Guerrilla History - The Exterminating Empire w/ Chris de Ploeg

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

The following dual episode of Guerrilla History/The Adnan Husain show was originally an Office Hours Friday livestream on Fri Aug 21.  In it, we discussed a new book from Monthly Review Press titled The Exterminating Empire: Capitalism's War on Life, from Palestine to the Burning Planet with its author Chris de Ploeg. The book examines the political economy of imperialism and its connection to climate crisis, war, genocide. Foreword by Jason Hickel. It was a great discussion!  Order the book: https://monthlyreview.org/9781685901653/ And follow Chris at: www.chrisdeploeg.com Please support the fundraiser for Adnan's online course for students in Gaza: Guerrilla History: Anticolonial Resistance History, Theory, Practice for materials, supplies and equipment for creative expression and sharing of their historical research. Please be generous again as you have in supporting this course: https://chuffed.org/project/174168-su... Support the Adnan Husain Show on Patreon or Substack: www.patreon.com/adnanhusain https://www.adnanahusain.substack.com  Help support Guerrilla History by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember Dan Van Boo 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. Salam, hello, peace to all, and welcome to a very special episode, not only of the office hours weekly, more or less, a live stream program on my channel. Of course, I'm Adnan Hussein, but also,

a special edition of Gorilla History podcast, of which I am co-host, and I'm joined today by my co-host, Henry. Henry, it's great to see you. Nice to see you, as always it done? Yes, well, we have a really wonderful opportunity here for a discussion, like we do on guerrilla history regularly, is discussing a major book with an author, and I can't think of a more appropriate and relevant work than this new book that has come out, the Exterminating Empire, whose author is with us today, Chris de Plur from the Netherlands, and he is an investigative journalist, a grassroots organizer, author of a forthcoming,

a first volume is out in Dutch, but a three-part or a three-part or, three-volume work called The Great Colonial War that surveys the last 500 years through a particular frame of imperialism and colonialism, all of which are themes of the exterminating empire as well. And he has organized locally with many groups and movements on housing, pro-Palestine, solidarity movement, socialist groups, and also a, new party the party de vonk which i understand is a reference in dutch to uh what means the spark uh a reference to iskra so chris welcome it's so wonderful to have you on thank you for making time to talk about this book and which i understand this is your first uh interview about about the book so we're

honored to have this opportunity thank you for joining thank you for having me and i think it's appropriate to have it on this podcast because I've been following your work for a while. So it's nice, actually, that now I finally have published something in English so I can talk to you about it. So happy to be here. That's great. Well, we look forward to translations of like your other work, the book into English, which I understand is underway. So we can look forward to that. And listeners, I've put the link for where you can buy this book, which is published by Monthly Review Press. You can order it. and it should be available very soon to you.

But I thought I would just maybe start with a kind of basic general question about, you know, how you came to write this book. You tell us a little bit in your introductory remarks or preface that you were working on the Great Colonial War, but then you decided to also write this book. So tell us a little bit about, you know, how you came to write this. why you decided you needed to write this and put aside for the moment, your ongoing larger project,

and what you wanted to accomplish with it. That's a great question. Maybe it's good to start with the Great Colonial War, because it's true that it started with that book trilogy. In fact, at some point, I thought this would be part four of that trilogy, but I decided it would be a separate book. But the Great Colonial War really started, it's not just about the last 500 years. It really starts actually from the Second World War, from fascism and Nazism, which of course is kind of considered, especially in the Western world. And, you know, I'm in the Netherlands as this kind of moral anchor and moral compass for good and evil and kind of the ultimate evil and how we understand the world.

And that's why it's very effective to use that as a kind of opening to then expand from there and show what you think is, you know, in liberal history, some kind of aberration from Western history. some kind of comment who fell from the sky, you know, Nazism had nothing to do with colonial history or capitalism, to really deeply infuse that into the history of colonialism and capitalism. Of course, the whole colonial boomerang thesis is not necessarily original. There have been many before me who have done this. What I do think I do quite effectively in that work is really getting more into the nitty-gritty, the historical, the factual, really kind of giving the proper factual historical narrative and basis for what someone like Amazar, perhaps did much more poetically, beautifully, of course. So that work kind of, I was already writing that

before the genocide in Palestine started. And I think in a way what is, what the Holocaust is for many people of the older generation, Palestine is for the younger generation. But what I do notice, and I'm also active in the Palestine movement, of course, is that engagement with Palestine does not necessarily mean that people get a coherent worldview, that they necessarily understand how the genocide in Palestine is related to global capitalism, or global imperialism, let alone things like climate breakdown. And of course, some of these connections are being made more and more. But what I really wanted to do with this book is really dive a bit deeper and give people a coherent worldview. But also what I did in this book, what I didn't actually do in the

Great Polonial Wars, I have a long chapter at the end. talking specifically about strategy as well. Because I think that's one of the things that we are lacking sometimes in our movements is that we talk a lot about all the problems. We sometimes talk about the solutions, you know, if we somehow take power. But actually how to get there is one of the most difficult questions. And I'm not saying that necessarily I have all the answers, but I think at least trying to get there and trying to think through these questions

are one of the most important things to do. So these are some of the things I set out to do with the book. And we were talking a little bit before that it's actually hard to touch upon everything because I cover so much round in the book. So we'll try to do that. And as I expand, I'm sure it'll get clear and clearer about why I wrote it. Absolutely. Well, I mean, it is about many, many topics and their interconnection.

So I'm very interested in how we will pull on the various threads and what Henry will also want to focus on. But I did want to, before we get too far into this, since I neglected to do so at the very outset, is first, say the full title of the book, The Exterminating Empire, Capitalism's War on Life from Palestine to the Burning Planet, so you can see that it encompasses many different kind of components

of what this exterminating empire is. And maybe that'll be something, you know, Henry will want to ask you about how you put those together. But I also wanted to remind everyone is that we always try and do a fundraiser, you know, on these live stream programs in particular. And I will put, it's already in the description to this video, what I will put in the chat for people who are live on YouTube, the fundraiser that we've been doing for the past several weeks, which is for my students who are taking an online course in Gaza. These are students who have been surviving the genocide,

but trying to continue their education in various ways. And we're doing an additional fundraiser on top of the generous support that this audience and others have shown for the whole kind of project of the small private online courses being offered in Gaza by MITX and a project organized by MIT graduate students in solidarity with Palestine and in response to the genocide and, of course, the scholasticide, most specifically.

But right now we're organizing a fundraiser in addition for students on their final research projects to help them with supplies, materials, resources, tech, other kinds of things that they might need to do their historical research on anti-colonial resistance and to do it in creative ways in various formats that they might be able to share it. and hopefully including some video essays and oral history projects and audio podcast type episodes that we will of course share on this platform. So please be generous if you can and support this small effort to at least support students in Gaza to be successful in achieving their aims and goals for the course. So without but without further ado, let me turn it over to Henry to see where he'd like to start in this discussion. Yeah, I have, I'm very excited for this conversation. I'm really looking forward to talking with Chris. Before I turn into the first question, though, I just want to make two quick notes. First is that Chris is not the first member of DeVonk that's been on guerrilla history.

Listeners of the show, longtime listeners of the show will know that about two years ago, we had Jay-Z Veldhoisen on the show for an episode that was titled Zionist rampage and narrative distortion in Amsterdam. A really interesting episode. I highly recommend those of you who are more recent listeners of guerrilla history, haven't been listening for more than two years to go back and check out that episode. It'll be related to the discussion today, I'm sure, but it was a really fascinating conversation that we had with Jay-Z.

And then a second notice is that I mentioned this last time we had one of these live streams at none with these final projects of the students that you're doing. I'm still pushing for music as a way of getting analyses. You're right. You're right. I was just thinking we're talking about extermination in the conversation today. We will be talking about extermination, not just extermination of a people, extermination of species, exterminations of ways of life. I know that I had mentioned that I had written a song called alienation last time, but I also have another song that's about cultural genocide and the extermination of a people causing the extinction of entire languages. Now, that's not exactly the same situation that we see in Gaza.

We don't have Arabic going extinct because of the genocide, but we do have an extermination of life writ large, which is where I'm going to go into this first question for Chris. Chris, in the book, you use the term omniside. So the killing of all life, you know, we often hear the term genocide being used, but you very intentionally used the word omniside to describe what's happening in Gaza and across the planet. This is also connected with the linkages that we were talking about earlier in this conversation. So you argue that the destruction of olive trees, water infrastructure, soil is inseparable from the destruction of the Palestinian people as a people. Why is it important that we understand

genocide and ecocide as twin operations rather than as completely separate crimes. Actually, I think this goes quite deeply into the whole capitalist ideology separating man from nature or even, I would say, man from their surroundings and our interrelations. It's actually extremely logical that if you want to destroy a people, you need to destroy the land that they depend on. You need to destroy the ecosystem that they depend. on. And there's this myth that we have quite strongly, even within climate movements and environmental movements, that people often say, like, you know, humanity is the virus or in the

Anthropocene, or like humanity is the problem, even though we know now from a lot of research that human societies have interacted quite well with nature. In fact, they have quite often co-created ecosystems. I give various examples in the book, whether it's Native Americans shaping the Great Plains and

vastly expanding the range of the bison, or whether it's a Palestinian standing for olive trees. We also know actually that olive trees survive a lot better if they are tended by local people than if they are just, you know, randomly left on their own.

Or whether it's the Amazon Rafe forest where we know now that a lot of areas there are, you know, some describe them as human gardens more than some kind of, you know, pristine wilderness. There is a co-creation constantly going on. And when you depend on your environment for food, on your environment for your livelihoods, if you want to destroy people, you need to destroy their ecosystem. And this is what we see actually very, very consistently. It's not just in Palestine. we see this all around the world. In fact, we see that with the great genocides of colonialism,

whether it was in the United States, in Australia or many other places, the creation of what some call so-called neo-Europeps, where people try to kind of recreate Europe in a sense in these environments. They import their own invasive species, which are, it's actually a biological term, which is very appropriately. named invasive species. So they kind of, it's not just, it's not just people who are physically killed. It is also their environments that are killed.

