Guerrilla History - Washington Bullets w/ Vijay Prashad

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

In this episode of Guerrilla History, the guys run through some of the long and sordid history of US interventions abroad, whether by the military, the CIA, the IMF, or other even less thought about methods.  The very special guest is Vijay Prashad, Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and author of (among many other vital works) the new book Washington Bullets.  Vijay can be followed on twitter @vijayprashad and the Tricontinental Institute can be followed @tri_continental.  Washington Bullets is available from LeftWord books for a very low price!  You can find it here https://mayday.leftword.com/catalog/product/view/id/21820.   Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/msgp-queens, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and on Libsyn at https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/, and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod and on Libsyn https://redmenace.libsyn.com/.  You can support those two podcasts by visiting https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio and https://www.patreon.com/TheRedMenace.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.                                                

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki, joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. Hi, Henry. And Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. Hello, Henry. Nice to have you both here.

I'm really looking forward to. the conversation that we're going to have coming up. So today our guest is Vijay Prashad, who is the director of the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research, is the author of many books, including the darker nations, the people's history of the third world, the poorer nations, a possible history of the global south and Red Star over the third world. But today he's going to be gracious enough to talk about his newest book, which is just out. It's called Washington Bullets.

from left word books. That's left W-O-R-D books. And it talks about the history of U.S. intervention, CIA coups and the like across the world. And what I think was a really, really interesting and thought-provoking book. So before VJ comes on, let's talk about our general thoughts of the book, some of the things that we thought were particularly interesting and some of the questions that it kind of raised for us. And then we'll bring V-J on and we'll have a conversation with him about his book, Washington Bullets. So Brett, Adnan, what were your thoughts on Washington Bullets? Brett? Sure. Yeah, I'll go ahead and start this off. I love the book. Obviously, it's a sort of broad overview of the patterns of American imperialism, touching on a bunch of different

stuff without getting lost in the details of any one specific event. One thing that really comes through and something that I really like to reiterate is that you have to, it really helps to understand the CIA as the organized crime branch of the American ruling class. Their job is to go about the world not to promote freedom and democracy like American ideology and American ideologues like to pretend that American governments do, but actually as a force of evil, as a force of anti-democracy in the world, all in the name ultimately of multinational corporations and their profits which own the American government. So understanding the CIA,

not as just an intelligence agency with some good and bad things, but really as the organized crime branch of the American ruling class, I think is essential here. And another thing I thought about when I was reading through this book, which occurs to me often, is it's funny in the American context when you have American patriots, American nationalists. And I've noticed a relationship where the more of a patriot someone is in the U.S.,

The less they actually know about American history, the more of like a childlike, naive, middle school level and idealist conception of American history that they tend to have. And if you do, in those extremely rare cases, come across somebody who truly understands American history with real clarity and still supports it, you're talking almost entirely to a fascist and an imperialist. The history of America is truly a brutal one. And, you know, we're just going to drive that point home today, I think. Well, this was a very interesting and readable book in a short period of time. He managed to cover the patterns, really, as Brett was saying, of U.S. imperial intervention. But one thing that I really liked about the book was how it grounded his analysis in a period even before the U.S. becomes the predominating global superpower in the post-World War II period to set up the way in which colonialism and imperialism of an earlier era set up some of the structures that really inform how the world is organized today and a lot of the views and ideas about the dangers of

colonial peoples seeking their democratic and economic rights has been and how that continued under the U.S. with new forms and patterns where the U.S. really sort of perfected the way of intervening in this new global order post-World War II. I think it's also a terrific companion to a book you mentioned that was very important and influential when it came out, The Darker Nations. That book really went through a lot of the history of the third world movements, anti-imperialism, and talked about a lot of these histories.

And what we're getting in this book, it seems to me, me is a lot of the analysis about how and why and the patterns of intervention of how those movements anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-capital movements were derailed and have been by U.S. intervention. So it's a really good companion piece, I think, to the darker nations. Yeah, I agree with both of you. And one thing I want to highlight is what Adnan just said about readability. The readability of this book is, extremely high. I think that this is a book that anybody can take and really take a lot from. It's written in a way that it focuses on highlights without getting lost in flowery language.

You're getting too deep into any specific event. It really is a good through line of the history of U.S. intervention abroad without getting too mired down in either language or details because there is so much that you could cover. And of course, a lot of authors like to write in very flowery prose. But Vijay here does an excellent job of just presenting things to you in a way that really makes you learn new things, find new events, and really think about how these things work. And another thing that I think was really interesting is that, as Adnan also said, it looks that before the U.S. was the predominant power in the world, or as he says many times before they had preponderant power in the world and almost tracks this back to the foundation of America

as a nation back in 1776, but especially since the Monroe Doctrine. And you really get this through line and you see the changes in methodology that the U.S. is a state used over time to intervene in these foreign lands. One of the through lines that you see in this methodology is it goes from tanks to banks to bank, to NGOs to lawfare and the U.S. kind of has adapted its methodology over time because some of the methods that they used to do either they found were ineffective or became ineffective over time because these nations that they were trying to intervene and became wise to the methods that the U.S. were using and then the U.S. had to adapt its methodology in order to exert the same

sort of influence that it had previously. So this book really did an excellent job of showing this transition of methodology in a way that was understandable for everyone. Adnan? I think this was also, this is a really good book for inaugurating the podcast in some ways because it does cover a lot of ground and because it is meant to really revive a sense of histories that have been suppressed. Something I'd like to hear him talk a little bit further about or the methods and approaches to really digging up this history from the sorts of sources that you have to.

But I think he said something really valuable that characterizes the project of the book that I think is really the project also of our conversation with him and of this podcast. He says on page 53, militant struggle about the militant struggle of the Tri-Continental. Democracy in Portugal and in South Africa was taken by the gun. It was not given by liberalism. Those narratives are now submerged. It has to be revived. Not just the sounds of the battlefield,

but also the stories of the doctors and the technicians of the revolutionary educational programs in Mozambique and Cape Verde, the attempt to build a new society out of the detritus of the colonial order. This was the revolutionary energy that is now forgotten. And that's why we need these sorts of histories. to revive a sense of those stories that have been suppressed.

And that's, I think, also the project of this podcast, guerrilla history. Yeah, and just to add one quick thing on there. So I had a note from basically the same segment as you. And this, again, is the understanding of guerrilla history and understanding that events aren't static or monolithic. So you mentioned these struggles in these former Portuguese territories. One of the things that I thought was really interesting that he pointed out and that I wasn't quite aware of and a lot of us wouldn't be aware of is that for a long time, the struggles in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde were nonviolent. The PAIGC had non-violent movements to try to decolonialize themselves from Portugal. But because of massacres, of villagers, because of massacres, of dock workers, etc., by Portugal, that was what forced the arm struggle. But if you look at just history tax direct large,

they would focus on the armed struggle is what overthrew the Portuguese colonization of these areas, not understanding that there was a transition there, that it wasn't just people overnight took up arms. There really was this being pushed by the Portuguese. And I think that understanding things like this are really important to understanding the history, more holy. Brett, let's pitch it over to you. Was there anything in here that really caught you that, you know, you weren't aware of

or something that really raised some questions that you're planning on asking VJ when we bring him on? Well, I did want to mention that the whole sort of pattern of U.S. imperialism, the way it rose to superpower status and the way it evolved over time, which I think both of you have alluded to so far, really speaks to the nature of this whole thing being a historical process of counter-revolution around the globe. It's very interesting to see how he talks about, and maybe we'll get into the interview, that although we think of the Cold War period as this East and West sort of contradiction, he really flips that around. It says it's actually a global north versus global south contradiction. And a lot of these,

this Cold War battles, they obviously didn't happen with the U.S. taking on the USSR head on. They were through proxy battles often in the global south. It also speaks to the herald heroic nature of so many just regular people around the world who, you know, exhausted every effort they could just to have basic rights, basic say over their own life, basic control over their own resources, and just how brutally and unforgiving the U.S. government and its allies treat these people around the world. And one thing that's always been close to my heart and one thing I hope maybe even guerrilla history can touch on in the future is the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan.

just you know he just he mentions it and he talks about in the aftermath and and it's fascinating but to drill down on just how unprecedented that was just how monstrous that act was just how unnecessary it really was he touches on this fact that japan was already on the ropes they were they were already about to really give up and not one but two of these bombs and they were just wholeheartedly aimed at at city centers and of course the history of world war two has plenty of that, but I find that act of barbarism particularly striking and really as this opening salvo of what we now know as the Cold War. We really have to think about that dropping of the atomic bombs as the U.S. flexing to the Soviet Union and saying now that World War II

is coming to an end, you're the enemy. And things like Operation Paperclip where the U.S. extracted a bunch of Nazi intellectuals and scientists to start their war effort against the Soviet Union. I think all that history is fascinating and really deserves its own sort of deep dive at some point. Yes. So one of the things that you touched on, I think, is something else that we're going to want to bring up. So you talk about Operation Paperclip and extracting Nazis. And, you know, there was something else that I was completely unaware of is how religious institutions were doing essentially the same thing, where they were extracting Nazis from Germany after World War II and

bringing them to various places, you know, harboring them and allowing them to take a foothold in in other places, particularly in Latin America. But yeah, I just also want to emphasize what Brett said that this thinking of the Cold War is not really being a Cold War East West, U.S., USSR, but rather a global north, global south colonialism versus decolonialism or anti-colonialism was really something that, you know, caught me, I guess it shouldn't have caught me by surprise, but something that really was eye-opening for me. Adnan, I'll let you have more or less the last word before we bring in VJ. So anything else that you want to raise in our introduction before VJ comes on?

