Rev Left Radio - A World Order without Conscience: Imperialism, Islamophobia, and the Geopolitical Order (Introducing The Adnan Husain Show)

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

In this episode of the brand new Adnan Husain Show, Professor Adnan Husain is joined by two outstanding scholars and thinkers, Drs. Peter Beattie and Karim Bettache of BettBeatMedia (‪@BettBeat_Media‬) .They discuss a number of interrelated topics including: the current geopolitical order, China’s role in it, BRICS and political economy, anti-imperialist politics in the Trump era, the media, as well as the politics of race and Islamophobia beyond “left and right" in “the West”. Please subscribe, share, and support this channel @adnanahusain786 Adnan's Substack: https://adnanahusain.substack.com/ Support Adnan: Patreon.com/adnanhusain Learn More: https://www.adnanhusain.org     Check out BettBeat's Substack: https://substack.com/@bettbeat Subscribe to the channel here    / @bettbeat_media      

Hello, Rev Left listeners. This is Adnan Hussein. You know me as a guest on Revolutionary Left Radio a couple of times, speaking with Brett about Sufism, Muslim mysticism, and spirituality, as well as a wonderful episode on St. Francis of Assisi. And also as co-host of Gorilla History, where Henry and I were pleased to work with Brett for a couple of years. I really want to thank Brett for. letting me say a few words here and share an episode from my new show. I've started a show. What you're about to hear is a discussion that I had with Peter Beattie and Karim Bettash from Betbeat Media about geopolitics, China, Islamophobia, a whole bunch of issues. It was a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation. That is the kind of thing I'm doing on this new show, on this new channel, the Adnan Hussein show, on YouTube, although you'll also be able to listen to it on audio feed as a podcast on the usual platforms. But it's an extension of the work I used to be doing

on the Mudgellis podcast about the Middle East Islamic world, Muslim diasporic culture, but I wanted to go independent to avoid entanglements and suppression from being associated with the university environment and atmosphere, and also to expand the range of the show, to do more about not only politics, but wider discussions of aspects of history and culture, left thought from the global south, but also religion and spirituality, and to develop something that I would call Muslim liberation theology, the intersections between spiritual, spirituality and the left, particularly through the lens of the Muslim tradition. But as a comparative religion scholar, director of the School of Religion, I also want to talk about Jewish, Christian, Muslim

interactions, which is part of my own teaching and research. And so I just want to invite you to the channel and thank Brett so much for giving me the opportunity to tell you about the new show. It's, as I said, on YouTube, you can find it at Adnan A. Hussein 786, and you can, of course, look in the description for the episode and find all this information there. I think you're going to enjoy it. A lot of great guests, a lot of interesting discussions, and I hope to do on YouTube quite a number of live streams. So we can maximize some aspects of audience interaction. That's what I like, the dialogue and the discussion. So hope to see you on the other side, and thanks so much, solidarity. Salam, hello. Peace to everyone on this broadcast. Thanks so much for joining me. Welcome to my show. I'm Adnan Hussein, historian of the medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. And I do want to welcome you to the show because it is a new show. It's a departure from. from the Mudgellis podcast that some of you may have listened to in the past that was associated with Queen's University and the Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project.

As I've explained in another video, there are a number of reasons why I've decided to start an independent show unaffiliated with the university. One component of which is that in this era of a great deal of censorship, of political speech and violations of academic freedom that have become so obvious across the West in the aftermath of the genocidal assault on Gaza, it just seemed important to be able to take the political and intellectual and academic perspectives that we'll be having on this show independent and free from any interference. While we have these platforms, let's use them. And in that light, it is now an independent show, please subscribe, share, and support if you can. And you can donate

to the show by going to patreon.com slash adnan A. Hussein. And we look forward to meeting you there. There's extra content that we'll be putting up over there. But our goal is to make as much of everything we do on this show, publicly available, free to you on YouTube. But if you can support us, we'll greatly appreciate it. Without further ado, I'm really excited today about a conversation that I've been looking forward to for a while. I have two guests who are both professors of global political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Peter Beattie focuses on the intersection of geopolitics, media, and psychology, while Karim Betash examines the connections between geopolitics systems and ideology, such as capitalism and racism and psychology as well.

And together, they are Bet Beat Media, which you can find on YouTube, where they've been hosting excellent guests for really insightful and important conversations, and also on Substack, where they produce wonderful commentary and analysis of global affairs with a, I think, a really unique angle and approach that is both materialist and anti-imperialist, but also, you know, has insights into psychological and cultural phenomenon and the politics of those. In fact, I would even characterize a lot of their work as having a phenonian temper, and I can't give higher praise than that. So thank you, Peter and Kareem, for coming on the show. It's really great to meet you.

Likewise. Great to meet you. Thank you. Yes. Well, I'm really looking forward to this conversation because I found a lot of your publications as well as videos really striking a chord with and often ahead of the curve in terms of analyzing developing trends, not just on what has happened. And most of my work as a historian is always looking back at what has happened, but also having a sense for the contemporary political. circumstances and looking forward a little bit on what and providing warnings you might say of some of the emerging trends and and issues and one such piece was an article that you wrote Kareem about a world in which China emerges as a dominant power may be a world without conscience. And I've been thinking about this topic a little bit about China, its relationship to geopolitical conflict centered in the Middle East and noted that, you know, there were encouraging signs of China's involvement, you know, the brokering of Saudi Iran diplomatic relations,

for example, that happened and led to ceasefire and negotiations in Yemen. Even in spring 2003, I tweeted a couple times about articles that showed that there were reports of China offering to mediate the Israel-Palestinian peace talks. Of course, after October 7th, we've seen that there's been a real reticence to engage very directly, although there might have been some signs. There were some bureaucratic obstacles, you know, prepared to limit tech exports to Israel that were announced in December 2023, for example. But by and large, there hasn't been a lot of direct engagement and involvement. And so when the Takfiri militia sponsored by Turkey, Qatar, and supported by the U.S. and Israel forced out the Assad government in