It is also their way of relating to each other, their cultures, their economies. All these things are highly interrelated and you need to destroy them all to actually commit genocide. And we see, as some call this, a scorched earth campaign. But there's actually quite some scholarship that you see kind of scorch earth campaigns kind of globalizing since the 16th century since the massive global expansion of colonialism and imperialism. So I think, yeah, Omnicide is a good term, this killing of everything to understand more deeply what's at stake here, yeah. Yeah, I think that's very important to characterize this as you do about a war on life itself. And it reminds me a lot of, you know, we had a very good discussion. We've had more than one, I think, with Jason Moore about seven cheap things, as well as other aspects of his work about the capital scene that also tries to undermine this idea of the anthropocene and remove the real critical.

of the environmental devastation from, you know, to human intervention as opposed to the particular form of intervention under capitalism as the real culprit for the devastation of the planet and the destruction of peoples and bringing those two things together. So I think this is a very important kind of line of inquiry to link these things. And I think you make the point, you know, at the very outset of the book, that these strands have not often been integrated well in our politics that in fact actually you even noted at the very outset in the introductory chapter that, you know, you see occasions where, you know, pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protesters or slogans were made unwell. welcome at climate mobilizations and marches as like hijacking, you know, of the climate, you know, movement, which is allowable, legitimate, important, and universal as opposed to, you know, decrying, you know, the slaughter of a particular people that might have its own, you know, complications and so on to be able to maintain some difference and distinction between these things. And why is it so important in your understanding and how do you go about showing the links

between these things, you know, over the course of history and what implications that has for our politics and movements today? Yeah, this is a great question. and there are actually so many layers to answer that are treated in the book, and I will probably forget a few, because there are so many strings to attach to each other here. I first want to mention that this is still very relevant. I think I give it an example in the book about a climate march soon after the genocide started,

but it's still happening. I'm right now organizing for a national anti-war march, and Greenpeace just declined because they basically said, like, oh, you're bringing in Palestine and militarization, or for the climate. There's too much going on here. It's not related or not related enough. We need to focus.

So this is still very much going on, this kind of siloing of issues. And of course, the most obvious way is what we already discussed. It's the intense eco-site that accompanies the genocide in Palestine. Then we're not even talking about also the massive CO2 emissions that accompany them, the war machinery itself. But on a more deeper level, I think, and this comes, I think, to a more kind of systemic threat in the book, I talk about a kind of dialectic between slavery and genocide throughout the book. And what you kind of see is that what capitalism does and imperialism does, and those are fundamentally intertwined,

is that it fundamentally exterminates both the resistance movements and both movements that operate outside of its system. And its system is either outright slavery, as we knew from Haiti and Chattel slavery, and still in some places we experience today. But of course, also, even when the so-called wage or free wage labor came up, this is what Marx called the Veald slavery or what people refer to as wage slavery. And why it's because people were systematically, robbed of the commons of their lands, of their way to basically feed themselves, nourish themselves,

so that basically hunger would spur them on, force them to work in conditions that they normally would never accept. And this was, you know, articulated very explicitly and openly back in those days when this was coming up in the 18th, 19th century. And this is what, you know, some scholars would call a structural genocide. And then maybe to make it more concrete in how these things relate. There was a very interesting petition level at the UN at the United Nations in 1951 by a communist African-American communist named Patterson. And basically it was called We Charge Genocide, very well-argued document, 240 pages. And he basically charges genocide against the United States against African-Americans. And he mentions, of course, the systemic lynchings.

he estimated about 10,000 black people lynched and very brutal ways, very open ways. Sometimes people also forget these were not like in some ways hidden, right? These were, you know, neighborhood parties, you know, pictures would be spread on postcards and send around the country. But that was not actually one of the main ways that the genocide argument was made. The genocide argument was made also about denying the means of life to a people. And he basically says that the lynchings were only the more kind of active violent method that would intimidate the black masses to accept a kind of subhuman,

be accepted as a subhuman labor force for capitalism, for the profits of corporations. And that's why he called this a genocide for profits. And he shows that the unequal material standards between the white and the black population led back then about 30,000 extra excess mortality per year, 30,000 killed. And actually, I took various studies together, showed that actually if you put them together, the figures from 1940 to 2020, it's about 6 million dead. So we're talking about massive numbers.

And I think what you see basically at the level of Palestine, if you zoom out globally, you know, what sometimes the thing about settler colonialism is, you know, apartheid, the racial apartheid is so blatant and in your face because it is local. But of course, colonialism kind of by all these artificial borders and distance, kind of masks a global apartheid system that in a very similar way creates enormous distance in what people will have to accept in terms of their living standards, their wages, but also their environmental standards, the pollution they have to accept in all these things in the factories, the smog, which also obviously impact their living standards.

And I think what you see basically the genocide in Palestine is a kind of open lynching that forces the global south to basically stay in line and accept this kind of structural genocide that basically also is intertwined, this structural genocide, these lower living standards, is also essential to make them accept wage slavery at a level of super exploitation that would normally never be accepted. And, you know, this is deeply intertwined, as I said,

like on the both active level, when we're talking about active genocide, the more kind of blatant genocide in Palestine, we see ecocide and genocide combined there. But on the more structural level, we see the same thing, right? We see how many Indian cities are working in vast, like even if we look at climate breakdown, People often talk about how unequally, you know, the deaths from hurricanes, typhoons and things like that are divided across the global south and the global north. But even the direct pollution, the direct air pollution in cities already kills millions every year.

Even if we're talking about the lead pollution, if we're talking about all these other forms of pollution, they obviously also have an impact on structural genocide. So they are fundamentally interrelated both on the ecological level as on the human level, but also on the both structural level and the more active level. And you see that even when there is a more kind of structural relationships of exploitation, super exploitation and structural genocide, but not an open attempt at annihilation, you see that when resistance pops up, that can become genocidal. Look at Vietnam, look at Gaza today, and look at so many other places. So I hope that answers your question.

It was a bit of a long tangent. Well, your tangent, Chris, actually went right over two questions that I was planning on asking. And you answered them so brilliantly that, like, you covered most of what I was planning on asking. But I will add a couple of points in. And then I do have small follow-up questions on each of the two points that you were making. So your point of structural genocide being connected with pollution. pollution is a really brilliant one that I think that more people need to acknowledge. And we have many examples of where we have major studies that have been done on the ways in which pollution is placed onto populations not only in the global south, but also minority populations within the global north, so that profits from corporations are extracted by certain populations within these societies.

and the effects of pollution from those same industries that capital is being extracted from are then being placed onto completely different populations. So you have one group of people that are taking the profit and another group of people that are bearing the cost environmentally and as a result, their health. There was a major study that came out, and I'm going to get the year wrong, but I want to say that it was around 2014 or 2015, came out from, as memory serves, University of Chicago, but again, this is like 12 years ago, so I might, I might have the wrong university here, but I think it was University of Chicago that was looking at industries within the

United States in particular, and they were looking at which neighborhoods were profiting most from specific industries and which neighborhoods the pollution was most prevalent in. And what they found is that the neighborhoods that were taking all of the profit were almost exclusively white. and they found that the populations that were exposed to the pollution from those same industries, the same production processes that were generating the capital for the white neighborhoods, were being born almost entirely by majority black and Latino neighborhoods. So one industry, creating profit for one group and creating structural damage to the other group in terms of health outcomes. I also just want to make a brief mention.

You mentioned environmental. pollution. My best friend, Salvatore Engel de Mauro, is a soil scientist, and he also looks at the ways in which soil pollution is in many ways unequal. And what I mean by that is that the pollution is, of course, put out by certain groups of people, but that is not the same groups of people that are bearing the costs of that pollution. It's often minoritized populations, even within the global north that are suffering from those, but also in particular in the global south. So that's just a little bit that I wanted to add in in terms of specific points of what you said there, Chris. But to add in these follow-up questions to, again, what you had brilliantly answered and actually really covered very well what I was planning on asking you about,

you had mentioned this twin logic of genocide and slavery and the ways in which slavery and wage slavery during the Industrial Revolution at their core really demonstrate that, there is violence at the heart of capitalism as a system. It's not an aberration for violence to be present in the system. It's the core operating principle of the system. So the first question I have for you, Chris, is can you talk a little bit more about why it is that violence has to be necessary in order for this system to operate in the way that it's intended to operate? And then the second question, you talked about we charged genocide and we were talking about structural genocide. I'm wondering if you can also talk a bit about how understanding that there are very direct, intentional, explicit forms of genocide. And there's also these long-lasting, less easy to see, but no less catastrophic structural genocidal ways in which this is carried out.

I'm wondering if you can talk about how the distinction between the structural genocide forms as well as the direct genocide forms is important for anti-imperialist organizing or does that distinction matter for organizing? These are great questions. Can you just repeat the first one real short as a summary? Yeah, sorry, I tend to talk too much. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. The first one was about why it is that violence has to be. Right, exactly. Yeah.

Of capitalism. Yeah. Well, in its most simplest form that I can answer would be to say that, you know, corporations are by law, actually, by now, by law, operating as a system to maximize profits. and they need to be kind of the most ruthless psychopathic entities by law to achieve that. The only aim is to increase profits. And how do you increase profits? You either push down costs or you increase your market share. And both of these, if you think them through a little bit, accompany a lot of violence.

Because if you push down costs, what are those costs? They are labor, whether it is human, labor, the people working in the factories, whether it is unpaid labor that are kind of pushed to the sides because actually those humans first had to be raised, had to be clothes, had to be fed, have to be taken care of by healthcare to do their work, or whether it's the soils, whether it's the resources which are obviously also created in incredibly complex interdependent labors of life within the ecosystem. You want to push down those costs as much as possible, which means your cheapening life.

And obviously, people will not want to accept this. So they will want to resist. And that is why you need violence to keep them down. And in fact, that's exactly one of the points I mentioned before, why we see this twin birth of both kind of the robbery of the commons, basically the means of subsistence for people and at the same time the rise of capitalism and the wage system because normally people would not accept this and they would make this very explicit.

