IB: Iran, Conferences, and More [Patreon Early Access]

Speaker 1: You remember Din-Din-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Hakimaki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hakimaki, joined as usual, but for the first time in a while, by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. Nice to see you again. Great to see you, Henry. It's good to be with you. Absolutely. So today we have a Patreon early access episode. It's going to be a combination of some current events that are happening because as listeners will remember, we recently had our revolutionary guerrilla menace annual live stream discussion of current events. But given the fact that that event took place yesterday, I'm pretty sure it was the same day that Nicolas Maduro was kidnapped. It might have been one or two days after at this point. I forget if it was the same day or not. The focus was on that issue, and we didn't really talk about the rest of what's happening in the world as much. So we'll take a couple of things that we'll want to chat about in current events. But before we get to that, I know you and I have both been doing a lot of very interesting things recently, conferences, writings, et cetera, et cetera. And we want to let the listeners know what some of the things are that we have been doing and kind of the work, basically the work that we've been doing off of the show that they might be interested in. So why don't I just open up the floor, Adnan, to, I don't know, choose something that you've done recently that you want to share with the listeners?

Adnan Hussain: Well, I think it would be apropos, given what we probably will be discussing to mention that While I was in the Middle East over December in Istanbul for lectures I was giving and a conference in Cairo, I took a week to join a friend of mine, David Yagoubian, who teaches modern Middle Eastern and specifically Iranian history at Cal State San Bernardino and who I knew from graduate school when we were both PhD students in the history department at UC Berkeley back in the 1990s. to join him for a week-long visit in Tehran. He was going, he told me about it ahead of time. I had never been, you know, despite the fact that I've studied, you know, medieval Persianate, you know, world history and studied Persian, but never really had a chance to Be immersed in either Iran or really any Persian language speaking country because of U.S. wars of like, you know, civil strife and conflict taking place all over and especially because Iran has been. Under sanctions, everybody go check out the episode we did as part of the Sanctions as War series here on Guerrilla History. And just the sense that like, oh, with a U.S. passport, it's very difficult. You can only go under very special circumstances. And you can't just go sort of just in an unofficial sort of way. You have to actually... be registered and so on. Plus, of course, there are consequences for traveling potentially back in the US with it. So recently things had changed and I managed to have access to a different passport with a country that while it may not always have the best relations with Iran as a you know, NATO US, uh, ally, but, you know, isn't actively at war basically with, to be able to travel. And so I decided to go ahead and join him and had a fascinating week in Tehran. Um, visiting, you know, the former U.S. embassy that has become a museum on U.S. espionage and going to Palestine Square and seeing the murals that change on these two buildings and are updated regularly, you know, related to what's happening. And, you know, to also, you know, visit Inqilab Square, which is where people have been paying attention recently. All the big Public demonstrations tend to take place. And of course, there were at least a million, two million, maybe more recently on January 12th. I think it was earlier this month, a massive demonstration against imperial interference taking place. which we're going to talk about, I'm sure. So it was just a really fascinating week because it was so different, actually, even than I thought it would be as somebody who, of course, doesn't buy into the U.S. propaganda and the imperialist kind of disinformation campaigns. But even I just really, you know, tend to think of Iran contemporaneously as an issue that I'm kind of thinking about and talking about and, you know, make assumptions about like, you know, they've had the Islamic Republic for a while and surely it must be, you know, full of like religious kind of culture everywhere and all of that. And actually it wasn't. I thought, you know, if I didn't know better, I would think like I could be Well, it's not like there is a real alternate universe, but just any sort of global south major capital city, it felt like that. Yes, you saw some mosques, but actually you didn't really hear the azan everywhere, the call to prayer everywhere. It was very different in some ways from Cairo and Istanbul, where it was very much part of the kind of public culture, even though they're not, you know, known, you know, as being, you know, the Islamic Republic of Iran. I mean, I saw no mullahs in the street one time. I saw somebody with a turban and the robes who was out in public. You know, it just, it sits so much more lightly. It's like woven in the fabric of society, but it wasn't like, what you would imagine is that, you know, it's a theocratic regime. And so everywhere you're confronted by, you know, the power and the influence of a ruling class that is a clerical elite and the impression that people have all the time that there must be, you know, kind of because of the sense of repression. And of course, even in places that are not sort of described as repressive governments, authoritarian, et cetera, you see a lot of police around. I saw almost no police anywhere when I was in Tehran. I was like, this is just not what I would expect, even as somebody who's an anti-imperialist encounter, kind of countering the hegemonic kind of discourses. It really was surprising how much it felt like... It could be like if they spoke Spanish there, I would have thought, hey, we could be in like Mexico City, one of these big third world cities with infrastructure, but, you know, kind of a little taxed by the fact that it's a huge city and it's a slightly poorer society, you know, so things aren't exactly the way you would expect in Western Europe or the US. But, you know, it's a modern city. And that's the point is actually, interestingly, Tehran is really a pretty recent city. If you think of like how old and how ancient Tehran The culture of like Iran and its history is, you know, thousands of years, right? Tehran is like a modern 19th century kind of capital city that was moved. They moved the capital from Tabriz. Isfahan had been a kind of important kind of city before in the earlier past. And this is something that was really a product of a more modern nation state formation under the Qajars and subsequently. So it didn't have that kind of feel. I was surprised by that. and we could talk about so many things about what it was like there. That's different than the impressions. And then the propaganda that has ramped up recently, but that was something that was really kind of important, um, for me to visit for the first time. And I would love to go back. I just think it's, and I'd love to visit some of the more historic cities like Isfahan, Tabriz and, and, uh, Shiraz and so on to get a better sense of it. But, um, uh, That, I think, is apropos to some of the things that are going on right now and since earlier. After five days after we left, really, on the 23rd is really when the currency manipulation started taking place to really dramatically... depreciate the Iranian rial. It had been depreciating since March as a result of U.S. sanctions and Treasury Department policy, but it was precipitous, very dramatic on the 28th, 29th through appears currency manipulation, organized currency depreciation by sell-offs and and so on through the Dubai kind of exchanges. And that's what precipitated the first economic strikes of Bazaari merchants, merchants and shopkeepers in the central bazaar, who, of course, had a historic role in being one of the chief constituencies that brought down the Shah's regime in the Iranian revolution. in 78, 79, when they went out on strike. And so they started shuttering their businesses to protest the currency, wild currency depreciation that had just taken place to ask for some remedies and so on. And of course, as we know, those economic grievances and protests around it spread to other cities and so on. But after a couple of days already started being highlighted hijacked by you know other forces we can talk about that but what's so interesting is that this was we were there just days before and to be honest um while the economic situation was clearly difficult and the devaluation of the currency was a big big problem um the society was really kind of still functioning. There were economic, there were some protests that we heard about among oil workers and South parse, uh, the South parse oil, um, you know, company that had been, you know, I think as a government company, but maybe quasi, um, privatized. And I talked with a wonderful, uh, scholar, um, who's there now, um, who has been involved with some of the communications for the striking workers and the protests and how significant and important it had been to them in the couple of months campaign that they'd been doing that culminated in 5,000 workers, one of the largest strikes in the history of Iran, and certainly in modern and contemporary Iran early in December, how careful they had been to kind of direct and frame their demands and their protest and their strike in such a way to avoid it being co-optable by external forces, their attempts to undermine it. And use any kind of social protests for those purposes. So we knew that there were protests and there were economic kind of concerns and grievances and that workers were organizing, but that they also did not necessarily want to sow chaos to bring down the regime, but they wanted remedies for that. life under sanctions. And as much as we can talk about corruption, mismanagement, and all that, those are actually functions and features, as we know from our series, of sanctions that are meant to actually create opportunities for to corrupt the economy, to benefit and create and widen class differences so that the population will suffer and be receptive to these kind of regime change operations and discontent. But you wouldn't have thought that it was about to break out given the way society was working because They actually accommodate and tolerate quite a bit of, you know, and are responsive. That's the big point that I would make subsequently is that it's clear that it is more responsive as a government than many others. Like, you know, maybe even like, say, the United States and Western governments where we've seen since the. studies from the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s that have looked at patterns of, you know, public opinion and actual public policy and legislation that really is not responsive at all, you know, to the concerns of actual working people, the majority of the population, but to elite interests in these so-called democracies. But immediately after these kind of protests, there were economic adjustments. They replaced some of the ministry figures. They changed the way the subsidies would be administered and organized so that it would be more direct to consumers rather than middle agents where there could be manipulation and corruption and so on of those self-enrichment schemes and trying to kind of tamp down the black market. But of course, the tools are limited because they're under extreme maximum pressure sanctions. But it showed that the government is willing to make shifts and changes just as they did after a woman life freedom. When I was there, I saw a You know, like, I don't think I was always in the most conservative type of neighborhoods. I did go visit the tomb of Imam Khomeini. And yes, in this kind of shrine, everybody is wearing a headscarf and so on. But out on the street in kind of major thoroughfares of downtown Tehran, some of these other mixed sort of kind of normal middle class type neighborhoods, it was about like... you know, 50-50 if you wore a hijab or not. And nobody was making an issue of it. There was no evidence of either social pressure or political pressure by agents of enforcing it. They've given up on that because they could see it's just not popular with the people. And so you have a kind of order that is responsive in some requests, in some respects, to people's concerns and demands. Yeah.