Rev Left Radio - Understanding Sudan: Revolution, Civil War, and the Fight for the Future

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

In this episode, Breht sits down with Mohamed Khougali, author of Politically Unconscious: The Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution (Iskra Books) for a sweeping and deeply illuminating conversation on Sudanese history, revolution, counterrevolution, and the current catastrophe unfolding in Sudan. Together, they discuss the 2018–19 Sudanese Revolution, how it erupted, what forces animated it, his direct participation in it, how it was contained, and what its aftermath reveals about the dynamics of counter-revolution and co-optation. Mohamed also walks us through the history of the revolutionary left in Sudan, from the period after independence through the rise and repression of the Sudanese Communist Party, and the weakened but still significant state of the Left today. Along the way, we touch on the civil war, Darfur, the RSF, the unfathomable human suffering and staggering acts of brutality taking place in Sudan, and why revolutionaries everywhere need a much deeper understanding of this country, its people, and its unfinished struggle for liberation. Politically Unconscious: The Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution is Mohamed Khougali's reflection on what it means to organize and think after a revolution has been usurped. Written as both a participant in Sudan's 2018-19 uprising and a working psychotherapist, Khougali weaves together a history of the Sudanese Left, an account of the current war and the racialized financialization that informed the various factions, alongside the development of a new clinical modality he calls "praxis psychotherapy." Refusing the reductive binaries of international media coverage and the moral puritanism he sees paralyzing contemporary leftist thought, Khougali argues that Sudan cannot be understood apart from a longer "irrational revolution" linking Khartoum to Darfur, and Sudan to Palestine, through the same circuits of imperial accumulation and waste. At once political history and clinical experiment, Politically Unconscious is a work with lessons for comrades involved in the struggle; in Sudan, and far beyond. Check Out Mohamed's podcast Black Radicals HERE   Follow Black Radicals on Instagram HERE     Outro music: Lunch Break by spinitch ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. I have an incredibly important episode for you today. I have on the show Mohamed Kugali, who is the author of a book put out recently by Iskra Books, entitled Politically Unconscious, the Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution. So we talk about Sudan. We talk about the Civil War in 2011 that gave rise to South Sudan. We talk about the 2019 People's Mass Movement Revolution. that overturned a dictatorship in Sudan,

and then the unfortunate consequences afterwards, the takeover of that post-revolutionary situation by the military and paramilitary forces, the current situation in Darfur, and throughout Sudan with the UAE-backed RSF death squads, basically, these fascist death squads, almost certainly if you've seen any horrific, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching imagery out of Sudan,

it's the deeds and the nasty behavior of the RSF almost certainly. So we're connecting this long history of the Sudanese communist left, the independence movement post-World War II situation in Sudan, connecting it all the way up with the 2011 Civil War, and then really focusing in on the 2019 Sudanese revolution, not least because Muhammad participated actively in the streets on the front lines of that revolution. So he's writing about it from a perspective of lived experience, not scholarly distance.

And that makes it all the more compelling. And, you know, I think a lot of people, and I think I mentioned this in the show itself, a lot of people on the left, a lot of people writ large, but even on the left, this is an issue that is under-discussed, it's under-emphasized, it's understood, right? Misunderstood or not understood at all by people even on the international Marxist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist left. And so Muhammad is a great guest to have on to walk us through some of this crucial history and to help make sense of what's happening presently.

And just an amazing guest all around. And of course, you know, no interview substitutes for the book itself. So I highly, you know, urge people to go and support Muhammad, support Iskra books. They're putting out amazing stuff. They are also putting out my book, but that's not even the amazing stuff I'm talking about. I'm talking about works like this, politically unconscious. and several of guests I've had on in the past couple of months have been published through Iskra.

So they're doing an amazing job putting out books that you can't find anywhere else. And I think this is yet another example of precisely this. So by the time you leave this conversation, you will have a much, much deeper understanding of Sudanese history and the present situation in Sudan than you do going into it. I can guarantee you that. And I'm really excited to share this episode with you. Although, you know, at times, it's, I mean, heartbreaking isn't even sufficient to explain the human crisis, the catastrophe, playing out over the last several years and currently in Sudan.

You know, words can't express. I truly believe that that Sudan and Palestine are the two, you know, inflection points globally right now. And you could, you could add the Congo as well of just unfathed. amass violence and slaughter and genocidal murder. And Palestine rightly gets so much attention and we'll never stop focusing on that until Palestine is free and totally liberated from the occupation. And the war in Iran is obviously an outgrowth of that genocide and we're focusing a lot on that lately. But Sudan in particular in the Congo as well, they need this focus. And we as internationalists need to understand this stuff. and so I hope this episode contributes to precisely that.

So go support Iskra, go buy this book from Muhammad, from Iskra, I'll link to it in the show notes. And I'm not even going to plug anything else. I'm just plugging that. And so I encourage people to strap in and listen to the rest of this episode. And if you like it, Mohammed himself, he lives in Germany currently,

and he puts out a podcast called Black Radicals that I'll link to in the show notes. He's a just wonderful orator, very intelligent, has the personal experience as well, that just adds this layer of human-lived first-person experience to the history that he's discussing that just really can't be replicated anywhere else. And so if you like this conversation, definitely go check out Black Radicals as well. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Mohamed Kugali on his book, Politically Unconscious, The Psychic Aftermath of the Sudanese Revolution.

Enjoy. Hello everyone. My name is Muhammad Kulgali, and I am a Sudanese socialist who was part of the Sydney's Revolution of 2018 and 19. Today I'm residing in Germany, where I'm also politically active in radical circles. It's good to be here. Yeah, so it's an absolute pleasure and an honor to have you on. The book that we're going to be discussing is this fascinating book that not only takes history and politics incredibly seriously and not only is a sort of very principled anti-imperiod. revolutionary analysis of Sudanese history and political struggle, but also a fascinating

as we'll get into dive into psychoanalysis and sort of, in my opinion, in the Phanonian tradition of weaving those two things together, do you see yourself as inspired by wretched of the earth in that way and kind of expanding that interesting and unique form of analysis? First of all, I'm so humble that I went to hear those words. But yeah, I think I think to ask you a question, yeah, I mean, this is literally where I get the inspiration from in sort of the Richard of the Earth. In his last pages, he talks, he gives like case studies of like people going through the troubles, going through the Algerian War of Independence.

And I thought it was really interesting how these case studies sort of, it's like an intimate link and insight into basically the lives of people who are struggling. For me personally, when I read this book a long time ago, this was the part that I sort of stuck with me. And then I kept on coming back to, and then for the book, this is what basically inspired me. And, you know, we'll get into like, you know, the whole, you know, psychotherapy that I did in Sudan. But yeah, for sure, I would say that this, especially this part of the book was, for me, I'm sure for a lot of people, it was so fascinating. Yeah. Absolutely. I really appreciated that aspect of it.

But yeah, let's, so before, I mean, I want to get into the first question, but I also want to say up front, I kind of reiterate this idea that we talked about a little bit before we started recording, which is that Sudan is definitely on the radar of the international left in various ways and for various reasons. It's perhaps been on the back burner in a way that I think is unfortunate. A lot of people on the left might not understand, I think, fully the history. history and the current situation going on in the region and in the country itself. They might, you know, they'll hear things like Darfur, you know, they'll hear things about the Civil War during the Obama administration, perhaps. They'll be familiar with some inflection points, if that. And really, I think a lot of people have a lot of, including myself, educating, to do on this topic.

And so I'm so happy to have you here to do exactly that. Amazing, man. Amazing. Looking forward to it, man. So let's go ahead and get into it. So to begin, you know, and for listeners who, as I was just saying, may know very little about Sudan beyond the scattered headlines about revolution, civil war, Darfur, humanitarian crises, et cetera. Can you give us a basic historical and political orientation? Like, what is the larger story of Sudan that people need to understand before they can make sense of the current catastrophe as well as the rest of our discussion?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the way, we can answer this question by a lot of ways, I suppose, but one of the ways are the, like to focus on is, you know, to just go back a little bit and say that it's not just about Sudan. You know, it's like there's a lot of countries in a global majority or in the global South that, you know, the history seem to be a little bit out of our reach for some reason. A country is that we, on the left, you know, we feel strongly towards, we have solidarity towards and so on and so forth, but we don't really know too much about these countries, including Sudan, of course. and I think

I've been also writing this book and like you know talking about Sudan for a long time I've been thinking about this why is it the case that on the left like we don't know

these histories intimately and like the first question that you would get would be like well you know they're not we're not taught this history in schools yeah but also we're not taught about the histories that we do know of

for example you know on the left we know for example about the French Revolution, for example, about France's history, even though we're not taught about it, but it's quite popular, the English Revolution, the American Revolution, you know, even to some degree, to some degree, of course, the Lesser degree, the Haitian Revolution, and so on and so forth. And I think one of the helpful sort of ideas or traditions that help me, like, unpack or understand why it is that we're so, well, not like, purposefully. informed about Sudan and other places in the global minority is the Afro-pessimist tradition.

And I think here, you know, I would say that there is a reason why it is deeply mystified and almost sort of, in a way, sort of, when we talk about Sudan, it's something that's kind of like a little bit beyond our comprehension. We don't understand it too much. And I think what I'm more, more understanding or appreciating is that the reason for this is that in order for you to sort of maintain the mute

compulsion, the exploitation in the global minority, and you know, to say that, for example, Europe or America or Canada or Australia, what global minority generally is like well to do and like even though there's some shitty things here, you know, at least it's better than the rest of the world. You have to mystify the rest of the world.

And so, you know, when it comes like Sudan, even like today we're talking about Iran for example, like Iran's in the news and so on and so forth when we're talking about like these histories of these people we even use different terminologies which I'm sure we're going to get to later on but we even use different terminology

to even describe them like we sort of pre-modernize them we sort of like sort of mystify them as like oh Sudan is like a bunch of Islamists just fighting against the Democrats or like a bunch of sectarians fighting like the words that are used

are so loaded but they mean really not too much And so, like, this is basically a long way of saying that the history of Sudan, I don't blame people for not knowing what the history of Sudan is because the knowledge about Sudan, about the global south, we have to, whenever we're reading about Sudan, we have to understand that in order for us to say that we are civilized in the global minority or in America or in Europe or whatever, we need to like juxtapose this or like contrast is to be like these other people here are uncivilized. And so we purposefully, even in history books, we see like Sudan is like, there isn't, for my knowledge, there isn't a book, for example, that talks about Sudan that doesn't use the deeply problematic term Islamism or Islamist. You know what I'm, and I'm sure we're going to get to that later on. But I think this is what I would say to anyone, which is basically when you do read about Sudan, when you read about the history of things, you also need to keep your mind about like where this mystification comes from. like why don't we understand it? Then it's deeper than just we don't have access to this knowledge.

