Sanctions as Genocide w/ Ali Kadri

Speaker 1: You remember din-din-boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a wrangler. 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 by my usual co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. It's been a while since we've been together. You've been on a speaking tour all over the place, but how are you doing today?

Adnan Hussain: I'm doing great, Henry. It's wonderful to be back with you and talking with our listeners about important topics. I have really missed it, even though I've been doing a lot of interesting things. Maybe we'll do an intelligence briefing, you know, to update on some of those stopovers in, you know, the Netherlands, Grenada, and now Istanbul. But, you know, we have a great guest today, so we should just get right into it.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, just to briefly mention that if we have that conversation, it will appear first on Patreon because the listeners can, of course, help support the show by signing up to our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. The contributions there are the only reason that we can continue doing the show because... We don't run ads or anything like that, but we do have expenses associated with the show. I also, instead of announcing all of the places on social media where the listeners can follow us, at the top here, I do want to make note that we have our YouTube channel up and running at this point. So listeners should be aware. It's basically still just a podcast. You don't have to look at Adnan and myself. Lucky for you. But we do have an animation, which was made by a terrific artist. So with that out of the way... It's my pleasure to reintroduce a returning guest on the show, my friend and the esteemed scholar, Dr. Ali Qadri. Hello, Ali. How are you doing today?

Ali Kadri: Hi, hi, Andrew. Hello. I'm doing very well indeed. Thank you. All is well. Hi, Qadri. Well, all is well, relatively speaking. You know, the environment here is not all quite well.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, Ali is in Lebanon right now. So when he's talking about the environment not necessarily being the best right now, well, that is fairly obviously the case. But listeners will remember Ali's been on the show a couple times in the past. And actually, I'm going to announce right up front here to get the listeners excited that Ali will also be joining us for a mini series with him as the featured guest over Thursday. Three to five conversations in the relatively near future. So I know that many of our listeners are big fans of your work, Ali. So I want to make sure that they know that that's coming up. Today's episode, unfortunately, is not going to be one of our super long ones because we have some other things that we have to take care of as well. But we have a fascinating conversation on sanctions as genocide. Listeners will remember that almost three years ago at this point, we started running a series, Sanctions as War, based off of the book, which was co-edited by our friends Manny Ness and Stuart Davis. And this conversation, while not coming from that book, as all of those other conversations in Sanctions as War did, is very much going to fit within that analytical realm. So Ali, I know that you recently spoke on sanctions as genocide in Arabic. How did this topic come up when it was raised to you? Was that something that you brought up that you wanted to talk about in Arabic, or did the hosts of that platform that you spoke on bring the topic to you?

