Guerrilla History - [Unlocked] Conferences, What We're Reading, and More (October 30 on Patreon)

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we're unlocking a conversation that we recorded for Patreon on October 30.  Here we had an impromptu chat when a guest had to reschedule last minute, but despite not planning in advance, we had a marvelous conversation on a pretty wide variety of topics.  We put out the call to our patrons on whether they thought anything in the conversation would be useful for our non-patreon audience, and some of the responses we heard included:  "I especially enjoyed Adnan's continuation of the Crusades theme he discussed with Sina a couple weeks ago." "I really liked the Cyprus Isnotrael connection and the reminder that the histories in the region are intertwined going back a very long way." Be sure to listen and let us know on social media if you found anything interesting or useful!  You can @ us on Twitter at @guerrilla_pod and on IG at guerrilla_history. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

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

names to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hukimaki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry, just, you know, busy as you are, but it's always a pleasure to be with you. Yeah, this is very much going to be a behind the scenes episode, and part of that is because of how busy each of us are. We had an actual episode recording planned, but we have to reschedule with our guests at the last minute for personal reasons, which, you know, we're looking forward to being able to talk with our guests soon. But seeing as Adnan and I are both

so ridiculously busy with little time in our schedule, since we had already boxed out this time to do a recording. We figured we might as well, since this time now is free, do a Patreon episode. And one of the topics that came up in terms of things that we could talk about is kind of a behind-the-scenes grab bag of material that we're going through. So sometimes we do get questions, at least I get questions sometimes, I'm sure you do too at none, of what are you reading, what kind of things are you going through, what are some of the things that you're thinking about. And so we want to use this opportunity to discuss some of the material that we're going through, which some of it may make it onto the show in some capacity in the

future. Other things, I know I'm reading quite a bit that is not going to be devoted to specific episodes on the show, but will just help me develop my own thought and all around analysis of various events and periods of time and places and things like that. So let's take this opportunity, Adnan, to discuss some of the things that we're going through. I guess what better place than you were recently at a conference. Why don't she tell us a little bit about what that conference was in some of the talks or whatever that were taking place there. And then we can kind of go back and forth and talk about things that we're reading and absorbing. I know you had mentioned a couple of things on Twitter that you had been engaging with recently. So why don't I just

turn it over to you here now. Oh, sure. Well, you know, um, I organized a small symposium with, uh, some guests from, uh, and, you know, academics from a variety of different disciplines, some who, you know, were historians like myself, but a great number of whom are political theory or political science people, anthropologists, religion, uh, scholars, um, uh, you know, some literary folks as well, trying to take a multidisciplinary perspective on the question of Muslim politics. And it's the place of, you know, Muslim politics in not only historical context, but, you know, from these different angles in the post-Khalifal period, that is, marking the 100th anniversary, which happened earlier this year in 2024, so 1924, the centenary of the abolition

of the Ottoman caliphate, which was a pretty signal moment. And yet, interestingly enough, as we were remarking and part of the reason for holding this conference to really engage with the subsequent histories and politics and trajectories of political organization in the Muslim or Islamic world was because there was almost no remarking on what would be considered, I think, in other circumstances or context from a non-Western historical perspective as a pretty major historical event, the emergence of the Turkish Republic, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and in this respect, something that took away and dissolved what had been one of the rationales for independent Muslim sovereignties.

And so the conference was called after the caliphate's sovereignty and subjectivities, you know, to get the sort of sense that like, you know, there was a change in sovereignty. Much of the Muslim world was already under colonial rule and the central Islamic lands in the Middle East that had under the Ottoman Empire managed to avoid being colonized by the British or the French or, you know, other kind of expansionist sorts of ventures from Europe. and so on, we're now subjected to the mandate, you know, where the Middle East was divided. Most of the Middle East's was divided into supposedly temporary periods of colonial governance that restricted their sovereignty. And, of course, we've done episodes that talk about this kind of fateful period.

We even talked about in maybe a second or a third, you know, episode early on, Libby Thompson's, democracy, how the West stole democracy from the Arabs that looked very carefully at this period and the attempts by, you know, Arab resistance groups that had fought with the British, you know, against Ottoman rule in World War I and had expected that their collaboration with the colonial authorities would lead to self-governance and a sovereign Arab state, right? And none of that ended up happening, even though they planned and prepared for it and had a very interesting constitution and discussions that were proposed. So this is a kind of very interesting and fateful period. And yet the fact that there really wasn't much in historical circles,

certainly not in public education circles, but even within the historical community, there wasn't really much happening to talk about what were the consequences and implications of this, not just historically and retailing, you know, what happened in the mandate period and subsequently, but really kind of engaging with, well, what are the opportunities for political thinking and political thought as Muslims have struggled to conceptualize, to fight for sovereignty? And what does that have to do with the larger global world order and the way in which it was configured and structured through colonialism and then in post-colonial society? So themes that are very rich and important for, you know, this podcast and touches upon many kinds of episodes.

So that was kind of the basic idea to bring people together to talk about that from their own different, you know, perspectives of research, whether historically or more on contemporary visions and trajectories. I'd like to hop in for a second because it does raise a question for me and something that I've long been curious about. You know, you mentioned that this is a pretty signal moment in global history in relatively modern history, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, but it's something that is really not really, it's not really discussed within popular Western history at all. I know that I'm, I always like thinking back to the history textbooks that we learn from in school, which is always a dangerous thing because they are so bad. But it's interesting to think back to that and think what was. discussed, what wasn't discussed, and of the things that are discussed, how was the way that they were framed? Because I find that to be a very interesting and useful way to understand how a lot of these events are absorbed in popular consciousness versus other things are just kind of missed completely. And so, you know, thinking back, and I'm not claiming that I have a perfect photographic memory, but I do have a fairly decent recollection of how these things were

taught, you know, we spent far more time on 1066 the Battle of Hastings. I don't think that we mentioned the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. And this is quite interesting because I had actually not that long ago, like within the last couple of weeks, discussed the breakup of the Ottoman empire. And one or two of the people that I was discussing this with were like, oh yeah, when did that happen? Was that in the 1800s, the 1700s? It was like, no, you're off by a couple hundred years. It's way more recent than that. It's a very recent thing. They were involved in World War 1, you know? Like, this is very recent history. So it's interesting to think why does such a signal moment of history? I don't want to say get swept under the rug because I don't think

that this is something that's being like intentionally hidden. It's just interesting that for such an important event that it is not being discussed within more popular histories. And just as a kind of comparison, you know, to stick in the same region and to bring up one of the things that I had been reading recently, or had read recently, I'm co-writing an article with some other editorial board members at ISC for an upcoming issue of international critical thought on Domenico Lsorto. And so I'm reading and in some cases rereading some of his works to make sure that I have some contributions that I can make to this article that we're co-write. and one of the things that I'm rereading is War and Revolution.