I think it's somewhat, yeah, somewhat purposeful, I would say. Yeah. I would even argue it's a, you know, a product of 500 plus years of colonialism and a way that, you know, the global north and the imperial core think about, talk about or otherwise ignore what's happening in the global South writ large and specifically, always specifically in Africa. You know, we'll get into the crises and the catastrophe, but what's been happening in Sudan for the last several years

is a humanitarian crisis on par with the genocide in Palestine and not to diminish by any stretch of the imagination what's going on in Palestine, but there's an unevenness in just the attention, the focus on it, the news stories about it, and then more broadly from that basic understanding of what's even happening. And it feels like there's a lack of even an effort on behalf of everybody in the imperial core, left, right and center to even look at, let alone grapple with what has happened and what led up to it in Sudan.

So hopefully this episode will act as a corrective to that and a real important tool of political education. But before we move forward, I do want to ask you something, because you had personal experience and these two inflection points that I think might be worth just setting the table for before we get into a deeper discussion of them and other events as well. But the two events that people might be familiar with would be, as we talked about earlier, the Civil War from 2011 that gave rise to South Sudan. And then the perhaps 2019 Sudanese revolution, which you not only cover extensively in your book, but which you personally partook in. So can you kind of help orient us to what happened in 2011 and what happened in 2019, knowing that you don't need to give all the details because we'll go deeper as the conversation continue? I think in 2011, I'm sure we're going to get into it more so.

The question of the, we have to, first of all, grounded in this, since independence, which is in 1956, the quote-unquote southern question, so the question of South Sudan, you know, in relation to North Sudan, has been a question or has been something that every administration in Sudan has been grappling with. And we're going to get to this later on, hopefully, but the exploitation and the destruction that was visited one by, you know, the South Sudanese from North Sudan

has been decades in the making, if not even, of course, there's like a colonial histories that, you know, intensified these antagonisms and so on and so forth. If not like centuries and, you know, what culminated in 2011, it's still an ongoing sort of antagonism, but it's something that's even beyond just Sudan, the south, and the north, splitting. I think maybe we'll get into this later on

about the dynamics of like why it happened, not just in Sudan and even dynamics that we see today in South Sudan, but even dynamics that we see today, for example, in Tramfor and in West Sudan. But perhaps more intimately, for me, because you're right, I was part of the Sudanese Revolution of 2018 and 19. I mean, the Sudanese revolution, it's similarly a combination of like a long history, but I would like to just give, if you don't mind, two anecdotes just to, you know, to, you know, for for the viewers or for the listener's mind to just contextualize this moment. During the Senate Revolution, you know, when it was a full-blown, it was protest first,

and it was like sort of marches and it turned into a revolution. We overthrew the dictatorship in 2019. You have to understand that the vast majority of people in the streets during the revolution were younger than the dictatorship. So you have a dictatorship that's 30 years old. At that time, I was in my mid-20s. But the vast majority, all of us, the vast majority of us, at least, we did not know anything apart from this dictatorship. Now think about that for a second, right?

Like imagine being born into like a political system that you know. So for example, imagine all you knew was like the Republicans and Democrats or like the labor and conservative. or like, I don't know, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in Germany or whatever it is. That's all you knew. And you had a moment in which this entire edifice, this entire government came tumbling down. The sort of euphoria and like the potential for a new thing to come about, like a, you know, sort of gripped us. And like it was a very historic moment. Yeah, I mean, for for for for for for this I think it was a very very significant

We're going to talk about what came out of it But it was a very significant moment for all of us that were that were there and I think the conversations And this is what I tried to do in the book basically Which is try to be as faithful as I can to the conversations that we were having During this euphoric moment right where we thought you know that's it I lost like liberation is just like on the horizon And in this book is like at least in some sections in the book,

I try to detail like, you know, basically like the conversations or like try to like pull or tease out the conversations that we were having during these moments. And it's in moments of revolution, I think, where the most sort of, the jewels of how we understand the world

or like because the, the mechanisms of social reproduction enter into a schism, you sort of get to see like, you know, you get like a first-hand, look into what was bad about the past, but also what can we build in the future and what can we build now? And in that sort of moment in history, a lot of things come out, solidarity,

like knowledge, like camaraderie and so on and so forth. Just like a good example of this would be when during the protest, for example, we were, we used to go to like the protest and the protests were like separated. So there was people who were in the front lines, who were, you know, using like stop signs and like rocks or whatever to throw out like the paramilitary. There were people in the middle who were like, you know, used to chant and like just to show that, to try to demonstrate that we're bigger than what we actually were. There were people all doing the back who were medics. And then like it was an organized mechanism, right? And I remember like during that time like you don't know anyone in front and so I was one of the people who were

in front like in front of like the like throwing rocks of the military and the paramilitary and stuff like this we don't like yeah you have like your friends and stuff but you don't know anyone but the solidarity that you have with someone right like I remember you know someone that was standing next to me who was like you know we were chanting we were like hiding and throwing rocks and you know and this was like a very technical thing like it might seem like when you see the news or like when you see videos, it seems like kind of arbitrary. But at that moment, we have to see which way the wind is blowing because when you throw tear gas canister, the wind blows in a certain way, right? And then on top of that, you have to see where you

are architecturally, because if the wind blows in a certain way, you need to go through certain, like you need to take a left and a right. You can't go back because if you go back, it's going to create a stampede and you don't want that. You want to. even when they're when they're pushing us, you have to, it's better that you're sort of in the midst of the shit, basically, instead of running back and stampeding

because there's people who are already injured that are all the way at the back. And they're obviously like people who are vulnerable, older people and kids and so on and so forth. And so it's like, while you, like, we see it in the news or like when you see videos, we see like the, you know, these random people doing these random things. But there was like an art and a science

to like what we were doing. And anyways, there was a person next to me. Sorry for, you know, like derailing the conversation a little bit. But there was a person next to me, and I don't know this person, right? And immediate, like, the, if anyone's been in, like, this protest and, like, you know, the tear gas canister, when it hits you, it's like molten lava. It's so freaking hot. It's really, really, like, if it hits you, it's very dangerous. And they go to the Israeli-grade military, what's they called?

gas canisters or tear gas canisters. Literally, the paramilitary had like deals with Israel and things. So this person who was next to me like got a hit on the shoulder and he just sort of started like trying to grasp for air and like have ventilating and it was it was really tough. And so like basically we took him and we sort of went a little bit to the side and a little bit to the back where, you know, we were shot like, is there a doctor here? Is there a medic? Is there someone, you know, like, and then the person was just, you know, at that moment, right?

Like, you know, I'm sure maybe today there's protest across America against ice and so on and so forth. And maybe these images are familiar to some people. But if it's not familiar to you, when you see someone who's grasping for air, right, especially if you don't work in hospitals or you're not familiar with these things like most of us weren't, it's like you don't know what's going to happen next. And your body is in a state of shock. and you're wondering what can I do to help

this situation? You take off your shirt you sort of like try to like you know blow wind or whatever fan fan the person you try to get water and you're just moving around but like you don't want to be too close so it's not claustrophobic and we found finally like someone who was like

a doctor and she was like trying to help this person and then he started shaking right and you're like ah fuck man is this person going to die like what fuck you know, like it's a crazy situation. And the person sort of, like, you know, a little bit of like saliva comes out and you're like,

oh, fuck, man, he stopped moving all of a sudden. And you're like, that's, that's it. Like someone that I just saw fucking jumping, laughing, I don't know, throwing rocks, like holding a sign. And that's it. You know, his life is just gone in front of your eyes. And then miraculously, you know, the doctor does, I don't know, like whatever it is.

He sort of comes back, you know, like he's resuscitated and so on and so forth. The first thing that that person said wasn't like, al-hambulah, or like, thank God, or it wasn't like, oh, give me some water, like, he wasn't a thing. The first thing that he said was, where are my brothers? And he was talking about us, people that he did not know. And I say this, an anecdote, and there are many, many others to say. that during a moment of revolution, the things that come out is, I don't know, it's really something undescribable. But yeah, sorry for going on a mad one. No, no, I mean, I think that's fascinating. It's deeply moving. I find, you know, myself

tearing up hearing that because I, you know, from a much smaller scale, obviously I've never lived through a revolution, but I've been at many, many protests, clash with the police, been pepper sprayed, been arrested. And the camaraderie that you're talking about is even present in those smaller non-revolutions, but they're smaller street protests. The camaraderie that you feel, I have often found myself at like really big protests throughout the years. Start crying in the middle of it for exactly what you're trying to describe, like this sense of like being radically and totally in the moment with this deep sense of solidarity

and camaraderie with the people around you. But I can't even imagine taking that and turning it up to 10 where you're actually living through a successful revolution. It has to be one of the most surreal, profoundly human experiences that there is possibly to have. And I think from the Cuban Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all these instances where there is an acute moment where there's an obvious sense of like we've won. And I can't even fully grasp what that must feel. feel like, but there's something deeply human about that. And so I find that anecdote from your personal experience, you know, absolutely deeply moving and fascinating and speaking to a deeper human experience of like overthrowing tyranny and this deep aspect of our natures that

refuse to just submit to tyranny, no matter how long it's been installed, there is always this human urge to fight back. And when that urge actually results in a successful over. turning of a dictatorship like it did in your case that has to be, you know, an unmatched human experience. I mean, for sure. Like, I think the word human used is literally a civilizing thing. Like, you feel yourself different. You know, you can no longer go back. You know, like you, if something that's fundamentally transformed inside you. I mean, if you don't mind, like one of the things, for example, for me, if you don't mind me talking about it, that was very, very moving was that was one of the stories where

for example someone who's with us today right who's managed to survive there are stories for example of those martyrs during the revolution and I think it's appropriate to talk about them today as we're seeing what's going on in our

part of the world and Iran and so on and so forth there are martyrs who died during the revolution and you know it is a very very it's a tragic it's a heartbreaking thing but, you know, what we were fighting for exactly what you said, right, a successful revolution, because we saw it in front of us, imagine, imagine, like, imagine for the lesson for you,