Ali Kadri: Actually, I've written a piece in Arabic which was called Who's Being Sanctioned? And the host read it, and he contacted me and asked me to do a session on the sanctions and the impact of the sanctions. And that's what we did, really. I mean, the piece was written a while back. And it says, basically, the United States is sanctioning so many countries is sanctioning so many countries and entities, business entities, people's persons, and so on and so forth, that... It's almost sanctioning half the world if one thinks about it. And it's limiting the scope in which it can do business with the rest of the world and so on. I mean, sanctions have been always there historically. There's an empire sanctions one state and then... pulverizes that state. But the way sanctions have developed recently, in recent history, is that it's sort of a blanket statement. I don't like you, I'm going to sanction you, and because... I provide the currency for the world, I provide the dollar, I provide the world reserve currency, you won't be able to do much without submitting to my demands. And so there's too much of a... of a good thing for the United States may turn out to be too much of a bad thing. And that was the logic of that argument. And I sort of followed up by saying the United States benefits from printing the dollar over a greater geographic area around the world. And if it is no longer supplying the dollar to the rest of the world, too much of the world, then it's imperial rents because the dollar provides the United States with significant imperial grants. It's a conveyor belt that draws the wealth, the value that's been created in the developing world to the center, to the financial centers of the Western hemisphere and specifically the United States. So what has happened in the United States is a sort of strange empire in a sense because its debts turn out the credit it provides because when it brings dollars and gives it to the rest of the world, it owes the rest of the world that money, that dollar, and that people can take that dollar and say we're going to claim some property in the United States for that dollar or something. something like that. But in point of fact, because it prints the dollar and it has power and control over much of the world's resources, all the dollars recirculate back to the United States and finds itself in a smug position. It has drawn the labor and the sweat and tears of much of the world to its coffers. So its debt, as it's often probably been said, its debt is its credit. Its debt is its wealth. It is a strange empire in a sense that the more it is indebted to the rest of the world, the more it is wealthy. With the caveat, of course, that it has to be powerful enough to control. Without the control, it cannot be wealth. So in that sense, what backs... The dollar is control, is hegemony over the rest of the globe. Control in a sense that when somebody borrows money, they have to work in the future to repay that money. And when it prints the money and sends it to the rest of the world, and that money is it loans that money, whether it is debt or debit or credit, and both in the case of the United States, it's credit, then the rest of the world will have to labor, will have to auction its resources for nothing and starve its population to basically send its people and resources to the Western Hemisphere. This circular cycle, cycle of I am richer by printing money for the rest of the world has a backing. People say that oil, for instance, the commodity theory of money, that oil is the substitute for the gold standard. But It's not only oil, really. Oil is a thing. And what matters is the control of all the resources and all the work and the control of the governments and the control of the masses and the rest of the world. That's what really backs the dollar. So the less hegemony the United States have over the world, the less it will be able to convert its debit into credit, its debts into wealth, etc. And because it sanctions so many countries and so many entities and so on, It sanctions those that cannot control. Then the backing of the dollar becomes less efficient. It can no longer... The United States can no longer sustain the creation of money out of thin air and sending this money out of thin air abroad because the abroad here in this case has been diminished in size. China, Russia, many countries around the world are not under the control of the United States. And that's a huge portion of the world. And therefore, the currency of the United States, the dollar status as the senior it has, it becomes smaller. It's reduced in potency. And that in itself, the sanctions in that cycle of I create debt and I create wealth, I can no longer do that. My debts are a sort of a burden to me. People are unwilling to basically work in the future and sell me their wealth. And that sort of situation is new. So the credit space, in a sense, has been diminished. And although in the United States depends very much for its accumulation that was at the helm of the world's capitalist system. And it depends pretty much on maintaining a dual structure in the world, the broad masses who will starve and sell things, sell their resources and labor cheap, to a sort of affluent consumption class around the world, which is principally based in the Western hemisphere. that consumes what's being produced. So it needs the repression, it needs the exploitation, it needs the austerity applied to a significant swath of the world in order to maintain a cycle of cheap resources and cheap labor for higher profits. But that That said, the point, the crux of the matter is it could do that because the system is expanding exponentially. It's explosive because the system is based on finance. It's the financial plus, not the industrial plus. Not I want to sell more of the things that I produce, so I need people to... everywhere to make more money, to earn more income so that I could sell them. Because the system is based on profitability, based on the popularization of broader masses for the consumption and the luxury and the wealth of the few, we have a sort of debacle that's difficult to fathom. Because, first of all, I am... my repression and my austerity and so on, my wars and my sanctions are biting. And that's reducing the negotiating power of the masses in the third world. That's reducing their living standards. That's reducing their longevity relative to the times, because times are qualitative, we can say. We go back in time, time is social time. But we've done so much of this that much of the world now is seeking independence. And when it seeks independence, it affects the system where I want to ostracize you I want to oppress you I want to exploit you for the benefit of the few there is still you have a dual crisis in a sense the first the first facet of the crisis is that the sanctions have they have grown so much they sanction so many people so many nations and peoples and so on that they no longer have control over that space they lost the hegemonic And at the same time, the growth in finance, money growing money, without consideration of what the industry should do, because money can grow indefinitely. But in the end, there has to be something produced and something produced with cheap resources and cheap costs. to meet the competitive needs of capital. This situation is the first facet. The first facet is this, and the second facet, of course, is... is the fact that you have a smaller industrial cycle relative to the expansive and immense growth in the financial markets and the financial cycle. So these contradictions are piling up, have become intractable in time. And the United States finds itself more and more in a position that it must regain the hegemony. Without regaining the hegemony, it's going to reinstate the old cycle, the old cycle where I can sanction a few, I can exploit a few, and then I let the money grow by creating debts and creating dollars, and then that money is growing. There are financial rents, it's growing all the time, but it's not meant... It's not met by a growth in the industrial sector because the very fact that I'm selling to... I don't decide... I know what production does. Capital knows what production does, but doesn't know who's going to buy, how much money is there to buy. The buying market is shrinking as well. So there is a... a complex order of contradictions between the financial sphere, the industrial sphere, and the sphere of the developing world, the ones subjected to the immiseration of capital. These together make us face a new situation, a new situation where the United States will have to regain its hegemony, as I said, and it does this through flexing its economic and political muscles and military muscles. It's doing that as we speak, you know, with the tariffs and the threats of war here and there. But at the same time, it is no longer as efficient as it used to be. It's not gaining much grounds against China. It's not gaining much grounds against Russia. And the BRICS, the other countries, have grown somewhat into independence from the yoke of dollar imperialism. And this altogether makes the deaths of the United States more like... not necessarily perfectly like third world debts, but they've become something that they have to address. They didn't care about the debts before. Because if I control and own the world, I can issue debt indefinitely. They no longer have that. And because they no longer have that, they're running into problems. Not only the national debt is grown over the GDP, but also the corporate debt in some estimates is several times greater than the debt of the nation state. and other debts as well, private sector, consumers' debts, and so revolving door debts. These are altogether immense in quantity relative to the decline in hegemony. And so it has to redress more seriously. It has to take more seriously. You're seriously addressing the debts because the dollar loses its status as a non-risk instrument. And as the dollar loses the status, so The world enters into a new stage. We are in the labor of history now. We don't know what the future will look like, but it's the United States unless it wins by genocide everywhere.