Well, it's a book with so many different dimensions and aspects. We could ask him about many, many things. I think I'll be interested. You alluded to religious institutions. I think in this book he also talks about liberation theology as a counter force, a religious movement that was on the side of people and also had to be suppressed in various ways. And I think that's an interesting topic to broaden out is the ways in which religious movements, you know, worked on both sides of this. But also just fundamentally, he concludes

the book, it's a little bit dark, you know, this story of all of the Washington bullets, all of the ways in which U.S. imperialism has derailed movements around the world for liberation and social justice. And so I just wondered at the end maybe if he had any thoughts. I would like to ask him about not necessarily naive or vain hope, but whether or not the rebalancing of the world, now that the United States may not be such a predominating power, even if militarily, it's very strong, if there is a rebalancing of the world that might provide opportunities and options for future revolutionary and liberatory struggles around the world. Absolutely. So I think that we're all in agreement that the book was absolutely worth

our while to read. It was a very fast read and very eye-opening. And I think that I can safely say that we're all recommending that the listeners, everyone, go look in. to grabbing the Washington bullets or Washington bullets, you're not going to regret it. And just final thing before we bring in VJ, the mention of liberation theology, I believe it was the second newest episode of Brett's Rev Left Radio, had an episode on Liberation Theology,

a pretty deep dive into it. So if you're listening to this and you haven't yet listened to Brett's Rev Left Radio episode on Liberation Theology, give that a look because that was an excellent episode. I think that having people cross-pollinate between these shows really will give them a deeper understanding because, of course, an episode on that specifically is going to be far more in depth than anything that we're going to be able to cover with Vijay on Liberation Theology coming up. So give that a listen and we'll be right back with Vijay Prashad.

Welcome back to guerrilla history. We're now joined by our very, very special and inaugural guest, VJ Prashad, director of the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. As I mentioned before in the introduction, VJ is the author of many, many books, something like three books at this point, including some really important works, like the darker nations, the people's history of the third world, the poorer nations, the possible history of the global south, and Red Star over the third world. But today, Vijay is going to be talking to us about his newest book, which we've already introduced,

Washington Bullets, which is now out from Left Word Books. That's W-O-R-D, left-word books. And Vijay, I guess they get us into it. I'm going to mention the fact that Washington Bullets' preface was written by none other than Avo Morales. And at the time of recording, we're now just a couple of days. divorced from Moss being victorious at the polls in Bolivia. So I know that we're going to get back to Bolivia, you know, by the end of the conversation. But do you have anything that you want to get out there early on? And how did you get Able Morales to write the preface to the book?

Well, it's great to be with you. And I like the idea of a guerrilla podcast. It's super. It brings back all kinds of emotions and evocations, you know. It is a very important. evokes our rearguard action to bring good ideas to good people and make more people good people, really, to make the majority good people. It's not easy being good in this world. And I think part of, I think the task of intellectual activity is to try to expand this sense that it's possible to be good and it's possible to be a decent person. You know, that's part of our task, I think. And this brings me directly to the fact that there was a coup against the government of Evo Morales, Aima, in November, well, beginning in October of 2019 and then in November, during that period, lots of people, not only in Latin America, but worse, in the overseas, particularly Western left, lots of people felt that this was not a coup. and they felt that Evo Morales had made lots of mistakes

and therefore somehow deserved what was happening to him. I was surprised to read so-called think pieces written on websites of what purports to be left periodicals, and there's no need to mention them. They know who they are. You know, making the kinds of gestures that suggested that they would be happy to be weaponized by the CIA against a movement of the people in Bolivia,

which is the movement to socialism, which was in government and whose term was not going to expire till January of 2020. And yet when Evo Morales was removed from office in November 2019 by a military action, even liberals who, constitutional liberals, who should have said, look, he should be allowed to serve out his term till January.

You know, even if the election of October 2019 is in doubt, that was not, it was not based on that election that his term went till January, but even constitutional liberals and people of the so-called left started saying, well, you know, it's good. There was fraud in the election, they said, believing the organization of American states. And that really struck me as peculiar and disturbing. And I decided that, you know, I'm going to do this. I'm going to now, apart from all the other things I do, I'm not going to go to bed for the next three weeks and I'm going to write this book. And I literally wrote this book in a feverish pace.

You know, I have, you know, great fond memories of Eduardo Galliano. And I remember very well, Galliano saying that there are times when it's our job just to do things. You know, don't, you know, you thinking at that moment, I'm angry at what's happening. People don't understand the history of how coups happened. They don't understand what the OAS is. They don't understand the CIA, or maybe they're being deliberately opaque about their knowledge, you know.

But Galliano, I remember said many times, sometimes you just have to say it again, you know, like his books on torture. You just have to say it again. It's not like entire generations don't know what the junta did in Argentina and Uruguay in Chile. and Brazil and yet Eduardo went and wrote brilliant books over and over again because you just have to do it and I said to myself you know you just got to do it and I sat down and I just wrote this book at a fever pitch and I said I'm writing it for young militants because we need

armor we cannot afford to have amnesia against you know 60 70 years of the you know the history of the CIA and what they've done what the CIA has done done. You know, not like one person here and one person there. This institution, which continues to exist, what this institution has done, it has to be there. Now, of course, there are million books in the library. Of course, there are many, many synthetic accounts sitting somewhere or the other. That doesn't matter. What did Galliano say? You just got to do it. You've got to say it again and again and again because the battle of ideas is adverse. We haven't made the point, you know. And so many of these books are 500 pages long because the crimes of the CIA are so significant.

So I said, I'm going to write a hundred page book which is going to tell the whole story. I'm somehow going to do this. In 100 pages, I'm going to just indict the CIA from its founding till the present. And, you know, I'm going to tell you, in a month and a bit, I had a draft. And I said, Evo has to write the forward to this. and he agreed because he was sitting in Argentina and had just been overthrown in a coup and when you know I said this book is called Washington Bullets

because I've been waiting to write a book with that name Washington Bullets and I went for a walk and I had my headphones on and I was listening to music and I put it to a recording app and I basically just said to and I haven't even edited this you know I just said, what is the price of an assassin's bullet, some dollars here and there, the cost of the bullet, the cost of a train ride, a hotel, an airplane. I just started speaking this.

This is totally unedited, the first part. It's exactly, the whole of that first paragraph was basically me pissed off talking into my phone while I was just walking around. And I came back and I transcribed it and I said, that's it. And when I sent it, a preface has to be done, and it was done. And if you see the preface, the last line of the preface from Evo Morales, he says, last two lines, we have the conviction that we are the masses and that the masses over time will win. This was written in April. Here's a man who has his finger on the pulse of his people.

Yeah, excellent. So I guess to get us moving into the book itself now, and then that'll be. open up opportunities for the guys to, yeah, jump in and start asking questions. But I want to just add a quote from that little section that you were talking about in regards to Washington bullets. And you're talking about, yeah, what is the price of a bullet? It's not the price of the raw materials. It's not the price of production.

It's the price of what was the, what did it cost that bullet to the people that that bullet was used on? And you said, quote, in Indonesia, the price of the bullet was an. the millions. In Guatemala, the tens of thousands, the death of Lamumba damaged, the social dynamic of the Congo, muscling its history. What did it cost to kill Chokri of Belade and Ruth first? What did it take to kill Amalcar Cabaral and Berder Casares? I mean, it's amazing that we don't often think of what the cost of these actions were to the people in these areas. And we also don't understand a lot of the times that it's not necessarily as simple as

a bullet. And I think that this brings us to one of the key points of your book is what you were calling the manual for regime change, which was a nine-step program. And I'm just going to read out the nine steps, and then I'll have you comment on it, and the guys will be able to, you know, bounce back and forth off of you. So you have your manual for regime change. One, lobby public opinion. Two, appoint the right man on the ground. Three, make sure the generals are ready. Four, make the economy scream. Five, diplomatic isolation. Six, organized mass protests. Seven, green light. Eight, a study of assassination. And nine, deny. There's this whole through line for these movements. So, Vij, I guess, why am I talking? We have you on. Why don't you comment on that?