I should make this maybe a bit more dramatic or bringing the numbers because I think not everybody always realizes how terrible actually the rise of capitalism and imperialism have been for living standards across the globe. And I'm leaning on this for a foreign world. on an excellent study that was done by Jason Hickle, who of course also wrote the forward to the book, along with, I believe it was Dylan Sullivan.

And they show that on a material level, whether we're looking at wages, looking at height, looking at all kinds of ways to really measure or the rise of famines, you basically see a complete collapse of living standards basically everywhere when a region or a continent is basically integrated within the capitalist system, even within Europe. Even within Europe, we saw a massive rise of famines.

And we also see a massive rise in violence. You know, sometimes we have this strange idea that there was this, and obviously you don't think this, but the dominant story is kind of that we have, you know, these liberal revolutions, whether it was like the Dutch against the Spanish and then the glorious revolution in Britain and then the American Independence Revolution. And, you know, they bring in parliaments. And, of course, it was limited because, you know, not everybody could vote, but slowly, but surely it got better from there.

But if you actually look in a bit more detail, it's not just that not everybody had the right to vote. It is, in fact, that the people who were excluded from that right, which was the vast majority of the people, because the working class, women, colonized people, all of them couldn't. In fact, their repression increased. vastly. We see a massive expansion of genocide. We see a massive expansion of slavery, a massive expansion of colonialism, and a massive expansion of repression even against the domestic working classes in each of these countries after those so-called liberal revolutions.

You know, Domenico Luzurdo wrote a great, great book, liberalism, a counter-history on this. And I thought one of the very telling facts that he mentions is that actually after the glorious revolution, the so-called glorious revolution, I must say, you saw also a massive expansion of the death penalty. And almost all these death penalties were for crimes against poverty. You know, attempted murder was considered a minor offense. While if you would steal a handkerchief, you could be hanged, you know, for a boy as little as 11 years old. And that tells you something about what those liberal revolutions were really about. When they're talking about rights, they are talking about the rights of property. And more specifically, and this is also what I

emphasize, they are not even talking about property. They are talking about private property. Because, you know, they were robbing en masse. They were robbing the commons. They were robbing entire countries. But they were basically saying, those do not matter because those are communal labors. And sometimes they wouldn't even recognize communal labor as relevant at all. They would just call those idle lands. But even some liberal philosophers who would recognize it would basically say, you know, divine law does not recognize this as relevant. Only private property matters.

So you see a kind of very direct relationship between both the ideology, the use of violence and the explosion on their capitalism. If we get, you know, there's this resistance part on the one hand. There are also some dynamics that I think Ali Kha. also mentions very well, is also this tendency of overproduction that capitalism has. Very simply, if you keep pushing down wages, you know, who's going to buy your products? So at some point, it becomes quite difficult to keep increasing your profits. And then it becomes actually very, war itself becomes a very effective means of solving this problem,

because you are basically burning down a massive, massive, you know, one tomahawk missile, I forgot the exact number, but I know it costs more than a million. You can burn that through very easily, very quickly. It does not have to be bought by the general population. In fact, the cost is borne by them. The profits are private. And at the same time, it's also a means of basically solving the resistance of people against the system.

And this comes back to your question of why it is relevant to make this distinction between active genocide and structural genocide. I think it is very important to see the connections. And I think at the same time

it is absolutely vital to be in complete and total solidarity with those people who are facing active genocide. Because, you know, one of the things that a lot of

a colonialist would talk about, they would often compare colonized peoples as a kind of volcano, as a kind of, you know, a kind of, it can burst any moment. They know this repression cannot last. They know no people will ever submit indefinitely to this kind of repression. So they know the volcano might burst at some point. But when it bursts, it is a challenge to this entire omnisciental world system. Whether it was the revolution in Haiti, whether it was the revolution in Russia, whether it was the revolution in China, whether it was the revolution in,

whether it is an anti-colonial resistance in Palestine today, those are fighting in essence for the overturn of this structural genocide and structural ecocide. They become kind of a focal point, a kind of acupuncture point where a lot of these things come together. Because we also see, you know, if we look at the nitty gritty of how Israel is tied, you know, as a counter-revolutionary force globally, backing military dictatorships, backing, you know, reactionary campaigns, disinformation campaigns. We see it now happening in Latin America, for example. They become a kind of tip of the sphere of a global system. And those active modes of violences, you know, in a sense, you know, there's this saying, you know, first they came for the communists. And then they came for us.

We could also say, first, they came for the hedero and the Nama. It would maybe be more accurate, but that's a topic for another time. But what we see is basically that when those kind of resistances succeed, it gives a lot more breathing space for the rest. Like, for example, the victory of the Soviet Union. And we can, of course, have all the new ones discussions about what went wrong and what didn't go wrong. But structurally, we see, and I especially actually in the Great, Colonial War, I go into much more detail on a lot of the data about this. But you see basically

everywhere where socialists take, or almost everywhere, where socialists take power, we see a massive improvement in the long term. Of course, there are, you know, the tragic episodes that we all know about in the Great Soviet famine, but in the long term, we see a massive improvement of living standards, health, life expectancy, doctors per capita, massive, massive expansion. And them doing better than any capitalist counterpart with a similar level of GDP. But it's not just them that improve. In fact, they give breathing space to the rest of the world. Because suddenly the Soviet Union can give weapons to the anti-aparpaid movements.

Cuba starts to actually join them and put their own lives on the line to liberate southern Africa. And suddenly, also, you get more breathing space for what they called, you know, so-called nationalist, although even what we call nationalists, we're also socialists. You know, if you look at someone like Sukarno, he said, my ideology is a combination of nationalism, Islam, and communism. You know, they had their own interpretation, but there was, you know, some economic level, some, you know, level of nationalizations, of, you know, welfare policies, of taking back the economy. It was more than just a cultural product, more than just fighting for a flag independence.

Nobody's going to shed their blood in a national war of liberation just for a flag. They will fight for the land. They will fight for real material improvements, as Amal Kabral said. So you see that when those liberation movements succeed, it gives breathing space also for the rest of the world. And this is also, I think, and even within the imperial core, I think the whole concept of social democracy in large parts was a kind of comprehensive. of capital, what they call the golden age of capitalism, you know, with stable wages and stable social welfare and after World War II, you know, that was also because of the threat of the Soviet Union and the threat of communist movements. We see this in a lot of internal documents that they were motivated in strong part by that. And that also once, you know, socialism fell, that's, it's no coincidence that then we saw the complete domination of neoliberalism and of structural genocide. You know, in the 90s, this is, it's no coincidence that then we saw the complete domination of neoliberalism and of structural genocide. You know, in the 90s, it's, it's a In 1996, probably the absolute height of U.S. power in the world, the World Health Organization publishes his communique,

saying that we see a massive resurgence of all these preventable diseases that were retreating before, and that there are about 50,000 daily deaths per capita from a lot of diseases that you could save those lives at $1 per person. $1 per person. So basically $50,000 per day to solve that. At the same time, the United States is spending a billion dollars per day, if not more, on the military, which is intimidating all those countries. It's the same period where this thing called the Ledeen doctrine was coined, where some policy officer at the United States said basically, the Ladeen said, yeah,

you know, every few years or so, we need to smash your little country against the wall just to show we mean business. And this is exactly this kind of lynching that I'm talking about, the logic of the open violence. You know, sometimes I think within liberalism, we kind of, you know, there's this hesitance to see the rationality sometimes in, for example, how openly Israel commits this genocide and how openly this backing is. And I think this comes back to, you know, and maybe I'm, if you have. If you want to cop me off, by the way, I'm connecting a lot of tensions, but, you know, I'm just going to rabble on.

But I think, you know, this has something to do also with the predicament we are in. You know, fascism was not an anti-liberal movement. You know, it had its issues with liberalism, but it didn't have issues with the original aims of the so-called liberal revolutions. You know, the aims of, you know, a small part of the population being the master race and dominating above all others. and those hierarchies, it was basically becoming scared because just as Los Urode very well argues in a counter history of liberalism is basically that a lot of that rhetoric about, you know, this, you know, human rights and those parliaments and those voting rights, they were being co-opted by movements that were not liberal. They were not speaking about them. When the Haitians rose

up in revolution and just before we had the so-called French revolution with slave owners who are part of that with still no voting rights for the working classes. You know, people who claimed those rights they were never meant for. And what happened is basically that those rights were being co-opted from below. And that's when fascism basically says there's a revolutionary threat. And we need to, you know, go back to the more open methods of violence and do away with all these parliaments. And I think we see a similar conjectory moment in history today where basically, in this time, it's less of a threat from domestic communist movements,

and it's much more of a threat from obviously the rise of the global south, and then especially obviously China, which is threatening to basically turn over the imperial arrangement. And I think that's why we see a kind of return to this more open mode of violence. I think this is how we can explain a phenomenon like Trump. I think also it's very telling, actually, about the liberal center, how they treat Trump. There was this moment, I believe it was Marco Rubio,

who gave the speech in Munich. And he got standing ovations from the whole liberal center in Europe, even though he gave the most explicit colonial speech that we haven't heard for decades. But they were happy because he said, we are in this together. They are not worried about Trump, you know, committing open violence against Iran, backing the genocide in Palestine, which Joe Biden did just as much. They are worried about tensions within the imperial block, and as long as they are together on the violence against the global south, they are okay. And this is how we see the dialectic between liberalism, in a broader sense, they are really part of the same capitalist movement.

