Indonesia. We have listeners in India. We have a fair amount of listeners in India. We have listeners all around the world and the global south. But the fact is, much to my chagrin, the vast majority of our listeners are from the global north, you know, particularly the English-speaking global north, US, Canada, England, Australia. We have more than half of our listeners from these places. Again, much to my chagrin. With that being said, with all of this history and the analysis of the present situation in Sudan that we've gone through within these last two episodes, Muhammad, what is not the takeaway message for the listeners in the global north? Because they certainly are,

going to draw a lot from this conversation or these conversations. So not the takeaway message, but rather what you would call on them to do or how they should utilize what we have discussed in these two conversations to, you know, not only advance their own understanding of the situation, but also what materially they can do regarding Sudan. I think I get this answer quite a lot. Right now, I think there are a couple of, just because the situation is so bleak, you know, the only thing that I can think of immediately

to alleviate people's pain is there's a couple of, you know, initiatives. Maybe I can send you the links of, you can put them in the description notes, Henry, that people can donate. But what I would say is, you know, when I ever ask this question is, look, if you're anywhere

from the global minority, if you called me or emailed me or text me or whatever it is during the revolution and you told me, yo, Muhammad, I'm trying to link up with, trying to be part of the revolution that you're in, wallah al-a-a-a-a-a-zim, I would have given you my bed.

You know what I mean? Like, I would have, like, you know, it used to be a common thing for leftists, you know, people with a liberatory, appetite and vision, you know, for them to go and join revolutions, whether it's in, I don't know, Spain or whether it's in places in South America, you know, places in Algeria and so on and so forth. It used to be a common practice, and I think we should go back to this. I think, you know,

wherever there is a revolt around the world, I think because of the, I don't know what it is because, or I don't know because people don't have enough resources. I don't know. You if the media sort of makes it as if by sharing or participating in like the revolt. I don't know what it is, to be honest, but we need to bring this tradition back. Can you imagine, can you imagine basically if there's revolts happening as we're speaking right now? I mean, there's one in India, which is picking up steam and so on and so forth. But can you imagine in the midst of like these revolts for us as communist, as I mean at least a communist or as Marxist or whatever.

If we were able to join lock hands with these people, people from all across the world, then you might think that language is a barrier, but you will find all kinds of people in these revolts. And I think join the Chinese Revolution, join the revolutions in India, join whatever you can. And I think, you know, maybe some of your listeners, I know might be like academically minded

or like themselves academics. Like I said in the last episode, I think we are in a moment of practicing change. We might not at that moment immediately have access, you know, to the relevant theories. Maybe, you know, people might have spent their entire lives just theorizing about these kinds of things. At these moments, you're needed the most. You know what I mean? So I would call it like these theorists and, you know, I've called it all sort of, left-leaning people, the best thing that you can do is just join.

That's literally the best thing that you can do. You don't, you can't imagine. I remember during the revolt, one of my close friends in Sudan, was a Syrian dude. He came from France and he was himself dispossessed in Syria and stuff like this. And he came to Sudan to like take pictures for, I don't want to say, for what you think, but close one of mine.

and you see I met him in like these gatherings and stuff like this and then the next day I see him in the front lines wearing like his gear and shit like that and like you know throwing I was just like man like you're dispossessed from your country

having to leave and like a flight of asylum in like I don't know France and then you find yourself in like the midst of you know revolt in Sudan you do you I cannot explain to you the level of not just love and solidarity and the strength of community and not just community,

but like the revolutionary sort of togetherness that you forge with these people, it literally civilizes anyone who's, you know, being uncivilized by capital, which is all of us. You know what I mean? And this is what, this is something that I would call for people to do, to be honest.