Well, you see, the first thing is that it's not like I need to make up anything. And really the advantage here is that because the United States is, you know, a half-big democracy, there are rules that some materials need to be made public after a certain amount of time. Plus, there's, you know, the Freedom of Information Act, you know, opportunity available to you. With the U.S. coup against Jacob Arbenz's government in Guatemala, actually don't even need to use the Freedom of Information Act because it's just all online. Everything is available. All the information I got on that coup I got as PDFs from the CIA library, from the State Department library, it's all online. So I said, you know, again, Greg

Grandin has written, there's so many people have written terrific books about the Guatemala coup. You know, it's all there. But what I was interested in is to use the Guatemala coup to try to create the methodology of the coup data. What's the methodology? What are the pieces of the coup? If you just tell the narrative of the coup, it looks like, well, that's about Guatemala 53. I was not interested in the narrative of that coup, you know, the conjuncture of that coup. I was interested in the structure of regime change. And that's a theoretical concern. That's not a concern on the level of empirical. But in order to produce the theory in a credible way, you need enough empirical, valid empirical information.

And rather than go and interview the victims whose opinions can be discarded, as they often are, I just took the CIA's own texts. And if the CIA is to be believed, if you look at their own text, this is what they say they did, then this is the methodology that they operate with. And it's not just merely in Guatemala, which is why interspersed it. I bring in Guyana, I bring in different coups, and, you know, tell the story in such a way that if the reader is reading with care, then they will notice that Bolivia, 2019, follows the exact script. You know, you just need to read about Guatemala and you understand Bolivia. And that's chilling, because that means from 1953 to 2019, the CIA has basically been using the,

the same manual. And it's not just the CIA. I mean, in Colombia today, in the northern part of South America, almost every day a social movement leader is killed. And you know, you get sporadic information about this, you know, the death of the, and they're often Afro-Columbian. This leader killed, that leader killed, local leaders. And the thing is, you've got to understand, if your local leader is killed, it's almost that for a generation, politics in that area is destroyed. Because it's not just the loss of that individual. Everybody else is made terrified. And they just don't want to put the head above water. You know, when you kill one person, you can terrify a community. And that's the sort of homeopathic use of violence by imperialism that needs to be really grasped. You know, what they did in Indonesia was they killed over a million people and totally dismantled the left movement in that country for generations till today, dismantled it. In the Congo, they just actually needed to kill Lumumba in public, as it were. You know, just kill him in public.

And then Mobutu comes in and they killed a lot of other people. Let's not, you know, be imprecise about it. It's not like only one person was killed. But the death of Lumumba, just like the death of Sankara in 1987 in Burkina Faso, the death of Sankara, these things had a role much beyond the death of an individual. It actually, you know, it takes decades to build up the confidence of a people to confront authority. Decades. In many societies, it takes generations to lift your head up to authority.

You know, I'm talking physically, you know, for generations, people were beaten so that they wouldn't raise their eyes to people in power. You know, I'm talking, they wouldn't look powerful people in the eye. And by the way, I'm not talking about the medieval world. I'm talking about today. I'm talking about today. I'm not talking about in, you know, countries that, you know, wherever. I'm talking even in the advanced industrial countries. You know, somebody, a janitor walks into a building.

There's somebody a banker sitting in his glass office. The janitor doesn't make eye contact with that banker because they're afraid of that banker and whether they'll fire them, you know. So it takes decades, generations to build confidence. And that one bullet, that one person take another. out, can set the confidence back, you know, a long time. And that's what I wanted to explain to people that, you know, and what's amazing about Bolivia in this period is that the overthrow of Morales,

you know, what they did to Patricia Arce, you know, they cut her hair off, they painted her face red, they brutalized her. Do you know what? She's back as a senator. She is back as a senator. the Bolivians have given me so much complete confidence. In a way, they've completely negated the thesis that you overthrow somebody and there's confidence lost for generations, and I salute them.

Please prove me wrong. I want to be wrong because I want you so badly to be right. Adnan, you had something you wanted to say? Well, it's just very interesting. One question I did have for you, and I'm so glad to hear you talk about the inspiring example. that resistance to Washington bullets can perform for us because in some ways it's such a depressing history, right, to see the pattern of regime change that you identify and it was very useful to have

that crystallized through all of those examples. But then, you know, you have a sense that they've been running this game very successfully for, you know, since World War II. What is the possibility you began the book talking a little bit about how hope is a very important resource for resistance. But in reading, you know, the stories and the patterns of successfully derailing of these popular movements for justice around the third world, you know, you're left at the end just with that sense that, yes, we stand for life and justice. But where do we see, from your perspective, the opportunities or the possibilities for successful resistance out of the history that you've shared with us? Yeah.

So, you know, it's not an easy question to answer, because if it were easy, then the world would be a different place. Of course. I think the thing that gives us hope and resilience perhaps is reflected in a line that you will not believe it was passed by the UN General Assembly in the 1960s. In their resolution on decolonization, there's a beautiful line which I use all over the place. And I quoted in here, the line is the process of liberation is irresistible. That's such a great line.

You know, it was in a UN resolution. It's poetic. The process of liberation is irresistible. You can't resist it. It doesn't say it's going to win. It's irresistible. and so what's important is that humans just keep coming up i mean it's that old anarchist song right uh you know what's it you can't knock me down i keep standing what's the hell is that song

that stupid dance number by the anarchist band uh i get knocked down but i get up again you know i get knocked down but i get up again you know you just can't keep me down and i feel like there's something quite powerful in that and I'm not one of those that romanticizes struggle for its sake I want to win you know I actually want to win I don't want to just say look what's great is that we struggle

I think that's extraordinarily you say that from a point of luxury because there are people who can't eat and go to bed the children go to bed at night they want to win they don't just want to struggle for the sake of it they want to win and I believe we can win but I also believe that you can't keep us down.

You know, I get knocked down, but I get up again. And there's something powerful in that. And I have to say that just in terms of the pros, I tried my best not to write the pros so that it was from the standpoint of Langley and the CIA. I wanted very much to write the pros so that it was from the standpoint of a young kid looking out of the window.

saying that, aha, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to throw a rock through your military Jeep. And I'm going to do that because I want you to know that right now I might not be able to overthrow your government, but soon I will. And that was the mode that I was going for, that young kid, you know, he or she is sitting there looking out of their window saying, I'm going to do something now because your days are numbered. So in a way, sort of you're saying that this was intended as a resource for activists. This history should be a resource. In fact, it is guerrilla history. You know, it's a history that will impel the young activist to fight back and to believe and have some confidence that the struggle can be victorious.

It can be achieved. But in a way, for me personally, this has been my quest for the last 20 plus years. in the sense that, you know, and it, you know, it shows. I wrote a PhD, which was two volumes, enormous amount of field research, you know, reconnaissance research. You know, I couldn't get that book published. It was a book about a Dalit community in northern India. And that book, by the way, is circulates in that community by PDF because people find it

very useful in their own lives and struggles and so on. but I couldn't get that book published and it struck me at that and then when it was eventually published it was attacked by all the scholars in the academic journals and I actually came to an understanding it clarified something for me which is that that's not my world actually actually it's not my world I respect academic work enormously you know I respect it I respect its protocols I understand the importance of it you know and I think it must grow and develop and and strength some of its protocols and people need to be serious. That's another world, though. What I was interested in is just the following proposition, that there are enormous libraries which have enormous amounts of incredible information. And then there are hundreds of millions, billions of people out there who have no access to these libraries.

They don't know what's in them. And, you know, what had happened in a way to scholarship is that scholars began to write for each other. And it became like a kind of monastic, religious exercise. and I thought about 20 years ago, you know what, I'm going to just, my job is not that, my job is piracy. I'm going to go into the library, I'm going to read tons of stuff, and then I'm just going to open a funnel and try to funnel out as much information as I can to people. So the second book I wrote karma of brown folk was basically written formally for people who don't

have any idea about academic debates. and you know and in fact it puzzled people in the academy because how do you review a book like that you know it doesn't fit any protocol it was very successful it made my career in a way more than my the book where i spent years researching you know this was like a runaway bestseller and that's not what motivated me though what motivated me was going there and so for the last 20 years i've written you know you say you've written 30 books well you know it's not exactly like an academics book I mean, Washington Bullets is 100 pages long, you know. There's an enormous amount of reading in each of these.