like, for example, imagine you have at your fingertips, like I said, all of us were younger than 30 years old than dictatorship. So we thought in our fingertips, like, this is the solution to everything, like the solution, the final thing, imagine at your fingertips you have like a a socialist utopia just like waiting to happen. And people are willing to sacrifice anything. But the fascinating, for me personally, it's not even this aspiration of a better future. But during the revolution was,

the revolution itself for me was the civilizing thing. It wasn't even like whether we were reached socialism or communism or like utopia or whatever it is. The revolution, because I remember distinctly when a martyr or someone would die and was murdered and he became marty. during the Revolution, we would go all of us. And I mean like in our thousands, in our tens of thousands,

we would go every day or every couple of days, however appropriate it is, to the martyrs family. And we would be walking, and during the walk, we will chant, what's we called? Umma's Shihid, ummi, Dammeshahe, Dammie, which means the blood of the martyr is my blood, the mother of the martyr is my mother. And we go to the mother of the of the martyr. And we literally sit there and we stand there,

it would be like, you haven't lost a son or you haven't lost a daughter, but you've gained sons and you've gained daughters. And we're here for you, whatever you need to do and whatever you want us to do and so on or so on and forth. And to me, that, that itself was much more. more civilizing, much more sort of, one of the most really, you know, like liberating experiences. For me, then this, this here, what thousands of people walk into the streets to like the mother and the father, the family of the people who've lost their lives and telling them

that you haven't lost the son, but you've came. This is such a civilizing thing in our current capitalist system that we just, you just don't, we don't have except in these moments. Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, early in the book, you argue that perhaps the usual binaries that are used to explain Sudan, right, era versus African, nationalist versus tribal, civilian versus military, et cetera, that they obscure more than they reveal. Can you kind of talk about these framings, what they miss, and, you know, maybe give us a

picture of the broader demographic dynamics that are actually at play in Sudan that kind of explode these simple binaries? Of course, for sure, for sure. I think today whenever someone reads about what's going on in Sudan, immediately they find themselves reading an article or watching a video or reading a book or whatever it might be, which is sort of contrast or juxtapose, for example. On the one side, you have the military, the Sudanese forces, and the rapid support forces. So the military, which is the SAF, the Sydney's Armed Forces,

and the rapid support forces, which is the paramilitary, the RSF. And we sort of, you know, the story is revealed to us or is told to us. So the narrative is told to us that it is this side versus that side. You know what I mean? And that might be the case in Sudan itself, of course, like that these two sides are warring and they're fighting and, you know, this is, this is the reality in which we exist. But what I try to say in the book, what I try to demonstrate is it's not like these two oppositional groups or these two warring sides sort of came out of a vacuum. It's not like they were, you know, automatically just came up and they were warring against each other. There is a long history to why this happened. And I think why it obscures it for the case of today, for example, when we talk about the RSF versus the SAF, is that,

you know like first of all the RSF and the SAF were you know products of the same sort of governments or the same sort of dictatorship of Sudan and they were in match and they were one of them is a subsidiary of the other in one point but it's not even

beyond this is not even that the fact that they're related to each other so intimately but also in order for us those who want to see a different Sudan, it's not just enough to side with one side and then that's it if we side with, let's say, like, the military for today. And this is, I think, most, while I understand people's urges to side with the military against the paramilitary, of course, you know, if we want to build a Sudan, we need to look at

the deep history of like, you know, why, why should we look, how did these dynamics come about? why did this civil war or whatever come about and how can we do something differently? And I think this is what I try to fight against in the book

generally just to go beyond this so we can maybe build a better future and maybe understand things a little bit more intimately. Yeah. And we'll get into more of the SAF and the RSF and the RSF and their sort of class composition and the interests that are behind them and

driving them. But before we do, move a little bit forward and also talk about the history of the Sudanese left more broadly. Can you just kind of let people know, like, you mentioned this revolution and you're movingly speaking about your personal experiences within it. Obviously, you know, we understand historically that these inflection points are deeply connected and are connected to what's the present situation in Sudan. What happened in the immediate aftermath of this, of the 2018, 2019 Sudanese revolution and how did it kind of perhaps collapse some of the more? utopian or hopeful visions that those that partook in that revolution might have had about it.

Okay, nice. I think this is such an interesting question. It's such an important question. Okay, so just to continue from our left off last, so we can have like a chronology. Cool. So we said that everyone was younger than the dictatorship itself. So what did you have? You had basically this revolutionary mass, because they were younger than the dictators,

all they thought was, or all we thought, including myself, of course, is that we got rid of dictatorship, that's it, chahlas. Something better is going to come, right? Now, of course, you know, like I don't blame my younger self or I don't blame my comrades for thinking this way because this is, you know, this is what we set out to do to overthrow the dictatorship. But it's just the day after the revolution that we were not necessarily prepared for. Of course, you know, we started becoming prepared for, and like especially the resistance committees in Sudan, the neighborhood resistance committees in Sudan,

sort of, you know, leapt into action and sort of, you know, became integral to the reproduction of society itself. You know, in that sense, what I mean is there were the main mechanisms, for example, that distributed, you know, natural gas. There were the main mechanism, which took, like, surveys of, like,

who lived in how many people lived in which houses and what their needs were and who was who was taken care of and what do we need to do. Children, us, like, in our 20s, like, you know, people younger than us just, you know, going around. So we did leap into action and we did do these things. But nonetheless, I think we suffered, I mean, I say we, but, you know, I wouldn't blame us necessarily. maybe we'll get into this later on about the history of the left.

But it's just a left movement wasn't ready to handle the revolution. And so that being the case, what happened was there was on the, and there was a vacuum that was being created. The government collapsed, the dictatorship fell, you know, of course there's still remnants of it and so on and so forth, there was a vacuum. And in this vacuum, you know, the people, who were most organized in Sudanese society occupied it. That was naturally the military and the paramilitary, which is the RSF and the SAF.

But also, you know, people who have been working, and I think, you know, people, maybe people know, listeners know about this a little bit, but also the NGO class. And these, all these three sort of organizations or all these three sort of factions of society, they were much better organized historically than sort of, let's say, the left. And so it kicked into action and so, you know, there were a lot of decisions that were made and, you know, we can get into these decisions.

But one key historic point, I think, I would highlight that's not talked, because it's not talked about as much, is there were sort of, the sort of, the military and opposed to the military, they were like the quote-unquote the civilians, right, the civilian administration. Now, the civilian administration sort of had a problem in front of them. They wanted Sudan to move from a military dictatorship to like a civilian-run democracy

or like a, at least a civilian-run government. The problem they faced was because there was not, it wasn't, you know, Sudan-wide or society-wide organization of like a major, you know, let's say movement or a major left movement. And like even the civil society was co-opted by the dictatorship and so on and so forth. So because there wasn't that,

they were facing a major problem, which is if we run elections in a couple of months, they thought that these elections were going to be won by people from the old dictatorship because they held basically the livers of power

and the mechanisms of social reproduction. There were heads of hospitals, for example. There were heads of major sort of, let's say, radio stations and so on and so forth. So they did have sort of sway in society. So they were worried about this. But the anxiety from this specific thing led to devastating outcomes. For them, they thought in their head, instead of having immediate elections and democracy, like in immediate elections in like a couple of months.

I'm just, this is by the way, a history. Like I'm not, I'm not someone who's saying that elections are going to be the answers to like everything and everything's going to be cool and stuff like that. No, but like this is what the thought that was going on. They said that instead of having like immediate elections, what we're going to have basically is shared, like a share, a power sharing agreement with the military so that we can prolong the transition period and so that for them, they themselves can start working on sort of from the roots

like ripping out like the old sort of dictatorship and so on and so forth. This, in my understanding on my reading of what happened, was a devastating decision to make. This is a decision to make basically because you have people in the streets like us, like I was saying, who are sacrificing themselves so that you can have a better, you know, reality and a better, a better future. And the military and the paramilitary knew this. I mean, they saw it and the paramilitary was like, yeah, I'm not going to side with like the dictatorship. I'm going to sign with these Germans. Not because of any love loss for us, but they decided with us because they sued, they saw the potential, the power like the masses of people in the streets. And now once the

civilian sort of faction was like, okay, we're going to have like a power sharing agreement. The military saw that, well, okay, these people might just be paper tigers. It might just be a momentary thing. We're going to test out how, you know, how strong this, this sort of civilian movement or like this, you know, democratic movement or revolutionary movement, whatever it is, how strong it is. And all they had to do was just wait. And after a certain time they would make like concessions, they would like renege on like certain like promises and so on and so on and so on and so forth, so on. And they just found out that they can just waltz to basically power again. And I think that was one of devastating mistakes and ways of

thinking, even though there are historic presidents for, precedents for thinking that way. But it was a mistaken decision, I think. Yeah. Honestly, I think this is an incredibly common pattern. in, you know, post-revolutionary moments, especially those that perhaps lack an already existing politically powerful force. Like in the Russian Revolution with the Bolsheviks, they already had sort of a consolidated, hyper-organized entity apparatus ready to take over the state post-revolution, and of course they also had to defend it from the attempts at counter-revolution. So, like, the two biggest things that happen after a revolution topples, a dictator or, or,

tyrant or whatever is you have to consolidate post-revolutionary gains into a new political force and then you have to often defend that revolution from counter-revolutionary forces which can, you know, span the spectrum of different interests from internal Comprador bourgeois interest, military interest and also, of course, external imperialist or neo-colonial interest. And so, you know, it's an incredibly, it's in many ways I would argue that that is more difficult than the actual revolution itself. But I just want to look, I took this note when I was reading your book and kind of just to put an exclamation point on this part of the conversation before we move into the history.

This is my understanding of what happened. And let me know if this is more or less correct, kind of summarizing what we're talking about here, that the Sudanese Revolution was kind of this broad mass uprising. You mentioned neighborhood resistance committees, you know, students, professionals, workers, doctors, of poor people, dispossessed people, left-wing forces. These are kind of the amalgamation of forces that were leading and pushing forward the revolution. But you make this point very strongly in your book that the real forces, these bottom-up forces were later contained by formal already existing political coalitions to some degree liberal or NGO actors, international organizations,

and then ultimately the military and the paramilitary forces that kind of took advantage of the inability to consolidate a strong post-revolutionary situation that reflected the interests of those that had participated in the revolution. Does that more or less sound right or am I missing something there? Yeah, I think that sounds very accurate. I think like, let me give an anecdote.