And one of the things that I forgot how frequently he brought it up, but it's very apropos of this conversation, is the Armenian Genocide. And that's another thing that, again, within popular Western history, is not discussed almost at all. And again, thinking back to how history was taught in my schooling, I do not recall the Armenian genocide being brought up at all, like even once. And again, we're talking, listeners, if you don't remember this either from your schooling, we're talking 1915. This is not ancient history.

This is within, you know, the last century, within the 20th century. And it's not discussed at all, despite being the first large genocide. You know, again, there were genocides taking place elsewhere. You can look at what was happening in South Africa and Namibia and whatnot. but in Europe for sure this was the first genocide in Europe in the 20th century and I think about how much time is spent speaking on the Holocaust as a singular unique event and I'm putting singular and unique in quotation marks here because again the Armenian genocide happened a scant 25 years earlier and it's not discussed at all and as Lucerto describes there's many

many reasons for that. And one of the reasons he points out is to justify Zionism, you know, to uphold the Holocaust as a singular and unique phenomenon in order to say that there is a necessity for Zionism. And we can't focus on other genocides that have been taking, are taking place, because that would delegitimize one of the main justifications for Zionism. So that's just one reason among many. But the reason I'm going off on this tangent is that it is interesting that we have these kind of signal moments like the Armenian genocide, like the breakup of the Ottoman Empire that aren't discussed within Western history. And I'm curious from your perspective as somebody who works within that field, why is it that something as monumental as the breakup

of the Ottoman Empire is, again, if it's discussed that all in our history education within the West, it's like very much in passing to the extent that I don't remember it at all. Yeah, no, that's a really great point. I mean, firstly, there is just in general a Eurocentric curriculum in the schools and in the public imagination when it comes to talking about the narratives of history and of world history. And so World War I is called a World War and yet much of the world that was affected by that war is really absent in kind of focus. It's really all about, you know, lines of trenches in, you know, in Western Europe. You know, I mean, this is kind of like all the imagination. And of course,

World War I was a very transformative and important war. Historians really think of that as the kind of beginning of the 20th century. So great Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbaum, for example, talks about the age of revolutions and he goes up to basically World War I in 1917. And then he suggests that, you know, you think of the 20th century's history as a shorter 20th century. There's a long 19th century that people look at. And even this framing is still somewhat Eurocentric, not somewhat, but it is Eurocentric that it's like 1789 or at least it's the kind of era of liberal bourgeois revolutions against monarch. and so on, American Revolution and the French Revolution that usher in modern idioms of politics

and a new era. And that goes from the end, essentially, of the 18th century to the early 20th century, right? That's often seen as like a kind of coherent long 19th century. And the shorter 20th century begins basically with this Russian Revolution, breakup of Ottoman Empire, end of the Russian Empire as Azarist Empire, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And so actually when we think of the transformations that are taking place in this time, we have to see that it is in some ways the imposition of the nation-state model on a much larger territory of the world and those who are not judged to be ready to have their own independent nation-state and the model of sovereignty that was understood and recognized in this new order,

we're still going to be under a colonial rule, even if, you know, they framed it as a mandate and tutelary, you know, tutelage, you know, on the pathway to becoming a sovereign nation. But really what it is, this is these large scale, land-based, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic empires that broke apart. And in breaking apart, the inheritor, states were either colonial possessions or new nation states, and ultimately those colonial possessions would become post-colonial new nation states. And it's the imposition of this

as the framework that is taking place on a massive scale in those areas where there were participants in World War I. And the Ottoman Empire was one of those participants. Obviously the Russian Tsarist empire was until, you know, the revolution withdrew their participation in World War I. And of course, World War I, as everyone knows, was, you know, touched off or, you know, sparked by nationalist agitation, you know, in the Balkans, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that, of course, shattered the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a result. And the consequences of this that were unresolved, unsuccessful, and in many cases, total failures that have been horrible for the world because it left stranded minority populations and all of these new nation-states

that created under the ideology of nationalism and in this nation state model where nationalism is the only justification for your sovereign nation state, which is the only acceptable form for political affiliation, you know, it left like all these real big problems that continued to have, you know, consequences and repercussions for, you know, Germany's relationship to parts of Eastern Europe that led to this bellicose, you know, expansionist, fascist ideology that unleashed World War II and so on. you know, it's a very interesting and important transition. And there have been some scholars, in fact, actually Libby Thompson, who did write that book that we've talked with, has held a number

of conferences about like the Middle East and World War I to really actually fill in this historical gap and actually make our sense of the World War, you know, the Great War, as it was called at the time, actually have a global history and to look at that. And I would say one of the key points that our conference was interested in in terms of the legacies of that war that I've just described as the breakup of these large-scale, multi-ethnic religious, multi-linguistic states into nation states under nationalism, nationalistic ideology, is that we have not been able since that time to really think of frameworks for internationalists and even the word internationalist doesn't make sense. It's only because the new nation states have created

the necessity for collaboration and cooperation across national boundaries as international. But what we don't have is a framework for thinking of trans-regional, non-national kinds of affiliations, politically speaking. And that's important both for Marxists and I would say for those who still have some kind of commitment to the legacies of some kind of legitimate political affiliation that can't be reduced just down to the nation-state model. So you have, for example, pan-Arabism, you have Pan-Africanism, you have the caliphate as like a, you know, it's an old model that, but historically there were people who thought it was unfortunate that it was abolished because there was some value to thinking of a wider political set, a horizon of

commitment, rather than just these small, fragmented nation states in the post-colonial, in the colonial and then post-colonial period when they became nation-states that were bedeviled by all kinds of problems that were the result of the fragments of empire that prevented them from following models and pathways of development that were, you know, first incubated and developed in the West, you know, this politically economic development took place under a certain kind of historical trajectory, and it created capitalism, essentially created, you know, the nation-state model and reinforced it. And this doesn't necessarily work so well, either for workers who want a different kind of model and want to see solidities across regions and, you know, in terms

of their global collective class position. And it also didn't, you know, suit, you know, you might say certain political elites and popular groups that saw their kind of commitments and affiliations either to a greater kind of non-colonial fragmented identity, political identity like Arab nationalism, or to, you know, their Muslim identity as somehow having some political salience to them. And so that's kind of what we were engaging, you know, with how can that be reimagined, you know, these forms of solidarity and affiliation as political, political possibilities, you know, in, in, in, in, you know, in, in, you know, in, in, in today's, today's world. That's quite interesting. And, you know, you mentioned thinking of these different eras, the era of revolutions, and I think one of the other things that came out of war and revolution that I was reading is that there is this grouping of the period between the start of World War I and the end