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, and there's a lot of things that I could and want to say on this issue. But I know that also we have an episode that hopefully will be coming out fairly soon with Max Eil about Iran. He has a really interesting article, and I'm going to recommend the listeners check it out now in advance of us potentially having Max on. I just talked with Max today, and he's up to come on the show. I just don't know if we'll get this particular article published. recorded in the near future with him. But we do have plans with him to do other things as well. But he has an article that came out in Middle East Critique. And ironically, it came out about a month before these protests that you're talking about and this major currency devaluation kicked off on Iran. And specifically the way that Iran is thought about in Western left circles. And there's this question of, well, how do we view Iran? Iran is not a progressive state. Iran is not a socialist state by any means, even if we look... So Iran is an anti-imperialist state, but it's not a progressive state. It's not a socialist state. The economic system of Iran, particularly in the last couple of decades as the sanctions have... only increased on Iran. There's been a massive neoliberalization of the economic system of Iran inside of the framework of the Islamic Republic. Like if you look at the domestic economic system, it has been extremely neoliberalized. And as a result, because of this neoliberalization, it's In some ways, it has made dealing with crushing sanctions easier, but it has also planted the seeds for a lot of the flashpoints that you see in the Iranian economy now when these sorts of issues do arise, these external pressures. They push on various sectors more acutely than others, and that is what causes the flashpoints. And so Max has this really terrific article that was before these most recent events, but it very much is apropos of the discussions that have happened afterwards within the Western left. Like, oh yeah, we don't want military intervention in Iran, but Iran is not a progressive country. It's a brutal autocracy, a theocratic autocracy. We have to stand up with women. We have to stand up with XYZ. We don't want to support the Islamic Republic. Of course, we support the people of Iran, but... We don't want the US to intervene in Iran, but we also don't want to put any sort of support for the system that the Islamic Republic has. And, you know, one sees the impulse for that if you're in the West. But when the primary contradiction is imperialism, it just does change the calculus quite a bit. And unfortunately, Western leftists and particularly those in the United States when they're looking at Iran, they completely disregard the question of imperialism. Or if they don't completely disregard it, it goes very, very far onto the back burner. And that causes there to be a lot of very poor analysis that's done by people that otherwise you would expect should do better and should know better. But their analysis of Iran is clouded by this imperial lens through which they're looking, despite being members of the so-called left. And so I'm hoping that we have that conversation with Max later. soon, where I can rant much more about that particular component of things along with him. But additionally, I just wanted to make a quick mention of one other thing that you had mentioned, I guess two other things that you mentioned before I get off the topic and move to, I guess we'll kind of ping pong between the two of us and what we're doing until we decide to turn towards current events for the end of the conversation. But two other things that you mentioned. that I think are quite interesting is that when you're looking at the protests that have been going on in Iran, I'm very happy that you mentioned that there was an actual economic basis for the grievances that precipitated the protests early on. but that those protests were co-opted. And this is a typical imperialist strategy. You cannot foster large-scale protests in a country in which there are not legitimate grievances. You have to take advantage of legitimate grievances and co-opt them in order to undermine your enemies. And that's what imperialists... Again, particularly the United States has been experts at for the last 60, 70, 80 years is finding these spots in which they can push on the society. in which they can cause some legitimate grievances amongst the citizenry, but then in some cases, infiltrate these movements in some cases, uh, bring in provocateurs in some cases, uh, There's a lot of different methods. I don't want to go through all of the different ways that it's possible to utilize existing protests to advance imperial strategy, but that is the imperial strategy is to cause discontent. wait for discontent to come to a stage at which there will be some organic movement in the populace, which also acts as cover for the imperialist plan, and then utilize that in some way. And in the case of Iran, this is exactly what we see. There were economic hardships. There was a dramatic economic downturn, currency devaluation that happened extremely dramatically that caused there to be protests in the country. That is a very understandable reaction to to everyday economic issues amongst people. It's what happens after that that has to be looked at as well. And unfortunately, there seems to be this dichotomy where the imperialists only look at the legitimate grievances and say, well, look, there were legitimate grievances. Therefore, all of the protests were grassroots, legitimate, rooted in economic realities, rooted in opposition to the political system. And therefore, we need to support these protests because they're completely legitimate legitimate grassroots organic things because there was these organic roots to it. We also have people who will kind of skip the analysis of the economic reality. that was underpinning the protests in the early phases and jump right to, well, the imperialists have completely co-opted these protest movements. They've brought in all sorts of people into these protests that aren't grassroots. They're paying protesters. They're doing X, Y, Z. And is that true? Yes. But without understanding both sides of that, where you understand that there was a legitimate reason why these protests began, and the protests were inflamed intentionally by the imperialists, and that the economic grievances in part, not entirely, but in large part, were caused by imperialist strategy as well, then you can begin to have an understanding of what happened and understand, well, again... Are the protests completely illegitimate? No. Is there no grievances? No. Are there provocateurs? Are there paid protesters by the imperialists? Yes. But we have to understand the total situation in order to make a realistic and sober analysis of the situation in Iran, as well as try to formulate what should be done and how this should be viewed. That was the second point that you raised, which I wanted to mention. And the third was about the police. Now, this is a very funny. I'll be a bit more flippant on this one. You mentioned that you see very few police. It's the same here in Russia. I know everybody thinks that Russia is like a hardcore totalitarian police state where you walk down the street and you see 27 police officers before you get to the grocery store. You very rarely see police officers here. You'll see traffic police pretty frequently in their traffic police cars, which are like denoted traffic police on the car. You see them all over the place. And partially because there's a lot of really crazy drivers around where I am. But again, that's a somewhat flippant point. Like there is a reason for those traffic police around here. But in any case. Walking down the streets, whether you're in a small town like where I am now, or whether you're in a big city like Kazan where I lived previously, you very rarely see police officers. In Kazan, pretty much the only place where you would see them on a relatively consistent basis is the main tourist street in the city. And that's about it. Other than that, it's just traffic cops. In this town where I am now, I don't know. I can't think of the last time that I saw a police officer walking down a street here, except for when the head of the republic was visiting the town. And, you know, they had like an additional security presence in the center of the town. Other than that. I really cannot remember the last time I saw a cop walking around patrolling. It's only traffic cops that I've seen. And the village where, you know, we spend some time as well. We've got a place in the village here. I've never seen a cop there, traffic cop or otherwise. I mean, it's a village of 500 people, but I've never seen a cop even driving through the village, which has a road that connects it to the village. regional center, which is not a big town either. It only has about 7,000 people in the regional center there. But there you can see cops driving around. Never saw one walking in the regional center either. But in the village, I've never even seen one driving. Meanwhile, and as you said, in Iran, you don't see that many cops either. On the other hand, when I lived in Germany, which was from 2017 to 2020, and then again a little bit in 2021, I was in Bonn, Hamburg, and Rostock. Rostock, there was not a huge amount of police officers in. Hamburg was crawling with police officers, absolutely crawling with them. When I would go to the laboratory that I was working in from the apartment, it wasn't even a full apartment I was renting. I was renting a bedroom. The walk to the laboratory that I was working in was about 15 minutes. And I would say that if you had to count the average number of police officers you would see on that 15-minute walk to the laboratory, it would have been about four or five. You wouldn't see less than four or five on just about any day. They would patrol in pairs, in threes. There would be a couple of groups that you would see every few minutes. It was really remarkable. And that was 2017 to 2020. What we've seen in Germany more recently, and I talk with some comrades in Germany, is that there has been a large increase in the police presence in terms of number in the militarization of the police and also the impunity of the police to act as they wish to. And not to mention that there is also now a criminalization of left wing and radical speech, which was not as present in 2017 to 2020. I mean, you couldn't speak totally freely, but you could say quite a bit in that time. And, you know, the police officers would look at you and stand next to you, but they wouldn't do something to you. Now, if you say the words and I'm going to say the words from the river to the sea, you get arrested in Germany. It's against the law to say that in public right now. It's against the law to say that Switzerland right now, you know, the police state, Switzerland, just what everybody imagines when they think of police states. You can't say the words from the river to the sea within earshot of a police officer without them arresting you.