I don't know, I'm in a weird state today. I'm talking in anecdotes. But let me give you an anecdote. You know, speaking of like the NGO class, when the neighborhood resistance committees, when they wanted to negotiate after the dictatorship fell and stuff like this, we wanted to talk and negotiate. We wanted to be like part of like, I mean, we brought this about,

so we wanted to be on the table, so to speak. One of, because, I mean, bear in mind, Like I said, we knew nothing about this thing. And, you know, there were some comrades within us who are, like, very well read and, you know, we're into, like, political philosophy and so on and so on and what. But, you know, like, for us, we just, it was through practice. And we cut our teeth, you know, with the revolution. And so we're like, okay, we want to be in this table.

Granted, like, one of the major things that needs to happen in order for us to be in this table, we demand that all. all the communications and negotiations should be live streamed on Facebook. For maximum transparency. Exactly, right? I mean, this is something that for us, it was just like, I mean, you know, it's just, it's just so commonsensical, like, okay, we don't know, you know, not everyone here knows exactly what's going on and stuff.

And we want to sort of have, like, transparency of, like, what's going on, or we don't to like, you know, we, we press, I don't want to speak on top of someone. I don't want, you know, to be there. And I want people to see what I'm saying, for example. And the UN was just like, yeah, not going to happen. That's not, that's not happening, Captain. You know, like, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's thing. But I give this anecdote to say that, for example, and I said this previously,

the most organized forces in society at the time were naturally the military and the paramilitary and these NGO classes. And now the NGO classes, like, I want to say to the anecdote to say that they might come to like places like Sudan, like Haiti,

places like, I don't know, Jordan and so on and so forth. And they might come with like this sort of wishy-washy and like, yeah, we're going to bring up, they always come with like sort of an, orientalizing logic, like, okay, we're going to make sure that, like, people are educated and there's a strong focus on women because, you know, you barbarians, you don't know how to take care of women. And, you know, we're going to, you know, sort of protect my minority rights, which has always been the case for, you know, imperialism, like using minority rights to, like,

basically destroy other countries and to conquer and so on and so forth. And they always come with these like liberal sort of like and when you hear it you're like okay wow man like you know you guys are actually doing some really good work but as a matter of fact on the ground they are basically not effective at all at all like they because what are you talking about you're talking about people who are dispossessed completely and like you know an economy that's based on financialization which we're going to get to later on and then you're coming and saying that I'm going to upskill this person. Yeah, okay, where is he going to work, my bro? Like, you don't have, like, there's no, the labor market is absolutely, like, there's no meaningful labor markets. There's no statistics

to even see if this is success. And you're like, yeah, we're going to teach them how, how to do what exactly, like to, like, it's just completely the thing. But the one thing that they are super, super good at is absorbing revolutionary power. It's because when you, you're when you're sort of in that moment and you're like, okay, this is what a better future is like this. And so these people come and they're like, you know, I mean, obviously there's a certain level of decadence and so on and so forth. And like, you know, you have like the UN number place that basically don't get stopped by the police and there's like a reverence and like, it's all ceremonious kind of stuff. Not that we're not that way we're not that, you know,

it entices, it doesn't entice us necessarily. But like, you're like, okay, these people know what they're talking about as a professional veneer and all that kind of stuff. and they're very good at being like having a lot of meetings and being like okay you know let's let's set up this meeting so we can have like awareness campaigns and so we can do this and we can do that and all the revolutionaries because for us not all of them but for revolutionaries you're like okay yes actually you're right people do need to be more aware about these things yeah actually you're right maybe we need to do these things but it's basically never works, or if it does work, it works just incidentally.

And the best thing that it does for them is just basically, like I said, absorb this energy. And so that's the moment that we find ourselves, like during a revolution, the day after, so to speak, there isn't an organized sort of left movement or like a communist movement or a socialist movement. But there's these things. And one of those, like you said, and like I said in an anecdote, are these what I call in the book

ontologically emotionless organizations? And the reason why they're ontologically motionless is because, you know, whenever there's like a mass event that happens, whether it's a genocide, whether it's like, I don't know, starvation and famine, whether there's war or whatever, they don't want to resolve it, these organizations.

They want to ensure that things don't move. So neither should the genocide increase in its violence, nor should it resolve the original sort of motivations or the original dynamics that sort of put this genocide into action, you know what I mean, or the continued intensification of this genocide. And that's exactly what happened in Sudan. So they're kind of stabilizing a sort of situation that needs to continue a revolutionary transformation, like a revolutionary transformational process needs to occur here, but there's this sort of stopping of momentum, this bogging everything down, this promises of like meetings to resolve problems or raise awareness, and that kind of

chips away at an otherwise revolutionary momentum takes advantage, perhaps, of a lack of already existing political forces that can, you know, move in the right direction and then creates the context in which these military and paramilitary forces can kind of come in and take over? For sure. And the cherry on top is we actually in like different dynamics and some weird ways. At the end, we end up paying for all the cars and all the hotel rooms that they stay. So well done. You know what I mean? Like yeah, yeah, basically, basically. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and zoom out and talk about the history of the Sudanese left because this is a major thread of the book and I think it's one of the more fascinating and, you know,

relevant to an audience like ours. Like I want to understand this history about. every society on earth, I want to know their left history. So for those unfamiliar, can you kind of walk us through the history of the Sudanese left, where the Sudanese communist and left movements kind of came from, what their strengths were, and, you know, why they once became such an important political force and where they are today. It's a big question, take it in whatever direction you want. Thank you. If I start drifting off, just, you know, make sure to stand me back because I sort of, like I said, I'm in a weird mood today. Yeah, I think just following from what I said earlier, it's, you know, since like we successfully overthrew the dictatorship, but it was sort of co-opted and, you know, there's, it wasn't ours, basically, it no longer was in our hands. It was sort of taken from us. And so what I wanted to do, and this is, this, this, this, this book was sort of my inflections and my research on like what happened basically. And so one of the best ways I thought personally of trying to understand what happened, um, or what this thing.

is like a revolution is like a gift from God to the left. You know what I mean? And I thought to myself, I'm like, okay, you know, since we, this thing happened, where was the left? And so that's where I'm coming from is to try to understand why, why is it that, you know, we weren't ready for this. And so to go to your question, which is, you know, how did this, where does the left in Sudan stem from, generally speaking, just to for caveats, any person who's like

oppressed has obviously resisted this oppression. Like the resistance from Sudan or anywhere really, but from Sudan specifically, it can go back as, you know, much early, like centuries earlier, it can go back to like when the state of Khartoum was on, the city of Khartoum was first established, I think, in 1824 or something like this.

and the resistance of the farmers, like, you know, the crossing of the the crossing of the White and Blue Nile, and so on and so forth. But what I concentrate here on specifically is the communist movement and just the proto-communist movement. Now, how this came about is similar

to other sort of colonized countries is when the British entered World War II, when the war started or when they entered the war, Now, before that, they repressed all the quote-unquote intelligentsia. They repressed all the sort of even left liberal aspirations, all the sort of national independence aspirations of Sudan and other countries, but in Sudan. And the repression was very, very severe.

And this was the case. Just to run an empire for colonialism, you need to suppress the national aspirations of the peoples, naturally. When the war broke out, this suppression sort of eased. Not out of any kindness, not out of any, you know, love lost or whatever. But it's just fighting too many fronts at once. And so simultaneously, while this suppression eased, there was a particular soldier, and you know, there was a British soldier's station because there was something

going on in Ethiopia, Ethiopia, and so on and so forth. But there was a British soldier that was stationed in Sudan, and this British soldier sort of had, from the Communist Party, the, I think is the British Communist Party of Britain or something like this. But a communist soldier that was stationed in Sudan, and he had like Marxist readings in Khartoum. So, you know, there was this, it was two factions. There was this faction, which is the reading circle of like,

or like the, he used to provide like a Marxist, analysis of what's going on in Sudan and so on and so forth and, you know, a vibrant, vibrant circles from the sounds of it. And on the other side, you had, actually in Egypt, you had the sort of Egyptian National Liberation Movement. And, you know, in that movement, there were some Sudanese cadres who sort of led and, you know, came to Sudan and also established the sort of established, but they came to Sudan and, you know, they joined forces, those who came from Egypt with the soldiers group to form the Sudanese National Liberation Movement. Now, my dates are not, I need to go back to the book, but this was before independence and, you know,

the period between World War II and Independence, so between 45 or 46 and to 1956. And in this period, like all these talks of, you know, sort of liberation and all these talks of like national aspiration was going on beyond these two. But these two movements, when they came together in Kharton to create the Sudanese national liberation movement, this was the moment where a proto-communist movement was birthed in Sudan. Now, during this moment, you know, to go back, there was the first head of this movement. But the most significant, is the second head of this movement, which we'll get into his background a little bit later on,

Abdel Khaliq Mahjub. But so this was the movement. That was the communist movement that like, you know, sort of brought the left together or like created a meaningful socialist or communist left in Sudan. In the early days of the left, maybe we'll get to this later, but they were focused on national liberation. and then afterwards they were focused on not just national liberation,

but also trying to organize the poor and the religious poor and the working class and so on and so forth. After that, you know, there was an opportunity with like a dictatorship or the dictatorship of Nemei, who was originally a socialist. We're talking about the 70s here. but Nimeri and the communist sort of you know broke off or like they they weren't together and to begin with but like they had like a working relationship and then they broke off

and after that it was sort of they were exiled and they were massacred and you know prosecuted and hung and so on and so forth we're going to get to I'm just given a brief summary so we'll get to the details later And then after that, the left was basically destroyed in Sudan. It was slowly trying to revive itself, but it was reviving itself along very sort of liberal nationalist lines.