of World War II is the 30 years war and looking for continuity between the two, because typically within historiography, we tend to think of there being this epochal break between the end of World War I and then a period of quote unquote peace, which is what Lucerto tries to dismantle with this argument. And then out of, out of, you know, seemingly nowhere, according to that popular historiography, World War II kind of comes up as a result of, you know, the reparations that Germany was forced to be, that Germany was being forced to pay. And, you know, there's a very shallow analysis of where Italian fascism came from. Yet, if you look at this as there being a break

with peace between World War I and World War II, whereas Lucerto looks at there being continuity. And so the reason I bring this up is that I think it's the way that we think about history, there's a lot of different ways that history can be thought about and whether or not you agree with one particular framework or not, it's important that we engage with different frameworks in order to think about how do some of these dynamics take place. So, you know, you've been discussing some of the dynamics that are at place that were taking place during World War I outside of the dominant framework of thinking about World War I within the West and how that led to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. And then what came out of that, again, which is distinct

from what we typically are thinking about if you are brought up within Western historiography. And similarly, there's many ways in which you can think about periodization in general. And I think that that's just another thing that needs to be brought up. And also the fact that if you try to categorize things using one method of periodization, It's important that you're aware of other potential periodizations as well because just because you tend to gravitate towards one framework of periodizing history does not mean that these other attempts at periodization to show continuities between various events are not accurate.

We have to think about all of these things feeding into one another. And so I particularly like this thinking of the 30 years war from World War I to World World War II, not that that's directly related to what you were saying at none, but, you know, it did make me think of that in terms of different framings of history and, and also, you know, your conversation and your discussion of Eurocentrism within Western historiography and in the historical narrative is one that we've talked about, what, 25 times, 40 times on the show through various episodes that this, This Eurocentric approach to history gives a very shallow analysis of how things are actually happening globally, even when somebody is attempting, supposedly, to take a global analysis like we would in a quote of quote, quote, world war. When we're talking about World War I within Western history texts, it really is just looking at Western Europe, even though, as you point out, you know, these dynamics spread

far beyond that. And similarly, another thing that Lassurdo does, not to keep going back to him here because I don't want to spend too much time on his analysis now, because I have to still work out some of these ideas more deeply myself. But a constant call to what is happening regarding the colonial question vis-a-vis what is happening in these other events that you're trying to analyze. So even when you are looking at, the dynamics of World War I in Western Europe. That's not to say that you totalize it as Western Europe, but when you are looking at Western Europe and what is happening in World War I to think about how that is also resonating with the colonial question and how the colonial question is then

feeding back also into the dynamics in Western Europe. And so this constant grappling with that colonial question and thinking about how these seemingly disparate events are indeed deeply interconnected is something that can only help deepen or analysis of each of these. So that was just a little bit of a digression on my part. Oh, no, not a digression at all. And I really want to read the Los Ordo, but I, you know, what you said about that reminded me of one thing. I'm so glad you mentioned the colonial question because that was one component that I, you know, wanted to, a thread to bring back out from, you know, this discussion is that, you know, you mentioned, like, why is this genocide not really discussed? there's, you know, there's, of course, well, on the Armenian genocide, I mean, I think this has something very clearly to do with the birth of nationalism as an ideology that is surfacing in the context of the breakup of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguistic empire, and that that unleashes some very serious and horrific violence. The reason why it's not talked about so much is because it happened in the East and in Ottoman lands, it's something that would be talked about when,

they're talking about justification for, you know, colonial domination of the Middle East, of the illegitimacy of the Turkish state. Part of the reason why, though, it's not that well incorporated is because there's already an assumption that the lands of the Ottoman, you know, empire really should be under colonialism like the rest of, you know, what is today we call the global south or so much of it, you know, in the course of the 19th century, particularly Africa and parts of parts of Asia, of course, much of Latin America had by this time, you know, emerged from, you know, but they are settler colonies, you know, so there's a whole different, you know, kind of dimension of it. But what was ignored in all of this is that the genocides of colonialism

and of settler colonialism, of course, is really the foundational kind of moment or period for massive, genuine genocide, like, you know, the West, you know, the British themselves are responsible basically for, you know, genocides on two continents that wiped out like the indigenous peoples essentially. I mean, they're survivors. But, you know, as like thriving existing societies, two continents were essentially depopulated of their indigenous inhabitants. And so, you know, you know, when we think of like what ended up happening is something, of course, we've come back to when we've mentioned many times, is this wonderful kind of work, discourse on colonialism. you know, by the, you know, Caribbean poet and scholar and activist Amy Cesar, you know, where he said,

look, this kind of violence that you're decrying here at the end of that 30 years war is what we call World War II is basically what's been happening in the colonies. And it wasn't called a genocide. It wasn't something that shocked the conscience, you know, at that time. but it is just the importing of colonial violence back into Europe. So when you said about the consequences that affect Europe is that Europe, you know, acculturated itself to colonial genocide. And then some of these ideas came to come back into a certain supremacist idea where Europeans could be subjected as well to that kind of genocidal violence or peoples within Europe. And this is something that Europe has really not.

confronted itself on. Like, you know, it doesn't engage this history to really acknowledge the link between those two things, which I think is absolutely instrumental to getting beyond that kind of genocidal violence. And we see that the West now we're, you know, we're in and this something I did de course, you know, soon after the end of a year of intensive genocide that is just the culmination of 75 years or even 100 years, you could say, of genocidal settler colonial policy in the Levant and in the Middle East, that, you know, it's been over a year at the time of our recording, and that's one thing that, you know, we've really seen is that Césaire was right and that nobody learned anything from the end of World War II that was universalized,

even despite the fact that there was a declaration of human rights, universal declaration, There were all of these kinds of treaties and mechanisms, you know, but, you know, there was a reason why the Bandung Conference had to happen is because they could see that despite some rhetoric, these principles weren't firmly established as a global reality and a universal sense that incorporated all human beings as human beings because the Cold War and capitalist, you know, attempts at hegemony were creating neo-colonial, orders that really undermine the prospects for a genuine new humanism, which is something Fanon called for at the end of the wretched of the earth. And I tweeted recently about it because a good friend to the show and a wonderful activist, Calla had, you know, excerpted a piece saying you got to read, Fanon is basically, you know, the best thing to read right now. And I really do think that is the case. And I sort of retweeted that basically what he talked about there has become newly salient. Like, there may have been periods of history subsequent to decolonization