Adnan Hussain: That's actually, Ali, what I wanted to ask you before we get further into the consequences of the contradictions that you just mentioned about how the sanction system works and the fact that the attempt to sanction half the world basically is one that isn't sustainable enough. over the long term in exactly the ways you've been articulating, the weakness of the U.S. hegemony has to be dealt with in some fashion. And that's where the title that you gave is very suggestive. And I wanted to ask a little bit more about Because as Henry alluded to at the start, we have had a series that talked about sanctions as war and the book basically and the different discussions that we had were meant to address the fact that very often sanctions are seen as some kind of alternative. to war that many people in liberal and internationalist regimes thought was more acceptable than actual invasion. But there's clearly a relationship between the two and the purpose of that series and that work was to undermine the idea that sanctions were any kind of alternative. They were just war by any other means that you have sort of suggested in your piece by you know, analytically comparing sanctions to genocide when we're facing at this moment, you know, the obvious genocide taking place in Gaza. You're, you know, making a suggestive and provocative point there that the redress perhaps of U.S. hegemony is having to be taken to a different level. And so I'd like to ask you, what is it that you think this comparison reveals and why compare it to genocide and what is the role of genocide in attempting to redress U.S. hegemonies reaching various kinds of limits of the sanctions regime?

Ali Kadri: Right. Things can be put bluntly in a way. Capital exploits to make profits. I mean, when we go to the store to buy something, you know, it's not We bought something for $10 and it cost $5, so the profits are $10. The real reason why we have profits, it's not because we bought it for $5, it's because somebody was beaten into submission And, you know, instead of asking for $7, you know, for the input that he provided to the capitalist, he's so weak, he's hungry, he's devastated, he asked for $5. So the exploitative process is a process of... Outright wars and sanctions. Sanctions are a form of war as well. The genocide is always there. It isn't undercut. Let's just bring things into focus here. There isn't... I mean, just as I was, you know, working the other day, somebody's published an article where it says there are 700 or 800 million people who are hungry, whereas we produce food for, you know... 11 billion people. So we have a situation where the structural genocide, what Friedrich Engels said when he discussed the working classes in Britain, he said there's something called the structural genocide. That means people become sick and so poor that they die before their time. And I was talking to a medical doctor the other day He lives somewhere in the north of England or Scotland. And he says there's a where he lives across the street, there's a poor area where the life expectancy is 15 years for the poor, shorter than that of the rich. So making people die early because of poverty is also a process of killing, but it's killing slowly. So the structural genocide is there all the time. And if we think that society altogether works over its lifetime, and the work of society is what produces things, then what we're seeing is a reduction in the life of society and economizing, as Marx says, to economize the life of labor. We're seeing that reduction, and that's going to, you know, society, the social production cost of society is going to be less, or less and less relative to the times, which means that The rate of exploitation is going to be higher and higher. So the rate of exploitation, which translates into the rate of profit, is determined by how badly society is going to live relative to the time. Always relative to the time because time is quality and finance. qualitative and so that sort of genocide is always present with us and it's been if one thinks that relative to the capacities that we have the technological capacities and the development and the productive forces people should be living a lot more and better but they are not so that sort of difference determines the rate of exploitation which will determine the rate of profit But there is also the direct genocide, the obvious genocide, the one ongoing in Gaza now. This genocide serves many purposes. It's war and war-inflicted genocide. And one purpose it serves at the present crisis of capital is it shows that capital will go To any extreme, in order to show that it's sparse. And we have so many cases in history, in the history of capitalism, that when it is necessary, they just exterminate a population. and so on. So, there is a demonstration effect of what's happening in Gaza. It's now telling the world we've had enough of the human rights talk, you know, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These things have always been a sham, but now they're completely dead. And what we have is a situation where we're willing to teach the world a lesson. What we've done in Gaza, we can do anywhere else. That's one aspect of things. The other thing, and it's also, it branches out into political power. The hegemony that we've talked about earlier, it is the fact that you are capable of new technology and masculine instruments to prove power. yourself a victor a victor of sorts then that's doing that that's you know we are you know we want there are people on the land we want the land without people there are too many people abroad that so If we don't have slaves, we'll have coolies and we'll bring those in. And so that again is a case in point. And it's also, you know, I mean, the ramifications are quite significant because it tells the rest of the world That with the new technical developments that imperialism has at its disposal and AI being used for military purposes and so forth, that no national liberation movement, of course, national liberation movements are as present and as under neocolonialism as they were under colonialism. Because neocolonialism sometimes is the worst form of colonialism than colonialism itself. And so it's telling the rest of the world that the times have changed and we want to be in control again because we cannot allow, we want our financial gains, financial rents to grow all the time. And for that to grow all the time, we need to exploit more and more. To exploit more and more, it means to basically... eradicate people's lives, eradicate nature, buy people and nature very cheaply. Not only cheaply, for negative prices as well. You know, there's something called negative prices. These people in the developing world pay with their lives. And if one