And until the 90s, where the 90s, they basically declared that the Marxist experiment has failed, and we need to sort of look to understand what we can do differently. and they even suggested change in the Communist Party of Sudan to like the Socialist Party of Sudan. And during that time in the 90s, specifically, they started basically entering NGOs. And how I understand it, you know, with talking to various cadres and so on and so forth,

is that they thought that because of the religious poor, like, you know, a capitalist revolution needs to happen before socialism can happen and we weren't yet. Capitalism has sort of, what's it called, globalized but not universalized. And so like all these kinds of things,

maybe we can get into later on. And that's all to say is basically depending more on the NGOs in the 90s, what's the reason why they couldn't command mass labor movements or even like, let's say, I don't know, Tuktok drivers

or shop keykeepers, or barbers or like just a general, vibrant, you know, left movement or like anyone who's working, really a working class person in Sudan. Or they could even control the revolutionaries or like have, no control, but like have like saying what the revolutionaries have done. It's because they concentrated on, like I said, the ontologically motionless NGO class in the 90s. But yeah, sorry, I went real quick through the history,

like, you know, pick up where you think is best, or maybe you can leave this question when the time is right. No, yeah, I think that's fascinating. And obviously, that's, you know, decades and decades of history, so you can't get into all the details. But one thing I am kind of curious about before we move in to that figure that you mentioned is, wherever there is a communist movement or a socialist movement, particularly in the global south, Uncle Sam is looking over at it, side-eyed and willing to step in and do everything it can to prevent its maturation

or its development as a party or as an organization. To what extent has there, you know, I'm an American, so I'm particularly interested in this, dynamic, to what extent has there been an American imperialist presence, not just with regards to the Sudanese left and the socialist and communist movement, but more broadly within the country as a whole historically and presently? There was, one of the things that come to my mind immediately historically is after independence, there was like the first very short-lived sort of democratic, parliamentary period.

And then, you know, afterwards, there was a... had the dictator by the name of Abud, who took power. Or he was even, he didn't take power. He was basically handed power because of, you know, the people at the time who were elected or who won the elections. They thought they were going to lose the elections. And so they handed the power to this person who was like favorable to them, who was, you know, a dictatorship.

Now, Abu himself sort of subscribed to the Eisenhower doctrine, which I would imagine in America, I think maybe there's, you know, is an interesting, or, you know, like it's relevant to American audience. And that time, you know, explicitly, if you look at the details of the papers, it explicitly mentions that, you know, we want to fight the threat of communism in Sudan. And so we're going to have economic and military ties with Sudan. And like, you know, you don't have to be like a historian or like a thing to read. Like this is all nonsense.

Like the concept of like an incipient sort of like communist danger that's going to take over Sudan. That's going to, I don't know, quick. Like the Sudanese movement, the Sudanese communist movement is a strong movement, maybe the second strongest after the Iraqi movement at a certain point in history. Not that point, but a certain point of history. But the idea that they were going to overthrow and like come to like create like a Soviet or like create like a communist country or even continent or whatever, like it's it's it's it was really just nonsense but it was I think sometimes how I read this kind of history is even if there was a threat or if there's no threat. They would always say that there is a threat of communism and these countries and that's why you need to side with the US. instead of the USSR.

And this is why you need to say, you know what I mean, with freedom and instead of like freedom, of course, here, I'm using in quotations. So that's why immediately comes to mind. But I think I would say, you know, and this from my reading of history, the much greater sort of well-covered and sort of significant events,

for better or worse, like sort of happened in Egypt and so Sudan was kind of overshadowed because Egypt with Nassar and so on and so forth they saw this as like you know like a real danger and Nassau obviously like his his allegiances to what's it called

Arab socialism and so on and so forth that was the threat and so Sudan like it's not as like there wasn't as much hostility I would say like from my reading maybe I'm wrong or maybe people can correctly,

but as there was, for example, in other places, it's just, it's just, you know, even Sudan was administered by the British. It was administered from Egypt. And it was seen as such. But this also brought out very interesting histories and very radical politics because of this explicit reason, you know, because it wasn't seen too much

or wasn't cared about too much. So it was somewhat there was like very interesting politics going around. But also simultaneously, that you might have not avoided Uncle Joe until, you know, Uncle Joe sort of, oh, no, Uncle Joe, sorry. Uncle Sam, not Uncle Sam sort of was like, you know, like later on in the 90s, there was like a couple of missile attacks and so on and so forth. I see.

Okay, yeah, and for those that don't know, we keep bringing up Egypt. Maybe your map of Africa and your head is kind of fuzzy, but of course Egypt and Sudan share it. incredibly large border. Egypt sits right on top of Sedan northward. And so, you know, Egyptian politics are really crucial to Sudanese politics historically and to some extent presently. And so, of course, that's why it keeps getting brought up in this conversation. But a figure who looms large in your book, and you've already mentioned him, is Abdul Khalik Mahjub. Apologies if I butcher that pronunciation. But especially his insistence that, you know,

communists cannot dismiss the religious poor or treat them as backward. And I think, you know, that's an important point because often in secular left-wing politics, sometimes the religious aspects are downplayed and historically socialism and communism have been at times militantly atheistic and anti-religious, which, you know, maybe does well in certain contexts, but much less well in other contexts, particularly in histories and cultures where there is a pronounced and important religious strain. So can you kind of talk about who this figure is, his importance to the history of the Sudanese left, and anything else you feel that is important or inspirational, perhaps, about him and his approach?

Yeah, for sure. Like you said, for me personally, I really admire Abdul Khalik Mahjub. I mean, he's really, I hope one day, inshallah, like a book is written about him. It's like an English and widely thing because he is very, very significant. One of the things that I would say, I didn't write this in the book, but I give an example, I think a lot of listeners are aware of like Fanon and Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. And, you know, during, in a certain section in like the Richard of the Earth, Fanon warns about the sort of post sort of independence national bourgeoisie. You know, it's like, okay, you guys, you know, watch out for them. they might have like different aspirations than you and stuff like that, you know,

like, you know, not the Adam, just just keep an eye on that. Now, for Abd al-Qaulch-Mahjub, maybe years before Fanon put these words to paper, Abdu-Kalik Mahjub actually not only thought about it, but put this into action. During the independence in Sudan, which I said is 1956, 6, Abdul Khaled Hamajou saw like a trend in the communist movement, which he was the head of, which he saw that we were always, the communist were always sort of siding with the nationalist or like the people who wanted national independence, regardless of who they were. Right.

And so for him, he was like, man, okay, you know, maybe this is like a short-term good goal because we're trying to get like national independence, but we're giving much more energy and like much more voices and much more sort of like power to these people who are basically, you know, they don't share our politics, let's say, for like a better word.

And what the Khalid Mahjid did was like, you know what? Actually, fuck it. I'm not going to concentrate, excuse my language, guys. I'm not going to concentrate like exclusively on the national independence. question. But we're going to be also, and more importantly, present in working class movements, present in women liberation movement, present in the student movement, present in urban urban

centers. And you have to understand how significant this moment is and how what this, like, you know, this history is. Because imagine, like today, it may be something that's somewhat to relate all, but not exactly, not the thing, but today in America, for example, I think audience are familiar with like there no kings, sort of anti-Trump sort of movement and stuff like that. Imagine there was, imagine a left-wing person who comes in as like, yeah, you know what, I'm not going to concentrate on Trump explicitly, but rather it's going to be a secondary thing and I'm going to concentrate more so on like the working class and so on and so forth. It's at that time, we're talking about basically colonialism.

And it's like the biggest thing in front of you, the biggest hurdle. And you're concentrated. Why? Because you're afraid that after colonialism, exactly what Phelon warned us about, that, you know, the national bourgeoisie is going to basically take over and, you know, kind of have free reign to, you know, maybe even reproduce the same sort of colonial dynamics. If, you know, maybe not as severely or whatever, but like continue the, at least the accumulation process. And he was absolutely right.

And imagine this is something that was done. We talk about like this, you know, a lot of ink has been spelled, like talking about the work, this specific passage in Fanon. Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub was doing this in practice. Years before, and I mentioned this just to give an example of just the brightness and the sort of revolutionary appetite and aspirations that this person has. And the second part of it, which you mentioned, and I think it's an important thing for us today on the left,

which is he said that we should concentrate on the religious poor. Because I think, you know, even Abdul Khalid from Hajib saw that even in Marxism, I sort of joke around when I mentioned her, I said like his more Marxist than Marx himself. But even in Marxism, he says that, well, you know, there is this thing where, you know, because there's direct economic exploitation,

people are going to sort of burst asunder, the sort of these superstitions and so on and so forth, and they're going to get into like a direct class war and blah, blah, blah. You know, like this was, like it has different manifestations, but this was the idea. And so what he noticed was that there were parts of the communist movement that looked down to the poor as if, like, they didn't burst asunder,

as if like they didn't progress or they weren't, modern enough. You know, they're like still like sort of kept like superstition and so on and so forth. And for him, this was very, very upsetting. And, you know, he made it a, he made it a thing like for like, okay, we, we don't need any more sort of middle class or, you know, sort of these people who think that they're above it all because, you know, they don't believe in God and so on and so forth. No, we need to be where the people are. I mean, these people have real life concerns. These people have like, you know, a worldview and so on and so forth. And he sort of, he completely ignored. And he made it like, I think one of the report says that if they had like a

meeting during Friday, there would be a break so that everyone can go like to Friday prayer and so on and so forth, which, you know, if you know the communist movements, especially in, Sudan, communism is basically another euphemism for like atheism. You know, I mean, it's just, there's no difference or like it's a synonym for like atheism. And so for him, he thought like yeah, okay, this doesn't make sense

you know, for us the priority is like working class people. And I quote him in the book where he says like the enemy our enemies are not like the Christians or like the Muslims and so on and so forth. Our number one enemy is of course imperialism, you know. I think

just to answer the question, for me personally when it comes to the question, the question of religion, especially on the left, I think this question, unfortunately, is really, really, you know, has set us back quite a bit. And I think, of course, Iran today with what's going on, is sort of maybe civilized this question a little bit better and, you know, has sort of made us rethink some aspects of it. But I think generally on the left, I think, you know, we basically need to drop this understanding that, you know, everyone who's religious is superstitious,

and because of this, they can't be revolutionary of it anymore. And we need to drop it for multiple reasons. We can go into the philosophy of it all and stuff like that. But I want to just a rhetorical point that I want to make is you can't call people, you know, Muslims, for example, or Christians for that matter, or like, you know, Jewish people. people or whatever. Okay, these people are backwards and superstitious. They don't believe in like, you know, they think that the world revolves in a different way. It's, you know, it's, you know, it's where people who believe that one day that there's going to be a revolution,

it's going to be a socialist revolution. We're not, we're not anyone to like point fingers. If you look out there, the last thing that's going to happen is, seems to be like the socialist revolution. So we may not want to point my fingers about like what kind of mysterious powers are playing, what kind of things that we believe in. But I say this in jest and stuff like this, but I think it has done somewhat of a harm. Maybe you can get into it later on. But yeah, that's Abdul Khaled my view for you.

