Office Hours #1 w/Prof. Adnan Husain: Deep Histories and Deep Politics
Added 2025-08-02 18:24:23 +0000 UTCI appear at about the 23 minute mark. I got sidetracked and was late for the live stream. From the description:
The radical academy is in session, the online university is open! Historian, scholar of religion, and analyst of contemporary global and geopolitics, esp in the Middle East and co-host of Guerrilla History podcast, Professor Adnan Husain holds "office hours" an open, interactive livestream to discuss global issues, commentary and analysis, historical insights and methods, understanding of religion and politics with the audience on YouTube. Aaron Good, author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, joins me to talk "Deep Histories and Deep Politics." Send in your questions and comments on X/Insta (@adnanahusain) and in the YT comments. Priority to Patrons and supporters in the "superchat" but all are welcome to engage respectfully in a spirit of inquiry, learning for political education, and effective and disciplined action for liberation and justice.
Comments
Nah. Maybe less complex individually but not less problematic. There's a tendency historically for each region to agglomerate into a large civilizational empire (can be multicultural and multi confessional) with a collection of small border states that serve as tributaries/buffers. Periods where the central empire fragment and break up are often considered"good times" for some of the border states, but most people suffer greatly under such times of instability. That gets to my other pet peeve with small nationalist states. They're obsessing over glory days centuries or millenias in the past, rather than figuring out how to live well within the neighborhood now. Exceptions would be Malaysia and Singapore, which doesn't have such historical baggage and currently have skillful governance. Big countries like China, despite their evocations of the past, actually very much live pragmatically in the present, which seems like a better solution to running a nation state.
JB
2025-08-11 13:51:51 +0000 UTCJB so maybe we agree at least that the big states are more problematic than the little states.
Kevin Gregg
2025-08-10 04:25:43 +0000 UTCRead up on Lebanon and then get back to me. Divide and conquer, especially using a despised minority to govern on behalf of Whitey, is the standard operating procedure for all European imperialists. You also didn't consider my other point, which is that small countries are simply more vulnerable to outside manipulation compared to large strong states. Russia and China and Iran could resist the West, while Lebanon and Armenia cannot.
JB
2025-08-07 20:17:26 +0000 UTCYou make good points but Who said these small nations had to be ethnically or racially homogenous? Perhaps that’s the issue with the Balkan states you mention but haven’t they also had a history of being colonized, invaded, exploited , ethnically cleansed by mega states and would be Empires ? Do you understand what Leopold refers to as the problems of scale?
Kevin Gregg
2025-08-06 13:28:52 +0000 UTCSmall ethno nations gets you the Baltic states. Self obsessed by their historical grievances and feeling perpetually threatened by their larger neighbors, their captured political and bourgeoisie classes are willing to do anything for larger more powerful entities like the US, for the illusion of being able to resist their Russian neighbor. See also the Balkans, GCC countries, Guatemala and Belize, Philippines, etc. Large countries can be challenging to hold together, but Russia and China demonstrate that it's completely possible if the central government pays attention to the rights and education of its minority populations and ensure that prosperity is shared. Individuals in those countries are far more sovereign than if they lived in small countries with flag independence but allow large multinational corporations and outside organizations dominate their states.
JB
2025-08-06 10:13:16 +0000 UTCHave you read the Break down of nations by Leopold Kohr, where he argues that all our nation state problems are not issues of ideology or system but problems of scale? As a solution he recommended the breaking up of large nations into smaller ones. Looking at history before capitalism or communism what I see looks like ruthlessness , criminality and war based on national interests in opposition to human interests. In my current reading of the philosophers of the warring states period, and in the Record of the Grand Historian I can't help but notice we are living out a very similar conundrum of opposing systems of political science and philosophy: Confucian versus Legalist. This is a war over who should rule , how they should govern, what their priorities should be and how they should behave. Just as in that time, and perhaps ever since the legalist/ pragmatic approach to governing seems to have won the day. Philosophers like Confucius and Mencius looked high and low for people (men) of virtue ( like we do today) who could unite and order the empire. But it was shockingly a ruthless monster who was able to unite the country and subdue the warring states. This first Qin emperor killed at least four hundred Confucian priests who dared to criticize him. He ruled through a legalist methodology. Some of the principles of Legalism are: centralized governance, effective control of the land and population, the welfare of the state over it's individuals, no real use for morality or religion, the ruler and ruling elite are above the law, human nature is seen as basically evil and in need of tight control, charity by the state was considered a sin because it "robbed the industrious to pamper the idle" the people are best kept in a state of ignorance and awe. I don't have to tell you that even before we came to Trump , even when we had more decent seeming leaders of our country, our empire still acted criminally in keeping with legalist philosophy throughout the world and at home.
Kevin Gregg
2025-08-05 23:40:06 +0000 UTC