considers them... how much money they earn over their lifetime, over how their indebtedness, they end up being in the negative quadrant. So in a sense, That said, there is also the fact that the war and the genocide itself is an industry as well. It is an industry that, in any industry, there are stages of production. The first, the initial stage, the second stage, and there's value-added production. across the supply chain. The first case, the first stage in production is usually the war and the genocide. Because in the end, the masses and the working classes are not So ignorant as one might think. Because people live, every person has sort of an existential condition. He knows he cannot afford the food. He knows he cannot afford the schooling and the housing, et cetera. And realize that it is the power structure that is condemning him or her to that condition. Now, the... But then... The society made up of many people who are miserated must adapt to the conditions of defeat, to the conditions of surrender. They must adapt to the ideologies of defeat and surrender. They don't, and they adapt by absorbing, interjecting the ideology of capital, the neoliberalism that the free market works. Of course, one needed to say that. I mean, everybody knows these are fairy tales. But the fact that they are accepted on us means that people have a sort of... I want to live as much as possible by accepting what they're taking in the rubbish they're telling me as an ideology to live by. But they know this is not the case. They don't arrive at this point of accepting the ideologies of capital because of the logic, the intrinsic logic or the beauty of the theory that capital poses to the free market. They arrive at this point because they are literally beaten into submission. They're beaten into submission either directly, they're bombed by drones or what have you, or there are military bases that are too powerful for any country to move to basically... The world is surrounded by imperialist military bases, and they're there not for show. They're there... in case something goes wrong, they're there to basically get involved and do the job that needs to be done. So violence, in this case, is not only reminiscent of violence under direct colonialism, when Fanon spoke of that violence has to be faced off with violence, violence is still here and still as strong as it was before and as effective as it was before. And it's this violence, the use of weaponry or the threat of war that is always going to make people believe the rubbish that capital throws onto them. And so if we have, you know, when looking for a theory of revolutionary consciousness, that theory is, you know, there are many, many ways to describe why people resolve to fight back one way or another. But the only means to fight back so appears, as was the case before, would be arms struggle. Without having... Some form of people's wars, again, it is impossible to basically move beyond that watershed moment where I am a submissive working class into a revolutionary proletariat. And the conditions for that are... Maybe not so obvious now. There are cases where countries which are sanctions, and Gaza is a case in point. Gaza is presenting a heroic resistance despite the losses. Because in the end, without resistance, they would be annihilated. With or without resistance. With resistance, they may not, they have a chance of winning and not be annihilated. So the key point always is what sort of people's war and how we define a new people's war to reshape through the practice of struggle. By all means, not necessarily only military means, by all means, but definitely the military means is there because capital knows that it is through violence that it could form the ideology. The idea that ideology is related to symbols of power and, you know, the postmodernist or something like that, that's somebody who's been to a psychoanalyst. He hasn't been to the third world where, you know, the... You know, the killing is a way of life. The reactionary armies that are related to imperialism practice killing on every day, either them or directly imperialism gets involved and does the massacre. So, And so it is this aspect of the process of forming revolutionary consciousness that is missing in the process. Things have become actually more difficult as well because Imperialism has learned two things. First, it has to pervert revolutionary theory. It is perverted through Western Marxism, and you guys talk a lot about the idea. And that's to abort revolutionary consciousness altogether, to basically write off imperialism as a you know imperialism writing off the obvious which is you know when the federal reserves lowers the interest rate and money flows into the commodity market bread prices rise and people starve I mean, if that's not a universal order that's wholly integrated and is at the mercy of capital, I don't know what is. But the point here is that aside from this, There is also the perversion of that, and there is the military aspect of things, the fact that there is a military threat and the use of military threat. Now, what is so obvious in... and it goes undiscussed, is the idea of civilizing mission. This, you know, that the Western hemisphere has developed, has progressed and has technology and so forth. So this idea that machines make wealth, is ludicrous. It's making things do things, verification. And what really makes wealth is the fact that if they literally have bombed the rest of the world into disastrous conditions for over five centuries, then the rest of the world won't be able to develop any technologies or any researchers or anything of the sort. So the subject here, the sub-historical subject of the machine is this relationship of the destruction, which is the relationship of imperialism. And that idea, the notion that we can always blame things for doing things is odd. And what is also obvious is that the Western civilization, I mean, all we hear is that the planet is going to basically be, within 50 or 100 years, will not be able to exist. governed by the relationship of capital, which I want to get things cheap to sell there, and I get things cheap because I can destroy man and nature. This relationship governs profitability. The law of profits governs everything. So if we have to do that all the time, and we're destroying the planet, really, and we're destroying the planet... So that means what we have now, if we're going to be in a very unhealthy planet within 50 years or something, right, that means what we have accumulated so far is so many terrible things. You know, not the computers and not the cars and things like that that are probably of use. But we've accumulated a lot of environmental and social destruction and waste. And so we created more bad things than good