Adnan Hussain: You don't have some pretty brutal about like very brutal of like protesters. You know, it's not just like, OK, I'm sorry, we're going to have to arrest you. It's like violent. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting issue about.

Henry Hakimaki: We could talk about the United States and the United Kingdom as well. But I think that those are very obvious examples that the listeners of the show are already very familiar with. But, you know, maybe you're not thinking as much about places again, Western Europe, Germany, Switzerland. You know, the police presence in these places. When I was in France, I was in France in 2014. So a long time ago at this point. But even in 2014, the police presence there was an order of magnitude higher than what I've ever seen here in Russia, in anywhere that I was in Russia, even when I was visiting Moscow, St. Petersburg. You know, it's interesting that these are considered police states, but, you know, those are free Western democracies.

Adnan Hussain: A question about Hamburg, for example. Yeah. How much do you think I mean, obviously, we know in the United States as a kind of racial apartheid settler colonial state, you know, with this formerly enslaved population that, you know, was the birth of certain kinds of and forms of policing, you know, to maintain democracy. You know, the racial segregation, the apartheid, that areas of the segregated South were like occupied territories. The ghetto became, you know, it's the reason why the Black Panthers talked about the ghetto as a colony. you know, and so on. So obviously, there is that kind of history and background to it. And we look at see, you know, Minneapolis, where the whole, yes, you know, you know, Black Lives Matter protests, and the George Floyd protests were so important. And now, you know, it's like, there's an army of occupation of these ICE You know, there's three thousand to five thousand of these officers running around the streets, et cetera, that that like, you know, is something that we can understand the history and the reasons why that might be important in the American political structure. But, you know, what I wonder about is like places like Hamburg, Germany. Do they have a very large immigrant, kind of recent Germans, kind of workers, gastarbeiter, and then subsequent immigration and Syrian? It's one of the places I would imagine where there's a large concentration of people who are foreign born, are not like German national citizens by heritage, maybe only in the last generation or two. And I wonder if that's one reason why there is sort of heavy policing that might be responding to kind of monitoring, controlling these populations. Yeah.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, I have some thoughts on that. So Hamburg definitely had a much larger police presence, even, I mean, considering Hamburg has a much, much larger population than Rostock or Bonn, the other two places where I lived. But of course, I did visit other big cities like Köln and Dusseldorf, which were right next to Bonn, where I was studying. Yeah. But, you know, even if you take that into account, the the frequency at which you would see police officers versus just ordinary people was way higher in Hamburg. And there's a few reasons for that, I think. Now, I'm not going to claim to be an expert on these issues, but just based off of my observations. So, one, I do know that Hamburg has a very large immigrant or recent immigrant population. I saw a statistic within the last week or so, actually, that said that if you look at people who are under the age of 21 in Hamburg, I want to say something like 55% of them are not of ethnic German heritage. So if you're looking at the ages of 21 and under, Again, with quotations here, because Germany is a fairly recent construction as well, in terms of what is a Germany, what is a German state. But this idea of ethnic Germans, they're a minority in Hamburg, as well as many other parts of the country.

Adnan Hussain: In that demographic.

Henry Hakimaki: In that demographic. And of course, as time goes on, that demographic then ages up and we're seeing the trends that particularly the younger ages, that number is even higher. So there is definitely a A feeling of disconcern amongst more German nationalist figures in the country and as well as the populace, people that believe in a German ethnic identity. There is disconcern around that issue. I saw it while I was there and it has gone up. That percentage has gone up since the time where I was there. But even in the time that I was there, The Turkish and Syrian population in particular were extremely high in the time where I was there. There was a massive Turkish diaspora, which had made itself kind of permanent and integrated into the city at that point. And the Syrians were much more recent than most of the Turks, but... Even at the medical college, a lot of the doctoral students or medical students at the college were Syrian, like Syrian nationals, not like Syrian ethnic German nationals, but they were Syrian nationals who were living and studying in Hamburg. And it was the same, actually, when I was in Rostock. There was a lot of Syrian people at the medical college there. So that's one aspect of it. There is another aspect, which... I mean, I'm sure that there's a lot of other components that I haven't thought about. But one that definitely also strikes me is that the place where I was in in Hamburg specifically had the highest police presence of anywhere that I had seen in Hamburg, any district of the city. And that was St. Pauli. This is the district of the city that I was living in. There's a couple of reasons for that. Well, it's also the region. I didn't choose it by chance. That was where the laboratory was. There's a couple of reasons why there would be a larger police presence there. Some of the ones that would be more surface level obvious to people is that the Raper Bond is in Sao Paulo. It's one of the largest red light districts in all of Europe. It's a legalized part of the city's fabric, and it's very integrated in that district of the city. And so naturally, there's going to be a large police presence around it because those things are extremely heavily regulated. But then also... having districts of the city like that also invites a lot of other crime into the area. So when you see, unless you have a very high police presence around red light districts, the crime rate in general goes up. So that's kind of the surface level thing that people would look at. But the other thing that I think, is perhaps not as well talked about is the fact that St. Pauli was the radical part of the city. I know that people think of the football club, St. Pauli, and think of it as kind of the hipster radical club. And I have a lot of criticisms of the football club. I mean, not only the fact that they're openly pro-Israel, but anyway, they are definitely a hipster radical club. But St. Pauli as a district was always the most radical district. And the reason for that is because that was where the dock workers worked and lived. It was where the stevedores were located. And the... stevedore unions that were present in germany and of course you know the unions were of course destroyed several times over history that was always the most radical union uh and even after even in the periods where the unions themselves were kind of dismantled those were the most radical workers in the country were the dock workers were the stevedores and they were working and living in san paul now when you have radical unions organizations of workers. And then even when it's not formal organizations, but just agglomerations of radical workers, what do you always see? The state brings in the police because you cannot have these areas where you have a high level of radicalism as well as worker solidarity. And so even though the radicalism of San Paolo and the radicalism of the dock workers in general, because a lot of that has been automated at this point, uh, is much lower today than it was historically. That district still is, uh, it still has some of that present in it. It's not like a radical hotbed as it was decades ago, but there still is aspects of that that you can actually see and feel while you're in that district. And so that district in particular also has that high level of policing, in my view, because of the radical workers that had been there historically. And the fact that anytime you have an agglomeration of radical workers, the state is going to ensure that they have a heavy presence of armed police in those areas and i mean the police were armed they were walking around with machine guns i know the idea of german police is you know probably one that's similar to british police where they have a billy club and nothing else but no they were walking around with machine guns on the streets you know i'd pass by four or five of them on my way to work every day it was it was wild

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, yeah, that is amazing. Yeah, yeah. So it's definitely a contrast because it goes against the expectations of the image that we have of what are these free democratic liberal societies versus authoritarian repressive ones and you find that the actual social reality can be experienced very differently. I mean, if you're an immigrant or a radical dock worker, as you're saying, or something, and you have to go through a gauntlet of police just to get around and all of that, you definitely feel a heavier hand of surveillance, monitoring, potential repression than you do if you're you know, a kind of middle class person in a pretty well-off district of Tehran. You know, he's just like, there's no, there's, you don't really encounter any of, any of that kind of the state. It seems to rest rather lightly on many aspects of society. So that's, that's kind of interesting. On the Iran thing, just before we get into hearing more about the things you've been working on, and maybe I'll talk a little bit about the conferences that I alluded to.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, I'll talk about a couple of conferences, too, in a little bit.