and liberation that made us think we were moving in a direction. But, and even if we were moving in a direction, those gains have been reversed. And there's a reversion, you could say, back to colonial, imperial mentalities and ideologies that suggest genocide and genocidal violence, settler colonialism. These are Western values. I mean, this is something Joseph Massad said on the electronic intifada recently, we said, well, you know, and that's the conclusion you have to draw is that there's something deeply embedded in the history of the development of Europe's grammar of politics from its histories that has made it very difficult despite some conscious attempts to create, you know, principles of universality,

of democracy, of justice, et cetera, that really have to be critiqued right now that they have failed because there's a deep commitment to genocide. to settler colonialism, to denying the humanity of other people that we're witnessing after a year of genocide and really nobody in the kind of Western powerful in corporate and political and even intellectual elite to a certain extent. There's some dissidents and so on that has really kind of questioned or been uncomfortable with this. Allow me to say something particularly provocative. I mean, I know that this is going only to the Patreon and our patrons are, you know, the most hardcore listeners. So they'll probably

be all on board with this. But I actually, I'm not saying it to be provocative. I'm saying it because I'm being quite sincere about it. When you mentioned, so you mentioned two things that I'm going to put together with my provocative statement. You mentioned that genocide is a Western value, cosine entirely. And you also had mentioned declarations and treaties, you know, declarations on universal human rights and whatnot. Now, here's where the provocative statement comes in. It's something that I have alluded to periodically, but maybe haven't said quite as explicitly as this.

These declarations and treaties against genocide for universal human rights are actually not at all for the purpose of preventing genocide or protecting human rights. The purpose of them is to give the West, and I am again explicitly stating that this is a Western tool, these are to provide justification for the West to criticize their adversaries when they perceive there to be a threat to the West by someone that has even the slightest possibility of being criticized on the grounds that are supposedly

being protected against with these treaties and these declarations. But these treaties are not intended to actually prevent the things that they say that they're being intended to prevent. They are simply there as a rhetorical device against Western enemies. And now specifically, with the case of genocide, the case of genocide in Palestine is incontroversible. That's the word? Pretty sure. So, and it has been. You know, you mentioned it's been going on 100 years, something that I mentioned on the Good Shepherd Collective episode that we recently released on our general feed. The genocide didn't start on October 7th. The genocide started with the colonization of historic Palestine by Zionists. That was the origin of genocide there. It has only

been intensified within the last year. And it's clear. And it has been clear. It's been clear for 100 years. It's been extra clear since 1948. And it's been, you know, any, any living person should have been able to concede that genocide is happening, if not before that point, especially since October 7th. But we still have Western institutions and Western governments that refuse to classify it as a genocide, the most obvious genocide that we have had in decades, excluding the ones that have been ongoing, like the indigenous population of the United States, that's not a question that has gone away.

that genocide is ongoing and I think that most people will concede that that was a genocide even if they don't concede that the genocide is ongoing which of course it is but these western institutions don't concede that there was ever a genocide going on in Palestine and that there is not a genocide going on now but the same western institutions accused China of committing genocide within Xinjiang something that every single Arab and Muslim government across the world, every single one without exception, has come out and said we see absolutely no evidence of actual genocide taking place. That's not to say that everything is rosy and that, you know, everything that's happening in Xinjiang is perfect. But there's no direct

evidence of genocide. No government that is aligned with the plight of Muslim communities globally has flown any evidence of genocide? Who are the ones that are accusing genocide in this case? Western governments and Western institutions, the same people who deny that there is a genocide taking place in Palestine, one that is exceedingly clear. This is just an exemplar of the fact that these institutions simply use the rhetoric of these treaties and declarations that have been signed as a cudgel against Western adversaries and not as any sort of prevention for the things that they say that they are preventing. It's a veneer of the Western project, the Western Project of Genocide, the Western Project of colonialism and settler colonialism and imperialism.

This is just a veneer to show that they are a kind liberal West, but in reality what it is is simply a tool to propagate their purpose and to propagate their projects of colonialism, of imperialism, of global capitalism. And so whenever we see an adversary that, again, even when there is no actual evidence of any of these things being breached, but there is some whiff of something that could be accused, these institutions go whole hog on declaring that there is a genocide taking place, that there are human rights violations being breached, but again, they have nothing to say when their allies or themselves are committing these atrocities.

Well, absolutely, Henry, we've seen that's the reason why the Western discourse, whether it is buttressing, kind of claims about being democratic societies and insisting on, you know, the selective enforcement or application of these so-called universal declarations and treaties and the genocide convention, the Geneva conventions, you know, all of these international treaties that have come to establish a regime of international law. It's clear that these come out of colonial governance mechanisms and that they have been developed in a form in a way that can be a tool for certain kinds of resistance, but that are clearly, you know, not applied in a universal fashion. And the genealogy of them has been always to undergird colonial

propaganda and neo-colonial, you know, implementation to maintain Western and capitalist hegemony. And so that's why, at this point, given what's been happening for a year of extreme unleashing of violence, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Gaza and the expanding kind of incursions and invasions and bombardments by, you know, Israel's military on, you know, other areas, neighboring areas, that nobody in the global South can, you know, there are no liberals left because they can't go in conscience. and say, yeah, we need to uphold this regime of international law when it's clear that it doesn't matter or mean anything to the West. And that the West's attempts to globalize and enforce these

have come only to serve their own purposes of geopolitical and economic hegemony. And so there's no legitimacy left. I think a real problem is that we're now opened onto an era in history where it's not going to be clear. It's going to be very contested. What is the basis for international order? It's being contested. It's being renegotiated. But unfortunately, it also means that those who have been holding hegemonic control over those institutions who are seeing their economic strength start to wane and be overturned with rising competition, they're unshakable position in control of these international bodies and institutions is starting to be contested, that unfortunately it means instead of embracing a world that actually fits those

values of justice, of social equality, of democracy, what they're attempting to do is through violence and through military strength, which is one of the only technological advantages and production, you know, economic production advantages that they currently hold on using that to leverage greater geopolitical control in a situation that is, you know, not conducive to that. I mean, there's lines of resistance everywhere to such a project, and it's just introducing extreme violence and instability in the world. And so this is a huge opportunity. It's something we talked about when we had our IB on multipolarity back with Brett a couple of years ago, you know, which is that it's hopeful in the sense that Western hegemity is being contested

and undermined and challenged. But it is also a very dangerous period where we don't see ourselves, certainly in the Imperial Corps, and a year of genocide that we've been unable to really put the brakes on, shows how disorganized, despite all the wonderful things that have happened, but also, you know, whether after a regime of neoliberalism and 40 years of World Bank and IMF destruction of the post-colonial states of the global South, especially those that, you know, were developing a kind of independent project of some kind for their own development, those were all smashed or have been smashed. There's almost no survivor of that other than, you know, China and to some extent India that has found its place within the neoliberal order in a different

way charting a very different kind of path. You know, that, you know, what are the resources on which we can build some genuine resistance? This is why the Palestine situation is so important because if the people of Palestine are not liberated and not free, you know, what are the prospects for, I mean, perhaps it's possible that, you know, their example, even if, you know, that people suffer so much that we can't say that there's eventually, you know, the kind of victory that we are envisioning or imagining against settler colonialism and, you know, the kind of surveillance and, you know, fortress economies, you know, and geopolitics that are the model that it is embodying and demonstrating and the testing ground for that, you know, where are the sort of sources of resistance? I mean, one of the problems with this multipolar kind of arrangement is that they're just larger kind of self-interested nation states rather than a truly internationalist liberatory project that has distilled. And we've got to find out and figure out what.