I grant you, Red Star with the Third World is 130 pages long. Huge amount of reading. But I just want to take everything I learned, like that annoying person who's just finished reading a book and then comes out and wants to tell you everything they read. I want my books to be a little bit like that annoying person who's just read a book that's fascinating 500-page book about, you know, World War II in China. And they just want to come and tell you everything, but they want to tell you everything in an hour. I don't find that annoying at all, by the way, Vij. So keep doing what you're doing. Brett, what do you want to

add to this? Yeah, just to take the conversation forward a little bit, I really want to sort of think about the importance of mass support with a lot of these things and the process of education. Because when you look at places like Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba specifically, we see that there's mass support and we see that the people themselves are because of their experiences and their leaders have been very educated on the machinations of Western imperialism, how it operates, and that allows them to more effectively fight back. You can think of the Bay of Pigs and you can think of these recent coup attempts in Venezuela and Bolivia that in large part were beaten back because of that mass support of the people.

So I was hoping that you can kind of talk about the importance of that and just the way that manifests in different context. You know, some of this is a learning experience because when the Guatemala coup was happening in 53, it turned out that, you know, Che Guevara was there in 54, sorry, Che Guevara was there in Guatemala City. And he experienced what was going on. And he writes that he was frustrated that the government didn't arm the people, didn't, you know, arm their main support base and so on.

So when the Cuban revolution takes place, there's a couple of things that the Cuban leadership does, which is really very important. And we shouldn't underestimate the power of it, a lesson learned in Venezuela. One is that you have to constantly educate the public. You know, it's one thing for people in countries like in the West where there's, you know, much higher rates of literacy, there's more access to universities. Then they can easily mock, you know, when Castro would speak for six hours. They mocked that as kind of the ramblings of a, you know, authoritarian or whatever it is. But if you're a Cuban, you don't see it like that. You see that as your university education.

This is very important. You know, it's funny that you will mock Castro for giving a long speech, but you'll be okay for spending six, eight hours, going from one class to the other getting lectures in your university. Somehow, eight hours of lectures is okay in a day. But eight hours of Professor Castro giving you a full sense. of world international relations of the situation in the

Cuban sugar industry, going over statistics, explaining the problems of electricity. I mean, Castro's speeches were a tourative force in conjunctual analysis. You know, he if you go back and read his speeches, he was an educator of

his country, a country which didn't have levels of education for historic reasons, you know? And that was to, in the battle of ideas, school the people. Tell the people, this is where we're at.

You know what? We failed in the Cuban Harvest. Castro's most amazing speeches were after defeat. Not only 1953 history will absolve me after Monkada, but, you know, when the 1970 sugar cane harvest speech, incredible. He goes to the people and explains why Cuba is in difficulty, and he says, I want to resign, and they say,

no, you can't resign. People yell from the crowd. We don't want you to resign. When the Soviet Union collapses, he gives a series of addresses. which explain what happened. And it's really very informative. And so that's one. You know, there's public demonstrations and these speeches.

It's not the ramblings of a megalomaniac. However, you know, there's an annoying way in which, you know, the imperialist core so quickly tries to delegitimize people. It doesn't see the social context, you know. And as I said, it's perfectly okay to go get, you know, go to a speech, you know, whatever in college or school, but this somehow is a bad thing. You know, no, you don't agree with what he's saying. That's the problem.

It's not that you're pissed off that he's speaking for, you know, three, four, six hours. I've heard him speak. He's an incredible speaker. I would listen to him three days running. It's the best series of lectures that I've heard, you know. But the second thing they did was that around the time of Bay of Pigs, they created the committees to defend the revolution in every single hamlet around Cuba, where they arm people.

And I don't just mean militarily, they armed them organizationally. I'll give you an example what this means. When a hurricane is tearing towards Cuba, the committee to defend the revolution has in any community, they have people who are electricians and understand electricity. They mobilize the committee. They go out there before the hurricane hits and they disconnect power lines. They bring them down. Okay?

And they prepare. Then the hurricane goes through because the hurricane is going to bring the power lines down. once the hurricane has gone through they get back and they reconnect in cuba they lose power for the duration of the hurricane do you remember porto rico when the hurricane came because the people are not organized they disarmed by arming the people it never means just guns it means you organize people that's what true arming the people means the difference between cuba in a hurricane and porto rico in a hurricane is the difference between social capitalism and capitalism.

Yeah, so I think that you hit on something that's really key is that we have to be prepared for being armed, whether that's in the sense of guns or in terms of just organization, before we actually need to be armed. We have to be prepared for the eventuality that we will need to be armed. And one of the examples that you used that I want to touch on, and we mentioned it in our introductory segment of this episode, is you mentioned the P.A. JIGC of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. They were not originally a armed militant struggling organization,

and that really only came to be an armed struggle after the Portuguese forced them to become an armed organization by massacring people in those areas. You don't know when you're going to be massacred. And of course, you know, if you can avoid a violent armed struggle, of course, you know, everybody is going to naturally say, we're going to want to avoid that. But when you're being massacred, the option for avoiding an armed struggle is no longer there. And I think that that was a really informative example that you put in the book.

And you're giving more examples now of, you know, being armed doesn't necessarily require arms. You have to be armed for any eventuality. And a lot of these different societies and systems don't allow for the arming of the citizenry. And I think that that's something that we really need to take out of your work here is that we need to be prepared and people worldwide need to be prepared for every eventuality because you never know when these things are going to be coming. Do you want to comment on that before I move us on to another topic, Vij? Well, you raised the PAIGC.

This is the party in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, led by Amilka Cabral. there's a superb book by Sonia Vas Borges about the militant education of the PAIGC. In fact, for Tri-Continental, she's written a three and a half thousand word document about their militant education, which we'll bring out soon. You see, because they understood, yes, they begin as a legal civic organization, you know, to raise people's confidence to struggle against colonialism. There's a massacre. Then they have to move. Their armed struggle is imposed on them. This is what happens in almost every theater.

In almost every national liberation situation, armed struggle is imposed. In South Africa, Mandela and others, they create the sort of the nation, you know, because it is imposed on them. They start out with court cases and so on, and then they have to go underground and then sabotage operations, then an armed struggle and so on. It's imposed by power. Power never gives things up. Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand, but now, wait a minute. Frederick Douglass, this is not enough. Power never concedes enough anything without a demand, but then when you demand something, they try to kill you.

And so you have to defend yourself. And now the question is how? It's not always with guns, and it's important. I just want to underscore that, because the PIGC, in the middle of an arm struggle, recognize the most important thing you arm people with is history, with sociology, and with an understanding of the technical capacities needed to build a society. So they taught them history. What is our history? What is our history as opposed to their history? What they are telling us is our history? What is our real history? That's one thing. What is our sociology? What kind of society

do we live in? What are the different ethnic communities? Why is it that we are told we are fighting each other. This is both historical and sociological. You know, you need to understand how sociologically people are, you know, and economically confronting each other. And finally, you have to be armed with competence. You have to study agronomy. You have to study, you know, seed science. You have to study all these important things so that you can build a society in the future. And that's weaponry, you know. Cabral comes to Havana in 1966 and gives an important address at the Tri-Continental Conference called the weapon of theory. in this address called a weapon of theory he makes this point it's a range of things it includes arms struggle because they are forcing us to fight they're coming and killing us but it also includes education because education is weapons it's armor for people it helps you protect your dignity if you believe as fanon and others have written you know if you believe that what the colonizer is telling you is what is real about you you you you

You will have no dignity. You have to understand who you are to stand straight and confront the colonizer. And that's Phelon's, you know, consistent point from black-skinned white mask to regid of the earth. It's a consistent argument. If you don't have your own history, which is your real history, if you don't have, because everybody's history is dignified, you know, everybody's history is dignified. Nobody has a history that is not dignified. you know you always have a history histories are complicated and contradictory and there's bad sides and so on but everybody has a history with dignity in it you pull at that seam that's pulling at that seam will strengthen your backbone then you will stand up for yourself that's what arming is about you know the gun is a side that's a tactic you know weapons are a tactic the strategy is to stand upright why did sankara take upper volta and change the name to Burkino Faso.

Burkino Faso means the land of upright people. Great. So I think, I mean, you covered that really well. And what I want now is I know that the three of us, when we read your book, we came out with a lot of messages and epiphanies, you could say, that, you know, I think that the vast majority of the listeners won't have been exposed to. So first of all, everybody, buy Washington bullets and read it. It's a very fast read.