Absolutely. I'm so glad you brought up, because I was ahead in my note. So I need to ask you about what you think the function and role of Marco Rubio's Munich Security Conference speech was, because it is sort of your book in a way as a report. from like the internationalist socialist left to this idea that the last 500 years of colonization was, you know, coterminous with the rise of the West and Western Christian civilization, which they were endorsing and praising and saying needs to be re-energized. But why would they say that in this way at this time if it weren't that this is itself a kind of family?

appeal to a false past that your book and I think the three-part series that you're doing on the Great Colonial War is going to, you know, help us document and understand the incredible costs on the world, the immiseration of the world. But it's about this kind of intra-imperialist solidarity, which we've seen as always what has happened with these international institutions, the sponsoring of international law, these bodies like the UN and so on, is a technique and a tactic for trying to deal with intra-imperialist or inter-imperial, but from the West, you know, conflict and manage them in an appropriate way to maintain Western hegemony, which, as you're pointing out, is now really collapsing and facing the biggest threat since the rise of the communist bloc to challenge. capitalism and so it's having to kind of resort to these more militant direct appeals to authorizing violence, colonial violence in particular. So this is one of the things it seems to me the book is so good at doing is using the moment that as you rightly say it's the Holocaust

for our times. It's the clarifying kind of event through which you can see. and understand global politics at the local and the global level. And the book uses it so well to piece together these connections between capitalism, ecocide, genocide, i.e. omniside, as you're saying. But one component that I wanted to ask you about, which I was delighted to see in the book, is getting back to this way in which liberalism, political ideology, culture are also necessary to really understand in this context in order to really liberate ourselves from the devastating and very comprehensive conditions of capitalism that rationalizes and normalizes all kinds of things to the detriment of ourselves

and others. And so you have a really interesting chapter, about two chapters that we could talk about, but I'll just ask you first about the earlier one, which is chapter four in this book, called structural cultural genocide, the hell of inner life under capitalism. This really appeals to me, this analysis, because it really integrates some of the things we've been talking about with Gabriel Rockhill, about, you know, kind of construction of the imperial theory industry and forms of culture that are actually servicing a compatible left distraction from the real issues. And the other component that somebody like Lara Shihai,

who's a recent book from the clinic to the streets and her podcast psychic militancy, we've talked with her about, and my friend Benji Schoendorf in Resistance is Fertile about the psychological sort of war front, you know, that has to be waged. So, you know, I'm interested in if you could tell us how this question of the inner life under capitalism is central and necessary for us to really see how it operates.

What is the inner life, the hell of inner life under capitalism? This again, a big and great topic with many layers that I'm sure I will forget some of them. But maybe I think there are multiple levels that this operates, right? There's on the one hand that I think your conversation with the great Gabriel Rockhill was probably mostly about that's the ideological plane and the kind of intellectual plane and how that is controlled. And I kind of summarize a lot of the studies and, you know, the political economy of which theories become more dominant that are, you know,

less tied to actual material analysis and revolutionary struggle. And on the other side, and obviously postmodernism plays a huge part in this, you know, getting excessively focused on, you know, words and culture and symbolism. And on the other side, you see, you know, that this is what is aimed. And it's not just obviously the university and these theories, it's also the media, which is still highly dominant, dominated by the Western world that we sometimes don't even realize the extent to which it is. and I give a lot of the data in the book. But at the same time, you also see kind of that the lower classes and the working classes at the same time are basically caught off in general from basically education. We see a massive defunding of education budgets, especially obviously in the Global South.

A lot of this was pushed by the IMF and the World Bank, obviously, in the 90s and 80s. And you see a kind of, you know, I think there was one data point. There was a moment in Brazilian history that Madison Avenue was spending about equal to 30% of the entire Brazilian education budget in Brazil. People are being massively indoctrinated by capitalism in ways that we don't even realize. And like capitalism is destroying, and this is the other thing it is destroying, on the one hand, our relationship to the environment, right? We are being pushed evermore into cities, which itself are being ever more cut off from the countryside. You know, there's no good transport from one to the other. In fact, even the countryside has become a massive, massive field of poverty.

You see more and more people having to leave because they cannot survive. So there's that element. There's the obvious element of alienation from your own labor, right? It's not that you are working in a communal economy, that you know actually why you are doing what you're doing. and you see the direct fruits of your labor going to your neighbors, to your family, to your, uh, uh, know you are being basically dominated by a kind of, you know, a boss somewhere. Probably it's not even your own direct boss, some subsidiary and you're working indirectly, you know, through a whole chain of hierarchies for somebody.

And we know obviously by the whole kind of tailorism, how everything is being made as mechanic and road as possible, basically turning us into kind of machines. And we know, from the education system that this had to be really, really kind of beaten into people. This was not something natural that people wanted to accept. You know, there's the more direct violence we were talking about the hangings, the poverty, the famines, but there's also, you know, the educational level. There's a very interesting thing that in Suriname, for example, Dutch colony, there was a compulsory education they introduced there before they introduced it inside the Netherlands.

and the reason is the abolishment of slavery. And they were scared that people would basically rebel or start joining the maroons in the jungle and that they would not be an obedient workforce anymore. So they had to basically indoctrinate them in hating themselves, hating their culture, hating their language, obviously winty, the local or the African kind of spirituality, the indigenous spirituality have to be repressed, which interestingly was a trigger, by the way, for the Haitian revolution. It was triggered by a voodoo ceremony of Cecil Fatemann.

So, you know, these things are interrelated. That doesn't mean, and this is a tricky thing. Sometimes I think when we talk about this, culture is important. Culture is important and many revolutionaries have recognized so. But the key thing is it has to be tied with a material struggle for liberation. There's a very great essay by Amman Kahrel on culture, actually, and he gives his anecdote. I don't know if it's actually a real anecdote or he's just making a point, but he says it.

It's said that basically when Joseph Goebbels, the main propagandist of the Nazis, he heard about culture. He brings out his revolver and now it's serious, showing that, you know, even the most pure forms of imperialism for them, culture was this very serious thing. And also, like, the person who pointed term genocide, Rafael Lemkin, also treats culture actually is a very important facet of genocide. He defines genocide as a much broader phenomenon than just mass killings. You know, it's about disintegrating the cultural structures, the communal structures, the economic structures, the language, the whole thing that binds a people together, all that together. The problem is, I think, what happens with liberalism and the kind of co-optation,

that sometimes happens is they take only the cultural aspect and they remove all the rest. This is how we get somebody like a Mobutu who, you know, renames Congo Zaire and, you know, has all these traditional African dresses and is decolonial and then, you know, is in bad with the CIA was literally helped into power by the former colonizers who, you know, murdered Patrice Lamumba. And this is why, you know, Amico Cabral at the same time emphasizes, yes, cultural, culture is vital, the self-respect, the dignity is vital for resistance, but at the same time, it has to be rooted in a material struggle for liberation. And this comes back to maybe the, so on the one hand, we have the kind of indoctrination

of the upper classes with the dominance of the media, of the academy, certain tendencies there, or whether it's, you know, the shadow banning online and all these mechanics that we have. On the other hand, we see a kind of math alienation of life being pushed on the lower classes. You know, the alienation in the factories, whether it's the alienation from their environments, where there's the social media platforms that are literally created to create, you know, dopamine dependencies. They are created to become addictive. They are created to suck you in. And, you know, not for everybody.

This is even political indoctrination. You know, it might be the most random type of content on TikTok just to distract you from your woes, from your ills, to push you into your own screen and basically take you out of your environment and numb you to the pain that you are experienced to, which in a lot of ways, you know, they used to do this with opium. They used to do this with tobacco. This was also massively pushed among the working classes. Even also in the global south, in Indonesia, this was also a big thing. So we see this kind of alienation of life being pushed on multiple levels. You see basically the ruling class is being indoctrinated to become the handmaidens of imperialism. And this was even more blatant, obviously, in the colonial times, like a lot of those universities were literally founded by colonial powers to create collaborators. And at the same time, the rest is supposed to become alienated from life. It's supposed to constantly also internalize these constant pressures, right?

We don't have time. We don't have resources. We're constantly scrambling to survive. And at the same time, then we have to, you know, do a mindfulness course or go to therapy or, you know, nothing against these things. I actually go to monasteries. I meditate. That's not the problem. The problem is that it's about internalizing your own problems.

And Fanon said this very well, but the real liberation comes not from internalization, but from externalization. It's from basically seeing where the real cause of those problems lies. and organizing to fight them. That is real liberation. That is what ignites the fire inside yourself and basically transforms you as a person. And that's when you start to organize and basically make a revolution. Listeners who are interested in your discussion of Mobutu,

I'm going to make a recommendation before I turn us to the next question. So on guerrilla history's African revolutions and decolonization series, we have four or five episodes that are like over two hours. long each on the history of the Congo and the present situation in the Congo. And in one of the two, or possibly both of the two episodes that we had with Georges-unzangola and Talaja, we discussed the history of the Congo and talked quite a bit about the Mobutu era. And exactly what Chris was talking about with regard to the way in which Mobutu was supported and brought into power really by the CIA, but then has these, you know, cultural callbacks while he's in power to, you know,

placate some certain segments of the populace is something that we got into in that episode quite a bit. So instead of discussing it more beyond what Chris already did, I can just recommend listeners go back and listen to those episodes that we did with Georgians, Angola and Talaja on the history of the Congo. And that section in particular was pretty interesting in those conversations. But to turn us to a slightly different. topic here, Chris. One of the things that was pretty interesting in your work is that you have this discussion of phylo-Semitism, the proclaimed love of Jews by Zionists, and you write that it's

actually a form of anti-Semitism. You then go out and talk about Joe Biden's statements on these sorts of topics. You talk about analyses of how Jewish fascists and anti-Semitic fascists work together. to uphold white supremacy. I'm wondering, because this is really interesting, I'm wondering if you can on the show now, explain this dialectic, what does it mean for how we understand the relationship between Zionism and the far right?

This is again a topic. There's a lot to uncover here. In fact, one third of the part two of the Great Colonial War is entirely about this. So there's even much more than I deal with in this book. But where to start? So there are different layers to this question. The first thing to understand is that Zionism is originally not a Jewish tradition.

It is a Christian tradition. And it comes, in fact, at a moment in history that we see the massive expansion of the Crusades, of colonialism, which is accompanied by anti-Semitism. Of course, the original kind of racial anti-Semitism is literally about saying that, Jews are a Semitic people, so they don't belong to Europe, they belong to West Asia. So they are kind of an intruder. But before that, it was on a religious level, you know, they were also considered kind of part of West Asia.