What are the ways in which that can be fostered? Because so far what we've not seen is, for example, you know, those states being able to intervene directly in this and even somewhat indirectly just to say we're going to have sanctions, we're going to, you know, remove support, diplomatic support and so on. There still is no one has come to the, you know, UN General Assembly and said we need to eject, you know, Israel and sanctioned the United States for its, you know, and sanctioned Germany and other states that are continuing to perpetuate genocide through their aiding and abetting of something that is a clear violation of international law.

Nobody has had the courage to do that under this kind of regime. So how are the people? That's the question. How are the peoples of the global south and the global north where they are allies and in solidarity with the peoples of Palestine and the global south going to create a genuine revolutionary project, which is the only hope, really, it seems. And we can't really rely just on the states. States have a big role to play in repositioning how the global order works, but the nation states that exist. So this actually comes back to this other interesting question

that I've been thinking about, and we really should have somebody who works on this era of history to talk about. But I was kind of trying to think about how would there be a politics that is non-nation state-oriented and thus not international, I mean, in the sense that it accepts that these nation-states are the only legitimate kind of spaces, and then we just look for some kind of transnational or international mechanisms, the solidities, to modify the harms under these terrible nation states. You know, if decolonization had been really trans, like pan-African, for example, if decolonization had been truly Bolivarian and, you know, and connected with indigenous solidities as well, because in many cases they were just led by the planter settler class, if, you know, resistance, you know, to the British Empire was something that looked to democratizing the empire or at least regional, you know, groupings within, instead of like, we need to have a Pakistan and in India and, you know, and so on and Malaysia. But, you know,

what if there had been? You know, this is what I was thinking about. And this is something we should have, Dr. Ariel Salzman, friend of the show and a good colleague of mine to come to talk about because one of the things she's been interested in working on are attempts under the Ottoman Empire to develop a democratic and constitutional political order through the era of reforms with the Ottoman parliaments of the 1870s and 80s that reframed, you know, Muslim hegemony now as titular and you would have a kind of caliph, but just like the kind of view of the Arab state that was described in the constitutions that the Damascus kind of convention was working on after the Paris Peace Plan and before the mandate really took hold for a proposed, you know, of independent Arab state, was that, okay, maybe the king has to be Muslim as a part of the constitutional. It's a majoritarian kind of thing. But sovereignty should be rested in a Democratic parliament of all the peoples within that territory. And that's in some ways what the

Ottoman were working on in the 70s, where you had Jewish and Armenian and, you know, Coptic as well as Sunni and Shi kind of representatives to a parliament and where it didn't matter your religious affiliation. You were trying to democratize a larger scale kind of. Just think if the Ottoman Empire had become a democratic, you know, state that represented its peoples, but instead of it being fragmented in these small states now presented a genuine geopolitical, economic kind of challenge that was, you know, democratic. I mean, of course, we'd love it to have been a, you know, the really existing socialist, but just let's say in the 19th century, if they had actually been able to democratize the empire, you know, maybe there would have been

better outcomes, you know, because nationalism has been such a destructive force and as an ideology of a nation-state foreign has created so many wars, ethnic cleansing, and fragmented peoples from being able to put together a genuinely transformative developmental project for sovereignty and development and achieving the goals of the people in terms of their welfare. So I sometimes think about that as a kind of, that counterfactual leads me to think, what are the ways we have to be thinking now in the reality of the nation states that exist, of ways of creating a collective, social, political, and economic imagination that genuinely transcends these borders and boundaries that have been erected not to the, you know, real

liberation of people, but to imprisoning them in a new false consciousness of nationalism that undermine, which is always was developed in order to overcome class division and, you know, within certain policy, it was always a way of trying to overcome. Well, you may be poor, you may be rich, you may be an employer, you may be a worker who feels oppressed, but we're all this nation and our biggest enemy are the people who are not like us. You know, this has just been kind of the most insidious, insidious and ever-present false consciousness in politics in the modern period. And it is all something that is a construction of a particular form of history. that developed in Europe, like certain kinds of capitalism, et cetera, that have been to the detriment

of the world. You can't get rid of capitalism unless you get rid of also false national nationalisms. And so the project of national liberation that we're going to be talking about in our Africa series, we've talked about in many other cases, we've always framed as national liberation. But, you know, Fanon himself saw that there were pitfalls to that because that kind of consciousness could be used to aggrandize a political and economic elite. would just renegotiate its position within the global, you know, economic and political order as leaders of a nation state that had been, you know, liberated, even if it didn't free itself from that kind of world system. He was calling for something more radical, even though national liberation struggles, of course, are the first step to removing colonial oppression and colonial violence. But, you know, there's got to be more. Otherwise, what we've been living with for the last century. century or so, or, you know, almost, you know, 75, 80 years of the post-World War II period is post-colonial states that are trapped still in neocolonial global world order.

So anyway, I thought that was a very significant and important point that you raised. Well, I just want to briefly say something regarding a couple of points you made before I move us on to the end because, you know, I look at the clock and I realize we could talk about this all day at none and we should probably continue these conversations. at some point but we should move on it's we need to move on at some point but a couple of quick observations uh you know you mentioned this paradigm of thinking of the nation state as the sole legitimate form it's always worth mentioning that this is a western imposed paradigm it's a paradigm that had been imposed by the west and one that is perpetuated by the west through

institutions like the United Nations, which recognizes what, nation states. And so if we want to think beyond the nation state, there's kind of two things that we need to do. One is that we have to first recognize that this paradigm of nation states being the sole legitimate form is a Western imposed paradigm imposed on people that did not previously perceive this as the sole legitimate form in which autonomy could take place. But we also have to then grapple with the literature, the epistemologies that have thought beyond the nation state. Like this is not a conversation that is unique to this particular moment in terms of you and I talking about we have to move beyond thinking of the nation state as the sole legitimate