Adnan Hussain: It's just that I think it's an interesting topic to think about what kind of a... state and economy, you know, Iran is and actually how it has changed since the revolution, you know, like that will be interesting. And maybe it would be, I don't know, either separately or on together is another great scholar, Nina Farnia, who's. Oh, yeah. She's been on the show before. Show. Yeah. Here we did a wonderful discussion yesterday. And actually, we should have her on when her book comes out in a month or two, in a couple months. Yes, already planned to. Oh, wonderful. Great. But she said Iran is not a capitalist country. Like, okay, we've been observing these neoliberal kind of – Maneuvers, we'll say maneuvers, I think is a great word for it. These maneuvers that, of course, have weakened the society in various ways. But, you know, there's like that has definitely been progressively weakening, you know, as like the reformists who really take that kind of perspective forward. you know, we're trained actually in the West, like we're University of Chicago trained. And then they came and they're part of like the Islamic Republic of Iran. And they keep, they were reproducing kind of ideas from the West, basically that kind of undermine the fabric of society. So there is that trend, but some other respects, especially in its roots, it, you know, might say, you know, one might be able to say that it, that it is not a, you know, kind of Western style capitalist neoliberal society. There's a lot of like state, you know, uh, uh, supports and there's a whole kind of welfare state type ethic that is also very powerful and strong and rooted in these kinds of social and religious values as well. So it would be interesting to hear like, you know, the tensions around that, because I think, uh, You know, it obviously is not a socialist society in the ways that we're used to seeing, you know, and that whatever it had as a core seems to be under attack as a result of pressure of sanctions and internal neoliberal kind of reformist tendencies and the maneuvers they've put in place. So that would be kind of very interesting. But I think also it's just you alluded very briefly to the kind of conditions, whatever of the, we might say about the mismanagement and, you know, kind of corruption or inefficiencies or, you know, of like the way in which the government manages like social policy and economic policy of the country. We do know, though, that even within the constraints of the terrible maximum pressure sanctions, there was actually specific since March a plan to depreciate the in this kind of multi full spectrum kind of hybrid type war is to do. even more work economically by manipulating the currency. And as a result, you know, went from early, late spring, early summer, 850,000 rial to the U.S. dollar to when I was visiting in December. you know, 1.25, you know, 1,250,000, you know, so that's a big change over some months. And then on top of it, there was, you know, very targeted, precipitating, provocative kind of depreciation and devaluation that took place that made it go from 1, you know, 1,250,000 to 1 uh, like four or five, you know, one, 1,400,000, 450,000 in a, like a day or two, you know, like to have that kind of, that's like on top of progressive depreciation where the real is like falling against the dollar. And then suddenly a crash, you know, like that.

Henry Hakimaki: Oh, I know. I know all about what that's like.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah. I remember what that was like. In Russia, exactly.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, we had a very similar thing where, of course, after the special military operation started, the ruble fell really dramatically. And then it came back most of the way. And then it slowly got weaker, weaker, weaker, weaker, weaker until it was about, you know, 50% weaker. Wow. And then there was something that happened where over the course of the next few days, the bottom dropped out and it dropped another 50% on top of that. And so it went from being, as my memory recalls, something like 65 rubles to dollar before the situation started. Then it dropped to about 90 something for a while. And then all of a sudden. And this is, of course, unlucky for me right at the time that we were getting married. So, you know, I had terrible conversion rates trying to carry rubles in my pockets to go to Georgia to convert them into Georgian lorry to get married. It dropped to 153. to the dollar. So it went from 60-something, I want to say maybe 66 or 67 before the situation started. And then it was stagnant in the 80s or 90s for a while. And then it dropped to 150-something. That was tough. And there was a lot of very strange things that were being priced in crazy ways. And then... It has been on the upswing since then. So now I just saw in the news today, the ruble is stronger than 75 to the dollar for the first time since 2023. So, you know, back almost where we started. But yeah, I definitely know exactly what you mean when the bottom drops out on the currency.

Adnan Hussain: It is a thought. I think the problem for people in Iran is that it's been 30 or 40 years of depreciation and revaluing and producing new bills and all of that.

Henry Hakimaki: It was the same here, though, because, you know, Adnan, if you look before 2014, which I wasn't living here at the time, but if you look before 2014... I know the ruble rate was somewhere in the ballpark. I could be off by a little bit, but I want to say that it was in the ballpark of 24 or 26 rubles per dollar. And then after 2014, there was a huge depreciation from 24 or 26 rubles per dollar to between 50 and 60. Mm-hmm. It dropped a little bit lower than that for a time and then came back and kind of stabilized 50 to 60. So there had already been a halving of the value of the ruble between 2014 and the time that I moved here, which was 2021. And then, as I said, when I moved here, it was upper 60s, lower 70s, kind of fluctuated between that, you know, 65, 71, 67. Yeah. And then we had that depreciation on top of that. So, you know, if you compare it to like 2013, when it was 22 to a dollar to, I guess, middle of 20, when did we get married? Middle of 2022. it went down to like 153 to the dollar. So, you know, that's a five times depreciation. No, that's more than that. What is that? Seven times, eight times depreciation, uh, over that time. And it's come back since then, but that's a huge change.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, that is a huge change. That is a huge change. But yes, at any rate, wow. I mean, a little lesson in currency. And, you know, like, I mean, the thing is to note that this has been a technique, you know, used and the fact that the U.S. dollar... being the reserve currency and, you know, making it difficult for all these exchanges, they can very easily target, you know, a particular foreign currency. And we've seen the private interests have done that, of course, you know, George Soros and, And this guy, Scott Besson, who is the Treasury Secretary, who's been made the Treasury Secretary and been saying these wild things of revealing actually the processes behind U.S. kind of criminal targeting of other countries to do economic war. And as part of this hybrid kind of regime change, or even if regime change would be, you know, one thing, I mean, it's like break up Iran into a kind of chaotic rump state, but you know, is that he himself was also involved with those before he was then now given the power as a private, like kind of hedge fund and currency trader and worked with Soros. And now, you know, he's been given basically for all of the Horrible illegal kind of techniques that he learned and developed manipulating currency markets for private profit and gain. He's now using the power of the kind of, you know, US state treasury to like target like it's like a kind of. dramatic increase in like the possibilities of manipulative power that he now can kind of wage. And he's been it's interesting because you don't normally hear anything about the views of the U.S. secretary of the Treasury. Like, you know, this is like arcane stuff that you'll find in the financial press. This guy has been out. Ever since he got appointed, making big public declarations about geopolitical matters, threats on countries. He just told Carney, Mark Carney, that, oh, you know, not a wise thing to, you know, be discussing, you know, to be, you know, trying to, you know, tangle with the start of fomenting like, you know, trouble with the United States before, you know, these U.S., Canada, Mexico issues. you know, trade agreements are going to be renegotiated in the next week, couple of weeks or so, you know, like threats, like saying, you know, you have made a big mistake. I would keep quiet because we're about to renegotiate everything. And, you know, we could impose these 100% tariffs and so on. So you don't normally hear about like somebody like this, but he's been in the news because it's clear that we've ramped up These imperialist use of the US state, you know, like in ways that I think are it's not that they're totally unprecedented, but it's like a quantum leap in the aggressive employment of these financial warfare kind of techniques. Yeah.

Henry Hakimaki: Are you trying to tell me at none that the Trump administration is not a bunch of protectionist anti-imperialists? Because I was led to believe that they were protectionist anti-imperialists. That was what I was being told.