Syria, I was quite concerned that there might be a strategic mistake here in what appears to be the passivity of China in terms of exercising its influence politically. economically and so forth. And it brought out a larger question about whether multipolarity, which a lot of people have been talking about in the reordering of the world, is really, you know, going to change the system, you know, if there aren't ideological questions that are motivating and or if there isn't conscience, as you put, Kareem, in your article, what is the kind of world we can look forward to? So I wanted to ask both of you about your thoughts and feelings about this latest stage in multipolarity and particularly about China's role, you know, in

global affairs. Yeah, sure. Shall I start? So what I know, so I live, of course, in China myself, and one of the reasons I live in China is because I just didn't want to live in the West anymore. So there's also a reason why I was hoping that the Chinese-led world would maybe change geopolitics in the way that we are currently experiencing it. And in particular, I think we're all exhausted with the kind of imperialist world that we are in right now

in the total devastation of West Asia. and China is, when you follow most of the anti-imperialist discussions online, for example, it's always either they hate China, that's one side and another side is they absolutely adore China and there is literally not a critique among any of these people, never a critique against China. But that's not a very nuanced discussion in my opinion. the celebration of multipolarity and a new world run by multiple poles and the bricks block. I think that enthusiasm is really, at least on my end, it's pretty much gone since the genocide in Palestine.

And I think a lot of us have been very enthusiastic when it comes to the multipolar world. And we expected that it would be a counterweight to American hegemony. and that is something that I started to question, and that is also why I wrote that piece. I started to question what will happen when China actually is so powerful that it's the new global superpower, you could say. And I saw a discussion between Dimitri Lascares and Ben Norton, where Dimitri Lascares actually said that what's going on?

Countries have an obligation under the genocide convention to step in, And especially with major power like China, you would expect that happens. And Ben Norton was like, yeah, but China has this policy of absolute non-interference. And that is something that I really started thinking about and realizing that if there's absolute non-interference, then not much is going to change because the United States couldn't care less about anyone else. So then the United States will just bulldoze on and eventually encircle China and then do something to China. So before I talk too much, that's a bit of my idea that I had that it doesn't bode well a world like that. Yes, yes. And I should note that early in December I tweeted some things that were, you know, along these lines that this may be a strategic mistake.

If China doesn't act proactively, it could find its. having lost all of the allies and strategic alliances to oppose Western hegemony and find itself, you know, targeted very directly. And so there has been, you know, some concerns about in the same way that Iran, for example, has taken this very cautious approach, which you can understand. They've wanted to maintain some kind of strategic balance and deterrence, but, you know, playing the games of the global order, perhaps, you know, in the way in which they've been established by its terms and its norms, you know, presents a problem when you're dealing with such an aggressive imperialist set of forces that are fairly prepared to sow chaos and destruction as one of their strategic aims for, you know, preventing the global south from emerging as a genuine counterweight or achieving sovereign, you know, development. And so I know that's something, Peter, that you have thought

a lot about. And I heard an excellent program where you both were guests on a Syriana analysis. And we're talking a little bit about the limitations of bricks and of attempts to try and move beyond the structures of the global economy that use the dollar as a reserve currency. And so it seemed also, Peter, your analysis about these kind of barriers, you might say, to really changing the system, give Karim's pessimism perhaps some material context. I'm wondering if maybe you wanted to elaborate a little bit on this situation. Yeah, sure. So I guess I would start off with like one slight difference in perspective that I have as the United Statesian. Whenever I hear conscience used in the context of foreign policy, I get real nervous and want to like run far away in the opposite direction.

Because, you know, the way that conscience is used in U.S. foreign policy discussions is always to justify some massive bloodletting abroad. And it's always because, oh, you know, we're helping people. We have to be, have the higher moral standard, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, that is where I start off as a United States and considering this question of conscience and foreign policy. But I think stepping back a little bit, you know, you have to look at what the capabilities are. And that kind of gets into your question about the global monetary system. Like, if you think about it, what could China do? There's been a lot of talk about multipolarity, but I think that was the wrong word from the beginning.

Someone else has suggested multi-nodality. Like instead of thinking of these as two opposite poles of power of roughly equal size, somewhat akin to the U.S. and USSR during the Cold War, I think instead of just the connections between different countries being radically reshaped and much more of instead of the U.S. being the U.S. being the U.S. being the hub and spoke model where everything is connected to the U.S., you'll have more connections to countries like China, India, Russia, etc. So that kind of sets our expectations a little bit lower. The second point is China doesn't have the power projection, the force projection that the U.S. military has. The U.S. military cannon is directly involved in perpetrating the genocide until up until the ceasefire.

They have all sorts of military assets in the region where they're directly participating. China doesn't have a global network of military bases. If it tried to send one of its very few aircraft carriers out there to try to set up a no-fly zone, it would just get sunk and, you know, the planes would get shot down. They don't have, that's not a possibility. So what is the possibility that they do have? Well, the only possibility they have in the real world, given the constraints, would be in setting up global cooperation because the only thing that could stop the U.S.

is a counterweight. And to get a counterweight anything like the U.S.'s weight would require a massive number of countries all playing the same game, all adhering to the same strategy and remaining strong against all of the unavoidable attempts by the empire to defect, to coerce people to defect and get some reward for leaving the coalition. Well, that is also very much what's at stake in dollar hegemony is in order to change the global monetary system and get rid of the exorbitant privilege that the U.S. government currently enjoys would likewise require an unprecedented degree of global cooperation. So it seems to me like it's not really so much a pessimistic

story. I get it if you are just now becoming aware of the kind of structural constraints that operate. But I would just say, don't let that pessimism kick in. Just, you know, be glad that you have a more accurate understanding now and you have a better grasp of the very strong structural constraints. But understanding them is the first step towards overcoming them. So I would counsel people to try to avoid pessimism to the greatest extent possible, although I can't say that I succeed in that myself. Well, yes, I think that's a healthy approach, and I would expect no less from people who are psychologically aware to reorient away from debilitating pessimism. But I think what it does

do is highlight something that I found interesting. And as a historian, I tend to look at these things as patterns and precedents and so on. I think you're right to suggest that the real issue here is one of political cooperation because, of course, you wouldn't expect China to match the United States as a military power at this stage and to be willing to confront. In fact, that isn't really their ideology anyway. I mean, part of that non-interference or intervention kind of approach and policy that Karim was talking about Ben Norton explaining to Dimitri Lascaris is that they, you know, don't want to violate the norms of the, you know, international system of international law. They, you know, are respectful of international. Right, that's a U.S.'s