form because this is a West and imposed paradigm. Many people and entire schools of epistemology have been built around this idea that we can't think of it as nation states as being the sole legitimate form. So indigenous epistemologies and Pan-African epistemologies are two that you mentioned briefly that I want to, again, highlight the entire purpose of these epistemologies is to show that the nation state is a Western project and that in order to achieve liberation, we have to go beyond this imposed nation state paradigm. time. And this is, it reminds me of some of the discussions that I had with, again, somebody

who I've mentioned in previous episodes in passing, one of my mentors during my undergrad, Betty Kay McGowan, who is Mississippi Choctaw, indigenous activist and scholar. I took several courses with her and then also did, you know, kind of mentor-mente relationship type things outside of the classroom as well through various organizations and also just, you know, when I caught her on campus. and one of the things that she talked about, she was involved with all of the indigenous delegations to the United Nations. She was involved with the construction of the, I'm going to pull a blank on the name of it, but the Declaration of Indigenous Rights. I don't remember the exact name,

so I'm not going to try to put it together, but there's a universal declaration of indigenous rights at the United Nations, and she was involved with the construction of that quite heavily. And she went to the United Nations every year for like 25 years straight, basically until COVID. Actually, just before COVID, she had a stroke and wasn't able to go. And that was more or less when I lost contact with her, unfortunately. But one of the things that she always told us about is that, you know, these indigenous epistemologies, transcontinental epistemologies, they obviously had a wide degree of diversity in their thoughts. But the thing that was very clear as a through line throughout these epistemologies was, as we've

been discussing, thinking of this imposition of a paradigm of nation states being the legitimate form, being a Western imposed paradigm rather than one that is natural in any sort of way. And that in their diverse epistemologies, again, transcontinately that they would have and they would discuss at these various meetings when they would go and collaborate at the United Nations, representatives from all of these different indigenous communities around the world, the through lane was that, that we had to look beyond these Western imposed paradigms, like the imposition of a nation state narrative and legitimacy, and to then work through the various discrepancies between their epistemologies and their theories and tactics,

but utilizing these coalesced ideas around things like the nation state. And again, in Pan-Africanism, we see many scholars who also will acknowledge and try to think about this insistence on a nation state as a legitimate form by the West. But as I said, I don't want to dwell on this too much because this is an entire topic that we could do a two-hour episode on in itself. So I'll save some of that for later. and perhaps I'll get to talk more about Betty Kay later as well because she really was one of my inspirations as I was as coming into political consciousness in a more rigorous way at that period of time.

I want to get into the final topic for today Adnan and we can try to be brief with this. So I know I mentioned at the beginning that we consume a lot of media reading. You know, you and I are both educators in various forms and in addition to that, we are readers. So we read for the purpose of our educational capacities, and we read because I know you and I both just enjoy reading.

And so a lot of what we read and what we get to discuss with each other, typically are things that we're reading for the show. So, you know, listeners, you're going to hear. We're going to be talking about Western Marxism, Lassurdo's newly translated work, Western Marxism, on the show in the near future. you're going to hear a conversation about an anarchistic commun land reclamation project taking place in Indonesia. These are books that we have read for the show. And so rather than us talking about, well, we read these books together and let's discuss kind of things that we took out

of it, those are going to come up in other episodes. I'm particularly curious and the listeners probably are as well. What are the sort of things that you've been reading and consuming that are not explicitly for episodes of the show, but, you know, perhaps are giving you some ideas because I certainly have plenty, but I'd like to hear what you're kind of reading these days. Well, I don't get a chance to do a lot of just scouting around reading for interesting things that could be good for the show. Unfortunately, I rely a lot there on like what I hear about, you know, in various venues and social media to identify. And of course, I read a lot of like political essays and, you know, journalistic kinds of things to keep up with an analysis

about what's happening in the current world. Most of the reading that I have to do relates to, you know, research projects and teaching and reading new things that might have come out that are related to courses I'm teaching. I just happen to be, you know, organizing this conference and teaching an independent study graduate class that's dealing with a lot. on the questions of religious and political authority in the Middle East and Islamic world. And this conference, you know, has led me to read a lot of new scholarship that relates to periods that I don't typically work on just to be familiar with what's out there. And so I did read and have a good conversation with the author actually as an event

opening this conference, recalling the caliphate decolonization and global order with its author Salman Sayyid. And this is a book that was published decade ago and so we had a kind of conversation about like you know how does it relate to kind of contemporary world order and do we see the analysis still fitting and what new things kind of have come up so that was interesting and so on this kind of question of the caliphate i was reading quite a lot of like ottoman era history and later periods and i read a good book by another person who we invited called caliphate of man which was basically about you know the arab so-called spring and other movements that had emerged and their foundations, you know, as political orientations

and what had happened to those and ideas of sovereignty and how they're being kind of thought through and developed. And so, you know, I was reading quite a lot on that. And, of course, lately I've been reading quite a bit on kind of world systems. We've had a great episode with Dr. Ariel Salisman about world systems. And I'm reading it because I'm interested in kind of some of these reframing ideas of reorienting our historiographical narratives, kind of like what we had been discussing at the beginning of the conversation. And in particular, I'm engaging with other attempts to globalize medieval history or medieval culture and literature that's often considered European. and in this particular period, and these are separate and isolable.

And all my work and teaching is always about trying to bring the Middle East Islamic world and other parts of the Mediterranean in conversation with one another to reframe history. But even Mediterranean history is a regional focus within what we could think of as a global world system. And so I'm kind of engaging with people who have been trying to do that for the medieval period. And I've got my own kind of critiques and so on. and I'm working on a piece that's kind of crusading in the world system. You know, that's the kind of work that I've been trying to do. And this would be a part of an article separately, but, you know, some components of it would be part of the, you know, a chapter,

a sort of historiographical chapter on, you know, the formation of the crusading society, the project that I've been working on and talking about. So I don't get a chance to read kind of just a political book as often, as I would like to find out things. But I actually, in many ways, these things really connect with what I was just talking about today, which is how I'm thinking and feeling about what's happening in the contemporary world, is that for me, the stakes are always connected, actually. I mean, I don't see them as totally separate from, you know, what's happening now. And now, and frankly, I think everything that has happened in the last 15 or 20 years

of the like global war on terrorism and its legacies has been year by year just making more obvious the thesis I have about the crusading society. And so, you know, everything that I'm reading, I fit into some way in which it's connecting to the expansion of an originate, you know, the features of, you know, like every day there's something that I read about the Crusades and I'm thinking about, oh my goodness, this is so much more connected to, you know, settler colonial history overall and in specific, you know, the, you know, history of the Zionist, you know, colony, settler colony, its behavior, the fact that there are no borders or boundaries that were declared similar to the Crusader states, they just were universalist sort of project. And, you know, even now, I just was reading, I was just watching something and I now have more things that I have to read about the relationship between Israel and Cyprus. Because, you know, there was the Lusinian dynasty. Something that maybe we should, I'll do something on, you know, which is that, you know, after 1291, you know, because Cyprus had been taken from the Byzantines and conquered by, you know, you know, the Norman, you know, actually Richard, Richard the Lionheart actually conquered Cyprus. And after, you know, 1290, you know, they established a kind of colony in an independent kind of kingdom, you know, there.