If you think, John or revolt, if you know someone right now in India and you're able to, like, you know, be part of these things, you might not, from afar, we might sit down be like, oh, this is, like this kind of movement and like that kind of movement and you know it might not be to my liking it didn't it didn't go down as like i don't know somebody trust yes might be like oh it's not like it's not like how it happened in like soviet soviet tv or something like this i don't know but

you know what i mean it's just it's just it's not going to go down how it is and these things at this moment history has is made more congealable history has made has made has made it has made of sort of, you know, more elastic for us to bend. And, you know, I would say to join, basically. Yeah, if I can just add something as well. I mentioned it at the beginning of our last chat. But I think that there has been this emerging realization, global realization, zeitgeist, awakening, whatever the fuck you want to call it,

where people have finally connected the, the dots, you know, the average person has finally connected the dots, that all these struggles are not separate, you know, that they're all manifestations of the same thing, which is good, which is obviously good, because we now know what the, you know, what the problem is. But it's also done a strange disservice in a way, I guess, where people have, you know, thought that, okay, so if all the struggles are the same, then let me get involved in this little manifestation in my, you know, my Midwestern hometown. And it's not to describe it your what's going on in your, in your little American Midwestern hometown, but it's the real

ruptures that are happening are happening in these places. It's like the only metaphor, can seem to think of is like those early video games where you had to always fight, you know, the boss at the end of the video game. And then there were like certain parts of the boss's body that you had to hit in order to to break them down. You know, you could shoot the dude as much as you want, but you had to like hit him in his elbow first to make him drop this and then hit him in the knee. And there's like certain weak points that you had to go for.

And that's what these these places are. These these ruptures are the weak points. So yes, your struggle, we can call it a struggle that that's happening amongst, you know, the global north. It's not to be discredited, but bringing down the system requires intervening in these places. If that makes sense. I think we mentioned it to Markham. that people who say, you know, should, I think it's Mississippi, that people who say, you know, we should sort Mississippi out before we worry about the Congo will never get Mississippi sorted out. And I think with that line of thinking, yes, yes, obviously we take it that the struggles are all interconnected.

But there's also, I think, a deeper reading of it, that it's Congo that's more important than Mississippi. Congo is the rupture. Congo is the weak point. you know, we, if we direct our attention to Congo, winning Congo wins Mississippi, winning Sudan, wins Gaza, wins everything, wins whatever first world country you come from, wins Sweden, Finland, Denmark, you know. These are the breaking points of capitalism, of imperialism, of all these things. and that that's where the attention needs to be directed. It doesn't discredit your struggle. It's just that this is the weak point, if that makes any sense. It makes total sense.

We've talked about this is going back to Lenin's conception of the weakest link in the chain. We're looking back at theory that's more than 100 years old. It was used very extensively by the dependency theorists through the 60s. and 70s. World systems analysis also looks at this idea of, you know, looking at where the weak links in the imperial chain, thinking of imperialism is a global system that requires all of these linkages to maintain itself. And that if you're looking at seriously overturning the system of imperialism, you have to not strike at the point where imperialism is most fully ingrained and most resilient, but rather look for these parts of the chain that aren't right at

that central node, but are required for the maintenance of the system. If you see a link of the chain that's a bit rusty, that is the link of the chain that you should first target. And by breaking these weak links of the chain, that is how you're going to overturn the system in total. And, you know, it's really great that the two of you each talked about the fact that there needs to be some risks that are taken, whether that's, you know, going through a revolt. I know, Ruhul, you mentioned the Midwest, and I'm from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan originally, but, you know, I can tell you, I have seen far more drones recently than I have seen the

Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the last few years, not to give away too much about, you know, where I am or what I do. Everybody knows I live in Russia. That's no secret. But, you know, I see, let's just say I see drones an order of magnitude more times than I see my family, not to, you know, valorize what I do in any way. But I also just want to share an anecdote that I share way too often on this show. But it's such a fun one that I can't help myself. we had a comrade Joma Sisson on the show many years ago at this point. It was obviously before he passed and I want to say it was at least a year before he passed because we were going to bring him back on for a second conversation and then he ended up passing

that same week that I was in conversation with him about about coming back on. In any case and I really do miss Comrade Joma. I don't talk about this very often, but he and I had a very long running. email chain back and forth, which is one of the more, you know, important people that I've had long-running conversations with. But Comrade Joma, for those who are unfamiliar, was founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines and longtime leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines. When we had Comrade Joma on and asked a similar question to him at the end of that conversation, we said they're, imagine you're talking mostly to, you know, leftists, socialists, communists

in the global north. What would you advocate for them to do to help with the struggle, the struggle that's ongoing in the Philippines? And his answer was, and I'm going to paraphrase him, but I'm going to paraphrase him as accurately as I can. He said, hypothetically speaking, if there was people in the global north who hypothetically had access hypothetically to, you know, military means, whether that was hypothetically weapons or hypothetical blueprints to weapons or hypothetical weapon systems or any of these, again, fully hypothetical situations. you should hypothetically find ways of transmitting that to struggles such as the hypothetical struggle in the Philippines.