job, exactly. And they don't want to, you know, simply be a hegemon in the same way and abuse in hypocritical fashion values to justify, you know, their own imperialist ambitions in the world, and they do pay respect to international institutions. But that's why, in some sense, you know, quite apart from just a military question, it is a political question. And in the world of nation states, with their own perceived national interests operating in an unfair and unequal system where they can be targeted by unilateral and illegal sanctions by the United States, which is another component of war by other means. And on my other podcast, guerrilla history, we had a whole, I don't know, 10-part series about sanctions as war based on a very good collection

of essays that looked at the way in which the U.S. deployed unilateral sanctions to achieve these kind of political ends that include just so in chaos. preventing development in societies of the global south that resist. So, of course, the stakes are very, very high. But what it suggests is that there needs to be an urgent sense of some kind of form of political collaboration and coalition that if any lessons should come from what's happened in the Gaza, you know, genocide and its larger regional kind of consequences. as it is that you cannot wait for, you know, you to become targeted,

that there isn't a way of simply negotiating and making your peace unless you want to be completely subordinate and an active agent of the empire. And, of course, there are many regimes and elites in the region and around the world that are willing to make those, you know, bargains. Look at the Gulf states. I mean, that are basically in existence. only because of colonialism, you know, in the post-World War II era and that they have, you know, managed to exist to privatize for a very narrow few, the incredible wealth and resources that could

have been used, you know, in a broader, more populist, you know, program of development for the region as a whole. So there are plenty of groups that are willing to break ranks and solidarity. The question is, is what are the resources? politically diplomatically to enhance the lessons that actually should have been learned since the Bandung Conference in 1955, you know, the great hope that there would be an alternate kind of block that could face the Cold War and still achieve sovereign ends, you know, and the various iterations that have gone since then. In some ways, a lot of people looked

at Bricks as a revival of that heritage and that perhaps they might, you know, in this new stage of history and learn from some of the, you know, problems that had existed in the past with solidarity and collaboration, that perhaps there might be a new project. But unfortunately, it seems that, you know, bricks is itself riven by very different kinds of strategic orientations, ideological commitments, and so on. So I guess that's really the question is what is the material basis for a different kind of political alignment that may be a counterweight at the political and the diplomatic kind of level if, you know, of course we're saying that, you know, China doesn't have to intervene and send an aircraft carrier to the Middle East, but what are the other things that it could do, you know, to make a better world actually possible? yeah yeah no i totally agree and peter and and and me have had this discussion many times it's a very difficult question because a non-states that engage in non-interference would be absolutely perfect if we had a functioning UN let's be honest if we had a functioning UN a grand international body that can that can intervene when it's needed and all that stuff and it's based on democratic

it's a it has it's founded on democratic by democratic or it works in democratic means sorry I'm Dutch sometimes I'm thinking Dutch and then I cannot find the translation but the problem is we don't have a functioning UN and and we have the United States domineering the UN as well and so so that is not working so the question here is and this is a very important question in my opinion. It's a very philosophical and moral question. When does a disaster become so incredibly terrible that it transcends a cost-benefit analysis? So in other words, I understand what Peter says.

China doesn't want the United States to invade or put even more sanctions or whatever. But I mean, where is our humanity where we judge things not based on these kind of matters when it comes to something as terrible as a genocide. I mean, when is this this kind of, this kind of rational cost-benefit analysis? When is it gone? And do we say, okay, guys, until here and no step further, we have to do something. My opinion, China has such immense power economically. They can do other things than sending a warship. They can cut diplomatic ties. They can cut trade. They can do so many things. And in my opinion, especially considering that the United States is not going to stop. They are going to get China as well if they don't do something. So in my opinion,

the Chinese, and I still feel very strongly about that. I think the Chinese have more power than they think. I think they underestimate U.S. imperialism and its depravity. And I think they should have done more outside of military means. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe you have different ideas, Peter, but I'm very curious what you think about that. Well, I mean, I don't know how to start, but none of us have taken a flight and then a boat to Gaza to take up arms and risk our lives to stop the genocide. But when we talk about countries, it's much easier to kind of make that commitment for other people. But that's not really my point. I'm not trying to make a kind of, oh, that's hypocritical kind of argument. My point is more if we did that,

took a flight to, I don't know, Turkey, took a boat trying to get to Gaza, we just get shot out of the water. So there would be zero point in us doing that, regardless of our intentions. Likewise, if China were to, you know, try to do anything militarily, they just get shot out of the water. It's just not a real option. But in the realm of the economy, there is a place that China and a lot of other countries, if they were united, could have a major impact. And the way I see it is, like, The strategy that China's been following for the past, like, 40 years has basically been to make the following deal with the capitalist world. You give us technology transfers so that we can climb up the value-added ladder, and we'll let you exploit the fuck out of our workers and pay low wages, but, oh, by the way, we also built excellent infrastructure best in the world. So your business costs are going to be extremely low, and everyone took that deal.

and that's why now the ruling classes of the U.S. and Europe are, you know, looking a little nervous in the mirror like, oh, shit, we accidentally industrialized China and screwed over our own countries and now they're trying to backtrack. But anyway, that was their, that was China's strategy. So it seems to me like the next step forward would be to recognize that the door is shut on the tech transfer. Like the U.S. ruling class is psychotically anti-China now. And so that door is not reopening. The natural alternative, it would seem to me, would be to try to get the rest of the world. And I literally mean every other country in the world, more or less, in a kind of, it doesn't have to be a formal alliance, but cooperating to reshape the global economic system. And it's really nothing short of that that's required simply because of the, the, the weight that the U.S. has in the global economic system.