You get a lot out of it. guys, I guess let's bring up some of the things that we thought were really, you know, critical out of the book and maybe some questions for Vijay that are related to these epiphanies that we've had. I know that one of the ones that I had was regarding the AFL CIA, but I've been talking too much. So I guess let's turn it over to the guys first. And if we got time for the AFL CIA towards the end, we'll get to that because that is something that I would like Vijay to talk about. Well, we shouldn't go too far away from that. That was a very interesting episode. I think one of the things that was so good about the book is identifying the operations during this so-called Cold War, because it wasn't cold in the third world, as you point out, but the way in which the United States had to enlist intellectuals, artists, and cultural figures, and left labor and, other leftist groups within the United States and to make those sorts of alliances because their real task was somehow, you know, to convince people, you know, not to go for the real option that

was available, right, of genuine social revolution, worker control, these sorts of things. So they had to kind of adapt their message and really, their targets were the liberals, you know, in a way in these societies. And so I think that would be very interesting to talk a little bit more about the enlisting of some of these other groups like the intellectuals, like cultural figures. You've talked, for example, quite a lot about the importance of the Bandung Conference as this marking out of a new direction for post-colonial states and the trajectory that emerges of the non-aligned movement. movement and then the more radical dimensions of it in the Tri-Continental. But, you know, somebody who covered this, a former Marxist, you know, African-American writer of the left, Richard Wright goes, writes the color curtain.

He's sponsored and funded clearly by the CIA's organs for cultural dissemination of liberal, anti-communist sorts of ideas. And it's quite a shocking read when you read it. It's full of its own bigotry and patronizing. racism. And so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the way in which the kind of amnesia you're fighting against is also created by all of these obfuscatory intellectual and cultural enlistments by power. Yeah, this is a very interesting part of it, because this comes straight to the question of the battle of ideas. You know, from the 1940s, in fact earlier, before the CIA was

founded during the time of the OSS and I mean way back this goes beyond U.S. history into other into the it was always clear that you win when you win the argument you know you can suppress somebody you can dominate somebody and you can terrify them you can rule by fear you know Machiavelli has a section on this you know it's better not to rule by fear actually it's better to rule by winning the argument, you know, what the Russians called hegemony, you know, which then Gramsci takes the term from Russian debates and then it enters in a very bizarre way in the American Academy, you know, but the idea of hegemony was to win the argument. That was the idea. And the CIA was adept at this. I mean, listen, these people, the bosses at the CIA,

they all studied at Harvard, at Yale. You know, they know history very well. They often studied, you know, history or literature, things like that. They understood that you had to win the argument. And they also understood that you can win the argument powerfully. You didn't have to actually win the argument. You enlist people to force the argument through. For instance, the media.

You call up the New York Times and you tell them that coverage is not appropriate. we want you to send this reporter to Cuba. We want you to send that reporter to Guatemala. That's it. And they would, because why? They all went to Harvard and Yale together. They were friends. There was not even the need to twist anybody's arm.

They agreed with each other at that level. So, you know, we have ample evidence of these mainstream newspapers, seeding reporters on behalf of the CIA. And I'm sure this happens till today. You know, I'm sure this happens now. Phone calls are made, maybe not phone calls. Maybe signal messages are sent, little whispers at some club in New York City, et cetera, et cetera. It's taken care of.

We know this stuff happens. So media, you know, you start getting favorable reporting in the mainstream media. Oh, my Lord, you know, the Guardian in Britain should be ashamed of saying congratulatory, you know, stories on Mars's victory in Bolivia. Because last year, they basically went along with the OAS. and who, you know, pays the piper calls the tune. And I don't know who pays the piper. Francis Saunders wrote a terrific book about this called Who Pays the Piper? I forgot the American edition had a different name.

Oh, it was called a Cultural Cold War. The Cultural Cold War. It's an excellent book. It's about how the CIA finances art so that, you know, what's his name with a throwing of paint on the canvas? Jackson Pollock? Jackson Pollock suddenly becomes heroic because they were trying to set aside not just realism but art that was left political and instead you suddenly get this emergence of you know abstraction Rauschenberg and you know this stuff which is let's face it it's not unattractive but what is it saying I mean you know you smash up cars and then you spray paint them and put it in the gallery I mean I mean A generation before this Dali, I think, put a toilet bowl, or was that Marcel Douchon put a toilet bowl in a gallery, you know, and said, behold, you know, this is what the CIA funds. And Francis Saunders, she, you know, demonstrates it.

And then you get Lane Kirkland and the CIA. I mean, sorry, the AFL-CIO, the labor movement in the United States, which in the United States had made its compromise with a capitalism. This was known as business unionism. And so Kirkland led the American Federation of Labor, Congress of Industrial Unions, the AFL-CIO, into basically bed with the American capitalists. And then further, even more disgraceful, into bed with the CIA and participated through these training, you know, the military, U.S. military, will bring soldiers and officers from outside to train with them and basically be bribed like Manuel Noriega to go back

and become agents of the CIA in their country. You know, the man, Williams Caliman, who walks in there and tells Evo Morales, you've got to get out of Bolivia, was trained in the United States. So that's what the military does. But so does the AFL-CIO. It brought these senior trade unionists. They got big stipends. They enjoyed the flavors and fruits of American life.

And then they returned home. And then suddenly you pull the chain on them and say, now you've got to do a demonstration against Chedi Jagger. And so it's a British official who says we shouldn't call them the AFL-CIO, we should call them the AFL-C-I-A. That is a stinging thing. I found that in the British documents. That is a really stinging piece of British wit because, you know, do you need to say any more? And I tell you something that till today, the American labor movement, Canadian labor movement, none of them have apologized for their role.

in the coups which have been, like, the American labor movement should apologize to the Guyanese people for the coup against Chedi Jaggan. It would be important as a gesture of solidarity, but you know why they don't apologize? Because I think they're still doing it. Yeah, so I think that one of the things that is really interesting here, so just wrapping up on the AFL-CIA, is that, of course, labor unions in the U.S. by, you know, liberals, left liberals, they're always seen unequivocally as positive, but they were, you know, kind of incorporated into the CIA as an apparatus for usage abroad.

But Brett, what do you want to bring up? Yeah, I want to continue this thinking about the CIA and how its machinations sort of operate. You talk about in the book a little bit about how these documents come out and sort of we can look back in retrospect and understand things. And, you know, part of that, I think you mentioned something like a wink and a nod to their own power. Like, they release these documents that are, you know, showing what they're actually engaged in. But, you know, what is the motivation for releasing them at all? And then if there is a time lapse between when they do the things and when the things come out, well, certainly we're probably still living in that moment now. And that's just to set up this question, which is I'm often interested in that shift towards the use of the rhetoric of human rights,

the use of the rhetoric of authoritarianism as an ideological weapon that the U.S. does against its enemies to sort of clear the way for these sorts of activities and really gain support of the Western populations for these imperial adventures. Can you talk about the ideological use of human rights and authoritarianism? Yeah, so this language goes back to World War II. You know, this is not new language, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, it's really weaponized. it's an old language. I mean, you know, you hear it. I, when I first read

Hannah Arend's book, Origins of Totalitarianism, I was horrified by this book, you know. Everybody said, oh, it's a great book. It's a classic. You've got to read it. I was at the University of Chicago doing my PhD. You know, this university touts itself as a place of big ideas.

And this is a book with a big idea, but it's a totally big idea that's useless, which is that communism and fascism are identical. And they stand opposed. to liberalism. And I read this thinking, I as a communist don't recognize communism in this book. I don't know what she's talking about. And by the way, why doesn't she talk about the fact that she thought Heidegger was a real

thinker and not a Nazi, you know, who should have been shunned? Like, why isn't that part of the conversation when we think about this book and blah, blah, blah. But from that book onward, you know, we see this discourse of the free world. You know, it's this discourse of the free world that is there from after. Well, it's there during World War II, but it really picks up in the aftermath of World War II. There is a free world and an unfree world. And this isn't exhausting and suffocating discourse. It's brilliant.

Because what more brilliant way to divide the world than by saying we are on the free side and there's an unfree side? Like it's the most elegant thing. You'd think, what were the Soviets doing? Why didn't they do this before saying, we are the free world, you are the unfree? Instead, they are said, we are the free side. We are the proletarian world in terms that don't make sense to anybody. You know, the most elegant thing is free and unfree, right? Hello, Hegel and so on.

All tradition of thinking, freedom. And they take this elegant term and say, we are free and you are unfree. And it's bizarre because we are free and yet we have Jim Crow laws in the United States. And yet Native Americans are on reservations. and yet, you know, you know, the situation for, you know, people of Latino background and so on is appalling and abysmal and, you know, people whose land we seized in the war against Mexico are treated as second-class citizens even though they were there before us and, you know, etc., etc., etc., free and unfree. And this then, after 91, this, because it's so sedimented in the global consciousness that this is the free world, that these are democracies, it's so sedimented, you know, people have the, then you can, there's no human rights problem in the West. You know, but people around the world don't believe it, because every time there's a George Floyd, every time there's an Eric Garner, it makes world news. Why? Because people are like, see, see, see that. This is what.

it really is. What it really is, they really suffocate somebody on the street. That's what it really is, but we can't say it because when we say it, we look absurd A, and B, they cut off aid money or they bomb us or whatever it is.