Well, I mean, I completely agree. I think atheistic dogmatism is its own type of non-dialectical, you know, sectarianism that is very irrelevant and that often serves to. you know, prop up somebody's ego and sense of self-righteousness more than it is a serious political tactic. Regardless of whatever your personal religious or non-religious beliefs may be, it remains a fact that religion is a terrain of struggle. And I would argue every single religion has within it seeds of a liberatory politic. You know, whether you're talking about

Islam or Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, we've done episodes on all of them. And the elements that we need, the dialectical approach is not to say, these religions are stupid, backward, superstitious, they should be rooted out or ignored or whatever, but rather the dialectical approach is to find what is present already existing within those religious traditions that can be cultivated and emphasized in a broader struggle for liberation. The moment you start telling somebody that, you know, their belief about God and where their family goes when they die and their their moral and existential anchor in this world is nonsense, you lose them. You come off as, as just an asshole, you know, and it makes it much harder to, you know, to organize people and

just to be engaged with people as equals, right? And I also think that the religious, the religious dimension in the human spirit is like a natural thing, because regardless of what happens materially and politically, there is always this. huge question mark that all human beings have to wrestle with, which is like the eternal, right, the divine, the mystery of the cosmos and our being within it. And that is just a fundamental aspect of being a self-conscious creature in the cosmos that politics will never wash away entirely. It will change. I think if we, you know, over however long period of historical time, we move into a communist world, I think the religions that exist under global communism,

would look different and emphasize different things than they do under feudalism or capitalism, right? That's a historical materialist point to make. But I don't think the human yearning to understand the mystery of our existence will ever be resolved politically. And so once you understand that, I think that we have to treat the religious terrain as a terrain of struggle and take it seriously and enter it with with humility, right? I think 100%. Like you said it, you said it perfectly. I think I would also say absolutely what you said. And look, as human beings, we have to make assumptions about things, about society, about the future, about history, about whatever. We have to make, I don't know,

I don't want to get too technical, but you have to make like transcendental claims. You have to. Like for example, even the most, you know, let's say atheistic person who believes that the world is just an observable, you know, mosaic of atomistic. facts and that by virtue of exploring or experimenting every sort of mosaic or every certain atomic fact, we're going to get to the capital R reality of things. Even if you take this small sort of fundamental thing, you have to have, you have to basically make two transcendental claims. The first one is observation is equal to determination. So you can observe something and this observing of something

determines what that something is. But of course we know that this is not true. For example, just a small example is race. I can say that during every recession, you know, black people in America or like racialized people generally are the worst hit with recession. But this does not determine what racism is

because if you just fix that aspect of it, it's not going to end racism. So observation is not, is not determination. And the second ask transcendental claim is, like, if how do you know that if you, if like you get all the pieces of these mosaics

or like we can, in the academy, I'm not in an academy, but in academy there's like, constant like every single year, there's like a minute sort of experiments about things. But this is, you have to make a transcend delta claim

that actually reality is like this and that if we have enough, thing about reality, we're going to capture capital our reality. This is also a trans, another thing. So, like, just, this is an example just to say that you're absolutely right. I mean, it's an essential part of being human, even the most, even if you don't like it, just by virtue of operating in this world, you have to make claims about it. And to dismiss another person's claims, I think this is really sort of, it's, it's very upsetting

like you said, like to people who have. have created these assumptions out of struggle. For example, you know, the many Muslims who were brought in from East Africa and from other places to come work in in plantations in America, for example, they made sense of their struggles through their assumptions about religion. I feel to be like, oh, yeah, they're just talking. It's like, no, actually, they might have a better insight on the assumptions of what's going on than we do, actually. You know what I mean? And so, yeah, it's something that we need to work on, to be honest. Absolutely.

I totally agree. And I'm just going to say one last point. If you really firmly, you know, whether you're an atheist and you say you're an atheist and you say, I know for a fact that there's no God and there's no afterlife. And this is all just atoms, soup of atoms, smashing into each other. No, you don't. You don't know that for a fact. Nobody knows that for a fact. And so the moments you make a concrete, metaphysical claim and you pretend to be certain about it,

you are actually in the realm of the very sort of religious metaphysical claims that you're ostensibly critiquing. I think agnosticism would be at least a more epistemologically justifiable position than a hard atheism. But, you know, this is neither here nor there. That's a whole separate episode. But I think you made really, really interesting and fascinating points. And yeah, it's something we got to wrestle with and face. And I think the approach of going in and listening to people as opposed to going in and telling them is always a better approach in. So, let's go ahead and shift a little bit to, I think, the most original, some of the most

original parts of your book, which is your development of what you call praxis psychotherapy. This is, as we talked about, I think it was before we started recording very much in, I would argue in the Phenonian tradition of, you know, in the wretched of the earth, he's doing this fascinating political analysis of the colonial situation. And in the back third of the book, he engages in this sort of, psychological explication of the psychological damages of trauma on both sides of the colonized colonizer dynamic, et cetera. And you're kind of doing something very similar or at least inspired by that that I think is absolutely fascinating. So can you kind of explain what practice psychotherapy is,

how it emerged during the revolution and why you think revolutionary politics has to take psychic life, right, trauma, desire, shame, et cetera, seriously? Yeah, I mean, I think a long question. Yeah, it is. I'm bad about that. It's like good. To start off during Saddam, just to contextualize it, like this happened somewhat by accident.

So a friend of mine came to me and he said, look, you know, my family member is suffering from first episode psychosis, right, from psychosis. and so he came to me like okay what do you think about about this and we took him here we took him there and so I'm not I'm not a psychiatrist or anything like that

I studied psychology and I worked as before I come to the revolution I worked as an assistant assistant assistant therapist but but I do read a lot I do read somewhat in like these these these kinds of things

and so when he came to me I told him basically that you know I don't know like whatever any any sort of clinician will tell you that in these episodes, for example, it depends how long like if it's the first time,

how old they were, what kind of cosmologies that they believe in, like what kind of, what generation of psycho, of antipsychotic drugs they're taking, and you need to make sure that they take it, take a certain generation at a certain time

for a certain period in order for you to even just get, you know, the probability of of treatment higher. But this is also determined by their, you know, cultural outlook and how you sort of engage, not just at a pharmacological level, but at a psychopharmacological level and that kind of stuff. Like, it was just basically advice, you know, friends talking and, you know, talk to the family. And then one thing led to another, he, his friend found out about it and he gave, they gave, they gave him my number and, you know, like, okay, you know, maybe, you know, if you don't mind,

can I have a session, I'm suffering from this and that and stuff like this. And so I started, I started just being almost pushed into, into going, because I didn't have cans on like going back to, to therapy or like, back to psychology, actually, you know, my full-time job at that time was, was basically the revolution. but you know things sort of progressed and you know at the end of it there was you know had clients coming in you know like you know taking like a two hour journey or something like this to come and see me and stuff like that it was very it was a very humbling experience for me yeah and so what what what what it was basically when that happened I thought well okay

you know since now it seems like I'm doing this somewhat frequently and like You know, people want to come and engage with me. I have to be faithful to these people and actually know and read up and, like, you know, putting into practice and systematize what I'm doing. When I was in, I worked a little bit in the UK. And there there was like saco-therapeutic modalities basically that I thought were kind of inappropriate for the people that I was seeing in Sudan, for the clients that I was seeing in Sudan.

And, you know, during this sort of moment of, you know, this structure that happened, like, you know, during the revolution and like everything went into schism, right? Like the things that we knew no longer are the things that we know. Like, you know, society has went into like somewhat of a shock, like a new, something new developed. And I thought, okay, if I want to be faced, to my political commitments and faithful to the client, it cannot just be regurgitating the same

sort of therapies that are, that I personally don't agree with and I think there's something missing from them. And so I sort of, you know, through with my clients, we sort of try to come up with, you know, unconsciously or otherwise try to come up with like how do these therapies even work. And we did a lot of things, for example, because I sort of worked with people who are less fortunate and, you know, people who are basically poor people. I wouldn't accept payment from some and I would say, for example, instead of payment, I'm kind of hungry, you know, maybe if you make me something at home, you know, you can, like

these kinds of things. And it started off from these kinds of experiments, like, okay, since, you know, you You know, that person might not have a lot of money. I'm also kind of hungry. Can you buy me, like, I don't know, like a falafi sandwich on the street or something like this? And we're going to have, like, I walk and talk. It started from like this kind of like experimental sort of approach of like, how do we think. And it went all the way down to like understanding the relationship between society and man.

So does society create man or does man create society? And with that, what I found very helpful was critical realism and, you know, generally the philosophy of the philosophy of science approach combined with psychotherapy. And so what psychotherapy is basically it tries every single day we live through contradictions. Every single day, all of us all the time, we sort of, we live through contradictions. What psychotherapy tries to do is try to take these contradictions and create them, like, like super magnifying to them, understand them, and create them into ruptures from which we emerge, sort of, you know, with somewhat autonomies and so on, but we emerge differently.

An example would be, let's say maybe something like usual that maybe a lot of people can relate to or, I don't know, maybe not, maybe not. But for example, growing up, you sort of kind of humanize your parents, right? I mean, when you're younger, you might see your parents as like these sort of towering figures who have like some sort of authority who you learn from, who you sort of get your moral cues from and so on and so forth. But as you grow up, you start to like drift a little bit away from. And then sometimes, you know, you know, those unfortunate of us, we sort of realize that actually,

fuck man, our parents are actually kind of assholes, you know what I mean? Like, I don't really, I don't really, I don't really, you know, want to be that kind of person. And there might be a realization of this that the parents, my parents are, they faltered, their imperfect beings or whatever. One sibling might react to this by saying that the reason why they faltered is because they had like misguided assumptions. about reality and I disagree with them and like, you know, they're to this, to that or whatever. But another sibling might look at the same situation, might be reproduced on the same circumstances and be like, well, the reason why they faltered was because they haven't, what they aspire to, they haven't succeeded.

And so you see this a lot of the time where the sibling, even though they know that their parent is wrong, becomes an even bigger asshole than their parents. you know what I mean? Oh yeah. Like, I'm just trying to just try to make like an example. And so in practice psychotherapy, what you try to do is basically take these moments, right?