And then obviously in terms of the military, like no alliance can really even come close. But economically, a united rest of the world, like a G-133, you know, the world's developing countries acting as one. And that's really the key thing. And also Europe, I mean, if Europe would shift more towards the rest of the world rather than being so embarrassingly, subservient to the U.S. and disastrously subservient to the U.S. Now we're talking about something that could actually make a difference. The challenge is on both mass propaganda and tree-tops propaganda. Mass propaganda, meaning convincing people all over the world in different countries

to put pressure on their governments that they want to see their government unite with countries like China, the EU as well, anyone who's on board for creating a different, more fair, more just, and also, by the way, sustainable, like literally can be sustained economic system into the future. And then on the treetops propaganda side, you know, it varies from country to country. But like in Europe, you've got, we've got to be able to convince people at the top of society, maybe not existing parties, but some parties that are a little more amenable to a left-wing perspective, that they've got to realize where the rubber hits the road, and that means distancing themselves from the U.S. embrace or getting

off the U.S.'s lap as a lap dog and actually forming alliances with China and the rest of the world and participating in this move to reshape the global economic system and accept that the U.S. is going to be hostile to that. Like all of these things, it seems to me need to start happening if we're really going to see any major positive change. Right. Well, I mean, I think, you know, that question about whether the Europeans, well, and indeed, I was just going to say that part of the explanation for that has to come later in the conversation. I hope when maybe we talk about the structuring role of Islamophobia

in, you know, kind of our contemporary politics, particularly in the West, about why it's impossible for them to envision and imagine a kind of different future that is one that's more integrated with the rest of the world and sees itself as, you know, equal and in solidarity with the humanity of the global south. That's itself, I think, a question that we could come to. But one thing I wanted to talk about is that, you know, Karim mentioned that he thought China had perhaps underestimated in some ways the aggressiveness of the imperial hegemonic ambitions of the United States. And I think that similarly, regional powers in the Middle East, for example, should have learned by now that the doctrine of hegemony that Israel has,

that it cannot be challenged. You know, even by allies, they are not, they must not be in a position to challenge Israel's political and military hegemony in the region has led, of course, to being targeted and force chaos being sown in the region. And so similarly, you know, there may be a question that we also should look at is that also the Gaza, you know, assault on Gaza and the resistance, the heroic resistance of Palestinian people at all social levels. I don't even just mean by organized resistance fighters, but the solidarity of the society has, despite being subject to the incredible violence, colonial violence and bombardment that has destroyed their infrastructure, has slaughtered so many people. Nonetheless, Palestinian society has

actually survived in a way with maintaining their kind of, I just read an interesting tweet, for example, somebody who had gone back to North Gaza, you know, crossed now that the Netzerim passage is open, the corridor is open, had returned to Gaza, you know, alone and in a ruined house, and he received food sent by, you know, various far-flung neighbors who remembered that he was returning alone and, you know, wanted to take care of him, sent food, and so on, and he was celebrating that, you know, I don't feel alone, you know, this is what Palestinian society is about, right? So there are, you know, elements to be able to say that some sense of solidarity of taking a stand, of having a conscience of principle actually allows you

to survive the imperialist, you know, violence. So there may be a big, a good point there about lessons being needed to be learned about this. But the other side of it is also, are we overestimating? Because that's what we also see is the weakness of Israel's military and its society is, of course, it can so terrible destruction using the technological advantages of its military. But it's not actually able to completely control and dominate as it intends. And likewise, is the United States as a decline? impire, also undergoing certain changes that suggest that political and diplomatic and economic forms of resistance could be effective. Yes, of course, the United States, if you

come into their crossfires, they can, you know, bombard you, they can do these sorts of things, but at a cost that is not necessarily bearable, you know, for the United States and or achievable in terms of the political goals. And, you know, war is just politics by other means. I mean, the purpose is to achieve one's political aims, not just, you know, so military destruction. And so I wanted to actually turn to something you've written recently, Peter, which is, you know, about the sort of how to understand the Trump phenomenon in a declining U.S. empire and the kinds of confusions that seem to result. from this stage of the management of the empire. We have a very unpredictable actor

who's not necessarily following exactly the same paradigms of the imperial presidency of whether it's Democrats or Republicans. There is something of a new phenomenon. And even the politics of left and right have been scrambled, something else that we can talk about when we discuss Islamophobia a little bit later, perhaps. But so I'm wondering, you know, you wrote this very provocative,

sort of peace should leftists, you know, praise Trump. And what I read it as is some way of trying to analyze the confusions of American imperial politics in this stage and to think about what new political alignments are possible. I was wondering if maybe you could tell us a little bit about that analysis and how you see this question of whether the U.S.'s strength is actually being overestimated. It may be able to lash out, but it is also something. offering itself of divisions, you know, that are manifested, I think, in the Trump phenomenon and even within now the Trump phenomenon. Well, I should say first off that I haven't been able to write anything in earnest in a while.

Like the political situation around the world for years now has been so bleak that I've only been able to write in a very sarcastic tone. and this one is no different. Like I was also kind of trying to make the point like how pathetic it is. Like what a sorry state we've arrived at where the, you know, the greater evil right now is demonstrably in terms of the genocide, replacing ethnic cleansing with genocide, the lesser evil, just objectively. And that's just, you know, it's not to praise Trump. It's actually to damn the Democrats.

And so, you know, the idea of like if leftists were organized and we tried to have this whole campaign of praising Trump and appealing to his sense of flattery and narcissism and try to influence him in a positive direction. I mean, the problem is we don't have an organized left, although that does get to kind of your question, how should U.S. imperialism be estimated? That's a huge question. I guess I would just start with just what I've seen develop over the course of my lifetime, at least when I've been politically socialized from my 20s. Early 2000s, the dominant view in the United States and the world was neoliberalism is just, it's not even correct, it's a correct theory. It's just the common sense.

If you say anything outside of the neoliberal consensus, you're a kook. Like, just where is this wacko coming from? So in terms of where economic ideology has gone in just the past 20 years, you know, arguably a big step forward. Now you have the U.S. and European ruling classes talking about industrial policy. Well, you know, people on the left in the 2000s were saying, yeah, we need industrial policy. We just need to do it in a democratically directed way to achieve the betterment of human needs or the betterment of human life rather than, you know, competing with China to win the future, you know. So in some respects, things have gotten less bad. In other respects, you know, the, I think the cost of war project at Brown University did an analysis of U.S. military interventions before, during and after the Cold War.

and they found that they had actually gone up significantly after the Cold War because basically the USSR was a check on the use of U.S. military power. And in that time, since the USSR disappeared as a check, the thinking among the foreign policy elite has just gotten even crazier than it was during the Cold War, which is saying a lot because they were psychotic during the Cold War. But then they, now the neoconservative school runs amok among the foreign policy elite in the U.S. So that is a very bad thing. But I think the two things, when you think of them together, what is the cause of the change in economic ideology? It's the impossibility to escape the conclusion that our dominant belief fucked up. It was wrong. It didn't work.