Adnan Hussain: Apparently, there's some neoliberals, some imperialist regime change operators, and neocons who somehow slipped in the back door without anybody knowing it.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah. Yeah, I wonder how that could have happened. I mean, I don't know. Marco Rubio, I think, just inserted himself as Secretary of State without anybody ever consulting with the president. I think that that was a complete vice. He became like Juan Guaido. He's the Juan Guaido of the American government. He saw the open door of the State Department, decided to walk in and claim that must have been what happened. It surely couldn't have been appointed to that. Yeah. So anyway, off of that flipping point, I think we should talk about conferences for a little bit since we were talking about Iran and whatnot. I'll talk about two things rather briefly because they might be of interest, but I know that you have much more to say on conferences, so I'll leave the floor open for you. I'm sure you do Adnan, you can shrug all you want, but... My conferences are not so interesting. So there's a lot of small things that I'm doing these days in terms of speaking at various places. I know Salvatore and I are going to be speaking with the Communist Party of Sweden on Tuesday and things like that. But in terms of actual conferences, there's two that I have done things related to recently. And both of them are hosted by the Russian government. So very interesting. The first one took place. Oh, I don't even remember when. So the first one took place in, I don't remember, maybe November, maybe October. It was a forum called Inventing the Future. And at this forum conference, they had people from all around the world coming in and talking about their visions of the future, visions of a technological future, environmental future, economic future, et cetera, et cetera. And I knew that it was going to be a hotbed of... well, neoliberal ideology and whatnot. So I decided I would go as a delegate to it and try to bring some radicalism to the proceedings. I wasn't a speaker at that conference. I could have applied to be a speaker, but I decided I'll go as a delegate. So I get into the back rooms, talk with all the people like that and met some very interesting people, which we'll talk about off the air. But in any case, it was interesting to me. There was a couple of trends that I noticed there that I don't want to say we're concerning because it's not unexpected. You can only be concerned by things that you were expecting in the first place. But while I had the inclination that this would be the case, it was a bit dismaying that this was indeed the case. And there was a couple of trends that I noticed. One was a huge... lean in to this techno-optimism that was divorced from any sort of analysis of class and divorced from any sort of analysis of the world system. I know that as soon as I say this word techno-optimism, people are going to assume that, well, if I'm criticizing this, I must be criticizing it because I'm a techno-pessimist. No, that's not actually the case that I'm making here. The idea is that I am neither a techno optimist or a techno pessimist. I find that I fall pretty much right in the middle between these two. There's definitely things that technology can and should be utilized for. There's definitely things that I think should be tried to be advanced technologically speaking, but also I think that there's a lot of technological waste that's being done. And I also see a lot of problems with technological advance technology. with regard to workers' rights, with regard to the environment, with regard to X, Y, Z. We could talk about the criticisms, pros and cons. I end up being somewhere in the middle, but not for the same reason that a lot of other people do. I do have strong opinions. It's just my opinions are on each side of the debate. But in any case, what I saw was almost a uniformity of opinion that not only was there... A necessity to drive at ever increasing speeds towards technological development in all spheres of life. But. I can understand the impetus for that. You know, that is the typical techno-optimist lens. However, if you are a techno-optimist, there is a way of looking at how technological advance should be made, keeping in mind class dimensions and keeping in mind global economic system concerns and tying those concerns into the way that technology is utilized and the way that technology is developed. And I saw almost a complete neglect of those concerns components of a class, both domestic class, international class. The Global South was present at that conference in pretty high numbers. There was a lot of people from Africa and Southeast Asia who were presenting at the conference. But even they often would talk about the... North South divide, but wouldn't talk about class divides that were present within the country as well as the maintenance of the international class divide utilizing, you know, theories like unequal exchange and things like that. So there was this idea that technology must be advanced in all spheres of life, but without any. And when they were formulating how that could be done, there was never any acknowledgement of class and of the maintenance of an imperial system, economically speaking. So that was one trend that I saw that I thought was dismaying. Again, not concerning because I was kind of thinking that that would be the case, but it was somewhat dismaying. There was a big talk about Again, integration between Russia and the Global South. And while some of the presentations that were on that topic were quite useful, there was not nearly as much of while they were trying to make like proto anti-imperialist narratives of why Russia and the Global South should be coming together. The concept of anti-imperialism never really came out. This question of imperialism was kind of sidelined and it was more talked about, well, the West, they've historically held down the global South and Russia is trying to make connections with them and it can be a win-win situation for Russian investors and then the global South stakeholders and the citizenry of the global South. But there wasn't an analysis of... The imperialist system, there wasn't an analysis of what an anti-imperialist politic looks like, how these linkages between the global south and countries like Russia and China, of course, was also talked about quite a bit at the conference, how that can inform an anti-imperialist politic. That was not really discussed. And for me, even though I see... Reason for optimism in terms of Russia trying to integrate itself in a relatively solidaristic and of course, it's not completely solidaristic, but in a real and I grilled some people on that, by the way, at the conference, but there was a somewhat solidaristic message that was coming out from both the Global South presenters as well as the Russian presenters at the conference. But the fact that it's not tied to a political project, a global political project is a huge mess, a huge mess. And so that conference, there was a lot of very interesting things that were being said. There was a lot of very interesting things that were being discussed. We can talk about, you know, different topics that were on the table quite heavily. Demographics was a big issue that they were focused on because the Russian demographic trend is not a very positive one at the moment. But those, you know, amongst a couple other things that I'm sure will come to me after I finish talking were some somewhat concerning or worrying trends that I noticed at that one. And that was why I wanted to be at the conference was to see what the... state of those sorts of discussions was, and then also to try to bring in those sorts of things into the discussion by questioning people, grilling them, you know, pushing them on things. I had somebody who's very involved in the financial sector, governmental financial sector of Zimbabwe, who I had a very long conversation with. You know, he's fairly high up in terms of like governmental circles and in the financial sector. And when I would grill him, his answers on this question of imperialism were very clear. But when it came time for him to be presenting his his arguments in a roundtable about Africa, Russia relations. Again, that politic disappeared in terms of an anti-imperialist politics. So it was very interesting that even when you could get the people individually to commit to that, it wasn't the focus of the conference. It wasn't something that was discussed. And then this more recent thing that I just did. Oh, it's funny. That's why I'm going to bring it up. There's a new thing, and maybe you'll laugh at this Adnan, the Russian government has put up their second annual open dialogues conference. So people, scholars, academics from around the world can submit essays online. on these different categories and the top essays as selected by a panel, including people who are very high up in the Russian government, as well as people like Jeffrey Sachs, by the way, is on the selection committee of the essays, which is, you know, given his role in Russia in the 1990s, you know, I know that all is forgiven. I mean, he says very good things these days, but you know, yeah, I am a much less forgiving person, Adnan. If I was in the Russian government, I don't care. I would let Jeffrey Sachs keep saying good things and thank him for saying good things today, but I would never let him around decision-making related to the government after what happened in the 1990s. And listeners who are fans of Jeffrey Sachs but aren't aware of what happened with Jeffrey Sachs in the 1990s, I don't want to get into it right now because it's a long story. But... Yeah. If you're fond of what Jeffrey Sachs has been writing and saying for the last few years, but you're not familiar with what he did in the 1990s, look that up. And you'll probably understand why if I was in the Russian government, I wouldn't have him anywhere near a panel of decision makers. But in any case, he's on the panel. So. they have this open submission for essays and I decide, okay, I'll put something in there because again, I want to try to push kind of more radical discussion, even if it's not going to be implemented in any meaningful way, at least I can get the discussion out there. So at first there was no guidelines and this is, you know, this will come back. Here's a bit of foreshadowing. There was no guidelines listed on the essays when I had started writing this thing. And I decided that I would write an essay on the centrality of Russia in generating a polycentric world and breaking the chains of unequal exchange. So both analyzing the Soviet heritage, analyzing Russia today, and then also analyzing the system of unequal exchange and the imperialist world system as it is at the moment and how Russia could Play a critical role in disrupting that, allowing countries in the global south to de-link, to use Samir Amin's term. So I started writing and writing and writing, and eventually they put up guidelines after about a month after I had been writing this. And there's a character count guideline. Uh-oh. Character count. 2,000 to 8,000 characters. I think to myself, well, I haven't used the character counter, but 8,000 characters seems a bit short. I'm not sure how many I have. So let me look at what I've got. And I wasn't done with the essay at the point. I had most of the content that I had in there, but I hadn't edited it. I hadn't done the tweaking and the fine-tuning. There was still a lot of work that had to be done on it. But a lot of the content was there. Most of the content was in there already. So I checked the character. 28,000. I was at 28,000 characters and I had to cut it down to 8,000 characters. I can tell you Adnan, I have it down to 8,000 characters, but it's probably the worst thing that I have ever submitted with my name on it. And I'm including like papers that I've submitted at university, probably even at school. This is the worst thing that I have ever put together and submitted, but I submitted it anyway, because I was so frustrated that I had put in 28,000 characters and I still wasn't done. But I had 28,000 characters ready to get into the final editing stage of things. And then I had to absolutely gut it because what can you do in 2,000 to 8,000 characters? You could give some broad idea, but once you have 28,000 characters, how do you cut it back that much?