And he didn't say hypothetical quite that many times, but he did say hypothetical. Just, you know, to be clear, listeners, he did say that this was a hypothetical situation. But if you did have access to those means, hypothetically, you should find ways of doing something with them, hypothetically, to advance the struggle in the Philippines or elsewhere. So I think that that anecdote, even though, as I said, I bring it up on the show way too often, I'm going to bring it up again here. Now, I'm going to move us towards the final question of this conversation. And I'm going to be directing this question to both of you because the question is about publishing. So each of you, Rule and Muhammad, have brought works through publishing.

to the market. Rule, you are the editor of building a people's art, really terrific work, and you have a lot more in the pipeline, which we alluded to at the end of the previous conversation, at least one of the projects that you're working on. And Muhammad, obviously, is the author of the book that we've been talking about today, as well as last time, and Muhammad is also, as I understand, working on more things as well. So the question is, let's say that our listeners are not the, you know, academic people that are already publishing works, but they have projects that they are working on or struggles that they are committed to

and are making analyses of these struggles. What can you tell as individuals who have brought these sorts of projects to the market? And again, to the market, both of your books are available for free download at iscrabbooks.org. so, you know, I use market in the colloquial sense. What can you tell to the listeners who have these sorts of projects on mind or struggles that they're connected with and they would like to do something with this work that they're doing and try to get it out to as many people as possible? Because I know that, unfortunately, we don't have that many works that are available by Sudanese Marxists on Sudan. and particularly the Sudanese revolution that are available to us. As far as I know, Muhammad, your book is it for us.

So how do we get more works like this to the market? And can you provide any encouragement to the listeners to do so if they're in a position where they do have that sort of analysis and connection to struggles? The first thing that comes to mind. If I can be honest, and it's probably not going to be very encouraging for a vast number of leftist academics. But I think that like we mentioned earlier about this idea of, you know, that yes, all struggles are valid and they're all connected. It's all the shared struggle, but they are weak points.

I think a lot of, a lot of leftists, especially leftist academics, they almost soothe their guilt by focusing on, you know, what did we say? The, your Midwestern town struggles where, of course, it's valid. It's the same struggle. Your Midwestern town struggle is the same struggle as Sudan, as Gaza, as Congress. Cuba, is Iran. But to go back to the drone analogy, you know, unless there are drones above you while you're struggling, you've probably already lost that struggle.

So if you're looking for a struggle where you have a shot, chances are there will be drones above you. If not, it's probably a struggle that you've already lost in some way. It's not where the pressure is. It's not the weak point, you know. And so what I would recommend more than anything for leftist academics is to not fall into this trap of, you know, of trying to almost like buy their moral redemption by focusing on, I don't want to call it like dead end struggles, but, but I think you understand what I mean. struggles where that may not necessarily manifest into anything positive. But rather, don't fall into this trap, you know, of trying to soothe your guilt in this way.

But get out and go to these places. Speak to these people. You know, it's, I suppose in some way that there's, there's a very Maoist thinking there, you know, just send you out to the farmlands. That's what you need to do, is go out and speak to these people. And if you are these people, you know, like we were joking about,

you know, the Marxist Sudanese, we have Muhammad and we have him, you know. So if you are these people, then there's an obligation on you to produce, produce and produce and produce. And if you're not these people, the obligation on you is not to speak for these people, you know, but to go to these people and give them a voice or learn from them. But I think it's vitally important to leave your periphery of this drug pill and go to the core.