We have to find something else. And I think that speaks to a real weakness in the empire. They do realize that they have this top-heavy system that can't innovate quick enough, that all of these, it's kind of like, you know, aristocratic lords just sucking rents out of people and making the whole system very inefficient. They can't build infrastructure for, you know, it's a joke. And they're coming to realize that. That's the weakness in the empire.

But unfortunately, the military strength is strong. longer than it's ever been relative to the rest of the world. There is no USSR-type counterweight. China's nowhere near that. And media dominant, by the way. And media dominance, which is a key bit of glue to keep the whole structure together because people don't think of it in these terms. They think of it in the terms that people in D.C., the foreign policy psycho elite blob members,

they end up getting an understanding of the world that's not too different from theirs. But that's a weak part in the empire. And I think that's somewhere where people can have hope and encouragement that the economic foundation is a hell of a lot weaker than it was in the past. The military power is still very, very strong, and that's very worrisome. But I think, you know, there's some hopeful signs or hopeful directions about influencing US culture, U.S. political culture, the internet changes in the media system, as bad as it is today, it's less bad than it was in the 1980s. So the possibilities are there.

Those are some excellent points. And I think what it reminds me, though, is that in terms of the organized left or the disorganized left, as the case may be, not taking advantage of some these positive consequences that, you know, it really actually itself can't take credit for, but are part of these global, you know, absolutely recognizable, you know, economic shifts and so on, that, Kareem, you've, you know, been thinking a little bit about this question, I think, and had some critiques even of the left for the white anti-imperialist left. So, you know, if this is a kind of coalition that's emerging and that there's much more questioning of U.S. and Western interventions, wars, and support for genocide and things like this that have emerged with popular resistance and huge, you know, I was living in London last year on sabbatical. And, you know, basically every other week there was a national demonstration in London with, you know, anywhere from two to 600,000 people. the street, something that, of course, we all recognized after, you know, a couple of months

was clearly not going to, you know, actually achieve any political objectives. It may have had some effects, but I think the effects may have been to undermine political rights to protest and, you know, repression, you know, the infrastructure of repression and the use, the expanding use of, you know, anti-terrorism laws and things like this to repress political speech and organizing. And we've seen the consequences of that. On journalism, Ali Abunima was just, you know, detained for two, three days in Switzerland and so on. Yeah, kidnapped indeed. So, you know, there's that kind of component. But there's also, you know, the problem that perhaps understanding their role in order to be organized and effective is something that has been last

Partly because of a blindness towards the intersection, you might say, between anti-imperialist and class analysis on the one hand and the sort of ideological fuel by which imperialism manages to continue to maintain through the media, through popular culture, and through ideologies of, you know, racism and dehumanization of the other, that, you know, even allies sometimes are mistaking or missing. you know, the real strategic questions here, you know, that maybe makes some of the so-called left in the West, even if they are avowedly anti-imperialist, ineffective and lacking in solidarity with the people that supposedly they're attempting to defend against the empire. So, Karim, I'm wondering if you have any, you know, anything you'd like to say in elaborating on the critique that you've offered of. people like George Galloway and others who, in a fit of peak, you know, after Syria and the fall of the Assad government, you know, out of frustrations that, oh, I'm abandoning, you know,

the Arab cause. They're unworthy, you know, of my solidarity. It was even worse. They were just abandoning the Arabs, not even the Arab cause. if that would have weakened to blow a little bit, but they said the Arabs. To answer this question, this is so difficult. That's why I often love to write really long articles because I can step by step, put my thoughts into words, because this is just such a deep problem that we have in the Western, and particularly if you're talking about the Western left. And in particular Europe, I'm from Europe, I'm half Algerian, half Dutch.

I grew up in a society that is extremely Islamophobic. I'm not even talking about very Islamophobic, extremely Islamophobic. I myself, I am not religious. But of course, if you were growing up like me, half-kip with my name, you are just, you're a foreigner. You're an outsider. So I've always seen and felt, you know, the way that works in Europe. And it's really, really deep to the extent that I feel that, that, it's so powerful the way we have been conditioned in the West and in my case in Europe

that racism is so deep rooted into our cultures and to our and our mindset that it literally stops the Western left from binding with people outside of the West. I'm very convinced about that and I think we have a real, real problem there. And I think many of the white leftists, as I say, not all white leftists, but many, white leftists or anti-imperialists do not even realize the kind of latent racism that is that is driving the way they look at things. For example, saying, for example, a George Galloway or Scott Ritter saying that they are giving up on the Arabs. Okay. And so lumping all Arabs together is completely normal. In fact, most people didn't even notice it. Of course,

there were some people noticing it, such as yourself, Adman and Dimitri Lascarius and myself. But if you look at the comments, a lot of people were just like, yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it, yes, yes. Nobody even reflecting on the fact how racist it is, how generalizing it is, forgetting the fact that the resistance are Arabs too. But that is that kind of racism that is so deep rooted in the Western mindset, including the left, that it's, in my opinion, that's why I write and study so much about racism. In my opinion, it's one of the central, central problems that we have today when it comes to the way our world is organized. And that is also why we often invite Professor Gerald Horn,

because I feel it's one of the few historians who keeps emphasizing race, how important it is, because every time I hear from leftists and in particular white leftists, it's about class, and we should focus on race and all these kind of things. But, of course, it makes no sense because race is so deeply, deeply intertwined with the class question that you cannot, you cannot disentangle the two. So, yeah, I have many, many thoughts at now, but I hope you get my point here. I think it's one of the major problems we are currently facing as leftists.

Well, yes, absolutely. And, you know, I think it's possible very much. have a critique of the deployment of what we call identity politics as a shift away from materialist analysis. And that's what I would say is the real problem with it, which isn't to say that cultural conditions, media narratives, these are of course also extremely important, but they clearly are related to the, you know, even the structure of the media, you know, you can't just analyze it from discourse analysis. You have to also see these are big corporations that have, you know, deep investments. And then also the institutional relationships that mainstream media has

with the deep state, you know, the intelligence services, the way in which new media, the internet, and all of these things were deeply tied from the very beginning, you know. And there's been so much analysis about how social media, Reddit, all these spaces for people to share their opinions are really, you know, part of doing two things. One, surveilling people, because it encourages them to talk about, you know, things, political speech, so one, you have all this information about people's lives, et cetera, that they present themselves and share to others that can be, you know, shared with, you know, nefarious agencies that have our oppression in mind and our control. And on the other hand, also is patterning and influencing the way, you know, these

media narratives are constructed and culture. So there's like a very deep analysis that has to be done, even of what we think of as culture and of the soft kind of power. There's a materialist component of how power works that also has to be related. So we can have that critique of identity politics as mistaking that there is the material component and institutions that have to be understood. But without ignoring the fact that. Sure, yeah. Can I jump in for a moment?