Adnan Hussain: That's going to be really, really hard to do because it's so many times greater, but it's three times greater or more, more than three times. About four.

Henry Hakimaki: I had to cut it down by about 75%. Yeah.

Adnan Hussain: But I mean, like it can be a good exercise to try and like, you know. write 10 pages for a six page paper and then you really kind of trim and get to the core and something like that. But in reality, you can only say things that people already kind of believe or at least work from presumptions that people already accept and then have like a bit of a twist or some additional analysis in such a short thing. Like it has to already be accepted. Like you can't challenge a framework or, attack uh the presumptions and offer different kind of basis for analysis because that takes a lot of time a lot of effort to build the argument you know you need all this evidence and all of that so in in essence they've sort of asked for what are some bright kind of within the kind of current systemic thinking thinking bright kind of takes within it rather than an opportunity for like let's open up this for a real kind of reassessment so i would encourage you so and

Henry Hakimaki: So when I have this thing where I'm looking historically, contemporarily, and also future possibilities and trying to analyze the global system in all of these three aspects. Yeah, that wasn't really going to happen in 8000 characters. So did I cut it down to 8000 characters? Yes. Probably good history. A lot of the history. I had to cut almost everything. None. 8000 characters is nothing. So that that is I'm being they're going to think that I'm the biggest idiot in the world. And maybe I am for just like continuing to send it in. But I was up against the deadline and I didn't have any more time to think about how can I salvage something from this? It's so bad. But. It was fun to think about in the initial stage of the history, the contemporary politic, and how Russia... Because Russia is a very interesting country when you try to analyze how it fits into the global system. Thinking about how Russia could... fit into the global system or disrupt the global system for a more just one. That was a very productive exercise. And I had a lot of thought that I enjoyed doing during that process. But yeah, once I had to cut it down, like there was no more brain processing that was happening. It was just cutting. And yeah, it's bad. I will never... Share that with anyone other than the submission committee because it's so bad.

Adnan Hussain: Well, one way to kind of deal with this unfortunate circumstance of the 8000 character quote unquote essay is maybe do something with the original one, finish the editing and maybe publish it somewhere else where you can really express your thoughts. Yeah. Important topic, you know, like it's considered it.

Henry Hakimaki: There's still quite a bit of work that has to go into it. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens with it.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's all very interesting. So it sounds like to me, in a way, your essay was responding to and reacting to the kind of two facets. You identified them as separate kind of disquieting trends that you observed, but in some ways they kind of go together. At root is you have a similar kind of analytical critique and response to each of those that actually comes together, probably in the essay, you know, but in some ways, like your analysis brings it together. But also that problem that there wasn't this, you know, very much of this anti-imperialist kind of understanding. It's almost like, to my mind, something that we've been talking about for a while when all this discussion about You know, the end of the unipolar world and the rise of multipolarity, but the genuine kind of bricks and, you know, the genuine kind of flaw here that I think we've been observing and thinking about and wanting more of was actually some kind of analytical and ideological component that would actually turn. the conditions of multipolarity into a genuinely anti-imperial i give it's just an anti-capitalist i mean if it is just let's have some different networks of capitalism um you know and instead of everything going through the west let's have some kind of south south exchanges south you know russia exchanges and just try and build something that's a little bit Opposite to and independent from, you know, pure Western controlled and dominated, but it still works in the global system in a way to actually.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, it maintains the economic system. Maintains the economic system, but tries to make alternative routes to the imperialist route to the current economic system. But the economic system is still maintained. That's the frustrating thing.

Adnan Hussain: That's right. I mean, you know, see, that's the weakness of this whole kind of... And I think the tech thing is similar because it's framed within competition for markets in the high tech, right? And less concern really in some ways about how does tech, how do technological developments fit? I mean, technological advancements or, you know, fit into actual markets. you know, social and economic and political development, like the development component, you know, there's the assumption that more tech, higher tech is synonymous with development, you know, whatever that is, but it isn't actually necessarily because it's really not organized to how do we meet the sovereign needs of a people rather, you know, it is, you know, how can we participate in this whole system of exchange where, you the benefits of high-profit economy, high-profit um sorts of endeavors you know can also be taking place you know um outside of say the west but we could also have a share in it you know the way that like okay we could you know develop some you know ai you know or somehow benefit from ai etc but these are not like you know how can we solve the problems of the people it's like how can we kind of connect into the system um in a the problem is like without the real analysis as you're pointing out there are a lot of opportunities that are lost you know that this is a kind of potential radical moment but it isn't a radical moment until it is actually turned into one you know yeah yeah fascinating but I'm sure that the conferences you went to were much more

Henry Hakimaki: Interesting. I mean, mine were interesting, but, you know, not necessarily. I didn't make the ground that I was hoping to in them, but I would love to hear about the conferences that you did. And I'm sure that it was better than the essay that I did. I'm going to stress again, that essay is so bad.

Adnan Hussain: Now you're going to make people curious to read it, Henry.

Henry Hakimaki: They're never going to. Unless I get the 28,000 characters. What about for patrons only? It's so bad, Adnan. I cannot stress how bad. I was embarrassed clicking submit. But, you know, I figured I had worked on the thing for about a month before I had to try to scrap it. So I submitted it anyway because I don't care if Jeffrey Sachs thinks I'm an idiot. But, you know. I don't want the patrons to think that I'm an idiot.

Adnan Hussain: You're assuming he's actually going to read it. With all the things he's doing, I just wonder how in the world. He's probably got a research assistant who will read the drafts and make a ranked list, and then he'll take a look at it or something. They still care much more about the thoughts of our patrons than of Jeffrey Sachs. Absolutely, yeah.

Henry Hakimaki: And again, I appreciate what Jeffrey Sachs is doing now, but I also remember the 90s, so I do care more about our patrons.