things, in a sense. And so many terrible things that they're going to basically erode the basis for the reproduction of physical life in the future, specifically human life. And so as a civilization, civilization is defined, let's say broadly, as the material and spiritual wealth that's been accumulated, right? So, you know, the material wealth is all destruction. Western civilization, which is the civilization of capital, it's not the civilization of Christianity or Islam or something like that. That's hula baloo. It's the civilization of capital. It's a structure that actually leads the... puts into effect the dictate of the law of value. It wants to make things cheap at any cost and so forth. So what we have is... is a situation where we have a lot of this. We produce through labor. Labor produces those things. When we produce anything, we produce the plastic that we're going to throw away. That's taking necessary hours of labor, of social labor, to produce as well. It is a commodity. We produce so many bad commodities that they outshine. The good things are nothing in comparison, especially if we know that we have so much bad things now, and also the social, the human destruction, the waste of human lives, the premature death. We have a trail of death. We have so many skulls that, you know, in some estimates, a billion skulls. in the wars of colonialism and imperialism. A billion, nearly a billion or so. I mean, I don't know the estimates, but the number, I mean, some estimates say it's 900 million, but there are huge numbers. I mean, so as a civilization, this Western civilization, which is the civilization of capitalism, By necessarily, by abiding by the law of value, by the law of profits, it has achieved none of the material wealth it claims to have achieved and none of the spiritual wealth it claims to have achieved because it justifies the killing in order to protect a way of life, a way of life for the few. Whereas we know in reality this is, you know, we have a crisis of overproduction. We have too much food for everyone. We have enough technologies for everyone to be treated for any disease or something like this. We're relative to the times, of course. Right, relative to any disease. But relative to the times. So we overproduce all the time. And we overproduce way more than what we need. And yet because capital needs to ration things such that it starts somewhere in order to get their resources and their labor for nothing. And sanctions are, you know, the sort of twin of war. Sanctions do the same thing. I mean, if we call the sanctions on Iraq and the death in Iraq, I mean, probably the death toll from the sanctions is higher than the death toll from the war. So, again, so it is not much of a civilization. I mean, I know some Gandhi says it's a good idea, Western civilization, but it's not much of a civilization. It's actually a civilization of destruction. And the spiritual aspect of it is a world supremacist aspect at core. So we have... And this is so, I mean, that's the obvious. One hasn't theorized yet. We're looking at the world as it is. And this is not a very healthy world. It's a world that's been based on destruction. It's produced too much destruction. And the future doesn't hold. So the idea that when one looks at the fashions and so on, the glitter of Western civilization beneath the glitter, there is a river of blood flowing beneath that glitter. And it is not because some guy is bad or good or some psychology. People are born into social relations, which are capital social relations, which necessarily mean that I need to exploit to survive, to make profits, not to survive, to make profits. And to exploit means I have to basically... Crushed society. Society works. You know, the labor in mind is social labor. That's society that works. Otherwise, we can't say that somebody with a physical invalidity has the right to wage, although he doesn't work. Or a mother at home has the right to wage, although she doesn't work. Because that means we know that society as a totality of social relations is what works. what works to produce and the life of society is the time of work and the wages that society earns over its lifetime are lesser if that society lives shorter lives and spends less and lives shorter lives because it doesn't cost as much so the social cost of the reproduction of labor is lower for capital and it's going to make more profits because these costs are lower then surplus labor is going to be high which is going to translate into profits. So they are born into a system that works like this. It works like this, and they just act out the directives of history in this case. History is scary. And so the point is, we are now at a point, although this is, you know, a very grim picture, but also, you know, There is much to be confident about the future that the resistance is impossible not to have resistance under these conditions because there's a threshold at which people will say enough is enough. And it's developing with the rise of China and the independence and the continued struggle of the Russian people against NATO. That is changing. That is changing. And when the whole changes, remember Lenin and Mao all speak of The general determining the particular. So in the dialectic of the general and the particular, it's the whole that's going to tell the parts, you know, that's going to implicate and impart to the parts what to do. And so we have a holistic structure that's changing at the level of international relations. A weakening United States that's resorting to a caliphized genocide in order to show the world that I'm still in control through its imperialist proxies in Israel, you know, by concocting some... mysterious stories about the right of people from 3,000 years ago because, you know, so on. So it's, I mean, this doesn't bamboozle anybody. It's not going to gaslight anybody. People know that there are people and Iran, people in Iraq, people in Syria, people in Palestine. Syria, for instance, the fall of Syria is pretty much, you know, could be accounted for through sanction. I mean, you know, the fall of Syria, Syria was starving. I mean, it was a cakewalk for a small group of people to take over a whole country because literally it was in a state of starvation. Iraq was in a state of starvation. Gaza is in a state of starvation. Sudan is in a state of starvation. And if you look at this region, the Iranian-Arabian region in this case, and, you know, the corridor from here to Afghanistan, and the war on terror, there's some estimates, you know, now the death toll from the wars and the sanctions in this region are excess of 5 million people. So we are now in this region ahead of the Korean War and the Vietnamese War in terms of direct losses to war. And that's... That's great.