And this is such an important point that you make because people often say that, okay, if you are focusing on class, you don't care about race, if you focus about race or Islamophobia or whatever, you don't care about class, you're doing that kind of liberal identity politics. And that is something that is something that I do not mean. So I do not mean to focus on issues of race or what some people would say cultural, issues without a materialist of class analysis, and I also wouldn't focus on only class without a racial analysis. I would say these two are extremely connected, so that in other

words, absolutely, these structural inequalities maintain these racial disparities. But the funny thing is, if you fight structural inequality without focusing on these racial disparities, you're not going to, you're not going to get social equality. It will, it will maintain the same disparities, so to speak. It's very difficult to explain. I just mean to say that these two, you just simply cannot disconnect them. You understand what I'm getting? Absolutely. And what I was going to follow was the other side of it is, is that an analysis of contemporary capitalism and the, you know, global system without understanding the legacies and consequences of colonialism and colonialisms and what it allowed and what it justified and the way in which particular forms of

settler colonial societies were established that are built on a foundation of racial apartheid and genocide that you know then you're missing i think an important legacy which is why you know perhaps when we come to talk a little bit more about the union in particular structuring role of Islamophobia as a species of racism, but, you know, one that has its own genealogy and history that is of significance and relevance in today's global politics, I would say you have to do a long-dure sort of history really to appreciate the manifestations and transformations that secularism accomplished certain things, but it also masked and subordinated into deeper structural forms, you know, it may, maybe the religious ideology was no

longer, you know, relevant. Maybe the church was weakened. But a lot of the cultural structures that were part of Christian society as it developed in the Latin West, nonetheless continue, pardure, and survive in secular forms. And so that helps explain and understand why there are some deeper investments in a kind of hegemonic cultural formation or subject position vis-a-vis the rest of the world that we could think of as a kind of inhabiting a position of racial superiority, even if it's not consciously considered race or named as race or not considered religious superiority because it's not named as religion, but there is something that is inherited and consistent across time that you can perceive when you take a long-dure approach and you notice, well, this may be

manifesting in a different sort of vocabulary or symbols, but it's structurally very consistent with the logics of earlier and prior forms of social organization and ideology. So I think that's the point is that if you don't have a colonial, an appreciation of colonial history, there's something very important missing in your analysis. I think if you've got a lot of materialists watching this, I think I can explain it in a way that in those terms. Like the apparent conflict between class and race in one's analysis and trying to illustrate the last illustration that or last point that Kareem was making about

if you only focus on addressing class disparities, racism can still rear its head and cause all sorts of social problems. So if you go from the very beginning of race, it's born out of class. It's this new class relationship of utter domination in the form of European slavery then calls forth this idea of race and all of the pseudoscience encapsulated within it about different capacities, different temperaments that differ on the basis. of melanin essentially. So those ideas then are also material. They're neural networks. They're not in the spirit realm. They're not in the ideational realm as if it's not material. It's very much material. These are patterns of thought, habits of thought encoded in our neural networks that cause us to act certain ways. So after race is kind of, it's tethered to that class relationship of slavery for a long time, that tether is then broken, is broken with the formal abolition of

slavery, but those ideas, those physical entities are still throughout everyone's heads. So I think the point Green was making at the end there was, if you win state power tomorrow, you know, inshallah, and then we just focus on eliminating class relationships, class disparities, that people are still going to have those physical ideas in their head about the characteristics, the capacities of people based on melanin, these pseudoscientific bullshit ideas that cause them to act differently, even if other reasons for domination, you know, like class, having an employer-employee relationship, landlord, tenant, et cetera, even if those are solved as they should be, you need other measures to deal with race.

And it's not alien at all to the socialist tradition. You know, all over the world in China and the USSR, they dealt with minority, nationalities, whatever they called them. They didn't call them races because they weren't morons. But, you know, that's, I think, a way to kind of take these two ways of looking at things that might seem to be different and seeing how they're actually the same at the core, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And it also means, exactly like you say, Peter, even if you only focus on those class issues, it'll just simply come back. I mean, culture is, we reproduce culture, we reproduce all these kind of ideas. So it's not that they're going away. But I wanted to make one little small point,

and that would make your audience maybe understand what I mean by, that it's so important to focus on race, because I have this discussion so many times with leftists. It's really baffling. that they just, yeah, well, I won't be judgmental. But what I always say is, indeed, I get it. You know, when you think about liberal focusing on only on identity, then you can say, oh, look at this.

You have black faces in high places and it doesn't do anything. I mean, social inequality is still there. White supremacy is still there. Class inequality is still there. So focusing on race alone indeed cannot explain why having black faces in power doesn't change anything. But, I would say, but focusing on class alone can also not explain why the white working class often prefers to engage in cross-class collaboration with other white people instead of class solidarity. So what I'm trying to say is that you have often, you will see that the capitalist class, you could say,

is literally sucking the working class dry and people are angry. And somehow, somehow the magic idea of race triggers many of the working class to vote for billionaires again, white billionaires. So there is cross-class solidarity with other whites, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, you name it, above class solidarity with other black people. And if we don't discuss race, we cannot explain this, you know, so I hope that that makes it a little bit more. Oh, absolutely. I think the real question is, is can we find a way to discuss race as Peter and you were just doing in ways that avoids the simple knee-jerk, anti-liberal, anti-woke discourses of the ways in which it's been promoted in identity politics in some of the postmodern, you know, orientations that ignore. these materialist questions for all the talk of so-called intersectionality, what I've seen, you know,

inhabiting a lot of more academic political left discussions of these questions is that class doesn't get very well integrated into it, and it obviously needs to. So what we're dealing with is a problem where, you know, so-called materialist leftists are wanting to deny or, you know, not get embroiled in the thorny difficulties of discussing race. And, You know, the other side is that those who specialize on really thinking through the ways in which, you know, discrimination has manifested itself culturally and, you know, white supremacies, genealogy and manifestations in society have in some ways abandoned the class materialist analysis in a sophisticated way. So I agree. I think the real question is like, well, how do we integrate it? how do we talk about race and its historical legacy in ways that can communicate how and why