See what it's like at the call. See the drones above you. Thanks for that very encouraging note, a rule. I'm sure that the listeners are all ready to publish right now. But I do think that that's an important point is that if you're in a position where it's easy for you to publish and there's people like you publishing, you're probably not the person that we need publishing. And there are other ways in which you can assist in these struggles and to get an assist

in getting the voices out of people who we should be getting the voices out like Muhammad. So, Muhammad, I'm hoping that you can encourage the listeners a little. Oh, rule. Sorry, I see that. If I can interrupt, yes, please. Sorry, if I can interrupt one last thing. And this is coming purely from the academic side with the shit that I see and that I deal with. If you are one of the people who are fortunate enough, because obviously there's things involved.

There's time. There's finances. you know, travel is not easy. It's, we, we talk about it, you know, like get on a plan and go to stand, but we understand that there's time involved, there's labor, there's costs. Not everyone has that privilege. But if you are one of the people who has that privilege and you are able to do this, you know, good for you, but don't fucking gatekeep.

In academia, there is the culture of gatekeep. because you found you're one of the few people that can do it. It's very nuanced. You know, this is your baby now. And you don't let it ever leave your thing. Don't gate keep for the love of God. Yes. So more encouragement from Rule.

And I also just want to say, you know, regarding the drones overhead, since I realize that I may have made it sound like I'm on the front lines myself. I am not, just to clarify, I'm involved in places where there are drones that are coming, but I'm not very much not on the front lines or in the military myself, and I don't want to portray it that I am. So, you know, apologies if it came across that way. But there are drones where I am located, again, not to give away more than I should, but there are drones here relatively frequently. Muhammad, now that we have rules anti-encouragement and my discussion of drones out of the way,

maybe you can leave us on an encouraging note. One can only hope. Yeah, I'll try my best. But I think, I think, look, today we live in a specific moment. I think, you know, you know, there's a real, like, following. off from the question about Islamism and, you know, the, what's going on in Palestine and the sacrifices of Muslims and, you know, not just the sacrifices, but, you know, for better or worse, the most famous, the most famous elected socialist in the world, Zora Mundani's a practice

Muslim, the only anti-Zionist member of parliament in the UK is, Zarath Sultanate's Muslim, and then there's Rima Mawaruk in Paris and stuff like this. Following off on that conversation, maybe I said this before, but the struggle today has been reanimated by quite literally the cross skulls of people in the global south. Like we have, you know, newer and newer members joining the struggle, new and newer faces, younger generations being radicalized by what's going on in Palestine. and in Sudan and elsewhere as well, but more specifically in Palestine.

And I think for anyone who's listening, the vast majority of people listening are part of the left, I would imagine. And I think we have to be very, we can't lose sight. It's no longer enough for us to, you know, be comfortable in our forms of resistance. People have given up way too much for us to be comfortable

in our resistance. And I think, you know, one of the things that we can start off doing, if you want to understand Sudan, and we care about what's going on there, and we see the destruction, and we've been animated by it to do something, I would say pick up a copy of this book. And I say this, it's a free book. You can get a PDF version and stuff like this. You can also buy it, but it's a free book. Learn more about what's going on in Sudan, and we can't miss this opportunity, this moment.

It's not just an opportunity. It's something, it's not an opportunity in a sense that. history has blessed us with an opportunity. It's as if time and history or history was going in a certain way, and it's through the destruction of Palestinians and people in the global south where they reached out and literally cut from the fiber of time an opportunity for us to revolt, to rebel. And I think we can't take this lightly. there was a Palestinian woman who was asked during this accelerated moment in the genocide.

She was like, you know, what do you have to say for people out there? And she answered, you know, for me, it still sticks with me. And, you know, bear in mind her children have been murdered and, you know, members of her family and she's dispossessed and so on and so forth. And who knows, maybe even today she's not with us. but she says that I don't I feel pity for the people who are going to live

after us for us our souls are going to be judged and we're mortars we believe as Muslims that are going to go to heaven but who I worry about them most is not the people who are martyred

who are guaranteed a place in heaven but the people who remain in this hell in this earth and I think we cannot take these words lightly we have any for us it is the hard work of, you know, trying to rip open the cut that they left in history, this opportunity, to do something with it. And I think with that note, I think, you know, we have a lot of work to do.