So there is a way in which people actually know this is BS. They know that the West is not free and democratic and so on because they taste the drones and the hellfire missiles and they know what freedom is.

But you can't say it. So it wins the ideological battle, even though culturally there are gaps. People don't believe it. But they can't change the ideological battle around. I think that's really where we're stuck. You know, why is the human rights watch going after Venezuela so intensely, where is the indignation when it comes to Colombia or to Brazil?

You know, the human rights watch is totally weaponized to the State Department point of view. Yeah, Saudi Arabia. And really quick, Anon, before I let you go, I just wanted to mention, it's also very useful using this anti-authoritarianism and human rights rhetoric to bring over liberals and left anti-communist in the imperial core, because that's the sort of rhetoric and language, often going back to Hannah Arendt type, you know, totalitarian rhetoric. But that really can co-op a segment of the left, at least, and push them towards even full on supporting some of these imperialist actions. Yeah, and I'm just, sorry, I also butt in right before you get in, I just wanted to bring up one other point that VJ brought up in his book, which of course is something that is fairly well known, but a lot of liberals, people that would consider themselves liberals, don't really pay attention to, which is when we're labeling these countries free or unfree, one of the more recent classifications is that of a rogue state. And VJ brings up the dichotomy between us labeling other nations, us being the U.S., labeling other nations as rogue states, States, whereas Madeline Albright, Secretary of State is completely fine with more than half a million Iraqi children dying. We're not the rogue state. They're the rogue state. And this labeling really allows for basically the security apparatus to do whatever they want

without any repercussion because it's justified. We're doing it against the rogue state. But anyway, Adnan, I'll let you go now. Just to follow up with the continuing point, I think one of the things that the book does so well, I really appreciated Vijay, that you were doing. is that you connected that later hypocrisy about the free world as a discourse in post-World War II U.S. imperial discourse, but how it was embedded in a longer history of the colonial era and the way in which even the regimes that we think of as universalist and progressive, you know, the founding

of the UN and the logics behind it, but even before that, the way in which the world was sort of carved up, and international law was conceived as a regime for managing colonial and imperial competition with one another so that they wouldn't use, you know, the native had to be uncivilized, because otherwise there would be the temptation by the colonial powers to use this discourse of, I'm doing this on behalf of this colonial native group or that, and that would cause rivalry between, the power. So there was this kind of long history that's embedded even in the so-called universal logics and discourse and conceptions of things like international law and so on that also was part of the contradiction you were getting at. It was an interesting contradiction of U.S.'s sort of anti-colonial discourse and sometimes anti-colonial policy when it was confronting Britain and France during World War II to give up their colonies so that the U.S. could penetrate these markets, they had an idea, you should roll back colonial control of the old colonial powers.

But at the same time, it quickly and swiftly moved into, you know, retarding and stopping and suppressing anti-colonial movements in the actual third world, that in a way it seemed that it came to your critique of the colonial context of the United States. So you didn't talk as much about the fact that it's a particular kind of colony, like the settler, you know, colonial context is very important in understanding why the United States, for its elite, its settler elite, you know, developed this democratic ideals, liberal political philosophy and so on. But at the same time, that could be conjoint with the policies of eradicating the indigenous people, enslaving others. And I thought also you could even, we talk about the Bolivarian revolution and it's turned into something that can be used as a progressive, you know, ideal. I know in Venezuela, they talked about it a lot. But of course, even that were these planter class plantation that wanted to break away from Spain. And it's very similar in some ways that these Republican ideals in the era of colonialism used democratic language and Republican ideals,

but they were partly for this elite to better suppress and achieve their settler colonial projects. So perhaps that explains that contradiction, which I'd be interesting. a little bit more in you talking about, actually, that transition of the, you know, apparently anti-colonial policies of the U.S., but then it's quick, you know, reconstruction of a neo-imperialist order. Yeah, it's a great question. By the way, Simon Bolivar was interesting because Bolivar starts as a Creole planter class leader and then gets defeated, and then when he is in exile, makes a pledge against slavery,

and then assembles an army of, you know, people of completely different backgrounds, including enslaved people, and they, when they are, when they are, well, almost victorious, he's victorious because he changes. And that's the complete, you know, Simone Boulevard is therefore the unity of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, in a way. If Washington and Lincoln were not separated by so many generations, this is what happens in South America. I mean, it's a very interesting story

because he was definitely from a position of weakness forced to go to the side of the masses, actually. He doesn't use the masses for his ends. He actually declares that I accept your demands. And that's to the credit of the people who had been enslaved in South America who actually had organized themselves and made demands. You know, it's a very different kind of history,

But his, the revival of Bolivar by Chavez was a very studious revival. Chavez thought hard about Bolivar, Robinson, the people around Bolivar, his advisors. And there's a reason he was very keen to bring that back into the national imaginary as a way to, in a way, confound Venezuela with its past, you know, to say, look, Chavez was like Castro. He would give long historical speeches. he would explain to people, who is, you know, Simone Boulevard, who is Francisco Miranda, who is Robinson, you know, because he said, we need to go back to our history. It's not enough for us to learn U.S. history, to eat pasta, you know, to try to become American.

We need to understand the Bolivarian experience. We need to understand Patria Grande. We need to understand the whole area. You know, it's fascinating how they mobilized history, which is where we began this, right? The United States is complicated because in the book I make the argument that, in fact, the American revolution should be understood not as an anti-colonial revolution, but as a revolution to colonize. Because it's there in the material that the 13 colonies against, you know, the English yoke wanted to go outside and take the rest of the landmass. And England was busy making deals and, you know, they were not interested in. facing the French, they had all kinds of other things going on.

It wasn't that, you know, the king of England was insane, which is, you know, oh God, you know, please, Hamilton, you know, what history lesson is that for kids, man? Oh, God, appalling. It's appalling. I mean, you know, I'm all for popular history, but not this kind of crud, you know. So then you can go out there and then you don't need to go overseas to colonize because you have more territory than you need you first go all the way out then you defeat mexico in the war in the 1840s you claim a third of mexico all the way out to california then you can you know

purchase uh alaska in a well what at the time looked like suites folly as they said but then becomes important you get louisiana and then after you've secured the territorial landmass war with canada was just a side show, you can go off and get Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, you know, Hawaii. I mean, there is no beginning of American colonialism in 1945. America begins as a colonial power. It's insane to forget this story. And it's insane to forget the territorial colonization. You know, well, I'm not asking people to go and read Hitler's Mind Kumpf, but on the other hand, in Hitler's Mind Kempf, he has. a huge section where he's saying that look what i want to do as the nazi project in europe i want

to do the anjulus to take austria then i want to take the slavic people i'm what i want to do is what the americans did to the native americans he writes at length he at length explains the genocide of the native americans he said what they did was correct we want to do the same to the slavs hello america you want to know what you did what you did was basically what the Nazis were not able to do. That's what's scary. You know, what's scary is not that you defeated the Nazis, but you fulfilled the Nazi program.

Generations before the Nazis saw their program in your history. And that's exactly what Cizier says is, well, there's all in discourse on colonialism, is that this has happened in the colonies to peoples around the world all the time. the reason why we're crying bloody murder about Nazism is that he did it to Europe and two Europeans. That's the difference, yeah. So I know that we could keep Vijay all day.

We have a lot of things planned, but we've got to be respectful of VJ's time. So, Brett, I'll let you ask if you have any final points that you want to raise to VJ since... Sure. So, yeah, the way I wanted to sort of dive in towards the end of this conversation is to, Think about what we know about imperialism in the past and then perhaps project forward. One of the things that I think puts a unique spin on going forward is particularly the climate crisis. And on the liberal left in America, we hear all this talk of green capitalism. And I think what that will actually turn out to be in practice is more of this global north plundering of the global south,

the extraction of stuff like lithium, right, to bring back and put in Tesla car batteries, for example. and it's going to have this liberal facade of being very progressive here at home while it continues the same project abroad. So just with what you know about imperialism, where do you see things going in the near to medium term future on that front? I want to piggyback onto that, if I may. So again, just Brett makes an excellent point of Global North versus Global South. And I just did want to, I wanted to raise one final point from the book before we let Vijay answer that question and then we thank him. one of the things that you mentioned in the book was that the Cold War were thinking about it wrong. We tend to think of it as East versus West, USSR versus U.S. and all of these proxies,

but really it's global north versus global south powers of colonialism versus anti-colonialism. So I guess if you're able to address that north versus south, along with Brett's point about this eco-capitalism that we're seeing and exploits, of the global south and then then we'll thank you and get you out of here okay um well that's the heart of the book in a way is the or the rather broad argument is that is periodization that um you know if you accept the periodization of the cold war and then the post cold war and you know these this periodization comes to us from the man um you know they have told us that there's a post cold war era i'm not sure what they're talking about or you know they said they were

was a hot era of the Cold War, then there was more Dayton. I mean, I don't even know what they're talking about, because right through all that, if you look at the history of the world from the standpoint of, let's say, you know, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, doesn't look like there's been much, you know, periodization necessary, you know, that we need to rethink our periodization. And, well, there certainly was a break in the early 1960s from the previous history. And maybe there was a break in 1908 when, you know, Leopold III had to essentially give up direct control of the Congo. So there's periodization within this, but it's not exactly a Cold War post-Cold War. Where's the post-Cold War? It hasn't appeared in the world yet. So that's very much

part of the book. And I won't say more about that because you can read up on that. It's a key part of the argument in the book. Well, I've got to say, coming back to Bolivia, When the coup happened, I wrote a series of articles. Well, one of them actually, Noam Chomsky and I wrote two days before the coup, warning that there's a coup coming, and people need to be out there banging the drums. And, you know, I called Noam and said, Noam, I got a call from, you know, from La Paz, this is serious. And up in Cochabamba, they're afraid that they might try to kill Morales. And he was like, okay, let's do something.