Like this, you know, it seems to be like a contradiction of like what's going on. And, you know, like I have these competing thoughts in my head. And like, you know, I see things and I behave in a certain way. And you take this and you expand it. And you sort of zoom into it. and try to not resolve necessarily the contradiction, but sort of highlight it and come to sort of the realization that,

okay, out of this rupture, out of like this contradiction, we create a small rupture, and from this rupture, we emerge from it, and this emergence from something that might be very small, changes your outlook on how you see life and how you engage with society and so on and so forth. And like practice psychotherapy is not unique in this. Perhaps what I'm describing, a lot of people have gone through where you sort of realize something very minor in your life. It might not even be something very, very major.

I don't know, like a weird example would be like, if your partner, for example, instead of has the keys on their pockets to open the door fast, they have it in their bag. And this is just one thing you sort of think about it so much. They're like, ah, shit, no wonder we get into so much arguments is because it's just, like, I'm joking or like, I'm making it a little bit light. But it takes these moments of contradictions of like, you know, these explorations and tries to explode them. And why I got this during the Sudanese revolution, I think, is related to, you know, what I was saying earlier.

the psychotherapeutic modalities that I was familiar with at the time, that I was familiar with and I was practiced at the time, they weren't appropriate for that moment because, well, that rupture that I was talking about is happening in front of our eyes. Like a lot of things are like stop making sense and like, you know, the contradictions are so wild and so acute that, you know, you have to, force yourself to sort of

basically emerge or entrench. Entrench would be like reproducing the same structures but you know continue to continue to reproduce like the entrenchment is like that the example that I gave which is the sibling who sees his parents or an assort's like but they weren't

they didn't aspire fully to be the asshole that they could have been so I'm going to be a bigger asshole than them a kind of thing I'm talking in just and stuff like that but but this is basically how how it came about and what roughly it is. Yeah.

And, you know, it's sort of frustrating because there's so much to go into this. This could be an entire episode of its own. And as we go through this outline, having to skip questions and all of that is like, it's very clear that I would like you to come back on the show for like perhaps a part two or just to explore different aspects of not only this book, but of this complicated and nuanced history because there's just so much here and I'm throwing these huge questions at you. but I find that aspect of the book really fascinating and I highly encourage people to just get the book

because, you know, an interview no matter how in depth can never substitute for actually sitting down and reading this book and reading this history and understanding these things in their full articulation. So I just wanted to kind of, you know, say that up front and just say I really enjoyed this book. It's so good. I have a couple more questions, though, and I kind of want to shift gears a bit here to kind of catch up with the current situation in Sudan. And I want to just give some facts I collected through various sources, Al Jazeera and other sources like that, just to kind of give people the human dimensions of what's happened over the last several years in Sudan. So as of April 26, roughly 11 million people in Sudan are internally displaced. An additional 4 million have fled as refugees into surrounding countries like Chad, Egypt, South Sudan. Nearly 25 million people are affected by famine with 4 million children acutely malnourished,

million children malnourished. An estimated 40,000 people have been killed, according to the World Health Organization, though total deaths are almost certainly much, much higher than that in a similar way that, you know, Gaza's number is stuck at like 70,000 dead, but we know it's well into the six figures at least. In 2025, Sudan accounted for 82% of all global deaths from attacks on health care infrastructure. And of course, one of the more, you know, heartbreaking aspects of this conflict is the sexual violence being used as a weapon with countless, you know, women across Sudan being victims of various forms of sexual violence. And, you know, right now the country kind of remains gripped by this multi-front fighting sort of de facto territorial

splits between the east and the west and south. The SAF and the RSF are the two dominant players. from my understanding, the RSF is backed by, you know, primarily the UAE, while other countries have more sympathy for the SAF, including Russia and Iran, for various reasons of their own. Does that all sound right? And then can you kind of take that and just kind of help us understand the current situation and what the relationship between like Darfur, gold, the Gulf capital, you know, financialization, how these aspects are playing in to the current situation, and what the situation. Basically, I just want people to kind of get a deeper picture of what is happening

presently in Sudan. Yeah, I mean, these are, these are, I mean, like you said, right, just like the other numbers that we sort of, you know, watch and just sort of know intuitively that, you know, this cannot be correct. The numbers cannot be stuck at 70,000. The numbers cannot be stuck at 11 million. The numbers cannot be stuck at these, these various numbers, you know. But these are the reports that we get. I mean, maybe I'd shift gears a little bit and try to contextualize it. Maybe give like an anecdote because these numbers perhaps don't do justice to what's going on in the ground. And I think, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stories that we can tell.

But one of one story that sort of sticks to my mind is, oh man, there's a couple of stories, man. For example, I have a cousin who's staying in Sudan and, you know, he was just walking. of course there's no where he is, there's no electricity there's there's there's only one person that has electricity because of a generator and like you sort of pay him so you can charge your phone

so that maybe you can get a cell reception so that you can call people and stuff like this it's getting better now but but it's it's like you said the infrastructure it affects everything and so one day my cousin sort of goes to the local kiosk, to get whatever food there is, and, you know, to basically to have dinner.

And when he goes there, he sees, he sees this, he sees like a mother holding a child and she has a, you know, another five-year-old child holding her hand and walking. And he's walking there and, you know, he says hi to them and, you know, it gets, gets the things from the kiosk and, you know, he's walking back and the mother's also walking back. And then the child, the five-year-old sort of projectile vomits into the ground. And he's like, oh, shit, man, like, is everything okay? You're okay, do you need help and so on and so forth? They remind, there's no real sort of medical infrastructure to rely on.

Of course, there are bits and bobs here and there, but there's nothing to rely on. and basically it's like, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, this is the second time or the third time and just they're like, oh, okay, like if there's something that you need, just let us know and stuff like this. And then they walked a couple of steps

and she vomited again. But this time she collapsed and didn't get up. This was basically out of a disease that is in anywhere in the world is curable. But because of the infrastructure

that is collapsed. You see people just, you know, these young girls who are just going to buy something from the kiosk with their parents collapse in front of your eyes. I mean, even beyond this, you know, I have another comrade of mine who is one of those comrades that, you know, we were together during the revolution and so we share a lifelong bond. And for him, he, you know, he was in a particular a place in Sudan, he had to leave his home in Khartoum, and Khartoum is the capital of Sudan. And he was in a, went to this other area, which is just like a village, just to escape, like, the wrath of, you know, destruction that's, you know, vistas upon them by the RSF and stuff like this. And, you know, they were living in this village and, you know, basically nothing was happening.

Like, every couple of days, maybe weeks, they'll be like a shipment of full. food that passes by and just gives them like something that they can, you know, survive of. If he, if he wanted to, like, access the internet, he would have to go to the next village onwards, take a bus and go to, like, you know, a hub. And then from there, you know, he would pay money to just use the, I think he had like a Starlink station or something like this where they could use to access the internet. For all in terms of purposes, you know,

they lived beyond the grid and, you know, the infrastructure was terrible. If anything happened, if, you know, any minute, like something terrible, you know, could happen to them, you know, and he was the only, he was the only guy and, you know, his sisters were younger than him and, you know, he was his sisters and him and his mom. And so in his head, he thought, because he's able-bodied and he thought, okay, the situation in front of me is as such. can either continue to stay here and be with my family. So in case anything happens, at least I can pick up a gun or do something, you know,

to vent off the attacks. Or I can basically try to get money so I can travel to the UAE or travel to, you know, Saudi Arabia or any of these Gulf countries. So I can make a little bit of money as, you know, a modern slave working in constructions so I can send back to my family. And, you know, he one day he sort of took this trip to the next village and, you know,

went to the hub and called me. He's like, yo, Muhammad, you know, I'm struggling, you know, I'm trying to think, like how, what would you think I should do? And, you know, you can't imagine being in a situation of war and, like, you know, destruction all around you.

And there's no work to be done. There's nothing. there's this zero, you're just waking up and going back to sleep, basically. And so, you know, I told him, I don't know, man, like, I honestly, I couldn't advise you. You know better than I am in the situation, but of course, you know, whatever help you need, I can help, but, you know, you know best what's going on the situation. And so we thought about it and we talked about it. And, you know, then the day he decided to travel, basically.

You know, it's like, we call it the Tuukkala Allah, which is, you know, just, you know, go to like, you know, basically leave your things to God, you know what I mean? God will provide. And so he left and he went to Port Sudan. In Portugalan, he left to like the Gulf countries

and, you know, he worked as basically like as like just, you know, lived in like a room with like 10 other people in, you know, in one room that the AC is broken and all that kind of stuff so they can provide you know, money and like

you know, all that kind of stuff. Now, a couple of days after he left and he landed and he set himself over, he started working in the UAE, basically he starts getting news that, you know, the village where his family is from has been infiltrated and there's been mass sort of death and rape happening in that village. Now, can you imagine you cannot call your family. They don't have access to the internet. All you do is just hear these random tweets because no one is really on the ground seeing who is this

and like identifying who this person is and so on and so forth. Simultaneously, you have to go to your work literally as a modern slave, but you don't even know if you're going to work so you can provide for your family, a family that you don't know if they're alive or dead or like some sort of calamities, sort of visited them or whatever, what have you. You know, and these, the reason why I say these stories is because we're talking about millions of people.

Can you imagine being in a situation where the people who depend on you, the people that you sort of sacrifice and you sort of become a modern slave force so you can send them up. back you don't even call them you don't even have access to them and all you don't know if they're dead or alive like what what are you doing with your body your your your your your your physical self now we're talking about millions of people millions of people like that that's this this this this war has like devastated and i say this anecdotes just to because sometimes this number sort of, you know, capture certain things and, you know, we capture like a certain, a certain perspective. But there is that, that human perspective that we keep on hearing about Sudan, and

it's really, every story is, it's really heartbreaking. For the second part of your question that you said about, you know, the relationship to Darfur and the gold and so on and so forth, I think, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, people can read the book to get like a more of a better understanding of this. But what I would say is sometimes when we talk about what's going on in Sudan, we sort of look at Sudan and the actors of what's going on in Sudan as basically being moved by foreign interest such as the UAE and such as like Saudi Arabia, such as what's it called, Egypt and so on and so forth.