And I hope these words are encouragement because there are so much, there's so much, there's so much more people like us around the world than, you know, you might be disappointed with you the local sort of socialist group or whatever, but there are so many more radical people there around the world. Don't give up faith. We might not be linked geographically, temporarily, but we are linked in spirit. So, you know, just continue to fight and, you know, don't squander this moment. Absolutely agree with everything that you said, Muhammad, as well as you rule. Although I have to admit it was knowing the two of you, slightly foolish of me to say that we were going to end on an encouraging note because, you know,

I'd give it to Rule to encourage the listeners to publish something and Rule says if you're, you know, in a position where it's easy to publish, go where there's drones. And Muhammad opens his explanation with the struggle is being built on the crushed skulls of people in the global South and ends his discussion by saying, well, you know, they're most fearful for the next generation to come. So with that sort of encouragement, you know, surely the listeners are getting ready to publish right now. But that's not to say that I don't agree with everything that you said. I certainly do just, you know, I probably should have used other words than encouragement knowing the two of you. But with that being said, I've really enjoyed these two conversations that we've had.

I feel like I've learned a lot even though I was prepared for these conversations. And I'm sure that the listeners will also find these conversations extremely useful. So at this point, I'm going to turn it to each of you to let the listeners know. Once again, maybe we can tease a bit of what we're working on and let the listeners know, Muhammad, in your case, since you do have a public profile, whereas rule is a hermit in the middle of the woods, doesn't want anybody to find him. But we can at least tease the work that we're doing. And in Muhammad's case, you can let the listeners know where they can find you.

So, Muhammad, we'll start with you this time because I think we started with Rule last time. Can you let the listeners know what you're working on and where they can pick up, first of all, pick up your book and then where they can keep up to date with what you're working on? First of all, you can pick up the book. Like I said, you can go to Iskra. Iskrabooks.com. Iskrabooks.org. I should have probably learned this before the start of the recording. But Iskraubbooks.org, you can pick up the, um, iscabook.

copy of the, you can order the book or have it for free, it's a PDF copy. For me, person at the moment, I'm in Germany. I am organizing radical anti-racism informed by the black radical tradition. You can follow us on, our handle on Instagram is black underscore radicals. Black underscore radicals. And we have a podcast called Black Radicals. You can find this in Spotify, Apple. YouTube and stuff like this. Yeah, and I'm also doing, I'm not supposed to be calling it psychotherapy

because of certain things here in Germany. But I am doing practice of psychotherapy here in Germany. If you want to, if you want to gain contact, you can gain contact. You can go to the website, nota therapist. Dot.de.

Yeah, that's basically what I'm doing at the moment. And as for writing, nothing so far, maybe something in the horizons, but nothing right now. It's going to take a break. A well-deserved break. We'll have all of that linked in the show notes. Of course, we'll have the book linked in the show notes. We'll have Not a Therapist.de linked in the show notes and we'll have black radicals in the show notes as well. So listeners, you can just scroll down and find that.

Now, our, I say that rule is the hermit, but, you know, in all honesty, I'm at least as hermetic as, as rule is. But rule, can you let the listeners know a little teaser? We gave one last time as well, but a little teaser of what you're working on. And, you know, we'll hopefully get them excited and I'll let them know in advance that. While you can't find rule online, when these projects are coming to fruition, you will hear Rule on guerrilla history talking about. them so you know stay tuned to the show subscribe if you haven't already to this three hour long show yeah it's it's god it's it's quite tempting because it's such a cool project you know i already want if i can speak about it but is in the ace but so the main thing for me at the moment is

to take a break so the main thing for for me is is obviously a much needed holiday where I will actually coming up next week, I'll go back home to South Africa. But on the way, somewhere on the continent, I will make a stop for this ongoing project that I'm not allowed to talk about, but I really, really want to. And yeah, it's, to be honest, it's wrapping up now. It's, I mean, looking, I've got the pages sitting in front of me on the table here, and there are about 1,100. So the project has basically come to an end. It's just the, you know, a few final things here and there. But like I mentioned, in our last talk, it's an extensive. collected works, basically