They were part of the internal enemy, part of, you know, the Muslim world in that sense. And we see also very interesting, actually, that just before Columbus set out to invade Apayyala or the Americas, we see the consolidation of, in the fall of Aalus, in the Iberian Peninsula, and you see a kind of racialization of both Muslims and Jews there as who become kind of a second-class citizenry, a lot of them are ethnically cleansed.

Even if you convert it to yourself, your bloodline would still be followed for a long time, basically to check your loyalty and things like that. like that. So you see already a kind of racialization that you can even escape with conversion. So at this time, at this exact time, you see basically Zionism appearing first as a religious doctrine, which is basically about basically the ethnic cleansing of Jews and pushing them back to, you know, Israel where they supposedly came from. in later versions of it, which are very popular, of course, in the United States, in the evangelical tradition. It's a quite literal interpretation that, you know, the Christ will come back if all

the Jews are deported to Palestine. I shouldn't even say Israel. And then basically, they will give in a choice, Christ will come back, and they will be given a choice to either convert or die. You know, so this is a very clearly anti-Semitic tradition. I believe that, there was even a major Israel pro-Israel rally at the early, early months of the genocide, a major evangelical Christian was also speaking alongside all these pro-Israel voices. And this is somebody who literally thought Hitler came, you know, as a mission from God to create Israel. So this is kind of this deeper relationship. So the interesting thing is that it starts more as a religious doctrine and it gets a more secular

form in the 19th century. And we see this in Britain. And interestingly, this is actually also very clearly tied to the destruction of the earth and fossil colonialism in the sense that the first use of steam power as a method of warfare by the British was in Palestine, was in Akha, Palestine in 1840, if I remember correct. And basically they completely leveled and destroyed the entire city and it created this complete like euphoria among the British ruling class of what kind of destruction they could wreck and this complete enumeration also with with fossil fuel because of it. And that also created a myth, the destruction and the genocide of that city was so complete that they created this myth of a land without the people for a people without the land, which of course

wasn't true. It was more of a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, which of course hasn't been fulfilled yet, but they are trying very hard to fulfill it. But again, these are Christians. Although it takes a more secular form in the sense that, obviously what's happening in the 19th century, we see the rise of socialist movements. We see a massive poor working class, Jewish underclass in the Russian Empire,

many of them refugees, many of them fleeing. And we see a lot of racism against these people, which is why a lot of Jews are attracted to revolutionary movements and socialist movements, just as was the same, by the way, with black people in the United States or Chinese migrants in the Netherlands. So you see this kind of racialization of communism because communism was anti-racist.

It's a very logical fusion of these things. But sorry, I lost my tension. Somebody just came out home in my house. But what was the original question again? The question was, why it's sorry, the question is why it's important to understand

the relationship between Zionism and the far right and why phylo-semitism is a form of anti-Semitism. Right, I'm giving a long answer, I'm realizing now. Yeah, yeah, I'm still... That's what we like on these shows. Yeah, yeah. No, so basically what you see is

Zionism becomes, one, a means of getting rid of the Jews. It becomes a means of basically trying also to push Jews away from socialism and give them an alternative. And it becomes also a method of creating a new imperial beachhead within Western Asia. And we see this as probably even the most explicit aim that goes well into the 21st century. Joe Biden has said many times in the past that he considers Israel the most efficient $3 billion a year investment that the United States could make.

If there weren't in Israel, we would have to create one, he often says. Well, you did create one, although, you know, it was the UK, your former imperial patron. But so obviously there is a very clear, you know, Israel is a kind of forward military base of imperialism in a very important strategic region. It's obviously where a lot of the oil is created and passes through, but it's also obviously the Suez Canal is a major transport region for a lot of goods in the world. So for various reasons, it's very important for that to be there. And a settler colony is actually a much more reliable form of imperialism, a much more reliable forward military base in a sense than even countries like Saudi Arabia or Egypt or kind of these kind of neo-colonial puppet states

because it's much easier for revolutions to be triggered in neo-colonial puppet states than inside of a settler colony. Like the whole point of a settler colony is that we see in history, they become some of the most aggressive forms of imperialism because you also see that kind of class struggle kind of evaporates because you can kind of redistribute the land. You can kind of recreate a kind of solidarity based on whiteness against the indigenous population

and obviously in the case of the United States, against the enslaved. And we see this, whether it's the United States, whether it was Australia. Gerald Horn has done a lot of great work on this, especially in terms of the United States, where you see that in Europe, people are constantly fighting each other, whereas along class lines, along religious lines,

but within the United States, they can kind of find this new solidarity based on whiteness. And because the class tensions are kind of diffused there, they've also become much more effective imperialists outside of their own borders. Like many of the methods of extermination they used against the indigenous peoples were later exported across the world. You know, the United States has been one of the most aggressive forces

in the history of mankind. it has been at war, about 92% of his history, and we see obviously something similar with Israel. So I think there is also a very clear dynamic there. Then it comes to this Philosemitism, and this is a very important thing, because we need to also realize that for a very long time, Jews and even the Holocaust were not actually...

Like right now, obviously, you know, if you say anything remotely anti-Semitic. In fact, if you say something that's not at all anti-Semitic, and it's just anti-Zionist, you'll be immediately, you know, vilified and, you know, publicly ashamed in all the newspapers, canceled everywhere. But this was not the case at all before the Holocaust, during the Holocaust, and even for a long time after the Holocaust.

And this has a lot to do with both the class position of a lot of Jews that have changed over the years. As I said, you know, we were talking before World War II about a massive socialist movement, massive working class movements among Jews. And we saw kind of their incorporation within the imperialist world after World War II, which also, by the way, happened with the Irish. This is not a completely unique thing of kind of becoming wide,

to be coming integrated into the imperialist project. But the real turning point, like even after World War II, you know, in the Netherlands, the Holocaust was not remembered until 66 in the official commemoration. Before that, it was just this kind of nationalist mythology about a resistance nation. Only the soldiers were, you know, even the royal house, which literally the prince was a Nazi, but okay, you know, it's an actual card-carrying Nazi member. I'm not kidding you. And he was like at the forefront of those commemorations.

So it was not a part of the memory that really changed especially in the 60s and especially after 67. And people like Norman Finkelstein have shown this very well. Well, it's basically the moment that Israel proves itself as a reliable, powerful, military, anti-imperialist, counter-revolutionary beachhead in Western Asia and becomes firmly and openly in the American camp, that we see suddenly this so-called Holocaust industry expanding. And what this means, basically, is that Jews are welcome. In fact, their trauma is even excessive.

exploited, and the Holocaust is constantly exploited, basically if it serves a certain function. And what is interesting is that Joe Biden at some point also says, and this is the comment you were referring to probably in your question, he says at some point that Jews need Israel to be safe and that the United States cannot guarantee your safety. And he was saying this as the president of the United States of America. And it's a very interesting statement. Because if we look at the implicit statement about that, he's basically saying, if Israel is gone, I will not protect you.

If Israel is gone and you will not serve your function as the most efficient three billion a year investment for American power abroad, I will throw you under the bus. And I think this is very clear. And in fact, we can go back to the 30s because we've bought in less extreme manners. You know, the Nazis were very anti-Semitic. I would not call them philosophic, but they did have a relationship with the Zionist movement. A quite strong relationship. Sometimes people underestimate this PhD from Aetam Bloom looks into this very where also that's a great book on this.

There's another PhD by this Israeli scholar called Aitam Bloom, which also goes into this in quite a lot of detail. But the relationship was material, economic, even ideological. Some of the key founders of the Zionist movement had very deep ties also with Nazi racial thinkers. You know, I can go deeply into this, but the key question here was that for a while, the Nazi movement was basically a movement of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, not yet outright genocide. And basically, when that strategy started to fill, they went over to outright genocide. And I think this is a warning. And obviously, a lot of those Zionists who collaborated with the Nazi regime and even also disproportionately, by the way, within the so-called Jewish councils,

I think with those, if I remember correctly, the figures from the surveys with those of a political background, about two-thirds of them were Zionists. And so they were very dominant there, and that was tied to their ideological positions. We see even after the Second World War, by the way, that Israel, for example, was deeply in bed with the Vidala regime in Argentina, which probably, you know, we hear it after the 7th of October, the biggest deaths, the biggest massacre of Jews ever since World War II. You know, let alone we're not even going to talk about the whole Hannibal directive and all that. But even just looking at the plain numbers, the estimate is that about between 3,000 Jews were disappeared, murdered, tortured to death by a regime where, you know, basically there were swastikas on police stations, some people were tortured while Nazi songs were playing in the background.

You know, you see a very close relationship between Zionism and fascism that runs very, very, very deep. And I think the interesting thing, the last thing I will say about this dialectic to finally bring it home, your question between Philosemitism and the kind of more blatant anti-Semitism, because I think, again, like I said, with Biden, there's even an anti-Semitic undertone in the Philismetism. Another example would be Churchill, who wrote this piece on the struggle for the Jewish soul, Zionism versus Bolshevism. And it's a long article. with a lot of anti-Semitic tropes about how Jews were behind every revolution in history, and they are literally the Antichrist.

This is how he talks about them. But there's also the divine, and that is the Zionist movement. And it's basically saying, we will have your back, but only if you are two of our imperialist forces, and otherwise you are the Antichrist, and we will fucking exterminate you. This is the subtext that is in there. But you also see a dialectical relationship, between the Philosemites and the anti-Semite,

the more kind of openly neo-Nazi kind of movements who kind of use this philosophism that is not really about Jews, that it's more about imperialism and Zionism. And they kind of use that to say, oh, see Jewish people really control the government, they control the United States,

refusing to see, obviously, the structural role that they play within imperialism. And they can constantly point at each other and kind of feed on each other to become bigger and bigger. And then obviously, once all these Philo-Semites build up the police forces, build up the militaries, build up their institutions of repression, repress the very anti-racist movements that if an actual anti-Semitic power would ever gain power openly so, would be in solidarity with Jews, they are repressing them.