really that became very closely connected with the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. And when, you know, they lost territory, and particularly they lost Jerusalem to Salahadine, you know, the kingdom sort of relocated and the dynasty that ended up ruling and certainly after 1291 was this Lucinian dynasty in Cyprus. And it's like they had a little crusader state there. And you can see now that there is a huge immigration, you know, Cyprus has seen. is something very closely connected to Israel. So Western country that was also formed as an independent country with a problem of mixed population that was not resolved by the British, you know, and it was under the mandates. And it stayed as a British, you know, possession for a long time, which is why they still have a military base there that is so implicated in the daily support of the genocide, providing intelligence and armaments and so on. And so, I'm I was thinking, wow, even in this respect, the relationship between the Latin Crusader kingdom and, you know, Latin settlement and colonization of the island of Cyprus is so similar

in some ways because of the geographical and political and orientation of these settler colonial projects that it's almost natural that there would be a continuing resonance between that history from the 12th century and the 13th century and what's happening in the 20th and 21st. centuries. And so there's lots of talk about how so many people are emigrating, you know, from Israel to Cyprus. And it's coming, you know, and in fact, even in the late 19th century, they attempted to establish before they, because they didn't have permission from the Ottomans, you know, to really settle at certain periods of time in Palestine, you know, that they said, well, we should start in Cyprus. And so they purchased land and they started trying to create a kind of proto

colony that then they felt like once the time was right, they could move a lot of these people, you know, there. And so there's just this kind of historical symmetry. So everything that even I'm studying when I'm doing my historical work, I find, you know, such amazing connections with contemporary political histories that we're dealing with now. Well, I think that that's the fascinating way in which to do it is look for connections. You know, just before I talk about some of the other things that I'm reading, I'm going to plug a couple of of things. I know that this is, again, just for the Patreon, but patrons, you'll get to hear about one of these projects before anybody else because it hasn't been publicly announced

yet. Adnan, you had mentioned talking about, reading about world systems. You know, we had talked about world systems in unequal exchange. There's two books that are coming out that will probably be of interest to you. So one that was just announced yesterday was Torkel-Lausans, the long transition towards socialism, which, you know, Torkel-Lausen is one of the big names within unequal exchange that's still living today. And that is coming out through ISCRA. It's going to be 430 pages or something like that. I saw that very excited for it.

We'll definitely have to do an episode about it. Absolutely. But we've got another thing that Torkel will have to talk about as well. And my plan is that we can bring him on in between the two publications to talk about both of these. So one, as I mentioned, is the long transition, which is an all new book, 430-something pages written by Torkel Lawson, exclusive through Iskra, and it'll be coming out within a month or so. I don't remember the exact publication date off the top of my head, but it's coming

pretty quick. Now, as for the second project, and this is going to get me into talking about things that I have been reading, you know, a lot of the things that I'm reading these days are things for Iskra because I'm editing things internally that, you know, my name is not necessarily going to be on. So whereas I've talked about the fact that I, Salvatore and I did the translation for the forthcoming communism, the highest stage of ecology, which will be coming out in the winter. And my name will be on that. There's also a couple of projects that I'm involved with as an internal editor for. And one, which has not been announced yet, but will be on the launch day of the long transition, is another book, Torkelowson-related.

So Torkel Lawson, as the listeners may be aware, he's been on the show before, he was one of the main members of the Communist Working Group in Denmark, which was a group that, and I'm not going to beat around the Bush, one of their main activities, in addition to thinking about how to advance the cause of socialism within Denmark, was also to achieve international solidarity with colonized peoples, and one of their methods of doing so was robbing banks in order to send money to the government. the PFLP. And that was what they were arrested for, was after a series of successful bank robberies in which they did get money out of banks in Denmark and send it to the PFLP. And you can read that story in turning money into revolution by Gabriel Kuhn, who wrote one of the blurbs for this book that I still have not announced yet. And I'm kind of beating around the bush a bit, I understand. But great book. And we should talk with Gabriel about that book sometime. So they were sending money. Absolutely.

Yeah, they were sending money to the FLP. This is what Torkel did. That was why Torkel was arrested. But now he's primarily writing about, you know, unequal exchange and also how to show solidarity with colonized peoples globally. One of the books that they had written in the 1980s when the before they had gotten arrested was unequal exchange and the prospects of socialism. And that book was originally written in 1984. It was originally published in Danish and then in English in 1985 and had obviously a very limited run because it was through their underground publishing press that they were operating as the Communist Warf King Group and has been out of print since then. It did feature a forward by Argyri Emanuel, but it's not exactly the most easy to find text in terms of physical form.

You can get the digital copies off of various websites for free. Yeah. But what I've done, I commissioned Torkel to write an extensive prolog and epilogue all new so that we could republish the book for a very affordable rate and we're going to make it look like a mass paperback and we're going to print it like really, really cheap. So it's going to look like it came out of a vault from the 1980s, very retro cover and everything. And that's kind of cool idea, yeah. Yeah, because if you see the long transition, it's like a textbook. It's like a 430 long, a page long, high-quality, glossy textbook. And then the idea is this one is going to be the opposite

of that. It's going to look like a mass paperback from an underground room with a very retro, like, 80s cover. You're going to love it at none. And listeners, I'm sure you will too. But anyway, Torkel wrote like 50 pages of a prologue and epilogue for this. And then I also wrote a foreword for it alongside Namanya Lukich, who has been on the show, part of the Argyria Emanuel Association and the person who runs the site anti-imperialist.net. So that book will be coming out very soon as well. And I think that that will also be interesting for you. So now with that long explanation out of the way, I am reading a lot of things for Iskra and editing

them. We have a memoir that I've also commissioned. It'll be coming out through Isker, which is a very exciting project and more about that soon. But I do, even though I'm having to read a lot for the show and a lot for Iskra, I do get time to read some random things, but like you would not, I like to make connections between these things. So a book, and this is going to seem super random.