complete works, of a very... We had the same problem last time. Unknown but unknown. A known but unknown African revolution. But yeah, that I think is quite interesting. And it's been a really exciting

and intriguing project. And very soon it will be out. then hopefully I'll be back here talking about it. I can guarantee you that you'll be talking about it, that you don't really have a choice. Listeners, Rule is a friend of mine. If he doesn't come back on,

that's friendship over. But I also have to say that Rule is an incredible artist, and I am knowing that this work is getting close to fruition, I am very excited to know. I don't have any idea. I know exactly what the work is. I don't know if Rule has any concept about what the artwork of it is going to look like,

but I can only imagine that it's going to be terrific because I know Rules work very well, and everything that Rule does is absolutely beautiful. So listeners, you should be very excited for that work because it's going to be an absolutely, unique work. And again, I'm also trying not to violate rules and DAs because that would be uncool of me. It'll be absolutely unique in many ways.

But I'm also looking forward to the artwork that's going to be on the front of it because I know that you're going to be doing that rule. So with that being said, rule will be on the show talking about it when it's ready. Again, no choice. As for me, listeners, in theory, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck. 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. I believe my account is still on there. I don't know. Let me know. Somehow, again, I'm kind of a hermit, so I don't know how you'll let me know. Maybe through Muhammad. If I get a message from Muhammad saying, people are telling me that you're still online somewhere, or at least your account is, then that'll be good because it means that you

have also, you know, made contact with Muhammad, who's a lovely person. Gorilla history is also on social media platforms. Again, in theory, you can find those on various platforms. But the most important thing is to, if you appreciated this episode, to share it, that's the most important thing. I think that this and the previous conversation that we had were extremely fruitful and important. So, you know, help us get the word out by sending it to some comrades who you think could utilize this discussion in some way. And if you'd like to financially help guerrilla history continue to make episodes like this, go to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history.

So on that note, then, listeners, and until next time. What about G-O-R-I-L-A history? Why don't we do guerrilla history? You know, really? It's a... The history of monkeys. It's the... In fact, in fact, let's put our money where our mouth is.

We just told all... all these leftist academics, you know, to get off their little thrones in the ivory towers and fuck off to the Congo. Let's do the same. Our next episode, we're going to go sit in the Congo with the actual guerrillas. I wish, I wish that I could for various reasons that, again, I can't explain for various reasons. I cannot go right now from where I am. But that's a discussion for off the record. But I will just say, rule, when we put up our.

first episode of guerrilla history, the first comment that came back was a friend of mine that Adnan and I both knew from appearances that we made on another show. He said it's about time that the left starts talking about guerrillas, G-O-R-I-L-A-S. So you're very much on the same page as this guy from six years ago. I know it's such a white thing, but it really is my dream to just go see these guerrilla. because I've only ever seen them in like a zoo. And it's so mesmerizing to, I don't know if you've ever seen a guerrilla in like up close.

It's so fucking memorizing. It's, it's, well, what, what's that, that uncanny valley or whatever if it's good like. Like where, it's so close to being human, but, but not.

Anyway, sorry to completely side, side, derail everything. No, that's okay. And I agree. I mean, I've also only seen them in captivity, which is heartbreaking in its own way because, you know, these are very sentient beings that are in that uncanny values. You just mentioned, for all. And there they are in enclosures that are far too small, uh, in conditions that are divorced from what they are. are, you know,

I don't want to use the word intended because that, you know, gives some sort of agency to, you know, the design of these creatures. But it's depressing. So I also would like to have some. So there we go, listeness, please go, donate money to Henry's White, Patreon.

Buy, buy, buy the book. Henry's the only fan. whatever you can. Let's get the money in. And then the next Karela history episode is going to be the three of us sitting somewhere in the jungles of Congo. I wish that, first of all, I wish that we were anywhere near being able to afford that. You know, we would need a lot more donations from a lot more people. And also, you know, there's those things I can't really talk about that, even if that money did come in. It would still be pretty difficult for me at the moment. But, you know, Listeners, you can go to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history if you want to at least help us pay for the platform fees, which is the main thing that it goes to. So with this episode going off the rails here at the end, I will once again say until next time, solidarity.