Adnan Hussain: And then also, if you add also the displaced populations made refugees, I mean, we're talking about absolute devastation in the region. Yeah. Yeah. And so you went in the direction I really wanted to ask you, but maybe you can, you know, further enhance the discussion here. But because of what you said about the contradictions about U.S. weakness, its sort of demonstration effect because of that weakness of open genocide and inventing, as you say, a kind of political rationale or cause that's so absurd that, you know, it doesn't, you know, the rest of the world doesn't buy it at all. But I wanted to ask a little bit more about, you know, where you see those potentials and possibilities for resistance because, of course, you did mention, you know, the direct attack and the consequence of sanctions has produced resistance in places like Gaza, you know, Yemen. We can see despite, you know, years of war and of blockade that, you know, They are continuing to rebel against the international order. And yet it also, as you point out, seems to have worked in some ways in a place like Syria. And at the same time, many of the governments of the region have, you know, basically enlisted in a kind of U.S. program, despite the fact that it doesn't really benefit the their populations um so we have a kind of mixed picture for this region that as you pointed out has suffered as a global war on terrorism millions of deaths tens of millions of displaced people you know what do you see as the space where resistance can emerge outside of the pockets that we've seen that are under direct uh direct sort of uh attack um I think it's an important kind of thought. And since you've been theorizing this, maybe you have some thoughts about it.