it will be liberatory for all of us, you know, if we can abandon, you know, racial hierarchies and racialized discourses to actually recognize, you know, solidarity, human solidarity. And I think that's the really important point. You know, since Gaza, we've seen the way in which dehumanization has been possible. And you talked about it in, you know, how dead Muslims became normal in a, a very interesting and important piece about Islamophobia. And that's where I would like to come because I think how I would frame it is, is that we're seeing, for example, I know you both are off Twitter now,

but I still live on that, you know, terrible space of X and it's not good for my health mentally or any otherwise, but I am seeing so much trafficking of Islamophobia rising recently, partly because the patron and owner of the platform, Elon Musk, in order to process his interest in cheap, you know, imported tech labor faced a sort of backlash from MAGA. He pivoted very successfully and quickly to reviving stories about, you know, grooming gangs, raping and abusing white girls in Birmingham and other, you know, post-industrial cities where there's been a lot of immigration in Britain. He's pivoted to, you know, washing, you know, Germany's political far right of their Nazi legacies and, you know, saying the past is the past, we shouldn't

be, you know, holding everybody accountable for, you know, the sins of the father and the grandfather, you know, by supporting AFD. And so we've seen, you know, a geometric, it seems to me, rise of memes of discussion that traffic in rank Islamophobia. And how I characterize it is the political economy of the AI techno feudalism, the feudalism, in techno feudalism that Yanis Varifakis, you know, sort of talks about. And what Ali Qadri talks about, about the surplus populations that have emerged. So you have to dehumanize. These are unnecessary people who, you know, you'd rather have debt, you know, or certainly in their place. And there's a whole infrastructure and economy of controlling and surveilling and oppressing them that where money can be made.

But so what you have is really juxtaposing the Muslim Great Replacement conspiracy versus the plans, transhumanist tech replacement of human obsolescence. You know, that's what is sort of being thought about is that, you know, we really need to replace, we can replace workers, we can automate things. And then, of course, we have the problem, what to do with all of these, you know, unnecessary people. Well, let's give them the, you know, fears about the, that you're being replaced. Yes, you are being replaced. But, you know, let's make you fear that the Muslim is there to replace you while we're replacing you, you know, with robots and AI and so on. So, you know, I wanted to talk about, you know, that's just my sort of sense of what's happening now in the fissures and, you know, what's fueling far right, politics is that there is a reliable reservoir of Islamophobia that you can always draw upon.

And what I would suggest is that you can't really understand Western politics now without understanding Islamophobia. And yet it's so little discussed. It's denied. In the same way that before, you know, class resentments and class politics were, you know, submerged under nationalism. No, we're a nation. We're all together. You know, we can't talk about, you know, class differences, workers, German workers, first to German, you know, like this kind of sort of thing. And we're seeing that there is at a cultural level in the West an appeal on both left and right in various ways to using the legacies of Islamophobia to structure a failed and bad.

bankrupt, you know, political system. So how is it that dead Muslims became normal? And, you know, the sort of discourses of securitization have come to replace every other value. We have to be secure. Anybody who threatens that is a threat, is an Islamist threat. I note that Ali Abou Nima was characterized by the Swiss authorities as a dangerous Islamist. I mean, this is a secular leftist, you know, person. But now, you know, if you express solidarity with the Muslim body, you know, the Muslim body under suffering and bombardment, you are an Islamist, you know, and this can be used to eject you, you know, as Shirin Razak would would say, to eject you from, you know, the norms of Western society and you become a disposable, you know, subject. So, you know,

I think you had a lot to say in this, and sorry, this ended up less a question than me riffing on a very great piece that you wrote about the importance. How do you see the importance or significance of Islamophobia, particularly as a species of racism operating in Western society and politics now? Yeah, no, no, great comments. And I fully agree with everything you say. That's also why my piece is relatively long, you could say. And to be honest, I still have things popping up in my mind. And I was thinking, oh, I wish I put it in there. Oh, I wish I put it in there.

But I guess I'll just make a part two, maybe someday, and part three, and on to part 10. But so today, Ali Abunima also said something that when he was in a Swiss jail, he said everybody was Arab. And that is... He could have, and he didn't. Maybe it would have been interesting if he had said everybody was Muslim, because I think all those Moroccans and Algerians are. He characterized it as Arab.

You could also say they were Muslim, and that also might give a layer of what's exactly at stake in warehousing these populations in that way. Exactly, exactly. And even though they are, maybe he recognizes a lot of them as Arabs, probably at least in the European mind, these are also Muslims and that is the thing you also saw it with the attack in Germany I mean the guy was a Saudi white supremacist and they still wanted to say that he was a Muslim so there you see the racialized character of Islamophobia so Islamophobia it's it's I can advise everybody to go to my substack to read a bit more because I always find it easier to write it down and to put it on the words because there are so many thoughts come come into my mind when I

think about this but I would There's one thing I would say, and that's also what I say in my piece, is that Islamophobia is that you could almost say the holy grail of imperialism, of imperial ideologies, you could say, because Islamophobia really justifies pretty much everything that is happening to Muslims today. And it's so powerful. So what I try to do in my article is actually to make people understand how it is on so many cultural, and structural levels that it continuously reproduces itself in our societies. I mean, I grew up as a little kid in the Netherlands, and I remember already being four years old and asking

my mother, why are the bad guys always looking like people from my dad's family? You know, from my father's side. And as a kid, I already noticed it. I already noticed it. And it's so insidious because it's, and there's a good documentary about it called

real bad Arabs, R-E-L bad Arabs, about how we are already conditioned from a very young age to be scared of Muslims, to fear Muslims, to fear Arabs, so that's it, the both are intertwined. It's often there's no distinction. And that kind of, that thinking, to put that kind of thinking into a population is very beneficial for those in power, in particular the capitalist class, that, tries that needs cheap resources from the Middle East, let's say it that way, I should say West Asia. And that's also the reason why, for example, David Miller, the sociologist, did a very good

research on the fact that most Islamophobia is not organic, but is actually funded and supported by billionaires, Zionist lobby groups, Zionist. organizations, Zionist billionaires, of course, Western capitalists. Because it's, it's what maintaining Islamophobia has always been very helpful, for example, in garnering support for Israel. That was very, very successful. And I think still today it's one of the reasons why so many don't care about what's happening to the Palestinians.