Adnan Hussain: Absolutely. Well, you know, I mean, I think, you know, I wouldn't say that the conferences that I went to are participated in Istanbul and Cairo. Well, Istanbul was an invited lecture and I was just speaking at Boğaziçi University in their humanities kind of program. I took the opportunity because it was a chance to get to Istanbul, see people, do some interesting things. But it was, you know, kind of on medieval travelers. And I guess all I was really trying to do with this was to, as we do on Guerrilla History all the time, is talk about the value of history and maybe have a longer historical perspective for understanding any contemporary history. phenomenon. And so I think when people think about travelers, they think about people who made connections with different cultures and civilizations and bringing them somehow together. And I wanted to try and talk, one, about integration of the world and the world system and how travelers were some kind of an index of the fact that what we think of as globalization is just a particular stage in the global interconnections of the world system and of trade and of contact. And that what's really important is about critiquing, you know, what are the terms and conditions under which that happens, not that it is happening, because it's happened at different times it's really what is the character and nature of these connections and then what I was trying to do was sort of draw character you know a contrast and I think it's important in a place like Boise University that is you know historically was Roberts College an American Protestant missionary college or university where the language is English of instruction is English and then it became you know nationalized as part of the Turkish higher education system, but it maintained its status as the, uh, kind of premier, um, university, uh, in, uh, Turkey, right. Um, that all this cache, but it served, you know, for decades, uh, and people should go back and listen to, um, our second episode ever in guerrilla history where we talked about why is Turkey an authoritarian state that examined the way in which the process of westernization and secularization in the post-Ottoman era you know successor state of Turkey under the Turkish you know Republican revolution under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk etc how it really imposed a certain kind of authoritarian governance structure in order to accomplish these goals not of what we would say is like real genuine sovereign development but of westernization and modernization and secularization That was the way in which you could analyze contemporary Turkish authoritarianism. Like, you know, and I think the benefit of this analysis was to say, look, Erdogan is not some unique figure in Turkish history. It's just that he's doing it in a different, you know, for different purposes and with different ideology, but that the construction of the state had really been founded in this way and the political culture bore that responsibility. And so how do you train your elites for this kind of project of managing this new secular Western modern state of the Turkish Republic? Well, you know, you need to rely upon, you know, some elite university institutions, really. And that was kind of the culture of Boazici. So. while there's obviously great diversity now, that is historically the class, you know, that sent their kids to, you know, this elite English language based university in Turkey, right? Who can afford to like learn English? It's only the kids who went to these private schools and then, you know, they go to Boğaziçi. If they don't go to Harvard, they, you know, their safety school is like, okay, we'll stay in out here forever. I thought it would be kind of interesting to contrast... European travelers and Islamicate, you know, Muslim travelers, you know, like, and where they went. And we were looking at Marco Polo versus Ibn Battuta. William Rubric was a Franciscan friar in the 13th century, you know. And what I tried to kind of suggest is that it wasn't just a cosmopolitan, you know, Marco Polo, he, you know, like integrated. Firstly, you know, You know, Ibn Battuta traveled just as widely. But what's interesting is that everywhere Ibn Battuta went, pretty much until he got to, like, China, he was able to kind of work because it was a Muslim society. And even though they spoke a different language and even though they had... It was a little bit like kind of the way in which the Commonwealth law system was an international system where... As long as you knew and understood common law, even if you were in Malaysia or if you were in South Africa or you were in Kenya or you were in Scotland, you could basically know what you needed to to function and rule as a judge or a lawyer, etc. And it wasn't tied to a nation state kind of law legal system the way if you're an American citizen. lawyer, you get trained and in U.S. law, you cannot work somewhere else unless what you're doing is consulting about U.S. law. Like you cannot go and work in France because the legal system is totally different. But in the Islamic world, he was able to basically have relevant knowledge despite different conditions so that there was both great diversity, but also, you know, some kind of continuities that held us together. Yeah. And so his way of relating to some of these societies that he traveled to and the way he describes them is then through a different prism. Whereas what I wanted to argue is that these European travelers during this time period, it's not just out of some kind of cosmopolitan perspective. you know, kind of curiosity and interest and like we're so interested in these diverse cultures. It really was about trying to circumvent, you know, as all of this history of trade and commerce was, you know, that led to these networks across Eurasia to trying to circumvent them by, you know, going around Africa, you know, and kind of short circuit the dependence on the Islamic world sort of in between, you know. resources in the Far East and Southeast, South Asia, et cetera, to find a different way to integrate. And that, in fact, when you looked at these travelers from the 13th century, essentially, is that they were actually interested in kind of creating the conditions for advocating either a link up with the Mongols as a pincher action to kind of invade from both sides during the Crusades or, you know, really call for, like, if we can't convert them, then maybe we'll have to fight them. You know, so there was missionary activity. There was crusading, as well as trade. And we tend to think of somebody like Marco Polo as just somebody interested in commerce. But if you really look at the prism through which he was looking at the world and who some of the precursor travelers in this global moment of the 13th century, when the Mongol world empire is connecting up with the Middle East and Europe and creating a much more integrated uh you know uh polity a kind of political system that has uh is connecting eurasia in a different and new way is that they are you know kind of very concerned with like uh you know crusade and um commerce is something that follows from when you can kind of create this military uh sort of complex to short circuit your big competitors. And so my point was like, it is globalization, but what are the terms under which the Europeans are trying to integrate into this like emerging world system? It is what we will see the roots of it later in a different era in the 15th and 16th centuries, 17th centuries and 18th is that the era of Atlantic colonization and colonization in Africa and the Far East. And that that is something that's developed out of this kind of crusading experience in the Mediterranean. And that you should see that it's not just that there's global connections, but what are the terms under which certain groups are going to integrate? Is it through kind of mutually beneficial connections? kind of contact, or is it like proto-colonial conquest and imposition that is at stake? So I thought that would be interesting and useful for them to be thinking about what the value of medieval history and medieval travelers is to our present moment, which is, of course, what we try and do with for us, you know, who are not just interested in history because like, oh, it's fascinating stories and we love like the romance of the past, but like what is valuable for our struggles today. And so that's, that's kind of what I was trying to get at with a kind of broad lecture about medieval travelers, which I'd been asked to discuss. So I tried to make it into something that would have some resonance and value to, you know, like the topic we're talking about. And in fact, I even mentioned that, you know, what's interesting about this moment in the 13th century is this the formation of a world system that is multipolar. It's not one pole. And that helps us understand and think about, well, what's possible and what's the nature of in, you know, integration into a world of a, of a multipolar world that's forming now. These are, that's one of the only moments because, you know, really, You know, the next world system is the capitalist world system that is forged with European hegemony, violence and colonization. And so we need models to know that that's not actually the normal or necessary kind of outcome of history. That's one stage in how the world system has been formed. There was an earlier period with Janet Aboulouraud, a famous book, and I think everybody should go. It's still a very important work called Before European Hegemony, the World System 1250 to 1350. is a kind of multipolar moment. And we can learn a lot from that. So travelers are one kind of way in which you can see what are the connections that are happening. And I tried to use that to say, you know, there's some lessons for us, you know, in that. So that was what I did in Istanbul and Turkey. I did go to a conference.

Henry Hakimaki: And very briefly, before you get to that other conference, it reminds me also that we had some conversations that were related to medieval travelers in the Mediterranean when we went through our series on your book, A Faithful Seed. Patreon subscribers will remember, and I know this is a Patreon early access episode, so if you're hearing it right away, you're on Patreon. But those of you who are going to hear it on the general feed when we release this eventually... Adnan and I, two years ago, I want to say, two summers ago, I think, we went through Adnan's edited book, A Faithful Sea, the religious communities of the Mediterranean, religious cultures of the Mediterranean. Yeah. fascinating a book and we talked about I want to say six or seven of the different essays that were included in that book in a series on Patreon so if you're new on our Patreon and you haven't listened to that series yet you can go back and listen to that if you're on the general feed of course you can subscribe to our Patreon patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history g-u-e-r-r-i-l-l-a history and find that although at some point We'll be releasing at least some of those conversations, if not all of them, to the general feed as well. But some of those conversations that we had were about medieval travelers and about the linkages and different cultures. I remember one fairly vividly. I forget the person's name. It was the Franciscan friar who... Dr. Saul Ariel Salzman's Framoscato.

Adnan Hussain: Who, yes, who ended up converting by mistake.