Ali Kadri: The situation is very difficult because, as I said, they contorted a revolutionary thought, Western Marxism. Not only in the West. Western Marxism is the producer of revolutionary theory. We don't have time. People here don't have time to write or think.

Adnan Hussain: Or for another series, for another episode, for sure. We'll talk about that.

Ali Kadri: Yeah. So, you know, that's one thing. So the struggle, the war of ideas, needs theoretical work that theorizes that our successes and failures. We have... In the war that is ongoing, we have a small group of people in South Lebanon, in Yemen, in Gaza, who are fighting a much superior power and are capable to resist and continue to resist. So it just adds credentials. It corroborates the fact that people's war is... It wins, definitely wins. It doesn't. So we have that at the same time that we have the demonstration effect that the Americans and the Zionists are capable of killing. We have also the demonstration of the fact that resistance is capable of resisting and faring better. And that's not to say also that we don't have a crisis of revolutionary consciousness. We have a crisis of ideology. It started in 1990 with the fall of the Soviet Union. And many of the communists around the world were just, you know, sort of, copycat in what the Soviet Union was saying without basically drawing on their organic and cultural history and traditions and so forth. There isn't a working class without a culture, without tradition, without history, without symbols, without memories. And we don't expect the working class to be the industrial proletariat of Western Europe. I mean, that doesn't exist anymore. But there is a working class. A working class is society in relation to nature. in relation to the productive forces working to sustain itself, to reproduce itself, and it does so in relation to itself, in relation to nature, in relation to itself, and in relation to other societies or other classes, other social classes. But it's ontological. Every society must work to produce, and it has to enter into relations with itself and to relations with others. So that's the definition of class. And so, We are at a point where many people can't actually ensure next day and that situation is that you know the indigency and the poverty and the disease and the death from wars and sanctions is unbelievable and there is and the example of resistance is there to copy is there to emulate and that's going to happen and It is important to basically, but theory has to lead. Theory has to, you know, from this, we've seen resistance winning. And one must theorize this or emphasize the necessity of people's war and the possibility of victory in a people's war. And that people's war wins not only with the weapons, but with the consciousness, with the revolutionary consciousness. Consciousness must act, perceive anything. The necessity of the gun and the plow together, that's still there, but the gun and the plow are not the same anymore. Drones and social media are not enough. The same momentum of history is still there. The same generator of history is still there. And people are not going to be... People are not taken aback as much with the Western examples of civilization. The American example... is a travesty. I mean, it's, you know, it's usually, you know, they used to say, Nixon says, you know, you need a madman because I want to scare people with nuclear alternatives. But now we have an idiot and a man, you know, a class of idiots, not necessarily a person who's in, but a whole mass of people who are idiotic. who are a personification of capital without the revolutionary potential. Because the predicate for their survival is the imperialism and the hegemony and the exploitation of the third world. And so there is no working class, homogeneous working class, because the minorities in the West are something else. But there isn't a homogeneous working class, an industrial working class in the West that's not benefiting from imperialism. In fact, they have been the soldiers of imperialism all along, and they know it's not a question of percentage. We don't get $5 from Africa. We send them $5. That's That's not how it works. They get a lot from Africa for nothing because they're capable of pricing the lives of Africa and the resources of Africa. Not for something, but for negative prices. They're making the Africans pay for what they're sending to them. I mean, if you send... If somebody... moves from Africa to the United States to work. The person has, there's much investment that went into making a capable person who is going to labor in the United States for whom the United States did not pay the cost of upbringing and so forth. So it is negative, you know, the Africa and the rest of the world, the developing world are losing to, they're actually paying to be exploited. That's how it is. And that sort of world is now coming to a head because China is rising, specifically. China is... China as a social model, as a social and industrial model, it's showing the rest of the world that a sovereign state can actually develop on its own. And it's so powerful that it can actually say no to the United States. It can confront the United States. And it's just as big and it's better. Its standards of living are improving all the time. So this imagery... This is now there to see. And once the aura of the beauty and significance of Western civilization and Birkenau falls, all its ideological constructs are going to fall. People will no longer believe that the free market and that America has freedom and I don't know what. It has freedom when there are so many people who sleep hungry on the streets and are and millions who are incarcerated so we have a social model which is a decrepit social a decrepit industrial social model a decrepit human social model also so people will begin to observe but this needs to, this needs to be highlighted because they still own the means of propagation of knowledge. They still own the means of the production of knowledge and so forth. They have these buzz names, you know, like he won the Nobel Prize. Most Nobel Prizes are won by people who are criminals at these prizes. And most scientists, they've actually developed weapons of capital or things that are going to treat people who can afford to be treated with this. Not for the rest of humanity. And if they do seep into the rest of humanity, they do so relative to the capacity to labor for a certain lifespan such that they die at the age of retirement and don't receive any pensions or anything like that.

Henry Hakimaki: So they cost less. Ali, you mentioned that the Nobel Prize, most of the people who win it are criminals. I had a project that I made my students do not that long ago. We were doing a unit on various objects. honorary awards that people have received for different fields. And one of the examples, of course, that comes up right at the beginning is the Nobel Prize. And I basically made them do the exact same thing that you just described, which was, okay, let's take a list of Nobel Prize winners, and I want you to find... What is wrong with each of them? And if you find nothing wrong with each of them, well, you got very lucky in this case because the vast majority of them were war criminals, were criminals of some other variety, were just sordid people in general. And even the ones who weren't committing crimes by legal code that are codified by capitalist imperialist countries, they're breakthroughs were in pursuit of imperialist motives for their countries. But unfortunately, Ali, we're out of time for today. I know Adnan has a hard out to go to a meeting right now, but... I also want to, again, remind the listeners that we have you on record saying that you'll come back for this series, which I was teasing Adnan in the chat that we had back and forth during this, that I want to title that series The World According to Ali Qadri, because I think that that's... I think you deserve to have a series titled The World According to Ali Qadri. But Adnan and I were talking about some of the things that potentially could be in this series. Surplus populations and political economy of waste, poverty of Western civilization, revolutionary theory, the future of resistance, the model of China. All of these are topics that we would love to talk with you further on and hopefully we'll be able to talk with these each in turn with a devoted episode to each of them where we can do them justice. But in closing, Alik, let's say in two minutes, if you wanted to tell the listeners if they were going to go to somebody who is not so politically in tune, you know, they're not somebody who's absolutely consuming all of this political theory. They're not following every bit of news the way that we are. How would you tell them to bring up the subject of sanctions as genocide to those people? Again, if we were talking to our listeners and telling them, go out and tell people who you know and are genuinely curious people but aren't necessarily completely like we are consumed by politics and history.