We released a statement immediately. And then the coup happened. happened and i was very worried that that night they were going to kill morales i was very very worried about that and in fact he was worried he skipped down then he went off to mexico made a deal went to mexico and then eventually to argentina but um when that was happening i wrote a series of articles in which i said that this is a coup against the resource socialism of the mass government and i mentioned the lithium but i actually don't think i use the phrase lithium coup but i did say that it's lithium it's indium i wrote a series of things

so bolivia is thick with these you know important minerals and canadian mining companies want them u.s mining companies want them and the chinese were getting good deals and there's a clash here and that jerk elon musk you know sion of a south african apartheid family went to a private all-white school elon musk wants his you know his tentacles are going to go and then i wrote all this stuff i admit it okay then i got attacked from people saying you're a conspiracy theorist that this is nothing to do with and continues somebody wrote something recently and i was sent that oh he's a he and morales myself and morales concocted this uh false story that it's a lithium coup okay this this went around and i was thinking seriously okay fine i don't

care i don't have to answer you this is what i believe i think they're there for the minerals because here's what's happening is you're talking about a Green New Deal, which is going to rely, it certainly may transition away from fossil fuels, but it's going to rely because you don't have battery capacity in any other way than using things like cobalt, lithium, and so on, because solar, because, you know, even water, you know, hydropower, wind power needs batteries because it's irregular power, unlike fossil fuels. You need batteries. The best battery agents we have are these.

And when you're talking cobalt, you're talking about copper tailings and so on in the Congo. And those are highly exploited miners, often children and so on. Terrible situation. The biggest company there is a former U.S. company now domiciled in Switzerland called Glencore, you know, big in the cobalt mining. And then lithium, you know, which is Argentina, Bolivia. and, and, and, uh, Chile. Now, it's true that there's a lot of lithium is mine in Australia and so on, but this is where the bulk of it is. And if green is going to explode, this was the future. This is the money lithium. There's lithium in Cornwall, by the way, in the UK, but I don't

think they're going to allow that to be majorly mined because it's so beautiful and, you know, not in my backyard. You'll screw up the great salt flats of Chile and so, you're not going to screw up Cornwall. And Australia is basically what is being used now. When the expansion happens, it's Chile, Bolivia, Argentina. And this is of concern to me that, you know, liberals and so on in the West, touting the Green New Deal, it's not that the Bolivians don't want to export the lithium. You know, I know there's a radical environmentalist section that says, you know, Morales didn't tend. Listen, the Bolivians had the best climate argument about 10 years ago. They released the global plan on climate.

Nobody takes that seriously. In fact, I was talking to Nick Estes, you know, of the Red Nation, and he was saying, the conversation around climate shouldn't begin with the Green New Deal, as if it's been invented in Europe or the United States. It should begin in Bolivia, where they've been talking about this Pachamama, you know,

good life and so on for the last couple of decades. But you're still attacking Morales, saying he's anti-environmental. When your great environmental project is going to rely essentially on the destruction of indigenous communities around the world. I mean, what the hell is this?

You know, you're weaponizing environmentalism, Pablo Solon, former minister in Morales government is really the key person here. You're weaponizing environmentalism to attack Morales, who was one of the world's leaders on the issue of the environment. That doesn't mean his government doesn't do things like build a road in the Amazon. Because, you know, there are contradictions in the world, okay? I mean, I'm not embarrassed to say it, okay? Nobody can live perfectly.

You know, you're sitting inside an area where you've clear-cut the whole forest, you're working on a high-speed computer, you're driving to Walmart to buy your shit and you're accused saying they shouldn't have a road through the Amazon. I mean, what the hell, man? Let's have some, you know, basic decency when we have these discussions, you know? You're flying all over the world at environmental conferences attacking Morales. I mean, good God, man. This is the one indigenous leader.

who was standing up at the UN and saying, we need to do something much more than the Paris Agreement. And you're piling onto him. I mean, disgraceful, frankly, to your shame. I think that that speaks to a larger narrative against indigenous peoples by Westerners, particularly. I've seen a lot of Westerners talk about, you know, how indigenous leaders or indigenous groups have not been environmentalists.

okay, well, let's have a little perspective here. But again, there's so much more that we could say, VJ Prashah. That was incredible. So I just want to pitch to everyone that's listening. Check out the Tri-Continental Institute and just got their newest newsletter today. And it's stuff that you're not going to see anywhere else. I'll just quote the very beginning of it from the 43rd newsletter from the Tri-Continental. Any day now, Zambia will be the first African country to fall into a private debt default.

And you talk about the IMF. And, of course, the IMF plays a prominent role in Washington Bullets. But where else are you going to hear about Zambia falling into private debt default? So the work that you're doing at Tri-Continental is really invaluable. And everybody should go to the Tri-Continental and sign up for the newsletter. But Vijay Prashad, director of the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research and author of the new book, Washington Bullets out from leftward books. How can our listeners find you, and what are you working on now, now that you finish

this book? Well, firstly, the Tri-Continental is an incredible team of over 30 people based in many countries, and we are backed and supported by political and social movements that are our heart and soul. So anything you read in any of our work, it comes from our movements. It's, they have theorized us to where we are. And I'm not just saying that. I'm actually telling you the truth.

This is exactly how it works. People should go and look at the material. You know, we have a dossier coming out next month, which is on the impact of Paulo Freire on South African liberation struggles. And where our team interviewed people in the South African liberation movement to talk about the impact of pedagogy of the oppressed, but also to learn from our Brazilian comrades about the impact of the South African liberation struggle on pedagogy of the oppressed. It's a really interesting story, and they've done a terrific 3.5,000-word dossier on it with lovely illustrations and so on.

So, yeah, please, by all means, I agree with you. Go and look at the website. I'm working on a book now about, well, I have a book coming out in a couple of weeks, actually, edited book called Vivi Ramos. Venezuela versus hybrid war. And it'll be out from leftward, but also international publishers in New York. And it's edited along with Manola de los Santos and Claudia de la Cruz. And it has a preface from Carlos Ron, who is the director of the Simon Boulevard Institute in Caracas. It's a great volume, you know, it takes the piss out of the sanctions, whole sanctions thing.

It has a speech by Samuel Moncada, who's the Venezuelan permanent representative to the U.N., essays from, you know, a range of people, Belan Fernandez, you know, terrific writer, Ania Parampal, who's with the Grey Zone. You know, it's got terrific essays. Some of them are funny, even though it's a really difficult issue we're dealing with here. You know, so I recommend, it's called Vivi Ramos, which, you know, you remember Chavez took the Cuban slogan, Vencer Ramos, we will overcome. And he added to it, it was Vivi Ramos. Vinceremos, you know, we will live and we will overcome. And so we call the book Vivi Ramos. And the subtitle is, you know, it's basically classic cage wrestling, Venezuela versus hybrid war.

Great. Well, we'll probably try to bring you back after that's released to talk about that. But Vijay, you have an excellent Twitter page. Tell our listeners how to follow you on Twitter. I think it's just my name. It's at Vijay Prashad, I think. And it's basically, a great way to blow off steam and you know nobody should be nobody should live their life

attempting to always be serious in every way intellectuals particularly should not pretend that they smoke a pipe and wear a blazer and have an air of superiority and seriousness

and what I love about Twitter is that Twitter gives me the opportunity to be a human being and just have fun and playful and say things that are on my mind and then just go away and uh i think intellectual activity you know we just need to take the air out of that balloon there's just a lot of pompousness and and you know superiority and i mean you're smart and you read a lot of books but don't have to keep laying that on people you know, relax, like smile and, you know, aren't you an idiot sometimes in the day? Don't you like music? I mean, you're a human being. And I think that's all I'm going to say.