Henry Hakimaki: Converting, yes, and converting back and then converting back and unconverting and reconverting and a very fascinating character. And, you know, thinking about... the world system. I mean, we did talk about the economics of that, uh, that time and also the trade that was happening at that time. Um, but you know, thinking a little bit more deeply about that aspect of it might be, you know, it would be interesting also, uh, although we did do a bit of that in that discussion. So anyway, listeners, if you, if you're interested in that one, you can check out Adnan's book, faithful sea, but also you can, uh, Listen to those companion episodes that we did. Like I said, I think we did six or seven of them on different chapters and each of them is like 40 minutes long. So it's a pretty good chunk of time that you can learn about the religious and cultural differences within the medieval Mediterranean and some of these interesting characters.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, absolutely. That was a fun thing to do, to review some of the articles that people had contributed to it, and also the wider kind of sense like why one would study the Mediterranean, why medieval Mediterranean history. You know, so that's kind of something that I've always been interested in, is fascinated by the medieval period, but trying to think of... how against the normal way in which narratives of, um, modern, um, history or world history are framed about, uh, the world we live in is one that was basically radically by radically transcending and departing from the medieval, you know? And so in some sense that kind of set up some, uh, uh, way of framing the medieval is kind of irrelevant to the world that we inhabit today. And of course, I've, over the course of my career, felt that it is increasingly relevant in various ways and not always in the best ways, although there are some Also, you know, you know, things that actually are interesting to learn from, but the relevance of it is, you know, has a lot to do with the fact that we're in a kind of Neo crusade type moment and all the things that I like to talk about, but yeah. That was also sort of what I was interested in doing in this conference I went to in Cairo, which was really more of a kind of literary conference, it seemed, but it was called Psyche and Society. And I did end up having a brief discussion of what I discussed, of what I was talking about in a video on my travels that people could check out for more details on the Adnan Hussain show from December. But what I would like to say about it, and thinking back now with greater distance on it, is the really importance of something we've actually talked about on this show, Patreon, is the relevance of global... pre-modern non-Western kind of sources for theory. And so my piece was really about the kind of psychological sentiments and so forth that are at root in Ibn Khaldun's social theories of change in politics and so on in history and trying to kind of connect His method to the question of why he discusses and talks about dreams quite a lot, which seems like it wouldn't make any sense for somebody who is. I'm kind of known for materialist social forces as a really interesting approach to thinking about social change and social bonds and so on. And what I tried to do is look at the case of the social importance and significance of Sufi mystical networks and as a way to, you know, have an Islamicate sort of theory that actually helped us understand the significance of these spiritual brotherhoods and why they were so important, particularly in something that I talked about with Nick Estes in a special that we did about spiritual brotherhood. Spirituality is spiritual indigenous spiritualities and Sufi spiritualities and spiritual movements in anti-colonial struggles and why it is that most of the anti-colonial movements that exist. emerged in whether it's Algeria, like under Sufi Abdul Qadir against the French, whether it is like various West African Sufi figures and movements, Hajo Martal in West Africa and others. And even in Southeast Asia, we see like this kind of as a key history for in Malaysia, Indonesia for anti-Dutch and anti-British kind of movements. movements against colonization, and why the so-called reformist and these kind of Salafist Wahhabis like are not actually in the picture at all. In fact, they have a history of collaboration, you know, with the British with and being sponsored, of course, later with the United States, right, you know, so it was a kind of way of starting to think about how I might work with and apply my interpretation and understanding of both the psychosocial dimensions of Ibn Khaldun's theory to explain actual phenomena historically of these movements, movements that I'm interested in, you know, because we're in a, you know, we need models and for any kind of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist organizing. And so that's kind of what I was trying to do with Ibn Khaldun's ideas, whom we've discussed here in the past, but I was trying to actually apply it to a sort of his psychosocial, draw out a kind of psychosocial theory from his work and then examine how this is helpful to have a non-Western perspective you know, Islamicate sort of source for theorizing social and political movements in resistance to colonialism. So that was kind of fun and interesting. And I think it's something I'll be working on a lot more. There's the critical Muslim studies summer school coming up in Istanbul in June. You know, actually, people can apply for it if they're interested. If you're interested in critical Muslim studies and you want to do a week-long summer intensive, you know, kind of seminar and set of workshops, I'm going to be one of the faculty in there and one of the sessions I think I'll be doing like I did last year, the first time I participated. was called Sufism and Power. And it wasn't my title, but like, you know, the person who was supposed to be teaching and wasn't able to, they drafted me in because I was going to be in Istanbul for the, you know, Critical Muslim Studies Conference later that month. And I said, sure. And so I sort of thought about this. And actually what came out was the kernel, you know, for that workshop of what I'm thinking about for what I did end up thinking about for the paper, you know, that I gave in Cairo and probably I'll do an article, you know, on this that I think I could assign for the summer, you know, workshop, at least a draft, you know. And so I'm thinking about those ideas and it's also part of this wider Ibn Khaldun project that I'm supposed to do for Iskra and, you know, with people I've been recruiting and I think we're getting closer to a point where I think I can put together a you know, a final proposal and actually have us do the volume after I did a conference in, on it that I helped, that I organized in October and brought some people together for some initial discussions of how to, rethink Ibn Khaldun as a global, pre-modern, non-Western, Islamocatist, you know, theorist, how we might work with it today. And what I did for the Cairo paper was an attempt at doing what the project is to try and use it for, as an example, an illustration, you know, for what what insights you might have if you started from different theoretical inspiration and different sort of theories from different kinds of locations, would you still be able to kind of find value in it? So that's kind of what I did in the Cairo thing and what I've been thinking about. And there may be updates as this project goes further on that will be worth checking back in on, I think, in a few months.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, and I definitely hope to see more on Ibn Khaldun from you in the relatively near future. So I have my fingers crossed for that. There's, of course, a lot more that I could say. I mean, I have something that should be coming out from Iskra Books that I'm working on fairly soon, but it's about midnight here. So Adnan, I propose that we move to the conclusion of this discussion and we can have more of these going forward because... We haven't been doing very many of these kind of informal, impromptu intelligence briefings recently, but we always find a lot of fruitful ground to cover when we do sit down, even when we don't plan topics in advance. And so, yeah, these are fun, and I think I get quite a bit out of them, even though they're not planned. So we'll do more of these going forward, and patrons can look forward to that, I'm sure. But yeah, I think we'll wrap up for now. Any final notes, Adnan? Or do you want to let the listeners know how they can find the Adnan Hussain show? Anything along those lines? Yeah, sure.

Adnan Hussain: I mean, you know, we didn't end up talking too much about contemporary events, but we did. It was kind of mixed in. It was mixed in because we talked about Iran, which is something we hadn't really talked about quite as much at our revolutionary guerrilla menace episode at the sort of early new year episode. So I would just say that I think this is a very serious moment where genuine anti-imperialist analysis is highly needed in our movements, because even though there has been great solidarity in Palestine, Palestine solidarity, and that we've seen with Syria and we're seeing with Iran that there are, and this is something we'll probably, you know, talk about very extensively and deeply with, you know, Max Eil about, but I think this is a very important moment to really check your sources, check your, where you're getting your information and analysis from, and also to take a historical perspective. This is the thing that is often really missing, even in these theoretical discussions on the left where some people are critical of what they think of as knee-jerk anti-Americanism and identification with governments and so on, and they want to talk about internationalism as a people's solidarity, which of course it is, but if you ignore that there are states that are anti-imperialist, and if you don't recognize the key contradiction of imperialism in the world system, then it can become very divisive and confusing. And I think what's missing in a lot of those discussions when they're about politics and about kind of theory and these positions is a genuine historical contradiction kind of consciousness and knowledge of a longer period of time, you keep seeing repeated patterns. You have to sort of use that as a tool of analysis rather than just say, oh, well, you know, I mean, that was a different kind of moment and we have to look at each one. Yes, you do have to look at each one. But, you know, there is a repeated pattern of the empire and it's time we wake up. And you already had Syria a year ago. You know, we've seen what's happened there. Don't let, you know, the propaganda overwhelm, you know, appreciation for the historical long, you know, analysis that we've been trying to provide and is so necessary right now. So you can get that here at Guerrilla History, but also... I've been having a lot of these sorts of discussions also on the Adnan Hussein show. And please do subscribe and check that out. YouTube.com slash Adnan Hussein shows how you can find the YouTube channel. And also it's a podcast in audio version. If that's since you're a guerrilla history listener, you know, maybe you don't, you know, watch on YouTube or, and all of that, but you can also get it as a podcast, all the usual major platforms. So yeah, Please do check that out. Subscribe. And of course, you can also always support it. But the main thing is let's grow the knowledge base here of, you know, historical and anti-imperialist thinking. So anyway, that's my final conclusion about like why it's important we be talking about these things right now.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, and I co-sign all of that. I have not much to add to it. I will just say, for those of you who are listening on Patreon, thank you for continuing to support the show and allow us to continue making the show, continue having the conversations that we typically have.

Adnan Hussain: Our interviews are, of course, the bread and butter of the show, but...

Henry Hakimaki: we're glad that we can have these one-on-one conversations with each other as well. And, and it really is the Patreon support that allows us to continue to do it because, you know, we have platform fees and busy schedules and, and things like that. So this, um, is, is what makes it possible. And if you're listening to the general feed and would like to support the show and allow us to continue doing it, you can do so again at patreon.com forward slash gorilla history, G U E R R I L L A history. Um, And on that note, and until next time, listeners, solidarity.