And who will laugh last if they will inherit those police force? people like Trump. So this is kind of the dialectic that we see between that, and I think it is quite dangerous. Yeah, much to discuss there. And of course, it's very relevant to, you know, the politics of our time, the way in which, you know,

the question of anti-Semitism has been used politically to support, of course, the Zionist. but also why to help explain how and why it is at the far right seem to be very fully on board, right, with support of the Zionist entity. And of course, it has a lot to do with that deep history that you were talking about from the 19th century, but even, of course, earlier. But don't get me going on the Crusades because then, you know, we definitely will lose all of our time. But that is very much a part of, I think, the picture here in terms of the invention of Zionist.

coming from Christian colonialist and racial doctrines. But there's so much else to discuss in the book. I mean, there's several other chapters that I wanted to touch on, but as we're getting close to when we usually like to do about 90 minutes, like a football match, you know, and we can go a little bit further. But I don't want to abuse your generous time, Chris, for being with us. And, of course, it's a book that people should read. even if we don't cover absolutely every component in our discussion today about the wonderful analysis you're bringing,

I want to encourage people to pre-order this book. It's going to be published at the end of the month, and it will repay your reading of it. So I want to encourage that. But one of the things, so maybe we'll have to be abbreviated in terms of discussing the greening of colonial capitalism and maybe all the aspects of the globe planetary. revolution and counter-revolution, but if you want to incorporate what you think are the kind of key points in there, that would be helpful. But I wanted to turn us toward your final chapter, because I think this is very important that your book doesn't just try to analyze the problem

in a deep historical and conceptual way, which I think is very powerful and effective, and brings strands of analysis together that are often separated into a much more comprehensive and synthetic picture, which is politically valuable, that is a prelude to advancing for you and for your audience, a genuine discussion about what we can and must do to save the planet, to save ourselves, to resist on behalf of life. And so I wanted to open up the, you know, provocatively and, you know, reference to Lenin, you know, what is to be done.

You know, what is your kind of approach here, to thinking through and encouraging a politics, a resistant politics that could be more effective. And so, you know, what is to be done? You know, what are your strategies, as you put it here, for the defense of life? Maybe we can then get into some specifics. But tell us about, like, you know, how you take this up. What are your strategies? Right.

And obviously this is a huge question and a lot also depends on the local context, what is applicable and what context. But the kind of broad strokes, I often, when I do talks also at, you know, for activists or other spaces, I often start with the fact that I think is, and I think I can start this whole book with that. we need about 30% of our productive capacity today to give a good life for every single people on the planet. And we're talking not just about some extreme poverty line of like $1.8 or $2.3 or whatever the latest poverty line is. We're talking about physical material things like food, clothing, shelter, but even like access to modern technology, laptops.

telecommunication, a basic, decent, human life for everyone, with 30% of our productive capacity. And I think that is something very, very crucial to understand. Because that basically means that the economy we have today, this capitalist system, is incredibly inefficient in providing a good life for all. Of course, it is incredibly efficient from its own perspective, which is accumulating capital, which is the whole point I'm making in my book. But it also shows you that in fact, if we have a revolutionary transformation of society,

that a good life for all is very much reachable. It's very much reachable within planetary boundaries. And that means basically, you know, seizing the means of production. And I think, you know, there's a lot of very detailed kind of policy programs from various groups and international alliances and that go into nationalizing the heights of the economy and things like that after you gain power. And I talk about some of that.

But I think the even more difficult question and that I treat more of the chapter with is how do we actually get there? Because we can say we want to nationalize the heights of the economy, okay, great. But how do we actually get there? And I think that is one of the most difficult questions they are. And I think there are a couple of layers

that but I think the most important and perhaps also the most simple thing is that the main priority of what we do in our movements is about building organizational strength. And building organizational strength has various levels to it. But one of the things we see is that, for example, there are, and Bevin also wrote a great book about this, that we saw kind of some of the large, protest in history, whether it's Black Lives Matter, it was against invasion of Iraq, or was in 2010s, it was the Aerospring or in Brazil. We saw massive, massive protests, very little change. And that had both organizational and ideological weaknesses, and I think they are interrelated.

The organizational weaknesses is this kind of postmodern momentum that people are very afraid to actually create coherent, organized parties. You know, that doesn't mean, and I also go into some of the limitations of the Soviet Union and China, and we can have those critical discussions. But I think this kind of fear of replicating some of the mistakes of the past, and then basically fetishizing this kind of horizontalism and this post-ideological uprisings has been much, much, much more damaging than anything any kind of socialist government could ever do, it means that you're handing the reins to imperialism. Like it means that you can destabilize power, but you cannot seize it because you are not organized.

And it means that those forces who are organized are the forces of imperialism, are the reactionary militaries, or al-Qaeda, are the neo-Nazis, or the neoliberal technocrats and those funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, and I can go on and on and on. So that is something very crucial is building this organizational strength. Then it's the ideological clarity. And this has something to do with it, obviously, because there is a deeper root, obviously,

in postmodernism of this fear of building up actual organizational strength. But I think, and this is something, you know, as somebody situated in the Global North, I think also there's a very, very important point about recognizing imperialism as a vital, vital part of our struggle. And I go, and there are several reasons for that.

One of them, the most obvious, is actually, if we look at some of the inequalities that we are talking about, they are so much more extreme when we look at them internationally. If we're actually talking about a globally divided working class, the harshest division is

geographical, whether it's about wages, living standards, life expectancy, or just open oppression and violence that people, people have to deal with. That is one element. The other element is that for that very reason, we see that more organized and revolutionary strength is being built in the global south. Almost every major successful revolution that we have seen in history has been in the global south. They don't have the space very often to, you know, naval gaze in some kind of, you know,

fancy postmodern theory about discourse, they have to be thinking through very concrete and strategic and organizational questions, and that's why we have to learn from them. So we have to kind of reorient this learning process from the global north to the global south and take that the other way around. This is another element.

The other element is, and this is maybe, you know, the harsher part of the answer, is that there is, and I do believe this is true, and I tend not always to say this too loudly because obviously I don't want to kind of insult people and I don't mean it that way,

but I do think there is such a thing as a labor aristocracy. I think we can see on a very clear material level. It has been shown. Zach Cope wrote a great book on this and apparently he went off the ideological beep end strangely at some point, but still works there.

The wealth of sub-nations, he showed on a very concrete level, how the super exploitation of the global south is so extreme that people in the global north materially benefit from it. Now, I will nuance this a little bit because we do know that the capitalism is such an inefficient system that it does not necessarily translate into better lives. In fact, we know that healthy life expectancy is higher in China than it is in the United States, even though they have a much lower GDP per capita. So there is some nuance to this, but the key point I think is we see that basically for a real for their lives to really become better it would

not be enough to you know you know have some shuffling around around the corner you need some real revolutionary transformation and something like that only comes on the table when people are struggling to survive and I think those kind of questions are much more prevalent in the global south that means that in the global north we need to be not thinking necessarily about immediately getting this many seats. So I'm very actually pro or building revolutionary parties because I think they built much more coherence. We see a lot of climate action group here,

Palestine action group there. You know, I'm guilty of this myself as well. You see a lot of those movements. There are a few activists who run the show, then they get burned out. A party is just a very good vehicle of kind of synthesizing a lot of different things together. about how you combine tactics with strategy,

how you choose particular things in particular moments, how you build movement infrastructure and institutional memory within your organization, how you connect different topics together. All of those are very vital and you build them in a revolutionary party, but that does mean that if you, for example, participate in elections, that they have to be a means and not a goal, especially, especially in this phase of imperialism, where we still see this kind of redistribution of imperial super profits within the global north.

It means that you have to be building the institutional infrastructure for your movements for those moments that famously Lenin said, although it was more of a paraphrasing, but that there are decades where weeks happen and weeks where decades happen. And I think we are still in those decades where weeks happen, you know, in terms of the global north, least. But we need to be prepared for those weeks because obviously if you are not well organized, if you don't have a well, and the organization is not just about the organizational structure. It's also about the ideological coherence of your movement, right? Because a lot of those mass

movements of the 2010s, often they were, you know, against corruption or against repression or authoritarianism. And, you know, it's all valid, but they are very vague categories. They tell you very little and they are very easily co-opted. So you need a much more coherent movement. You need much more ideological training, cater-building and all those things coming together. That being said, I think the nuance is that obviously building up mass movements outside of the party with kind of dialectical relationships with those kind of parties are also very important. Like arguably the most successful Communist Party in history was the Communist Party of Indonesia, at least in terms of bringing in mass membership while not being actually in power.

You know, it's easier to build up a mass membership while they're in power. They were never in power. And still they had about 3 million members. But interestingly, they had about 20 million members of mass movements that were, you know, bigger than the Communist Party, but interrelated with it. Because not everybody is a communist. Not everybody can go as deeply into these ideological questions and strategic questions. So they had like women's movements, cultural movements, peasants movements, unions.

But you need to find a way to make them interrelate and make them strengthen each other. Of course, this comes back to one of these others, but these are more detailed questions, I guess. But arming yourself for counter-revolution is very important that that was one of the very big mistakes of the Pkii, obviously, as they were completely crushed by the Indonesian military after the CIA back coup. We don't know exactly how many died, some estimated a million. and there were effect some Indonesian generals who were bragging about two or three million. I don't know if they exaggerated or not,

but we are talking about mass, mass killings. Similar problems, obviously, with Allende. So those are also part of the questions. And then maybe to get back, I think this is also an important point. Sometimes there's this frustrating, and at least in the Netherlands, I don't know how much that is in the US,

but there's this kind of frustrating tension sometimes with, you know, Marxists and anarchists and, you know, I'm definitely more in the Marxist camp. Don't get me wrong. But I think we need to be more precise in the exact discussions that we are having. The key is not like top down versus bottom up. The key is that you do need state power and basically facilitating the very bottom-up structures and communal structures and direct democratic structures, even for them to be able to flourish in a serious, systematic way

that actually has some leeway to really transform society and doesn't become another one of these minor communes somewhere that don't really interact with mass movements. And we see this, obviously, there are examples I give of Thomas Sankara, that this is very effectively, obviously, in Venezuela for a long, and you can, I won't get into the whole discussion about Venezuela now, because that's a long discussion. But even there, you saw that there was a math growth, growth of communes,

but there was a math growth of communes, because also this was directly facilitated by the central state, even though there was obviously very, a lot of tensions within parts of the Chavista government, especially on local level. But you see that kind of a mass communal movement like that, much more properly grow with a broader structure. And that being said, I do think that is an important point because I do think one of the biggest problems that we had with the Soviet Union, well, there are various big problems.