And there is a big aspect of this. And when I say this, like, you know, we have to, we have to not just criticize, but I think we have to actively attack exactly what the UAE is financing and supporting in Sudan because it's a murderous, the UAE itself as a murderous regime, basically. It's just, it needs to go. Yes. But, you know, we also have to be mindful that, you know, we're not. just sort of, let's say, I don't want to be like

to rude or whatever, but we're not just sort of noble savages who lived in a utopia and just, you know, some people from abroad came in and sort of animated us to like fight one another. You know, that's sort of, you know, I think sometimes while people don't say this explicitly, but sometimes when we talk about what's happening in Sudan, it seems like that's what people are saying. But what I try to tease out in the book or I try to like bring out is a deeper history.

that while the RSF gets money from or is financed by the UAE and so on and so forth, we have to remember that, and this is just, you know, something whether we like it or not, but the UAE has been, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries more generally, have been the hub of accumulation for the capitalist classes in our region of the world, in North Africa or the Middle East or these cases has been the hub of accumulation and Himati is just the latest example of taking advantage of this hub of accumulation.

The greatest capitalist or even, even if you're not even like a great capitalist or whatever, but like the bourgeoisie in Sudan and the elites in Sudan have intimate ties with the UAE with the Gulf countries. The richest people, you know, like I'm sure, like I don't know if there's Sudanese people

who are listening to this. But if you are, and if you're listening to this, just think about, you know, that one uncle that you have was like enriched. And look at, you know, like, what is money come from or stuff? It's so prevalent. And I'm not saying this like, as a, like, you know, as soon as you have money, you go to the UAE kind of like, as in like Andrew Tate kind of situation. But it's a structural history. I mean, I don't know, do you want me to get into that, to the history or should we leave it for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for. for another question. Well, yeah, we might have to even leave it for another day, but I do want you

to come back on and discuss more of that history and those contexts. But one follow-up question I do have with regards to this stuff is, you know, you're 100% right that it's not like you were living in some utopia and these external forces come and destroy everything. These are internal and external contradictions and longstanding historical processes and dynamics. But the RSF, you know, the SAF versus the RSF, neither of these forces are like socialist or liberal by any means. It's kind of like an internecine fight within factions of perhaps the elite internally and externally the bourgeoisie, et cetera. But the RSF in particular seems like the worst of the two evils, if I can put it that way, directly backed by the UAE. Basically, as far

as I understand, the UAE is giving them weapons to commit these atrocities in exchange for access to Sudanese gold reserves in the country, gold mines or whatever the access to gold looks like there. So it's this arms for gold sort of transaction. And then all of the atrocities that I've seen, I'm not to say that the SAF hasn't committed any, but as far as what gets through onto my feet or my research is brutal atrocities, some of the worst things I've ever seen, on par with the genocide in Gaza. And these are coming from the actions of the RSF. So does that all sound right? And does the RSF have any domestic constituency that actually supports it inside a Sudan?

That all sounds right. And I think the RSF, like you said, even the things that we do see in our screens and the things that we don't see. And it's not just that happen in like 2023 onwards, but this is something that they've been committed to this sort of like, I would say like a, and a sort of a racialized ethno-nationalism that was, like we can get to, it's on in the book and stuff like this, but like since the 90s at least,

like they've been like destroying, like killing and pillaging like places in Darfur and, and elsewhere. So like for this, this, this, this, this RSF in particular, we, in particular, we have to be very, very, Like, it's not just critical, it's just a death machine. It's a complete sort of this wave of destruction. Do they have any constituency in Sudan?

Before I get to that question, I think the reason why, like, I'm glad that you brought this point, the reason why I emphasize that, you know, the circus of accumulation and, like, you know, what's happened, like this is not just, the circus accumulation, like the relationship between, the deadly relationship between the UAE and Sudan isn't just with Himati or like with the RSF is because learning from Abd al-Qalik Mahjub, the immediate what's happening in front of us, it's important to focus on

if we want to build a better Sudan going forward, it wasn't like before 20, 23 was all hunkedory and lovely and nice, but we need to know how it led to that. That's why I sort of complicated a little bit. but for if there's a constituency for the RSF in Sudan I think you know you know like there is a constituency it's not a strong constituency it's not a you know it's not particularly perhaps it's not a particularly it may be a strong but not a big one and the reason why they have a constituency is because their project is not just destruction or so on for

destruction's sake but it's also a project of you know racialization, the destruction of, you know, people in Darfur, destruction of people in the West of Sudan and so on and so forth. And for that, they have, they had support in the previous, in the dictatorship, and they have support somewhat on the ground. Not too much, but they do have support. Like, we wouldn't be, you know, it's not, it wouldn't be just to say that they don't have support as much as we wish, but, but they do have a small support, but nothing,

you know, significantly massive. What are the ethnic or racial divisions that the RSF is playing on and targeting here? What exactly are those divisions? So just to be quite concise, but when the dictatorship came in, it's this 30-year dictatorship in Sudan, like I said in the beginning of this episode, is that the quote-unquote, the South question in Sudan was always posed. Now, when they came in, you know, at the time there was a person called John Geren, who was sort of mounting a rebellion against the north of Sudan quite successfully.

And when the dictatorship came in, they wanted to like resolve this rebellious problem. And to do this, they sort of tried to, well, they didn't try, but they intensified the racialization of South Sudanese. You know what I mean? like they're not, they're, they're different than us, they're sort of, we're Arabs, they're African, you know, they're not, you know, they're Christians or pagans and or Muslims and so on and so forth. There were all this rhetoric going on in the air to increase the racialization, and on top of that, you know, there was forced conscriptions and all to fight the South, Sudanese. The reason why I mentioned South Sudanese is because it's intimately linked to West Sudan.

Now, during the 90s, there were also like sort of flare-ups of like rebellions from West Sudan. But more importantly, even if there wasn't like significant rebellions from West Sudan, the dictatorship could not handle at another front, you know, another rebellion. It just couldn't handle this. Because it was already unpopular from the forced conscriptions. it was exhausting. It's like powers and people were being fed up by this, you know, this war against the South and so on and so forth.

And so in order for them to sort of discipline or like, you know, suppress anything coming out of Sudan and also to continue to exploit the West Sudanese who are necessary for the reproduction of like the capital Khartoum and other capitals, because most investically, labor and most sort of reproductive labor is done by the Western Asian Sudan and so on and so forth. So they needed like a pool of basically dispossessed people and simultaneously they didn't want any rebellions.

So they intensified racialization in that part of Sudan. One of the ways in which they did was like finance the most sort of nativist, sort of racist, supremacist elements of this. and this happened to be sort of the the RSF, just to, and RSA and other groups, like, for example, the Arab gathering and so and so forth, but these groups were, you know, they were present there and they got a lot of funding

and this is how they sort of came about or developed. I see. Yeah. And of course, there's no, you know, there's no substitution for reading this book itself and continuing, I really hope that, you know, that listeners will take this and read the book and then continue to develop their deep political understanding of Sudanese history and the current situation in Sudan because it just does not get the attention

globally that it deserves. And I think it is our responsibility really as anti-imperialists and as human beings in the imperial core to understand this ourselves and then weave this into our own political education so that we can inform others on it. And you, Muhammad, have done precisely that today and have helped me. And I know my audience can deepen our understanding of this situation and I would truly love to have you back on again to go even deeper on the history, on practice of psychotherapy, on the current situation, especially as it continues to unfold. You've been so generous with your time and knowledge and I really appreciate it. But as a final question, I actually do want to ask this as well.

Like, when somebody reads your book and puts it down after reading the last page, what do you hope people take away from your book? What do you hope do you achieve with this book for anybody that, that, that, picks it up and reads it. First of all, I mean, thank you for having me on. I mean, this really, really, like I said that, like before the thing, I listened to revolutionary Rev. Left Radio. It's surreal to be here.

So thank you for giving the opportunity. And I hope I do come out and we can talk more about in detail about the other things. What I hope that people will pick up from this book is, I think what can we learn from the lessons of Sudan? I mean, I've learned a couple of things that I'm putting into. practice where I am today. I'm in Germany today. But one of the things is that, you know, hopefully, hopefully we need to have revolutionary aspirations. We are at a moment where things are way too critical for us to be acquiescent. The people who are being radicalized, whether it's by

revolutions in, you know, the Arab Spring or the genocide or the accelerated genocide in Gaza and in Palestine, whether it's, you know, the, the, the catacly, like the death cold that's, that's in America right now and, you know, across the Europe with the programs and stuff like like this. What I want to, and even what I try to do with the anecdotes that I, today is, man, we have each other and really, we need to be in sort of radical, we need to have radical aspirations, radical aspirations we cannot

because I think a lot of times the previous left or you know like for some time there's elements of the left who are like yeah we need to sort of like be with the liberals

and like anyone who's well-meaning so that we can have like a broad church approach from my understanding or from my experience in the revolution the fact that we had radical aspirations

attracted made people fall in love with a revolutionary prospects We don't build where, for example, where people are right now, because this I think, honestly, is, in my opinion, this is the easy way to go. But we build to the ground and we make people fall in love with the radical aspirations that we have. And I hope this is something that people take away. You know, we don't need the liberals, man.

We need our radical aspirations. Absolutely. And it does. And cultures of resistance. Sorry. Absolutely. No, no, 100%. You're incredibly correct and people are done with the liberal status quo.

They're done with the bullshit. We cannot liquidate ourselves into some united front with liberals writ large. We have to stake out our vision for a genuinely liberated world. And as internationalists, I think that's a crucial aspect because whatever country that you're in listening to this right now, the fate of that country and any revolutionary movement within it is deeply and inexorably tied to the fate of. Palestine, to the fate of Sudan, to the fate of Cuba and Venezuela. And if we do not internationalize our struggle, if we do not build those connections, first the understandings, the political

education of these countries and these societies histories and their struggles currently, and then the actual material connections, organizational connections, we will ultimately, you know, be isolated and be all the weaker for it. And so I really appreciate you, Muhammad, putting this book out and coming on the show and discussing it with us. I'd love to have you back on to talk more about Sudan. I'd also love to have you back on and talk about Germany, because I know you're politically active in Germany, and I have lots of questions and interests and how, you know, that society is working through the sort of global turmoil that all societies in different ways are facing up to right now. So the book, of course, is politically unconscious,

the psychic aftermath of the Sudanese revolution put out by our friends and comrades at Iskra books. Muhammad, it's been a real pleasure in an honor. and I can't wait to speak with you again, my friend. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And yeah, man, likewise, brother, like, let's be in community and let's create something wonderful. Thank you for having me on.

And a big shout out to our comrades in Escob, man. Thank you guys for everything. And, yeah, thank you for this conversation today.