We have all been culturally, we have all been culturally conditioned to just see Muslim life as something unimportant and it's yeah what can i say it's on so many many levels that it's going to be very difficult to get ourselves out of it and again that's the structural question so we need somebody like china or something to get the change in the structural situation of the world to also get a change in the way we think about different human beings but good that's another question i hope that that gives a bit of an idea about what i what i'm Absolutely. And I think all listeners and readers you really should check out Betbeat Media's substack. And you'll find that article there as well as a lot of the other ones that we've been

referring to and talking about. And just by way of picking up on that last point, which comes back full circle to the role of China, you know, that we began with, I mean, if you think of what's happened in far-right politics, the far-right political program in the West, is that it really has just institutionalized and implemented Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations theory. We've seen that how it's reshaping the Middle East. What's interesting about it is that it is the kind of takfiri jihadists and that milieu that actually really also embraces Huntington's ideas of the clash of civilization. It's just they want to win it, you know, and so they accept the kind of presumptions and the

But what's interesting about Huntington is that on the one hand, in terms of geopolitics and political affairs, the global order, he identified Islam and Islamic civilization as a chief rival, historic rival, to the West. But the other poll of this was, of course, China as, you know, a civilization apart that also posed a threat to Western. political and economic and military hegemony over the world. And his greatest fear was the idea that there might be some Islamo-Sino, you know, kind of green wave, you know, meets the yellow peril, and then we're in trouble, you know, kind of situation. You can see that that is a map for geopolitical kinds of affairs of how they see the world. And it is why there was the belief in the thought that the Cold War as just an internal civil war of the West might lead in the post-Cold war situation to the recruitment of Russia in some strands of, you know, right-wing sort of

conservative thinking, that it is an Orthodox Christian nation. And it's always been in this sort of quasi-European, quasi-Asian power. But what we really need to do is recruited into a form of Western Alliance so that we can face the Islamic civilization and China, you know, more united. Otherwise, we won't have a chance. And the internal domestic politics, the corollary, the book that he wrote right after The Clash of Civilizations, which was something like who we are. And it was like a study of the browning of America and how without a white Anglo-Saxon

Protestant, you know, hegemonic politics. you know, there was a demographic threat that the cultural conditions for American democracy, you know, might have to be abandoned. So in other words, there's something very similar to what we see as the ethno state, you know, in Israel. So there's real, it seems to me, parallels between what we see as, and of course, that's the whole problem is that Israel presents itself in this narrative as a Western frontier state, you know, that is the advance guard of, you know, happening, you know, in the rest of the West on behalf of the West. And so I think that's how Islamophobia helps rationalize both the geopolitical and the domestic politics that we're seeing, you know, of the West. That's crazy. I didn't know that the Huntington made that argument that basically like the the melanation of the U.S. population was a huge threat to like,

it's like wasp supremacy is kind of like a hegemonic stability theory but domestically like if you have wasp domination then you get like nice hegemonic stability where everyone's cool but you know wasp hegemony starts to dissipate and oh man she's going to start doing it still mixing it in still mixing it in with with what did he say that they will lose the democratic what was it that you know that you wouldn't be able to have democracy if you know, there was a demographic change to such an extent that the institutions developed under white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture wouldn't work and wouldn't be savable because his point is he doesn't use race. I mean, that's what he's very careful and very interesting in substituting culture

and civilization. A culture of white Anglo-Saxon cultures. Well, he's definitely. And what his critique is is that there's too much Catholic immigration and other, other, you know, kind of, you know, Latin, you know, Latin Americans, Mexicans. That's a throwback. Yeah. To like old xenophobia in the U.S. Like, you haven't heard the anti-Cathic argument in a while. That's your people, Peter.

That's your people. Well. Yeah, that's amazing. Like, I mean, but understand, like, what he thinks of democracy. Like, this is one of the authors of the Trilateral Commission report in the 70s where he basically said the quote unquote crisis of democracy is that our democracy is becoming too democratic that there's too many groups making demands of government and government just can't handle all these demands you can kind of put it into the the words he's using now like you know

the the wasp culture that has dominated U.S. political economic system is under too many you know they're getting too many requests from all these these non-cultural hegemonic stability providers. That's right. I mean, it should only be white Anglo-Saxon Protestant experts like Harvard professors who really should be running this empire. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And it also shows, of course, I mean, Huntington is, of course, a quintessential example of the kind of enemy thinking that is deep rooted in Western culture. It's pitting the white man against the rest of the world. everybody's a threat. Chinese are a threat.

The browns are a threat. The blacks are a threat. Everybody is a threat. And that kind of enemy thinking, I think, also plays a role still why the West has such a, Western left still has such a difficult time, binding itself with resistance across the world. Yeah, interesting. Well, you have both been, I feel like we could talk forever. There's so much to discuss.

I've enjoyed this so much. You've been very generous with your time, and I know it's late, you know, in China. So perhaps you can just tell listeners how they can follow your work and encourage them to support, you know, Betbeat Media's channel and substack. You can tell people about that. Go ahead, Peter. You're muted. He's muted. So, yeah, we've got a substack, a YouTube channel.

For me, personally, you can find academic writings at B-D-B-A-T-T-D-I-E. That'll redirect you to that. And if you're interested in the media politics relationship, I wrote a whole book about that. Basically, it's like I imagined it as manufacturing consent to this time with psychology. But I tried to provide a much more comprehensive understanding of how. the U.S. propaganda system exists, how it works, and how, like, our natural evolved psychology fits in very well with the propaganda system as it exists in the U.S. Yeah, not much to add.

Go to our substack, betbeat.substack.com, and on YouTube, betbeat media, where we have a, well, mostly an anti-imperialist kind of analysis of geopolitical affairs. But what is very important on our channel is that our guest list is very, very diverse. So we don't have the same usual suspects of the Western anti-imperialist sphere, but we try to make people from all over the world and all different backgrounds. Do check it out. I want to thank you again so much. I enjoyed having you on.

I hope you'll come back to talk more in the future. And listeners expect a lot more of this kind of. conversation and discussion with experts. So until next time, peace and solidarity. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.