But one of the problems is we know from a lot of surveys that there's a lot of Soviet nostalgia. A lot of people, you know, people, we have millions of access death rates after the fall the Soviet Union. I think your audience knows this quite well. There's a lot of surveys that show that actually defaulted the Soviet Union was not something people actively desired. In fact, there was much more something that was done top down. But the interesting thing is, why was there no rebellion, right?

Why was there no resistance? And I do think there was a tendency within the Soviet Union that at some point started working very top down that kind of seat the revolutionary energy away from the organization. masses that once basically the leadership, for various reasons that we can get into, decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, that there was no capacity to resist. And in fact, for a long time, the Soviet Union also had a very kind of, you know, consumerist consumption of catching up with the West. And this is, and maybe I'll finish with this last point. And again, there's much more that we can get it going to, but this last point, which is actually also the ending of my book,

this importance of internationalism and what Che Guevada actually defines his love or love as as gaining material on deeper force and this internationalism of course Che Guevada was somebody who showed this in his own life he gave it he did a whole revolution in Cuba obviously not alone but he played a big part

and he goes off to the jungle in the Congo and in Bolivia to just do it all over where obviously died of a martyr. But one of the very interesting things that he says about how love becomes a moving force and actual material force is internationalism. And he says this is actually not just important for world revolution. And obviously it's also therefore important for Cuba, because they need allies, they need other. That's all true. But it's even important for the internite dynamics of the Cuban revolution itself. Because there comes a moment, because the revolution is successful,

when people have their wages, better wages, their health care, their roofs above their heads, and the kind of, and generations passed, and at some point people forget, you know, about the Tsarist autocracy and the harsh life they were facing or, you know, the Batista dictatorship, they get used to that, and they become, I think it was drowsy or something like that, that you start to basically sit on your ass at some point. And internationalism is a force that makes you constantly kind of engage in a revolutionary struggle and a revolutionary fervor that also makes you much more vigilant actually about counter-revolutionary forces and counter-revolutionary ideologies sipping into your party, your leadership, your society, etc., etc. So, you know, these are, and again, there's so much to touch on, but I hope I gave at least the sense of some of the topics that I go into. And I want to say, again, I think strategy is really one of the most difficult things there are, actually. It's much easier, actually, only to talk about problems.

Strategy becomes, you know, it's also about, you know, in some sense, predicting the future, deciding within that context what is most strategic to do. So I'm saying this also with a certain level of humility. And I mentioned it in the book, but why I do feel it's so important to go into this, is that I feel like we need to be having those discussions. You really, really need to be having those discussions because if you don't actually discuss strategy, you will not get anywhere.

So three small points of information, and then I'm going to turn it over to Adnan again. You mentioned Soviet nostalgia in the post-Soviet space. Listeners, I'm sure by now, all know that I live in Russia and have lived in Russia for five-plus years at this point. And without giving too much away about where I work i work at a place that has stolen posters banners busts and statues in it in all of the different

buildings you'll find at the minimum a stolen poster but in some of the buildings we have like life sized statues of solon that you have to walk past to get in so uh soviet nostalgia alive and well point of information number two uh you mentioned zach cope earlier chris we have a very interesting episode of guerrilla history from a couple of years ago just after zach copes very strange break uh or breakdown this episode is called political traders and sellouts and it's with j mufa wood paul and our friend and zach copse former contributor or collaborator emmanuel ness and um that was a really fascinating conversation so if you want to know more not only about the zach cope situation in general But this phenomenon that we have on the left, unfortunately, where there's people that, you know, seemed like very good comrades and in many cases even did some very good work becoming political traders and or sellouts.

There's an episode for you in the guerrilla history feed with two really great guests that you should check out. And point of information number three, you mentioned that the consumptive nature of capitalism is not necessarily. always the best for generating healthy lives for people. And you cited the fact that China's life expectancy is fairly significantly higher than the United States is at this point, despite the fact that on a per capita basis, there's less money in China. You know, it's the system that's different. The point of information is that earlier this week, I was on press TV, Iran's English

language television network. And just before my interview on the show started, their ministry of, you know, Health, the Iranian Ministry of Health had just published their new life expectancy statistics, and they had just broken 80 years, is their average life expectancy, which listeners will know is over a year longer than the United States. This despite the fact that the United States is currently waging not only an actual military war, but is now openly stating, even though it's been the case for several years, that they're waging all out economic war on Iran. Even despite this, life expectancy in Iran, it's higher than in the United States.

So there's my points of information. Adnan, I'm turning it back over to you. Well, you've been so generous with your time. Just another maybe follow up to these important points that you were raising about the strategy and approach. You mentioned in this kind of final chapter where this discussion happened. which I think is a brilliant kind of discussion, covers a lot of things we don't have time to talk about, but maybe eventually we'll get around to discussing some of them.

But you mentioned that Samir Amin, the great kind of political economist, radical scholar, recommended that there should be a fifth international, which would welcome socialist and anti-imperialist forces, from around the world. And I think part of that call was to open up the kind of dialogue and approaches to some extent to be a little bit more inclusive and less like some of the earlier iterations that had Western kind of Marxists dominate. And it reminds also of a quote that you cite here of a Global South activist, I think, from Egypt.

who, you know, mentioned that it seems that all the theories flow from the global north, but maybe they're not so applicable because they haven't necessarily worked the way that we would have hoped and expected them to, and that there is a kind of exclusionary sort of, you know, almost a kind of intellectual imperialism and intellectual colonialism, even within these radical and critical colonialism, even within these radical and critical. circles that doesn't appreciate and understand how the experiences from the global south where resistance against the empire is most intense, most organized, and most has the chance perhaps to undermine the capitalist imperialist system are sidelined and not learned from. And I think that's another important component in trying to think through, is to overcome some of the chauvinisms and try and find,

what are the grounds of unity, right, where we could build that ideological coherence that you're talking about, but be inclusive in the fact that you have to have a broader coalition and be open to the fact that your position may give you insight from one perspective, but this kind of all kind of encompassing theoretical kind of objectivity has to be textured by the realities of the experience in different historical conditions. And so I wondered what you might think in this context, something that wasn't discussed very much in some aspects of this work, but I think is of deep interest to myself, is thinking about the fact that, for example, right now, the Islamic resistance, whether it's in Palestine, southern Lebanon, or the fact that Iran is a revolutionary,

anti-imperialist state that is, you know, really the linchpin for continued resistance across the region, as you discussed and mentioned, you know, has religious ideology. And yet this is something that seems like it cannot, must not be integrated into the broader coalition and conceptual understanding of what the pathways forward for anti-imperialism might be. And I know for a fact, of course, someone like Samir Amin was like an extremely secularist kind of person. He really opposed, and you could understand why he would oppose, especially during the Cold War, many of these religious movements were, of course, part of Cold War policy and the kind of forms of culture that were sponsored by capitalist imperialist West to, you know, achieve their goals and so on. But likewise at the very same time, it is clear that that is the vanguard right now for people defending life, right, against imperialism.

So I wonder what thoughts or recommendations you might have about how one can sponsor the genuine kind of dialogue and discussion about what are the real principles we have to come together on and what are the ways we can avoid divisive, chauvinisms that actually won't contribute to our liberation and understand that there might be slightly different cultural and political, you know, kind of dimensions to resistance from other parts of the world that have to be taken seriously and at least afforded their space to do things in a different way than in one, you know, kind of very narrow ideological framework. right? Like, you know, if it's still connected to the material conditions of resistance against empire and capitalism, you know, why should it matter so much, right, in these movements where often it's not even that there isn't sympathy, that there's actual hostile. And I would say there is something that needs to be figured here, which is the Islamophobia of some of the secular leftist movements, you know, in the West, in there, that undermine the possibilities. for effective resistance and solidarity against empire. These are great questions.

And I think this, you know, if you are actually a historical materialist, I think it's also very important to actually look at the class basis of some of these various religions. I think it is a very Eurocentric idea. You know, obviously the church in the European context was deeply ingrained with class oppression and imperialism. And so I fully understand why. you know, things developed a certain way within Europe. And but I think it is, you know, from a long time in history, we've seen, in fact, I think, you know, the Communist Party of Indonesia was already more flexible with this. They had in their early days quite some cooperation with Islamic movements.

Some of these also split up at some point. And then yet the rat faction and the white faction, the white became counter-revolution. and the Red became revolutionary. So this shows you, and we have, of course, had liberation theology. You had the interesting dynamic under Rios Mont, the genocidal general dictator in Guatemala, who is a phonetic evangelical Christian murdering other Christians who are liberation theologists, right? So I think it's very superficial to kind of put. religion into kind of this one big box and not look at the class basis and the material content

of a lot of these movements and theories and where they come from and who they serve. And I think obviously what we see with the rise of Islamic resistance movements after 67 has a lot to do with the failures of the left itself and a certain revolutionary vacuum that they left and that others have filled. And it would be a tremendous arrogance and a tremendous failure to not theorize that properly. I think it's also very interesting, by the way, that obviously the Muslim Brotherhood in many contexts have played a contribution role, and it was sponsored in many cases in the Cold War by Saudi Arabia. But I think it is also very interesting to see that, for example, the place where it took its most revolutionary form also,

you know, very clearly collaborating with Shia forces in Lebanon and Iran was in Gaza. And I think that's not a coincidence. It is because, you know, the material circumstances there are so extreme. And the vacuum left by the PLO that went basically into this process of retreat, which, you know, had their own material reasons for that. They lost their main backer of the Soviet Union. But there was a vacuum there. And it was filled by the Islamic resistance movement.