My wife had chipped in and, you know, contributed along with me because we do a lot of things collectively. We chipped in to get me a photo and textbook on film noir, so I don't watch movies very often. I think the last time I watched a movie was the summertime. time because I don't have time for it. But I really like film noir. There's two genre of movie that I watch, film noir and Soviet movies. And the reason why this is interesting is because film noir is incredibly individualistic, whereas the Soviet movies are

incredibly collectivists. So you think, like, how do you bridge this gap? And actually, it's the dichotomy that I quite like watching between the two is that they're beautifully filmed movies, both, but there is this very deeply, almost like ideological difference between the two of them. And some of the things that this film noir book, which was published by a German company, put out, it actually underscores a lot of these points of individualism in various forms, anti-women individualism, you know, vice as individualism, etc., etc. And also looking at the social context in which this era took place, this was the beginning of the Cold War,

well, the beginning of the second phase of the Cold War, I should say, you know, after World War II. I think it's quite interesting to look at this and think of it as a political project to have this movie genre as a hyper-individualist and explicitly anti-communist film genre at that period of time, Even though it's worth noting some of the authors who wrote the works that became film noir movies, like Dashiel Hammett, was a communist himself who then was blacklisted for his political views when it kind of came out that, well, he was kind of a communist. And so Hammett's works became many of the classic film noir as despite the fact that he was then blacklisted from even writing for popular outlets. So that was kind of an interesting thing to think about, even though that wasn't necessarily made.

explicit within the text. So I'm not going to tell people what the text is because there's a lot of subtext here that you have to read through. And like I said, it's a German book. So it might not even be available in the U.S. I don't know. But in terms of other things, I do get to read other random things. I've read a couple of Russian classics recently, a hero of our time by Lermontov. It was a fascinating work. I've read some Pushkin recently. But in terms of other political books, which I think the listeners will probably be more interested in. I've read some Stalin recently. We've got collected works of Stalin coming out through Iskra as well. So I'm, of course, checking those out. But then another book that I had read recently, Operation Greenhunt

from Foreign Languages Press, which is looking at something that we had talked about briefly in previous episodes is this dichotomy between counterinsurgency and genocide and how actually it's not quite the dichotomy that we think it is, but rather are two sides of a continuum. And within this, so it's specifically looking at Operation Greenhunt, which is a quote-unquote counterinsurgency campaign within India by the Indian state against Maoists and suspected Maoists in the author of this text, Adolfo Maya Fernandez posits that, you know, this is really just genocide under another name. The interesting part of this is that, you know, he looks at this hearts and mind strategy and how that has been utilized as well. So this looking at counterinsurgency

genocide, but then also this narrative of hearts and mind being wrapped into it was quite interesting. And it's a very short book. I highly recommend people check that out. I've been reading some obviously Lassurdo for this article, Walter Rodney. Currently, I'm reading the CFA Frank, Africa's last colonial currency. I read it a few years ago, but I want to read it again because that's one of the episodes in our African series coming up. So I want to make sure that I annotate that quite heavily for that conversation. And yeah, I've got a lot of other stuff that, you know, I pick up, I read through, I put it down, I pick up again, annotate it some, put it down. I read a history of the Tatars that was, you know, for my own personal benefit, but still quite

interesting nevertheless. But like you would non, and this is the last thing I'll say, is that in all of these works, there's something that can be gleaned in which we can utilize when analyzing other historical things, as well

as analyzing contemporary political things. And so even when I was going through this film noir book, I'm thinking about the political moment at which that genre was out, and then that comparison with the Soviet film industry, which at the same time was

putting out beautiful works as well, that could not be more different on an ideological foundation. So even something that's as far divorced politically, it's seemingly far divorced politically as a book on film noir as a genre, you can make these connections with politics, with history and that's something that I always try to do and something that I find quite fruitful because otherwise these connections would, you know, I would never have the connection between film nor individualism and anti-communism versus the Soviet period, unless I'm literally reading this work and thinking about it at that time. But now I can't help but think

about that. And I know whenever I have time to watch another movie and, you know, it'll either be a film noir or a Soviet film, again, now I'm going to be thinking more deeply about that dichotomy between the two ideologically and how that feeds into the way in which these films are made. So that's just my last little note. So Adnan, is there anything else you want to add or should we wrap it up here? I know we went longer than we were planning to. Yeah, well, like we usually do, but I think actually, you know, some of the first part of our conversation before we talked about, you know, what we're currently reading and so on, actually a pretty important episode level discussion that maybe we'll have to make, you know, early release for Patreon. And if there's

some way, maybe I think a wider community of people might actually be interested in some of the remarks we were having about history. So anyway, that's all to say, basically, is that I thought it was a really stimulating conversation. And I really enjoyed, you know, hearing your thoughts and questions. And it stimulated me to think about things in an interesting way. So I hope listeners to this episode on Patreon will benefit from that. And, you know, perhaps there's material in there in some fashion that others may yet benefit from as well. Well, let me say, you know, when I say that it's a Patreon exclusive, you know, listeners, even when it is a Patreon exclusive, let's be honest, we try to make as much available for everyone as we can

at some point or another when we have the ability to do so. So let me, let me say this. I'm going to put the bar pretty low. That way we make sure that we achieve it. If five people in our Patreon comment with a specific part of this conversation that they thought would be particularly useful for the general audience, then we'll make sure that we put it out for the general audience with your commentary on what you thought was particularly useful to listen to. So that'll hopefully, I know that this is at the very end of the episode.

so who's even listening anymore. But if five of you put a comment in with a specific point of this conversation that you thought was stimulating would be useful for a general audience, let us know, and we will be sure to release this with that commentary of what you thought was particularly useful for other people in the future.

So how about that, Adnan? Sounds great, and we just also want to thank all of our patrons for supporting the show and helping us out. like to do. We don't maybe get to do as many as we'd like because we're really focused on putting out as much content regularly for, you know, mass, you know, political education and historical resources, but we do like to do things. And especially if there's interaction that comes back from it, from those of you who are on the platform, I'm always interested to hear

from you and want to thank you for your support for the show. Absolutely. So in that vein, And since this hopefully will be going out as a general release, just let the listeners know where they can find you on Twitter, you know, in preparation of this going out beyond the Patreon community that we have. Sure. You can find me on Twitter at Adnan, A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and, you know, check out the M-J-L-I-S, a kind of podcast I host for the Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project. Yeah. As for me, listen as you can find me. excuse me, on Twitter at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. I will just mention, you know, this is, again, a Patreon episode,

but if it does go to the general audience, you can help support the show by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history, and follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod to keep up with everything that we're doing. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. Listeners, on that note, read your dashiel Hammett, read for those

communist underpinnings and see why he was blacklisted and then think about how the film Moore industry, that genre was a tool of Western imperialism. But despite that making some pretty excellent films as well, I must

concede, but it's interesting to think about. So on that note, be sure to do that. And until next time, Solidarity. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.