Ali Kadri: Well, I mean, as I said, you know, sanctions are also relative in a sense because sanctions are making things scarce, making food scarce, making medicine scarce, making income scarce in a very drastic way. And the working class all over the world is being subjected to sanctions in a sense, but by a different degree. Sanctions and more are intrinsic to capital all the time. Whereas we produce so much, we have a lot, the world can be easily a much better place. We have the Soviet experience and we have the Chinese experience and we have many socialist countries whose experience shows that in sovereign countries, not necessarily socialist, but sovereign countries who have more or less just distribution frameworks and so forth, but they're capitalists with disciplined distribution, that are doing well in the developing world. And so we have models that show that Whereas everybody is sanctioned, everybody must rid themselves of the sanctions. And the sanctions are imposed by the capital relationship. And the capital relationship is the structure, the political and the national power of capital represented in this United States and NATO and so forth. And these are what needs to be dismantled.

Henry Hakimaki: Very, yeah, excellent summary, Ali. And like I said, I'm hoping that we can carry on these conversations in the near future. Listeners, again, our guest was Ali Qadri, who has been on the show before a couple of times. I know that we talked about Lebanon with Ali and Kranja Khalek. And also we had an episode, Palestine, war, occupation, and proletarianization with Ali. Ali is... author of some incredibly important books, which I highly recommend the listeners pick up. Arab Development Denied Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, The Accumulation of Waste, The Political Economy of Systemic Destruction, and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism are just a few of them. But like I said, we'll have you back on again soon, Ali. And you and I still have to get a phone call, a friendly phone call sometime. Adnan, can you tell the listeners where they can find you and your other excellent show?

Ali Kadri: Thank you.

Adnan Hussain: Sure. You can follow me on Twitter. I still call it Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain. And, you know, check out my other show on YouTube, Adnan Hussain Show. Just put it in your search engine. You'll find it. It's also available as an audio podcast. And we do some parallel things to what we do here and some other additional things. And I particularly want people to know about the Palestine, Palestine and the world. History in a Time of Genocide Denial. It's a seven-part series that I did in collaboration with my colleague, Dr. Ariel Salzman, who teaches a course on this. And we thought, well, let's do a version of this, you know, in reframing the history in such a way that it might be useful for listeners. So two parts of it are out. Keep tuning in and you'll get all of them. You can go to buypatreon.com slash Adnan Hussain if you're so eager and you want to listen to them all at once. You can do that too.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, of course. Highly recommend that. And by the time this episode is out, surely at least one more episode of that series should be up on Adnan's YouTube channel by that point. As for me, listeners, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-9-5. I'll also announce, because by the time this episode comes out, the other show will be up and running, that I also will have another show that is going on. Unlike... Gorilla History and the Adnan Hussain show. This other show has a definite lifespan. It's a series on Russian history from pre-Rus foundation all the way to the present day. And we've periodized it into 25 parts. So we are actively recording. We've already recorded the first three or four episodes. And the first episode is due to come out this week as of the time of recording. So by the time this episode comes out, there should be At least two episodes out and more coming. And also, there will be some listener question bonus episodes thrown in periodically with things that are asked over the course of those 25 episodes that we're breaking down Russian history in. You'll be able to find that show on YouTube as well as in podcast apps by searching for Tsars and Commissars. That's the name of the show, From Rus to Modern Russia, Tsar, T-S-A-R. I know that that word has been transliterated in multiple ways in the past, but T-S-A-R, Tsars and Commissars. And of course, if you follow me on Twitter, I will also keep you updated on when and where those episodes will be. As for Guerrilla History, you can follow the show on social media, Twitter at guerrilla underscore pod, Instagram guerrilla underscore history. And we also have a Substack newsletter that comes out maybe once a month to let you know what is coming down the pipeline from Adnan, myself, and the show collectively. You can get that at guerrillahistory.substack.com. Just be sure, guerrilla is two R's, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A. And lastly, if you want to help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this, you can help support us by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, guerrilla with two R's. So with that being said, and looking forward to not only subsequent episodes of Guerrilla History more generally, but the upcoming episodes that we have with Alicadri. Until next time, listeners. Solidarity.