And that is something we need to understand. And you also see there's a huge difference, material difference in, like, you know, you mentioned Henry how much also Iran has delivered in terms of material improvements of living standards within Iran itself. I think, you know, it's useful to think also a little bit more complex sometimes and a little bit more how hybrid a lot of movements are, how many tensions there are within certain movements, different tendencies, different factions. But the Iranian revolution itself was, of course, a revolution against colonial powers. And against, you know, literally, basically in the shadows of a Mohammed Muzadegh, who was overthrown and after he wanted to nationalize the oil industry, and they took it back.

Like, this is the history. And actually, that was a very broad. brought coalition. You know, communists were part of that. And yes, we can go into, you know, some of the communists were later betrayed and this and that. And not just communists, by the way, also left-wing Islamists. But even if we look at the, there was an interesting book. I forgot the title. I think it was like socialism in the third world. I will give it to you later. but it goes into actually how the key question at the time was really not about Islam versus socialism. In fact, there was a whole mosaic of all kind of movements within Islamism that were more or less socialist leaning

and within communists and socialists that were more or less Islamic leaning. So I think it's just an total and other simplification to think that religion, just because Saudi Arabia is a center for country revolution. as if we cannot have atheist counter-revolution. The Netherlands is a very atheistic country, very fanatically so, actually. My mother is actually Armenian, Armenian Christian. So we're not actually an imperialist, Christians. You know, all of the whole Christians are imperialists.

But there's this funny arrogance often in the Netherlands, actually from atheistic people. I remember as a kid when you would tell them that your mother was Christian, they would look at you like if she was a bit stupid, you know, if you believe in some kind of spaghetti monster or whatever. And the Netherlands is one of the most reactionary imperialist countries in the world. So I think we need to complicate this. And in fact, I do think, and this is also something I mentioned in the book. And I do think it is important.

I mention at some point also the importance of the human spirit and the human dignity and the kind of deeper reservoirs of the human soul, whatever you want to call it, or the human condition. And religion can be a powerful force in that, you know. And I'm saying this not just as a philosophical thing. I'm saying this is somebody who has gone into monasteries dozens of times still go there quite regularly.

I know this deep in my bones. I know what it is to feel the fire deep inside. and I know this can come from religious sentiment. That being said, I think there are also examples in history where there are more secular movements that clearly have shown that same revolutionary fervor, whether it was, you know, the Soviet, how the Soviets repealed the Nazi invasion.

You know, some of these stories are just almost beyond human belief the things people had to go through. Or even just before that, there was a very interesting documentary made by this Dutch guy called Joris Evans who went to one of the factories during the Great Soviet Famine and obviously there were

there were food shortages everywhere and he just saw how motivated these people were on barely any food you know you had the Stachnabyte movement trying to even you know double production quotas on sheer will and there was clearly some fire in them you know driving them he said just being with them he felt it it was almost surreal

like so obviously I'm not saying like religion is the only force that can do that. But it has clearly been an important force. And it has also been an important force. And I was thinking about this question actually before this interview, because I know Anon that you think through the question of spirituality, materialism quite a lot. So that's why I was kind of pondering this question a little bit.

And now, I think maybe a reason why it's increasingly important now is that we're also living in the kind of an era of revolutionary retreat and kind of in an era of, or, you know, some things are turning, but especially if we look at like the post-Soviet era, the so-called post-socialist or end-of-history era, and we're not completely out of that yet. Like, we are out of the sense that capitalism is the end of history, like everybody sees this cannot go on. But there is still, I think, this deeper depression within revolutionary movements and histories that it feels for a lot of people surreal, to even talk about revolution.

Maybe even more so, like in the Netherlands, I'm writing these books in Dutch, and first I was a bit annoyed with myself. Like, why did I write them in Dutch? No, I cannot read it. Reach a broader audience. And, you know, it was a project that got out of hand and everything like that.

But then people were like, no, it's actually very important because we even lost the language. You know, it feels strange sometimes to write in Dutch about revolution. It feels almost like this weird 60s thing, even though analytically is clear, even it's the same thing that you write in English, but it's just, it's something we need to start to feel again, start to develop again. It needs to become a real moving thing again. So it's actually very important that we start to also write revolutionary literature in our own languages.

But, yeah, again, it became a bit of a long-minded answer. But I hope I answered your question. Well, I really appreciate your willingness to discuss that. I mean, sometimes it's very uncomfortable for people, but I think you're taking exactly the right approach. It's not exclusively that religion provides it, but yet it has provided it. So it needs to be evaluated in its context. Is it contributing to liberation? Is it contributing, you know, in this context and this movement to the possibilities for greater determination and commitment to human values of dignity, etc?

I mean, these are the questions to ask, not, oh, is it religion or is it secular? I mean, so I think that's exactly the right approach. I'm wondering if you were thinking about the book, Global Marxism, Decolonization and Revolutionary Politics by Simin Fadai. There's a good chapter in there about Ali Shariati and his contributions to the revolutionary kind of environment. But if it isn't that, then please do, you know, later follow up and tell me. It wasn't, but now you gave me a great other titaree. Okay, well, I hope you'll tell me about the other book, too, because it sounds good. Anyway, I want to just encourage everyone.

This is a great book. It's really well written. And can you imagine writing in your second language? So, you know, I mean, you're writing in Dutch, but you also wrote this effective, really excellent book that brings together so much. And, you know, we didn't even get to talk about some of the other things about environmentalism and, you know, kind of the corruption of environment. mentalism and other things. Maybe we'll have to, you know, have a further discussion at some time and about that. But also, I think you also had some really remarkably astute and careful and balanced analysis of the place of China in this kind of new system and what to kind of expect and getting

out of some of the just polarized debates about it because we recognize and understand China has to be defended against the imperialist system. And yet we also would hope that maybe they might be moving more in a way to contribute ideologically to the resistance of the global south. And, you know, so, but it was a very balanced and interesting discussion. So that I really appreciated so many things about this book that I want to encourage everyone to go pre-order it now. It's available at the end of the month. I think August 26th is the actual publication date from monthly review press. So I put the link a few times.

It'll be in and is, I think, already in the description. So go check it out. And but before, you know, we go, you know, maybe you can tell people besides ordering the book, where else to follow your work and how to connect with you, Chris. Yeah, thank you. That's great. So I have a website. It's just my name, www.cris depluk.com.

You can find most of my writings and books and other things there. and also the links to social media. I'm not as active on all of them as much as I should. This is the hard life of a writer that I don't like social media, but I guess I have to be on there more. But then I'm very grateful for being able to be on podcasts like these and to be here. And if people want to support also, by the way,

I do have a donation button on my website. I don't have any research affiliation, no university paying my bill. or anything like that. So it is a labor of love, but any support is, of course, welcome and appreciate it. But yeah, thank you so much again

for having me on the show. Again, this is one of the podcasts. I have a long appreciated. It is no coincidence that Jay-Z was here before. I told him he should come here, actually. And we actually co-wrote that piece that was on Monty Review about the McCormack.

copyrights back then. But obviously he was in city council at the time, so we sent him. But yeah, and always a real pleasure to be here. Very much appreciate your work. And yeah, who knows, I'll be back. I would be happy to do so. So yeah, thank you. Fantastic. Well, I want to thank Henry. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to do a guerrilla history episode. At the same time, we're doing a YouTube live stream of my office hours on Fridays. And so So Henry, you know, tell the listeners where they can keep up with support guerrilla history podcast and also your, you know, other work. Yeah, because of the many, many layers of bands on social media and blocking, it's pretty hard to follow me personally. You can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, but I haven't been on there for a couple of years because of the blocks.

but to support guerrilla history, you can go to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. I do want to just make one small teaser for the episode that came out today of guerrilla history. It's a three-hour-long episode of the history of Sudan from the moment of independence, kind of mostly post-independence through today. It's the second part of a series on Sudanese history. So in total, it's just shy of six hours. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because Chris had mentioned that if we're thinking of anti-capitalists and radical movements, many of them are religious.

And the guests on the episode that just came out today went on a really great, very impassioned discussion of, again, how Islam and radical politics are often very closely intertwined. So for those of you who want to listen to that, it's the episode that just came out today, which is, again, part two of a discussion on the history of Sudan and also the present situation in Sudan. So you should definitely listen to it. But if you're looking for that spot in particular where Muhammad Khujali, the guest, discusses the importance of understanding that there are numerous, very politically radical and anti-capitalist Islamic movements throughout history.

and that capitalism in particular likes to target Islam and Muslim communities. It's just after the two-hour mark in the episode today. I just finished editing it, so I know exactly where it is. It'll be at like two hours and one minute in the episode. So do check that out. It's about a five or six-minute long discussion on that specific point. So there you go. There's my suggestion for the day.

But support guerrilla history at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Terrific, and I'm regretful. I missed the episode myself, so I'm going to be listening to it as a listener rather than a co-host. Thanks so much, Henry. And thanks so much to all of you who have been in the chat. It's clear. You really appreciated this discussion with Chris, and hopefully many of you will go out and get the book and be supportive of him and his excellent work. But I just appreciate all of you coming together in the chat, making it a lively place for real, genuine, serious. discussion and I think we got a lot of material here for further discussions that we should be having about strategy and about how to change the world that we're often too, you know, happy just to describe and analyze. But obviously all of that has to be in service with organizing to try and change it. So I appreciate the community that's come together here and we look forward to

seeing you again soon. Next week we will have on Friday office hours, Gabriel Rockhill will be coming to talk about requiem for French theory, his latest work co-authored with I'm Eric Monveille, and we'll talk a little bit more about the obfuscations and distractions of certain kinds of theory under imperialist capitalism. So look forward to that next week. Until that time, please do support the fundraiser for my students in Gaza. The link is in the chat and in the video description and you can also of course support this channel if you'd like but i'd much rather you give to students in gaza and buy this excellent book the exterminating empire capitalism's war on life from Palestine to the burning of the planet from monthly review press until next time everyone

peace with solidarity and justice all the best to everyone