Amen. Well, I think we've had a lot of fun in this conversation, too. So we really, really appreciate not only your knowledge, but also your generosity in sharing it and the conversational way and fun way in which we've been able to engage with you. Yeah. Thanks, VJ. Thanks for coming. And we'll be right back with more on Gorilla History. Man, that was quite the interview that we had there with VJ.

What did you guys think about it? Brett, I guess we'll start with you. What did you think about our interview with VJ? Yeah, I mean, well, first and foremost, You know, VJ is an incredibly personable human being, and so there's a little nervousness when you have somebody as big as VJ come on a show, especially when you're just trying to find out who you are as a show. And so to have him have that just very welcoming, open, laughing personality was wonderful and put us all at ease, I think. But something he said in the beginning, I think, is worth, you know, reentrenching sort of. And that's this idea of good people and equipping good people with the knowledge they need to try to make the world a better place.

And very often, whether we talk about political theory or we do academic discussions of history or even some strains of the Marxist left, there's this sort of pushing away of the subjective of morality as super structural phenomena that we don't need to place too much focus on. But I think at the end of the day, a lot of people are truly inspired because of their humanity. They're truly inspired by this burning sense of love and compassion for other human beings. And so to play that up and to talk and to appeal to people's better natures and to, to try to appeal to their humanity, I think is an important part of everything that we're doing and it should not be dismissed. He talked about the dignity in people's histories and how certain

figures can help bring that out. And certainly, you know, in our intro, we have Malcolm X talking. And one of his great contributions to black radicalism in the U.S. was precisely this love yourself. He has these speeches where he talks about, you know, love the way that you look. everything that the white man tries to tell you is ugly or lesser than about you, embrace it and turn that into something that you find beautiful about yourself. And that expression of self-love then, I think, transformed through the Black Panther Party and into hip-hop itself, which I think is a fascinating sort of trajectory that you can trace stemming out of Malcolm X.

And, of course, before him with people like Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, et cetera. But I think that's an incredibly important thing. And that's something that Franz Fanon and Wretched of the Earth did as well, you know, thinking about the human psyche and the human fight for dignity and standing up on your own two feet and looking your oppressor in the eye and how that's a dignifying process. And then the other thing that stuck out to me was when he talks about arming the people in places like Cuba and Bolivia and Venezuela, he's like guns are one part of it. But the other two parts of it are education and organization.

So when we talk about these movements arming the people, arming them with knowledge, arming them with organizational capacity and then, or arming them with actual weaponry to defend the revolution. And I think that's a very crucial thing, particularly in some segments of the Western left, where I think there can be this fetishization of violence and this sort of abstract revolutionaryism, but without these other components really taken seriously. So I just really appreciated that about him. Yeah, and I'm just going to draw the interconnection between these shows again.

Brett, you had an excellent episode on Red Menace with your conference. co-host Alison Escalante on Wretched of the Earth. So for listeners who want to become more familiar with that work, definitely check out that episode on the Red Menace podcast. Adna, what did you think of our conversation with VJ? Well, I think it was a perfect inaugural episode because it really, in two ways, it really covered a wide-ranging terrain that I hope we'll be able to follow up with some more specific episodes, but he gave such a wonderful, synthetic, overarching sense of the terrain of history that we're interested in for contemporary struggles.

And two, his approach is so compatible with the purpose behind this podcast. I mean, he has been doing essentially a kind of guerrilla history, and one thing that really I appreciated very much is how he says, that the audience for his work really was young activists to be able to crystallize some key understanding and to arm them with the kind of knowledge that they need about the way in which the CIA's imperialist program for regime change is actually a playbook that has a historical pattern. And when you're immersed in one particular context, you may not see it. So being armed with this knowledge really helps

prepare people for how to respond to it, how to recognize it. And so I think that was something that was very important to come out of the conversation and come out of his work. So I think in some ways he's sort of the

ideal figure to talk about history for contemporary struggles. Like there doesn't need to be a lot of analysis from us to take a discussion of history and figure out how it can be useful. That's what his whole work, his body of work, is about. And certainly this book, Washington Bullets, does that.

Yeah. So I guess I'll give my thoughts on the conversation before I pitch it back to you guys for just any final thoughts on Washington Bullets as a book or how it integrates with the conversation that we had. But what I want to say is that this conversation was really important because Vijay brought up something in the conversation. I didn't think came out in the book. It didn't come out in the book particularly,

which the book was quite almost fatalistic in a way, which is something that we see pretty frequently. There's very seldom this middle ground that we are able to tread. You either have people that are naive as to how difficult it actually is to affect meaningful change in a society because they're unaware or just ignorant as to the sort of forces that are pushing back, against them. And, you know, whether that's within the United States or outside of the United

States, a lot of these people don't necessarily think of how the CIA are pushing against them both overtly as well as covertly, how the IMF is, IMF is pushing against them, how NGOs have infiltrated them. And that was something that we didn't get to talk about in the interview is the infiltration of NGOs in Haiti, which I think is something that a lot of people don't think about as a way of controlling a populace as well as as well as policy within that area but alas that's something that's happening um so you either have people that are ignorant as to quite how difficult it is to affect change within their personal lives as well as societally and then on the other hand you have people who uh maybe are informed about it maybe they've read the

Washington bullets you know who knows they but they're aware of all of these external forces on them and they become fatalistic in a way. They come to think, you know, is it really worth the struggle because we have all of these external forces pushing against us? There's no way that we can really overcome that. But the conversation with Vijay, both by talking about the information about these external forces that are pressing against you so that we're not ignorant, but getting that hope that Brett, you brought up at the beginning of the conversation, Adnan, you talked about earlier, getting this hope that, yes, it's difficult. We have to understand that it is difficult.

We have to understand why it's difficult. But by having that knowledge, we can then have the hope that we actually will change things because we have examples of where good people make change. And as we said, it's just a few days before we recorded this. I don't know how it'll come out temporally based on when this episode actually drops, but the election of Moss back in Bolivia is an example, and Vijay used it as a very fitting example of how good people can affect change, and that should give us hope despite the forces that we have pressing against us. So do either of you have any other final thoughts

that we want to conclude with before we wrap this up? Sure, yeah, quickly, my final thoughts and just harping on that idea of optimism and hope, which brings us back to sort of dialectics, some abstract in the clouds thing. It's a very real thing. And one of the things that dialectics tells us is wherever there is repression, wherever there is occupation, domination, exploitation, there's also simultaneously the seeds of the rebellion against that state of affairs. And as things get worse, as fascism becomes more resurgent, as climate change bears down on us, as all these contradictions become increasingly harder and harder to buffer by ideology and ignore, I do believe there are enough good people in this world that will continue to wake up and to rise up.

And I don't know exactly how that will happen. I don't know exactly how all those things will play out, how organized things will be. But there is that level of resistance and it's always going to be there. And it upticks with the uptick of repression and domination. And if nothing else from all of this history, wherever there's been imperialist domination and bloodshed and slaughter as tragic and as horrifying as that history is, there is also always people fighting back, always good people, willing to even sacrifice their own life to make things better for others. And that's the tradition that we stand in. And that can give us

not only the dignity of our history, as VJ would put it, but also a vision for how we can move forward and continue to do our work in a vein that is optimistic. You know, as Gramsci said, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. And that's the middle way I think that you're getting at, Henry. Yeah, exactly. Adon, final word. Just I would echo that I think what I really appreciated since reading it, it was a disturbing retailing of all the ways in which U.S. Empire has derailed progressive leftist movements, people's movements, that he did really have an analysis that should be encouraging because he's arming us with tools from history in our plans to win.

And that is indeed, it's not just about the struggle, but it's about. effective engagement. It's about effective struggle with the goal and the objective to create a better society. That's what we're after. And I think this history really helped us see some of the ways in which we can be prepared to achieve that purpose. Yeah, excellent. So, Adnan, breadth, thanks for coming in and sharing this conversation with me. It was a lot of fun, really informative. Brett, how can our listeners follow you on social media? On social media, you can just go to

at Rev Left Radio. And that's on Twitter. And under the Twitter, there's a link to our website. If you can find our Patreon, our sister podcast, etc. And everybody should go and listen to Rev. Left Radio and Red Menace and donate to those shows Patreon pages. They're really incredible resources for thought on the left. Adnan, how can our listeners find you?

They can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, one S, all one word. And if you're also interested in the Middle East Islamic world, I also have a podcast called The Mudgellis podcast, which is sponsored by the Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project I direct at Queen's University. Excellent. And as for me, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck, 1995. And you can join me on Patreon. I write about public health and science primarily. Patreon.com forward slash Huck1995. Thanks a lot, guys. Looking forward to our next conversation,

solidarity with both of you and solidarity with the listeners. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.